正当中国食品安全问题成为国际社会关注的焦点之一，中国政府穷于应对之时，北京电视台报道了震惊中外的纸包子新闻，国人愤怒地谴责道德沦丧、世风日下，国际舆论再次聚焦中国食品安全，一时间，“纸包子”大有变成假货代名词的去世。
刘 水：限价牛肉面：兰州官员是法盲加市场盲
今年上半年，中国发生三件直接关乎民生的奇特事件：房价普遍暴涨，政府不作为；猪肉飞涨，政府应对无方；兰州牛肉面微涨，兰州市政府悍然限价。暴利行业，政府不管不问；微利行业，政府却积极出头。这是个什么政府？
本文分析的是兰州牛肉面限价背后，兰州市政府的违法行政和转移公共财政救济义务的荒诞行为。
兰州市政府限价牛肉面，冠冕堂皇的理由是为了保障城市低收入市民的饮食习惯和生活质量。现在城市居民饮食早已多样化、丰富化，政府给出的市民早餐必吃牛肉面是否合乎科学和营养学，且当存疑。2006年末，据统计兰州市常驻人口320万，加上流动人口，总共大约400万。400万人的饮食市场不是小问题。单是每天多支出区区五毛、一块钱，竟然影响部分市民生活质量的说法，有多少人会相信这个理由？我没觉得兰州官员是做好事，倒觉得兰州市民生活水平也太低了。兰州市政府倘若真是有心关心底层居民生活，不如把心思放在如何增加市民的收入上，或者提高低保标准上。政府限价干扰了正常的市场秩序，违反国法并且反市场自由。
兰州市政府出此瞎主意，表明还在沿用计划经济思维管理民生，让人恍若回到十多年前的饥荒岁月。那时，中国人吃饭穿衣都被政府定额，要用什么劳什子粮票、副食票，等等。记得1980年代在兰州读书时，每所高校至少都有一家牛肉面馆，生意都很红火。许多同学宁可逃课，也要排队打到牛肉面。主要是各校伙食奇差，菜食单调。吃牛肉面等同于改善伙食，没得选择。每碗大概几毛钱，具体价格我已经忘记了。
兰州牛肉面，清末，由兰州回民马保子创制而成——一清二白三红四绿。味美价廉。正宗牛肉面，只有在兰州市区能够找到。水质、冬麦粉、黄牛肉、白萝卜、红辣椒、牛骨汤和和面的硼灰（据说现在使用拉面剂），其他地方是无法仿制的。别说其他省市，就是在紧挨兰州的定西市和武威市，端上来的牛肉面，面的筋道，汤料和牛肉的味道，都差几个档次。以后几乎跑遍全国，大小城市都有“兰州牛肉面”，但都是改良的，味不够地道，不吃也罢。
兰州官员鼠目寸光。干干正事，顺应市场，把“兰州牛肉面”品牌作大作强，扩大甘肃知名度，才是他们的应有之为。离开兰州十多年，天南海北的人都有结识。当别人问起我哪里人时，回答西北甘肃。有见识者会呈惊讶状：甘肃呀，奥，那里有兰州牛肉面、《读者》和敦煌，不错的地方；无见识者，会反问：你们是不是从来不洗澡，甘肃是不是全是沙漠啊？
现在兰州底层市民即使再穷，总不会倒退到吃不饱饭的地步吧。政府限价兰州的牛肉面2.5元/碗。即使现在甘肃境内地市一级城市的牛肉面，都涨到3.00元/碗。一个省会城市的居民收入，总比地市一级市民收入高，何来兰州市民无法承受之重？兰州官员称，每碗涨价五毛，让市民每人每月多开销15——30元，市民的经济压力加大。这要么是胡说八道、别有用心，要么就是非正当干预市场的托词。
限价行为，本身已违反《价格法》等国家法规，没有公开举行价格听证会，广泛咨询民意。肉、面等原材料涨价，导致牛肉面成本升高，这绝非牛肉面业主太贪心；限价，绝非政府体恤民生，而是因为政府的失职——GDP逐年增长而居民收入或低保等福利却原地踏步。其掩盖的是：本该由兰州市政府投入公共财政救济低收入家庭，却通过非法手段转嫁给了牛肉面经营者。其次，政府获得好名，经营者得到骂名。再次，挫伤牛肉面业主的积极性，可能使部分经营者倒闭。因此，兰州市政府限价牛肉面，是非常荒唐和别有用心的行为。这些官员压根不懂“兰州牛肉面”金字招牌的价值。最终受到伤害的是“兰州牛肉面”这个百年老字号。
餐饮业是市场化运作，牛肉面价格是降是升，随行就市，经营者的正常利润应该受到保护，这是常识。或者，如果存在兰州牛肉面行业协会这样的民间组织，价格应由会员协商定夺，政府没有资格强硬限价；再者，兰州市政府不该把手伸得长长地去干预餐饮市场，政府没有这个权力。兰州市政府赶快取消限价，把属于市场的还给市场，把财政收入投给城市弱势群体，尽力维护宝贵的地域品牌。
2007年7月22日
刘逸明：是什么导致传销在中国阴魂不散？
中国政府已经取缔传销多年，但传销活动在中国依然猖獗，大有屡禁不止、愈演愈烈之势。据美国之音报道，中国福建警方最近宣布，在中国政府七月份发起的严厉打击传销的专项行动中，福建破获了12起非法传销案件，逮捕20多人，涉案金额达两千六百多万元人民币。另据自由亚洲电台报道，在今年6月初，河北省保定市200多名传销人员因为不满当局对他们打压，手持武器冲击市内派出所，事件中有九名民警被打伤，数十名传销人员被抓。近段时间，有关传销的报道可以说是不绝于耳。
单凭传销事件并不足为怪，因为面对中国政府的三令五申，一些人和团体以身试法的情形早已经是司空见惯了。真正匪夷所思的是，在庞大的传销群体当中，竟然有相当比例的传销人员是平时被誉为“天之骄子”的大学毕业生。在大学生多如牛毛和文凭泛滥的今天，学历已经无法和一个人的素质划等号，充斥着中国社会的很多大学生已经堕落为高学历的“文盲”，他们在道德水平上往往也是不尽人意。
传销作为社会主义市场经济进程中一种不和谐的音调，早就令老百姓深恶痛绝，被政府明令禁止。然而，传销在被紧急叫停几年后的今天，并没有停下它那邪恶的步履，它依然象一个百变的魔鬼，不断地改头换面，驻足于一些鲜为人知的城市角落，继续蛊惑人心，骗钱害人。不光老百姓对传销象对待过街老鼠一样人人喊打，中国政府和有关部门也是头痛不已。总部设在美国的中国劳工观察组织表示，是中国社会中弥漫的拜金主义的风气导致传销骗局盛行，解决问题，不能仅仅依靠法律和严打。另外，传销活动的受害者和参与者很多是下岗职工等中国社会的弱势群体，打击传销以及没收货款会让他们的经济处境雪上加霜。
传销的原产地并不在中国，但是，它能以飞快的速度在中华大地上“生根发芽”，“茁壮成长”，以至“如火如荼”，无人不知无人不晓，这不能不说是一种“奇迹”！笔者早在九十年代早期就已接触过传销，并做了一段时间传销课的“忠实”听众。然而，笔者并没有被该行业的所谓“公平奖金制度”所吸引。这不仅是因为笔者对该行业作过是否产生社会效益的考量，更重要的是，笔者压根儿就觉得它是一种彻头彻尾的把商品作为道具的金钱游戏。笔者不否认传销做到“登峰造极”的境界可以财源滚滚，日进斗金（不过，客观注定走到这一步的人将是凤毛麟角）。当然，笔者拒绝传销也并非是对自己的能力缺乏自信，还有重要的一点，那就是，笔者深深地认为这种行业对财富道德的违背或许仅次于明偷暗抢。笔者曾询问过几位美国的朋友传销在美国的处境，他们均告知，传销在美国虽然合法，但是，从事者微乎其微。连在中国“赫赫有名”的“安利”，在那里都是名不见经传！
熟语云：“君子爱财，取之有道”，中国的媒体虽然年年为中国经济的高增长狂欢雀跃，但普通老百姓并成为经济发展的受益者，况且中国的人均收入水平依然还很低，很多人才刚刚走出“食不裹腹，衣不遮体”的生活困境。从人性的角度讲，我们每个人都希望发财，但是，我们还是应该在追逐财富的路途上，遵循这条流传千古的财富原则，不要为了发财而不择手段，把财富的积累建筑在他人痛苦的基础之上。据笔者所知，仍然有一些现在经济条件并不宽裕人拒绝从事包括传销在内的违法或者违背财富道德的活动。但是，仍然有不少人经不起诱惑，对传销趋之若鹜，这些人不但在经济上“穷”，在精神上更是换上了非钱而不能医的“穷病”，且病入膏肓。那些“心怀鬼胎”的外国“企业家”，之所以在中国撒下传销的种子，和很多中国人这种人性的弱点是紧密联系在一起的。作家韩寒前不久曾说中华民族已经沦为了“劣等民族”，此话并非危言耸听。
如今，连堂堂正正的大学生都不甘寂寞，加入传销的“洪流”，憧憬“亿万富翁”的“美好”，这让笔者自然而然地联想到几年前云南大学学生马加爵残酷杀害四名同学而畏罪潜逃的事情。据说，此类事件在中国留学生中就早有先例，如果只是道听途说，还难以令人置信，但事实确实如此。冉云飞先生曾说过“传统教育是专制制度的帮凶，奴才教育是现代教育的根本”，从近年来所发生的很多事情看，中国教育界的反思是时候了。
此前，随着中国政府的一声令下，各大传销公司纷纷土崩瓦解，唯有安利和雅芳等传销公司依然岿然不动，这令很多人百思不解。安利在中国的合法地位，为原先在其他传销公司被取缔后的“失业”者提供了一个难得的栖身之所。所以，在传销被正式取缔后的这些年，安利的经营规模以及从业队伍反而得到了前所未有的壮大。听安利的一位高级别职员透露，安利在中国取得合法性地位也付出了其沉重的代价。那就是，安利每年要把50%的营业额作为税款交税收部门。从这种意义上讲，安利似乎还在为中国的经济发展作贡献。笔者不知道中国的税收部门在“笑纳”那50%营业额的税收时，是否想过那笔款子的来源？中国社会的总体财富实际上免不了随这份税收同步大量流失，流向了那些“心怀鬼胎”者的“黑手”和其产品的原产地。这些年，传销的阴魂不散跟安利这样的实质性传销公司取得合法地位也是不无关系的。近年来，听过传销课的人都不会不清楚，安利在传销课堂上已经成为了非法传销的掩护伞。所以，从这一点上说，中国政府对传销的取缔还不够彻底。在商业日渐发达的今天，我们完全可以用光明正大的市场渠道来解决诸如安利产品的销售问题，完全不需要那种挂“直销”之羊头，卖“传销”之狗肉的经营方式。
安利等躲躲藏藏和靠人际关系带动的经营，是缺乏市场竞争力的表现，在拜金主义日盛的今天，传销行业对社会道德的衰退起到了推波助澜的作用。有人说，有几流的政治就有几流的国民，缺乏独立明辨是否能力和缺少道德修养的中国人注定无法托起“大国崛起”的梦想。笔者期待着传销现象在中国国土上彻底冰消瓦解的一天，同时也期待着我们的国民真正拥有大国民风范的一天！
2007年7月27日
Goodbye to Newspapers?
Goodbye to Newspapers?
By
Henry James in France
Henry James in France
Matthew Peters
Peter Brooks
HENRY JAMES GOES TO PARIS
288pp. Princeton University Press. £15.95.
9780691129549
In 1875, Henry James moved from New York into an expensive flat in the rue de Luxembourg in Paris. He was glad to have escaped what he saw as the unrewarding, thin social texture of American life. A year later, preparing to move to London, where he lived for the next twenty years, he wrote to his brother William of his boredom and disenchantment with Paris, saying that he had “got nothing important out of [it]”. In 1881, however, in an entry in his notebooks, James saw the year rather differently: it was, he wrote, “time by no means misspent”. Peter Brooks’s engaging and perceptive book sets out to explain why James’s year in Paris was not only time not misspent, but crucial for later developments in his fiction. Surveying James’s equivocal and occasionally hostile responses to the Parisian cultural scene of 1875 and 1876, Brooks contends that James’s exposure to French Impressionist painting and realist and naturalist fiction contributed to the development of what Brooks calls the “radical perspectivalism” and narrative experimentation of his fiction of the 1890s and beyond.
In an interview published in 1994, Brooks spoke of the “temptation” of writing a biography of a literary figure. Biography, he believed, was “one of the few forms that a literary critic can use, in our culture, to reach a large audience”. Henry James Goes to Paris is far from a biography of James. (Only its first chapter is devoted to telling the story of his year in Paris.) Yet its biographical element is clearly designed to win a larger audience than a book of criticism on James might expect to find. The events of James’s year in Paris are of great interest, and Brooks’s account includes the customary gems: the glacial response accorded to James by Flaubert and his circle after James committed the aesthetic sin of expressing admiration for Gustave Droz’s fiction (“we think nothing of him: you mustn’t talk of him here”); James’s unlikely and rather depressing friendship with the tenaciously uncolourful figure of C. S. Peirce (whom James dropped as soon as he made more friends in Paris); his watchful consternation at the sight of Ivan Turgenev – whom James revered as a man and as a novelist – crawling on all fours in a game of charades. James admitted to William that it was unlikely that he would ever become “intimate” with the French literary scene; but he also wrote to him of his intimate friendship with the Russian artist Paul Zhukovsky – a friendship Brooks examines in some detail here. James’s attachment to Zhukovsky was powerful but almost certainly chaste, and Brooks writes sympathetically of the gradual cooling of James’s regard for him.
The real value of this book, however, lies in Brooks’s assessment of what he sees as the delayed impact of French experimental culture on James’s fiction. Brooks writes with the clarity and confidence that characterize his earlier, greatly influential works of criticism, The Melodramatic Imagination (1976) and Reading for the Plot (1984). Central to his arguments in his extended readings of such novels as The Tragic Muse, What Maisie Knew and The Golden Bowl is that James always retained a belief in the value of representation, in spite of the proto-modernist experimentation with narrative methods in his late fiction.
Brooks contrasts the concentration on surfaces and impressions of Flaubertian narrative techniques with James’s commitment to a Balzacian form of representation, which was “less concerned with the details of the real than with what it signifies and connotes, less attached to the surface of things than to what may be suggested and concealed, behind and beneath”. Brooks argues that, valuable as these French experimental techniques were to James’s own narrative methods, he should be considered a novelist not of impressionism but of “expressionism” – a term to which Brooks gives the specialized and suggestive definition: “the effort to make surface yield something that is not purely of surface”; a “drama of ethical substance”. Flaubert, accordingly, was an intensely provoking and problematic figure for James.
Brooks’s treatment of James’s attitude towards Flaubert’s work is acute and compelling. James’s mingled respect for and hostility towards Flaubert has attracted some exceptionally insightful critical commentary over the years: one thinks immediately of Edmund Wilson’s comments in his essay on James in The Triple Thinkers (1938). At the same time James has always been unfairly charged with failing to understand Flaubert’s methods. Brooks rightly admits that in one sense James was frustrated with Flaubert simply for his refusal to write Jamesian novels of consciousness. James had a high regard for Flaubert as a stylist and as an artist devoted to his craft; but he also believed that his fiction was flawed by what he called a “defect” of his mind – namely, his belief that characters of limited intelligence and superficial emotions, such as Emma Bovary and Frédéric Moreau, were adequate to sustain the burden of narratives of ethical value. What is original about Brooks’s account is that it does not claim that James failed to comprehend Flaubert’s methods. Drawing on his work on James and Flaubert in his previous book Realist Vision (2005), Brooks successfully reverses this critical commonplace by suggesting that James’s aversion was justified by the way he understood Flaubert’s methods only too well – understood, that is, how the motiveless narrative of such a novel as Bouvard et Pécuchet, and the “process of designification” entailed in Flaubert’s descriptive methods, were “profoundly subversive for his own enterprise for the novel”.
For all the psychoanalytic tendencies of Brooks’s criticism (he writes that James’s aversion to French realism was “merely conscious”), his account of James’s reading of Flaubert evokes quite different forms of criticism. First, his distinction between the “process of designification” found in Flaubert’s descriptive methods, and James’s “hypersignificant” techniques, invites a comparison with James Wood’s concept of “hysterical realism” in modern-day fiction. Wood finds a lack of ethical value and significance in the bloated information and curious learning offered by such a novelist as Thomas Pynchon. Wood’s attitude towards Pynchon is strikingly similar to that which, Brooks convincingly argues, James held towards Bouvard et Pécuchet. Second, Brooks’s notion that James believed Flaubert’s fiction revealed “a lack of respect for life, and for the capacities of fiction to represent life” seems to envisage James as a proto-Leavisite. Brooks’s assessment is accurate. James’s abiding concern in his literary criticism with the way in which experience is mediated through the novel, and his relative lack of regard for stylistic artistry alone, were clearly a great influence on Leavis. Indeed, Brooks’s argument, in his discussion of What Maisie Knew, that this work offers “a kind of moral and psychological pathos that Flaubert never approached” elevates James on grounds that the Leavis of The Great Tradition would surely have approved: James was able to “combine the perspectival lessons of Flaubert with a moral vision that evokes a wholly different tradition of the novel – that of George Eliot perhaps”.
In his writing on Maisie Brooks comes to the conclusion that, for all the radical perspectivalism of James’s late writing, he remained committed to the representation of acquired knowledge and derived meaning. We might question this vision of James’s commitment to knowledge, however. The very distinctive conditions of that novel – those brought on by the representation of what James calls the “infant mind” – should not distract us from the way in which they highlight something of wider importance to James’s use of the reflecting consciousness in his fiction: that receptiveness and perception are valued more highly than knowledge and understanding. In his preface to Maisie, James wrote that Maisie “sees”; in a later preface James described such figures as Rowland Mallet, Christopher Newman, Isabel Archer and Merton Densher as “perceivers”; the dramatic centre of The Portrait of a Lady, James wrote, was “a representation simply of [Isabel Archer] motionlessly seeing”; Lambert Strether’s fate, similarly, is that he “at all events sees”. An essential quality of the reflective consciousness, then, is that the capacity for seeing is quite distinct from, and indeed, supersedes any requirement to “understand” or to “know”. It entails, rather, a sensitivity to complex experience, whose value is to be found not in its transformation into knowledge or understanding but rather in its receptiveness to the experience itself, which issues in the vivid demonstration of some intensely emotional effect on the reflective consciousness. Brooks’s account therefore surprisingly muffles what is most experimental and progressive in James’s fiction. James was an even more radical novelist than Brooks allows him to be.
Brooks is far less severe than many earlier commentators on James’s discomfort at what he called on more than one occasion the “unclean” elements of French fiction. Even so, James’s attitude is still presented here as something of an embarrassment. But if we are disappointed by James’s preference for Droz over Daudet in 1876 we might also admire his tenacity in holding this belief in the face of the contempt it received from the Flaubert circle. James’s intransigence was more interesting than Brooks’s notion that he was “missing things on the spot” suggests. And more important than the preference for Droz was his recognition in 1876 that, as he wrote to William James, he was “turning English all over”. James’s faith in the culture that produced George Eliot was more than a reaction against Flaubert and company. It was surely deep-rooted and even vital to James’s sense of himself as a novelist in that Anglo-American tradition. Brooks concludes rightly, I think, that James remained committed to ethical significance and value in his late fiction; but his notion of James’s “missing things on the spot” undervalues the importance to James of that commitment in 1876.
More generally, however, Brooks’s detailed readings of James’s fiction are highly convincing. His assessments of the melodramatic “turn” of The American (which James wrote during his year in Paris) and the “melodrama of consciousness” he sees at work in The Golden Bowl are rewarding and successful refinements of his writing on James in The Melodramatic Imagination. Throughout Henry James Goes to Paris, Peter Brooks shows the command of and saturation in his subject that have made him one of the most valuable commentators on nineteenth-century realist fiction, and he has produced here an exceptionally clear-sighted account of Henry James’s boldness and importance as a novelist.
________________________________________________________
Matthew Peters is writing a PhD on Henry James at the University of Cambridge.
Never Speak to Strangers
Never Speak to Strangers
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We must ride the lightning
Robert Heinlein envisioned a future in 1945 where the atomic bomb made conventional warfare obsolete and thus required the development of rockets, which could also be used for space exploration. (credit: The Heinlein Prize Trust)
We must ride the lightning : Robert Heinlein and American spaceflight
by Dwayne A. Day
July 7 is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Robert Anson Heinlein. In Kansas City the Heinlein Centennial will celebrate his writings and feature talks by the NASA administrator Michael Griffin as well as Heinlein scholars and enthusiasts. Heinlein is the closest thing that the American pro-space movement has to a patron saint.
Science fiction has, for good or ill, had a major effect upon how Americans think about spaceflight. Many early rocket engineers were inspired by Jules Verne, many current space enthusiasts were inspired by Star Trek. Heinlein certainly inspired many in the entrepreneurial space movement.
Heinleins unique strength was his willingness to reexamine assumptions. He had what Henry Kuttner called in his introduction to Heinleins 1953 book Revolt in 2100 the innocent eye. An article in the current edition of Reason magazine addresses Heinleins role in the history of libertarian ideology and notes that although Heinleins works ranged across many different topics and seemed to explore different philosophies, they generally shared certain main themes, one of the main ones being opposition to centralized authority.
Despite this view, Heinlein also had a pragmatic core. He believed in a strong military and opposition to Soviet communism. In his nonfiction writings and his political activism he frequently advocated both.
With these concepts in mind, it is worth looking at a rather amazing memo that Heinlein wrote in 1945 advocating a rigorous American missile and space program. Heinlein wrote it soon after the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Japan. He argued that the bomb had changed the world and he believed that intercontinental rockets would also have a major effect on warfare. He wanted the United States to get out in front of this new development like it had with the bomb.
Heinlein is the closest thing that the American pro-space movement has to a patron saint.
There are many interesting aspects to the memo, but what is unique about it is that it occupies a point precisely in the middle of the overlap between science fiction and current reality. Although Heinlein thought that he was discussing the world as it wasor was about to behis own interests in rockets and spaceflight were biasing his projections. He was advocating solutions to current problems that were far more fantastical than practical. Heinlein was certainly not alone in this. Many people looked at the atomic bomb and made dire predictions that fortunately proved false. But Heinlein believed in rocketry and spaceflight so fervently that it led him to conclusions that were not well-grounded in the actual technical realities of his day. That is worth considering today, six decades later, when Heinlein is still held in such high esteem as a prophet for the NewSpace movement.
We are out of business&
For most of World War 2, einlein worked as a civilian engineer on aircraft programs for the Naval Air Experimental Station (NAES) at the Naval Air Material Center, or NAMC, in Philadelphia. As the war was obviously coming to a close he wrote this memo to the head engineer at NAMC and then immediately resigned to return to private life, where he not only went back to fiction writing, but like so many intellectuals of his generation also concerned himself with the politics of the bomb.
The memo is written in classic Heinleinian styleconversational, not bureaucratic, and with a tone of overt cheerleading. It starts:
I believe it is evident to any sober-minded technical man that the events of 6 Aug. 45& should cause us carefully to re-examine all plans, proposals, and projects which obtained before that time.
The preliminaries aside, he then made a bold statement:
In the first place, in the broad sense we are out of business, just as thoroughly out of business as were wooden ships after the battle of the Monitor and the Merrimac. On the other hand we need not be out of business if we reorient, see what may be done with our exceptional resources in the way of trained personnel and mechanical equipment, and then determine what we should do in the interest of the United States of America in particular and humanity in general. What task is there for which we are fitted and which would serve the culture we are committed to support?
Heinlein then listed the specific reasons why he believed the world had changed.
Why we are out of business
The atomic bomb is so overwhelmingly different from every previous weapon of war as to change the whole approach. I could expand that indefinitely but I am at loss for wordseither a man sees it almost at once or he will never see it. But I will offer meager illustrations:
No more surface warships.
No more infantry.
No more reciprocating engines in military aircraft.
No more tanks.
Every type of craft or weapon abolished or changed beyond recognition because of the incredible changes in logistics and tactics.
Possibility of wars which last fifteen minutes instead of years.
No more aircraft carriers –and all which that implies.
It became quite evident at once that the greatest bomber in aviation history, the B-29, was not really up to the job of carrying the atomic bomb. It is much too slow, cant fly high enough, and is unnecessarily large. The atomic bomb should be carried by a rocket, manned or unmanned. Then the parachute would be unnecessary and the bomb could be placed with precision and with safety of the crew.
Heinleins predictions about the future of weapons systems were of course almost completely wrong. Surface warships, infantry, tanks, aircraft carriers and even reciprocating engines in military aircraft did not immediately disappear. Explaining why they did not in the face of the atomic bomb would require many books, but at the most basic level the issue was that the atomic bomb was soon viewed as a weapon so terrible that it would not be regularly used. Even while the United States held a nuclear monopoly, it did not drop bombs on other nations. Because the bomb was essentially unusable, all those other weapons were still necessary to fight the kinds of wars that continued to occur, like Korea.
Heinlein was right about the B-29, but that observation was self-evident. Clearly jets were the way of the future and what the United States needed was a jet bomber, which it got a few years later with the extraordinary B-47. But Heinleins memo illuminates his biases. Rather than jet bombers, Heinlein wanted ballistic missiles.
Heinlein’s predictions about the future of weapons systems were of course almost completely wrong.
However, what Heinlein did not understand—undoubtedly because he did not have access to any data about atomic weapons—was that atomic bombs were heavy. In a sense the B-29 was not “unnecessarily large” because it was the only plane then capable of carrying such a large weapon. Lofting a weapon of that size atop a rocket would be very difficult, something that Heinlein could not fully comprehend because he did not have the data.
“We must ride the lightning and ride it well.”
In the post-war period, Robert Heinlein devoted much time and effort to prophesizing about how much the world had changed because of the bomb. His outlook was grim: he thought that atomic conflict was virtually inevitable. He was not alone in this; many intellectuals felt the same way and even formed alliances such as the Federation of American Scientists to try to influence policy. But in his 1945 memo, Heinlein is not so much advocating disarmament as sober recognition of the new realities, as well as the need to embrace high-tech warfare.
What should we do?
This question needs to be approached with humility and with real desire to serve rather than simply with the idea of preserving a particular bureaucratic institution as a going concern. It may be conclusively assumed that, while war may possibly be successfully outlawed through the use or the threat of the use of the atomic bomb, the atomic bomb itself may no more be outlawed than sex or the silent stars. It’s here, we’ve got it. It is a fait accompli. We must at all times be ready and willing to use it. If our culture is to survive we must contain that power with sober judgment and humanity. It is a simple fact that (1) we can not afford a war ever again, (2) the atomic bomb cannot be abolished, nor can it be indefinitely kept from other peoples. We must ride the lightning and ride it well. I conceive the atomic bomb as being the force behind the police power for a planetary peace. Perhaps the custodian will be called the “Armed Forces of the U.S.” or perhaps the “Peace Forces of the United Nations,”—or perhaps another title. No matter, such a force there must be if we are not to be ourselves destroyed.
The idea of an international peacekeeping force was certainly in vogue around that time. It had predated the war with Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations, but the immense destruction of World War 2 lent it increased vigor, and the atomic bomb would soon add momentum to the movement. Some groups even proposed that the United States give up its atomic monopoly to an international force.
Heinlein then turned his attention to arming such a new entity and argued that the organization that he had worked for during the war, the Naval Air Materiel Command, could lead the way:
I propose that NAMC undertake to develop a suitable passenger carrying rocket to be the “squad car” for the “planetary police.” (No doubt the AAF [Army Air Forces] will tackle it also. Fine!)
Nuclear physics is not our field. Craft which rise above the earth is our field. A new type is needed. Let’s build it.
Perhaps realizing that his idea might be considered far-fetched, Heinlein pointed to numerous wartime examples of rockets, including the Japanese Oka rocket-powered suicide bomb, the V-2 rocket, and recent developments in increasing rocket exhaust velocities. He also explained that rockets were largely indifferent to weather because they cruised beyond the atmosphere. Pressurization of the vehicle for a crew should not be a problem and other technical developments made a man-carrying rocket feasible.
I propose a major project at NAF with numerous supporting projects at NAES to build such a rocket. A team should be set up consisting of a project engineer, several expert consultants (hired outside) engineers of many ratings including mechanical, ballistical, weight, electronic, and aero. The team should be large.
Heinlein then described in broad terms the steps needed to undertake this effort. Eventually it would transform the NAMC. We would end up with a new and different organization& but we would end up with a rocket.
But Heinlein was not naïve.
It is possible that the open development of a military rocket will meet strong emotional opposition in the next few years. It might be more feasible in peace time to carry on this job, a job of pure research, by selecting an objective non-military in character but which would with utter certainty provide the military results as well. For example we might propose to build a messenger rocket to the moon.
This early effort would be a stunt with practical benefits. It would:
&leave a mark (explosive dispersed carbon black, or similar dodge) on the face of the moona useless thing in itself but parallel to the 1st flight at Kitty Hawk, a conclusive demonstration that man can conquer space. The unique prestige which would accrue to the United States of America, to the U.S. Navy, and to NAMC in particular cannot be expressed. As an unpublicized side issue we would know how to build the perfect carrier for the A-bomb.
Heinlein proposed two types of rockets for discussion. One would be a two-person A-bomb rocket that might have relatively short range and have to be air-launched due to insufficiently powerful fuels.
The other was a
&Messenger Moon Rocket — A two-stage job with a 50 lb. payload. It might be subjected to radio correction for the 1st 1000 miles and thereafter controlled by a radar target seeker and a robot, set for the moon, and acting through cams out to this particular problem of two bodies, but that would increase the original weight several fold and may not be necessary. I suggest that it be done even though unnecessary as it would automatically carry out several military projects necessary to the A-bomb carrier.
Heinlein also claimed that It must be noted that it is really much easier to build a successful Moon rocket than to build a proper war rocket. Nevertheless either problem can be used to solve the otherthe choice between the two is a choice in diplomacy and politics, not in engineering.
Heinlein then ended with a flourish.
I could go on indefinitely. This is as good a place to stop as any. To you and my other colleagues, goodbye. I leave with very mixed emotions. If you get this project, I may be back, hat in hand, asking for a job!
Prophecies and realities
The US Navy did start studying rocket and space programs in the late 1940s. According to a paper from the 1980s by noted military space historian R. Cargill Hall, these efforts originated outside of the NAMC. They had nothing to do with Heinleins memo. But eventually the studies died out, whereas the Air Force continued conducting more extensive studies of spaceflight and eventually started a satellite program.
Heinlein was certainly a prophet, but sometimes prophets are ignored and sometimes they are wrong.
The Navy also did not engage in significant ballistic missile development in the immediate post-war years. The Air Force led in that field as wellbut slowly. To some extent Heinlein was right about emotional opposition to ballistic missiles. But in the case of the Air Force leadership was imprisoned by its own biases. For approximately a decade after the war, the Air Force sought to develop cruise missiles, believing that they were easier to perfect than ballistic missiles. They were not easy to develop; their guidance systems proved very challenging. But they had wings and Air Force pilots understood wings. Ballistic missiles received far less attention and money during this period.
But it is also true that the heavy weight of atomic weapons during this period would have required a very large rocket to carry them. The development of thermonuclear weapons changed the paradigm and made intercontinental rockets conceivable. The Air Force then poured money into the Atlas ICBM program and the shorter range Thor and by the end of the 1950s the United States had its first long-range ballistic missiles.
Heinlein was certainly a prophet, but sometimes prophets are ignored and sometimes they are wrong. As we focus more attention on his life, it will be a challenge to place him in the proper context of the American space program.
Heinleins original memo can be found here.
Acknowledgement: The author wishes to thank TK, Bill Patterson, and Robert Kennedy. He also wishes to thank Eleanor Wood of Spectrum Literary Agency and Arthur M. Dula of the Robert A. & Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust for their kind permission to use the memo discussed in this article.
A Seductive Spectacle
A Seductive Spectacle
'I Am Not Afraid of Death'
‘I Am Not Afraid of Death’
In an interview with SPIEGEL, prominent Russian
万 之：《瓦解》中“重生”的非洲文学
2007年堪称国际文化的非洲年。第二届布克国际文学奖授予号称非洲文学之父的奈及利亚老作家奇努阿‧阿契贝足显非洲的荣耀。本文评介阿契贝代表作品、已被列为非洲文学经典的长篇小说《瓦解》，而此作又象征了非洲文学的”重生”.这是否证明，瓦解重生，盛衰兴替，沧海桑田，其实本是人间正道？
著者：Chinua Achebe
书名：Things Fall Apart
国际书号：ISBN 0-385-47454-7
出版年代：1958
出版社：Anchor Books
页数：209
原版封面：
美国1994年版封面：
2007年春季，瑞典教育部公布了该部与瑞典文化委员会最新审定的瑞典高中生应读之五十部世界文学经典作品，号称非洲文学之父的奈及利亚老作家奇努阿？阿契贝（Chinua Achebe，生于1934）的长篇小说《瓦解》也名列其中，和莎士比亚、歌德、易卜生、陀斯妥也夫斯基、托尔斯泰、卡夫卡等等许多世界名家并驾齐驱，地位的确可观。为应编辑之约而作书评，也为补非洲文学之课，借暑假之空，我也象瑞典高中生一样从图书馆借来原版《瓦解》细细捧读，确实获益匪浅，多有感触。
《瓦解》为台湾译名，大陆则翻译为《崩溃》，都比较贴切，而香港版译名《生命不能承受之重》，窃以为不很切题，未表达出作家用此书名的良苦用心。此书名其实出自爱尔兰诗人叶芝名作《二度来生》（The Second Coming），所以扉页上专门引用叶芝此诗四行。这些诗行对于破解此书意义当有启示，不妨照录于此。不过，笔者搜览现有翻译，都觉不尽如人意，没有再现叶芝诗歌古风之美与音步音韵，所以笔者不揣冒昧试译如下：
小说扉页引用原诗：
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer；
Things fall apart； the centre cannot hold；
Mere anarchy is loosen upon the world.
笔者试译：
转而复转，螺旋变宽，
猎手呼喊，猎鹰不闻；
万物瓦解，中心难存；
泛滥世界，仅余混沌。
叶芝（W.B. Yeats， 1865-1939，1923获得诺贝尔文学奖），生于欧洲文明向现代转型的时代，亲历工业革命、第一次世界大战及十月革命等等巨变。他的《二度来生》即写于二战尾声之中（1919）。在诗中，诗人暗示传统而优雅的西方古典文明已经崩溃瓦解，中心不存，仿佛是一首令人感叹的挽歌。而阿契贝借用此诗，也正是为传统而古老的非洲文明的崩溃瓦解唱出一首挽歌。这一层意义，当”万物瓦解”这一句在小说中再次出现时（第三部第二十章）最为凸显，因此也不妨抄录如下（此处引用香港版译本）：
……
“白人了解我们有关土地的习俗吗？”
“他们甚至不会讲我们的语言，怎么会了解？但是他们说我们的习俗不好，那些接受他们的宗教的我们自己的兄弟，也说我们的习俗不好。我们自己的兄弟都反叛我们了，我们又如何能够抗争？白人很聪明。他们安静而平和地带来宗教。我们对于他们的愚蠢行为感到很有趣，就允许他们待下来。现在，他们已经赢得了我们的兄弟，我们的部族不再同心同德。他们已经切断了那种把我们聚集一起的东西，我们已经分裂（即叶芝诗句’瓦解’-笔者注）了。”
……
白人来了，异教来了，凝聚黑人的传统习俗瓦解了，那些努力维系传统习俗的黑人失败了，《瓦解》就是描写主角奥康渥的失败命运。奥康渥是杰出的智勇双全的黑人，小说头一段就写他”名震部落九村，甚至远播四乡”，因为他击败了连续七年称霸本地区的摔跤手黑猫。奥康渥出身贫苦，父亲是个只善吹笛却不善治家的懒汉，家徒四壁，而奥康渥依靠自己的勤奋与心计，靠自己的武功与威信，数遇灾变而能转危为安，置起一份令人羡慕的家业，在一个尚武而称霸四乡的部落中备受尊敬。在传统习俗的层次上他实在是个成功者，是一个英雄，如果生活在另一个年代，他能实现他成为部落首领的理想，甚至成为更广大的黑人地区的领袖。然而，奥康渥生不逢时：在对抗白人带来的异教文明的斗争中彻底失败了，连儿子都背叛了他，进入了白人开设的教会学校，部落同胞很多皈依异教，也再没有尚武之勇气与他一起抵抗。他的生活只能充满恐惧、忧虑与愤怒，最后自杀身亡。这是一出命运悲剧，因此《瓦解》成为”经常与伟大的古希腊悲剧比较的大师之作”（此书美国版封底评语）。
以土地观念凝聚族群的传统习俗在西方现代文明冲击下”瓦解”的故事，似无新意确是一种典型的历史叙事，奥康渥对异己文化的抗拒与恐惧心理，也有普遍意义。从这个角度看，奥康渥生不逢时的悲剧故事，不仅是一个奈及利亚故事，不仅是一个非洲故事，在亚洲、拉丁美洲和大洋洲的传统部落里也都可以照搬，是很多旧殖民地都有的故事，也反映了作者的一种更宏观的普世性的历史视角。这大概正是小说能在全世界都赢得读者的一个原因。在一篇2000年接受《大西洋月刊》记者的采访中，阿契贝还特别提到他曾收到南韩读者来信，才知道南韩也有与”瓦解”故事类似的体验。当然，《瓦解》的成功也还要归功于小说本身语言出色，简洁而透明，极少堆砌形容词汇，有海明威文学语言的”冰山”风格，足可成为学生学习的经典。（顺便说起，英语非母语的作家用英语写作，也许适用这种能弄巧藏拙扬长避短的简洁风格，另一成功范例是华人作家哈金，其作品也获得美国海明威奖）。
《瓦解》被公认为当代第一部非洲作家自己成功描写非洲的文学作品，影响巨大，已是全非洲学校的教科书，现在还成了瑞典等欧美国家的学生读物，在全世界都有众多读者，仅英文原著1959年出版以来已不断再版加印销售三百多万册，还不论有五十多种语言的译本。此作还鼓动了一批非洲作家开始创作自己描述非洲的作品，仅在奈及利亚，就又出现多位获得国际奖项的优秀作家，例如比阿契贝小四岁于1934年出生的索因卡（Wole Soyinka），后来还夺得诺贝尔文学奖（1986）。阿契贝还是英语”非洲作家系列”的创建编辑，把一批非洲作家介绍给世界，因此他被奉为当代非洲文学之父确实当之无愧。
在阿契贝之前，西方也多有描述非洲的作品，例如康拉德的《黑暗之心》、乔伊斯。卡里的《约翰逊先生》，海明威也写过《乞里马札罗山上的雪》，非洲实际上还贡献出过象加缪这样优秀的作家（Albert Camus，1913-1960，生于阿尔及利亚，1957年获得诺贝尔文学奖），但是这些仍属欧美白人文学而不算非洲文学，有些作品还被赛伊德（Edward Said）作为西方歪曲描写东方的”东方主义”文学典型批判。阿契贝对”东方主义”姿态描写非洲的文学也非常反感，他有一篇演讲论文就是批评康拉德《黑暗之心》在描写非洲中表现的种族主义（An Image of Africa： Racism in Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”，1975），此文随后成为后殖民主义文学批评的主要文献。他还认为，有一些作家虽然不是白人，但其写作也基本纳入了白人的”东方主义”叙事架构，例如着有《大河湾》的奈保尔（V. S. Naipaul，2001年获得诺贝尔文学奖），阿契贝甚至攻击奈保尔是”把自己卖给西方的出色作家……”在笔者看来，阿契贝这种既强调本土文化而抵制西方殖民文化，然而又明显受西方文化精华之影响而具备普世历史视角的态度，以及他对西方文明这种 “既爱又恨”（Ambivalence）的心态，在当代非西方作家中是非常典型的。阿契贝本人，正象《瓦解》中主角奥康渥的不肖之子一样，是进入西方教会学校接受西方教育的一代，因此才有英国文学方面的深厚修养，才知道引用叶芝，后来他还长期居住欧美，曾任英国广播公司编辑，曾任教欧美名牌大学，接受了西方赠送的多种荣誉。其实，《瓦解》本身就是一个典型例证，说明他的文化资源已经不仅仅是本土文化，而也明显受西方文化精华之影响。虽然小说之后还附有一个书中出现的当地方言词汇表，但小说基本表达已经是地道海明威式英语。他以第三人称叙述切入，一方面是一个合适的叙述角度，无需从主角的自我心理来表述，另一方面也是把自己放到了一个第三者的超越地位来反观非洲文明的”瓦解”过程，才能唱出一首挽歌。在这层意义上，恕笔者斗胆，以为阿契贝本人恐怕也是个”把自己卖给西方的出色作家……”.最具深意的自然还是《瓦解》书名本身和叶芝的历史观念存在的一种内在联系。如果我们以为文明之”瓦解”就等于一去不复返，就等于彻底死亡，如果我们以为叶芝诗歌或阿契贝小说仅仅是对崩溃的传统文明唱出的哀怨挽歌，那么我们的理解就会进入误区，就会局限在西方文化主流的线性时间观念和历史发展具有终极理想框架中，局限在所谓进化理论和发展观念中，局限在政治家的现代化计划与 “科学发展观”中，而不懂得《二度来生》的实在意义，不懂得《瓦解》复苏非洲文化的意义。《二度来生》诗作，其实是叶芝用宗教性的象征主义手法表达自己的”螺旋” （gyre）历史观，可参看叶芝著作《观点》（A Vision），本文限于篇幅不作详细介绍。简言之，叶芝的历史发展模式是由两个锥形螺旋相套而组成的，一个螺旋的结束其实就紧接另一螺旋的开始，所以才有”二度来生”.这有点象中国文化中的阴阳图符旋转中相生相成，也和西方用的沙漏定时器模式相似，不过更具备螺旋性：在一个锥形螺旋内的沙子流完时，只要倒置沙子就开始流回，就开始另一个时间。因此，在这种模式中，任何文明的崩溃，也等于标志新文明的开始。所以，任何文明都会”瓦解”，也因此得以”二度来生”.从这个角度看，与其说《瓦解》哀叹传统非洲文明的崩溃，不如说小说的诞生也催生非洲文明的”二度来生”. 阿契贝认为”文学”对殖民地人民具有”自我界定”（self-definition）和”文化复位”（cultural recuperation）的作用，他相信民族文学叙事──”自己说自己的故事”（telling one’s own story）──是复苏民族意识最重要的手段。在另一部长篇小说《荒原蚁丘》（Anthills of the Savannah， 1987）中，阿契贝说道：”只有故事，能够超越战争与战士，只有故事能使战鼓之声和勇士的功绩永垂不朽。故事能将我们的子孙从粗鲁得像个瞎眼乞丐，引导成像是仙人掌篱巴上的尖刺。故事是我们的卫士，没有它我们将有如瞎子。瞎子能充当自己的保卫者吗？不，只有故事才能管理我们，指导我们。”（台湾版译文）
事实如此，因为阿契贝讲述鲜明的”非洲性”故事，它宣告了新非洲文学的诞生，它也给非洲人的文化认同（Cultural Identity）提供了依据，鼓舞非洲人的士气。南非黑人领袖曼德拉就说，他在监狱度过漫长岁月时，”有《瓦解》做伴，白人监狱的高墙瓦解了。”歌颂”太平盛世”是御用文人的事情，追求”进步”、现代化或者”科学发展”是政治家的事情，而从诗人与文学家的角度看，人类历史永远不过是一首《红楼梦》的”好了歌”. 不论多幺辉煌的文明，多幺太平的盛世，都会有崩溃瓦解之时，而瓦解重生，盛衰兴替，沧海桑田，其实本是人间正道。因此，真正的文学家，不以物喜，不以已悲，不歌颂”太平盛世”，而只唱出”二度来生”的挽歌！
非洲依然是世界最贫穷的大陆，非洲之角依然是战火纷纷哀鸿遍野。但从文化角度来看，2007年堪称国际文化的非洲年，很多项重要国际文化活动都在这里首次举行，精彩纷呈，使得日具活力的非洲文化成为世界聚焦之点。二月中有埃及亚历山大港举行的国际儿童文学出版会议。六月初，笔者曾从北半球之北的斯德哥尔摩，飞越欧非两个大陆，到南非开普敦参加世界报业大会，这是第60届年会，但在非洲举行却是首次，有1600多国际大报记者与编辑出席，人数上也盛况空前。世界作家组织国际笔会也把2007定为非洲年，七月初，国际笔会第73届年会也在西非塞内加尔达喀尔拉开帷幕，同时还举办非洲文学节。九月，世界图书馆联合会也将首度在南非比勒陀利亚举行年会……如此热闹的背景之中，六月十三日第二届布克国际文学奖公布结果，努阿？阿契贝击败群雄摘取桂冠，是给非洲年锦上添花，多了一道虹霓。非洲文学确实已经重生了！
首发香港《明报月刊》2007年8月号
Henry James in France
Henry James in France
Matthew Peters
Peter Brooks
HENRY JAMES GOES TO PARIS
288pp. Princeton University Press. £15.95.
9780691129549
In 1875, Henry James moved from New York into an expensive flat in the rue de Luxembourg in Paris. He was glad to have escaped what he saw as the unrewarding, thin social texture of American life. A year later, preparing to move to London, where he lived for the next twenty years, he wrote to his brother William of his boredom and disenchantment with Paris, saying that he had “got nothing important out of [it]”. In 1881, however, in an entry in his notebooks, James saw the year rather differently: it was, he wrote, “time by no means misspent”. Peter Brooks’s engaging and perceptive book sets out to explain why James’s year in Paris was not only time not misspent, but crucial for later developments in his fiction. Surveying James’s equivocal and occasionally hostile responses to the Parisian cultural scene of 1875 and 1876, Brooks contends that James’s exposure to French Impressionist painting and realist and naturalist fiction contributed to the development of what Brooks calls the “radical perspectivalism” and narrative experimentation of his fiction of the 1890s and beyond.
In an interview published in 1994, Brooks spoke of the “temptation” of writing a biography of a literary figure. Biography, he believed, was “one of the few forms that a literary critic can use, in our culture, to reach a large audience”. Henry James Goes to Paris is far from a biography of James. (Only its first chapter is devoted to telling the story of his year in Paris.) Yet its biographical element is clearly designed to win a larger audience than a book of criticism on James might expect to find. The events of James’s year in Paris are of great interest, and Brooks’s account includes the customary gems: the glacial response accorded to James by Flaubert and his circle after James committed the aesthetic sin of expressing admiration for Gustave Droz’s fiction (“we think nothing of him: you mustn’t talk of him here”); James’s unlikely and rather depressing friendship with the tenaciously uncolourful figure of C. S. Peirce (whom James dropped as soon as he made more friends in Paris); his watchful consternation at the sight of Ivan Turgenev – whom James revered as a man and as a novelist – crawling on all fours in a game of charades. James admitted to William that it was unlikely that he would ever become “intimate” with the French literary scene; but he also wrote to him of his intimate friendship with the Russian artist Paul Zhukovsky – a friendship Brooks examines in some detail here. James’s attachment to Zhukovsky was powerful but almost certainly chaste, and Brooks writes sympathetically of the gradual cooling of James’s regard for him.
The real value of this book, however, lies in Brooks’s assessment of what he sees as the delayed impact of French experimental culture on James’s fiction. Brooks writes with the clarity and confidence that characterize his earlier, greatly influential works of criticism, The Melodramatic Imagination (1976) and Reading for the Plot (1984). Central to his arguments in his extended readings of such novels as The Tragic Muse, What Maisie Knew and The Golden Bowl is that James always retained a belief in the value of representation, in spite of the proto-modernist experimentation with narrative methods in his late fiction.
Brooks contrasts the concentration on surfaces and impressions of Flaubertian narrative techniques with James’s commitment to a Balzacian form of representation, which was “less concerned with the details of the real than with what it signifies and connotes, less attached to the surface of things than to what may be suggested and concealed, behind and beneath”. Brooks argues that, valuable as these French experimental techniques were to James’s own narrative methods, he should be considered a novelist not of impressionism but of “expressionism” – a term to which Brooks gives the specialized and suggestive definition: “the effort to make surface yield something that is not purely of surface”; a “drama of ethical substance”. Flaubert, accordingly, was an intensely provoking and problematic figure for James.
Brooks’s treatment of James’s attitude towards Flaubert’s work is acute and compelling. James’s mingled respect for and hostility towards Flaubert has attracted some exceptionally insightful critical commentary over the years: one thinks immediately of Edmund Wilson’s comments in his essay on James in The Triple Thinkers (1938). At the same time James has always been unfairly charged with failing to understand Flaubert’s methods. Brooks rightly admits that in one sense James was frustrated with Flaubert simply for his refusal to write Jamesian novels of consciousness. James had a high regard for Flaubert as a stylist and as an artist devoted to his craft; but he also believed that his fiction was flawed by what he called a “defect” of his mind – namely, his belief that characters of limited intelligence and superficial emotions, such as Emma Bovary and Frédéric Moreau, were adequate to sustain the burden of narratives of ethical value. What is original about Brooks’s account is that it does not claim that James failed to comprehend Flaubert’s methods. Drawing on his work on James and Flaubert in his previous book Realist Vision (2005), Brooks successfully reverses this critical commonplace by suggesting that James’s aversion was justified by the way he understood Flaubert’s methods only too well – understood, that is, how the motiveless narrative of such a novel as Bouvard et Pécuchet, and the “process of designification” entailed in Flaubert’s descriptive methods, were “profoundly subversive for his own enterprise for the novel”.
For all the psychoanalytic tendencies of Brooks’s criticism (he writes that James’s aversion to French realism was “merely conscious”), his account of James’s reading of Flaubert evokes quite different forms of criticism. First, his distinction between the “process of designification” found in Flaubert’s descriptive methods, and James’s “hypersignificant” techniques, invites a comparison with James Wood’s concept of “hysterical realism” in modern-day fiction. Wood finds a lack of ethical value and significance in the bloated information and curious learning offered by such a novelist as Thomas Pynchon. Wood’s attitude towards Pynchon is strikingly similar to that which, Brooks convincingly argues, James held towards Bouvard et Pécuchet. Second, Brooks’s notion that James believed Flaubert’s fiction revealed “a lack of respect for life, and for the capacities of fiction to represent life” seems to envisage James as a proto-Leavisite. Brooks’s assessment is accurate. James’s abiding concern in his literary criticism with the way in which experience is mediated through the novel, and his relative lack of regard for stylistic artistry alone, were clearly a great influence on Leavis. Indeed, Brooks’s argument, in his discussion of What Maisie Knew, that this work offers “a kind of moral and psychological pathos that Flaubert never approached” elevates James on grounds that the Leavis of The Great Tradition would surely have approved: James was able to “combine the perspectival lessons of Flaubert with a moral vision that evokes a wholly different tradition of the novel – that of George Eliot perhaps”.
In his writing on Maisie Brooks comes to the conclusion that, for all the radical perspectivalism of James’s late writing, he remained committed to the representation of acquired knowledge and derived meaning. We might question this vision of James’s commitment to knowledge, however. The very distinctive conditions of that novel – those brought on by the representation of what James calls the “infant mind” – should not distract us from the way in which they highlight something of wider importance to James’s use of the reflecting consciousness in his fiction: that receptiveness and perception are valued more highly than knowledge and understanding. In his preface to Maisie, James wrote that Maisie “sees”; in a later preface James described such figures as Rowland Mallet, Christopher Newman, Isabel Archer and Merton Densher as “perceivers”; the dramatic centre of The Portrait of a Lady, James wrote, was “a representation simply of [Isabel Archer] motionlessly seeing”; Lambert Strether’s fate, similarly, is that he “at all events sees”. An essential quality of the reflective consciousness, then, is that the capacity for seeing is quite distinct from, and indeed, supersedes any requirement to “understand” or to “know”. It entails, rather, a sensitivity to complex experience, whose value is to be found not in its transformation into knowledge or understanding but rather in its receptiveness to the experience itself, which issues in the vivid demonstration of some intensely emotional effect on the reflective consciousness. Brooks’s account therefore surprisingly muffles what is most experimental and progressive in James’s fiction. James was an even more radical novelist than Brooks allows him to be.
Brooks is far less severe than many earlier commentators on James’s discomfort at what he called on more than one occasion the “unclean” elements of French fiction. Even so, James’s attitude is still presented here as something of an embarrassment. But if we are disappointed by James’s preference for Droz over Daudet in 1876 we might also admire his tenacity in holding this belief in the face of the contempt it received from the Flaubert circle. James’s intransigence was more interesting than Brooks’s notion that he was “missing things on the spot” suggests. And more important than the preference for Droz was his recognition in 1876 that, as he wrote to William James, he was “turning English all over”. James’s faith in the culture that produced George Eliot was more than a reaction against Flaubert and company. It was surely deep-rooted and even vital to James’s sense of himself as a novelist in that Anglo-American tradition. Brooks concludes rightly, I think, that James remained committed to ethical significance and value in his late fiction; but his notion of James’s “missing things on the spot” undervalues the importance to James of that commitment in 1876.
More generally, however, Brooks’s detailed readings of James’s fiction are highly convincing. His assessments of the melodramatic “turn” of The American (which James wrote during his year in Paris) and the “melodrama of consciousness” he sees at work in The Golden Bowl are rewarding and successful refinements of his writing on James in The Melodramatic Imagination. Throughout Henry James Goes to Paris, Peter Brooks shows the command of and saturation in his subject that have made him one of the most valuable commentators on nineteenth-century realist fiction, and he has produced here an exceptionally clear-sighted account of Henry James’s boldness and importance as a novelist.
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Matthew Peters is writing a PhD on Henry James at the University of Cambridge.
Never Speak to Strangers
Never Speak to Strangers
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We must ride the lightning
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Robert Heinlein envisioned a future in 1945 where the atomic bomb made conventional warfare obsolete and thus required the development of rockets, which could also be used for space exploration. (credit: The Heinlein Prize Trust)
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We must ride the lightning : Robert Heinlein and American spaceflight
by Dwayne A. Day
July 7 is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Robert Anson Heinlein. In Kansas City the Heinlein Centennial will celebrate his writings and feature talks by the NASA administrator Michael Griffin as well as Heinlein scholars and enthusiasts. Heinlein is the closest thing that the American pro-space movement has to a patron saint.
Science fiction has, for good or ill, had a major effect upon how Americans think about spaceflight. Many early rocket engineers were inspired by Jules Verne, many current space enthusiasts were inspired by Star Trek. Heinlein certainly inspired many in the entrepreneurial space movement.
Heinleins unique strength was his willingness to reexamine assumptions. He had what Henry Kuttner called in his introduction to Heinleins 1953 book Revolt in 2100 the innocent eye. An article in the current edition of Reason magazine addresses Heinleins role in the history of libertarian ideology and notes that although Heinleins works ranged across many different topics and seemed to explore different philosophies, they generally shared certain main themes, one of the main ones being opposition to centralized authority.
Despite this view, Heinlein also had a pragmatic core. He believed in a strong military and opposition to Soviet communism. In his nonfiction writings and his political activism he frequently advocated both.
With these concepts in mind, it is worth looking at a rather amazing memo that Heinlein wrote in 1945 advocating a rigorous American missile and space program. Heinlein wrote it soon after the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Japan. He argued that the bomb had changed the world and he believed that intercontinental rockets would also have a major effect on warfare. He wanted the United States to get out in front of this new development like it had with the bomb.
| Heinlein is the closest thing that the American pro-space movement has to a patron saint. |
There are many interesting aspects to the memo, but what is unique about it is that it occupies a point precisely in the middle of the overlap between science fiction and current reality. Although Heinlein thought that he was discussing the world as it wasor was about to behis own interests in rockets and spaceflight were biasing his projections. He was advocating solutions to current problems that were far more fantastical than practical. Heinlein was certainly not alone in this. Many people looked at the atomic bomb and made dire predictions that fortunately proved false. But Heinlein believed in rocketry and spaceflight so fervently that it led him to conclusions that were not well-grounded in the actual technical realities of his day. That is worth considering today, six decades later, when Heinlein is still held in such high esteem as a prophet for the NewSpace movement.
We are out of business&
For most of World War 2, einlein worked as a civilian engineer on aircraft programs for the Naval Air Experimental Station (NAES) at the Naval Air Material Center, or NAMC, in Philadelphia. As the war was obviously coming to a close he wrote this memo to the head engineer at NAMC and then immediately resigned to return to private life, where he not only went back to fiction writing, but like so many intellectuals of his generation also concerned himself with the politics of the bomb.
The memo is written in classic Heinleinian styleconversational, not bureaucratic, and with a tone of overt cheerleading. It starts:
I believe it is evident to any sober-minded technical man that the events of 6 Aug. 45& should cause us carefully to re-examine all plans, proposals, and projects which obtained before that time.
The preliminaries aside, he then made a bold statement:
In the first place, in the broad sense we are out of business, just as thoroughly out of business as were wooden ships after the battle of the Monitor and the Merrimac. On the other hand we need not be out of business if we reorient, see what may be done with our exceptional resources in the way of trained personnel and mechanical equipment, and then determine what we should do in the interest of the United States of America in particular and humanity in general. What task is there for which we are fitted and which would serve the culture we are committed to support?
Heinlein then listed the specific reasons why he believed the world had changed.
Why we are out of business
The atomic bomb is so overwhelmingly different from every previous weapon of war as to change the whole approach. I could expand that indefinitely but I am at loss for wordseither a man sees it almost at once or he will never see it. But I will offer meager illustrations:
No more surface warships.
No more infantry.
No more reciprocating engines in military aircraft.
No more tanks.
Every type of craft or weapon abolished or changed beyond recognition because of the incredible changes in logistics and tactics.
Possibility of wars which last fifteen minutes instead of years.
No more aircraft carriers –and all which that implies.
It became quite evident at once that the greatest bomber in aviation history, the B-29, was not really up to the job of carrying the atomic bomb. It is much too slow, cant fly high enough, and is unnecessarily large. The atomic bomb should be carried by a rocket, manned or unmanned. Then the parachute would be unnecessary and the bomb could be placed with precision and with safety of the crew.
Heinleins predictions about the future of weapons systems were of course almost completely wrong. Surface warships, infantry, tanks, aircraft carriers and even reciprocating engines in military aircraft did not immediately disappear. Explaining why they did not in the face of the atomic bomb would require many books, but at the most basic level the issue was that the atomic bomb was soon viewed as a weapon so terrible that it would not be regularly used. Even while the United States held a nuclear monopoly, it did not drop bombs on other nations. Because the bomb was essentially unusable, all those other weapons were still necessary to fight the kinds of wars that continued to occur, like Korea.
Heinlein was right about the B-29, but that observation was self-evident. Clearly jets were the way of the future and what the United States needed was a jet bomber, which it got a few years later with the extraordinary B-47. But Heinleins memo illuminates his biases. Rather than jet bombers, Heinlein wanted ballistic missiles.
| Heinlein’s predictions about the future of weapons systems were of course almost completely wrong. |
However, what Heinlein did not understand—undoubtedly because he did not have access to any data about atomic weapons—was that atomic bombs were heavy. In a sense the B-29 was not “unnecessarily large” because it was the only plane then capable of carrying such a large weapon. Lofting a weapon of that size atop a rocket would be very difficult, something that Heinlein could not fully comprehend because he did not have the data.
“We must ride the lightning and ride it well.”
In the post-war period, Robert Heinlein devoted much time and effort to prophesizing about how much the world had changed because of the bomb. His outlook was grim: he thought that atomic conflict was virtually inevitable. He was not alone in this; many intellectuals felt the same way and even formed alliances such as the Federation of American Scientists to try to influence policy. But in his 1945 memo, Heinlein is not so much advocating disarmament as sober recognition of the new realities, as well as the need to embrace high-tech warfare.
What should we do?
This question needs to be approached with humility and with real desire to serve rather than simply with the idea of preserving a particular bureaucratic institution as a going concern. It may be conclusively assumed that, while war may possibly be successfully outlawed through the use or the threat of the use of the atomic bomb, the atomic bomb itself may no more be outlawed than sex or the silent stars. It’s here, we’ve got it. It is a fait accompli. We must at all times be ready and willing to use it. If our culture is to survive we must contain that power with sober judgment and humanity. It is a simple fact that (1) we can not afford a war ever again, (2) the atomic bomb cannot be abolished, nor can it be indefinitely kept from other peoples. We must ride the lightning and ride it well. I conceive the atomic bomb as being the force behind the police power for a planetary peace. Perhaps the custodian will be called the “Armed Forces of the U.S.” or perhaps the “Peace Forces of the United Nations,”—or perhaps another title. No matter, such a force there must be if we are not to be ourselves destroyed.
The idea of an international peacekeeping force was certainly in vogue around that time. It had predated the war with Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations, but the immense destruction of World War 2 lent it increased vigor, and the atomic bomb would soon add momentum to the movement. Some groups even proposed that the United States give up its atomic monopoly to an international force.
Heinlein then turned his attention to arming such a new entity and argued that the organization that he had worked for during the war, the Naval Air Materiel Command, could lead the way:
I propose that NAMC undertake to develop a suitable passenger carrying rocket to be the “squad car” for the “planetary police.” (No doubt the AAF [Army Air Forces] will tackle it also. Fine!)
Nuclear physics is not our field. Craft which rise above the earth is our field. A new type is needed. Let’s build it.
Perhaps realizing that his idea might be considered far-fetched, Heinlein pointed to numerous wartime examples of rockets, including the Japanese Oka rocket-powered suicide bomb, the V-2 rocket, and recent developments in increasing rocket exhaust velocities. He also explained that rockets were largely indifferent to weather because they cruised beyond the atmosphere. Pressurization of the vehicle for a crew should not be a problem and other technical developments made a man-carrying rocket feasible.
I propose a major project at NAF with numerous supporting projects at NAES to build such a rocket. A team should be set up consisting of a project engineer, several expert consultants (hired outside) engineers of many ratings including mechanical, ballistical, weight, electronic, and aero. The team should be large.
Heinlein then described in broad terms the steps needed to undertake this effort. Eventually it would transform the NAMC. We would end up with a new and different organization& but we would end up with a rocket.
But Heinlein was not naïve.
It is possible that the open development of a military rocket will meet strong emotional opposition in the next few years. It might be more feasible in peace time to carry on this job, a job of pure research, by selecting an objective non-military in character but which would with utter certainty provide the military results as well. For example we might propose to build a messenger rocket to the moon.
This early effort would be a stunt with practical benefits. It would:
&leave a mark (explosive dispersed carbon black, or similar dodge) on the face of the moona useless thing in itself but parallel to the 1st flight at Kitty Hawk, a conclusive demonstration that man can conquer space. The unique prestige which would accrue to the United States of America, to the U.S. Navy, and to NAMC in particular cannot be expressed. As an unpublicized side issue we would know how to build the perfect carrier for the A-bomb.
Heinlein proposed two types of rockets for discussion. One would be a two-person A-bomb rocket that might have relatively short range and have to be air-launched due to insufficiently powerful fuels.
The other was a
&Messenger Moon Rocket — A two-stage job with a 50 lb. payload. It might be subjected to radio correction for the 1st 1000 miles and thereafter controlled by a radar target seeker and a robot, set for the moon, and acting through cams out to this particular problem of two bodies, but that would increase the original weight several fold and may not be necessary. I suggest that it be done even though unnecessary as it would automatically carry out several military projects necessary to the A-bomb carrier.
Heinlein also claimed that It must be noted that it is really much easier to build a successful Moon rocket than to build a proper war rocket. Nevertheless either problem can be used to solve the otherthe choice between the two is a choice in diplomacy and politics, not in engineering.
Heinlein then ended with a flourish.
I could go on indefinitely. This is as good a place to stop as any. To you and my other colleagues, goodbye. I leave with very mixed emotions. If you get this project, I may be back, hat in hand, asking for a job!
Prophecies and realities
The US Navy did start studying rocket and space programs in the late 1940s. According to a paper from the 1980s by noted military space historian R. Cargill Hall, these efforts originated outside of the NAMC. They had nothing to do with Heinleins memo. But eventually the studies died out, whereas the Air Force continued conducting more extensive studies of spaceflight and eventually started a satellite program.
| Heinlein was certainly a prophet, but sometimes prophets are ignored and sometimes they are wrong. |
But it is also true that the heavy weight of atomic weapons during this period would have required a very large rocket to carry them. The development of thermonuclear weapons changed the paradigm and made intercontinental rockets conceivable. The Air Force then poured money into the Atlas ICBM program and the shorter range Thor and by the end of the 1950s the United States had its first long-range ballistic missiles.
Heinlein was certainly a prophet, but sometimes prophets are ignored and sometimes they are wrong. As we focus more attention on his life, it will be a challenge to place him in the proper context of the American space program.
Heinleins original memo can be found here.
Acknowledgement: The author wishes to thank TK, Bill Patterson, and Robert Kennedy. He also wishes to thank Eleanor Wood of Spectrum Literary Agency and Arthur M. Dula of the Robert A. & Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust for their kind permission to use the memo discussed in this article.
A Seductive Spectacle
A Seductive Spectacle
'I Am Not Afraid of Death'
‘I Am Not Afraid of Death’
In an interview with SPIEGEL, prominent Russian
万 之：《瓦解》中“重生”的非洲文学
2007年堪称国际文化的非洲年。第二届布克国际文学奖授予号称非洲文学之父的奈及利亚老作家奇努阿‧阿契贝足显非洲的荣耀。本文评介阿契贝代表作品、已被列为非洲文学经典的长篇小说《瓦解》，而此作又象征了非洲文学的”重生”.这是否证明，瓦解重生，盛衰兴替，沧海桑田，其实本是人间正道？
著者：Chinua Achebe
书名：Things Fall Apart
国际书号：ISBN 0-385-47454-7
出版年代：1958
出版社：Anchor Books
页数：209
原版封面：
美国1994年版封面：
2007年春季，瑞典教育部公布了该部与瑞典文化委员会最新审定的瑞典高中生应读之五十部世界文学经典作品，号称非洲文学之父的奈及利亚老作家奇努阿？阿契贝（Chinua Achebe，生于1934）的长篇小说《瓦解》也名列其中，和莎士比亚、歌德、易卜生、陀斯妥也夫斯基、托尔斯泰、卡夫卡等等许多世界名家并驾齐驱，地位的确可观。为应编辑之约而作书评，也为补非洲文学之课，借暑假之空，我也象瑞典高中生一样从图书馆借来原版《瓦解》细细捧读，确实获益匪浅，多有感触。
《瓦解》为台湾译名，大陆则翻译为《崩溃》，都比较贴切，而香港版译名《生命不能承受之重》，窃以为不很切题，未表达出作家用此书名的良苦用心。此书名其实出自爱尔兰诗人叶芝名作《二度来生》（The Second Coming），所以扉页上专门引用叶芝此诗四行。这些诗行对于破解此书意义当有启示，不妨照录于此。不过，笔者搜览现有翻译，都觉不尽如人意，没有再现叶芝诗歌古风之美与音步音韵，所以笔者不揣冒昧试译如下：
小说扉页引用原诗：
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer；
Things fall apart； the centre cannot hold；
Mere anarchy is loosen upon the world.
笔者试译：
转而复转，螺旋变宽，
猎手呼喊，猎鹰不闻；
万物瓦解，中心难存；
泛滥世界，仅余混沌。
叶芝（W.B. Yeats， 1865-1939，1923获得诺贝尔文学奖），生于欧洲文明向现代转型的时代，亲历工业革命、第一次世界大战及十月革命等等巨变。他的《二度来生》即写于二战尾声之中（1919）。在诗中，诗人暗示传统而优雅的西方古典文明已经崩溃瓦解，中心不存，仿佛是一首令人感叹的挽歌。而阿契贝借用此诗，也正是为传统而古老的非洲文明的崩溃瓦解唱出一首挽歌。这一层意义，当”万物瓦解”这一句在小说中再次出现时（第三部第二十章）最为凸显，因此也不妨抄录如下（此处引用香港版译本）：
……
“白人了解我们有关土地的习俗吗？”
“他们甚至不会讲我们的语言，怎么会了解？但是他们说我们的习俗不好，那些接受他们的宗教的我们自己的兄弟，也说我们的习俗不好。我们自己的兄弟都反叛我们了，我们又如何能够抗争？白人很聪明。他们安静而平和地带来宗教。我们对于他们的愚蠢行为感到很有趣，就允许他们待下来。现在，他们已经赢得了我们的兄弟，我们的部族不再同心同德。他们已经切断了那种把我们聚集一起的东西，我们已经分裂（即叶芝诗句’瓦解’-笔者注）了。”
……
白人来了，异教来了，凝聚黑人的传统习俗瓦解了，那些努力维系传统习俗的黑人失败了，《瓦解》就是描写主角奥康渥的失败命运。奥康渥是杰出的智勇双全的黑人，小说头一段就写他”名震部落九村，甚至远播四乡”，因为他击败了连续七年称霸本地区的摔跤手黑猫。奥康渥出身贫苦，父亲是个只善吹笛却不善治家的懒汉，家徒四壁，而奥康渥依靠自己的勤奋与心计，靠自己的武功与威信，数遇灾变而能转危为安，置起一份令人羡慕的家业，在一个尚武而称霸四乡的部落中备受尊敬。在传统习俗的层次上他实在是个成功者，是一个英雄，如果生活在另一个年代，他能实现他成为部落首领的理想，甚至成为更广大的黑人地区的领袖。然而，奥康渥生不逢时：在对抗白人带来的异教文明的斗争中彻底失败了，连儿子都背叛了他，进入了白人开设的教会学校，部落同胞很多皈依异教，也再没有尚武之勇气与他一起抵抗。他的生活只能充满恐惧、忧虑与愤怒，最后自杀身亡。这是一出命运悲剧，因此《瓦解》成为”经常与伟大的古希腊悲剧比较的大师之作”（此书美国版封底评语）。
以土地观念凝聚族群的传统习俗在西方现代文明冲击下”瓦解”的故事，似无新意确是一种典型的历史叙事，奥康渥对异己文化的抗拒与恐惧心理，也有普遍意义。从这个角度看，奥康渥生不逢时的悲剧故事，不仅是一个奈及利亚故事，不仅是一个非洲故事，在亚洲、拉丁美洲和大洋洲的传统部落里也都可以照搬，是很多旧殖民地都有的故事，也反映了作者的一种更宏观的普世性的历史视角。这大概正是小说能在全世界都赢得读者的一个原因。在一篇2000年接受《大西洋月刊》记者的采访中，阿契贝还特别提到他曾收到南韩读者来信，才知道南韩也有与”瓦解”故事类似的体验。当然，《瓦解》的成功也还要归功于小说本身语言出色，简洁而透明，极少堆砌形容词汇，有海明威文学语言的”冰山”风格，足可成为学生学习的经典。（顺便说起，英语非母语的作家用英语写作，也许适用这种能弄巧藏拙扬长避短的简洁风格，另一成功范例是华人作家哈金，其作品也获得美国海明威奖）。
《瓦解》被公认为当代第一部非洲作家自己成功描写非洲的文学作品，影响巨大，已是全非洲学校的教科书，现在还成了瑞典等欧美国家的学生读物，在全世界都有众多读者，仅英文原著1959年出版以来已不断再版加印销售三百多万册，还不论有五十多种语言的译本。此作还鼓动了一批非洲作家开始创作自己描述非洲的作品，仅在奈及利亚，就又出现多位获得国际奖项的优秀作家，例如比阿契贝小四岁于1934年出生的索因卡（Wole Soyinka），后来还夺得诺贝尔文学奖（1986）。阿契贝还是英语”非洲作家系列”的创建编辑，把一批非洲作家介绍给世界，因此他被奉为当代非洲文学之父确实当之无愧。
在阿契贝之前，西方也多有描述非洲的作品，例如康拉德的《黑暗之心》、乔伊斯。卡里的《约翰逊先生》，海明威也写过《乞里马札罗山上的雪》，非洲实际上还贡献出过象加缪这样优秀的作家（Albert Camus，1913-1960，生于阿尔及利亚，1957年获得诺贝尔文学奖），但是这些仍属欧美白人文学而不算非洲文学，有些作品还被赛伊德（Edward Said）作为西方歪曲描写东方的”东方主义”文学典型批判。阿契贝对”东方主义”姿态描写非洲的文学也非常反感，他有一篇演讲论文就是批评康拉德《黑暗之心》在描写非洲中表现的种族主义（An Image of Africa： Racism in Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”，1975），此文随后成为后殖民主义文学批评的主要文献。他还认为，有一些作家虽然不是白人，但其写作也基本纳入了白人的”东方主义”叙事架构，例如着有《大河湾》的奈保尔（V. S. Naipaul，2001年获得诺贝尔文学奖），阿契贝甚至攻击奈保尔是”把自己卖给西方的出色作家……”在笔者看来，阿契贝这种既强调本土文化而抵制西方殖民文化，然而又明显受西方文化精华之影响而具备普世历史视角的态度，以及他对西方文明这种 “既爱又恨”（Ambivalence）的心态，在当代非西方作家中是非常典型的。阿契贝本人，正象《瓦解》中主角奥康渥的不肖之子一样，是进入西方教会学校接受西方教育的一代，因此才有英国文学方面的深厚修养，才知道引用叶芝，后来他还长期居住欧美，曾任英国广播公司编辑，曾任教欧美名牌大学，接受了西方赠送的多种荣誉。其实，《瓦解》本身就是一个典型例证，说明他的文化资源已经不仅仅是本土文化，而也明显受西方文化精华之影响。虽然小说之后还附有一个书中出现的当地方言词汇表，但小说基本表达已经是地道海明威式英语。他以第三人称叙述切入，一方面是一个合适的叙述角度，无需从主角的自我心理来表述，另一方面也是把自己放到了一个第三者的超越地位来反观非洲文明的”瓦解”过程，才能唱出一首挽歌。在这层意义上，恕笔者斗胆，以为阿契贝本人恐怕也是个”把自己卖给西方的出色作家……”.最具深意的自然还是《瓦解》书名本身和叶芝的历史观念存在的一种内在联系。如果我们以为文明之”瓦解”就等于一去不复返，就等于彻底死亡，如果我们以为叶芝诗歌或阿契贝小说仅仅是对崩溃的传统文明唱出的哀怨挽歌，那么我们的理解就会进入误区，就会局限在西方文化主流的线性时间观念和历史发展具有终极理想框架中，局限在所谓进化理论和发展观念中，局限在政治家的现代化计划与 “科学发展观”中，而不懂得《二度来生》的实在意义，不懂得《瓦解》复苏非洲文化的意义。《二度来生》诗作，其实是叶芝用宗教性的象征主义手法表达自己的”螺旋” （gyre）历史观，可参看叶芝著作《观点》（A Vision），本文限于篇幅不作详细介绍。简言之，叶芝的历史发展模式是由两个锥形螺旋相套而组成的，一个螺旋的结束其实就紧接另一螺旋的开始，所以才有”二度来生”.这有点象中国文化中的阴阳图符旋转中相生相成，也和西方用的沙漏定时器模式相似，不过更具备螺旋性：在一个锥形螺旋内的沙子流完时，只要倒置沙子就开始流回，就开始另一个时间。因此，在这种模式中，任何文明的崩溃，也等于标志新文明的开始。所以，任何文明都会”瓦解”，也因此得以”二度来生”.从这个角度看，与其说《瓦解》哀叹传统非洲文明的崩溃，不如说小说的诞生也催生非洲文明的”二度来生”. 阿契贝认为”文学”对殖民地人民具有”自我界定”（self-definition）和”文化复位”（cultural recuperation）的作用，他相信民族文学叙事──”自己说自己的故事”（telling one’s own story）──是复苏民族意识最重要的手段。在另一部长篇小说《荒原蚁丘》（Anthills of the Savannah， 1987）中，阿契贝说道：”只有故事，能够超越战争与战士，只有故事能使战鼓之声和勇士的功绩永垂不朽。故事能将我们的子孙从粗鲁得像个瞎眼乞丐，引导成像是仙人掌篱巴上的尖刺。故事是我们的卫士，没有它我们将有如瞎子。瞎子能充当自己的保卫者吗？不，只有故事才能管理我们，指导我们。”（台湾版译文）
事实如此，因为阿契贝讲述鲜明的”非洲性”故事，它宣告了新非洲文学的诞生，它也给非洲人的文化认同（Cultural Identity）提供了依据，鼓舞非洲人的士气。南非黑人领袖曼德拉就说，他在监狱度过漫长岁月时，”有《瓦解》做伴，白人监狱的高墙瓦解了。”歌颂”太平盛世”是御用文人的事情，追求”进步”、现代化或者”科学发展”是政治家的事情，而从诗人与文学家的角度看，人类历史永远不过是一首《红楼梦》的”好了歌”. 不论多幺辉煌的文明，多幺太平的盛世，都会有崩溃瓦解之时，而瓦解重生，盛衰兴替，沧海桑田，其实本是人间正道。因此，真正的文学家，不以物喜，不以已悲，不歌颂”太平盛世”，而只唱出”二度来生”的挽歌！
非洲依然是世界最贫穷的大陆，非洲之角依然是战火纷纷哀鸿遍野。但从文化角度来看，2007年堪称国际文化的非洲年，很多项重要国际文化活动都在这里首次举行，精彩纷呈，使得日具活力的非洲文化成为世界聚焦之点。二月中有埃及亚历山大港举行的国际儿童文学出版会议。六月初，笔者曾从北半球之北的斯德哥尔摩，飞越欧非两个大陆，到南非开普敦参加世界报业大会，这是第60届年会，但在非洲举行却是首次，有1600多国际大报记者与编辑出席，人数上也盛况空前。世界作家组织国际笔会也把2007定为非洲年，七月初，国际笔会第73届年会也在西非塞内加尔达喀尔拉开帷幕，同时还举办非洲文学节。九月，世界图书馆联合会也将首度在南非比勒陀利亚举行年会……如此热闹的背景之中，六月十三日第二届布克国际文学奖公布结果，努阿？阿契贝击败群雄摘取桂冠，是给非洲年锦上添花，多了一道虹霓。非洲文学确实已经重生了！
首发香港《明报月刊