一株被賦予性別的櫻桃

一株被賦予性別的櫻桃

''Oranges are not the only fruit,'' Nell Gwyn once said, knowing she had something sexier to sell to Covent Garden's 17th-century theatergoers in the days before she became a royal mistress. Indeed, as Jeanette Winterson demonstrates in ''Sexing the Cherry,'' they're not. The young British writer used the one-time orange girl's words as the title for her first novel, a somewhat autobiographical account of a lesbian orphan brought up in a fundamentalist sect. And her new book proffers not only the title's cherry but also the first pineapple ever seen in England, presented to Charles II in 1661, and a banana that in its London debut is taken to be ''the private parts of an Oriental.''

在成為查爾斯二世的情婦之前，妮爾·格溫(Nell Gwyn)曾經向前往考文特花園看戲的十七世紀貴婦們推銷比橘子更性感的水果，她說：“橘子不是唯一的水果。” 英國青年作家珍妮特·溫特森(Jeanette Winterson)在《給櫻桃以性別》(Sexing The Cherry)中再次證明了這一點——橘子不是唯一的水果。這位作家多少有些自傳性質的第一部小說便以橘子命名， 講述了一位在原教旨主義的極端宗教家庭長大的女同性戀孤兒的故事。而在她的新作中不僅僅有標題中的櫻桃，更有1661年進貢給查爾斯二世、英格蘭的第一顆菠蘿，以及一根初登英格蘭時被當作“東方人下體”的香蕉。

Fruit as a metaphor for sexuality - well, nothing new in that. But for Ms. Winterson fruit is also something rich and sweet, an exotic juiciness hidden beneath the pineapple's unpalatable skin, a new marvel brought into our ken. ''Sexing the Cherry'' fuses history, fairy tale and metafiction into a fruit that's rather crisp, not terribly sweet, but of a memorably startling flavor. Set mostly in the 17th century, the novel employs two alternating narrators. One is the gigantic Dog Woman, an appealingly innocent murderess, puzzled by just what it is that attracts people about sex - for she's so enormous that experiencing it herself has proved impossible. The other is her adopted son, Jordan, a naturalist who wonders about the human applications of ''the new fashion of grafting, which we had understood from France,'' the grafting through which a new kind of cherry tree has been created and given a sex - female - without parent or seed. And the novel itself grafts together not just those two voices, but different narrative modes as well.

水果作為“性隱喻”的情況并不少見。但對于溫特森女士來說，水果還代表著層次豐富和甜美。比如菠蘿，表皮雖粗糙、味如嚼蠟，但卻包裹著極具異域誘惑的汁液，味道奇幻、讓人大開眼界。《給櫻桃以性別》將歷史、童話故事和超小說(metafiction)融合進了一種水果里，有著回味無窮、令人驚艷的味道。小說的主要時間背景為17世紀，由兩個截然不同的聲音展開敘述。一個是身形巨大的狗婦(Dog Woman)。她是無邪的殺手，且一直不明白為什么人們會沉迷于性。由于她身體碩大，根本無法切身去體會性。另一個敘述聲音是她的養(yǎng)子約旦 (Jordan)，自然主義者的他一直在琢磨如何在人類身上運用從法國學到的“嫁接方面的新潮流”。通過這種新的嫁接方式，在無種子、無父母株的情況下，養(yǎng)殖出了一種新的櫻桃，且該櫻桃被予以了性別——女。而除了這兩個敘述視角之外，小說本身也成功嫁接了不同敘述模式。

''My neighbour, who is so blackened and hairless that she has twice been mistaken for a side of salt beef wrapped in muslin, airs herself abroad as a witch.'' That's the Dog Woman, so called because she breeds dogs for the fights and races in Hyde Park. Jordan's voice is less pungent and more meditative: ''Every journey conceals another journey within its lines,'' he muses. ''The path not taken and the forgotten angle. These are the journeys I wish to record. Not the ones I made, but the ones I might have made, or perhaps did make in some other place or time.'' Like his quest for a woman whom he sees one morning ''climbing down from her window on a thin rope which she cut and re-knotted a number of times during the descent'' - a quest that leads to his discovery of 12 princesses who dance away each night to a weightless city in the sky. Or a journey through time itself, which Jordan believes to be rounded and curved like a globe, instead of flat and linear like a map - so that at the end of the novel we meet another Jordan and another Dog Woman in 1990, and find that nothing has changed in 300 years.

“我的鄰居，長得那么黑，又沒有頭發(fā)，以至于有兩次被當成了一塊裹著平紋細布的腌牛油，而她宣稱自己是個巫婆。” 這是狗婦的話，她因養(yǎng)殖賽狗去海德公園斗狗、賽狗而得此諢號。約旦的敘述相較少些辛辣、多些哲思：“每一段旅程的線路——那些沒走過的路和被遺忘的轉角，都隱藏著另一段旅程。我想記錄下的不是我已走過的旅程，而是那些我可能走過，或者在另外的時間另外的地方的確走過的旅程。”正如某天早上當他看見那個女人 “……借助一根細繩從她的窗口爬出來。在下降過程中，她不斷把這條繩子剪斷又重新打結”，便開始了對她的追尋。在追尋她的旅途上，他發(fā)現了每天晚上去天空中漂浮城市跳舞的十二位公主。這追尋的過程也是一場時間旅行。約旦認為時間像地球儀一樣是圓的，而非同地圖一般呈線性。于是后來在小說中我們來到了 1990年，見到了另一個約旦和和狗婦，三百年間什么都沒改變。

But Ms. Winterson alternates these metaphysical conceits with the Dog Woman's world of blood and pus and sweat. A Royalist, a Cavalier of the slums, she's long pondered the biblical motto ''an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,'' and one day decides to take it seriously. Soon she's got a bagful of both, all popped from Puritans, and moves on to work as an executioner at a brothel where the whores murder their puritanical Roundhead customers. Of course, all her victims are men. And the 12 dancing princesses murder the husbands they're forced to marry. At times, in fact, it seems that the only men in ''Sexing the Cherry'' worth saving are those who, like Jordan, have given cross-dressing a try. I note this, but curiously enough it didn't bother me as I read the novel. If Kingsley Amis can use women as objects for his misanthropy, I suppose Ms. Winterson can use men as a metaphor for a world based on a pestilential hypocrisy.

通過構造狗婦那淌著血、膿液和汗液的世界，溫特森同時又展現了一個形而上沉思之外的場域。狗婦是?；庶h、貧民窟女騎士，常年信奉圣經名言“以眼還眼、以牙還牙”。有一天她終于決定將信仰付諸行動，很快集齊了兩大口袋清教徒的牙和眼。緊接著她又移步一家妓院，為那里專殺清教圓顱黨(英國 1642-1652內戰(zhàn)期間的議會派分子，與?；庶h相對——編注)顧客的妓女當起了執(zhí)刑人。當然，她手下的所有受害者都是男人。而書中的十二位跳舞的公主也一一殺掉了迫她們進入婚姻的丈夫們?；旧希凇督o櫻桃以性別》中，似乎只有約旦這樣愿意嘗試跨性別的男人值得被救贖。即使在閱讀過程中就意識到了這一點，但奇怪的是，我卻并不為此困擾。若金斯利·阿米斯(Kinsley Amis)可以用女性形象作為他厭世的依托，那溫特森又何嘗不可用男人來比喻這令人厭惡的虛偽世界?

I do, however, question her success in producing her own kind of graft. Her prose is exquisite, although, like the best sort of fruitcake, it's too rich to take much of at a sitting. But the book seems disjointed. It needs, but never quite achieves, an integration of the Dog Woman's world and Jordan's speculations. The games it plays with gender aren't made to relate to the ones it plays with time. And while the effect of ''Sexing the Cherry'' depends above all on novelty, the kinds of materials Ms. Winterson uses - the feminist revision of fairy tales, the reliance on historical pastiche, an insistence on the subjectivity of all truth - have paradoxically become so fashionably familiar that they begin to seem the cliches of post-modernism. It almost seems written to recipe: graft Italo Calvino onto Angela Carter, with an admixture of Peter Ackroyd.

但我并不確定她是否成功制造了自己專有的文學嫁接。這本小說行文優(yōu)雅，但就像一塊高級水果蛋糕，要一次吃完實在有些甜膩。故事本身也有些不連貫，本可以更好地融合狗婦的世界和約旦的思索，卻沒有做到。且關于性別的文字游戲又無法與關于時間的文字游戲做到相互關聯(lián)。再者，《給櫻桃以性別》一書所期取得的效果，全部取決于它可以帶來的新意，但那些溫特森善用的文學手段——以女性主義視角重述童話、對歷史拼貼式寫作的依賴、堅持所有真相都是主觀的——卻因已風行多時，變得太過熟悉而成為了后現代主義的老生常談。這就像是一道寫好了的菜譜：把卡爾維諾(Italo Calvino)嫁接給安吉拉·卡特(Angela Carter)，再加一點彼得·阿克羅伊德(Peter Ackroyd)的風味。

But no - Ms. Winterson has her own strengths, above all an emotional intensity that Ms. Carter, for example, seems without. I think of two things that set her apart, two things that figure in all her work: a fascination with sexual ambiguity, cross-dressing and blurred genders on the one hand, and with foundling children on the other. And their combination gives her prose an exuberance cut with a melancholy knowledge of what it is to be hurt, and of how deep and enduring that hurt can be; a knowledge that's far more memorable, and unsettling, than any of the Dog Woman's murders. ''Sexing the Cherry'' may not be without parent or seed, but its taste is rich enough to make me look forward to whatever fruit may follow it.

也不盡然如此。溫特森的文字自有其獨特的魅力，特別是其中所展現的情緒張力是類似安吉拉·卡特那樣的作家似乎缺乏的。在她所有的作品中，有兩個反復出現的主要元素，令其與眾不同——模糊而跨界的性別和棄兒。這是她展示在字里行間的疤痕，醒目地提示著人們什么叫做傷害，而傷害的殺傷力又能夠多么持久。如此悲傷的認知，其實比狗婦犯下的任何一宗謀殺更讓人印象深刻、讓人不安。《給櫻桃以性別》或許稱不上無父母株、無種子的嫁接產品，但滋味已夠甜美，足以讓人期待她下一部關于水果的小說。