第二弹文本细读示范1：Robert Alter 的《在阅读中体会狄更斯的风格》

Alter 是美国文科学界泰斗之一，从60年代起就在加州大学伯克利分校任比较文学教授。他本人不是搞英国小说的，而是毕生致力于希伯来文圣经文本的研究。也就是说，他偶然写了这样一篇在他的专业之外，分析狄更斯的风格的文章，相当通俗，也没有抽象术语，但引人入胜。如同他在文末的结语：

面对那些被创造性地排列出如此精微序列的言语，如果我们认真倾听，它们就能够回馈给我们流溢着洞察性认识的美好时刻。

关于这篇译文。这源起于在中国人民大学课堂上一些同学共同翻译的“百衲”版，原本是我在课堂上留的一个课外作业——通过阅读和翻译 Alter 的这篇文章，来更加了解文本细读是怎么回事儿。结果有一些同学怀着浓厚的兴趣和热情进行了翻译。现在我参照他们各家的翻译，自己做出一个最终版。 我也把英文原文附上，以飨感兴趣的读者。

（Alter 是我母校的老师。母校的校训是：“Fiat Lux/ Let There Be Light/ 要有光”，出自《旧约全书·创世纪》——我觉得这个校训太好了，也值得进行丰富的细读阐释。）

《在阅读中体会狄更斯的风格》 作者 Robert Alter，发表于 Philosophy and Literature 20.1 (1996) 130-137。（原文里只有4个注释，也从略。）

风格的问题，对于阅读体验来说至关重要。如果连这一点都总需要解释一番，那可真算是关于文学研究，以及关于我们的文化与语言之间关系的衰退状况的一个悲哀症候了。随着文学语言被多样化地指认为或者是意识形态的面具，或者是“文化诗学”的一种表述，或者是一种在性质上跟菜单和街头涂鸦没有区别的交流的媒介，于是，在很多情况下，在文学的学术研究中，似乎已然失去了“风格有其独特魅力”这一基本感受了。那独特魅力常常像是一种独具效能的工具，能带给你洞察力，甚至是眼光。我在性情上是个理性主义者，并不想显得故弄玄虚，但作为一个读者，我发现了一个经验性的事实：一个了不起的作家能够通过各种惊人的方式进入那位于言语和社会的、历史的、心理的或道德的现实之间的神秘联系。/ It is a sad symptom of the devolution of literary studies and of our culture's relation to language that it should at all be necessary to explain that style is crucial to the experience of reading. As the language of literature has been variously designated a mask for ideology, an expression of the "poetics of culture," or a medium of communication not different in kind from menus and graffiti, the academic study of literature in many cases seems to have lost the essential sense that style has its unique enchantments, and that those enchantments can often be a privileged vehicle of insight, even of vision. As someone who is temperamentally a rationalist, I do not want to sound mystical, but I find it an empirical fact as a reader that great writers are able in a variety of surprising ways to tap into occult connections between words and social, historical, psychological, or moral realities.

一部小说，就是通过言语所再造的整个世界。风格之于小说，犹如我们所呼吸到的空气之于我们所居住的世界。（我将从狄更斯的作品中摘引恰当的例证，来展示这一原则。）风格也是被再现的事与人之关系的韵律，是展示场景的景深。当我们在读狄更斯或其他任何小说家作品中的风格时，我们当然也同时在读各种其他的东西——情节、人物性格、道德难题、历史困境等等。但唯有当我们注意到风格上的启发性运作时，我们才能看清上述所有东西的全部复杂性。/ A novel is a whole world reconstituted through words. Style in a novel is that world's very air which we breath (I shall presently cite a rather literal illustration of this principle in Dickens), the rhythm of relation [End Page 130] of the represented objects and personages, the depth of field in which they are seen. When we read style in Dickens, or in any other novelist, we of course are reading all sorts of other things at the same time--plot, character, moral dilemma, historical predicament, and so forth--but we can see all these in their full complexity only if we attend to the illuminating play of style.

狄更斯的主要小说作品虽然都很长，但值得带着享受的心境慢慢地去读，值得不时停下来重读某个心仪的段落，因为他是整个英国文学中最独出心裁、最鲜明的风格家之一。风格，正如我们所知的，有很多方面。狄更斯常常喜欢用的强有力的节奏，巧妙的字头押韵，铿锵重复的首语，不同话语格调的着意互动，这些都值得注意。但是，他首先是莎士比亚之后的英语隐喻性运用的大师。我想强调的是，作为读者的我如何聚焦于狄更斯的隐喻性修辞语言，以及他小说中的世界如何由此而向我展现。/ Despite the great length of his major novels, Dickens deserves to be read slowly, with delectation, with occasional pauses to reread a choice passage, because he is one of the most inventive and vigorous stylists in the whole range of English literature. Style, as we know, has many facets, and Dickens's powerful rhythms, his supple patterns of alliteration, the hammer-blows of the anaphoric insistence he often favors, the cunning interplay of different linguistic registers he sometimes introduces, are all worthy of attention. But he is above all the great master of figurative language in English after Shakespeare, and what I want to concentrate on here is how I focus as a reader on Dickens's use of figurative language, and what it reveals to me about the world of his novels.

狄更斯是作家中卓越的修辞能手。所以，在他的作品中，有大量的自觉的精湛技巧，生机勃勃的文字的戏谑的展现。这种戏谑，让读者过瘾，在历史语境中曾经抓住读者的兴趣，让他们在小说每月连载的出版形式中，一期接着一期地读下来。但随着狄更斯的掌控力和严肃性的加强，其戏谑性修辞，越来越成为贝娄所言的“发掘埋藏的本质”的一种手法。让我们扫一眼狄更斯在《董贝父子》（1848）——差不多是他职业生涯的中间点之作——的一个片段中的风格运用，然后再仔细思考一下在他完成的最后一部小说——《我们共同的朋友》（1861）中的两个片刻中行文的想象力。下面先是《董贝父子》的第十三章中，对那个令人生畏的资产者走进其公司办公室时的描写：/ Dickens is one of those novelists who is preeminently a rhetorical performer, and so there is a good deal of self-conscious display of virtuosity, sheer exuberant verbal high jinks, in his writing. The high jinks are there for the reader to enjoy--in historical context, to keep the reader's interest from one monthly serial to the next--but as Dickens grows in mastery and gravity, they are more and more a means of what Bellow calls unearthing buried essences. Let me glance quickly at the operation of style in a passage from Dombey and Son (1848), an approximate midpoint in Dickens career, and then consider more closely the visionary power of his prose at two moments in his last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend (1861). Here is the description in chapter thirteen of the company office of Dombey and Son as its august proprietor enters:

会计室的那位智多星一下子变哑了，安静得就仿佛他身后挂着的那一排皮制救火桶一样。暗淡的日光，经由毛玻璃的窗户和天窗过滤进来，在玻璃框框上留下一块黑色，并照出账册、票据，以及低头弯腰坐在它们前面的人们的身影。他们被笼罩在勤勉而幽暗的气氛中。从外表看来，他们被从外界完全抽离，仿佛是聚集在海底似的。在朦胧的远处，有一间发霉的小金库，那里总是点着一盏遮暗了的灯，可以代表海妖的洞穴。这妖怪正用血红的眼睛盯着大海深处的秘密。/ The wit of the Counting-House became in a moment as mute as the row of leathern fire-buckets hanging up behind him. Such vapid and flat daylight as filtered through the ground-glass windows and skylights, leaving a black sediment upon the panes, showed the books and papers, and the figures bending over them, enveloped in a studious gloom, and as much abstracted in appearance, from the world without, as if they were assembled at the bottom of the sea; while a mouldy little strong room in the obscure perspective, where a shaded lamp was always burning, might have represented the cavern of some ocean monster, looking on with a red eye at these mysteries of the deep.

在狄更斯式的招牌字眼“仿佛”所形成的上下文之间，有一种精致的张力。作为正在阅读一部大致被称为现实主义的虚构文学作品的读者，我喜欢在阅读过程中进行形象化的想象（或许并非所有读者都这样）。那墙上的皮制救火桶（灭火器在19世纪的老祖宗如此鲜明地固定在与它同时代的公共建筑的墙上），那用于描绘熏黑模糊的毛玻璃的词藻“暗淡”、“过滤”、“留下一块黑色”的给力的精确（我们待会儿还会看更到晚期的狄更斯对维多利亚时代伦敦地区性的空气污染所进行的文笔处理），这些都抓住了我的眼球。我还要提一下，在阅读优秀的散文性作品时，精确的用词本身就既使人欢愉，又富于启示。/ There is a fine dialectic tension between everything that follows those two eminently Dickensian words, "as if," and what precedes them. As a reader of what is approximately called realist fiction, I like to visualize in the process of reading (this may not be true in the same degree for all readers), and so here my eye is caught by the leathern fire-buckets on the wall (the 19th-century ancestor of the fire extinguishers prominently affixed to the walls of contemporary public buildings), and the lovely precision with which Dickens characterizes light coming through a ground-glass soot-bleared windowpane: "vapid and flat," "filtered," "leaving a black sediment." (We shall see presently what the later Dickens does with the endemic air pollution of Victorian London.) Lexical precision itself, let me note, is both a pleasure and a revelation in the reading of good prose.

作为一个“视觉性”的读者，我突然想到，现实主义小说中的这类描写常常出现在这之前的绘画中。在绘画中对光线的来源与质地的细致厘定，是场景描摹的基础。（就这一点而言，福楼拜是典范。）在这里，被灰尘和半透明的磨砂玻璃所双重浊化的昏暗日光，与深嵌在保险库中的遮暗的灯光前后共同作用。从外面透入的勤恳幽暗的气氛使得这个房间内的事物像是“被抽离”到这个世界之外，这恰到好处地伴随着该拉丁文衍生词（abstracted）里面的“撤出”之意，仿佛成为了躺在海底的东西。通过这种意象性的推测，在狄更斯这种招牌式的非情节化展开之中，我们从现实场景里的维多利亚时代的会计，转向属于童话故事与神奇历险的国度：那盏灯如同海底妖魔燃烧着的血红眼睛，它显然在守卫深藏的宝藏。叠加在现实个体上的幻想显然是属于描述性文笔所有可能达到的一种高水准趣味。但在更通常的情况下，狄更斯丰饶的隐喻性想象力既引导着他，也引导着我们，去认识到比狄更斯自己认为自己知道的还要多的东西。《董贝父子》中那所公司的财富来源于海外贸易；那个具有浪漫气质的主要人物——年轻的沃尔特•盖伊被公司派遣坐船去执行任务，他在很长一段时间里都似乎已经被大海吞没了。在这之后，容纳公司保险柜的那个房间，被奇妙地描绘成被海妖所占据的海底洞穴。这是洞穿了董贝公司的本质的一个绝佳意象——如果你愿意的话，这个意象可以意味着对于这个覆盖着海水的地球球体的商业掠夺。在小说所再现的世界中，喻意性的语言确实发掘出了被埋藏的本质。/ As a visual reader, it strikes me that description in the realist novel often draws on the precedent of painting, in which the careful definition of the source and quality of light is essential for the rendering of the scene. (Flaubert is exemplary in this regard.) Here, the bleak daylight, doubly obscured by dirt and the imperfect translucence of ground glass, works in tandem with the shaded lamp recessed within the strong room. The "studious gloom" filtering in from outside makes the contents of the room seem "abstracted"--in the nice Latinate sense of "withdrawn from"--the world without, like objects at the bottom of the sea. With this imagistic supposition, in an excursive movement that is virtually a trademark of Dickens, we pass from the realistic scene of the Victorian counting-house to a realm of fairy tale and fabulous adventure: the lamp as the burning red eye of a subterranean monster who is evidently guarding treasures of the deep. The fantasy image superimposed on the realistic one is obviously part of the high fun of the description, but it is usually the case that the fertility of Dickens's metaphorical imagination leads him, and us, to know more than he may consciously realize he knows. The wealth of the firm of Dombey and Son derives from overseas trade; the romantic protagonist, young Walter Gay, is sent off by ship on a mission by the firm and for a long time appears to have been swallowed up by the sea. The fantastic representation, then, of the room that contains the firm's safe as an ocean cavern inhabited by a monster is a luminous image of what the Dombey firm is all about--an image, if you will, of the mercantile exploitation of the aqueous globe. The figurative language has indeed unearthed a buried essence in the represented world of the novel.

晚年的狄更斯更致力于对都市全景的描绘。在这种描绘中，他借助形象化的语言这一工具来为其同时代都市现实中的道德或精神意义来赋形。这些场景的奇妙之处就在于，其对于维多利亚时代的伦敦现实的几乎是如照相术般的忠实再现，竟没有被它里面同时所“充斥”的象征修辞而颠覆。相反，这些修辞化手段反而为主题的阐释赋予了一种深度——有时这种深度是惊人的。我即将给出的两个在《我们共同的朋友》的例子中的第一个（第二部：第十五章）是相对简单的一个。它展示出并巧妙地实现了一个单一的目的。它是对于城市的想像的成功展示，由此使得《我们共同的朋友》具备震撼人心的力度和阅读快感。/ The late Dickens is more given to panoramic cityscapes in which figurative language becomes the vehicle for envisaging the moral or spiritual meaning of contemporary urban reality. The wonder of these scenes is that an almost photographic fidelity to the realia of Victorian London is not subverted by the riot of metaphoric invention but rather given depth--sometimes, alarming depth--of thematic definition. The first of my two examples (Book Two: Chapter Fifteen) is the simpler, exhibiting a singleminded purpose, artfully implemented, that explains much of its power as an imagining of the city and the pleasure it conveys as a strong piece of writing.

一个灰色、尘土弥漫和了无生气的傍晚。伦敦城的这副样子让人觉得没有希望。大门上锁的库房和办公室显得死气沉沉，而英国人对色彩的惧怕又给到处带来一种举哀服丧的气氛。在千家万户的房舍围绕之中，是一个个教堂的塔楼和尖顶，和似乎要塌下来的苍天一样暗淡无光。这种景象并不能够给普遍的阴郁气氛带来什么宽慰。教堂墙壁上的一座日晷，蒙着一个毫无用处的黑色罩子，那样子就好像它曾经创办过大事业，如今却已经破产，永远无法还清债款了。郁郁寡欢的流浪儿和流离失所的看门人、清洁工把同样是郁郁寡欢和流离失所的废纸和垃圾扫进路旁的沟渠里，而另一些更加郁郁寡欢和流离失所的人又把它们翻来翻去，仔细搜寻着，他们佝偻着身子，勉强支撑着自己，想找出点能够卖钱的东西。从都市中涌出来的那些人，就像是从监狱里放出来的犯人。惨淡的新门监狱（Newgate）似乎可以拿来给伟大的市长大人作为城堡，就跟他自己那庄严的官邸一样地合拍。/ A grey dusty withered evening in London city has not a hopeful aspect. The closed warehouses and offices have an air of death about them, and the national dread of colour has an air of mourning. The towers and steeples of the many house-encompassed churches, dark and dingy as the sky that seems descending on them, are no relief to the general gloom; a sun-dial on a church-wall has the look, in its useless black shade of having failed in its business enterprise and stopped payment for ever; melancholy waifs and strays of housekeepers and porters sweep melancholy waifs and strays of papers and pins into the kennels, and other more melancholy waifs and strays explore them, searching and stooping and poling for anything to sell. The set of humanity outward from the City is as a set of prisoners departing from jail, and dismal Newgate seems quite as fit a stronghold for the mighty Lord Mayor as his own state-dwelling.

这样的段落，在狄更斯的作品中是值得反复阅读的。通过反复阅读——最佳的、大声地念出来——会让人具备更丰富的洞察力，发现所有的语言要素是如何有机地凝结在对于一个城市完整景象的描绘上。傍晚的天空布满阴云；这种“昏暗”的迹象暗示灰尘和污染（实际上，在过于拥挤的伦敦存在着一个严重的问题，那就是不论何时，成百上千、成千上万的烟煤都在燃烧着）。当狄更斯并不采用实际的指代时，他通常就会在描绘中罗列一整套语义几近重叠的特征属性，以此来加强其主题观点的一致性。“灰色的、尘土弥漫的、了无生气的”这一排列顺序，与后文“举哀服丧的气氛”和“黑色罩子”产生语义上的呼应，并在视觉上强化了“暗淡无光”，与此同时，字头押韵法的采用所产生的语音方面的效果：dusty-death-dark-dingy-descending-departing-dismal，这些都迅速地指向“死亡”。/ This is the sort of passage in Dickens that rewards repeated readings, for on rereading--optimally, rereading out loud--one comes to a fuller perception of how all the verbal elements cohere in an integrated vision of the city. The evening sky is covered with clouds; the indication that they are "dingy" suggests dirt and pollution (in fact, a grave problem in an overcrowded London where at any given moment hundreds of thousands of soft-coal fires were burning). When Dickens does not use actual anaphora, he nevertheless usually enforces a unity of thematic perspective by lining up a whole set of overlapping, nearly synonymous attributes in his descriptions. The sequence "grey dusty withered" leads quickly to "death," semantically echoed in "air of mourning" and "black shade," visually reinforced by "dark and dingy," with the integrated effect of the whole underlined phonetically by the alliteration: dusty-death-dark-dingy-descending-departing-dismal.

在这里，四个不同的精心构建的隐喻，做到了有效地结合在一起：首先是死亡，其次是破产，再次是如迷失者和流浪儿般的被扫走的垃圾，最后是监禁。通过反复阅读，我看到这四个隐喻都完胜地与该小说的主旨共振着。郁郁寡欢的流浪儿和清洁工把同样是郁郁寡欢的废纸和垃圾扫走，而这些废纸和垃圾又将被相应的人再次挑拣出来，这种循环与重复造成了这部小说里面的循环往复的感觉，即一切经济活动都是从垃圾中提取出财富的无尽链条。（那些无家可归的人在垃圾堆中“勉强支撑着自己”的描写，使我们直接回到了这部小说开头的场景——为了在泰晤士河中寻找尸体和尸体所能携带的任何钱物，盖佛•赫克沙姆勉强支撑着身子眺望河面。）马克思主义者们在这里可能会欣慰地发现“异化劳动”的影子，福柯主义者们可能会发现“被监禁的自我”。然而明确的是，狄更斯对于处在工业革命峰顶的资本主义社会所作出的想象，并不能涵盖到劳动者在生产关系中所经受到的异化和扭曲的方方面面。他所作出的想像，相应的只是一个无穷无尽的、肮脏的纸屑追逐流程，在其间不义之财从污秽中被提取出来。/ There are four different elaborated metaphors here that manage to hang together effectively: first death, then bankruptcy, then the swept away refuse as strays and waifs, then imprisonment. What rereading leads me to see is how remarkably all four resonate with the larger vision of the novel. The repetition of melancholy waifs and strays sweeping out melancholy waifs and strays of refuse to be picked through by human counterparts takes up the novel's recurrent sense of all economic activity as an unending chain of scavenging, wealth extracted from garbage. (The fact that the street-people are "poling" through the refuse takes us directly back to the opening scene of the novel, in which Gaffer Hexam poles the Thames in search of human bodies and whatever wealth they may carry.) Marxists may happily find here an image of alienated labor, Foucauldians, an image of the carceral self; what is clear is that Dickens's vision of capitalist society at the height of the Industrial Revolution is unable to accommodate the idea of productive labor in all the new distortions of human relations, imagining instead only an endless dirty paper-chase, filthy lucre extracted from filth.

当我在揣度这些隐喻的运用时，破产的日晷这一奇特而又富机智诙谐的描写，作为空间和意象上的表征，浮现为这段文字的中心点。它当然不能用来计时，因为那时的天空被乌云笼罩。那关于“破产”的隐喻，触发了又一种转喻，因为这个日晷位于伦敦金融区的中心。把日晷设置在教堂的墙壁上，在现实中是合理的，可能是在暗示在这样一个死灭的都市金融世界中，宗教变得徒劳和无关紧要。后期狄更斯的典型特征，正是让荒诞离奇的构想通向冷酷的远见，让隐喻的运用达到意想不到的深度。对于一个“永远无法还清债款”的日晷来说，它被遗弃了，现今毫无价值，用来标志那个与自然界绝望地切断联系的世界的时间。在那里，太阳仿佛再也不会发光了。在我第三或第四遍的阅读时，我注意到这段文字是通过一种强化的方式所推进的，并最终在破产的日晷的意象这里达到顶点。整段文字是从十分收敛的陈述开始的：“一个灰色、尘土弥漫和了无生气的傍晚。伦敦城的这副样子让人觉得没有希望。”接着陈述建筑物“显得死气沉沉”。困在黑色罩子中的日晷的意象，吐露出连太阳自身也死了的可能性。再看《我们共同的朋友》再往后两章的一个场景。作为一个读者，当我遇到了两章后的又一个关于都市景像的描绘时，我的脑海里便再次浮现出刚刚引用过的这一段引文里那有如世界末日般的忧思。请看两章之后的又一段：/ As I ponder the deployment of metaphors, what emerges as the center of the passage, both spatially and figuratively, is the fantastically witty representation of the bankrupt sundial. It cannot indicate time, of course, because the sky is covered with dingy clouds; the metaphor of bankruptcy has a metonymic trigger because the sundial stands in the middle of the financial district, the City of London. Its location on a church-wall, realistically plausible, may suggest the futility or irrelevance of religion in this dead urban world of finance. The characteristic trait of the later Dickens is that the fantastication leads to grim visionary perception, metaphor carrying him to unanticipated depths. For a sundial that has "stopped payment forever" is a forlorn, now useless, index of time in a world hopelessly cut off from nature, where it seems as though the sun will never shine again. The passage, I notice on a third or fourth reading, proceeds through intensification, culminating in the image of the bankrupt sundial. It begins with the studied formality of an understatement: "A grey dusty withered evening . . . has not a hopeful aspect." Then the buildings have "an air of death." The sundial trapped in black shade intimates the possibility of the death of the sun itself. As a reader, I keep the apocalyptic broodings fostered by this imagery very much in mind when I encounter this related cityscape, just two chapters on:

这一天伦敦有雾，这雾浓重而阴沉。若将伦敦设想为活物，则其眼睛是刺痛的，肺部是发炎的——它眨着眼睛，喘息着，憋得透不过气来。若设想伦敦为死物，则它是一个乌黑的幽灵，被有意地分为可见部分和不可见部分，结果是整个儿地既看得见也看不见。家家店铺里的煤气灯闪闪摇曳，一副憔悴和受诅咒的样子，仿佛知道他们自己是一群夜游之物，光天化日下的事情与他们不相干。而太阳本身，当它在盘旋着的雾气涡流之中暗淡地显露片刻时，那样子仿佛它已经熄灭，正在彻底崩溃，变得毫无生气和阴冷。甚至在伦敦四周的乡村里也是一个大雾天，不过那儿的雾是灰色的。而在伦敦，在城市边沿一带的地方，雾是深黄色的，越靠里颜色越偏棕，直到商业区的中心地带——这儿叫做圣玛丽•爱克斯——雾是如铁锈般的黑色。如果从北边山脊上的任何一点朝下看，便可以看见，那些高耸的建筑物都不时地在挣扎着要把它们的头伸到这一片迷雾的海洋之上，特别是圣保罗教堂那巨大的圆顶，似乎挣扎得尤其顽固。然而在它们的脚下，这幅景象是看不见的，在那儿，这整座大都市只是一团充满着低沉车轮声的雾气，包裹着一场规模庞大的感染。/ It was a foggy day in London, and the fog was heavy and dark. Animate London, with smarting eyes and irritated lungs, was blinking, wheezing, and choking; inanimate London was a sooty spectre, divided in purpose between being visible and invisible, and so being wholly neither. Gas-lights flared in the shops with a haggard and unblest air, as knowing themselves to be night-creatures that had no business under the sun; while the sun itself, when it was for a few moments dimly indicated through circling eddies of fog, showed as if it had gone out, and were collapsing flat and cold. Even in the surrounding country it was a foggy day, but there the fog was grey, whereas in London it was, at about the boundary line, dark yellow, and a little within it brown, and then browner, and then browner, until at the heart of the City--which call Saint Mary Axe--it was rusty-black. From any point of the high ridge of land northward, it might have been discerned that the loftiest buildings made an occasional struggle to get their heads above the foggy sea, and especially that the great dome of Saint Paul's seemed to die hard; but that was not perceivable at their feet, where the whole metropolis was a heap of vapour charged with the muffled sound of wheels and enfolding a gigantic catarrh.

狄更斯的散文是由基本上相当于音乐意义上的主题动机所组织起来的。因此第一个句子给出了关于雾的主题，告诉给我们这将是一个惯常的关于雾气的场景：“这一天伦敦有雾，这雾浓重而阴沉。”另外，这还是狄更斯基于对现实图景的精确观察而得出的隐喻式幻像。虽然在当时，“工业烟雾”（smog）这个词还没有在英语里被发明出来，不过我们很清楚狄更斯说的就是这个，当我们看到，叙述者的全景叙述角度从没被污染的乡村雾气开始，通过同心环形向里面移动到城市边缘的淡黄色尘雾，再到大都市中心有毒的棕黑和红黑的烟雾，这有点像现代洛杉矶的糟糕的一天。就像晚期狄更斯经常做的那样，从现实所观察出的细节，被隐喻式的描述，转变成幻像般的场景。我作为读者，通过细察这些隐喻的延展韵味深，能够帮我去看这个段落和这个小说到底想说什么。/ Dickens's prose is thematically organized in a virtually musical sense, and so the first sentence enunciates the fog-theme, tells us this is going to be a set-piece on fog: "It was a foggy day in London, and the fog was heavy and dark." Again there is a precisely observed realistic matrix for Dickens's metaphoric fantastication. Although the word "smog" had not yet been invented, that is clearly what Dickens is describing, as the narrator's panoramic view moves inward through concentric circles from the still unpolluted fog in the countryside to the yellow-tinged fog near the city limits to the poisonous brown and reddish black smog of the metropolitan center that looks like modern Los Angeles on a very bad day. As so often in late Dickens, these niceties of realistic observation are transformed into phantasmagoric vision by the play of metaphor, and for me as a reader, pondering the ramifications of metaphor helps me see what the passage and the novel are all about.

在前述引文中，居于场景描述的核心的，是基督教启示录般的异象——太阳被雾气紧紧包围得“仿佛它已经熄灭，正在彻底崩溃，变得毫无生气和阴冷。”这唤起了一种关于太阳正在熄灭的冷峻，这比这之前两章出现的那个“破产”的“日晷”的紧张戏谑图景还要更震撼我心。紧跟着“仿佛”的，是令人寒心的感觉——光明在世界上逐渐逝去。这个关于太阳衰逝的意念，是由三种相互关联的隐喻所合力传达的：窒息、湮没，和鬼魂——前两者是生理上的，第三种则提供了对前两者的民俗学意义上的界定，因为鬼魂是一种介于活人和死人中间的存在，而窒息和湮没也同样是一种介于生和死之间的状态。在这一点上，重复阅读有助于让人感受到狄更斯在用词上的词源学意义上的力度。将城市设想成为“活物”，意味着城市拥有一个灵魂，一个精神。若设想为“死物”，则是缺失生机的。狄更斯在这两种表面相反的类别上制造出模棱两可的联系和一致性。浓雾弥漫的伦敦，像一个不曾有明确的头脑的鬼魂，不管你能不能看清楚它。而且煤油灯点燃在白天“憔悴的”的空气中，叠加了“受诅咒的”和“暗夜生灵”的意味，激活了民间词源上的“憔悴的”（haggard）和“女巫”（hag）上的联系。/ As in the previous passage, an apocalyptic image lies at the heart of the description--the sun swathed in fog that "showed as if it had gone out, and were collapsing flat and cold." This strikes me as a grimmer evocation of the extinguishing of the sun than the nervous jocularity of the bankrupt-sundial image: what follows the "as if" is a chilling sense of light dying in the universe. The idea of the collapsed sun is coordinated with three interrelated metaphors, two of which have a physiological basis: choking, drowning, and ghosts. The last of these three provides folkloric definition for the first two since a ghost is an intermediate being between the living and the dead, and choking or drowning is a transitional state between life and death. In this connection, rereading helps one feel the etymological weight with which Dickens often uses words. To be "animate" is to possess an anima, a spirit, while the inanimate is devoid of spirit; and Dickens works the ambiguities of connection and correspondence between these two ostensibly opposed categories. Fog-enshrouded London, like a ghost, cannot make up its mind whether to be visible or not; and the "haggard" air of the gas-lamps lit by day, coupled as it is with "unblest" and "night-creatures," activates the folk-etymological connection between "haggard" and "hag."

狄更斯成熟期的隐喻式意象是具备强大的综合性的。我每每觉得，这是出于狄更斯的直觉而非有意。从浓雾湮没城市的场景中，即可看出这种隐喻式意象的强大力量。（高耸的圣保罗大教堂是最后一个被湮没的。）该意象，当然也一直烘托着小说中一出出的溺水而亡场景，从泰晤士河上最初的阴暗场景开始，直到快到结尾处 Rogue Riderhood 和 Bradley Headstone 的双双溺亡。同理，因为缺乏新鲜空气而窒息，可以算做是一种内在的湮没。狄更斯对于浓重的工业烟雾为害眼睛、喉咙和肺部的表述再现，为他的总体上的湮没主题提供了生理学上的直截感性。如果如同我曾经说的那样，风格就是在小说所建构的世界中，我们所呼吸的空气，则狄更斯式一系列的交叠用词，使得这样的呼吸显得颇为费劲：“若将伦敦设想为活物，则其眼睛是刺痛的，肺部是发炎的——它眨着眼睛，喘息着，憋得透不过气来。” 狄更斯持续了这些呼吸困难的设定，继续勾勒出幽暗的煤气灯，倒塌的太阳，工业烟雾污染的色调递进，和被湮没的城市。这些意象再度浮现到这段结尾的精彩的总括性隐喻：“这整座大都市只是一团充满着低沉车轮声的雾气，包裹着一场规模庞大的感染。”这段留到最后的“感染”一词，这个最终的启示性喻表，展示了隐喻式想象所能具备的几乎是强制一般的力量。在“感染”一词里面，组合了疾病、呼吸困难、涕泪俱下、浑身散架等诸多彼此相关的症状。在狄更斯的眼中，这样的综合症状，就是工业时代所造就的伦敦。/ The metaphoric imagination of the mature Dickens is powerfully integrative--often, I suspect, intuitively rather than intentionally--and one sees that power working here in the image of the city drowning in fog (lofty Saint Paul's the last to go), which of course carries forward the images of death by drowning that run through the novel from the first sombre scene on the Thames till the watery death of Rogue Riderhood and Bradley Headstone near the end. Asphyxiation, in turn, is a kind of inner drowning, and Dickens's representation of what thick smog really does to eyes and throat and lungs gives his overarching motif of drowning a physiological immediacy. If style, as I have proposed, is the air we breathe in the constructed world of the novel, the Dickensian procedure of using chains of overlapping terms makes the breathing here labored: "Animate London, with smarting eyes and irritated lungs, was blinking, wheezing, and choking." Dickens continues to assume these respiratory difficulties as he goes on to evoke the spectral gas-lamps, the collapsed sun, the chromatic gradations of smog, and the drowning city, and they resurface in the brilliant summarizing metaphor with which the passage concludes: "the whole metropolis was a heap of vapour charged with the muffled sound of wheels and enfolding a gigantic catarrh." That final revelatory image, saved for the last word of the paragraph, illustrates the almost coercive force of metaphoric imagination, combining in a single term disease, difficulty of breathing, rheumy fluids, bleariness, messiness--all that the industrial age has made of London in Dickens's eyes.

我很知道一个事实，就是我作为一个读者，展示出的解读结果比解读过程要多。我是有意这么做的，因为我并不相信，解读的过程，需要参照步骤清单，或者固定的技巧。如果说阅读行为如同其他一些行为一样，体现为一种技艺的话，那么这种技艺是基于体验、耐性、灵活性，和即兴的感受。这必须要凭借读者的个体心智，才能得以实践起来。并不是每一个读者都欣赏我所欣赏的东西，或者被感动我的同一件事情所感动，或者注意到了相同的细节。我自己的感受是，一个作者的独特魅力，总会通过特定的风格特征而展示出来。对于我来说，狄更斯风格的决定性特征，就是隐喻。通过慢读、重读、读出声音，我开始看到其修辞性语言通向了何处，看到它如何返回自身，看到它如同地毯上的花纹，如何在小说的整体布局中生效，提供出有关于这个世界的繁复喻像。对世界的喻像这一说法，应该得到强调。我所从事的解读，终归不能算是形式主义的，因为我在解读之前已经认定，作者的内心，驱使他要去尝试着表征出历史的真实。作者对于语言形式上各种资源的运用，都是服务于此。我想我喜欢读小说，是因为我喜欢故事，也因为我对世界感兴趣，同时还因为我对咬文嚼字上瘾。不过这在我看来，这种上瘾是有收益的——面对那些被创造性地排列出如此精微序列的言语，如果我们认真倾听，它们就能够回馈给我们流溢着洞察性认识的美好时刻。/ I am conscious of the fact that I have presented less my procedures as a reader than their consequences. I have done this deliberately because I do not believe in checklists or set techniques for reading. If reading is, among other things, a craft, it is a craft that depends on experience, patience, flexibility, and improvisation, and that must be practiced according to the sensibility of the individual reader. Not every reader will admire or be moved by the same things that move me, or attend to the same details. My own experience is that a writer's special power is often manifested in a particular stylistic feature, and for me that feature in Dickens is metaphor. By reading slowly, rereading, reading out loud, I begin to see where the figurative language leads, how it doubles back on itself, how it extends the figure in the carpet of the novel as a whole, generating a dense vision of the world. The idea of a vision of the world should be underscored. The reading I have undertaken is not finally formalist because it presupposes that writers' deployment of formal resources leads to a probing representation of the historical reality that presses in on them. I suppose I read novels because I love stories and because I am interested in the world but also because I am a word-junkie, but it seems to me a salutary addiction because words ordered on this level of originality, if we listen to them carefully, can in fact reward us with moments of overflowing comprehension. University of California, Berkeley