متن زیر را به صورت عالی و کامل و دقیق به فارسی ترجمه کن
Clarissa’s Flowers
WHEN MRS. DALLOWAY SAYS, in her novel’s famous opening line, that she will buy the flowers, she
sets a day and a novel in motion. More importantly, she gives us a first look at what will become her
dominant character emblem. Virginia Woolf used The Hours as a working title (but happily left it for
Michael Cunningham), but she might just as easily have called the book The Flowers. Not every character
in every novel has an emblem, but many do. We have only to think of Nero Wolfe’s orchids, Hemingway’s
Old Man’s Great DiMaggio, Stephen Dedalus’s “ashplant” walking stick. Those emblems guide our
responses to their characters. Objects, images, and places become associated not merely with characters, but
with ideas about characters. Some of that is the authors’ doing, of course: Woolf puts the flowers in
Clarissa’s arms. But much of the creation of meaning lies with readers. Ultimately, it falls to us to decide
what we think it all means.
William Faulkner once said that his favorite among his novels was As I Lay
Dying. My admittedly limited experience teaching Faulkner is that it is the
favorite of students as well. I have better luck getting them through the whole of
that novel than the twelve anthology pages of “Barn Burning.” And I suspect it’s
the favorite Faulkner novel of a lot of nonstudents, too. Why? They can get it.
On one level, this is a matter of narrative simplicity. Absalom, Absalom! is a
darned hard slog. Ditto The Sound and the Fury. The Bundren saga, on the other
hand, is a slightly hard slog. A colleague calls it a romp, but I’m not sure I’d go
that far. But I don’t think that’s why so many readers prefer it. I think it’s
because they can keep the characters straight. No doubt there are a host of
reasons why it’s easier to sort characters out from one another in As I Lay Dying
than in his other novels. The names at the heads of each interior-monologue￾chapter help. And the names are memorable: Anse, Addie, Darl, Jewel (for a
man), Cash, Dewey Dell, Vardaman. Okay, I’m good with that. But there’s
something else that really helps. Each character has an emblem, some thing or
obsession or goal that helps to differentiate him or her from the rest. Anse, in
addition to refusing to be “beholden” to anyone outside the family, keeps
thinking about a new set of teeth. Jewel has his horse (and his anger), Cash his
carpentry and his desire for a “graphophone,” as he transposes the syllables of
phonograph, Vardaman the fish he catches and comes to equate with his dead
mother, Dewey Dell her pregnancy and desire for an abortion. How do they
work? First of all, they’re mnemonics. When we see someone obsessing about
his horse or reacting with anger beyond what might be called for in the situation,
we know that’s Jewel. No name necessary after the first time or two. And then
there’s character structure. Their obsessions provide depth and coloring. Cash
uses carpentry to avoid thinking about the reason he’s building that particular
box.
I made it on the bevel.
1. There is more surface for the nails to grip.
2. There is twice the gripping surface to each seam.
3. The water will have to seep into it on a slant. Water moves easiest
up and down or straight across.
4. In a house people are upright two thirds of the time. So the seams
are made up-and-down. Because the stress is up-and-down.
And so on, for a total of thirteen items, concluding with the best reason, “It
makes a neater job.” What’s conspicuously absent from his musings is their real
source—that is, what “it” is. It’s a coffin, of course, and readers know that, but
Cash doesn’t say it. He does mention graves once, but only in contrast to other
dug holes. For all his matter-of-fact tone, he avoids the one fact that matters,
namely, that he has built a coffin for his mother. Why? Grief. Or rather, the
avoidance of grief. None of the characters properly channel or even
acknowledge the grief. Instead, each one plunges into his or her own sphere of
interest.
Character mnemonics are extremely important in the Victorian novel, for
obvious reasons. Remember, this is the age of the serialized novel. If your copy
of The Edinburgh Review arrived on, say, the tenth of March with the new novel
you’ve become obsessed with, it might take you four or five days, tops, to read
the two chapters of the current installment, leaving twenty-six or-seven days
until the April issue and the next two chapters. I don’t know about you, but in
twenty-six days, I can forget my name. I would need a little authorial help. Meet
Silas Wegg, authorial helper. Wegg is a “literary” man and seller of ballads who
has a wooden leg (a “wegg”?) and a pal named Mr. Venus, who is an undertaker
and “articulator of bones.” They’re greedy and unscrupulous and, generally,
great fun as minor villains. The major villain is Bradley Headstone, a
schoolmaster who does pretty much everything except foam at the mouth to
indicate his derangement. His mnemonic, like Mr. Venus’s, is his name. We’re
not likely to forget a Bradley Headstone in a month’s time, any more than we
would any of Dickens’s great emblematic names: Jaggers, Miss Havisham,
Magwitch, Uriah Heep, Mr. Micawber, Quilp, Skimpole, Pecksniff, or that
Christmas favorite, Ebenezer Scrooge. Beyond the names, though, Dickens often
provides other emblems. Quilp is a dwarf, Bill Sikes has his growl and his dog,
Mr. Venus his bones, Micawber his punch and his belief that “something will
turn up.” They have limps and prostheses (no writer in history has supplied more
characters with wooden legs), facial oddities and peculiarities of hair, sidekicks
and talismans. His characters are sometimes described as grotesques, yet it’s
grotesquery with a purpose. They must remain not only memorable but vivid for
readers over the long stretch of months. Nor is he alone among Victorian
serialized novelists. A quick glance, if such a thing is possible, at William
Makepeace Thackeray or George Meredith or Anthony Trollope or Thomas
Hardy or even the comparatively restrained George Eliot reveals a wealth of
vivid and occasionally outlandish figures, especially among minor characters.