Stick Out Your Tongue
By Ma Jian; translated by Flora Drew
FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX; 93 PAGES; $16
Debunking the cliche of Tibet as a Shangri-la has itself become something of a cliche. By now, most readers who care about this troubled place surely understand that it is not — and never was — a Hollywood paradise of magical beings. But if Tibet is not nirvana, what is it? It’s been closed to foreigners for most of its history and closely guarded by the occupying Chinese government since 1951, so most Americans have little prospect of either visiting Tibet or speaking to someone who has seen it firsthand.
Fortunately for us, there are writers such as Ma Jian, the Chinese Buddhist poet, photographer, painter and longtime dissident, now living in Britain. After years of evading the Communist authorities in China, he decided in 1985 to flee to Tibet, “the most distant and remote place that I could imagine.” His travels there, often only lightly fictionalized, form the basis of “Stick Out Your Tongue,” a thin volume of poignant, often shocking stories published in 1987, denounced and banned in China and now available in English for the first time.
Jian’s sharply polished prose captures the sense of wonderment he felt on first encountering the Forbidden Land as a young man two decades ago:
“Our bus ground to the top of the five-thousand-metre Kambala Pass. Behind us, a few army trucks were still struggling up the foothills. As the last clouds tore from the rocks and prayer stones on the summit and slipped down the gullies, Yamdrok Lake came into view. When the surface of the lake mirrored the blue sky and plunged the distant snow peaks head-first into the water, I was filled with a sudden longing to take someone in my arms. This was the mountain road to Central Tibet.”
Such picture-perfect descriptions are sprinkled throughout the book; later we watch at dusk “as the sun turned red, wisps of white cloud drifted towards the horizon” and see “the goddess mountains Everest and Shishapangma … draped in silver robes, lifting their heads to the sky as though they were yearning to return home.” And, as expected, Tibet’s unique strain of Buddhism is a constant companion, with devotees circling Jokhang Temple in Lhasa “in a continual stream, spinning prayer wheels, praying for an end to their sufferig in this life and a prosperous rebirth in the next” and a pilgrim “on his way to the Gangdise Mountains … to wash his sins away in the sacred waters of Lake Mansarobar.”
But Jian’s Tibet is not all breathtaking landscapes and charming peasants. In fact, “Stick Out Your Tongue” packs about as much misery and hardship into a hundred pages as you are likely to find in any recent fiction. There are gruesome violence and staggering poverty, a miserable lack of medical care, even the deeply disturbing ritual rape of a young girl. Jian provides many matter-of-fact accounts of how easily death can come in Tibet’s desolate plateaus, such as a one-liner about a nomadic family moving camp during a drought whose youngest daughter had simply “fallen into a ditch and died while riding her yak up this hill.”
There is a “Dharma Bums” quality to Jian’s work. His honesty and informality also flowed through his popular 2001 travel memoir, “Red Dust,” a longer nonfiction book describing his several years of travel across China and into Tibet. (Readers of the earlier work may recognize several anecdotes here, and the story “The Woman and the Blue Sky” appears in both books with only minor alterations.) The last story in the new collection, fittingly titled “The Final Initiation,” describes the early life of an incarnation of a “living Buddha,” identified as such at the age of 9 days in a “shack built of mud and straw bricks” where “light from the butter lamp shone on the frayed cloth of her mother’s apron.” Jian recounts the tale with a cool historical detachment, but then ends it abruptly with something closer to a classified ad, offering up a macabre artifact he purchased at a nearby market: “If anyone would like to buy it from me, just get in touch. I’ll accept any offer, as long as it covers the cost of my travels to the north-east.”
Although he has lived in exile for many years, Jian tries to show how differently most people in China view Tibet. In his thoughtful afterward to these moving, difficult stories, he explains that “for them, it is not a mystical Shangri-La, but a barren outpost of the great Chinese empire.” On the surface, nothing here would be likely to change their minds. The Tibet that unfolds in these pages is a cruel and primitive place, and Jian insists that “Tibetans can be as corrupt and brutal as the rest of us.” But for all that, this book is not at all an apologia for the Chinese occupation. On the contrary, Jian readily acknowledges the Tibetans killed through “political persecution, imprisonment, torture and famine” and hopes that a separation from China can be achieved “soon, before any more of Tibet’s unique language, culture and way of life are lost for ever.”
In the end, Jian means no insult by showing us the messy reality of the Tibet he encountered as a self-described “Chinese drifter” on the lam in the mid-’80s. Tibetans, after all, deserve to be seen as actual people, not mere spiritual symbols or political pawns. “To idealise them,” Jian wisely counsels toward the end of his unflinching portrait, “is to deny them their humanity.”
Dan Zigmond is Menlo Park writer. He recently contributed to “You Are Not Here and Other Works of Buddhist Fiction” (Wisdom Publications, 2006).
Jung Chang
Writer, 54, London
Interview by Jonathan Heawood
Sunday June 11, 2006
I’ve always wanted to be a writer. When I was growing up I would observe the clouds in the sky and make up stories to myself, but in Mao’s China most writers were persecuted, and even writing privately was dangerous.
When I was 16 I wrote my first poem. My father’s tormentors came to the flat and I had to rush to the toilet to flush my poem away. We were told that Mao’s China was paradise, but afterwards I lay in bed and thought for the first time: if this is paradise, where, then, is hell?
I was exiled to the edge of the Himalayas, and worked as a peasant and a barefoot doctor, an electrician, a steelworker. When I was spreading manure in the paddy fields I would always be writing long passages in my head or short poems in the Chinese classical style.
My father was one of the few who stood up to Mao. He was tortured, imprisoned and driven insane. My mother was under tremendous pressure to denounce my father. She was subject to over 100 ghastly denunciation meetings, made to kneel on broken glass, and paraded in the streets, where children spat and threw stones at her. She survived, and she still lives in China.
When I came to Britain in 1978 I had the freedom to write, but at that moment I suddenly lost my urge to, because to write would mean to turn inwards and look at my past, and I didn’t want to look at the past; it was extremely painful to me.
When I first arrived at Heathrow I nearly walked into the men’s toilet. I had no idea the figure on the door wearing trousers was supposed to be a man. In the cultural revolution women were not supposed to wear skirts, and the man in front of me had long hair, so I followed him in.
One of my first impressions was that England was wonderfully classless compared with China. When I was beginning to do my doctorate at the University of York, my supervisor asked to see my thesis, and I said, ‘What are you talking about, I haven’t written it yet.’ He said, ‘But you already have all the conclusions.’ This single remark untied the knot that a totalitarian educational system had fastened in my brain. In China we were always told to write from the basis of what Mao said, or Marxist theories. An open mind was so hard to come by.
In 1988 my mother came to Britain and for the first time she told me the story of her life. She stayed for six months and talked every day. When she left for China she left me 60 hours of tape recordings and I started writing Wild Swans. My mother wanted me to understand her, and was helping me to fulfil my dreams of becoming a writer.
When I was researching Mao I interviewed Imelda Marcos. My husband asked her if she had found one western man who understood her, and she said only one man – Richard Nixon.
Mao is very strictly banned in China. When the Economist magazine carried a review of our book, those copies on sale in big hotels had the review physically torn out of the magazine.
Ken Livingstone said Mao had got rid of footbinding, and that that was enough to justify the Mao era. But Mao didn’t get rid of footbinding; and nothing justifies 70 million deaths.
I miss China more now than when I first came. I feel for Chinese people and feel very hppy when I go to China. People are beginning to have happy lives, and I see flowers. I saw the tea house which had been closed by pupils from my school reopened after nearly 20 years – and I felt indescribable joy at seeing all these little changes, people’s lives becoming better.
The day that Mao’s portrait is taken off Tiananmen Square will be the day that China truly becomes a wonderful place.
· Jung Chang’s Mao: The Unknown Story is published by Vintage, priced £15
A century of slaughter
From the trenches to the Holocaust and Rwanda, Niall Ferguson has sought challenging new explanations for world conflict, Allan Mallinson says
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The War of the World
by Niall Ferguson
Allen Lane, £25; 816pp
HISTORIANS ALWAYS YEARN for closure, a date when their narratives can end, says Niall Ferguson in the introduction to his latest heavyweight work of narrative and analytical history, an examination of why the 20th century was the bloodiest yet.
In so yearning, historians also appear to want to package their history in marketable chunks. But does a century possess inherent significance? In fairness, although his book The War of the World is a tie-in with a coming Channel 4 series, Ferguson does not labour the matter. The popular historian also needs an arresting title for his book. Again, the author does not flog over much the H. G. Wells connection. But a television tie-in undoubtedly colours a book, even if it does not shape it. The pity, however, would be to see and perhaps dismiss The War of the World as a mere pendant to populist TV history. On the contrary, here is a work of originality and depth, history at its most challenging and controversial.
Why was the 20th century so violent, and why did its worst excesses occur in the early 1940s and in Central and Eastern Europe, Manchuria and Korea? Fergusons answer is ethnic conflict, economics and empires in decline. On the face of it, nothing new, but he digs deep into the foundations of received notions and comes to rather different conclusions from the usual. German anti-Semitism, for instance, was an extreme case of a general (though not universal) phenomenon. The principal distinguishing feature of the Holocaust was not its goal of annihilation but the fact that it was carried out by a regime which had at its disposal all the resources of an industrialised economy and an educated society.
It was the application of the nation-state model to Central and Eastern Europe, a complex patchwork of pales and diasporas , that increased the potential for conflict, these regions becoming the most lethal of the killing spaces of the 20th century . His exploration of race, both its scientific reality and its place in national myth, is a fascinating multidisciplinary analysis.
But why, if ethnic antagonism has been a constant of the human condition, has extreme violence occurred only at certain times? The answer, Ferguson says, is that ethnic conflict is correlated with economic factors. But again he suggests a rather different interpretation: it is not enough to look for times of economic crisis when trying to explain instability, for rapid growth in output and incomes can be just as destabilising as rapid contraction. It is, therefore, to economic volatility, that we must look these violent punctuations having a bigger impact than long-running structural trend in prices and output.
But 20th-century violence, he maintains, is unintelligible if it not seen in its imperial context: the decline and fall of large multi-ethnic empires dominated the world in 1900. Nearly all the principal combatants in both world wars were empires or would-be empires. One of the reasons for this was again economic: economies of scale were available to an empire, as opposed to the nation state, in raising large armies and paying for them.
He points out that two of the greatest battles of the century — Stalingrad and El Alamein — were fought by “multi-ethnic forces under imperial banners”. Another reason was geographical: the points of contact between empires, the borderlands and buffer zones, or “the zones of strategic rivalry they compete to control”, see more violence than the imperial heartlands.
What Ferguson calls “the fatal triangle”, the territory between the Baltic, the Balkans and the Black Sea, was a vast killing space not just because it was ethnically mixed but because it was the junction of the imperia of the Hohenzollerns, Habsburgs, Romanovs and Ottomans. Manchuria and Korea occupied a similar position in the Far East, and with the rise in the critical importance of oil, so increasingly have the Gulf and the Near East.
The “ebbs and flows of international commercial integration” are closely associated with the rise and fall of empires, with war more prevalent at the beginning, and especially the end, of an empire’s existence. Twentieth-century empires were “exceptional in their capacity for dealing out death and destruction” because of “unprecedented degrees of centralised power, economic control and social homogeneity to which they aspired”. Indeed, they inherited from the 19th-century nation builders “an insatiable appetite for uniformity; in that sense they were more like empire-states than empires in the old sense”.
Perhaps most radically, Ferguson concludes that to see the 20th century as the triumph of the West, or the “American Century”, with its long, irreversible glide into liberal democratic capitalism (vide Francis Fukuyama’s “the end of history”), is “fundamentally to misread the trajectory of the past hundred years”.
What he sees is a reorientation of the world towards the East, which redresses a balance between West and East that had been lost in the four centuries after 1500. “No historian of the 20th century can afford to overlook this huge — and ongoing — secular shift,” he warns. If his reading of, in the words of the book’s subtitle, The Age of Hatred, is true, no one, not just the historian, can afford to overlook it.
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【2006年6月11日狱委讯】继李昌平和孙文广收到电话骚扰之后，6月9日上午，余杰家中也受到电话骚扰，每隔1分钟电话即响起，一般只响一至两声便中断。此骚扰一直持续了将近四个小时。
通过来电显示，该骚扰电话来自手机13791048154。该手机号码与骚扰李、孙两位的号码的前面七位数字全部相同，估计为同一人所为。
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越战时期一位北越女军医在前线所撰写的日记在失踪长达25年之后，去年奇迹般地由美国退伍军人怀赫斯特交还给她的家人。据香港大公报报道，最近，这本日记成了全球畅销书，多个国家正在争购它的翻译出版权与电视节目改编权。
越南女军医唐翠沉(Dang Thuy Tram)，是一个富裕的医生家庭的女儿。一九六七年从医学院毕业后，她自愿加入北越军队，在越南中部战场广义省的一家野战医院工作。她的日记是从一九六七年四月开始，记录了她加入军队三十六个月里心理和生理上的紧张疲累，如何治疗伤兵；如何为了逃避美军的狙击五次拆除又重建手术室；曾经躲在地下碉堡而几乎被憋死的惊心动魄场面。
在军医院服务三年多之后，唐翠沉于一九七○年六月死于美军一次攻击，年仅27岁。这本日记在唐翠沉死后，被当时担任美军情报官怀赫斯特拾获，怀赫斯特将其保存了下来并带回美国保存卅多年。去年，怀赫斯特终于找到唐翠沉在越南的家属。
去年，日记首先在越南的报纸连载。许多读者看了之后都剪报保存，并在亲友之间传阅。日记后来付印成书，首印30万本，并迅速成为越南的头号畅销书。
唐翠沉的笔下充满感情，她在其中一篇写道：往后，如果能在美丽阳光跟社会主义灿烂花朵下存活，须谨记那些为共同目标流血的人所付出的牺牲。
死前两天，唐翠沉在日记中吐露她疲惫的心灵，及如何渴望母亲那只抚慰我的手。她写道：“在我如此孤寂的时刻，请来我眼前握着我的手。爱我，并给予我步向艰险前程的力量。”但日记在此嘎然而止，之后只留下一页页空白。
日记中，唐翠沉也不时表露她身为一名军医的无力感。“昨天，一名受重伤的廿一岁军人呼喊我名字，希望我能帮助他。但我无能为力。我望着他死在我那双一无是处的手中，我眼泪不禁流了下来。”另篇日记，唐翠沉则以愤恨心情描述她对战争中失去朋友之感受，战争，不会管任何人的死或活。
一位现年38岁的越南女读者表示很崇拜唐翠沉，她说：“我们这个世代没有机会活在那种情境中。而这本日记是真实的，这才是有意思之处。”
英国年轻女作家扎迪．史密斯(Zadie Smith)6日以作品《On Beauty》（论美）赢得英国橘子奖（Orange Prize）。橘子奖是世上奖金最高的文学奖之一，凡女性作家以英文出版的作品均可角逐。
据报道，颁奖典礼在英国伦敦的皇家法庭举行。30岁的史密斯领奖时激动地说：“我简直不敢相信，我把入围作品读遍了，全是一时之选。”曾入围去年英国布克奖的《On Beauty》是史密斯的第三本小说，她可获得3万英镑奖金。橘子小说奖评审团主席马莎‧基尔妮称许这本小说“人物性格描绘出色，铺陈情节的技巧高超却不矫揉造作”。《On Beauty》以美国某所长春藤名校为背景，叙述学术圈两个家庭的故事。史密斯说过这本小说的情节、文字风格皆师法20世纪英国知名作家福斯特的小说《此情可问天》。生长于伦敦、有一半牙买加血统的史密斯2000年以处女作、小说《White Teeth》（白牙）扬名文坛，曾入围橘子奖。美国《时代》周刊在5月初评选出的2006年度全球最具影响力的100位名人中，扎迪‧史密斯击败英国首相贝理雅等人，成为唯一上榜的英国人。
法新社报道，畅销书“哈利波特”作者罗琳今天被票选为英国最伟大的在世作家，击败重量级文豪如鲁西迪，以及去年诺贝尔文学奖得主剧作家品特等名家。
由“Book杂志”举行的民意测验显示，罗琳的票数比排行榜上名列第二的奇幻小说作家普莱契多三倍。其次是“布克奖”得主麦克伊旺.鲁西迪及日裔英国作家石黑一雄。鲁西迪是一九八八年“魔鬼诗篇”的作者。
“Book杂志”编辑奇妮说：“这项调查可以提供一个很好的观察，让我们了解到英国大众认为怎样的作家可称得上‘伟大’。”
罗琳的“哈利波特”系列已出版到第六集，书迷们正引颈盼望最后一集、也就是第七集的出炉。
前六集在全球的销售量超过三亿本，并且被翻译成六十三种语言。其中前四集也已被改编为电影上映，部部卖座。
法新社”报道，畅销书“哈利波特”作者罗琳今天被票选为英国最伟大的在世作家，击败重量级文豪如鲁西迪，以及去年诺贝尔文学奖得主剧作家品特等名家。
由“Book杂志”举行的民意测验显示，罗琳的票数比排行榜上名列第二的奇幻小说作家普莱契多三倍。其次是“布克奖”得主麦克伊旺.鲁西迪及日裔英国作家石黑一雄。鲁西迪是一九八八年“魔鬼诗篇”的作者。
“Book杂志”编辑奇妮说：“这项调查可以提供一个很好的观察，让我们了解到英国大众认为怎样的作家可称得上‘伟大’。”
罗琳的“哈利波特”系列已出版到第六集，书迷们正引颈盼望最后一集、也就是第七集的出炉。
前六集在全球的销售量超过三亿本，并且被翻译成六十三种语言。其中前四集也已被改编为电影上映，部部卖座。
已经有太多的人对批评表示出了不满。虽然，批评作为一种事业，一直不缺乏为之努力的人，但它的文学功用的日益衰微，却是不争的现实。尤其是在我们这个媒体时代，批评固有的功能正在被媒体宣传和会议发言所代替，那种微弱的、专业的批评声音，已经变得相当可疑。读者不看，作家不承认，甚至连批评家本身，一度也恍惚起来，从而忘记了自己本应履行的责任——词语的责任，变得被动、廉价而无所作为。
看上去，批评更像是文学族类里的贱民。而真正让人痛心的是，当别人蔑视批评的时候，批评家们并没有充分地用自己的创造性劳动来捍卫批评的尊严，反而在人情、利益和复杂的文学境遇面前继续溃败，也继续着自己的无能。真正的批评不是这样的。它应该有一整套的原则、价值、梦想、生命力供我们探讨和坚持。
什么是批评？什么是批评的生命和力量，什么是批评的障碍和敌人？相信没有人可以给出标准答案，但我还是渴望能握住一些秘密通道，得以进入批评的心脏。由此，我首先想到的是，批评这个词最初出自希腊文，意思是判断。这是一个简明而清晰的表述。然而，批评作为一种判断，在当代批评的实践中，往往面临着两个陷阱：一是批评家没有判断，或者说批评家没有自己的批评立场。这种状况在当代批评中非常普遍。许多批评家，可以对一部作品进行长篇大论，旁征博引，但他惟独在这部作品是好还是坏、是平庸还是独创这样一些要害问题上语焉不详，他拒绝下判断，批评对他来说，更多的只是自言自语式的滔滔不绝，并不触及作品的本质。这是一种最为安全的批评，既不会得罪作者，又不会使自己露怯，但同时它也是一种最为平庸的批评，因为批评家失去了判断的自信和能力。这种批评的特点是晦涩、含混、在语言上绕圈子，它与批评家最可贵的艺术直觉、思想穿透力和作出判断的勇气等品质无关。这样的批评有什么用呢？一个批评家，如果不敢在第一时间作出判断，如果不能在新的艺术还处于萌芽状态时就发现它，并对它进行理论上的恰当定位，那它的劳动就不可能得到足够的尊重，它的价值也值得怀疑；二是在判断这个意思的理解上，一些批评家把它夸大和扭曲了，使得它不再是美学判断和精神判断，而是有点法律意义上的宣判意味，甚至有的时候还把它当作“定罪”的同义词来使用。比起前者的拒绝判断，这属于一种过度判断，走的是另一个极端。这样的例子也并不鲜见。批评界许多专断、粗暴、横扫一切、大批判式的语言暴力，均是这方面的典范。美学判断一旦演变成了严厉的道德审判，我想，那还不如不要判断。——因为它大大超出了文学批评的范畴。
对于批评中这种过度判断的警惕，令我想起米歇尔·福柯说过的一段话：“我忍不住梦想一种批评，这种批评不会努力去评判，而是给一部作品、一本书、一个句子、一种思想带来生命；它把火点燃，观察青草的生长，聆听风的声音，在微风中接住海面的泡沫，再把它揉碎。它增加存在的符号，而不是去评判；它召唤这些存在的符号，把它们从沉睡中唤醒。也许有时候它也把它们创造出来——那样会更好。下判决的那种批评令我昏昏欲睡。我喜欢批评能迸发出想象的火花。它不应该是穿着红袍的君主。它应该挟着风暴和闪电。”这真是精彩的表述，可以说，它几乎包含了一切优秀批评所需要的元素：生命、点燃、观察、聆听、召唤、存在的符号、唤醒、创造、想象的火花、风暴和闪电……还有比这更动人的批评吗？
如果以这样的批评作为标准，那我们就会知道，批评不应是作品的附庸，也不仅仅只有冷漠的技术分析，它应该是一种与批评家的主体有关的语言活动；在任何批评实践中，批评家都必须是一个在场者，一个有心灵体温的人，一个深邃地理解了作家和作品的对话者，一个有价值信念的人。就这点而言，我认为，批评也是一种写作，一种能“给一部作品、一本书、一个句子、一种思想带来生命”的写作。是写作，就有个性；是写作，就有私人的感受、分析、比较、判断。所以，我对那些动不动呼吁所谓客观、公正的批评的人，历来不以为然。批评既然是一种写作，不是法律，也不是标尺，就不可能是完全客观的、公正的、符合大众的普遍准则的，也不可能是“是非自有公论”，它更多的是批评家面对作品时有效的自我表达。也就是说，对于真正的批评来说，没有客观不客观、公正不公正的区别，只有是否专业、是否站在良心的立场上说话的区别。
在文学这个复杂而隐秘的世界里，我不敢说批评家要成为写作的引导者和规范者，但是，它至少要有所发现，从而能使读者更自由地阅读和选择。这一点不容忽视。如果不强调批评是一种有主体认知和自我发现的专业活动，我们就会很容易把当下流行的、毫无个人创见的读后感式的文字当作批评，而谁都知道，真正的批评并没有这么简单。真正的批评应该在有效地阐释作品的同时，也能有效地自我阐释，以致二者之间能达成美学和存在上的双重和解。我曾经在《我们批评什么》一文中说过这样的话：“本雅明评波德莱尔，海德格尔评荷尔德林、里尔克，别林斯基评俄罗斯文学，都算是很出名的批评了，但他们决非冷漠的工匠，而是一个热情的存在主义者。他们是在借着诗人与作家，来阐释自己内心的精神图像，对美的发现，以及对未来的全部想象。他们看似在谈论别人，其实他们是与被谈论者互相阐释着。这可以说是最高的批评，因为它包含着批评家本人的生命体验与价值追问。只有这样的批评，才能有效地解释我们时代的精神，以及我们时代与其他时代的差异所在。中国批评界的缺乏，恐怕不在知识的结构上，也不在批评语言的运用上(恰恰相反的是，在这些方面中国的批评家都有很不错的表现，比如说，把西方几十年的文论一夜之间就占为己有；又比如说，当下的一些批评家写的文章，在表面看来，几乎像是一个国外的汉学家在说话，不仅使用着生硬的汉语，中间还夹杂着许多外文)，批评真正的困境，在于批评家逐渐地失去了对价值的敏感，失去了对自身的心灵遭遇的敏感。简而言之，他们在精神趣味上出现了很大的问题。”
因此，现在重提一些业已失去的批评品质是非常重要的，它可以防御批评家落入新一轮的精神腐败之中。而除了上面所说的这些，我以为，就当下的批评现状而言，批评家现在最需要恢复的品质是批判性，即精神的锋芒。我想起阿多尔诺在《美学理论》一书中的话，他认为，艺术只有“拒绝与社会的认同”，成为“社会的反论”，才能体现出它的真理价值，成为“自由的象征”。我想，这些话同样也适合于批评。当文化工业越来越威胁到写作的纯洁性，并对大众的文化需求实施越来越多的控制的时候，批评要发挥起它固有的否定与批判的力量，以澄清写作中经常出现的误解和越来越模糊的精神界限。
福柯还有一句话说，批评就是使自然的东西陌生化，表明事物并不是如人们所相信的那样不言而喻。
遗憾的是，这些批评品质并
没有得到普及，相反，会议发言式的、不负责任的吹捧文字却越来越多。这个时候，我认为批评应该是一种异见，批评家要敢于直言，敢于真实地面对自己的内心，敢于说出自己所看见的事实。有一个叫斯威夫特的人说：“真正的批评家就是作家各种错误的发现者和收集人。”——这话看似简单，实际上是最检验批评家的能力和勇气的。所以，这是一个做真正的批评家需要付出巨大代价的时代。在这个时代，更多的时候，批评成了一种内在的斗争——不仅是与作品斗争，也是与自己的批评良心斗争。说还是不说？怎么说？说到什么程度？等等，这些问题像专业和美学问题一样折磨着批评家。随着时间的推移，我想，这种斗争在批评界会更加强烈，因为有很多批评死结正源于此。我很喜欢的俄罗斯哲学家别尔嘉耶夫在说到自己被迫与什么作斗争时，他的回答是，“与我的洁癖，我精神和肉体的洁癖，病态的和针对任何事物的洁癖。”我在批评的写作中经常想起别尔嘉耶夫这句话，并在暗中认为，若有可能，批评家都应尽力使自己成为一个在精神上有洁癖的人，而不是随便与当下的文坛同流合污。
这些，也许不仅是对批评的苛求，而是近似于批评的野心了。而据我的观察，好的批评家往往就是一个有野心的人。
