再好的厨师也有失手的时候，作家亦然。只不过好厨师要力求水平稳定，同一道菜你吃两回不该有太大的分别；而好作家则容许犯几点错，只要他至少有一部足以挽回他所有声誉的惊世巨著就行了。如果你以为凡属诺贝尔文学奖
莱辛何至于成“冷门”
有些传媒形容今年的诺贝尔文学奖“爆出冷门”，居然落在八十七岁的多丽斯·莱辛手上。我真不知道他们所谓的“冷门”是什么意思？按照什么标准？是赌博公司开出的盘口吗？没错，事先是没有多少人猜到这个结果，但莱辛的得奖绝对不能称作爆冷门，这叫“终于”。谁是热门？村上春树？假如真让这个名过其实的文坛红人得奖，那么我就不会再相信诺贝尔奖评审委员会的眼光了，虽然本来我就很怀疑凭什么一帮瑞典人就是天下第一流的文学评论家（恕我孤陋寡闻，瑞典今天出过多少文学批评大家吗？）
说回莱辛，她简直是近几年来最实至名归的诺奖得主之一，在这位教母级作家五十多年的创作生涯当中，单是一本《金色笔记》就不知能够压过多少其他获奖者了。说她是冷门黑马的人大概根本没看过这部超越时代的经典。不过，正如三星级大厨也会生病，莱辛当然也有她的低潮。
《裂缝》是低潮吗？
莱辛今年推出的《裂缝》（The Cleft）在很多人眼中就是她的低潮了。例如我十分敬佩的科幻小说大师娥苏拉·勒瑰恩就认为这本书犯了“本质主义”的错误，她说：“解剖学就是命运，性别绝对二分。女人被动、不好奇、胆小，只为生育而存在；没有男人，她们很难脱离动物般的无知。男人则聪明、有创意、大胆、鲁莽、独立，他们只需要女人去释放自己的欲望和养育更多的男人。”这简直完全背叛了莱辛早年在《金色笔记》里表现出来的复杂思考。即使是最客气的论者，也说《裂缝》是场“伟大的失败”，意图伟大但是下场惨淡。
究竟《裂缝》是本怎么样的书呢？简单地说，这是个寓言，一则人类起源的寓言。莱辛根据近年的科学发现，认为女人早于男人存在，于是构想出一群介于人与海象之间的远古人类，她们全是单性繁殖的母兽，定居在一座岛屿的海岸崖壁之间。这群最早的“女人”（如果她们算是人的话）自称“裂缝”，一方面是因为她们住的地方有一道巨大的裂口和孔洞，另一方面则是因为她们的生理特征。她们偶而会生下一些“怪兽”，身上长了“管子”的变种，于是惊慌失措的她们就会把这些怪胎从悬崖推到裂缝里头消灾解难。后来她们才发现，有些怪兽原来被巨鹰叨走，活了下来，开始成群地活在内陆的林子里。人类的历史就在这两群人命中注定的相遇、对抗、谋杀、强奸和各种疑惑之中诞生了……这些类似母神传说的远古记忆被保存在一份残缺的口述档案里头，而整理和研究它们的就是这本小说的叙述者了，一个尼罗皇帝时代的罗马老参议员。整本书就在源文件的复述和这位参议员的评注之间来回跳动，平行前进。
坦白讲，尽管勒瑰恩的批评不甚公允，但她的观察是正确的。在这个传说里面，火的发现，房屋的建造，武器的生产，船筏的使用，几乎全是长了“管子”的男人的功劳。女人最擅长的，似乎就是谋杀年幼的“管子”，投诉男人不关心小孩，和令人烦厌地记住所有发生过的琐碎杂事。何以如此？莱辛没有解释，看来果然是 “管子”和“裂缝”天然的生理区别，因为全书没有多少心理描写。就像有些评论所说的，既然这本书根本没有什么角色可言，又怎么描写心理呢？然而，角色的存在却是正常读者对一部正常小说的应有期待。
莱辛在探讨一切故事的起源
但我觉得《裂缝》依然是了不起的，因为它要说的是一个不可能被诉说的故事。请注意，那群女人是真真正正的先民，一开头她们甚至分不开 “我”与“我们”的区别，没有完整的自我意识，所以连姓名的意义也是可疑的。在这种情况底下，“角色”又该怎么确立呢？莱辛藉着罗马参议员的评注不断反省叙述这个故事的艰难，因为故事是文明的产物，再古老的传说也得仰赖文明与人类认知的能力而存在；可是这个“故事”里的一切却全在文字之前，文明之前，时空之前，甚至感情之前；我们又如何能用文明时代的概念去理解这史前的状态呢？故此莱辛在处理这群“裂缝”与“管子”的那一层故事时特别用上了分外质朴甚至没有色彩的文字，只有到了罗马参议员的评注部分才又显露出她那招牌式的智性语言。须知这群“裂缝”与“管子”不知时空，不知自我，不知爱恨，乃绝对的先祖；他们的历史就是时空、自我、家庭、社会与政治诞生的过程，一切我们视作当然的事物渐次成形的源起。所以那位正值风烛残年的老罗马人才会煞费思量，他不知道什么时候该用“母子”去形容一对有血缘关系的“裂缝”与“管子，因为他们好像还没有后人的“母子”概念；他也不知道该不该以“羞愧”去描述一群“管子”轮奸了一名“裂缝”致死其之后的沉默和畏惧，因为那是“羞愧”这种感受的第一次出现。这位见证了罗马帝国由盛转衰的老贵族陷入了沉思，他在人生的末尾沉思时间的真正开端。
莱辛的野心确实很大，因为《裂缝》不单是一则人类起源的寓言，也不只是文明的出现，它甚至是一个探讨故事之起源的后设小说。的确，她写得有点啰嗦，但她写的是一切故事的源头。要用一堆历史开展以后才有的工具去描述历史以及这些工具的发生，要用故事去收纳故事出现以前的事件，你怎能不啰嗦？又怎能不在恰当文字的选择面前进退失据？《裂缝》也许真的是个“伟大的失败”，但我相信未来会有更多人记住它的伟大，多于它的失败。
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删除 引用 milkyflower (2007-12-12 01:05:38, 评分: 0 )
不过他评价这本书的角度很有独创性。
贴一下他文章里提到的科幻作家Ursula K. LeGuin 对这本书的评价：（很有意思，这位科幻大师嘲笑作为“科幻新秀”的莱辛，说她的故事是读者看烦了的"cliché" ）
A Roman scholar of the age of Nero possesses a mysterious manuscript from ancient times - times that he considers ancestral to his world, though they differ strangely from Roman, or even human, history and myth. The Cleft is his translation of this document, with his comments and occasionally a modest bit of autobiography.
Somewhere, sometime, creatures like a cross between women and walruses, called Clefts, heaved about on a seashore and had babies. They conceived by an unspecified mechanism of parthenogenesis, since there were no males. They did nothing but wallow, give birth, suckle and occasionally sacrifice a young female by pushing her off a high rock, also called the Cleft. It was an idyllic life.
But suddenly, somehow, one of the females had a baby with a spigot rather than a cleft. Ruled by unthinking instinct as they were, this upset the walrus-women. As more of them bore such monsters, they dimly perceived that trouble lay ahead - change, progress, even perhaps the dawn of something like intelligence. They tried discarding their male infants, and mutilating them, and so on; but they kept having them, and large eagles kept carrying the babies off and depositing them safely in a valley just over the hill. There some eventually survived, nourished by a single extremely patient doe.
After a while these males - or Squirts - grew up, and a female who went over the hill found them and discovered sex. Just sex; nothing in the story so far has indicated that these creatures knew love, affection or friendship, or had any community feeling more developed than that of a school of fish. As in other speculative fiction by Doris Lessing, free will is not an option; people are driven by an inner or outer imperative, ineluctable orders from Nature or God or people from another planet. So impelled (and having become slenderer and more terrestrial), the young women desert the fat old walrus-women and start keeping house for the men. Of course they go on having babies. The men neither keep house nor have babies, but do brave and adventurous things.
Eventually - the passage of time is deliberately vague - some men, led by a man named Horsa, set off by raft and coracle to explore beyond their world-island. Since the unruly mob of little boys that tags after them is on foot, the men of the fleet hug the shore, landing every night to be with the boys and some young women who also came along for sex. Why they use boats at all is unclear. At last they sight a farther shore, and Horsa sets sail for it with a single companion, but is thrown back by a storm. The whole exploring party blunders its way overland back to the original colony. There some of the young men, for no particular reason, destroy the great rock called the Cleft, and Horsa and the leader of the women, Maronna, move the colony up the coast. And so the story ends.
There are a few other names - Maire, Astre and Maeve (as puzzlingly Celtic as Horsa is puzzlingly Anglo-Saxon) - but there are no characters: the author scrupulously refrains from anything characteristic at all. Description is in the most resolutely general terms. The climate is warm. The landscape has trees, caves. There are wild animals. Nothing vivid, no details. Perhaps Lessing believes inexactness is typical of myth, or that lack of local colour gives a parable more universal applicability. I can only disagree, as I find the power of myth often lies in its startling immediacy, and follow Blake in believing that "All Sublimity is founded on Minute Discrimination".
I call the tale a parable, but hesitantly, because I can't believe it says what I think it says. It appears to be as prescriptive as Desmond Morris and more essentialist than Freud himself. Anatomy is destiny. Gender is an absolute binary. Women are passive, incurious, timid and instinctively nurturant; without men, they scarcely rise above animal mindlessness. Men are intellectual, inventive, daring, rash, independent, and need women only to relieve libido and breed more men. Men achieve; women nag. Much of the presentation of this is familiar from the literature of misogyny. The "Old Shes" are described with utter loathing and disgust; the escapades of boys are made much of, while the doings of girl-children are ignored.
Now this, of course, may be the voice of the Roman scholar, who seems a decent fellow in his autobiographical musings, but who is, after all, retelling the story from a man's viewpoint. He's aware of that, and often speaks of it. Yet where does that leave us? It merely makes it impossible to read the text as irony or satire.
There are some strange omissions. Our Roman would wonder at men who never fought, showed no signs of being warriors and kept no discipline over their sons - all very unmanly, by Roman standards. Living in the days of Greek influence, he might also have wondered why homosexuality is mentioned only as a temporary expedient for boys without access to women.
If we are offered the story as an origin myth of human sexuality and gender, I can't accept it. It is incomplete; it is deeply arbitrary; and I see in it little but a reworking of a tiresome science-fiction cliché - a hive of mindless females is awakened and elevated (to the low degree of which the female is capable) by the wondrous shock of masculinity. A tale of Sleeping Beauties - only they aren't even beautiful. They're a lot of slobbering walruses, till the Prince comes along.
· Ursula K Le Guin's City of Illusions is published by Gollancz