文學(xué)獎“橘子獎”帶有性別歧視嗎?

文學(xué)獎“橘子獎”帶有性別歧視嗎?

BRITAIN’S prestigious Orange Prize, awarded exclusively for fiction by women writing in English without regard to nationality, has just now completed its 17th year. And while the prize is lauded for its international reach and has never been disparaged for choosing to bar translated work, once again the annual clamor erupts: how can such a circumscribed honor be deemed legitimate? Why only women?

英國享有盛名的橘子獎(Orange Prize)，剛剛走過第17個年頭，它不分國籍、只頒給女作家創(chuàng)作的英語小說。在該獎因其國際化的影響力而獲得稱頌、把翻譯作品排除在外卻從未遭人貶抑的同時，一年一度的責(zé)難聲又再度響起：怎么能把這樣一份附帶限制條件的榮譽視作理所當(dāng)然?為什么只面向女性作者?

A. S. Byatt, the eminent British novelist who in 1990 won the Booker Prize, and who has determinedly kept her books out of the Orange race, offers a blunt answer: “The Orange Prize is a sexist prize. You couldn’t found a prize for male writers. The Orange Prize assumes there is a feminine subject matter — which I don’t believe in.” Responding to the recent report that Orange, a telecommunications company, will no longer sponsor the award, this principled writer demurs yet again. “I shan’t mourn it. ... Women should be allowed to have everything men have, but they shouldn’t be allowed to have their own little sheep pens.”

英國赫赫有名的小說家、1990年布克獎得主A.S.拜雅特堅決不讓自己的作品參加橘子獎評選，她坦言：“橘子獎帶有性別歧視。你找不到一個為男作家設(shè)立的文學(xué)獎。橘子獎假定存在女性題材一說——對此我不以為然。”響應(yīng)近期橘子(Orange)電信公司將不再贊助該獎項的報道，這位原則性很強的作家再度嗆聲，“我不會為此感到遺憾……女人應(yīng)該和男人一樣，平等的享有一切，但她們不該有自己的小羊圈。”

On one hand, “sheep pen,” “ghetto,” “biologically based self-confinement.” And on the other, the Woolfian ideal of “a room of one’s own,” ultimately culminating in the Orange Prize. Which view is truer, which owns the greater persuasive force?

一方面，是“羊圈”、“隔離區(qū)”、“基于生物學(xué)的自我拘囿”;另一方面，是伍爾芙有“一間自己的房間”的理想，在橘子獎上達到極致的巔峰。哪種觀點更合情理，更具說服力?

In the hope of settling this dispute, I ask you to consider the history of literary women. It turns out, oddly, to be also a prolific history of “men,” among whom the most celebrated are Currer, Acton and Ellis Bell (Charlotte, Anne and Emily Brontë), George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), George Sand (Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin), Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), Vernon Lee (Violet Paget).

寄望能解決這場紛爭，我請大家思考一下女性文人的歷史。說來奇怪，這也是一部豐厚的“男人”史，其中最著名的有庫瑞爾(Currer)、阿克頓 (Acton)、艾利斯·貝爾(Ellis Bell)、勃朗特三姐妹 (Charlotte, Anne and Emily Bronte)、喬治·艾略特(George Eliot)、瑪麗·安·伊文思(Mary Ann Evans)、喬治·桑(George Sand)、阿曼蒂娜·奧蘿爾·露茜·杜班(Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin)、伊薩克·迪內(nèi)森(Isak Dinesen)、卡琳·布利克森(Karen Blixen)、弗農(nóng)·李(Vernon Lee)維奧萊特·佩吉特(Violet Paget)。

The motive behind these necessary masquerades is hardly an urge to hide. Instead, it is a cry for recognition and a means of evading belittlement, or worse yet, the curse of not being noticed at all. The most pointed symptom and symbol of this pervasive fear is the poignant exchange between the 20-year-old Charlotte Brontë and Robert Southey, England’s poet laureate. Humbly and diffidently, she had sent him a sampling of her poems, trusting that he might acknowledge the worth of what she knew to be her “single, absorbing, exquisite gratification.”

取這些必要的假名，背后的動機并不是為了竭力掩藏身份。相反，那是渴望得到認(rèn)可的疾呼，以免被人小看，或乃至更糟的，落入根本無人問津的厄運。這種普遍的恐懼，最突出的癥狀和標(biāo)志體現(xiàn)在20歲的夏洛特·勃朗特與英國桂冠詩人羅伯特·騷塞(Robert Southey)可悲的通信中。勃朗特選了一首自己的詩歌代表作，謙卑而戰(zhàn)戰(zhàn)兢兢地寄給騷塞，企盼他會肯定其中的價值，勃朗特認(rèn)為那是她“唯一引人入勝、造詣精湛的滿意之作”。

His notorious reply, while conceding her “faculty of verse,” is nearly all that remains of his once powerful fame. “Literature,” he chided, “cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure she will have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation.” If such condescending sentiments leave a contemporary writer feeling sick at heart, Brontë thought the letter “kind and admirable; a little stringent, but it did me good.”

盡管承認(rèn)勃朗特“在詩文上的才華”，但騷塞惡名昭彰的答復(fù)，令他曾經(jīng)顯赫的名聲幾乎只剩下這封回信。他斥責(zé)道：“女人一生不能從事文學(xué)，也不該從事。她越埋首于自己應(yīng)盡的職責(zé)，就越不會有閑暇時間來舞文弄墨，即便是作為一種才藝或消遣。”縱然這種充滿優(yōu)越感的看法令當(dāng)代作者從心底感到厭惡，但勃朗特認(rèn)為這封信“和藹親切、令人佩服;有一點點嚴(yán)苛，但對我有益。”

The Orange Prize, then, was not born into an innocent republic of letters. Nor need we thumb through past centuries to discover the laureate’s enduring principle. After gaining a modicum of notice following an eclipse lasting years, I was once praised, as a kind of apology, by a prominent editor with these surprising words: “I used to think of you as a lady writer” — an inborn condition understood to be frivolous and slight, and from which recovery is almost always anomalous.

如此看來，橘子獎并非誕生在一個清白無辜的文壇。我們也無需上溯過去幾個世紀(jì)，找出這位桂冠詩人秉持不變的原則。我在隱沒了很長一段歲月、繼而受到些許關(guān)注后，一次，一位知名編輯以道歉的方式褒獎我，措辭令人訝異：“我原本以為你是一位婦人作家”——不言而喻，那意味著天生微不足道、無足輕重，能從中獲得新生，幾乎無一例外都是反常的。

So much for the defense of a reparative award dedicated solely to writers who are women. Advocacy of this sort, vigorously grounded as it is in a darker chamber of the literary continuum, is not the Orange’s only defense. We are reminded that there are, abundantly, prizes for regional writers, for black writers, for Christian writers, for Jewish writers, for prison writers, for teenage writers, for science writers, and on and on. Why must a prize for women’s writing be the single object of contention?

為一個補償性的、專為女作家設(shè)立的文學(xué)獎辯護的理由還有許多。因為在文學(xué)不可分割的整體內(nèi)，女性處于相較不為人知的暗室，因此對此類獎項的支持，不僅限于捍衛(wèi)橘子獎。而且，別忘了我們有諸多針對某一特定群體作家的文學(xué)獎，針對黑人作家的、基督教作家的、猶太作家的、監(jiān)獄作家的、青少年作家的、科普作家的，等等等等。為什么偏偏一個針對女性創(chuàng)作的文學(xué)獎，成為唯一爭論非議的對象呢?

Yet this argument will not hold water. Each such category signals a particular affinity, or call it, more precisely, a culture (and in the case of Jews and Christians, a deeper and broader civilization), and women are integral to all of them. To argue for femaleness-as-culture is to condemn imaginative and intellectual freedom and to revert to the despised old anatomy-is-destiny. And to the sheep pen and the ghetto and the circumscribed body of feeling and thought.

不過這一論點站不住腳。每個這樣的類別，標(biāo)志著一種特有的相似性，或更確切的說，一種文化(至于猶太人和基督教徒，那是更深廣的文明)，女性是所有這些類別里不可或缺的部分。主張把女性列為一種文化，等于否定想象和思想的自由，回復(fù)到舊有的、遭人鄙棄的“生理決定命運”說(anatomy-is- destiny)?；貜?fù)到羊圈、隔離區(qū)、被局限的情感和思想。

In an essay titled “Literature and the Politics of Sex,” I once ventured a definition of feminism. “In art,” I wrote, “feminism is that idea which opposes segregation; which means to abolish mythological divisions; which declares that the imagination cannot be ‘set’ free, because it is already free. I am, as a writer, whatever I wish to become. I can think myself into a male, or a female, or a stone, or a raindrop, or a block of wood, or the leg of a mosquito. Classical feminism,” I concluded, “was conceived of as the end of false barriers and boundaries; as the end of segregationist fictions and restraints.”

在一篇題為“文學(xué)與性別政治”的文章里，我曾大膽地定義女權(quán)主義。“在藝術(shù)領(lǐng)域，”我寫道：“女權(quán)主義是一種反對隔離的態(tài)度;它意味著廢除無根據(jù)的劃分;宣告想象力不能‘被’解放，因為它本就是自由、無拘無束的。作為一名寫作者，我想成為什么就是什么。我可以把自己想成男的、女的，想象成石頭、雨滴、木塊或蚊子的腿。正統(tǒng)的女權(quán)主義，”我總結(jié)說：“在構(gòu)想中是對錯誤的壁壘與界限的終結(jié);是對隔離主義小說與束縛的終結(jié)。”