金融時報:鬼故事為何讓我們害怕？

鬼故事為何讓我們害怕？

現(xiàn)在，越來越多的人已經(jīng)不再相信鬼了。但我卻驚訝地發(fā)現(xiàn)，即使是不相信有鬼存在的人，依然害怕鬼故事，而我也是如此。當(dāng)我們怕“鬼”的時候，我們所恐懼的究竟是什么？

測試中可能遇到的詞匯和知識：

anachronism[?'nækr?n?z?m] 時代錯誤

preoccupation[pri??kju'pe??n] 先入成見

contemporary[k?n'tempr?ri] 當(dāng)代的；同時代的

connotation[?kɑ?n?'te??n]] 隱含意義

equate[i'kwe?t] 等同, 使相等

secularity[?sekj?'lær?t?] 世俗主義

Why it's scary writing ghost stories?（829 words）

By Kamila Shamsie

Once upon a time, this was a nation of seances, spiritualists and spirit photography. Britain was thick with ghosts and the Victorians knew how to speak to them, and see them. The writers of the time were quick to seize on this interest. Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Gaskell were among those who wrote ghost stories — as did many others in the popular periodical presses of the time.

Today, the landscape — or the ether — in Britain is very different. The ghosts that moved with ease on creaking wooden floorboards and could be glimpsed at night illuminated by gas lamps (which, incidentally, contained carbon monoxide, which may have brought on hallucinations) are less at home in silent modern constructions, less likely to reveal themselves in the light cast by a smartphone screen. When ghosts do appear among us in fiction for adults, they often do so by transporting us to the past — as in Susan Hill's The Woman in Black, Kate Mosse's The Taxidermist's Daughter and Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger. This is not merely a British phenomenon, as the Texan writer George Saunders' Booker-winning novel of American ghosts, Lincoln in the Bardo, attests.

By contrast, a 21st-century ghost story set in 21st-century Britain can seem an anachronism. There are two ways to account for this. Ghost stories have long been seen as primarily a Victorian preoccupation, and every contemporary writer who sets a ghost story in the past furthers the notion that the present is not a suitable setting for such a tale. There is also the question of belief. To the Victorians, ghosts were real; it gave their ghosts stories a menace and an edge that our contemporary stories can't match.

Of course that latter theory assumes that Britain has ceased to believe in ghosts. Let me set that assumption against the story of a friend of mine who recently found herself staying overnight, on her own, in a beautiful modern home. Even though she knew the previous occupant of the house had committed suicide there, she didn't think this would affect her in any way. But once she was in the house, she found herself on edge, playing music loudly to stop herself from hearing sounds that weren't there. And at night, her dreams were troubled.

When I started work this year on a ghost story set in contemporary Britain, I was surprised to find that more people than I imagined do in fact believe in ghosts — although they might prefer to call them “spirits” or “presences” to get away from the chain-rattling connotations of the word “ghosts”. I've heard dozens of “real” ghost stories over the years, in every country I've ever spent much time in. Even if the 21st century gives us far fewer examples of them in fiction than was once the case, they continue to exist in the oral form in which they originated.

That is why I started writing my story with the assumption that most people fear ghosts, regardless of whether or not they believe in them. I fall into this category of person myself — I had to write my ghost story in the daylight because I grew too afraid at night. The fact that I had been commissioned by English Heritage to set my story in the ruins of Kenilworth Castle did allow me to fall back on the literary convention that equates old, crumbling structures with ghosts. But even as I wrote it, I knew I could have set the same story in a house as modern as the one in which my friend spent that restless night and, if written properly, it would still infect its readers with ghost-terror. After all, if you scratch the surface, what you find is death-terror, out of which rationality, secularity and reason cannot lift us. It is only literary convention that makes the ruins of a castle seem more appropriate for a ghost story than an eco-friendly modern house.

We return again and again to the ghost story to look at death and look away from it. To imagine our own extinction is near-impossible, and some people manage to go through life without ever really doing so. But we've all had to, or will have to, contend with the extinction of someone we've loved; and we've all had moments where we have stopped and felt not so much sad, as puzzled: “How is it possible that the world is now so completely without this person? How is it possible there will never be a moment when we'll see them again?”

Except, of course, we do see them again. In the weeks and months after someone has died, they are often there in the corner of your eye. You see them in one person's gait, another person's hairstyle, a third person's gestures. We know death has happened well before we learn how to believe it. From this place of sorrow and terror and incomprehension, the ghost story arises. Literary tastes shift with the seasons, but ghosts will always be with us, whether we believe in them or not.

請根據(jù)你所讀到的文章內(nèi)容，完成以下自測題目：

1.Why do contemporary writers in Britain often set their ghost stories in the past according to the second paragraph?

A.Because the modern landscape in Britain is not a suitable setting for ghost tales.

B.Because the landscape in Britain now is very different from the Victorian era.

C.Because nowadays people in Britain have ceased to believe in ghost stories.

D.Because ghost stories have long been believed to originate in the Victorian era.

答案(1)

2.Which of the following statement about the author is true?

A.She found that British people no longer believe in ghosts anymore.

B.She writes ghost story in the daytime because she fears ghost at night.

C.She prefers to set her ghost story in a modern house instead of a castle.

D.She is a researcher focusing on ghost stories set in contemporary Britain.

答案(2)

3.Why does the author set her ghost story in the ruins of a castle?

A.Because she is quite interested in Kenilworth Castle.

B.Because setting story in the past can attract more readers.

C.Because she doesn't know how to write a modern ghost story.

D.Because she was commissioned by English Heritage to do so.

答案(3)

4.What is the substance of ghost-terror according to the author?

A.The lack of rationality.

B.The fear of death.

C.The fear of human extinction.

D.The Victorian literary convention.

答案(4)

* * *

(1)答案：A.Because the modern landscape in Britain is not a suitable setting for ghost tales.

解釋:如今，英國的景觀已經(jīng)大變樣，因此當(dāng)鬼在小說中出現(xiàn)時，它們往往會把我們帶回到過去。

(2)答案：B.She writes ghost story in the daytime because she fears ghost at night.

解釋：不管相不相信，大部分人都害怕鬼。我也不例外——我不得不在白天寫我的鬼故事，因?yàn)樵谕砩衔視ε隆?/p>

(3)答案：D.Because she was commissioned by English Heritage to do so.

解釋：英格蘭遺產(chǎn)委員會委托我把故事背景設(shè)定在凱尼爾沃思城堡遺址。

(4)答案：B.The fear of death.

解釋：歸根結(jié)底，如果你揭開怕鬼現(xiàn)象的表面，你發(fā)現(xiàn)的是對死亡的恐懼。