Добавил:
ivanov666
Опубликованный материал нарушает ваши авторские права? Сообщите нам.
Вуз:
Предмет:
Файл:Современная литература Великобритании и США. Учебно-методическое пособие
.pdf
с авторской концепцией информационной и нравственной энтропии? Какой скрытый смысл, по Вашему мнению, заключен
в образе «лота», который должны выкрикивать на аукционе
в конце романа?
План практического занятия
1. Проанализируйте метафизический план романа согласно следующим пунктам:
1) вопрос соотношения реальности и человеческого сознания;
2) кинематографические и живописные аллюзии в романе;
3) «система Тристеро» как воплощение образа тайны;
4) насколько важную роль в повествовании играет мотив
неопределенности;
5) с какой целью автор подводит читателя к мысли
о том, что окончательно «истинное» суждение о реальности невозможно;
6) метафора слова и феномен «delirium tremens» («трепетное проникновение разума в неведомое») как форма
выражения религиозного откровения.
2. Рассмотрите пародийно-детективный план романа, опираясь на следующие пункты:
1) мифологические аллюзии (Героиня Эдипа – царь
Эдип);
2) «эдипов комплекс» – связь античного смысла и современности;
3) пародийно-смысловая нагрузка номинативных конструкций в романе:
а) Сан-Нарциссо – миф о Нарциссе – легенда, о Свя-
том Нарциссе;
б) имя Пирса Инверэрити;
в) название Тристеро.
3. Порассуждайте на тему энтропии как центрального
философского и метафорического образа в романе, опираясь
на следующие вопросы:
1) смысл мифа об Эдипе в свете достижений современного науки и философии;
2) паломничество Эдипы Маас к тайне Тристеро:
201
а) «термодинамический» аспект: от состояния инерт-
ности к этапу активного разгадывания тайны;
б) «информационная сторона»: накопление информации о Тристеро и возрастание неопределенности смысла
этой информации;
в) образ машины Нефастиса: переведение метафоры
из ряда изящной словесности в разряд объективной истины.
4. Найдите в тексте романа иллюстрации на тему религиоз-
ных мотивов в романе:
1) ветхозаветных;
2) евангельских.
Тексты для чтения
Пинчон Т. Выкрикивается лот сорок девять. СПб. : Симпо-
зиум, 2000.
Пинчон Т. V. СПб. : Амфора, 2001.
Библиографический список
Михалюк Н., Слободянюк С. Занимательная «энтропология» Томаса Пинчона : предисл. // Пинчон Т. Выкрикивается
лот сорок девять. СПб. : Симпозиум, С. 10–17.
Кузнецов С. Обучение хаосу // Иностранная литература.1996. № 3. С. 223–229.
Темы для рефератов и докладов
1. Музыкальные формы фуги и джаза и их воплощение
в словесном тексте (на примере рассказа Т. Пинчона «Энтропия»).
2. Основные представители движения «черного юмора»
в литературе США 50–60-х годов ХХ века (Дж. Барт, Дж. Хеллер, К. Воннегут, Дж. Хоукс, С. Элкин, Дж. П. Данливи).
3. Тема энтропии как метафора творимой картины мира
в творчестве Н. Мейлера, С. Беллоу, Дж. Апдайка, Дж. Барта,
У. Перси, С. Элкина, Д. Бартельми.
4. Пространственная оппозиция «верх-низ» как принцип
сюжетно-композиционного построения в рассказе Т. Пинчона
«К низинам низин».
202
2.6. Джон Барт
Джон Барт (род. 1930) является автором романов «Плавучая опера» (1956), «Конец пути» (1958), «Торговец дурманом» (1960), «Козлик Джайлс» (1966), «Химера» (1972),
«Письмена» (1979), «День отдохновения» (1982), «Приливные сказания» (1987), «Последнее плавание Имярек моряка»
(1991).
Джона Барта считают одним из самых ярких представителей школы «черного юмора». Писателю принадлежит известное высказывание: «Правда литературы состоит в том, что
факт есть фантазия, “сделанная” история есть модель мира.
Но владения романа шире, чем Англия и Франция, вместе
взятые». Вопросы о соотношении правды и вымысла, иллюзии и реальности так или иначе ставятся во всех произведениях писателя.
Влиянием экзистенциализма отмечен первый роман
Дж. Барта «Плавучая опера», в частности идейными проблемами философского трактата А. Камю «Миф о Сизифе».
В «Козлике Джайлсе» метафорой истории человечества становится кампус американского университета. Безусловной
вехой в американской литературе стал роман «Химера»,
в котором воплощены новые для писателя понятия об игре
дискурсивными технологиями. Интересно, что эта игра внутри творчества писателя носит загадочный характер. Так,
в следующий роман «Письмена» проникают персонажи
из прежних книг автора, но в то же время последняя часть
«Химеры» под названием «Беллерофониада» воспринимается как цитата из романа «Письмена». Несмотря на большое количество профессионально используемых персонажами жаргонизмов, арготизмов, греко-латинизмов, каждый
стилевой прием имеет строго продуманную функцию. Нейтральный стиль самого Барта-повествователя остается постоянным.
В двух последующих романах Барта – «Сказка приливов»
(1987) и «Последнее путешествие моряка по имени Некто»
(1991) – развивается метафора морского путешествия как истинного и глубинного источника прозы.
203
Отрывок из романа «Химера»
1
DUNYAZADIAD
1.
At this point I interrupted my sister as usual to say, ‘You have
a way with words, Scheherazade. This is the thousandth night
I’ve sat at the foot of your bed while you and the King made love
and you told him stories, and the one in progress holds me like
a genie’s gaze. I wouldn’t dream of breaking in like this, just
before the end, except that I hear the first rooster crowing in
the east, et cetera, and the King really ought to sleep a bit before
daybreak. I wish I had your talent.’
“And as usual Sherry replied, ‘You’re the ideal audience,
Dunyazade. But this is nothing; wait till you hear the ending,
tomorrow night! Always assuming this auspicious King doesn’t
kill me before breakfast, as he’s been going to do these thirtythree and a third months.’
“ ‘Hmp,’ said Shahryar. ‘Don’t take your critics for granted;
I may get around to it yet. But I agree with your little sister that
this is a good one you’ve got going, with its impostures that
become authentic, its ups and downs and flights to other worlds.
I don’t know how in the world you dream them up.’
“ ‘Artists have their tricks,’ Sherry replied. We three said
good night then, six goodnights in all. In the morning your
brother went off to court, enchanted by Sherry’s story. Daddy
came to the palace for the thousandth time with a shroud under
his arm, expecting to be told to cut his daughter’s head off; in
most other respects he’s as good a vizier as he ever was, but
three years of suspense have driven him crackers in this one
particular -- and turned his hair white, I might add, and made
him a widower. Sherry and I, after the first fifty nights or so,
were simply relieved when Shahryar would hmp and say, ‘By
Allah, I won’t kill her till I’ve heard the end of her story’; but
it still took Daddy by surprise every morning. He groveled
gratitude per usual; the King per usual spent the day in his
durbar, bidding and forbidding between man and man, as the
1 Barth J. Chimera. New York : Fawcett Crest, 1973.
204
saying goes; I climbed in with Sherry as soon as he was gone, and
per usual we spent our day sleeping in and making love. When
we’d had enough of each other’s tongues and fingers, we called in
the eunuchs, maidservants, mamelukes, pet dogs and monkeys;
then we finished off with Sherry’s Bag of Tricks: little weighted
balls from Baghdad, dildoes from the Ebony Isles and the City
of Brass, et cetera. Not to break a certain vow of mine, I made
do with a roc-down tickler from Bassorah, but Sherry touched
all the bases. Her favorite story is about some pig of an ifrit who
steals a girl away on her wedding night, puts her in a treasurecasket locked with seven steel padlocks, puts the casket in
a crystal coffer, and puts the coffer on the bottom of the ocean,
so that nobody except himself can have her. But whenever he
brings the whole rig ashore, unlocks the locks with seven keys,
and takes her out and rapes her, he falls asleep afterward on
her lap; she slips out from under and cuckolds him with every
man who passes by, taking their seal rings as proof; at the end
of the story she has five hundred seventy-two seal rings, and the
stupid ifrit still thinks he possesses her! In the same way, Sherry
put a hundred horns a day on your brother’s head: that’s about
a hundred thousand horns by now. And every day she saved till
last the Treasure Key, which is what her story starts and ends
with.
“Three and a third years ago, when King Shahryar was
raping a virgin every night and killing her in the morning,
and the people were praying that Allah would dump the whole
dynasty, and so many parents had fled the country with their
daughters that in all the Islands of India and China there was
hardly a young girl fit to fuck, my sister was an undergraduate
arts-and-sciences major at Banu Sasan University. Besides
being Homecoming Queen, valedictorian-elect, and a fourletter varsity athlete, she had a private library of a thousand
volumes and the highest average in the history of the campus.
Every graduate department in the East was after her with
fellowships – but she was so appalled at the state of the nation
that she dropped out of school in her last semester to do fulltime research on a way to stop Shahryar from killing all our
sisters and wrecking the country.
205
«Political science, which she looked at first, got her nowhere.
Shahryar’s power was absolute, and by sparing the daughters
of his army officers and chief ministers (like our own father)
and picking his victims mainly from the families of liberal
intellectuals and other minorities, he kept the military and the
cabinet loyal enough to rule out a coup d’état. Revolution seemed
out of the question, because his woman-hating, spectacular
as it was, was reinforced more or less by all our traditions
and institutions, and as long as the girls he was murdering
were generally upper-caste, there was no popular base for
guerrilla war. Finally, since he could count on your help from
Samarkand, invasion from outside or plain assassination were
bad bets too: Sherry figured your retaliation would be worse than
Shahryar’s virgin-a-night policy.
“So we gave up poly sci (I fetched her books and sharpened her
quills and made tea and alphabetized her index cards) and tried
psychology – another blind alley. Once she’d noted that your
reaction to being cuckolded by your wife was homicidal rage
followed by despair and abandonment of your kingdom, and that
Shahryar’s was the reverse; and established that that was owing
to the difference in your ages and the order of revelations; and
decided that whatever pathology was involved was a function of
the culture and your position as absolute monarchs rather than
particular hang-ups in your psyches, et cetera – what was there
to say?
“She grew daily more desperate; the body-count of deflowered
and decapitated Moslem girls was past nine hundred, and Daddy
was just about out of candidates. Sherry didn’t especially care
about herself, you understand – wouldn’t have even if she hadn’t
guessed that the King was sparing her out of respect for his
vizier and her own accomplishments. But beyond the general
awfulness of the situation, she was particularly concerned for
my sake. From the day I was born, when Sherry was about nine,
she treasured me as if I were hers; I might as well not have had
parents; she and I ate from the same plate, slept in the same
bed; no one could separate us; I’ll bet we weren’t apart for an
hour in the first dozen years of my life. But I never had her good
looks or her way with the world – and I was the youngest in the
206
family besides. My breasts were growing; already I’d begun to
menstruate: any day Daddy might have to sacrifice me to save
Sherry.
“So when nothing else worked, as a last resort she turned to
her first love, unlikely as it seemed, mythology and folklore,
and studied all the riddle/puzzle/secret motifs she could dig
up. ‘We need a miracle, Doony,’ she said (I was braiding her
hair and massaging her neck as she went through her notes for
the thousandth time), ‘and the only genies I’ve ever met were in
stories, not in Moormans’-rings and Jews’-lamps. It’s in words
that the magic is – Abracadabra, Open Sesame, and the rest –
but the magic words in one story aren’t magical in the next. The
real magic is to understand which words work, and when, and for
what; the trick is to learn the trick.’
“This last, as our frantic research went on, became her motto,
even her obsession.
As she neared the end of her supply of lore, and Shahryar his
supply of virgins, she became more and more certain that her
principle was correct, and desperate that in the whole world’s
stock of stories there was none that confirmed it, or showed us
how to use it to solve the problem. ‘I’ve read a thousand tales
about treasures that nobody can find the key to,’ she told me; ‘we
have the key and can’t find the treasure.’ I asked her to explain.
‘It’s all in here,’ she declared – I couldn’t tell whether she
meant her inkstand or the quill she pointed toward it. I seldom
understood her any more; as the crisis grew, she gave up reading
for daydreaming, and used her pen less for noting instances of
the Magic Key motif in world literature than for doodling the
letters of our alphabet at random and idly tickling herself.
“ ‘Little Doony,’ she said dreamily, and kissed me: ‘pretend
this whole situation is the plot of a story we’re reading, and you
and I and Daddy and the King are all fictional characters. In
this story, Scheherazade finds a way to change the King’s mind
about women and turn him into a gentle, loving husband. It’s not
hard to imagine such a story, is it? Now, no matter what way she
finds – whether it’s a magic spell or a magic story with the answer
in it or a magic anything – it comes down to particular words in
the story we’re reading, right? And those words are made from
207
the letters of our alphabet: a couple-dozen squiggles we can draw
with this pen. This is the key, Doony! And the treasure, too, if
we can only get our hands on it! It’s as if – as if the key to the
treasure is the treasure!’
“As soon as she spoke these last words a genie appeared from
nowhere right there in our library-stacks. He didn’t resemble
anything in Sherry’s bedtime stories: for one thing, he wasn’t
frightening, though he was strange-looking enough: a lightskinned fellow of forty or so, smooth-shaven and bald as a roc’s
egg. His clothes were simple but outlandish; he was tall and
healthy and pleasant enough in appearance, except for queer
lenses that he wore in a frame over his eyes. He seemed as startled
as we were – you should’ve seen Sherry drop that pen and pull her
skirts together! – but he got over his alarm sooner, and looked
from one to the other of us and at a stubby little magic wand he
held in his fingers, and smiled a friendly smile.
“ ‘Are you really Scheherazade?’ he asked. ‘I’ve never had
a dream so clear and lifelike! And you’re little Dunyazade – just
as I’d imagined both of you! Don’t be frightened: I can’t tell
you what it means to me to see and talk to you like this; even in
a dream, it’s a dream come true. Can you understand English?
I don’t have a word of Arabic. O my, I can’t believe this is really
happening!’
“Sherry and I looked at each other. The Genie didn’t seem
dangerous; we didn’t know those languages he spoke of; every
word he said was in our language, and when Sherry asked him
whether he’d come from her pen or from her words, he seemed to
understand the question, though he didn’t know the answer. He
was a writer of tales, he said – anyhow a former writer of tales –
in a land on the other side of the world. At one time, we gathered,
people in his country had been fond of reading; currently,
however, the only readers of artful fiction were critics, other
writers, and unwilling students who, left to themselves,
preferred music and pictures to words. His own pen (that magic
wand, in fact a magic quill with a fountain of ink inside) had just
about run dry: but whether he had abandoned fiction or fiction
him, Sherry and I couldn’t make out when we reconstructed this
first conversation later that night, for either in our minds or in
208
his a number of crises seemed confused. Like Shahryar’s, the
Genie’s life was in disorder – but so far from harboring therefore
a grudge against womankind, he was distractedly in love with
a brace of new mistresses, and only recently had been able to
choose between them. His career, too, had reached a hiatus which
he would have been pleased to call a turning-point if he could
have espied any way to turn: he wished neither to repudiate nor
to repeat his past performances; he aspired to go beyond them
toward a future they were not attuned to and, by some magic,
at the same time go back to the original springs of narrative.
But how this was to be managed was as unclear to him as the
answer to the Shahryar-problem was to us – the more so since
he couldn’t see how much of his difficulty might be owing to his
own limitations, his age and stage and personal vicissitudes; how
much to the general decline of letters in his time and place; and
how much to the other crises with which his country (and, so
he alleged, the very species) was beset – crises as desperate and
problematical, he avowed, as ours, and as inimical to the singlemindedness needed to compose great works of art or the serenity
to apprehend them.
“So entirely was he caught up in these problems, his work
and life all had come to a standstill. He had taken leave of his
friends, his family, and his post (he was a doctor of letters), and
withdrawn to a lonely retreat in the marshes, which only the most
devoted of his mistresses deigned to visit.
“ ‘My project,’ he told us, ‘is to learn where to go by
discovering where I am by reviewing where I’ve been – where
we’ve all been. There’s a kind of snail in the Maryland marshes –
perhaps I invented him – that makes his shell as he goes along out
of whatever he comes across, cementing it with his own juices,
and at the same time makes his path instinctively toward the best
available material for his shell; he carries his history on his back,
living in it, adding new and larger spirals to it from the present
as he grows. That snail’s pace has become my pace – but I’m going
in circles, following my own trail! I’ve quit reading and writing;
I’ve lost track of who I am; my name’s just a jumble of letters;
so’s the whole body of literature: strings of letters and empty
spaces, like a code that I’ve lost the key to.’ He pushed those odd
209
lenses up on the bridge of his nose with his thumb -- a habit that
made me giggle – and grinned. ‘Well, almost the whole body.
Speaking of keys, I suspect that’s how I got here.’
Комментарии
В предисловии к трилогии «Химера» (1972) Барт заявляет, что обращение к мифу в этом произведении вызвано желанием пополнить образование среднего читателя. Но древние
мифы и сказки Шехерезады (у Барта – Шахразады) становятся формой, оболочкой для романной травестии, стержнем для
нанизывания фантастических приключений, для создания
орнамента в стиле барокко вокруг историй и сцен, которые
представляют собой размышления о сущности современной
жизни. Три новеллы объединены в одну книгу условно, каждая из частей могла бы существовать отдельно.
В первой части романа, названной по имени младшей сестры Шахразады «Дуньязадиада», повествуется о кризисной
ситуации в стране арабов. Власть принца Шариата абсолютна, в стране царит террор. После первой ночи принц убивает
дочерей высших сановников и военных министров. То, что он
делает – в традициях страны, народ остается к этому равнодушным. Обеспокоена лишь Шахразада, получившая в стране высшее образование. Однако все ее попытки изменить политику, повлиять на принца ни к чему не приводят. И тогда
она пытается прибегнуть к «чуду» – хочет заставить принца
полюбить, поселить в его сердце это чувство. Для чуда нужен
джинн.
Таким джинном становится американский писатель, почитатель сказок Шахразады. Он рассказывает восточной принцессе известные сюжеты 1001 ночи. Одновременно они с Шахразадой обсуждают животрепещущие проблемы современной
жизни, ищут выход из сложившейся ситуации. Они считают,
что кризис мешает развитию искусства. По мысли американского писателя, только любовь роднит человека с искусством.
Шахразада в любовь не верит. Перевоспитание шаха она продолжает как бы по инерции. Но постепенно ее вера и упорство
приводят к желаемому результату – никому не верящий шах
проникается силой любви и начинает рассматривать ее как
210
Соседние файлы в предмете [НЕСОРТИРОВАННОЕ]