传记写作——难题与谜题（英文）

Writing Biography:Puzzles and Mysteries

以前的传记作家通常会采用全知全能视角,仿佛他们对生活在很久之前的复杂人物掌握了所有情况一样。一旦手头的证据模糊不清或不够完整时,他们通常会对此轻描淡写或完全无视。最近,一些传者已开始愿意让读者参与自己的侦查活动,他们公开承认并非总能得到确凿可靠的证据。我将以斯威夫特与卢梭为例,讨论这两位人物与女性关系中的重要层面。虽然卢梭在《忏悔录》中发誓自己的作品对读者'透明',但文中却对自己过往生平中的重要事实作了错误表述,这可能连他自己也没有意识到。斯威夫特充满神秘色彩,他最重要的秘密值得探寻。在这两本传记中,我重点关注传主与女性的重要关系。我们知道这些女性是谁,我们也知道卢梭与斯威夫特与她们交往的时间与地点,但我们还远远不能确定双方关系的真正性质和亲密程度。这就是难题与谜题。卢梭认为,早年的关系与经历会对人格发展产生巨大影响。他还认为,当某次记忆深刻到令人烦恼的程度时,就一定会透露出有关自己人格的重要信息——不过他发现很难对此加以解读。在创作乔纳森·斯威夫特的传记时,我们面对的是另一种难题,实际上还遇到了一些真正的谜题。斯威夫特从未写过自传,他也从不想写自传。他身上有许多秘密,即便是他的朋友也不知道真相。他最重要的两次交往关系都隐藏在隐蔽的幕布之后,即使他最亲密的朋友也不确定真实情况是什么。300年过后,当我们努力窥探这道幕布后的真相时,不啻于像侦探一样破解悬案。总之,我希望强调的是传记的写作方法近年来已发生较大改变,它变得更加完善,这种新型写作方式很重要。以前为斯威夫特立传的作者在文中加入了自己的想象与推测并将此作为事实呈现给读者了。如今的读者喜欢探寻场景之后的内幕,以便与传者一同思考某些开放性问题。过去的传者遇到难题和谜题时,他们通常对此轻描淡写,甚至完全忽视它们的存在。他们这样做的理由在于,传者不应涉及任何无法证实的内容。但即便是与斯威夫特或卢梭十分熟悉的人都无法确定某一事件的真实性(就像我刚刚讲述的例子一样),今天的我们又怎么可能证明真实性呢?但这并不意味着谜题本身并没有吸引力。如今,传者已与读者一同参与到解谜工作中,这就是巨大的进步。

The older biographers used to convey an impression of omniscience,as if there was nothing they didn’t know about their subjects.And whenever the available evidence was ambiguous or incomplete,they tended to minimize or ignore the puzzles that arose.More recently,biographers have been willing to let readers share in their detective work,openly acknowledging that certainty is not always possible.With Jonathan Swift and Jean-Jacques Rousseau as examples,I will discuss important aspects of their relationships with women.Rousseau,though vowing in his Confessions to be' transparent' to the reader,misrepresented important features of his past,and may even have been unaware of some of them.Swift was a man of secrets,and his most sig nificant secrets are well worth exploring.In each case,I will focus on important relationships with women.We know who those women were,and we know when and where Rousseau and Swift were involved with them.But what we are far from certain about,is the true nature and depth of the relationships.And this is where the puzzles and mysteries come in.Rousseau believed that early relationships and experiences have a profound effect on the development of personality.He also thought that when a particular memory was disturbingly powerful,it must be telling him something important about his own personality — even if he found it hard to interpret.With Jonathan Swift,we face a different kind of puzzle — in fact,some genuine mysteries.Swift never wrote an autobiography,and never wanted to.He was a man of secrets,even among his friends.And his two most important relationships were hidden behind an absolute curtain of secrecy.His closest friends weren’t sure exactly what was going on.And we — three hundred years later — have real detective work,to do as we try to peer behind the curtain.In conclusion,I would like to emphasize an important way in which the practice of biography has changed in recent years,very much for the better.Like the previous biographers of Swift,older biographers presented their own assumptions and conjectures as if they were fact.Readers today appreciate being taken behind the scenes,to ponder open questions along with the biographer.When the older biographers encountered puzzles and mysteries,they tended to minimize them,or even ignore them completely.Their excuse for doing that was to say that a biographer should not mention anything that couldn’t be proved.But if — as in the examplesI’ve related — even people who knew Swift and Rousseau well were unsure about the truth,how could anyone possibly prove the truth today?But that doesn’t mean that the mysteries aren’t fascinating in themselves.It has been a great advance that biographers now share the game of detective work with their readers.