纳博科夫对《堂吉诃德》的反传统解读：谈论的与被谈论的
“The genius of comedy was the same with that of tragedy, and that the true artist in tragedy was an artist in comedy also.”
——柏拉图《会饮》，223d，B. Jowett英译
身为小说家的纳博科夫，同时也是一位视角极其敏锐的不同寻常的文学批评者。1951-1952年间，他在哈佛大学讲授文学课程，这些课程整理而成的讲稿有三本：《文学讲稿》《俄罗斯文学讲稿》和《〈堂吉诃德〉讲稿》。
在主流的文学观念中，有一条可以追溯到两千多年前的说法：柏拉图就说过，擅长喜剧者必擅长悲剧，擅长悲剧者也必擅长喜剧。如此看来，《堂吉诃德》无疑是一部杰作，是正典中的正典。我们为堂吉诃德的疯狂行径而大笑，又为他接连不断的磨难而悲悯；我们在桑丘一次次的受骗和他脱口而出的深刻格言中，愈发体会到塞万提斯的伟大。如此看来，《堂吉诃德》便是那融入悲剧和喜剧特性的伟大作品。于是法国人圣伯夫（就是普鲁斯特驳的那个）说道，《堂吉诃德》是“人性的圣经”（第7页）。不过这下纳博科夫就坐不住了，他告诉我们不要被评论家们的妖言所迷惑，他们都在瞎扯淡——Let us not fall under the spell of these enchanters. 纳博科夫眼里的《堂吉诃德》是怎样一部小说呢？
由此看来，与长期占主导地位的传统解读截然不同，纳博科夫对《堂吉诃德》的评价充满了反叛意味。他并不是以名著导读老师的身份而出现，而是以一个极度敏感的读者的姿态来重新审视塞万提斯的《堂吉诃德》。关于纳博科夫的看法，我摘录了一些：
首先，他不承认这本小说是幽默而人道（Humane）的。
Another critic speaks piously of the author’s “sympathy for the peasant,” and in order to explain the burlesque in Sancho Panza makes the extraordinary statement that Cervantes was aware that his more sophisticated readers would expect that if low figures were introduced they should be treated satirically. (Why this is sophistication and why Cervantes should toady to it is not clear.) The same critic goes on: the “wise and lovable” Sancho (who is neither very wise nor very lovable) as secretly known to Cervantes (and to the critic in question) had to be partially sacrificed to the demands of literature since he had to serve as foil to the gravity and high aspirations of Don Quixote. Yet another funny commentator thinks that in the development of Sancho Panza’s mind and character (far more than in the delineation of Don Quixote) Cervantes gave expression to a type of wisdom and eloquence, and to a shrewd analysis of life, which constitute the essence of humanism. Big words, little sense. (p. 23)
来看一看吧，在读过《堂吉诃德》后，若要我写一篇公众号推文，定会和那些批评家的观点一样！写成什么样子呢？Wisdom and eloquence，看一看批评家们眼里的桑丘和本号发过的一篇关于好兵帅克的文章有多么相似，充满了陈词滥调。纳博科夫批驳那些无聊的批评家们的话语，在我看来并不好笑。因为我那拙劣的文章也属于纳博科夫批判的对象的范畴。如果我不拿东方project旗下的同人玩偶引流的话，大家也不会点进去。正是我的big words, little sense.
话扯远了。纳博科夫所批判的是那些不可信的批评家，在传统的阅读体验下，我们以为《堂吉诃德》整体上是温和活泼的，我们只是笑看着堂吉诃德受苦，看着故事进行下去。但他一针见血地指出，这本书不是这样：评论家们说这本小说很人道，天啊！你们究竟是怎么理解的呢？
It is simply not true that as some of our mellow-minded commentators maintain—Aubrey Bell, for instance—that the general character that emerges from the national background of the book is that of sensitive, keen-witted folks, humorous and humane. Humane, indeed! What about the hideous cruelty—with or without the author’s intent or sanction— which riddles the whole book and befouls its humor? (p.52)
那些在坐在象牙塔里面的的评论家们，在纳博科夫看来，简直像是在读另一本书：
The extraordinary commentators who talk through their academic caps or birettas of the humorous and humane mellowly Christian atmosphere of the book, of a happy world where “all is sweetened by the humanities of love and good fellowship,” and particularly those who talk of a certain “kindly duchess” who “entertains the Don” in the second Part—these gushing experts have probably been reading some other book or are looking through some rosy gauze at the brutal world of Cervantes’s novel. (p.52)
在第四讲（“Cruelty and Mystification”）中，纳博科夫给出了他准确的判断：《堂吉诃德》简直是一部关于折磨人的百科全书：Both parts of Don Quixote form a veritable encyclopedia of cruelty. (p.52)
17世纪的西班牙人看疯癫与折磨，是一种娱乐。在这里，纳博科夫直接否定了那些“mellow-minded commentators（温和的评论家）所塑造的人道的堂吉诃德形象。如果冷静地把书中人物遭受的打击、羞辱、拷打、戏弄一一列出来，我们会发现许多所谓的笑点其实是建立在以他人的不幸为娱乐的集体心理之上。因此，在他那里，《堂吉诃德》不再是一部教你做人的温情小说，而是一部残酷的小说。
其次，他不鼓励从小说中去找“生活智慧”或“崇高寓意”，这是十分重要的，全书开篇就提到了：
We shall do our best to avoid the fatal error of looking for so-called ‘real life’ in novels. (p.1)
在他看来，把小说当成现实生活的缩影、思想的容器，文本只是媒介，而真正重要的是可以提炼出来的“主旨”和“观念”，这正是 fatal error。纳博科夫首先回顾了一整条自圣伯夫以来延续下来的批评传统：
Catholics and Protestants, lean mystics and fat statesmen, well-meaning but verbose and stonedead critics of the Sainte-Beuve, Turgenev, or Brandes type, and quadrillions of quarrelsome scholars have expressed their conflicting views about the book and the man who made it. (p.8)
于是，他宣布自己要绕开这一传统套路，他根本不关心那些无关紧要的事情：
We shall not follow in the dusty path of these pious or impious, impish or solemn, generalizations. It does not really matter very much whether Cervantes was a good Catholic or a bad one; it does not even matter whether he was a good or a bad man; nor do I deem very important his attitude, whatever it was, to the conditions of his day. Personally, I am more inclined to accept the view that he did not much bother about these conditions. What, however, does concern us is the book itself, a certain Spanish text in a more or less adequate English translation. (pp. 9-10)
在这里，作者的人品、信仰、社会态度都被刻意放到一边，只剩下原始的文本和结构本身。纳博科夫甚至说，《堂吉诃德》被称为“有史以来最伟大的小说”，这简直是在扯犊子，它甚至都不能跻身于名著之列：
Don Quixote has been called the greatest novel ever written. This, of course, is nonsense. As a matter of fact, it is not even one of the greatest novels of the world. (pp.27-28)
因为塞万提斯是一个讲故事的人和魔术师，而不是一个传道者：
Being by nature a storyteller and a magician, but not a preacher, Cervantes is anything but a fiery adversary of a social evil. He does not really give a hoot whether or not books of chivalry are popular in Spain; and, if popular, whether or not their influence is pernicious; and, if pernicious, whether or not it may actually drive crazy a virgin gentleman of fifty. (p.31)
如果认真去检查《堂吉诃德》中关于骑士小说的段落，我们便会发现，在这里，堂吉诃德并不是用来批判骑士小说的根据（a convenient and innocent gadget）：
The final impression one gets when this matter of chivalry books is inspected closely is that if Cervantes selected a certain subject to be derided in various ways, he did so not because he felt any special urge to improve the morals of his day but partly because in his moral utilitarian day in the stern eye of the Church a moral was necessary, and mainly because a satire on romances dealing with knights-errant was a convenient and innocent gadget to keep his picaresque novel going—the kind of peg that made the winged horse Clavileno fly to remote kingdoms. (p.41)
换句话说，如果塞万提斯真的是要用这本书去进行某种道德上的说理、去攻击骑士小说，那写上千页去推动一件本来就会被时间解决的事情，在纳博科夫看来，将会和堂吉诃德战风车一样荒唐：
In other words, composing a book of a thousand pages in order to give an additional push in a matter that was neither worthwhile nor urgent (being taken care of by time itself), this would have been on Cervantes’s part an action as crazy as any windmill adventure of Don Quixote. (p. 49)
在纳博科夫的读法里，小说首先是一个自洽的、由语言构造出来的虚构世界，而不是现实的复制品。因此，相比“它反映了什么”，他更关心“它是如何被写出来的”，更关心小说的叙事结构。在第三讲（“Structural Matters”）以及后面的几讲中，他反复分析历史编撰者（the Chronicler）的主题：书中虚构的阿拉伯人编年史家席德·阿默德、手稿发现者、译者等一整套伪文献；又指出《堂吉诃德》第二部如何让人物读到第一部，使小说变成一部关于“自己被写下”的作品。到第二部快结尾时，堂吉诃德本人去印刷厂看到了自己的伪书被印刷时，这一主题达到了高峰。
在第五讲（“The Chroniclers Theme, Dulcinea, and Death”）里面，纳博科夫分析了杜尔西内娅：在大部分的读者看法下，Dulcinea是堂吉诃德的理想恋人、高贵女士，是骑士幻想的浪漫对象。很多读者把她当成爱情理想或纯粹幻想的象征。而纳博科夫对此则不屑一顾。当他讲到最后堂吉诃德的死亡场景时，给出了这样一句浓缩度极高的话为她定性：Dulcinea is disenchanted. She is death. (p.86)
这句短短的话，浓缩了他对这个人物（更准确地说，对这一幻象）的态度。杜尔西内娅本来就是一个被语言吹起来的泡沫：她最初只是堂吉诃德对一个乡村女子的美化和改名，是语言与幻想的产物。而第二部中那场关于“杜尔西内娅被施魔法”的骗局，更是把这层幻象再度加工、加厚。公爵、公爵夫人等人利用她来设计一连串恶作剧。纳博科夫自己也提醒读者，这一整段不过是塞万提斯对“被施魔法的杜尔西内娅”主题的又一次变奏，用来让读者获得更多娱乐、让骑士有事可做，让这部小说能达到一千页的长度：
However, I am inclined to consider the episode as just another twist that Cervantes gives to the Enchanted Dulcinea theme in order to keep the reader entertained and Don Quixote busy. The problem now is how to disenchant Dulcinea. (p.61)
最后，当所有幻象被解咒、被揭穿之时，并不是所谓“真相”夺回了胜利，而是堂吉诃德的整个骑士世界崩塌，紧跟着就是他的理性恢复和肉体死亡——所以纳博科夫才说：She is death.
与常见的浪漫主义诠释不同，纳博科夫把杜尔西内娅看成一个结构性的幻象节点：她不是一个丰满人物，而是一个被不断利用、加工的空名；她在文本中的最高意义，不在于代表什么美德，而在于她的消失与解咒如何触发了结构上的终结与死亡。
纳博科夫认为，如果让真伪两位堂吉诃德直接对决，胜者很可能会是那位冒牌骑士。他以这种颇具戏剧性的假想，突出了作品内在的镜像结构：真堂吉诃德和假堂吉诃德的对立，象征了幻想与现实、天才与平庸的冲突。虽然塞万提斯并未采用这样的情节，但纳博科夫的这一番议论，恰恰显示出他对叙事层次和结构可能性的着迷——关注小说如何可能被书写，胜过关注小说要传达什么道理。这种独特的分析角度只有身为小说家的批评者才能提出：
My money is on Avellaneda’s man, because the beauty of it is that, in life, mediocrity is more fortunate than genius. (p.81)
在最后一讲内，纳博科夫分析了堂吉诃德是否是一位屡战屡败的骑士，结果并非是像批评家所想的那样。他统计了一下，胜负比正是20：20。这也正是来自于一种艺术自觉。
纳博科夫把对《堂吉诃德》的阅读过程变成了与塞万提斯跨时空的对话，甚至算得上某种程度上的再创造。这种解读或许与常人不同，却为我们读小说的人与文学爱好者提供了宝贵的启示：伟大的读者应当像伟大的作家一样，勇于发现前人未曾注意到的细节与真相，在思辨中不断丰富经典作品的意义。我们作为读者，不要被传统看法左右。至少卡尔维诺说过，一本谈论别的作品的书，永远比不上被谈论的书。
一篇谈论一本谈论另一本书的书的文章，永远比不上那本被谈论的谈论另一本书的书本身，那就更不用说那本被那本书谈论的另外一本书了。
参看：Lectures on Don Quixote, Vladimir Nabokov, HBJ Press, 1983. 引文里面所有的黑体字都是我加的。