马克·吐温笔下的沙漠风景与植物好恶

Desert Landscape,Plant Preference and Prejudice in Mark Twain's Writing

纵观美国本土200多年来的沙漠书写历史,马克·吐温的《苦行记》(Roughing It)堪称第一部书写美国沙漠的文学经典,美国大沙漠由此正式进入美国的文学殿堂和文化视野。围绕彼时沙漠作为死亡之乡的认知定位,作者除了在其所描绘的沙漠风景中频频融入死亡色调之外,也通过征用异域沙漠词汇、意象或风景等“异域化”手法以及“独木”诗学策略来进一步烘托或凸显沙漠的死亡色调,从而使作品所描摹的沙漠风景具有十分重要的文学原型意义。尽管作者借助植物的缺席来凸显沙漠风景的荒凉与死寂,但他对风景构图元素中十分重要的沙漠植物却始终持一种漠视或歧视的态度。这种态度的心理机制和文化动因可追溯到源自北欧绿色地理的民族情结和美国本土根深蒂固的花园神话上,同时也与19世纪末之前美国沙漠书写中普遍以绿色美学来审视沙漠风景的美学范式有着密切的关系。在特定的历史时期,这种在文学原型风景中鄙弃沙漠植物的弊端不仅影响着美国沙漠的“荒漠化”书写,而且也在某种程度上固化了民众对沙漠的负面态度和看法,故而成为马克·吐温“大煞”沙漠“风景”的一个瑕疵。

Throughout the history of desert writing in the United States for over 200 years,Mark Twain's Roughing It can be regarded as the very first literary classic on desert writing in that it has formally brought the Great American Desert into the American hall of literature and culture.Focusing on the then cognitive positioning that the desert was the country of death,the author not only frequently blends the color of death into the desert landscape he depicts,but also uses techniques of“exoticization”,such as desert vocabulary,images or landscapes borrowed from the foreign land,and the“singular tree”poetic strategy,to further highlight the death tone of the desert,so that the desert landscape depicted in the work acquires a very important literary archetypal significance.Although the author uses the absence of plants to enhance the desolation and death of the desert landscape,he always takes an apathetic or biased attitude towards desert plants that are very important landscape compositionelements.The psychological mechanism and cultural motivation behind this attitude can be traced back to the national complex originated from the Nordic green geography and the deep-rooted garden myth of America;it is also closely related to the wrong aesthetic paradigm of observing desert landscape in the light of green aesthetics in American desert writing prior to the end of the 19th century.In a given historical period,the inadequacy of despising desert plants in his literary archetypal landscape not only affected the“desertification”writing of the American desert,but also,to a certain degree,led people to hold negative attitudes and views on the desert,and it therefore has marred Mark Twain's desert landscape.