《摸彩》与《善良的乡下人》:黑色幽默语境下的乡村与暴力

Violence in the Countryside and Dark Humor in “The Lottery” and “Good Country People”

无论是1940年法国出版的《黑色幽默文集》(布勒顿),抑或是2010年美国出版的《黑色幽默文集》(布鲁姆),西方评论界都有一个共识,即18世纪英国的斯威夫特才是黑色幽默之父,其《一个温和的提议》(1729)是黑色幽默鼻祖。布鲁姆强调——其实他只是对世界文学中的现象进行了概括而已——黑色幽默通常分为两类:一是现实主义、现代主义黑色幽默;二是后现代主义黑色幽默。20世纪中期发表的《摸彩》和《善良的乡下人》两部短篇名著中的黑色幽默显然属于第一类黑色幽默。虽然两部作品不约而同聚焦黑色幽默语境下的乡下人与暴力,但《摸彩》描述了村里人通过百年不变的“摸彩”习俗,用石头活活把“中彩”者砸死的冷漠、血腥场景,而《善良的乡下人》则侧重塑造没有文化、没有宗教信仰的“善良的乡下人”如何通过冷暴力迫害同样没有宗教信仰的无业游民女博士,完美传承了美国幽默的反智本质。

In The Black Humor Anthology( Andre Breton,1940) and Dark Humor( Harold Bloom,2010),the western criticisms trace dark humor to“A Modest Proposal”( Swift,1729). Harold Bloom’s book is a good illustration that dark humor contains at least two types: one rooted in realism and modernism,and the other in postmodernism. This paper attempts to explore the relationship between violence and the people in the countryside from the perspective of dark humor in “The Lottery”( Jackson,1948) and “Good Country People”( O’Connor,1955). Yet,the two short stories differ from each other in that,in the former,the villagers in a small village stone a fellow villager to death through the very old custom of“winning a prize in the lottery,”while in the latter,“the good country fellow”condemns a cynical fellow countrywoman with a PhD to hell through cold violence,maintaining American humor’s anti-intellectual tradition.