再见，马尔克斯；再见，南美洲的桃花源

公元421年，隐居在家多年的陶渊明(365年－427年)写下了脍炙人口的名篇 -《桃花源记》。文不长，仅三百多字，讲述的是武陵渔人无意中闯入一片与世隔绝的净土。“土地平旷，屋舍俨然，有良田美池桑竹之属。阡陌交通，鸡犬相闻。”陶渊明笔下的桃源不但秀美而且人民生活幸福自在，“黄发垂髫，并怡然自乐。”这一切同东晋时的朝廷横征暴敛，民不聊生形成鲜明对比。从此桃花源就成为中国式的乌托邦或理想国的象征，深受历代文人骚客以及普通百姓的喜爱。到了现代，《桃花源记》更被选入中学课本，国人中很少有不知道的。

令人遗憾的是陶渊明并没有描写桃花源的人们的生活细节，天堂里的生活真的很甜蜜吗？他也没有回答一个很重要的问题：桃花源最后的结局是什么。这留下了很多想象的空间，但总觉得不完整。

无独有偶，一千五百多年后哥伦比亚作家加西亚·马尔克斯(Gabriel García Márquez)在1967年也写了一个世外桃源 。《百年孤独》(One hundred years of solitude)讲述一个叫马孔多(Macondo)的村庄的故事。和《桃花源记》不大一样，马孔多并不是一块净土或者仙境。从外表上看它同南美洲许多村庄，小镇差不多，人们也生老病死，过着普通的生活，仔细一看却充满了离奇和怪诞。人间的规矩常理在这里似乎不管用，比如老祖母乌苏拉活到了120多岁，最后缩成像洋娃娃这么大；家族中的最后一个人被蚂蚁吃掉，等等。这种写作风格被称为魔幻现实主义(Magic Realism)。诺贝尔文学奖获得者马尔克斯是这个流派最重要的作家之一。今年4月17日，马尔克斯在墨西哥城去世，享年87岁。

马尔克斯是我最喜欢的作家之一。《百年孤独》万花筒般的历史长卷让我流连，古怪离奇的变形让我诧异，对现实的尖锐批判更让我拍案称奇。以前我写过一篇博文比较《百年孤独》与莫言的《生死疲劳》(参阅“怪圈”)，但要对它进行的全面评价却超出我的能力。幸运的是我在“纽约时报”找到了一篇《百年孤独》的书评，将它翻译成中文，已飨读者，也算一点纪念。

说到“纽约时报”，你知道文章的质量是有保障的，如果作者又是哈佛的文学教授，你可以肯定，这篇书评一定很棒。本文发表与1970年3月，当英文版《百年孤独》刚出版之际。作者罗伯特·凯利(Robert Kiely)是English教授，在文学评论方面发表了很多专著。他也曾经担任哈佛亚当斯学院(Adams House)的Headmaster很多年时间。

记忆和预言浑然一体，幻觉和现实真假难辨

原作：罗伯特·凯利 (翻译：白露为霜)

说到带有魔力的仙境，即使是谈论现代小说，也会呼招出精灵(elves)，月光(moonbeams)和滑山(slippery mountains)的形象。除了侏儒和仙子之外，读者也可以预期奇妙的壮举和道德的预兆，但不会有太多的幽默，更不用说“性”了。想法似乎是，魔力就该忘记了地球上的一切。至少，这是魔力的一个特征。

这显然不是哥伦比亚作家加西亚·马尔克斯所认同的，他在《百年孤独》里创造了一个神奇的地方，在那里除了甜腻之外啥都会发生。马孔多即使在它最诱人和最让人开心时也渗着血，冒着恶臭，火烧火燎的。它充斥着谎言和说谎者，但它也流淌着现实。小说里的爱人们可以把对方理想化为出窍的精灵，在吊床上因快乐而嚎叫，或者，在一个例子中，给自己抹上桃子酱，在门前赤裸裸地翻滚。英雄可以穿越丛林进行堂吉诃德式的远征，虽然他的目标永远达不到，描写其探险的语言却是鲜活的辛辣：

“当他们的靴子陷入黑油的池塘，用砍刀斩断血腥的野百合与金蝾螈时，远征的人们感到淹没在潮湿和沉默的伊甸园的最古老的记忆中，回到原罪[注1]之前。整整一个星期，他们艰难前行，几乎不说话，如同梦游者穿行在悲伤的宇宙中，只有夜光虫的暗弱反射的照明，他们的肺部在令人窒息的血腥气味中不堪重负。”这是一位诗人的语言，他了解地球并且不害怕它会成为梦想家的敌人。

在《百年孤独》接近结尾时某人发现了一卷由吉普赛老人“在一百年前写下的”羊皮纸手稿，上面记载了他们家族的历史。他“没有把事件按常人的顺序记载，却将一个世纪每日发生的事件集中在一起，让它们在同一个瞬间共存。”小说的叙述就像一个魔术师的表演，其中记忆和预言，幻觉和现实浑然一体，真假莫辨。简短地说，这就像马尔克斯的惊人的小说。

描述这本书的技巧和主题很难不使它听起来很荒唐地复杂，吃力，几乎无法阅读。事实上，它完全不是这样的。由怪癖，古老的奥秘，家庭的秘密和奇特的矛盾编织而成，它却看上去合乎情理，并以数十种直接的方法让人享受乐趣。

家庭的记事围绕着何塞·阿尔卡迪奥·布恩迪亚(José Arcadio Buendía)和他的妻子乌苏拉(Ursula)以及他们的5代子孙。他们在19世纪初的某个时间在南美某地清水河边建立了村庄马孔多。对时间和地点的不确定性，就像书中其他有关事实的不确定，并不是作者在时髦地逃避，而是他所写的人们心中想法的真正反映。从一开始，我们被告知，布恩迪亚对该地区的地理环境一无所知。他很喜欢地图和指南针，但关于他在哪里的还停留在自己的感觉上。他做事总是太过火，“为了建立确定正午时分的一个准确方法”，在日头下摆弄星盘和六分仪，差点中暑了。

这本书是一部历史，但不是政府或正规机构保持公共记录的那种，而是一群人的历史。就像亚伯拉罕[注2]早期的后裔，了解他们的最佳方法是通过其与家族的关系。从某种意义上说，何塞和乌苏拉是故事中仅有的两个人物，而他们的儿女，孙子和重孙子是他们具有不同长处和短处的变种。何塞，对未知永远的着迷，开始了一个又一个项目，发明了一样又一样东西。他尝试过制造黄金，探索海洋和拍出上帝的照片，还有其他很多。他最后终于疯了，摔破东西，除了拉丁语之外不肯说话，给绑在家里花园中一颗巨大的板栗树上。

乌苏拉是实用的耐久和坚强的意志的化身。是她在灾难之后把一件件东西修好，把房子打扫干净。是她在自己的孩子已经成年后继续养育各种后代，是她仍然精力旺盛，头脑清醒，直到114或122岁 - 像往常一样，没有人能确定。

强迫性的理想主义和耐久的实用性的混合概括了布恩迪亚后代的生活。所有的男性，都命名为阿尔卡迪奥(Arcadio)或奥雷利亚诺(Aureliano)，要么投奔海洋，要么领导革命，要么跟着吉普赛人跑了，要么灾难性地爱上了自己的姐姐，或姑姑（只有一个例外，他对一个12岁的小女孩萌生爱意），但大多数都为家族增添地位和财富，所有的都给家族添人加丁。女人们也不让男人专美。有一个在抑郁的时候会吃泥巴; 另一个因为她的情人自杀在烤箱里烧伤了手，然后一辈子裹着黑布遮盖它。还有一个，美人雷梅迪奥斯(Remedios the Beauty)，是那么的纯洁，有一天她在后院折叠亚麻布，坐在家里的床单上升到天堂。

然而要从书中孤立细节，甚至是很好的细节，对它也是非常不公平。马尔克斯建造了一个连续体(continuum)，联接和关系的网络。一些细节也许是离奇和怪诞的，总体的效果却是妙趣横生和幽默诙谐，更加重要的，警醒和同情。作者似乎让他的角色们一半是梦想，一半是记忆自己的故事，最好的是，他十分明智地没有为他们这种做法提供借口。借口是没有必要的。马孔多不是一个仙境(never-never land)。它的居民也受苦，变老和死去，但按照他们自己的方式。

现实的各种硬的和熟悉的方面时时闯入他们的世界。以一个局外人来看，似乎不真实或至少不落俗套的，是布恩迪亚他们的回应，以及他们对事情如出生，死亡，战争，疾病，甚至天气的解释。当马孔多热的时候，它热的连人和兽都发疯，鸟类攻击的房子。一次漫长的雨季持续了不是几个星期，但四年十一个月零两天。当瘟疫来临，它不是普通的杀手，而是“失眠瘟疫”，从而逐渐使人们忘记了一切，包括最普通东西的名称和用途。为了应对记忆力的减退，村民们在椅子，钟表上帖上标注，甚至在牛身上挂个牌子：“这是牛，必须每天早上给她挤奶，这样她会产生牛奶，牛奶必须煮然后与咖啡混合，来做咖啡和牛奶。“

比恶劣天气或瘟疫更为严重的是从外部的侵入，神秘的吉普赛人，腐败的政府官员，残酷的士兵（包括保守党和自由党），浮夸的意大利调音师，巧妙的法国妓女，最后，铁路和冒着汗的外国佬，他们“计划在布恩迪亚和他的手下人寻找大海时经过的魔法之地种植香蕉树”。起初，看起来好像北美人会被吸收到马孔多的梦幻生活中，但他们真的是要改变这里的，包括地形和天气，他们也最终建立自己更合乎情理的马孔多，整齐划一的房子，还有网球场和游泳池。

它可能只是马孔多乱伦生活(incestuous life)的一个阶段，像32次革命或失眠瘟疫，但是世外桃源在遇上外国佬后很难存活下来，就像它无法避开20世纪一样。同这个古怪而动人的叙述中很多东西一样，终结似乎已经不可避免。然而，北美的读者 - 在思考这充满着令人难以忘怀的人、兽和事的叙述时 - 也很难不被自己同胞的做派而惭愧。“汗流满面的客人 – 甚至不知道谁是自己的主人 - [成群结队]占据餐桌上最好的地方”。马尔克斯非常艺术地告诉我们，这些主人是谁，更重要的，他们认为他们自己是谁。他完成了一部如此充满了幽默，丰富的细节和令人诧异的变形的小说，使我想起了福克纳(Faulkner)和君特·格拉斯(Gunter Grass)最好的作品。这是一个南美州的创世纪(Genesis)[注3]，一个朴实的仙境，而且，就像叙述者讲述马孔多所说的，“真实和幻影的精微的炖汤。”

用炖汤来描写这样一部魅力无限的幻想曲的智慧和力量是太过谦虚了，但是如果强烈的气味驱赶了“闪亮脚趾”(twinkletoes)的景像，它已经达到了目的。

[注1]指亚当夏娃偷吃了智慧果

[注2] 圣经中先知

[注1] 创世纪是圣经的第一章，讲述上帝创造世界的故事

Memory and Prophecy, Illusion and Reality Are Mixed and Made to Look the Same

By ROBERT KIELY (March 8, 1970)

To speak of a land of enchantment, even in reference to a contemporary novel, is to conjure up images of elves, moonbeams and slippery mountains. Along with the midgets and fairies, one can expect marvelous feats and moral portents, but not much humor and almost certainly no sex. The idea, it would seem, is to forget the earth. At least that is one idea of enchantment.

It is obviously not shared by the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, who has created in "One Hundred Years of Solitude" an enchanted place that does everything but cloy. Macondo oozes, reeks and burns even when it is most tantalizing and entertaining. It is a place flooded with lies and liars and yet it spills over with reality. Lovers in this novel can idealize each other into bodiless spirits, howl with pleasure in their hammocks or, as in one case, smear themselves with peach jam and roll naked on the front porch. The hero can lead a Quixotic expedition across the jungle, but although his goal is never reached, the language describing his quest is pungent with life:

"The men on the expedition felt overwhelmed by their most ancient memories in that paradise of dampness and silence, going back to before original sin, as their boots sank into pools of steaming oil and their machetes destroyed bloody lilies and golden salamanders. For a week, almost without speaking, they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief, lighted only by the tenuous reflection of luminous insects, and their lungs were overwhelmed by a suffocating smell of blood." This is the language of a poet who knows the earth and does not fear it as the enemy of the dreamer.

Near the end of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" a character finds a parchment manuscript in which the history of his family had been recorded "one hundred years ahead of time" by an old gypsy. The writer "had not put events in the order of man's conventional time, but had concentrated a century of daily episodes in such a way that they coexisted in one instant." The narrative is a magician's trick in which memory and prophecy, illusion and reality are mixed and often made to look the same. It is, in short, very much like Márquez's astonishing novel.

It is not easy to describe the techniques and themes of the book without making it sound absurdly complicated, labored and almost impossible to read. In fact, it is none of these things. Though concocted of quirks, ancient mysteries, family secrets and peculiar contradictions, it makes sense and gives pleasure in dozens of immediate ways.

The family chronicle centers on five five generations of descendants of José Arcadio Buendía and his wife Ursula, who sometime early in the 19th century founded the village of Macondo on a river of clear water somewhere in South America. The uncertainties about time and place, like other factual puzzles in the book, are not fashionable evasions on the part of the author but genuine reflections of the minds of the people about whom he is writing. From the beginning we are told that Buendía knew nothing about the geography of the region. He comes to love maps and compasses, but his sense of where he is remains very much his own. He plays with an astrolabe and sextant, but, with characteristic excess, almost contracts sunstroke "from trying to establish an exact method to ascertain noon."

The book is a history, not of governments or of formal institutions of the sort which keeps public records, but of a people who, like the earliest descendants of Abraham, are best understood in terms of their relationship to a single family. In a sense, José and Ursula are the only two characters in the story, and all their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are variations on their strengths and weaknesses. José, forever fascinated by the unknown, takes up project after project, invention after invention, in order among other things, to make gold, discover the ocean and photograph God. He eventually goes mad, smashes things, refuses to speak except in Latin and is tied to a giant chestnut tree in the middle of the family garden.

Ursula is the personification of practical endurance and sheer will. It is she who mends the pieces and sweeps the house clean after disaster; it is she who continues to raise various offspring long after her own children have grown to adulthood, and it is she who remains strong and clear-headed until the age of 114 or 122--as usual, no one is quite sure.

A mixture of obsessive idealism and durable practicality informs the lives of the Buendía descendants. The males, all named Arcadio or Aureliano, go off to sea, lead revolutions, follow gypsies, fall disastrously in love with their sisters and aunts (except one who develops a passion for a 12-year-old-girl) but most of them add to the family's stature and wealth and all contribute generously to its number. The women are not overshadowed by the men. One eats dirt when she is depressed; another burns her hand in the oven and wears a black cloth over it for life when her lover commits suicide, another, named Remedios the Beauty, is so innocent that one day when folding linen in the backyard she ascends into heaven with the family sheets.

But to isolate details, even good ones, from this novel is to do it particular injustice. Márquez creates a continuum, a web of connections and relationships. However bizarre or grotesque some particulars may be, the larger effect is one of great gusto and good humor and, even more, of sanity and compassion. The author seems to be letting his people half-dream and half-remember their own story and what is best, he is wise enough not to offer excuses for the way they do it. No excuse is really necessary. For Macondo is no never-never land. Its inhabitants do suffer, grow old and die, but in their own way.

Various hard and familiar aspects of reality intrude on their world all the time. What seems unreal or at least unconventional to an outsider is the manner in which the Buendías respond to and explain facts like birth, death, war, sickness and even weather. When it gets hot in Macondo, it gets so hot that men and beasts go mad and birds attack houses. A long spell of rain is remember to have lasted, not weeks, but four years, eleven months and two days. When a plague hits the region, it is no ordinary killer but an "insomnia plague," which gradually causes people to forget everything including the names and uses of the most commonplace objects. In order to combat the memory loss, the villagers label chairs and clocks and even hang a sign on the cow: "This is the cow. She must be milked every morning so that she will produce milk, and the milk must be boiled in order to be mixed with coffee to make coffee and milk."

More serious than bad weather or plague are the intrusions from outside, the mysterious gypsies, the corrupt government officials, the brutal soldiers (both Conservative and Liberal), the foppish Italian piano tuner, the ingenious French prostitutes and, finally, with the railroad, the sweating gringos "planning to plant banana trees in the enchanted region that José Arcadio Buendía and his men had crossed in search of the route" to the sea. At first it looks as though the North Americans will be absorbed into the dream life of Macondo, but they do mean to change things, including the terrain and the weather, and they do eventually build their own sensible counterpart to Macondo, a village of houses in neat rows with tennis courts and swimming pools.

It might have been just another phase in the incestuous life of Macondo, like the 32 revolutions or the insomnia plague, but enchantment and solitude cannot survive the gringos any more than they can avoid the 20th century. Like so much else in this strange and moving narrative, the end seems to have been inevitable. And yet the North American reader--in thinking of this narrative filled with haunting creatures and events--can hardly help being particularly haunted by the spectacle of his countrymen, "the perspiring guests--who did not even know who their hosts were--[trooping] in to occupy the best places at the table." Márquez has shown us, with extraordinary art, who some of the hosts were or, what is more important, who they thought they were. He has also written a novel so filled with humor, rich detail and startling distortion that it brings to mind the best of Faulkner and Gunter Grass. It is a South American Genesis, an earthy piece of enchantment, more, as the narrator says of Macondo, "an intricate stew of truth and mirages."

Stew is too modest an image with which to describe the wit and power of this lusty fantasia, but if the strong savor banishes visions of twinkletoes, it has served a purpose.