在一場軍事政變中閱讀柏拉圖

Among the many acid pleasures of the work of Roberto Bolaño, who died at 50 in 2003, is his idea that culture, in particular literary culture, is a whore. In the face of political repression, upheaval and danger, writers continue to swoon over the written word, and this, for Bolaño, is the source both of nobility and of pitch-black humor. In his novel “The Savage Detectives,” two avid young Latino poets never lose faith in their rarefied art no matter the vicissitudes of life, age and politics. If they are sometimes ridiculous, they are always heroic. But what can it mean, he asks us and himself, in his dark, extraordinary, stinging novella “By Night in Chile,” that the intellectual elite can write poetry, paint and discuss the finer points of avant-garde theater as the junta tortures people in basements? The word has no national loyalty, no fundamental political bent; it’s a genie that can be summoned by any would-be master. Part of Bolaño’s genius is to ask, via ironies so sharp you can cut your hands on his pages, if we perhaps find a too-easy comfort in art, if we use it as anesthetic, excuse and hide-out in a world that is very busy doing very real things to very real human beings. Is it courageous to read Plato during a military coup or is it something else?

羅貝託·波拉尼奧(Roberto Bolaño)於2003年逝世，享年50歲，他的作品中有很多尖刻的歡樂，比如他認爲文化是個婊子，特別是文學文化。面對政治壓迫、鉅變與危險，作家們依然迷戀文字，對於波拉尼奧來說，這是崇高感與黑色幽默的源泉。在他的小說《荒野偵探》(The Savage Detectives)中，兩個熱心的拉丁美洲年輕詩人一直都未失去對純淨藝術的信念，不管年齡增長，生活與政治發生變遷。他們有時很可笑，但他們一直都有英雄氣概。但在他那非凡的、令人不安的中篇小說《智利之夜》(By Night in Chile)中，他問我們，也捫心自問：當軍政府在地下室拷問他人的時候，知識分子精英能寫詩，能繪畫，能討論先鋒戲劇中更精妙的東西，這一切究竟有什麼意義？文字沒有國界、沒有政治傾向；是任何想要成爲主人者都能召喚出來的精靈。波拉尼奧的精靈以彷彿能切斷讀者雙手般的犀利反諷發問：我們是不是太容易就在藝術中找到安慰，這個世界忙着對生活中真實的人們做出真實殘酷的事情，而我們是不是太容易就把藝術當做麻醉、藉口與隱藏之地了？在一場軍事政變中閱讀柏拉圖究竟是一種勇敢，還是別的什麼？

“Nazi Literature in the Americas,” a wicked, invented encyclopedia of imaginary fascist writers and literary tastemakers, is Bolaño playing with sharp, twisting knives. As if he were Borges’s wisecracking, sardonic son, Bolaño has meticulously created a tightly woven network of far-right littérateurs and purveyors of belles lettres for whom Hitler was beauty, truth and great lost hope. Cross-referenced, complete with bibliography and a biographical list of secondary figures, “Nazi Literature” is composed of a series of sketches, the compressed life stories of writers in North and South America who never existed, but all too easily could have. Goose-stepping caricatures à la “The Producers” they are not; instead, they are frighteningly subtle, poignant and plausible. Like Leni Riefenstahl, the artistes Bolaño invents share a certain Romantic aesthetic, a taste for the classic and nonvulgar, a dislike of “cacophony” and a lurking sense that something has gone terribly wrong in the modern world — that children, for instance, have been “stolen and raised by inferior races” and that a better world in the form of the Fourth Reich is imminent. There is little to no mention of Jews or other undesirables; there are no death camps; World War II is a passing reference at best. Instead, with a straight face, Bolaño narrates the Nazi writers’ tireless imaginations, their persistence in the face of a world history that goes against them, their contrarian determination as they continue to write books that go unread, unreviewed and largely unnoticed. They’re the losers but, with incredible passion, they remain steadfastly in denial of that fact, churning away at their refutations of Voltaire, Rousseau and Sartre; their verses vindicating Il Duce; their novels decrying the decline of piety; their Aryan literary societies. Like Riefenstahl, they find the highest beauty in a particular sort of symmetry and order that only in retrospect seems indubitably fascist. Horribly, persistently, they have a vision that they are incapable of giving up.

《美洲納粹文學》(Nazi Literature in the Americas)是一部頑皮的、杜撰出來的百科全書，裏面記載了想象出來的納粹作家和文學風潮領頭人，書中波拉尼奧如同在揮舞一把犀利、扭曲的刀子。他彷彿博爾赫斯(Borges)愛冷笑的淘氣兒子，小心翼翼地創造出一張嚴密的，由極右文學家與美文創作者構成的大網，對於他們來說，希特勒意味着美、真理與偉大的失落希望。《美洲納粹文學》由一系列人物速寫組成，是虛構的南北美洲作家們的生平簡史，還有參考書目和二流人物的傳記書目爲它提供相互參照和補充，但生活裏很容易找到這樣的人。他們並不是《金牌製作人》(The Producers)中踢着正步的漫畫式人物，而是極度微妙、深刻、真實可信。波拉尼奧創造出的人物就像雷尼·瑞芬舒丹(Leni Riefenstahl)一樣，信奉浪漫主義美學，有古典和新平民審美，討厭“不和諧”，潛意識裏認爲現代世界是大錯特錯的——比如說，他們覺得孩子們“被低等種族偷竊和養育”，覺得在第四帝國統治之下，更好的世界近在眼前。書中沒有提到猶太人和其他不受歡迎的人；也沒有集中營；“二戰”頂多只是已經過去的東西。相反，波拉尼奧一本正經地敘述納粹作家們無窮盡的想象，他們一直頑強對抗着不利於自己的世界史，他們特立獨行地寫着無人閱讀、無人評論、基本無人關注的書籍。他們是失敗者，但又以驚人的熱情，堅定不移地對抗他們是失敗者這個事實，同時還不斷駁斥伏爾泰(Voltaire)、盧梭(Rousseau)和薩特(Sartre)；他們用詩歌爲墨索里尼辯護、他們的小說哀悼神性的衰亡；他們結成雅利安文學社團。和瑞芬舒丹一樣，他們在特定形式的對稱與秩序中發現至上之美，這種對稱與秩序人們只有在事後才覺得是法西斯主義無疑。他們有一種既可怕又頑固的幻覺，認爲自己不能放棄。

They are, in other words, writers. Substitute, say, “language poetry” for “fascism” and the trajectory of these invented lives would be much the same as they are for the busy networks of real writers Bolaño knew from the inside out. Whereas in “By Night in Chile” Bolaño’s dissection of hypocrisy and bad faith (the main character is a morally bankrupt priest allied with the junta) is swift and merciless, here it is not only as if the writer in him couldn’t keep himself from filigreeing in endless perfect and revealing details about his lost souls and their laughable oeuvres, but also as if he couldn’t entirely resist them. As a fellow traveler, he probably knew only too well what it is to pit the invented world on your ratty pages against the firmly stated values of the real world. The imaginary Ernesto Pérez Masón, who pounds away at his novella that is “an erotic and fiercely anti-U.S.A. fantasy, whose protagonists were General Eisenhower and General Patton”; the mysterious beauty Daniela de Montecristo, who loved Italian and German generals during World War II and wrote an epic novel called “The Amazons”; Max Mirebalais, the ceaseless plagiarist who sought to combine Nazism and negritude: the heinousness of their political philosophy is the only thing that distinguishes them from any writer, anywhere, at any time. Moreover, literature, Bolaño writes, “is a surreptitious form of violence, a passport to respectability, and can, in certain young and sensitive nations, disguise the social climber’s origins.”

換言之，他們是作家。如果用“文體詩”取代“法西斯”，這些虛構人物的生命軌跡就和波拉尼奧熟悉的那些真實生活中忙碌的作家們沒什麼兩樣。然而在《智利之夜》中，波拉尼奧剖析出虛僞和壞的信仰是易變而殘忍的（主角是一個道德敗壞、與軍政府合作的神父），而在這裏，他心中作家的一面讓他情不自禁地去濃墨重彩、栩栩如生地詳盡描寫這些失落的靈魂與他們的可笑行爲；而且他似乎無法徹底否定他們。作爲一個旅伴，他或許太瞭解如何在破損的書頁上營造幻想的世界，以此抵禦真實世界堅固不移的價值觀。想象中的人物埃內斯托·佩雷斯·馬鬆(Ernesto Pérez Masón)努力創作他的中篇小說，稱之爲“一出性幻想，也是激烈的反美狂想，主角是艾森豪威爾將軍與巴頓將軍”；神祕的美女達妮埃拉·德·蒙特克里斯托(Daniela de Montecristo)熱愛“二戰”期間的意大利和德國將軍們，寫了一部名叫《亞馬孫人》的史詩小說；不知疲倦的剽竊者馬克斯·米雷巴萊斯(Max Mirebalais)想把納粹和黑人傳統文化自豪感結合起來。這些人信奉兇殘的政治哲學，這是他們與其他任何時代、任何地點的作家們之間的唯一區別。波拉尼奧寫道，文學“是暴力的一種隱祕形式，是通往名望的通行證，在某些年輕而敏感的國度，可以掩蓋不擇手段擠進上流社會者的出身”。

Who said literature has no real power to affect history? Not Bolaño — for him, literature is an unnervingly protean, amoral force with uncanny powers of self-invention, self-justification and self-mythification. The mythmakers, he suggests, certainly do matter. If Hitler had won, for instance, the not entirely absurd stories in this encyclopedia would be the prevailing stories of the culture. Is Nazi poetry an oxymoron? Not a bit of it, posits Bolaño. On the contrary, it’s all too possible.

誰說文學對歷史沒有影響力？波拉尼奧肯定不這麼認爲——對於他來說，文學令人不安地變化多端，是一種無關道德的力量，有着自我創造、自我辯解和自我神化的神祕能力。他認爲，編纂神話的人確實非常重要。比如說，如果希特勒勝利了，這本百科全書中並非完全荒誕的故事會成爲文學史上盛行的故事。“納粹詩歌”是一種矛盾修辭嗎？波拉尼奧認爲，絕對不是。相反，它是非常有可能的。