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1989 In the spring, out of fear of wasting time, Pan Yue and I were attracted by the richness of narrative discourse and the simplicity and vividness of dialogue description in our works, and began to try to cooperate in translating Toni, an American black woman writer. Morrison's novel Beloved has just won the Pulitzer Prize. At first, I had no hope for publishing, but I revised, considered and polished it again and again with the enthusiasm of youth; This unexpected encounter made us indulge in Morrison's spiritual world for several years, and even the way of thinking, emotion and aesthetics were deeply affected, which was unexpected. After Beloved was officially published by China Literature and Art Publishing House on 1996, a TV station once made a special program for this book. Please tell us the outline of the story. As we speak, we will deviate from the side of the topic like the protagonist in the novel, and dwell on a certain detail without ourselves, as if we had been there and witnessed those thrilling moments. 1989 After the translation of the first draft of Beloved in autumn was completed, we decided in the discussion that this is a masterpiece comparable to any great novel in ancient and modern times in terms of artistic quality, and its author should be able to win the Nobel Prize in Literature within ten years; 1993 10 Tony? When the news that Ma Lixun won the prize came out, Pan Yue, who was far away from the other side of the ocean, immediately called to share his joy with me. Of course, among the world-famous and amazing voices, it is impossible for anyone to know and care about the inexplicable excitement of two young people in China.
China readers are interested in Tony? Morrison should be no stranger. Her Sula, Song of Solomon and Beloved have been published in Chinese, and there are more than one version of Song of Solomon and Beloved. The writer himself visited our country in the 1980s. In the survey of "20th Century 100 Literary Classics" published in September by 1999 (sponsored by the Special Issue of International Culture jointly organized by FLTRP and China Reading News), Beloved ranked 30th.
Tony. Tony Morrison, whose real name is Crowe? Anthony? Wofford, 193 1 February 18, was born in a family of shipbuilders in Lorraine, Ohio, USA. Her parents are confident and artistic, her mother is the leader of the church choir, and her father is an expert in telling black folklore and ghost stories, all of which have exerted a subtle influence on her. Her childhood dream was to be a ballet dancer. Morrison 1949 graduated with honors from Lorraine High School, 1953 graduated from Howard University in Washington, and 1955 received a Master of Arts degree from Cornell University. Her graduation thesis is entitled On William? Faulkner and Virginia? The theme of suicide in Woolf's works. Morrison has only been engaged in two occupations in her life, either as a teacher or as an editor. She first taught English at Texas Southern University and Howard University, then worked as a textbook editor at Singer Publishing Company under Random House, and served as a senior editor at Random House from 65438 to 0967. She has been teaching at new york State University and Yale University since 197 1. By 1984, she quit her job at Random House and became a professor at new york State University. Robert from Princeton University 1987? Professor Ghosn, who has been teaching writing so far. 1958, she and Jamaican architect Harold? Morrison is married and has two sons. But after only six years, the marriage broke up. She has been single ever since. 1993, Tony? Morrison Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded by Swedish Academy for "showing an important aspect of American reality with insightful and poetic novels".
According to Morrison herself, she was "never ready to be a writer". When her marriage was in crisis, she took an active part in the activities of a writing group to escape from the unfortunate marriage life temporarily through chatting. A short story she hastily wrote was based on her childhood and was praised by everyone. This is about a little black girl she knows. She prayed to God for a pair of blue eyes. After the divorce, Morrison raised two children alone, put them to sleep every night and began to write, from which she felt unprecedented pleasure. She looked up a short story and expanded it into a short story with her extraordinary imagination, called The Bluest Eye (1967). In the novel, pecora, who is black, ugly and neglected, also has a wild dream about life-a pair of beautiful blue eyes, but in the end this extravagant hope can only be realized in a crazy illusion; Her tragedy is that she grew up in a country called America, which only loves her blond children. After several twists and turns, this novel reveals the distortion and deformation of the black spiritual world eroded and squeezed by white culture and values. Finally, it was published in 1970, which was well received by critics. At this time, Morrison is nearly 40 years old.
The Bluest Eye sets a benchmark tone for Morrison's future novel creation, and also enables her to intervene in the tradition of African-American literature as a keen thinker and racial spokesperson. Although black American literature began when black slaves were forcibly brought to the New World, it really gained its own voice after the harlem renaissance Movement in the 1920s. The mature black literature in the 1940s and 1950s is marked by three novels: Richard? Wright's "Protest Novel" is a native child (1940), Ralph? Ellison's invisible man (1952) with the theme of "finding yourself", and James? Baldwin's Go to the Mountain and Tell Me (1953) explores the relationship between black and white. As the successor, Morrison carefully inspected the works of these predecessors and paid great respect to them, but she was deeply disappointed with her tone of defending, confiding and pleasing others. She later said in an interview, "They just told you that we are black, everyone, white and men." It was at this moment that she clearly realized her responsibility: to realize the care and concern for the double (multiple) disadvantaged groups such as black women with the light of modern art and human nature, and to create history for them and their hearts. She insists on calling herself a "black woman writer" because "as a black woman, I can enter a vast field of feelings and feelings that non-black women can't enter."
After the publication of the first novel, Morrison entered a stable writing state, and the appearance of every work promoted the exploration of thought and art. Except The Bluest Eye, she has published six novels so far: Sula (1973), which portrayed the tragic image of Sula, a black woman with distinct personality and rebellious spirit, and put forward the way out for black women under the oppression of race, gender and class. Song of Solomon (1977, won the American National Book Review Award) describes a rich black youth, a "milkman", who is confused by inner contradictions and inadvertently embarks on the road of seeking roots. Therefore, his racial consciousness was awakened in the legends, myths and ballads left by his ancestors. Tar Baby (198 1) tells the love story between a black female model Jia Ding who grew up under the influence of white culture and a black fugitive "son". While expressing their personality conflicts, she is deeply concerned about the position of black traditional values in contemporary black life. Beloved (1987, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction) reveals the endless harm of evil slavery through an infanticide case and its aftermath, and is her masterpiece. Jazz (1992) is about a strange triangle relationship between an old couple and a girl: 53-year-old Joe fell in love with young Docas, and when the latter moved on, he shot her; Joe's wife, Huai Hoillet, went to the girl's funeral and scratched the victim's face with a knife. Later, she visited many places and tried her best to understand her inner world. Finally, the husband and wife reached a wonderful reconciliation in the review of their common life. Morrison takes this story as the starting point, showing the historical picture of a large number of black people entering the northern metropolis from the southern countryside in the 1920s in order to escape racial persecution and find a better life. Morrison, based on Jazz, reveals the great conflicts between slavery and liberation, soul and body, city and country, and man and woman. Paradise (1998) tells the story that in 1970s, a group of socially unacceptable free slaves, Li Fu, came to the west with their young, settled in a small town named Ruby, and created a paradise-like community composed entirely of blacks. By 1976, a hundred years later, the erosion and influence of the outside world on this "paradise" has become unbearable for residents. They blamed the threat to the purity of the community on a group of homeless women who took refuge in a monastery outside the city, so a group of men attacked these "indecent" women. However, the deep concern for the fate of women at the bottom is still the theme of this book, because a lot of space is used to describe the past that has been constantly involved in their present lives. There was also a white woman among the attacked women, but Morrison did not point out which one, but left it to the readers to distinguish. Beloved, Jazz and Paradise constitute a trilogy aimed at summarizing and sorting out the history of African-Americans in the past 100 years, and each work involves love that eventually resorts to violence. Morrison also gradually developed her lyric epic art in the trilogy. For example, when Jing Wei wrote Jazz, she borrowed the expression technique of black music blues, interwoven and mixed various tones, making the whole text like a fluctuating and uninterrupted jazz score, thus accurately and fully conveying the hunger, pain and distortion of the characters' hearts, and introduced what critics called "two-voice narrative" to enhance the sense of hierarchy. In Paradise, Morrison develops the fiction, dreams and lyricism of language in narrative style to an almost unrestrained level. It is said that this new work was created in a state of semi-delirium. In addition to novels, Morrison also wrote the plays emmett in Dreams (1986), Playing in the Dark (1993) and the fairy tale The Big Box (65438).
From 65438 to 0987, Morrison published her immortal masterpiece Beloved. The main plot of the book is based on a real historical event: in the 65438+1950s, a woman named Margaret? The slave women in Ghana fled from the slave farm in Kentucky to Cincinnati, Ohio with their children, followed by slave owners. In order to prevent their children from repeating the tragic fate of slavery, she grabbed an axe and resolutely chose death for them, but only killed one daughter. Morrison came into contact with this story when editing the Black Book (1974) for Random House, which is a collection of documents reflecting the history of black people's struggle for equality and freedom in the past 300 years. At that time, she had a strong creative impulse to explore the psychological state of the client through the art form of novel, so as to write a spiritual history for the black slaves who were deeply hurt by the evil forces of slavery. After ten years of brewing and three years of writing, Beloved finally came out, which is enough to prove the weight of this book in Morrison's heart. The heroine in the novel is called Sethe, and the weapon of despair, madness and extreme love becomes a more dangerous handsaw. After the publication of the novel, it caused a strong shock in American literary and cultural circles, and major newspapers published articles to give the highest standards of praise, considering it a monument to African-American history. However, this book was later defeated in the National Book Award. It is generally believed that some adults in the jury are unhappy because of the ruthless attack on racism in the book. 17 black writers and artists jointly issued an open letter to protest. In this context, the Pulitzer Prize of 1988 was awarded to Beloved. After entering the 1990s, Beloved has become one of the classic works of modern literature, and has been selected as a required reading in the courses of modernist literature, stream-of-consciousness novels, black literature and feminist literature in many western university literature departments. Psychoanalysis, structuralism, feminism, western Marxism, narratology and other schools have all found materials to prove their theories. 1998, "beloved" was put on the screen, and the famous TV host oprah winfrey? Winfrey plays Seth.
Morrison chose the scene of Beloved as the haunted house at Shi Lan Road 124, a suburb of Cincinnati. Now it is 1873, and slavery has been abolished for 10 years. /kloc-in 0/855, Sethe, a beautiful and arrogant slave girl, fled here from the "Sweet Home" farm in Kentucky and went to her mother-in-law Beibei. Sagues (her two sons and one daughter have given birth early, and the other daughter was born on the way); Twenty-eight days later, the slave owner "school teacher" took people to kill him. Sethe sawed off the throat of her daughter, who was only about one year old, and named her "Beloved" when she was buried. Although it was 18 years ago to escape and kill the girl, the nightmare of the past never stopped pestering Sethe. At the beginning of the novel, it is clearly stated that 124 is "full of resentment against a baby", but by 1873, "Sethe and her daughter Danfu have become its only victims" (the ghost of beloved has been raging at home for many years, causing her two sons to run away from home and speeding up her mother-in-law, Beibei? Sagues's mental breakdown and death made his little daughter Danfu develop a withdrawn and claustrophobic character. On this day, Paul, the last male slave of the former "Sweet Home" farm? D's visit broke the apparent peace of Sethe's isolated life: he smashed and robbed the little ghost in the house and lived with Sethe instead, promising to give her "a life"; Then beloved came back to life in the body of a 20-year-old girl and entered the family to collect the debt of love; In order to possess all the love of Sethe, Favourite even seduced Paul? D, kick him out of the house. However, a ghost's pursuit of love is insatiable, and Sethe finally came to the brink of mental breakdown ... Finally, it was grown-up Daphne and black people who helped her get rid of her pets and start to face a new life.
On the surface, Beloved occupies most elements of a success story: suffering, love, mystery, sex and violence; However, in Morrison's works, there is another atmosphere, which is complex and colorful like mosaic art, lingering and passionate like jazz music, profound and obscure like modern poetry; Its power is beyond the reach of an ingenious bestseller. In my opinion, what guarantees the greatness of this work is not so much the author's superb narrative skills as her ideological level of being proud of her peers. The black history touched by Morrison's thought is often composed of some common scenes: one day after dinner, because there is nothing to do, a young white peasant woman will carry the doll on her shoulder and go out to watch the black people lynched; People who torture black people can never say that they have a deep hatred for the tortured black people. They may do this just because they are on a whim, joking and showing off their power. In Morrison's view, the arbitrariness of this cruelty implies contempt for human life and dignity, which is even more heinous than the cruelty of slavery itself. Therefore, her brushwork transcends anger and no longer "accuses", but states the fundamental situation of a slave (or a freed slave) in this world in a firm and painful way: "Any white man can take away your whole self because of an idea that suddenly flashes in his mind. Not only enslave, kill or maim you, but also defile you. It is completely defiled, and you can't even like yourself anymore. It is so thoroughly stained that you can forget who you are and never remember it again. " (25 1, 299) "White people think that every black person's skin is a tropical jungle, whether educated or not. Navigable rapids, baboons swaying and screaming everywhere, sleeping snakes, and red gums that covet their sweet white blood. ..... The more black people make efforts to convince them how gentle, intelligent, caring and human they are, and the more they exhaust their unquestionable beliefs to prove to white people, the more dense and chaotic their inner jungle becomes. ..... This is the jungle that white people planted in their hearts. ..... it will grow. It is spreading. ..... until it finally invaded the white people who planted it. ..... make them cruel and stupid, make them worse than they want, and make them afraid of the jungle they created. Screaming baboons live under their white skin; The red gums are their own. " (198,237) The "school teacher" in the novel is such a typical white man. He put on a selfless, scientific and objective attitude everywhere, but what he and his two nephews did was full of cruelty: in order to do so-called research, he took a ruler to measure slaves all day, just like animals; The two nephews were so bored that they forced Sethe down, sucked her baby's milk and trampled on a woman's most sacred motherhood. Sethe once divided white people into evil "school teachers" and nephews, as well as kind Amy, Ghana, Baldwin and policemen. However, I finally realized that this division itself is meaningless, because white people's good deeds or evil deeds are completely one-way. Occasionally, even emotionally, blacks have no choice but to resign themselves to fate. Entering the human history of modern civilization, it endowed the new American science and democracy with aura, but imposed its darkest and meanest part on African Americans. The dead soul of the inscription "60 million or more" on the title page of Beloved is irrefutable evidence; The influence of slavery and its aftertaste on black psychology even exceeds the suffering itself. Even at the end of the 20th century, its huge shadow cannot be removed from the hearts of the majority of blacks, and all kinds of social problems faced by blacks can be traced back to the history of humiliation. Morrison's vocation is to first show the history that people don't even want to look back and the plight of the black soul-endless suffering and eternal loneliness. Therefore, she despises the "self-whipping" encouraged by whites in contemporary black literature and art, claiming that her works are "written for blacks". The pulse of Beloved is slower than that of ordinary people, because the hearts of its characters are heavier; But this pulse is evidence that people who have gone through hardships have risen from the ashes of national tragedy and tried to find the meaning and reason of eternal hope. On the key issue of black spiritual self-help, she borrowed books from the role, giving a choice. Seth's mother-in-law, baby? The moment Sagues set foot on the land of freedom, she suddenly heard "her own heartbeat" and strongly felt that "freedom is unparalleled in the world" (14 1, 168), so she became a "not to join the priest" and dedicated her love for freedom to the black people. When she preached in the "glade", she called on them to love their bodies-eyes, skin, hands, face, mouth, feet, back, shoulders, arms, neck and internal organs-because "over there, they (white people) don't love your body. They despise it. " She further asked everyone to love their hearts: "more than eyes and feet." It is not just the lungs that breathe free air. I love you more than your uterus that sustains life and your private parts that create life. Now listen to me, love your heart. Because this is the value. "After the exciting speech," she said nothing more and stood up and danced with her hips twisted. Other parts of C44L. (88, 105) Love, this simple thought (and its expression) contains too much helplessness, but it is practical and powerful. After the publication of Beloved, some critics said, "Morrison has become the D of the black soul? h？ Lawrence. " In my opinion, such a compliment is a little low for Morrison.
Morrison's fierce racial stance has been criticized by some people and is considered to weaken the excavation of the depth of human nature. In fact, this specious view is extremely harmful, and a deep insight into the nature of racial contradictions is the most solid cornerstone of Morrison's literary hall, because only by solving this knot can the black ethnic group gain the minimum self-identity, thus further exploring and revealing the mystery of human nature; Avoiding and obliterating it and talking about human nature are tantamount to scratching your boots. As the core plot of the novel and the carrier of this idea, infanticide gradually becomes clear in the reader's field of vision. The cause of the incident was that Sethe fled from the "Sweet Home" manor, and this escape itself was an imitation and rewriting of the myth of Paradise Lost in the Bible. The name "sweet home" obviously refers to the Garden of Eden. Ghana, the owner of the manor, practiced "a special kind of slavery". They treat slaves well, never abuse them, teach them to write and calculate, let them carry guns, and allow Hale to go out to work on weekends to earn money to buy his mother's freedom. It was not until Mr. Ghana died that the "school teacher" took over the manor, and the slaves in the manor lived in an idyllic dream like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Corresponding to Eve's stealing forbidden fruit, Sethe's initial awakening to human nature came from an accidental eavesdropping: she accidentally bumped into a "school teacher" who was teaching two nephews, and he was instructing them to study slaves, asking them to put Sethe's "human attributes on the left" and "animal attributes on the right" on paper (193,23/kloc-0. She was deeply shocked and secretly vowed that she would never allow her children's attributes to be put on the side of animals again. Therefore, when the collective escape planned by Sethe's husband Hale and Szikszo failed, she resolutely decided to flee alone and succeeded in one fell swoop. She was six months pregnant and had just been beaten by two nephews. Her back was cut open and she was seriously injured. Adam and eve ate the fruit of knowing good and evil and were expelled from the paradise by the Lord, which was also a passive act; Sethe's escape is an out-and-out initiative, which declares human consciousness by denying and rejecting the so-called heaven. When the female murder happened, Sethe's violent maternal love brought the negative tendency in this behavior to the extreme, which was actually a logical result. Its significance lies in that for the first time, a slave really becomes the master of her own life. Her noble, rich and beautiful humanity relies on an irrational way to challenge history. 1995 we heard a live program on American radio, which was about the discussion of beloved. Many white listeners called to ask Morrison why she didn't morally condemn "the murderer Sethi"; To tell the truth, we are quite shocked by the arrogance and stupidity of these people, but we also further understand Morrison's writing position. When is Paul? After learning the truth about Sethe's killing the girl, D accused her of saying, "Your love is too strong." Her answer is: "Love or not. A touch of love is not love at all. " (164, 196) Here, a long-term "aphasic" nation has gained its own voice and character from a weak woman who seems to have lost her mind, and the imitation of the myth of paradise lost has thus been transformed into the construction of the myth that the national spirit and culture are reborn from pain. Morrison chooses women under the double oppression of race and gender as the protagonist of her national heroic epic, and undertakes the heavy responsibility of finding herself and shaping the image for the nation, which neither violates the authenticity of national history and present situation, but also embodies her consistent feminist thought.
Relative to Beibei? In Sagues's sermon (Divergent Love), Sethe's choice of love is more restrained: at least she should defend human dignity with the greatest strength. Both of them suffered a tragic failure: Babe was exhausted and had to lie in bed pondering the color and wait for death; Sethe lost her mind in a love-hate relationship with her beloved, who is still asking for debts. Morrison arranged an unusual background for these two failures: the abandonment of black compatriots. After the daughter-in-law successfully escaped, Babe, who enjoys high prestige among the black people in Cincinnati? Sagues hosted a banquet for her friends, but after they were full of wine and food, everyone was jealous of her, thinking that she had taken all the blessings and honors, and "the smell of strong criticism was stagnant in the air" (137,164); Therefore, when the "school teacher" took people to hunt slaves the next day, no one came to report the case, which indirectly led to the tragedy of infanticide; After Sethe was released from prison, she was alienated and isolated by them for more than ten years because of her pride. Morrison got rid of the limitation of racial theme at this moment, and paid attention to the plight of human beings in a world full of binary opposition (such as good and evil, love and hate, pride and jealousy) and their unremitting efforts to overcome loneliness and pursue meaning from a philosophical point of view, asking blacks and everyone to think and answer what will win. Perhaps this is why, at the end of the book, she gives a full expression of this irrationality: Sethe, who is unconscious, saw the hat of Mr. Baldwin, the employer who came to pick up Danfu, and mistakenly thought that the white man was coming to grab "her most precious part" again, so she shouted "No, no, no, no, no" in her heart (262,3/kloc)
In addition, I want to emphasize Morrison's various artistic treatments in the narrative process of Beloved ―― symbolism, metaphor, exaggeration, synaesthesia, stream of consciousness, time-space transformation, description of supernatural phenomena, multi-angle narration and so on. On the one hand, it serves the theme of the novel (hard core composed of clear and firm parts), on the other hand, it matches or conforms to a large number of rich and obscure components in her thoughts that need to be identified. For example, novels are written as ghost stories. The haunted house is the usual tactic of Gothic novels that prevailed at the end of 18, but in Morrison's works, it completely lost its function of creating suspense and rendering the atmosphere of terror, which is consistent with the exciting and bright tone in the book. The ghost of beloved lingered on 124 for many years, and grew up gradually with the passage of time until she came out as a girl. Its keynote is resentment, sadness, loneliness, injustice and anger. The darling of the soul returning to the flesh is designed to be not only the basic characteristics of human beings, but also the trance and vanity of ghosts, which is more like the connection between yin and yang than the signal of danger. In an interview, when asked if she believed in ghosts, Morrison replied, "Yes. Do you believe in bacteria? ..... (If there is no ghost) I will have to rely on so-called scientific data to explain things that have no scientific basis. " Obviously, the image of Beloved bears the imprint of African traditional religious thought and view of life and death. We can also regard it as a powerful backwash of the black national tradition advocated by Morrison to the established order of modern civilization.
As a novel aimed at revealing the harm caused by the spirit of slavery, Beloved focuses on the serious interference of the past time to the real world, especially the psychology of the liberated black people. From the perspective of modern psychoanalysis, the heroines Sethe and Paul? Desetshi's mental state before the reunion is about to begin is a typical psychotic symptom. Although Sethi can't forgive her memory (6, 7), she can't control it to slide into the abyss of the past. In fact, almost all the characters in the novel live in an extremely dangerous situation, facing such a psychological abyss that will fall at any time (in the later Jazz, it was also vividly described as 65094; )。 Like, baby? Sagues has six husbands and eight children, but they are all missing. Paul. D. Self-recognition of masculinity collapses in front of roosters; Optimistic and strong old black stamp? When Peide was young, his wife was occupied by the young master for a long time but he could do nothing. Ella's adolescence was spent by a white father and son, who she called "the meanest people so far". Morrison described Sethe's daily life as "rejecting the serious work of the past" (73, 86), when Paul? As soon as D stepped in, the same memory of Sweet Home made this work more difficult; The return of Beloved completely destroyed it. Strangely, all this was carefully organized by Morrison with a sprawling and fragmented structure on the surface. Almost all the literary means of modern novels were used, and every fragment was put in place and welded firmly. Some skills listed in the previous section were only part of it. This short story is like an exhibition of modern novel skills or a textbook for novel writing. Readers are attracted by its magic, and can enter its fictional reality from anywhere (every page of the novel), but they will always find it in the eyes of fans. Morrison sat in her heart, holding all the secrets of this fictional world in her hands like the old woman she talked about repeatedly. Regarding the structure of this book, some critics think that "it's like drawing a picture on a glass plate, breaking the glass, and then splicing the pieces into a dazzling modern form." Some critics described Morrison's originality as "shaking her dazzling kaleidoscope again". We can also regard the structure of the novel as a slowly flowing river with many undercurrents and eddies. The process begins and ends in the spring of 1973 and the summer of 1874 (describing the present tense). Undercurrent and vortex are memories, reflections and reconstructions of the past time. In the constant reverie, distraction and tears of the characters, the past and the present are intertwined, and the plot tends to be clear and complete with the expansion of ripples, and the inevitable truth emerges. At the beginning of the novel, the baby girl died after her throat was cut, and then she hinted at the truth of infanticide many times, but when the scene of infanticide is completely reproduced, the motive of infanticide will be discussed repeatedly in the future. Sethe gave birth to her daughter Danfu on the way to escape, which is mainly due to the selfless help of a kind and poor white girl Amy. This touching story praising universal humanity beyond racial boundaries is relatively independent of the whole book, but Morrison still allows it to be completed from three different perspectives, with distinct levels: the first time it was based on Danfu's thoughts, the second time it was told to Beloved by Danfu, and the third time it was supplemented by Sethe herself. In addition, the multi-voice chorus and symphony with various sound qualities (the chapter in the second novel, in which Sethe, Beloved, Danfu and the theme of "You are mine" are the most typical) also make Beloved have the basic characteristics of a great polyphonic novel.