متن زیر را به فارسی ترجمه کن
And there’s nothing wrong with pretense. The writer assumes a pose.
Always. The narrator who is not strictly the author? A pose. Omniscient, godlike
narrator? Definitely a pose. We read novels to follow writers pretending to be
things and know things that aren’t exactly true. Self-awareness—or its lack—is
just one of those things that gets pretended.
But another pair of practical considerations: you can’t do anything that
hasn’t already been done; everything is possible. If you know that everything
that can be done has already been done, you have a couple of options. One is to
shut down completely, or at least never try anything in that vein. We could see
this as the path pursued by Alain Robbe-Grillet and the French anti-novelists of
the so-called nouveau roman. They attempted to break down the illusions of the
novel, to dismantle the customary operations of fiction—you know, get rid of
extraneous things like plot, character, narrative continuity, theme—and reduce
narrative to a fragmented series of subjective apprehensions of things. There’s a
reason Robbe-Grillet never really caught on in the Anglophone reading world.
The other option? Get on with it. Write your novel. Of course you know there
have been other novels like yours before now. Of course you can’t be first to the
quarter pole. It’s okay. Fiction isn’t a race; you don’t have to come in first to
win. In fact, no one’s entirely sure what winning is.
Here, too, you have a couple of options. You can pretend that all those other
novels don’t already exist and attempt to write a novel that’s like a window on its
world. Jerome Klinkowitz calls this pretense “transparency,” the writer’s attempt
to make the apparatus of his novel invisible so that readers see straight through
to the contents. Or you can call attention to the artifice of the novel in a strategy
he calls “opacity.” A work of fiction is opaque to the degree it requires readers to
notice it even as they may be trying to focus on the story. Most fiction ever
written has strived for transparency. But not all, and not even all of it we might
think would. You can think of in terms of the theater. Does the playwright
pretend that the audience isn’t there, that the actors and props are “real,” that the
proscenium arch is merely a window? Or does she “break the fourth wall,”
address or engage the audience directly, remind us that this is only a play? Or do
both? Shakespeare chiefly tells his stories and engages us directly, but
periodically he throws in the aforementioned plays within plays and discussions
of stagecraft. So, too, with fiction writers. Every once in a while, they’ll surprise
you.
Is one way better than the other? Yes. The one that works for a particular
author in a particular work is the better one. Do I prefer one to the other? That’s
like asking if I prefer pie or cake. Why would they be mutually exclusive? I want
Dickens or Hardy or Lawrence to insist on verisimilitude. It would be deeply
upsetting if my favorite mystery writers suddenly went all metafictional. But I
want Fowles to be a metafictionist, and with him Calvino, Barth, B. S. Johnson,
Julian Barnes, Angela Carter.
Then there are the O’Briens. Three of the best novelists of the past, or indeed
any, century are named O’Brien. Edna, the girl from a repressive Irish village
who grew up to smash all the conventions of propriety surrounding Irish
women’s fiction, absolutely insists on transparency. Her mode of storytelling
requires that readers be drawn in and not let go until finis. From the trilogy The
Country Girls in the 1960s through more experimental works like Night (1972)
to the sociopolitical later novels House of Splendid Isolation (1994) and In the
Forest (2002), her novels either repel readers due to subject matter or hook them
and reel them in from the first pages. In part, Edna O’Brien is working
unclaimed land; when she began, there were few, if any, models to follow for the
sort of novels she wanted to write. But such self-conscious narrating isn’t really
her style in any case. Even when, as in Night, she is wrestling with the ghost of
James Joyce—the novel is a reworking of the concept of the Penelope episode of
Ulysses, a long, rambling, nocturnal, female meditation by a character looking
back over her life so far—there’s only the slightest nod to the prior work. The
American novelist Tim O’Brien balances narrative immediacy with a certain
degree of reflexivity. That may be the more true in his Vietnam novels, Going
After Cacciato (1978) and The Things They Carried (1990). It’s hard to write
about war without Hemingway looking over your shoulder, stupid to pretend
he’s not. But Tim O’Brien mixes sources from fantastic fiction like Alice in
Wonderland in with his Hemingway, even as he immerses us in the experience of
war. His novels are a heady brew. And then there’s Flann O’Brien, who as I’ve
said before is not even an O’Brien. Born Brian O’Nolan, he took his pen name
for his first novel, At Swim-Two- Birds, a hilarious if sometimes confusing
pastiche of Irish student novel, American western, Irish epic (much of it is drawn
from the legends of Finn MacCool and Mad King Sweeney). A novel within a
novel within a novel, At Swim has three openings and three endings, a novelistcharacter whose characters rebel and take him captive (drugging him so he can’t
write them into more difficulty), and a pookah, or demon, who takes control of
the offspring of the inner novelist and one of his own characters. Now there’s a
form of incest we rarely encounter. Mercifully. His other novels, particularly The
Third Policeman (1967) and An Béal Bocht (1941, translated as The Poor
Mouth, 1973), do similar damage to the novel form; the genre has never fully
recovered.
Does that cover the full range of possibilities for metafiction-or-not?
Probably not. Someone’s always figuring out something a bit different, and
every writer has different strategies. But these three O’Briens give a sense of
what can be done. Besides, in their very different ways, they’re all terrific. One
could do worse than to adopt a policy of only reading novels by writers named
O’Brien.
So maybe we don’t want a name-controlled reading list. What do
metafictional novels look like? Well, like a lot of things.