متن زیر را به فارسی ترجمه کن
What makes you so sure?
I’ve lived around people long enough to see that the impulse to recount their
lives is hardwired into the human brain. And while I’m no anthropologist and so
may have missed something, every society I know of has creation myths, which
are tied up in a narrative of divinity. Once you have those two elements,
reportage and mythologizing, you have the elements for the rest of human
communication. I’m just not sure which side of the ledger corporate quarterly
reports go on.
Fiction—that body of story about things manifestly not true—came later.
Our first fiction grew out of stories of human interaction with the divine. This is
what the late, great critic Northrop Frye called the displacement of myth, pure
myth (something that only exists in a sort of theoretical realm) being translated
into stories involving humans. These are sacred texts and hero tales in which
humans have direct contact with gods in ways we ordinary sorts never
experience. Is your mother a goddess (well, of course, but I mean literally)? Has
she brought you armor forged in a divine smithy lately? Have you experienced
any voices emanating from whirlwinds or burning bushes? I’m neither endorsing
nor denying the veracity of any stories here, merely pointing out that the earliest
human narratives always involve the divine world in a way that the works of,
say, Samuel Beckett do not. Epics and sacred texts stand on those two bases,
reportage and mythmaking, telling what happened and saying what it all means.
So does the novel. What else is there, really? A detailed account of events
and lives, a sense of how those events and lives express the universe in which
they, and we, exist. The events may be the Napoleonic Wars or a trip up an
escalator to a mezzanine, but that’s just detail; the basic function is unchanged
whether the writer is Tolstoy or Nicholson Baker. The significance, the mythic
level, may be an expression of the divine in the smallest details or an assertion of
the emptiness of it all. Neither matters very much from the point of view of this
examination. What matters is that they are all, in whatever their particulars,
iterations of the One Story. And therefore, they are all related.
So, does it matter? That they’re all connected, that is?
Very much. For one thing, we can tease out connections between this work
and that, tracing the intertextual play as I suggested when I enjoined you to read
with your ears. You listen, you hear the texts talking to one another. You find
layers of meaning you would never sense if you kept the walls up between
works. Schools of criticism since about 1960, what was called structuralism and
then (horrors!) post-structuralist criticicism, including deconstruction, have
emphasized “texts” over “writers” in what strikes me as a fatally flawed initial
premise. Yet part of their program makes abundant of sense, and it is this:
writing is in some ways bigger than the writer. Writers understand their own
reading and to some extent that of the writers who have influenced them. If you
are influenced by Joyce, you know that he has in turn read Flaubert and Aquinas
and Henrik Ibsen and Homer, among many others. But which ones? How many?
And whom did they read, listen to, accept, reject? It is impossible to trace out a
complete genealogy of any writer because the network has too many strands,
which are in turn made up of too many other strands. Besides, where did Joyce
get all those jokes?
One possible danger, or so it would seem, is that if all stories are part of one
Ur-story, then if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen ’em all. Instead, it works the other
way. You can have read a hundred novels, experienced all sorts of fascinating
and dull characters, noted all sorts of narrative tricks, but you ain’t seen nothin’
yet. There will always be another novelist, and another, and another, who will do
something you haven’t quite seen yet. Moreover, those networks lead you from
writer to writer, if you’re the inquisitive sort, and pretty soon you’re reading
people you never thought you would. Reading novels is a little like eating
popcorn: once you start, there’s no stopping. Let’s say you remember reading the
short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce when you
were in school. You look on Amazon for what else he might have done and
discover that a Mexican novelist, Carlos Fuentes, has a small novel, The Old
Gringo, in which Bierce (or someone very Bierce-like) plays the title role. Then
you discover that Fuentes says that all Hispanic fiction comes from Don
Quixote, and he mentions other novelists. And that’s just the start.