متن زیر را به فارسی تبدیل کن
It even happens in children’s novels, or at least in great children’s novels.
The Harry Potter novels have already been put through the interpretive mill, so I
almost regret what I’m about to do. Still, it can’t be helped. I recently saw an
article describing them as a literary political Rorschach test where people see
what they’re already programmed to see. That may always be the case with
literature, but we’ll leave that question for another day. This article cited such
tricks of memory as the link of Azkaban prison to the American Guantánamo
and Abu Ghraib detention facilities—nice work, since Rowling had invented her
lockup for warlocks several years before these real-world jails had come into
being. She can’t very well have known about things that had not yet happened,
could she? She could know, however, about Nazis and fascists and Communist
dictatorships, about totalitarian governments and those who would impose them.
And she would know about racism and racial violence, which has been on the
rise in Britain during her lifetime, as more and more racial minorities arrived.
She would have seen neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers in action. What did she
need with Guantánamo? Lord Voldemort (from the French vol de mort, meaning
flight of death), with his sense of a mission and his self-loathing (his insistence
on racial purity despite being of mixed nonmagical and witch parentage), his
charisma and his cruelty, and his desperate need for eternal power, something
like a Thousand-Year Reich, recalls Adolph Hitler. Does that mean that
Voldemort is Hitler, that the book is an allegory for the rise of the Nazis? No, of
course not. She’s much too subtle a thinker for something so crude, which would
in any case be lost on her target audience. But if you are of the generation born
in the twenty years or so after the end of World War II, as Rowling is, much of
what you know about evil, about world domination fantasies, and about racial
hatred and violence comes from the Nazis. And then there are the events. The
fight at the tower that ends Book 6, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,
owes not a little to the Battle of Britain, that quintessential desperate fight to
save home. There has been, naturally, ample opportunity to understand cruelty
by observing the world in the second half of the twentieth century, but much of
that is simply a gloss on the Third Reich. The connection may be conscious or
unconscious on Rowling’s part, but my guess is that she wouldn’t even need to
think about it. Any English child born when she was would simply know about
the years 1933–1945; the knowledge was unavoidable. It would inform the
consciousness and therefore the fiction of any writer of her generation.
I know this because her generation is mine, although I’m on the far end of it
from her. But there’s nothing special about J. K. Rowling, at least in this regard
—it’s always true. All writers, everywhere, all the time. Here, then, is the Law of
Now and Then: Every novel is an act of violence, a wrestling match with the
historical and social forces of its own time. Sometimes the novel wins,
sometimes history does. Okay, maybe not. But they do not play nicely together.
What does happen is that sometimes history is apparent and sometimes it’s
hidden. In either case, it’s always present and the writer has had to carve out the
book’s place in its historical moment. Until we figure out a way not to live in our
own time, we’re going to think like people of our own time. Every writer’s
response to history will be a little different. You can reject it, embrace it, treat it
as farce, but you can’t escape it.