On the bicentenary of her death, Jane Austen is still everywhere, often where one least expects to find her. Most of her devotees will have their own story; mine occurred in a Manhattan courthouse, with its stale-coffee smell and atmosphere of anxious boredom, in the midst of jury selection for a criminal trial involving a double homicide. Upon learning that I taught British literature, the defendant’s attorney—a woman who spoke with intimidating speed and streetwise bluntness—skipped the usual questions (how much did I trust police testimony, had I ever been a victim of a violent crime) and asked instead whether I taught Jane Austen. Puzzled by her indirection, I answered yes. A theatrical flash of disgust crossed her face: I was, evidently, one of those people. At which point the presiding judge interrupted to say: “Careful, counsel. Some of us here like Jane Austen.”
去世两百年了，简·奥斯汀依然无处不在，你常能在意想不到之处发现她。多数简·奥斯汀的追随者都有属于自己的故事，我的故事发生在曼哈顿的一所法院里，当时正为一起双尸命案挑选陪审团成员，空气里弥漫着陈旧咖啡的味道，气氛沉闷得令人烦躁。被告律师是一位出言咄咄逼人、在市井里摸爬滚打的女士，听说我教英国文学，她跳过一般性提问（例如我对警方证词是否信任，是否遭遇暴力犯罪等），转而问我是否教过简·奥斯汀。不知她葫芦里卖的什么药，我回答说教过，一种夸张的厌恶表情从她脸上拂过：我竟然是那种喜欢奥斯汀的人。这时庭长打断问话：“被告律师请注意言辞，我们这里有人喜欢简·奥斯汀。”
As Austen’s own Emma Woodhouse put it to her querulous father, “One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.” But in the case of Austen, that misunderstanding seems to have an urgency that isn’t attached to any other canonized, pre-20th-century literary figure. The disagreement has been amplified as her fame has grown, and her fame may never have been greater. This year sees her unveiling by the Bank of England on a new ￡10 note, replacing Charles Darwin (and before him, Charles Dickens); she is the first female writer to be so honored.
正如奥斯汀笔下的艾玛·伍德豪斯对满腹牢骚的父亲说：“世上有一半人没法理解另一半人的快乐。”然而对奥斯汀的误解远甚于二十世纪前备受推崇的其他文学人物。她名气越大，争议就越多，如今她声誉之隆可谓空前。今年，英格兰银行新版10英镑纸币上，她代替了查尔斯·达尔文，成为首个获此殊荣的女作家。达尔文之前是查尔斯·狄更斯。
Meanwhile, the scholar Nicole Wright’s revelation that Austen was appearing as an avatar of sexual propriety and racial purity on white-supremacist websites made national news on both sides of the Atlantic. A few years back, her 235th birthday was commemorated with the honor of our times, a Google doodle. The wave of film adaptations that began in the 1990s may have receded, but it left in its wake a truth as peculiar as it seems to be, well, universally acknowledged: Austen has firmly joined Shakespeare not just as a canonical figure but as a symbol of Literature itself, the hazel-eyed woman in the mobcap as iconic now as the balding man in the doublet.
另一边，学者妮可·赖特披露，在众多白人至上主义网站，奥斯汀成为举止贤淑、种族纯正的化身，这在大西洋两岸引发轰动。几年前，奥斯汀235岁诞辰时登上了谷歌主页涂鸦，获得我们这代人的尊崇。始于二十世纪九十年代的电影改编潮或许已经消退，却造成一个不同寻常且看起来举世公认的事实：同莎士比亚一样，奥斯汀不仅堪称文圣，她简直象征了文学本身。戴头巾式女帽、有一双淡褐色眼睛，现在她和穿着紧身上衣的秃头男子一样，并立为文坛偶像。
The Shakespeare-Austen comparison is in fact an old one—first mooted by the academic and theologian Richard Whately, in 1821, and echoed later by Tennyson and Kipling—yet it’s inexact. Iconic as she’s become, the reasons for her status often stir up zealous dispute. Is Austen the purveyor of comforting fantasies of gentility and propriety, the nostalgist’s favorite? Or is she the female rebel, the mocking modern spirit, the writer whose wit skewers any misguided or—usually male—pompous way of reading her? (For her supremacist fans, Elizabeth Bennet would have a retort at the ready: “There are such people, but I hope I am not one of them.”)
对比莎士比亚和奥斯汀，事实上已是老调重弹。1821年，学者、神学家理查德·怀特利首次提出，后来又有丁尼生和吉卜林，但此类比较并不严格。随着奥斯汀成为偶像，她受推崇的个中原因经常引发激烈争议。奥斯汀不过是讲述了沉迷于过去者最青睐的那种优雅得体、彬彬有礼的美好故事吗？抑或她是女性中的叛逆，有着嘲弄世界的前卫精神，以其才智讥讽一切对其作品错误的或是通常男性读者采用的那种狂妄的阅读方式呢？（对持有白人至上论的书迷而言，伊丽莎白·班纳特如是反驳：“确实有这种人，但我希望我不是其中之一。”）
Any hint of taking Austen out of her Regency bubble brings attacks. When the literary theorist Eve Sedgwick delivered a talk in 1989 called “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” some male social critics brandished the popular term politically correct to denounce Sedgwick and her profession. Six years later, when Terry Castle suggested a homoerotic dimension to the closeness between Austen and her sister, Cassandra, the letters page of the London Review of Books erupted. In other precincts, business gurus can be found online touting “what Jane Austen can teach us about risk management.” Not only is my Austen unlikely to be yours; it seems that anyone’s Austen is very likely to be hostile to everyone else’s.
脱离摄政时期（译注：即十九世纪第二个十年）的社会氛围谈论奥斯汀，总会招致攻讦。1989年，文学理论家伊娃·塞奇威克发表了题为《简·奥斯汀和自慰女孩》的演讲，当时某些男性社会评论家还挥舞着政治正确的通俗表达，对塞奇威克和她的职业大加鞭挞。六年后，当特里·卡塞尔从同性恋色情视角解读奥斯汀同她姐姐卡桑德拉的亲密关系时，《伦敦书评》 的读者来信栏目简直炸开了锅。在别的领域，商业大师还在网上兜售“简.奥斯汀教会我们风险管理知识”云云 。不仅我心目中的奥斯汀和你的不一样，看起来每个人心中的奥斯汀都可能与其他人的针锋相对。
Such is the nature of possessive love. Austen’s proudly defensive comment about her Emma—“a heroine whom no one but myself will much like”—has become the signature attitude of her critics, who tend to be obsessed with protecting Austen from her admirers and enumerating the bad reasons to like her. Both E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf, when they reviewed the famous 1923 R. W. Chapman edition of her novels, were able to admit to their admiration only after taking swipes at a different kind of fan. “Like all regular churchgoers,” Forster said of the usual Austen reader, “he scarcely notices what is being said.” For her part, Woolf smirked at the notion of “25 elderly gentlemen living in the neighborhood of London who resent any slight upon her genius as if it were an insult offered to the chastity of their aunts.” Club, meet the members who don’t want to join.
对占有欲之爱的本质同样争议重重。奥斯汀理直气壮地为爱玛辩护，“没人像我一样深爱着女主人公”，这成为批判奥斯汀者的标志性态度，批评者执迷于轰走奥斯汀的仰慕者，列举那些喜爱奥斯汀的错误理由。E·M·福斯特和弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫评注了1923年著名的R·W·查普曼版奥斯汀小说集，二人只在抨击了与他们初衷不同的书迷后，才承认自己对小说的仰慕之情。“就像所有定期做礼拜的人，”福斯特说到普通奥斯汀读者时说，“他几乎不在意牧师说了些什么。”“25个住在伦敦的老绅士，他们憎恨所有蔑视奥斯汀才华的人，就好像这侮辱了他们姑妈的贞洁”，伍尔夫对这一观点笑而不语。这就好比在俱乐部里遇到几个本不想加入的人。
Their asperity suggests a question, one that grows more apparent, and more profound, as we enter the third century after Austen: How modern is Austen—and are we still modern in the same way? Is it a fantasy of escape that draws readers to her fables of courtship among the precariously genteel, or is it the pleasure of recognition, the sense that she is describing our world? Other classics either have become antiques in need of explanation, or are obviously in a world—a world of technology and money and big, alien institutions—that feels familiar. Austen, with her 18th-century diction, village settings, and archaic social codes that somehow survive all manner of contemporary avatars and retellings, is strangely both.
他们口不留情，揭示了一个问题，进入奥斯汀身后的第三个世纪，变得愈发明显、愈发深刻：奥斯汀究竟有多现代？我们依然和她一样现代吗？是幻想逃离当下才驱使读者走进她笔下发生在风雨飘摇的高雅社会中的婚恋寓言吗？抑或因为她描写了我们所生活的世界而令人惺惺相惜呢？其他经典作品或是成为无人解读的过时文学，或是在技术、金钱、庞大且异化的制度相互交织的世界中让人感到似曾相识，而奥斯汀则成为两者奇异的结合：十八世纪的语言、乡村背景和古老的社会礼仪，竟比所有其当代改编作品流传得更为久远。
Two centuries is a long time to be contemporary, long enough for us to wonder what exactly keeps her so. It’s the oldest and most perplexing of her critical challenges, and the question her close readers are least able to resist pondering. In an article left unpublished at his death in 1975—the bicentenary of Austen’s birth—the critic Lionel Trilling wondered, with considerable suspicion, why students still turned out in droves for classes devoted to her. His answer was their yearning to escape their modernity: Austen, he observed, is “congenial to the modern person who feels himself ill-accommodated by his own time.”
延宕了两个世纪，仍然具有当代性，这实在够久了，久到让人好奇，究竟什么让奥斯汀如此与时俱进。这是评价奥斯汀时最古老、最令人困惑的挑战，也是资深读者最有可能去思考的问题。1975年，奥斯汀诞辰两百周年，当年已去世的评论家莱昂内尔·特里林在还未及发表的一篇文章中满腹狐疑地发问：为何依然有大批学生选修奥斯汀课程？他的答案是人们渴望逃离自己的现代处境。他注意到，奥斯汀“与那些自感生不逢时的人意气相投”。
What Trilling didn’t mention is that slightly more than two decades earlier, he had famously argued the opposite: that her novels “are, in essential ways, of our modern time.” Austen has that trick of slipping out of focus, of seeming to be vanishing into the historical background even as she’s coming closer to us. That felt like a problem in the age of cold war, and the puzzle of her relevance is unavoidable in this doom-haunted, angry, febrile moment 200 years after her death: Do we read Austen to flee modernity, or to see it clearly? Why would we need to do either?
可特里林没说的是，二十多年前他曾提出相反的著名观点，他说奥斯汀小说“本质上属于我们这个时代。”我们越是仔细看她，她越是有办法失焦，消失在历史背景之中。那让人感觉是冷战时期的一个问题，奥斯汀逝世两百年后，在这个在劫难逃、愤怒且狂热的时刻，她依然如此贴近人心，于是不可避免地让人感到困惑：我们读奥斯汀是为了逃离离现代性还是为了看清现代性？我们为何又要二选其一呢？
There are a few ways to address this puzzle, and in the interval between Austen bicentenaries, two ways in particular have become influential among scholars who make Austen their subject. The first would have us explore the context of Austen’s own moment, and read her as her contemporaries might have—to de-prettify her novels and show her immersion in the world, with all its political messiness and social friction. The second takes the prettifications at face value and asks how they happened. Its interest is in the history of Austen after Austen, in how she’s been understood, manipulated, adapted to speak to different times. Both are historical endeavors, but one pulls us back to Austen while the other pulls Austen toward us; the former tends toward metaphors of archeology or espionage—unearthing, decoding, uncovering—while the latter is a more garrulous activity, interested in unexpected meetings and expanding connections.
还是有办法解决这一困惑的。在奥斯汀诞辰和逝世两百年间，有两种方法在奥斯汀研究者中独具影响力。第一种方法是探究奥斯汀所处的时代背景，以同时代人的视角解读她——不去美化她的小说，将她置于那个政治混乱和社会摩擦不断的世界之中。第二种方法将美化行为视作表面价值，探讨它是如何发生的，关注奥斯汀身后的奥斯汀史，即她如何被理解、操作、改编以适应不同的历史时期。两种方法都是历史性的尝试，只不过一种把我们拉向奥斯汀，另一种把奥斯汀拉向我们。前者像考古或间谍活动——发掘、解读、揭露；后者是更加八卦，乐于不期而遇、寻找关联。
This bicentenary gives us readable examples of each. Helena Kelly’s “Jane Austen, the Secret Radical” pulls no punches in its insistence that Austen’s readers have forgotten, or don’t know, the conditions that gave the novels their shape and significance: property and inheritance laws that kept women in perpetual dependence on male relations; enclosure acts that remade, and privatized, the British landscape; economic dependence on commodities produced by slave labor in Britain’s colonies; and, above all, the militarized and paranoid environment in Britain after the French Revolution, with its suspension of habeas corpus, its policing of political expression, its quartering of troops on potentially restive subjects.
逝世两百年之际，两种解读方法都有值得一读的作品。海伦娜·凯莉在《简·奥斯汀，秘密的激进分子》一书中毫不客气地指出，奥斯汀的读者们忘记或者压根不知道赋予小说结构和意义的条件，即让女性永远依附于男性的财产法和继承法；重新分配并私有化英国土地的圈地法案和对英属殖民地奴工产品的经济依赖；最为重要的是法国大革命后英国走向军事化及偏执多疑的氛围——中止人身保护法、管制政治言论、在不满现状的臣民家里驻兵。
Taken as a whole, these conditions made Austen, in Kelly’s account, a revolutionary like Thomas Paine or Mary Wollstonecraft. But she was a revolutionary writing in code, for readers who would know “how to read between the lines, how to mine her books for meaning, just as readers in Communist states learned how to read what writers had to learn how to write,” according to Kelly, who teaches at Oxford. “Jane’s novels were produced in a state that was, essentially, totalitarian.”
用凯莉的话说，把这些条件综合起来，奥斯汀就成为和托马斯·潘恩与玛丽·沃斯通克拉夫特一样的革命者。可她是依规范写作的革命者，作品只给那些知道“如何读出字里行间的言外之意，如何在作品中挖掘意义”的人看，“就像共产主义国家中的读者学会如何读懂作家们的东西，后者必须学会如何去写作。”在牛津大学执教的凯莉说：“简的小说创作于一个本质上是极权主义的国家。”
This analysis is meant to be bracing. It derives from a diverse tradition of scholarship, by critics such as Marilyn Butler and Claudia L. Johnson, that attempts to place Austen in the politics of her day. It is also riven by a paradox. The closer Kelly gets to the historical particularities of Austen’s time, the more she reaches for anachronistic comparisons to a time nearer to ours. The idea of Austen writing in a “totalitarian” regime, producing something like samizdat, is deliberately provocative, but it’s a provocation that clouds historical precision even as it tries to make vivid her historical moment.
这一分析注定令人为之一振。它源于一种不同于传统的治学方式，由玛里琳·巴特勒、克劳迪娅·约翰逊等评论家肇始，旨在将奥斯汀置于当时的政治气候当中。它也被一个悖论撕裂，凯莉越是接近奥斯汀所处时代的历史特性，与我们所处的时代做比较就越是一种时代错误。认为奥斯汀生活在极权制度下，创作类似于地下出版物的作品，这种说法有点故意挑衅，就算能把奥斯汀所处的历史时刻描述得栩栩如生，仍然遮蔽了准确的历史。
Impatient with 200 years of sentimentalizing—some of it, Kelly argues, intentional, on the part of Austen’s family—Kelly gives us what turns out to be a distinctively modern Austen, someone who is always on the right historical side (that is to say, ours), with an unerring moral compass that flatters our sensibilities. Behind a spoonful of sugar, Austen wants us to see the violence of the colonial plantation, abetted by Anglican apologists. Behind the joining of estates in “Emma,” Austen wants us to see the exclusion of itinerant populations from sustenance. Behind the flirtatious soldiers quartered in Meryton in “Pride and Prejudice,” Austen wants us to hear the fall of the guillotine.
两百年来伤春悲秋，这让凯莉感到不耐烦，她认为其中一些是奥斯汀研究者有意为之，凯莉向人们呈现了一个尤其现代的奥斯汀，一个总是站在历史进步一边，站在我们这一边的奥斯汀，她拥有一贯正确的道德指南，迎合我们立场。在一派升平背后，奥斯汀希望我们看到，在英国国教卫道士的怂恿下，殖民地庄园里发生着暴力冲突。在《艾玛》小说中被兼并地产的背后，奥斯汀希望我们看到，流离失所的人被剥夺了生计。《傲慢与偏见》中驻扎在麦里屯打情骂俏的军人背后，奥斯汀希望我们听到断头刀下落的声音。
To get to this Austen, Kelly takes the liberty of imagining. Each chapter starts with a fantasia based on a surviving letter of Austen’s, in which “Jane” (Kelly’s preferred name, to suggest the then-unknown young woman rather than the canonical author) reacts with moral sensitivity to a small scene. Writing on “Northanger Abbey,” Kelly begins by evoking the disgust a 24-year-old Jane would have felt at witnessing the violent morning sickness of her sister-in-law Elizabeth, newly pregnant almost immediately after the birth of her first child. The scene is plausible and vivid; it leads to an illuminating discussion of the perils of 18th- and early-19th-century obstetrics, and the shadow of female mortality hovering over sex in Austen’s time. It is helpful to remember that beyond the happy couplings of Austen’s endings there lurked the lying-in, the dangerous ravages of delivery, the fears of postpartum complications and infection.
为了打造这样的奥斯汀，凯莉恣意想象。每章开头都以奥斯汀存世的一封信为基础，假想一个故事，故事中“简”（凯莉偏爱这个名字，以表明奥斯汀当时还是个默默无闻的年轻女子而非一位赫赫有名的作家）因一桩小事而拷问内心。写《诺桑觉寺》时，凯莉起笔让24岁的简看到嫂子伊丽莎白剧烈晨吐而心生厌恶，伊丽莎白几乎刚刚生下第一个孩子后就再度怀孕了。这一幕合乎情理又栩栩如生，引发人们对18世纪及19世纪初生育危险及奥斯汀时代女人因性而亡的讨论，富于启发意义。这有助于人们想到奥斯汀式的浪漫结局后，还要面对临产、分娩的千难万险及产后并发症和感染带来的恐惧。
Helpful because, as Kelly knows, concerns like the ones she invokes—the blithe male brutality of sex itself, the greed of landowners dispossessing their localities of the commons, the bayonets glinting on the rifles carried by the visiting militia—are actually marginal in Austen, silenced by the novels’ decorum. To see them requires a kind of paranoid gaze, looking for clues and hidden signs, and a willingness to imagine Austen as a dissident as much as a novelist.
说它有所帮助，因为正如凯莉所知，她说的这些担忧——男人随心所欲地施加性暴力，贪婪的地主剥夺了平民的住所，驻家民兵步枪上的刺刀闪闪发光——事实上在奥斯汀作品中提及不多，它们被小说的端庄得体掩盖了。看清这些需要一种偏执的目光，寻找线索和隐藏的迹象，不仅将奥斯汀当做小说家，还把她当成一个异见分子。
To be sure, the text does send out some signals. Kelly is particularly deft with names: the Frenchness of Darcy—a thinly disguised D’Arcy—with its tang of aristocrats facing bloody revolution; the metallic surnames of Sense and Sensibility (Steele, Ferrars) evoking the clink of money; the recurrence of famous names from the history of abolition (Mansfield, Norris) in Mansfield Park.
可以确定的是，文章的确表达出一些信号。凯莉对名字尤其敏感：达西来源于法语，那是不加掩饰的法国贵族名“达奇”，有一种面临血腥革命的贵族味道；《理智与情感》中有金属质感的姓氏（斯蒂尔、费拉尔）让人想到钱币在叮当作响；《曼斯菲尔德庄园》中重新启用被历史淘汰的著名名字（曼斯菲尔德、诺里斯）。
译注：这种有解构主义味道的文学研究方法可参见德里达的相关著作。
There is a satisfaction in conceiving oneself to be in possession of the codebook. Yet Austen’s own plots—with their caddish suitors hiding unsuitable pasts, covert engagements that give rise to social chaos, ciphers and riddles that lead to misunderstanding—figure secrecy as a moral flaw, which might give a sleuthing critic pause. (“Oh!” says Emma, “if you knew how much I love every thing that is decided and open!”) There is also, finally, a letdown in learning that the encoded message is actually by now accepted wisdom: against money-worship, against the trafficking of women, against exploitation.
设想自己拥有一本密码本，这让人产生一种满足感。可奥斯汀自己的故事却将秘密视作道德污点——下流的追求者有说不出口的过往，秘密订婚导致社会动荡，密码和谜语引发误解，这些都让奥斯汀停下来品评一番。（“哦！”艾玛说，“你该知道我多喜欢决定好的和开诚布公的事！”）要是知到现在编码信息被当成一种智慧，用来反对拜金主义、反对贩卖妇女和反对剥削，归根到底会让奥斯汀感到失望。
Radical once, perhaps, but commonsense now; gritty and serious, but disappointingly familiar. Austen’s appeal has always, instead, been a matter of surfaces, of a style to be admired rather than of a cipher to be cracked. Her sentences can leave readers in a swoon, with their controlled wit, their many-edged irony, their evident pleasure in their own mastery—and in the masterful way they negotiate or transform less graceful realities. (“You must learn some of my philosophy,” Elizabeth Bennet tells Darcy: “Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.”) Such deft playfulness gets eclipsed in reading these surfaces as a layer to be dug under for a more subversive depth.
也许曾经激进，如今却归于平常；写实而严肃，却又如此熟悉得令人失望。可奥斯汀的感染力一直都浮于表面，她的作品被视作令人钦佩的风格，而非有待破解的密码。她笔下的句子不露机锋，讽时刺世，又收放自如，以高超的方式美化或改写有失优雅的现实，令读者沉醉其中。（“你该和我学点处世哲学，”伊丽莎白·班纳特告诉达西：“只去回想过去，因为回忆给你带来快乐。”）透过表面，挖掘背后更具颠覆性的深意，这种轻巧的场面之乐便黯然失色了。
“Forget the Jane Austen you think you know,” Kelly insists. Kelly may depict a politically and ethically congenial Austen, but forgetting the Austen we know turns out to mean forgetting the allure of an art that seems more mysterious than any particular critique it might be hiding.
“忘掉你自以为了解的奥斯汀，”凯莉有自己的坚持。兴许凯莉塑造了一个与她政治观和伦理感意气相投的奥斯汀，但忘掉我们所知的那个奥斯汀，意味着忘掉艺术的魅力，这种魅力看上去比任何文字背后的批判都更加不可思议。
Devoney Looser, on the other hand, wants to write the forgotten history of that allure. “The Making of Jane Austen” is more entertaining than any reception history has a right to be, simply because of the oddities that Looser, an English professor at Arizona State University, restores to view. Divided into four overlooked cultural zones where Austen was reimagined in the 19th and 20th centuries—illustrations; theatrical and early film adaptations; political appropriations; and school texts—her book relishes its most piquant juxtapositions.
另一边，德凡尼·卢瑟想记录被人遗忘的奥斯汀魅力史。《炼成简·奥斯汀》比任何阅读史都更显欢乐，原因是亚利桑那州大学英语系教授卢瑟淘出种种奇人异事，其作品把奥斯汀在19和20世纪的重释分成四个被忽略的文化领域：插画、戏剧和早期电影改编、政治拨款和学校教材，作品乐于把最辛辣、刺激的食材一古脑端上来。
Looser highlights the Italian-born Rosina Filippi, whose 1895 adaptation of Austen’s dialogues for amateur theatricals stressed the feisty independence of her heroines. She exhibits a Marathi-language version of “Pride and Prejudice,” published in 1913, written in the hopes that India might one day adopt British Regency social codes. She pauses over the 1932 stage play Dear Jane, about Austen’s life, whose co-stars Eva Le Gallienne (as Cassandra Austen) and Josephine Hutchinson (as Jane) were known to be offstage lovers. In each case, as Looser shows, Austen is slow to enter a different medium, but once introduced into it, she quickly dominates.
卢瑟写到意大利出生的罗西纳·菲力比，菲力比1895年改编了奥斯汀作品，将其搬上小剧场，剧本突出了女主角的顽强独立。卢瑟展示了1913年出版的马拉第语版《傲慢与偏见》，该书希望印度有朝一日采纳英国摄政时期的社会准则。卢瑟谈到1932年描述奥斯汀生活的舞台剧《亲爱的简》，该剧联合主演伊娃·勒·加利安（姐姐卡珊德拉·奥斯汀扮演者）和约瑟芬·哈钦森（简·奥斯汀扮演者）在剧场外是众所周知的一对同性情侣。如卢瑟所示，在每个案例中，简融入另外一种媒介的速度都不快，但一旦被引入，很快便独占鳌头。
As a corrective to so much existing work on Austen’s reception, which has featured the opinions of critics and writers, this is brilliant stuff. Turning to Trilling’s austere, regretful 1975 essay, Looser reads it as a typical example of a literary scholar bewildered by a popularity whose impetus derives from outside the purely literary. What if Trilling had realized that his students had likely been raised on school viewings and televised reruns of the Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier “Pride and Prejudice”? Compared with Trilling’s airless pondering, Looser’s sensitivity to changes in the cultural atmosphere around Austen is refreshing.
《炼成简.奥斯汀》堪称上乘，对现存诸多评价奥斯汀的作品是一种矫正，那些作品只表达了评论家和作家的个人观点。卢瑟谈到特里林1975年发表的、一本正经且满纸叹惋的文章，并将其视作例证，即大众流行让一个文学研究者困惑不解，这是因为流行源于纯文学以外的世界。如果特里林得知他的学生上学时看的是葛丽雅·嘉逊和劳伦斯·奥利弗版的《傲慢与偏见》及其电视重播时会怎么想呢？奥斯汀周围的文化氛围发生了变化，与特里林沉闷的思考相比，卢瑟的敏感宛若一股清流。
The point is that a school of Austen criticism willfully ignorant of her many cultural manifestations is likely to be, to use a phrase of Emma’s, solemn nonsense. But what do those manifestations prove about Austen? Here Looser is as wisely reticent as Austen herself. They prove no one thing, Looser admits, either aesthetically or politically. Two centuries of Austen’s legacy reveal her to be “all over the political map”: She is brandished as an icon on suffragette banners in 1908, and used at the same time as a badge of affiliation by male club members anxious to preserve gendered social barriers.
关键是，一厢情愿地忽视奥斯汀的众多文化表达，用爱玛的话说，这种奥斯汀批评流派有可能在一本正经地胡说八道。但这些表达对奥斯汀意义何在呢？这里，卢瑟同奥斯汀本人一样睿智，她们有所保留。卢瑟承认，这些表达既有审美意义，也有政治启发。两个世纪中，奥斯汀的遗产证明她“遍布政治地图之上”：1908年宣传女性参政的旗帜上挥舞着奥斯汀像，同期她还被男性俱乐部成员视作入会徽章，后者急切要保留性别间的社会壁垒。
In Looser’s history, she is potentially anything to anyone. Aesthetically, she can look neoclassical or romantic, gentle or acerbic. Like a canny or lucky organism, Austen has thrived in any number of ecological niches, and Looser refuses to judge the extent to which those niches have done violence to her novels in order to make them fit. Far more generous and circumspect in its account than Kelly’s, Looser’s book might inspire us, like “Mansfield Park”’s Fanny Price when struck by the growth of a hedgerow, simply to wonder at change and adaptation itself: “How wonderful, how very wonderful the operations of time, and the changes of the human mind!”
在卢瑟的叙事中，奥斯汀让人人各取所需。从审美角度看，奥斯汀可以是新古典主义或浪漫主义，或温和，或尖刻。像一个精明或幸运的有机体，奥斯汀在各个生态位中都发达起来。可为了让适者生存，这些生态位究竟如何歪曲了奥斯汀的小说，卢瑟拒绝做出评价。相比凯莉，卢瑟的行文更加宽厚、细致和启迪人心，让人们对变化感到惊奇并加以适应，就像《曼斯菲尔德庄园》中的芬妮·普莱斯为郁郁葱葱的树篱墙触动一样。普莱斯说：“了不起啊，时间运转了不起，人类思想变化了不起！”
Where do these books leave us? One critic reads the novels; one reads anything but. One presents a single, but secret, Austen, rooted in the rough soil of her time; one gives us a volatile, protean Austen, amenable to any condition or climate. As histories of Austen they could not be more different, but neither, it seems, can address the question of Austen’s perennial and stubbornly perplexing appeal: What is it about her art that still inspires argument, retelling, adulation, commercialization, when other big worthies of the past slowly vanish? Is there something like an Austen Effect, obvious and yet also obscure, long-lasting and yet adaptable to new media and historical situations, that speaks to our sense of our modernity? Where might we look to find it?
这两本书能带给我们什么呢？一本细读小说，另一本索性抛开小说。一本展现了统一却不为人知的奥斯汀，植根于她那个时代粗烈的土壤之中；另一本则展现了一个易变多样的奥斯汀，经得起任何条件或气候的考验。作为奥斯汀的文学史，两者天差地别，可看起来都无法解答奥斯汀何以具有永恒且令人困惑不解的魅力这一问题：当先贤逐渐消失在公众视野之外，为何她的艺术一直引发争论，反复被传颂，受人称赞并适合商业运作呢？是否存在类似奥斯汀效应这种东西与我们对现代性的感知对话，它显而易见却又难以捕捉，历史悠久却能融入新媒体和不同的历史境遇？那么我们又该去何处寻觅它呢？
未完待续
译者 周江
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