Gender Games In Restoration London
一株被赋予性别的樱桃

''Oranges are not the only fruit,'' Nell Gwyn once said, knowing she had something sexier to sell to Covent Garden's 17th-century theatergoers in the days before she became a royal mistress. Indeed, as Jeanette Winterson demonstrates in ''Sexing the Cherry,'' they're not. The young British writer used the one-time orange girl's words as the title for her first novel, a somewhat autobiographical account of a lesbian orphan brought up in a fundamentalist sect. And her new book proffers not only the title's cherry but also the first pineapple ever seen in England, presented to Charles II in 1661, and a banana that in its London debut is taken to be ''the private parts of an Oriental.''

在成为查尔斯二世的情妇之前，妮尔·格温(Nell Gwyn)曾经向前往考文特花园看戏的十七世纪贵妇们推销比橘子更性感的水果，她说：“橘子不是唯一的水果。” 英国青年作家珍妮特·温特森(Jeanette Winterson)在《给樱桃以性别》(Sexing The Cherry)中再次证明了这一点——橘子不是唯一的水果。这位作家多少有些自传性质的第一部小说便以橘子命名， 讲述了一位在原教旨主义的极端宗教家庭长大的女同性恋孤儿的故事。而在她的新作中不仅仅有标题中的樱桃，更有1661年进贡给查尔斯二世、英格兰的第一颗菠萝，以及一根初登英格兰时被当作“东方人下体”的香蕉。

Fruit as a metaphor for sexuality - well, nothing new in that. But for Ms. Winterson fruit is also something rich and sweet, an exotic juiciness hidden beneath the pineapple's unpalatable skin, a new marvel brought into our ken. ''Sexing the Cherry'' fuses history, fairy tale and metafiction into a fruit that's rather crisp, not terribly sweet, but of a memorably startling flavor. Set mostly in the 17th century, the novel employs two alternating narrators. One is the gigantic Dog Woman, an appealingly innocent murderess, puzzled by just what it is that attracts people about sex - for she's so enormous that experiencing it herself has proved impossible. The other is her adopted son, Jordan, a naturalist who wonders about the human applications of ''the new fashion of grafting, which we had understood from France,'' the grafting through which a new kind of cherry tree has been created and given a sex - female - without parent or seed. And the novel itself grafts together not just those two voices, but different narrative modes as well.

水果作为“性隐喻”的情况并不少见。但对于温特森女士来说，水果还代表着层次丰富和甜美。比如菠萝，表皮虽粗糙、味如嚼蜡，但却包裹着极具异域诱惑的汁液，味道奇幻、让人大开眼界。《给樱桃以性别》将历史、童话故事和超小说(metafiction)融合进了一种水果里，有着回味无穷、令人惊艳的味道。小说的主要时间背景为17世纪，由两个截然不同的声音展开叙述。一个是身形巨大的狗妇(Dog Woman)。她是无邪的杀手，且一直不明白为什么人们会沉迷于性。由于她身体硕大，根本无法切身去体会性。另一个叙述声音是她的养子约旦(Jordan)，自然主义者的他一直在琢磨如何在人类身上运用从法国学到的“嫁接方面的新潮流”。通过这种新的嫁接方式，在无种子、无父母株的情况下，养殖出了一种新的樱桃，且该樱桃被予以了性别——女。而除了这两个叙述视角之外，小说本身也成功嫁接了不同叙述模式。

''My neighbour, who is so blackened and hairless that she has twice been mistaken for a side of salt beef wrapped in muslin, airs herself abroad as a witch.'' That's the Dog Woman, so called because she breeds dogs for the fights and races in Hyde Park. Jordan's voice is less pungent and more meditative: ''Every journey conceals another journey within its lines,'' he muses. ''The path not taken and the forgotten angle. These are the journeys I wish to record. Not the ones I made, but the ones I might have made, or perhaps did make in some other place or time.'' Like his quest for a woman whom he sees one morning ''climbing down from her window on a thin rope which she cut and re-knotted a number of times during the descent'' - a quest that leads to his discovery of 12 princesses who dance away each night to a weightless city in the sky. Or a journey through time itself, which Jordan believes to be rounded and curved like a globe, instead of flat and linear like a map - so that at the end of the novel we meet another Jordan and another Dog Woman in 1990, and find that nothing has changed in 300 years.

“我的邻居，长得那么黑，又没有头发，以至于有两次被当成了一块裹着平纹细布的腌牛油，而她宣称自己是个巫婆。” 这是狗妇的话，她因养殖赛狗去海德公园斗狗、赛狗而得此诨号。约旦的叙述相较少些辛辣、多些哲思：“每一段旅程的线路——那些没走过的路和被遗忘的转角，都隐藏着另一段旅程。我想记录下的不是我已走过的旅程，而是那些我可能走过，或者在另外的时间另外的地方的确走过的旅程。”正如某天早上当他看见那个女人“……借助一根细绳从她的窗口爬出来。在下降过程中，她不断把这条绳子剪断又重新打结”，便开始了对她的追寻。在追寻她的旅途上，他发现了每天晚上去天空中漂浮城市跳舞的十二位公主。这追寻的过程也是一场时间旅行。约旦认为时间像地球仪一样是圆的，而非同地图一般呈线性。于是后来在小说中我们来到了1990年，见到了另一个约旦和和狗妇，三百年间什么都没改变。

But Ms. Winterson alternates these metaphysical conceits with the Dog Woman's world of blood and pus and sweat. A Royalist, a Cavalier of the slums, she's long pondered the biblical motto ''an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,'' and one day decides to take it seriously. Soon she's got a bagful of both, all popped from Puritans, and moves on to work as an executioner at a brothel where the whores murder their puritanical Roundhead customers. Of course, all her victims are men. And the 12 dancing princesses murder the husbands they're forced to marry. At times, in fact, it seems that the only men in ''Sexing the Cherry'' worth saving are those who, like Jordan, have given cross-dressing a try. I note this, but curiously enough it didn't bother me as I read the novel. If Kingsley Amis can use women as objects for his misanthropy, I suppose Ms. Winterson can use men as a metaphor for a world based on a pestilential hypocrisy.

通过构造狗妇那淌着血、脓液和汗液的世界，温特森同时又展现了一个形而上沉思之外的场域。狗妇是保皇党、贫民窟女骑士，常年信奉圣经名言“以眼还眼、以牙还牙”。有一天她终于决定将信仰付诸行动，很快集齐了两大口袋清教徒的牙和眼。紧接着她又移步一家妓院，为那里专杀清教圆颅党（英国1642-1652内战期间的议会派分子，与保皇党相对——编注）顾客的妓女当起了执刑人。当然，她手下的所有受害者都是男人。而书中的十二位跳舞的公主也一一杀掉了迫她们进入婚姻的丈夫们。基本上，在《给樱桃以性别》中，似乎只有约旦这样愿意尝试跨性别的男人值得被救赎。即使在阅读过程中就意识到了这一点，但奇怪的是，我却并不为此困扰。若金斯利·阿米斯(Kinsley Amis)可以用女性形象作为他厌世的依托，那温特森又何尝不可用男人来比喻这令人厌恶的虚伪世界？

I do, however, question her success in producing her own kind of graft. Her prose is exquisite, although, like the best sort of fruitcake, it's too rich to take much of at a sitting. But the book seems disjointed. It needs, but never quite achieves, an integration of the Dog Woman's world and Jordan's speculations. The games it plays with gender aren't made to relate to the ones it plays with time. And while the effect of ''Sexing the Cherry'' depends above all on novelty, the kinds of materials Ms. Winterson uses - the feminist revision of fairy tales, the reliance on historical pastiche, an insistence on the subjectivity of all truth - have paradoxically become so fashionably familiar that they begin to seem the cliches of post-modernism. It almost seems written to recipe: graft Italo Calvino onto Angela Carter, with an admixture of Peter Ackroyd.

但我并不确定她是否成功制造了自己专有的文学嫁接。这本小说行文优雅，但就像一块高级水果蛋糕，要一次吃完实在有些甜腻。故事本身也有些不连贯，本可以更好地融合狗妇的世界和约旦的思索，却没有做到。且关于性别的文字游戏又无法与关于时间的文字游戏做到相互关联。再者，《给樱桃以性别》一书所期取得的效果，全部取决于它可以带来的新意，但那些温特森善用的文学手段——以女性主义视角重述童话、对历史拼贴式写作的依赖、坚持所有真相都是主观的——却因已风行多时，变得太过熟悉而成为了后现代主义的老生常谈。这就像是一道写好了的菜谱：把卡尔维诺(Italo Calvino)嫁接给安吉拉·卡特(Angela Carter)，再加一点彼得·阿克罗伊德(Peter Ackroyd)的风味。

But no - Ms. Winterson has her own strengths, above all an emotional intensity that Ms. Carter, for example, seems without. I think of two things that set her apart, two things that figure in all her work: a fascination with sexual ambiguity, cross-dressing and blurred genders on the one hand, and with foundling children on the other. And their combination gives her prose an exuberance cut with a melancholy knowledge of what it is to be hurt, and of how deep and enduring that hurt can be; a knowledge that's far more memorable, and unsettling, than any of the Dog Woman's murders. ''Sexing the Cherry'' may not be without parent or seed, but its taste is rich enough to make me look forward to whatever fruit may follow it.

也不尽然如此。温特森的文字自有其独特的魅力，特别是其中所展现的情绪张力是类似安吉拉·卡特那样的作家似乎缺乏的。在她所有的作品中，有两个反复出现的主要元素，令其与众不同——模糊而跨界的性别和弃儿。这是她展示在字里行间的疤痕，醒目地提示着人们什么叫做伤害，而伤害的杀伤力又能够多么持久。如此悲伤的认知，其实比狗妇犯下的任何一宗谋杀更让人印象深刻、让人不安。《给樱桃以性别》或许称不上无父母株、无种子的嫁接产品，但滋味已够甜美，足以让人期待她下一部关于水果的小说。

来源：好英语网