包弼德 伊佩霞 包伟民 邓小南 | 我与宋史

包弼德 伊佩霞 包伟民 邓小南 | 我与宋史

2017-04-24 胡梦霞 孟繁之 文汇学人

2017年1月6日上午，北京大学人文社会科学院主办的"北大文研论坛"第十八期"师说，我与宋史"在北大静园二院208会议室举行。此次活动由历史学系赵冬梅教授主持，哈佛大学副教务长、文研院特邀访问教授包弼德（Peter K. Bol），华盛顿大学历史学系教授伊佩霞（Patricia Buckley Ebrey），中国人民大学历史学院教授包伟民，北大文研院院长、历史学系教授邓小南结合自身研究经历，就怎样读书、怎样写论文等问题为学生们答疑解惑。

包弼德："研讨课讲到《梦粱录》，我发现我其实根本就不了解中国的历史。书中展现的是已经非常具有现代性特征的中国。"

    

《梦粱录》为南宋吴自牧撰，仿《东京梦华录》体例，多描述南宋末年临安（今浙江杭州）的风俗、郊庙、人物、伎艺，于当时的社会状况，巨细不遗。上图为王云五主编丛书集成初编《梦粱录》全1-3册（商务印书馆，1939）书影。

·  我为什么研究宋史  ·

    

赵冬梅：各位老师最初为何选择宋史作为研究领域，又为何留在这个领域？四位老师都可以说将自己的全部精力投入了宋史研究，宋史究竟有何魅力长久地吸引了各位？

    

伊佩霞：我一开始并不是做宋史的，我博士论文的题目是从汉到唐的中国贵族家庭，做的是博陵崔氏的个案研究。但是1978到1979年的时候，我决定转向宋史研究，因为我决定继续研究中国历史上的家族。宋史研究的资料比唐史研究丰富很多，宋朝出版物、笔记的数量能让我继续研究这个题目。而我留在宋史研究领域是因为我对宋朝的印象非常好。我喜欢宋代的艺术、喜欢士人作为社会主导阶级的理念、喜欢宋朝的城市生活。当时谢和耐的《蒙元入侵前夜的中国日常生活》有英文版，对宋朝的城市生活有浓墨重彩的描述。宋朝有一种文明的理念，用文明抵抗军事。而我们那一代人都反战。宋朝也是一个避免战争的时代。

    

包弼德：我本来也不是学习宋史的。我研究中国历史是因为对当代中国有兴趣。我生长在一个左派家庭，家人的政治观比较接近社会主义。在家庭的影响下，我年少的时候觉得应该要多学习一点关于中国的知识，因为中国有社会主义。1966年，我入莱顿大学，正好是"文革"开始的时候。不到一年我就开始检讨，觉得当时中国的状况更有需要反思的地方。可是我一直以来都对历史感兴趣，当时莱顿大学的一位教授开了一门研讨课，那是我们项目模仿美国的模式第一次开研讨课。研讨课的主题是南宋的杭州，讲到《梦粱录》。当时我发现我其实根本就不了解中国的历史，看《梦粱录》发现书中展现的是已经非常具有现代性特征的中国。后来，我就比较能接受中国的近代是从宋朝开始的看法了。唐宋变迁是中国历史上的一个根本性的变迁，对历史学者来说是非常重要的课题，因此，我就开始学习宋朝历史了。但是我的研究领域不仅限于宋史，而是从8世纪到16世纪初的中国社会文化史、思想史。

    

包伟民：研究宋史对我来说是"被选择"的过程。我到现在为止一直都认为，假如有第二个选择，我不会选择历史。我更感兴趣的其实是工程学。我今天第一次在公开场合说我自己的兴趣。1977年10月恢复高考，那时我初中毕业五年，绝不可能在参加高考的时候考理科，因为我上中学的时候没有化学和物理课，而且作为一个初中生在教室里上课应该也不超过一年。当时我们参加学工、学农、挖防空洞、野营、拉练等各种各样的活动，没有正正经经上课。这是第一个"被选择"的过程：我不能选理工科，只能选文科。当时文科只有三个专业可以选：政治、中文和历史。我作为一个经历过"文革"的人，不喜欢政治。我也不喜欢中文，因为我觉得中文系就是写小说，我也不看小说。剩下只有历史了。后来考研究生，杭州大学历史系的外国史老师研究的是法国史。我不喜欢法国史，所以就选了中国史。我也不喜欢近代史。于是只剩下古代史可以选择，而古代史唯一的老师是教宋史的，所以我选了宋史。

    

当然我后来留在宋史研究领域，还是有一点主观能动性在里面。其实还真有一段时间我想离开宋史。90年代后期，我有段时间转向了江南地区的地域研究，那个时候我一天到晚在小镇走，江浙一带农村的小镇还没有商业化，非常宁静祥和，我觉得非常愉快。还有一个很大的推动力是：我们研究古代史的如果对一个话题感兴趣，要看很多书，但真正落实到这个题目又会发现材料永远不够。相比较而言，我曾经从事过的民国历史研究材料实在太多，需要判断好几十条材料里面哪一条值得引用。我会觉得被埋在近现代的材料里了，我不是太理得清哪些是核心的、重要的，就是邓老师常说的"牵动性"的材料。而我对宋史相对熟悉一些，因而宋史对我而言更有吸引力，这样我就回到宋史。

    

邓小南：我跟包伟民老师有些地方是类似的，有被动的一面。很多人可能想，我学宋史是顺理成章的，因为我父亲做宋史，所以我自然做宋史。其实没有那么简单。如果没有"文革"，我自己当年作为一个初中生的理想是做一个文学家。我上初三时，北大附中语文组的沈礼棻老师指导我写一篇文章，叫《中学生怎样写作文》，准备登在当年的《中学生》杂志上。这对我是很大的鼓舞，让我觉得将来可以尝试写文学作品，当作家。"文革"期间，上山下乡，逐渐感觉自己的浪漫色彩不够，所以放弃了这个目标。

    

我和包伟民老师一样，考大学的时候选择范围很有限。我没有参加77年的高考，因为当时我父亲说，如果初中生能考上大学，这还叫大学吗？我觉得说得很对，所以77年我就没报。我在北大荒十年，其间当过小学老师，后来我发现，我在那个偏远的农村小学教的学生，有的考上了重点大学。学生写信来报喜，同时也问老师为什么不考大学。在环境氛围鼓舞下，78年就参加了高考。当时就想找一个离政治远一点的专业，所以就选择了历史。那时候北大文史学系招生分数最高，法律系、经济系取分比较低。吴志攀校长曾经半开玩笑说，北大历史系在他们天津只招一个学生，他当时也报历史系，但被成绩更高的荣新江老师挤下来了，就"只好去学法律"。

    

上了大学以后，我跟包伟民老师有一点不同，我从来没上过宋史课程，因为当时没有老师教宋史。我自己关于宋史的初步知识，是从张广达老师的通史课《中国古代史》里学到的。我们大二时，王永兴老师和张广达老师开了《敦煌学研究》，我们跟着这两位先生真正进了历史学的门。那时候星期六排半天的课，所有的星期六下午，王永兴老师和张广达老师会带着选课的学生读《旧唐书·职官志》和《新唐书·百官志》，我对职官制度多少有些了解，是从那个时候开始的。当时选修课少，选择余地小，我们班41个人大概有十多位选这门课。到准备考研究生的时候，就碰到这样一个问题：如果大家都去考隋唐史，班里的同学肯定会自己挤自己。于是我决定报考当时很少人报的宋史，然后就一直在宋史这个方向里。

    

其实并不是事先认为宋史有多大一片天地，但是进来以后发现，宋史的好处是空间比较大。所谓"空间比较大"，主要有两个方面的原因：一是从近代以来，先秦秦汉史、魏晋南北朝史、隋唐史都有新材料出现，也都有非常扎实的研究；宋史研究跟这些朝代的研究相比，不很成体系，深度也不够，所以研究的空间很大。现在说"宋代历史的再认识"，其实就是说这个领域的研究有些方面没有那么成熟，一些成说定论也还值得斟酌，再认识的空间相对开阔。另一方面，也是指材料的开拓、利用这些方面空间比较大。如果跟先秦史、魏晋南北朝史或者隋唐史研究者的研究方式比一比，就能看出，我们对材料的敏感度、利用开掘程度都远远不如那些学者。这就留给后人比较大的驰骋涵泳的空间。这几个方面是影响我、让我在宋史这个圈子里继续走下去的重要原因。

    

伊佩霞："我对宋朝的印象非常好。我喜欢宋代的艺术、喜欢士人作为社会主导阶级的理念、喜欢宋朝的城市生活。当时谢和耐的《蒙元入侵前夜的中国日常生活》对宋朝的城市生活有浓墨重彩的描述。宋朝有一种文明的理念，用文明抵抗军事。而我们那一代人都反战。"

法国汉学家谢和耐（JacquesGernet，1921—）《蒙元入侵前夜的中国日常生活》（1959）中译本（刘东译，北京大学出版社，2008）书影。

·  学宋史，从哪本书开始读  ·

    

赵冬梅：刚才包老师、邓老师都提到了材料的问题。第二个问题就是关于宋史研究的材料和材料解读。我读大学的时候，邓老师在我那一届第一次教宋史专题，那时候邓老师跟我们说，宋史研究史料的量是最合适的，不多不少。理想的状态是，如果你正常用功，一辈子足以穷尽。这是我们当年被诱导进入这一领域的重要原因。现在我也这样劝诱我的学生。

    

随着各种数据库的建设，如今史料变得相对容易得到。历史学中比拼的功夫有一个就是谁能够获得并使用更多的材料，用别人没用过的材料。但时代的进步对史学研究提出了更高的要求。站在现在这个时代，我想问，如果你打算将有限的生命投入无限的宋史研究中，以个体生命的长度来制定你的学习计划，各位老师会给青年学生什么样的建议？从什么书开始读起，怎样读？

    

包弼德：我来讲一个故事。十几年前，我请王曾瑜先生来给我哈佛博士班的学生介绍一下中国大陆学术界的重要研究课题。他来了以后却决定临时把题目换成关于宋史研究的基本训练。他建议学生先从《资治通鉴》读起，然后过渡到《〈资治通鉴〉长编》《建炎以来系年要录》《旧唐书》《新唐书》《五代史》等等。我的学生听了以后很纳闷，如果研究历史就是一本一本地读史料的话，我们还何必写历史呢？觉得这不是一个研究历史的方法。

    

我同意宋史研究材料"不多不少"这个看法，我研究生的时候就决定把所有宋朝的著作都看一遍，结果我是看过了，但没读过。比如宋朝的文集我都看过一遍，但那只是快看，不是真正的读。外国学生读中文书很慢，很难在一生里把宋朝的东西都看完。但我想（要研究的话）还是有两个步骤。第一步，你要考虑自己的领域是什么。如果你研究社会史，那么和研究思想史的人看的东西是不一样的。你要问自己，宋朝的资料中哪一个在当时最有影响力？为什么？这可以说是一个初步的研究题目。第二步，看现代学者的著作，哪一部有影响力，为什么它在现代的学术界里会有影响力。如果你研究思想史，那么《朱子语类》和《近思录》一定要看，王安石、司马光、苏轼、程颐、程颢、陆九渊、杨万里等等也一定要看。

    

伊佩霞：我同意包弼德教授的看法。美国的宋史研究训练不要求研究生在展开工作前先通读《长编》等基本典籍。我们认为，学生对材料的掌握就是在做研究时同步完成的。做完博士论文以后，学生们开始进入大量各式各样的史料，然后开始慢慢有了研究的感觉。

    

要说今天学宋史的学生应该读什么，如果是以中文为母语，从《夷坚志》开始是一个不错的选择。当然非母语的学生也可以读。

    

我认为所有研究宋史的人都应该读《宋会要》，了解当时的典章制度。墓志铭也应该是每个人都下功夫去读的。然后读地方志。即便不研究思想史，《朱子语类》涉及许多论题，也值得一读。最好至少通读一部文集，理解其中涉及的各种不同话题。我建议研究生选择一个感兴趣的题目，在此前提下穷尽所有材料，仔细检视每一条材料，比对一手材料和学者对此所作研究之间的联系。一手材料里总是有更多蛛丝马迹可寻。研究生做博士论文不能忘记自己研究这个题目的初衷，你做研究总是为了要发现一些东西。

    

包伟民：我们读书的时候我的硕士老师包括博士老师要求我们读《长编》，他不建议我们读《会要》，一般南宋肯定是《要录》。在老先生眼里，如果这种书你们都不能读，那还读什么研究生呢，卷铺盖就是了。但是，老先生们读书的起点和我们读书的起点、和在座同学读书的起点都不同。我在北大大考时，邓广铭先生跟我说，你别怕，我们就考一本书，《资治通鉴》。

    

我在浙大时，曾让有个研究生先读《宋史纪事本末》。这不是一本资料书，但我认为，当他对整个宋代没有任何概念的时候，这本书是入门书，可能有帮助。我思考的第一个起点是，对不同年代的学生，解决的办法可能不一样。我希望我现在的研究生每一类的书，文集、方志或笔记，挑一种，卷帙不要太大，认真读。我的出发点是，尽管宋代书那么多，但各个不同类别的书各有特点，挑一种有代表性的认真读，就了解了这一类书所记载文本的大致特点。这样，当你在这个领域内需要大量引用那类书的时候，可能就有帮助；同时这也能帮助你建立对整个宋代文献各个不同文本之间特点的比较。

    

我不希望现在的年轻学生们先去读《长编》，因为对现在脑子里只有手机、电脑，对历史文本特别生疏的学生来说，像编年体这类没有故事性、很片段的资料，他们建立不起前后联系。所以可能不是很好的入门书。

    

这个话题也牵涉到数据库。我现在经常用数据库，觉得非常好。首先，我知道哪个问题用哪个词汇进行检索，但是如果关键词没办法把那条材料抓出来，那么数据库对你也帮助不大。其次，你将一段文本从整个文本体系中拉出，能够感觉背后整个文本背景，当然这需要你用以往的积累去弥补。在检索出每一条材料后，都找到原文通篇读一下，会更好。另外检索也有副作用。过去参加很多研究生答辩，我们大约能读得出"检索体"，就是这条资料肯定不是学生自己读出来的，而是数据库找出来的；觉得出来，这条材料与论文里引用的其他文本间存在距离。因此，脑中对不同文本的特点要有概念，才能发挥数据库的长处，避免其弱点。

    

关于从哪本书开始读的问题。我还想提到的一点是，如今文本也是需要解构的对象。如果给你2016年的《北京日报》，让你研究2016年的北京，你大概能做，因为你生活在北京，每条材料背后的把戏你大约能读得出来。但是如果是公元1000年，给你一年宋代的邸报，让你去解读宋代，那就有很多隔阂了，因为你不生活在那个年代，读出邸报背后的信息很困难。

    

如何形成透过文字来阅读的能力应该说是现在最大的挑战。我最近利用地方志比较多，会思考地方志的很多记载。例如，大家都知道宋代的乡里制度，到了宋代以后，唐代的制度已经给替换掉了，乡和里已经不是同一个东西了；但一直到南宋，甚至到元代，地方志上所记载的80%以上仍然是某某乡、某某里，当时的都、堡，大部分都没有记载。以往的前辈回避了这个问题：为什么到南宋都堡制、乡都制是主流的时候，地方志还是用乡里制进行记载？这就要问当时地方志的编纂者是怎么想的，为什么这样记，而不是那样记。如果学生对每一类文献都挑选一部代表性的来精读，而且能提出一两点问题，那么对这一类文献的掌握就相对深入了。

    

邓小南：国内的训练背景与海外的训练背景是很不一样的，这一点大家要有非常清醒的认识。没有一个唯一的"好"方式。只是在特定的环境下，针对特定的学生，可能某一种方式是比较合理的。所以大家要根据自己所处的不同环境、需要，做出不同的安排。

    

另外，我们在阅读、训练、选择的过程里，也有精读和泛读的区别。两者在材料的集中程度和阅读方式上有很大区别。我们研究中也有类似问题，即是"从点到面"还是"从面到点"，两种方式各有优势。泛读先有面上的感觉和体悟，当你逼近到某一点时，会找得比较准确，不容易偏移。然而，像包伟民老师讲的，如果这个学生没有什么接触宋代材料的背景，他现在又希望比较快捷地进入研究领域，那也许从点上开始比较容易。这时候要特别小心，这个点必须是一个能扩张的"点"，而且是各种史料相对成"组"的点。也就是说，如果你研究《夷坚志》里的某一条材料，你不能光看这一条材料，你要把它和它周边的背景材料联系起来，变成一个材料组。一个组合笼罩在一个"点"上，这个点才会做得比较确切。所以，我们不管从哪一种方式入手，都要知道入手方式的利弊，要选择相对合理的路径。

    

我以前上《宋辽金史》的课，对本科生，我也是让他们读《宋史纪事本末》，让研究生读《长编》。我父亲作导师，也是这么教我们的。但是现在我也和包伟民老师有共同的反思，实际上研究生阶段选择学宋史的学生，不见得将来是要做宋史的，他可能是以宋史作为一个平台或者作为选择的一个出发点，来试一试他的各方面能力，培育他的多方面基本素质。如果我们看到这类求学目标，把培养方向放在这里，确实不必上来就读《长编》，也许接触各种不同类型的材料，让学生打下比较广泛的基础，是更合理的。

    

所以我想说，国内和国外培养学生的方式、阅读的选择很不一样；就学生个人而言，准备一辈子做宋史，还是来摸摸学术路径的可能性，或者来培养多方面的基本能力，选择也是很不一样的。老师们的培养方式也不一样，像我父亲他们会说要读《长编》，但漆侠先生是领他的学生读《文献通考》，也有老师主张读《宋史》，黄宽重老师从读文集开始。所以我觉得没有哪一个是唯一合理的选择，但你不管选择从哪里入手，你应该知道，你这种入手方式特有的好处和不足在什么地方。

    

另外，我还想说到的一点是，1987-88年我在美国，每周去参加两次郝若贝（Robert Hartwell）教授的读书会，当时给我留下的最深的印象，就是他非常注重社会科学的著作。在他的课堂上，会读诺思（Douglass North）讲制度经济学的东西，会和研究法国中世纪的教授联合开课，一个人讲中国的中世纪，一个人讲法国的中世纪，而且他那个时候已经开始做他的电子数据库。他对我的提醒是，要注意社会科学对人文、历史学科的刺激。不论你是学宋史还是其他学科，尤其在国内读博士的同学，要特别有这样的意识。在西方的大学里，博士生可能要选择两个到四个方面作为重点学习的领域（fields），这是一种教育体制内的要求，但是国内大学没有这样的要求，所以更要靠大家有意识地往这些方面努力，争取有所补充。

    

包伟民："唐宋城市史的起点文献是加藤繁《宋代都市的发展》这篇文章。……像加藤繁这样的大学者也不可能把一个题目做完，更何况那时候的研究条件不如我们。所以大家应该有信心。"

日本历史学家加藤繁（1880—1946）《宋代都市的发展》（1931）一文,收入《中国经济史考证》（东洋文库，1952）。图为中译本《中国经济史考证》（吴杰译，中华书局，2012）书影。

·  年轻学者如何选择论文题目  ·

    

赵冬梅：就博士论文的题目来说，每个人的选择肯定有各种各样的偶然性，但是这里面应该也有共通的东西。那么各位老师认为，怎样的题目才是有价值的题目？

    

伊佩霞：我认为选题很难。至少在美国人们压力很大，要尽早确定选题，写一份出色的开题报告并进行答辩。要是贸然进入，很可能就会在这个题目上胶着十年。理想情况下，我认为可以通过比较阅读获取灵感。如果你研究宋史，可以多读一些明清的材料，尤其是一些二手资料。很多情况下，在前朝或后朝的某些领域，已经有学者做了有意义且深入的研究，但是宋史领域还没有做过。所以这可能是一个有趣的着手点。

    

我认为也要和中国以外的地区比较。我们会要求学生选择一个中国以外的研究领域，学生们通常会选择欧洲历史。你也可以观察欧洲史研究者的研究方法，或许可以将他们研究宗教和城市的方式运用于中国史的研究。艺术史领域最好等你阅读了足够的一手文献，知道这到底是否可行以后才去做研究。我看到很多人开题报告写得很好，但是没办法开展研究，因为材料太少了。在我工作的华盛顿大学，系主任想让学生的博士论文快速过审，学院想让候选人更快地过审，所以你必须在某种程度上对抗这一系统，最终选一个好题目。

    

包弼德：我认为最重要的是按照你自己的兴趣去选题目。很多题目或领域不一定是按照朝代发展的。比如，所谓的宋明理学不是从宋朝初年开始的，而是在熙宁年间、元祐年间开始发展，到元朝、在蒙古人的领导之下才真正建立的。所以朝代固然有用，但是从社会、经济、文化的立场上来讲，我们也有别的视角。

    

如果你对某一个特定的领域感兴趣，例如家族的发展，思想的转换，或者价值观的变迁，那么你需要考虑，在这个领域之内，在当时的历史情境中什么问题是重要的。有的学生有很有意思的话题，可是和当时的历史情景根本没有关系。或者，有些话题在今天的学术界很重要，但在当时并没有什么材料支撑。一个真正重要的话题，在当时的历史情境中就应当是重要的，材料也肯定足够。

    

可是，上面我提到的所谓领域和话题还不能算是一个研究题目。研究题目是什么呢？如果当时某个现象是重要的，那我们需要去解释那个现象为什么会变得重要。为什么本来一个不太重要的趋势会变成非常主流、非常重要的现象。然后你要了解这些现象在当代的学术界是如何被解释的，如果现有的解释已经充足、有说服力，那这个现象也许你就不必再研究，如果现有的解释不能说服你，那你再动手研究。

    

我本来研究宋史是出于对制度史的兴趣，我比较常用地方志、《宋会要》这样的材料。可是后来开始念四书五经，我的兴趣就变成了思想史。在唐宋变迁之际，在思想史方面最重要的现象就是道学的兴起， 同时，在社会史方面也发生了从唐代的士家大族到宋代的士人社会的变迁。我认为这两个现象应该有关联：社会变迁就是精英的变迁，也有思想的变迁。怎么去解释宋明理学、道学变成了主流思想呢？我对当时已有的解释并不满意，所以就有了我的博士论文。

    

我博士论文的题目是关于苏轼和苏门四学士的。他们觉得他们所投入的文学是当时思想文化的主流，其实，他们并不知道自己其实只是支流而已。我读《宋元学案》，发现苏轼和王安石是最后几卷，这意味着他们根本不能说是中国思想发展的主流，可是当时他们认为自己是主流。他们为什么会这样认为？我当时觉得这是值得研究的。

    

伊佩霞：我想补充一点，中国和外国的研究者在选题上很不同，是因为（对我们来说）让人对你的题目感兴趣很重要。我认为，如果要一直保持你的研究兴趣，就必须想象有一个和你趣味相投的读者群。比如你可以想象一下有多少人对宋代的思想史感兴趣，会读你的作品。一般来说你研究的历史时段越早，找到很多读者的概率会越小。做清史肯定比做宋史得到的读者多。到底是研究前人没有开垦过的领域，还是做别人做过的题目从而可以与同行对话和交流，这两者之间有一个平衡的。

    

包弼德：我也要补充一点。伊佩霞教授讲得很对，我们知道她本来是做唐史的，后来变成宋史。我们的解释是因为研究宋史的人比研究唐史的人聪明——至少是更多。（笑）但我不完全同意说选择的题目必须一定得有人感兴趣。我开始做博士论文的时候，想从思想史的角度研究苏轼和他的弟子，我还记得我第一个老师非常反对，他说，文学和历史没什么关系，他们并不重要。我说，可是当时的人都说文学很重要。我问老师，你怎么知道他们不重要。他说，我是中国人，所以我知道。有时候你要反对你的老师。后来我也不知道他有没有接受我的看法，大概一直都没接受吧。

    

包伟民：在中国现在的学术生态面前，即便读了博士，还是有大量的博士去做了公务员，去做了其他工作。因为学术领域显然不是一个轻松的就业市场。如果在这种情况下，我们的考虑可能会更复杂一点。

    

所以我有时会特别功利主义，博士论文体量大，如果选错了，回头过来另选一个那就要命，恐怕没有让你推倒重来另选一个的余地。现实地考虑，首先得有足够东西写，也就是史学叙述的量得占比较大，可能只有很小一部分体现你的思想。

    

要有叙述的内容，得有相应资料的支持。但更为难的是，究竟什么是问题？邓老师老说要有"问题意识"，也就是要找有牵动性、联系到的社会现象比较广泛深刻的问题。但在不同的历史时期，我们的看法是不一样的。如果现在有人写一篇宋代农民战争的博士论文，感兴趣的人不会太多。所以我非常同意刚才两位老师说的，你得想一想，你挑的这个问题有没有人感兴趣。

    

所以我不太赞成同学做没人做过的题目，因为没人做过其实也就说明没人感兴趣。现在不可能再有没人做过的好题目留在那里。今天大家感兴趣、听众比较多的恐怕多半是老题目。我想我们的本事就应该在如何把旧题目做出新的味道。

    

我举我自己的例子，我做城市史，当时非常犹豫，这是一个老题目，但我很有兴趣。唐宋城市史的起点文献是加藤繁《宋代都市的发展》这篇文章。我想我如果不能在这篇文献中找出可以深入的余地来，就放弃这个题目。于是我把加藤繁文章中的每一条材料都对着原书读，对了以后我慢慢有了信心——像加藤繁这样的大学者也不可能把一个题目做完，更何况那时候的研究条件不如我们。所以大家应该有信心。

    

邓小南：论文选题确实比较困难。田余庆先生曾经说，一个做历史的人如果找不到题目，那就是一个致命伤。到底该怎么选题，我认为，首先从阅读中来。包括阅读加藤繁这样的大师的一些著作；也包括阅读史料。另外一个很重要的来源，是从比较里来，很多想法是从比较中产生思考，进而"激活"的。就是伊佩霞教授刚才说的，这个时代和其他的、前后时代相比较，有什么特殊的地方。我们经常看到，某些时期会集中、大量地出现过去很少见到的话语表述，出现一些特别的处理问题方式，这些可能就是值得琢磨处，可能就是选题的方向。

    

我们说到选题，首先是一个方向，然后才是一个题目。方向的确定很重要。比方说，我们都学过隋唐史，通史课程都是从唐讲到宋的，那么宋到底跟唐有什么继承性，有什么不一样？像包弼德老师关注的是从思想上有什么异同，伊佩霞老师关注社会生活方面有什么异同，我关注从政治史方面有什么异同。我们读陈寅恪先生的著作都会注意到，他说唐代中后期河朔地区的胡化是个严重问题；那么为什么到宋代"胡化"就没有了呢？河北、山西是五代、宋初政治活动的重要"基地"，胡化现象怎么淡出甚至被消解了呢？从长时段来看，这显然是个问题。但很多年里没有人讨论这些，好像唐代的问题在唐代就结束了，宋代的问题都是另外发生的。实际上这些问题都很重要。

    

另外，我们的研究都有特定时段，需要选择一个合适的时间单元。我们研究宋代，不是从公元960年开始，任何问题都有它的前因，可能也有其后来的影响，所以你不管研究什么，都要找到合适的时间单元。比方有些问题，从晚唐、五代到宋初，尽管跨越三朝，但可能从属于一个时间单元，当时碰到的挑战差不多，解决应对的思路也是渐进的。类似地，如果研究思想史，可能有另外的时间单元；研究家族史，又有不同的时间单元。所以时间单元也是一个很重要的问题。

    

刚才说到"牵动"，什么是牵动？要靠问题去刺激问题、引领研究，这就是"牵动"。有一些问题，起初是别人提出的，有的他认为已经解决，有的还搁置在那里。其中有些值得跟进思考。包伟民老师刚才说，大面上的问题我们确实都有所覆盖，但是有些问题到现在还没有人去动。之所以注意到这些问题，是由现在的一些研究议题带动、"激活"的。

我举一个例子，我关注宋代的尚书内省其实是受罗祎楠启发。罗祎楠当年跟葛兆光老师写硕士论文，我读他的硕士论文时，注意到他讨论元丰期间官僚机制的层级化，官僚机构分别处理不同的事务。论文中有一段说，来自各方面的报告、请示、章奏都送到禁中，然后皇帝将这些事务分类后送到不同的部门处理。当时我问他，你以为皇帝是个收发室？皇帝若是负责分拣材料，每天就不用做别的事了。这一问题当时确实不好回答。可是这个问号一直压在我的心里：当时这些材料进入禁中后，谁来做分类、编目、筛查、分发这类事务？追踪下去，后来就有了写尚书内省这篇文章。

    

所以有些问题，需要有敏感，然后去跟踪。有时候我们自己写文章，觉得哪个地方可能有疏漏，一时处理不了，可以加一个注释，容日后再讨论；也有时候，我们没加这个注释，把一片空白暂时存下来了。但是这些压着的东西，你心里得要明白，要知道这就是将来追踪的一个线头。线索是靠线头拉出来的，一些原有的东西会激发新的问题意识。

    

另外，我会跟学生说，本科论文我觉得选题范围可以宽泛些，本科时期属于思想方式和学术议题可以相对自由驰骋的阶段，不妨多接触各类内容。但是进入硕士研究生阶段，应该找相对比较实在的题目，例如制度史、社会史、经济史之类，这样比较容易凿实历史学的基本训练；换句话说，不宜把选题重点放在"书写"上。历史"书写"确实是很重要的问题，但是你要分辨什么东西是"书写"的结果，剥开书写对于史实的层累式包裹，需要有实在的基础功力。所以最好首先走稳"实"的这一步，在此基础上，对话语之类"虚"的东西才能把握得当。

    

不同时代的不同学术圈，确实有不同的研究兴趣。对这些兴趣的感悟，需要有所平衡。一方面，我们不能不顾及学术圈当下的学术兴趣；另一方面，我觉得某些兴趣是靠前沿的研究引领出来的。比如文书的研究，十年以前没法说谁对它有什么兴趣，但是这些年就很不一样了。当然这与徐谓礼文书的发现有关系，但在这之前，也已经有了一定的基础。现在社科院历史所黄正建老师还就此申请了国家重大研究课题。所以我觉得真正扎实而有意义的研究成果，应该会有引领的力量。

    

还有一点是，我们现在写论文，大多关心有些现象背后为什么是这样，关心why，这当然是很重要的。但不仅如此，我们还应该非常关心how，关心路径的问题，关心制度、设想如何实现，如何扭曲。比如我做宋代官员的考核，除了研究书面规定之外，还要问朝廷如何知道地方官员有什么表现，根据什么原则来决定是惩罚还是表彰？实践往往与宣称不同，从初衷到结果，其中有很长一段路，有非常大的演变空隙。将来如果要讨论2016年的交通状况，我们肯定不能按政府公布的交通规则来研究；但这也不等于说这个规则没有用，如果没有交通规则，那么交通状况肯定更加混乱。究竟起到作用的有哪些因素，如何相互作用，怎样一步步走过来的？桥梁、路径的问题非常值得关注，这也是选题时值得注意的方面。

邓小南："郝若贝在课堂上，会读诺思讲制度经济学的东西，会和研究法国中世纪的教授联合开课。他对我的提醒是，要注意社会科学对人文、历史学科的刺激。……我特别认同伊佩霞教授说的，我们读社会科学是为了找一种研究方式，找一条思考的道路；而不是为了追求新鲜的词语与结论。"

美国汉学家郝若贝（1932—1996）搜集并建立中国中古史料研究资料库，成为后来"中国历代人物传记资料库"的基础，他将资料库赠与哈佛燕京学社，目前由哈佛大学费正清中国研究中心、台湾"中央研究院"历史语言研究所与北京大学中国古代史研究中心负责建设。

·  社会科学和历史研究之间的关系  ·

    

赵冬梅：下面我想问的是社会科学理论和历史研究之间的关系。其实四位老师都在不同程度上做跨学科研究。包伟民老师的城市史、财政史研究，伊佩霞老师的家族和女性研究，邓老师也做过女性研究，以及信息渠道研究，其实这些研究本质上都受到社会科学的深刻影响。包弼德老师除了是一个杰出的历史学家，还是哈佛地理分析中心（CGA）的主任、中国中国历代人物传记资料库（CBDB）的领导者。

    

我们做研究时需要社会科学理论。而社会科学理论，目前为止大部分来自西方经验，是对西方经验的总结。哈佛大学裴宜理教授曾经批评中国社会科学工作者，置身于如此广阔宏大、前所未有的变革中，到目前为止却尚无突出的创造力。中国过去和现在的经历与西方确实不同，我们在研究中国历史时应该如何摆正社会科学理论和历史研究之间的关系？

    

包弼德：思想史可以说是距离社会科学理论最远的。他们三位可以说是社会科学的历史学者，我不是。最近两三年，有中国研究生说社会科学理论的思考方式和议题都是西方的产物，同中国没有什么关系，我觉得这个观点不太能接受。比如，经济学也算社会科学，我们不能说它只是西洋的，跟中国社会没有什么关系——司马迁的时候就已经开始讲经济了。

    

19世纪时出现社会理论（social theory），也只是在西欧，法国、英国、德国这三个地方。为什么是那里出现社会理论，这本身也是个历史问题。那么，社会科学理论的一些基本假设，是不是一定限定于西欧自身历史、因此对我们思考中国历史就没有启发了呢？我想不一定是。如果因为今天的主流社会科学理论具有欧洲思想史的背景，并因此来断定说社会科学理论就只对研究西方有效，我觉得这个观点是值得怀疑的。

    

伊佩霞：就我个人而言，社会科学是我选择研究中国历史的一个重要原因。我在芝加哥大学的第一年上了许多必修课。在社会科学课上我们读马克思和韦伯。我觉得他们提出的问题非常重要，但主要基于西方的经验。如果要得到证明，应该有人去研究其他地区的历史，中国是最大的值得研究的案例，但是当时并没有什么人研究中国。我就一直想着这件事。

    

我想研究贵族，这是一个普遍的现象。家族、性别、国家建设、军队、战争，这些在世界上都是普遍的议题。我还怀有艺术史研究的信念，但我不指望做欧洲艺术史的人对中国艺术史有什么关注。不过我确实认为我们已经取得了一些进步。我参加一些会议的时候，我成了代表中国的人，带入更多外部的视角。今天做历史社会学的人确实觉得纳入其他地区的证据会更好。比如，有一种观点认为，帝国需要更多的官僚制度，比如印度和大英帝国。但是我研究宋史发现，辽比宋更帝国化，但是宋比辽更官僚制度化。所以有时候你得承认，这个理论只在一定范围内有效，有些情况下就不起作用了。

    

我认为像国家、战争、家族这些话题在世界范围内有足够的共性，所以你可以加入中国的证据，并引起人们重视。杰克·古迪（Jack Goody）就很重视中国，并努力了解中国。他是人类学家，专注于前现代世界。阅读他关于财产、识字率等许多不同话题的作品，你可以看到他是如何运用中国的证据的。我觉得从更广阔的视角去观察事物与我们研究中国之间有积极的关系。我个人不会致力于新的理论的研究，但是我希望我的读者能从我这里获得一些关于中国的有趣材料，他们也可以运用这些材料，思考那些宏大议题。

    

包伟民：现在已经没有人会质疑，历史学科需要掌握一定的社会科学的知识。我自己的学习过程大约是这样的：要弄准很多概念。我的博士论文涉及财政领域，我不能完全用宋人财政领域的概念，而要去看现代人财政领域相关的书籍，去读这个学科的本科教科书，把相关概念弄熟。与其他领域学者的接触对我们的思考会有帮助。

    

邓小南：我特别认同伊佩霞教授说的，我们读社会科学是为了找一种研究方式，找一条思考的道路；而不是为了追求新鲜的词语与结论。像古迪的社会人类学，也许我并不做那样的议题，但是那些研究对我们做社会史、制度史会有启发。把握社会科学的"真谛"并不容易，我感觉，从一些经典、从研究范例入手去读社会科学的东西，可能相对比较有效。另外，某种程度上要在"对话"的过程中去读。有些东西我们一开始会觉得非常生涩，但在一个对话的环境里，会有逐步深入阅读境界的机会。

访谈录（2017.4.21）| 文研学术·包弼德、伊佩霞、包伟民、邓小南在北大文研院的座谈

Evernote helps you remember everything and get organized effortlessly. Download Evernote.

LRB · Michael Wood · Empson’s Buddha

Empson's Buddha

Michael Wood

'There is something very Far Eastern about this,' William Empson says in Some Versions of Pastoral, meaning the manner of Marvell's poem 'The Garden'. The remark is mildly intriguing but pretty loose, and even if we think of Empson as having the thought while he lectured to his Japanese students before he wrote it down, the Orient still seems stereotyped and far away. We lose this impression if we keep reading, because we soon learn that Empson has in mind 'the seventh Buddhist state of enlightenment', in which a person is 'neither conscious nor not conscious'. We can't know from his criticism or his poems, though, that while in the East he chased up images of Buddha with what his biographer John Haffenden calls 'a learned amateur interest amounting to an obsession'. The offhand phrase about Marvell is a bit of English disguise: camouflaged passion rather than easy generality.

Empson taught literature in Japan from 1931 to 1934, and in China from 1937 to 1939. After the war he returned to China for five years before settling into a life divided between Sheffield and London. In 1932 he fell in love with some eighth-century Buddhist statues in temples near Nara in Japan, 'the only accessible Art I find myself able to care about', he told a friend. For several years he spent much of his spare time travelling to look at famous images, taking in, as he himself reported, 'Japan, Korea, China, Indochina, Burma, India, Ceylon and the United States'. He said that although he was 'in no way an expert in this very technical field' he had 'looked at Buddha all right', and seen in situ all the statues or carvings he talked about.

Talked about where? Well, in The Face of the Buddha (Oxford, £30), the book he finished in 1947 and gave to his friend John Davenport, who left it in a taxi. Davenport really thought this was what happened, and told Empson so. Empson died in 1984 believing the work was gone for ever. Then the typescript surfaced in 2003 among some papers that had been acquired by the British Library. This is the book we can now read, in an attentive and intelligent edition by Rupert Arrowsmith.

For Empson the two chief Western assumptions about Buddhist sculpture – 'the faces have no expression at all … or else they all sneer' – are about as far from the truth as they could be. 'The drooping eyelids of the great creatures are heavy with patience and suffering,' he writes, 'and the subtle irony which offends us in their raised eyebrows … is in effect an appeal to us to feel, as they do, that it is odd that we let our desires subject us to so much torment in the world.'

Empson liked the mixture of otherworldliness and humanity in so many of the Buddha figures he saw. Of a sixth-century statue in Seoul that represents 'the coming Buddha not yet born' he writes: 'It is in a subtle way not so much childish as casual; in its dream it is skimming the surface of human affairs just as the right hand is just brushing the cheek.' Some of the images were too spiritualised or smug for him, too remote from the earthly sorrows they invite us to overcome – this was when they assumed what he calls 'a sort of transcendental pout'. But most of them managed to suggest a deep engagement with a creaturely world they have left behind or not yet entered. He liked the philosophy behind the faces too. There was sacrifice in it as there is in Christianity, but the Bodhisattva 'gives up not this life but (broadly speaking) his death'. This formulation is rather obscure, but seems to rest on Empson's admiration for a stance that includes death in life rather than making it into a platform for a segregated eternity.

Empson's writing on the images is lively and quirky, and at first sight seems a little provincial, tucked away in a narrow corner of time and space and class. One statue looks 'comically' young, 'like a Mabel Lucie Attwell baby'. Another appears 'beefy', and on still another 'the straight sag of the jowl gives a Mussolini effect.' Many of them have slit eyes because round eyes 'would give the coy surprise of George Robey'. The cross-cultural juggling here is pretty amazing: ancient Eastern artists are said to be avoiding an effect a 20th-century English comedian made famous. 'I always expected surprise' was Robey's verbal version of what his face said.

But Empson is not universalising Robey, he is localising coyness, of which he thinks the East must have had its share. The principle – cultures are different but not always or only different – is precisely what allows him to say what he sees in the faces: 'a gentle placid humanity and … the dignity of the aristocrat'; 'pride and suffering and … a certain cunning'; a mouth that 'is plaintive and even ready to squall', an expression of 'refined, coy distaste', a look that 'is masculine and foxy'. Of course these readings are personal, but so are different photographs of the same object, and as Empson says 'photography … should not be blamed for being a branch of interpretative criticism.' Nor should descriptive prose, and Empson remarked in a draft for his book that 'the faces are magnificent; it is a strange confession of helplessness if we have to keep mum for fear of talking nonsense.' Not that he was ever afraid of that, although he talked very little nonsense considering the risks he took.

The controversial claim in the book – it wouldn't be a work by Empson if it wasn't both making an argument and looking for one – is that many (not all) faces of Buddha are asymmetrical, and that their two halves tell different stories. 'It seems to me,' he writes, 'that the chief novelty of the Far Eastern Buddhist sculpture, beyond what had already been done in India and central Asia, is the use of asymmetry to make the face more human.' 'More human' for Empson means more complex, even conflicted: 'The asymmetrical face demands a certain humanising of the god, an attempt to get under his skin.' At such moments the Buddha's face 'is at once blind and all-seeing … so at once sufficient to itself and of universal charity'. As Sharon Cameron shrewdly says in her study of impersonality, Empson doesn't distinguish between a contradiction or paradox of this last kind and other interesting modes of difference and connection (oppositions, incongruities, incompatibilities). But that is his point: the faces both bring together and separate many attitudes and forms of thought.

Is he right? Arrowsmith tells us that the 'camp' of contemporary scholars 'is divided'. Some express no interest (or belief) in Empson's asymmetries, another finds Empson's ideas about their use 'entirely convincing', and Arrowsmith, while not really concealing his fondness for Empson's view, says 'it is up to the reader to decide.' It is hard to see how the reader could do this, but one thing is clear from the illustrations in the book, many of which Empson collected himself. The asymmetries in the faces are real, however they got there and whatever they mean. It's not quite enough to say that all human faces are asymmetrical, that we all look different when seen from different angles. The sculptors wouldn't have to copy this fact – supposing it is a fact – if they didn't want to, or didn't see some sense in it. Indeed it might be, from a religious point of view, a fine fact to rectify in art. But from the actual existence of asymmetry of human faces to believing all the talk, very common in the 1930s, about the meanings of their right and left sides (power to help on the right, detachment on the left) is a large step. Empson, characteristically, was sceptical about that scheme but uses it anyway, taking a photograph of Churchill as an example that will lead him back to Buddha: 'The administrator is on the right … and on the left are the petulance, the romanticism, the gloomy moral strength and the range of imaginative power.' I don't see why the descriptions wouldn't work just as well if they were reversed, and the idea of dividing everything by two offers a rather impoverished idea of ambiguity, especially coming from Empson. But are we going to say instead that faces don't mean anything, and just keep quiet for fear of talking nonsense?

Evernote helps you remember everything and get organized effortlessly. Download Evernote.

世界读书日 | 余英时教你如何读书做一个有知识的人

2017-04-23 海外汉学研究

余英时，1930年1月22日生于天津，今天是余先生87岁生日。余先生原籍安徽潜山，系当代著名历史学家、汉学家。香港新亚书院文史系首届毕业生，哈佛大学史学博士，先后师从钱穆、杨联陞二位先生。台湾中央研究院院士、美国哲学学会院士。曾任密歇根大学副教授、哈佛大学教授、耶鲁大学讲座教授、普林斯顿大学校聘讲座教授、康奈尔大学第一任胡适讲座访问教授和新亚书院院长兼香港中文大学副校长等。2006年，余英时荣获有"人文诺贝尔奖"之称的"克鲁格人文与社会科学终身成就奖"。 2014年荣获唐奖首届汉学奖。

著有《汉代中外经济交通》《历史与思想》《史学与传统》《中国思想传统的现代诠释》《文化评论与中国情怀》《历史人物与文化危机》、《士与中国文化》《中国近世宗教伦理与商人精神》《朱熹的历史世界》、《方以智晚节考》《论戴震与章学诚》等。 

---

中国传统的读书法，讲得最亲切有味的无过于朱熹。《朱子语类》中有《总论为学之方》一卷和《读书法》两卷，我希望读者肯花点时间去读一读，对于怎样进入中国旧学问的世界一定有很大的帮助。朱子不但现身说法，而且也总结了荀子以来的读书经验，最能为我们指点门迳。

我们不要以为这是中国的旧方法，和今天西方的新方法相比早已落伍了。我曾经比较过朱子读书法和今天西方所谓"诠释学"的异同，发现彼此相通之处甚多。"诠释学"所分析的各种层次，大致都可以在朱子的《语类》和《文集》中找得到。

古今中外论读书，大致都不外专精和博览两途。

"专精"是指对古代经典之作必须下基础工夫。古代经典很多，今天已不能人人尽读。像清代戴震，不但十三经本文全能背诵，而且"注"也能背涌，只有"疏"不尽记得，这种工夫今天已不可能。因为我们的知识范围扩大了无数倍，无法集中在几部经、史上面。但是我们若有志治中国学问，还是要选几部经典，反覆阅读，虽不必记诵，至少要熟。近人余嘉锡在他的《四库提要辩证》的序录中说："董遇谓读书百遍，而义自见，固是不易之论。百遍纵或未能，三复必不可少。"至少我们必须在自己想进行专门研究的范围之内，作这样的努力。经典作品大致都已经过古人和今人的一再整理，我们早已比古人占许多便宜了。不但中国传统如此，西方现代的人文研究也还是如此。从前芝加哥大学有"伟大的典籍"（GreatBooks）的课程，也是要学生精熟若干经典。近来虽稍松弛，但仍有人提倡精读柏拉图的《理想国》之类的作品。

精读的书给我们建立了作学问的基地；有了基地，我们才能扩展，这就是博览了。博览也须要有重点，不是漫无目的的乱翻。现代是知识爆炸的时代，古人所谓"一物不知，儒者之耻"，已不合时宜了。所以我们必须配合着自己专业去逐步扩大知识的范围。这里需要训练自己的判断能力：哪些学科和自己的专业相关？在相关各科之中，我们又怎样建立一个循序发展的计划？各相关学科之中又有哪些书是属于"必读"的一类？这些问题我们可请教师友，也可以从现代人的著作中找到线索。这是现代大学制度给我们的特殊便利。博览之书虽不必"三复"，但也还是要择其精者作有系统的阅读，至少要一字不遗细读一遍。稍稍熟悉之后，才能"快读"、"跳读"。朱子曾说过：读书先要花十分气力才能毕一书，第二本书只用花七八分功夫便可完成了，以后越来越省力，也越来越快。这是从"十目一行"到"一目十行"的过程，无论专精和博览都无例外。

读书要"虚心"，这是中国自古相传的不二法门。

朱子说得好："读书别无法，只管看，便是法。正如呆人相似，崖来崖去，自己却未先要立意见，且虚心，只管看。看来看去，自然晓得。"这似乎是最笨的方法，但其实是最聪明的方法。我劝青年朋友们暂且不要信今天从西方搬来的许多意见，说甚么我们的脑子已不是一张白纸，我们必然带着许多"先入之见"来读古人的书，"客观"是不可能的等等昏话。正因为我们有主观，我们读书时才必须尽最大的可能来求"客观的了解"。事实证明：不同主观的人，只要"虚心"读书，则也未尝不能彼此印证而相悦以解。如果"虚心"是不可能的，读书的结果只不过各人加强已有的"主观"，那又何必读书呢？

"虚"和"谦"是分不开的。我们读经典之作，甚至一般有学术价值的今人之作，总要先存一点谦逊的心理，不能一开始便狂妄自大。这是今天许多中国读书人常犯的一种通病，尤以治中国学问的人为甚。他们往往"尊西人若帝天，视西籍如神圣"（这是邓实在1904年说的话），凭着平时所得的一点西方观念，对中国古籍横加"批判"，他们不是读书，而是像高高在上的法宫，把中国书籍当作囚犯一样来审问、逼供。如果有人认为这是"创造"的表现，我想他大可不必浪费时间去读中国书。倒不如像鲁迅所说的"中国书一本也不必读，要读便读外国书"，反而更干脆。不过读外国书也还是要谦逊，也还是不能狂妄自大。

古人当然是可以"批判"的，古书也不是没有漏洞。朱子说："看文字，且信本句，不添字，那里原有缺缝，如合子相似，自家去抉开，不是浑沦底物，硬去凿。亦不可先立说，拿古人意来凑。"读书得见书中的"缺缝"，已是有相当程度以后的事，不是初学便能达得到的境界。"硬去凿"、"先立说，拿古人意来凑"却恰恰是今天中国知识界最常见的病状。有志治中国学问的人应该好好记取朱子这几句话。

今天读中国古书确有一层新的困难，是古人没有的：我们从小受教育，已浸润在现代（主要是西方）的概念之中。例如原有的经、史、子、集的旧分类（可以《四库全书总目提要》为标准）早已为新的（也就是西方的）学科分类所取代。人类的文化和思想在大端上本多相通的地方（否则文化之间的互相了解便不可能了），因此有些西方概念可以很自然地引入中国学术传统之中，化旧成新。但有些则是西方文化传统中特有的概念，在中国找不到相当的东西；更有许多中国文化中的特殊的观念，在西方也完全不见踪迹。我们今天读中国书最怕的是把西方的观念来穿凿附会，其结果是非驴非马，制造笑柄。

我希望青年朋友有志于读古书的，最好是尽量先从中国旧传统中去求了解，不要急于用西方观念作新解。中西会通是成学之后，有了把握，才能尝试的事。即使你同时读《论语》和柏拉图的对话，也只能分别去了解其在原有文化系统中的相传旧义，不能马上想"合二为一"。

我可以负责地说一句：20世纪以来，中国学人有关中国学术的著作，其最有价值的都是最少以西方观念作比附的。如果治中国史者先有外国框框，则势必不能细心体会中国史籍的"本意"，而是把它当报纸一样的翻检，从字面上找自己所需要的东西（你们千万不要误信有些浅人的话，以为"本意"是找不到的，理由在此无法详说）。

"好学深思，心知其意"是每一个真正读书人所必须力求达到的最高阶段。读书的第一义是尽量求得客观的认识，不是为了炫耀自己的"创造力"，能"发前人所未发"。其实今天中文世界里的有些"新见解"，戳穿了不过是捡来一两个外国新名词在那里乱翻花样，不但在中国书中缺乏根据，而且也不合西方原文的脉络。

中国自唐代韩愈以来，便主张"读书必先识字"。中国文字表面上古今不异，但两三千年演变下来，同一名词已有各时代的不同涵义，所以没有训话的基础知识，是看不懂古书的。西方书也是一样。不精通德文、法文而从第二手的英文著作中得来的有关欧洲大陆的思想观念，是完全不可靠的。

中国知识界似乎还没有完全摆脱殖民地的心态，一切以西方的观念为最后依据。甚至"反西方"的思想也还是来自西方，如"依赖理论"、如"批判学说"、如"解构"之类。所以特别是这十几年来，只要西方思想界稍有风吹草动（主要还是从美国转贩的），便有一批中国知识份子兴风作浪一番，而且立即用之于中国书的解读上面，这不是中西会通，而是随着外国调子起舞，像被人牵着线的傀儡一样，青年朋友们如果不幸而入此魔道，则从此便断送了自己的学问前途。

美国是一个市场取向的社会，不变点新花样、新产品，便没有销路。学术界受此影响，因此也往往在旧东西上动点手脚，当作新创造品来推销，尤以人文社会科学为然。不过大体而言，美国学术界还能维持一种实学的传统，不为新推销术所动。今年5月底，我到哈佛大学参加了一次审查中国现代史长期聘任的专案会议。其中有一位候选者首先被历史系除名，不加考虑。因为据昕过演讲的教授报告，这位候选者在一小时之内用了一百二十次以上"discourse"这个流行名词。哈佛历史系的人断定这位学人太过浅薄，是不能指导研究生作切实的文献研究的。我昕了这番话，感触很深，觉得西方史学界毕竟还有严格的水准。他们还是要求研究生平平实实地去读书的。

这其实也是中国自古相传的读书传统，一直到30年代都保持未变。据我所知，日本汉学界大致也还维持着这一朴实的作风。我在美国三十多年中，曾看见了无数次所谓"新思潮"的兴起和衰灭，真是"眼看他起高楼，眼看他楼塌了"。我希望中国知识界至少有少数"读书种子"，能维持着认真读中国书的传统，彻底克服殖民地的心理。至于大多数人将为时代风气席卷而去，大概已是无可奈何的事。

但是我决不是要提倡任何狭隘的"中国本土"的观点，盲目排外和盲目崇外都是不正常的心态。只有温故才能知新，只有推陈才能出新，旧书不厌百回读，熟读深思子自知，这是颠扑不破的关于读书的道理。

转自爱思想网。

Evernote helps you remember everything and get organized effortlessly. Download Evernote.

LRB · Tim Parks · Thunderstruck: ‘Les Misérables’

Thunderstruck

Tim Parks

• BuyThe Novel of the Century: The Extraordinary Adventure of 'Les Misérables' by David Bellos
  Particular, 307 pp, £20.00, January, ISBN 978 1 84614 470 7

Any reflection on Victor Hugo risks degenerating into a procession of superlatives. Poet, dramatist, novelist, romantic, reactionary, revolutionary, mystic, miser and indefatigable philanderer: without him French literature, French politics of the 19th century are unimaginable. The scope of his ambition, the range of his genius, the vastness of his output, the extent of his appetite, the audacity of his opportunism and the oceanic immensity of his self-regard prompt awe – as well as sentences like these, cumulative and insistent, as his own so often were. The title of David Bellos's book on Les Misérables – The Novel of the Century – immediately tells us we're in the territory; Hugo is greater than his rivals; Bellos has fallen under the spell. 'I was entranced,' he tells us at once of his first reading of the 1500-page novel, and goes on:

Nineteenth-century France … was uncommonly generous to the rest of the world … But among all the gifts France has given to Hollywood, Broadway and the common reader wherever she may be, Les Misérables stands out as the greatest by far. This reconstruction of how this extraordinary novel arose, how it was published, what it means and what it has become is my way of saying thank you to France.

Never abandoning this celebratory tone, The Novel of the Century makes a number of large claims with gusto. The first is that despite being composed over 16 years, from 1845 to 1861, the novel was all intended to be exactly as it is. 'Everything in a work of art is an act of the will,' Bellos quotes Hugo. And so 'every detail and every dimension' of this 500,000-word novel 'was designed, calculated and decided by the author'. And calculated to be successful: 'The unique adventure of Les Misérables as a global cultural resource did not come about by chance … Hugo always intended his great work to speak far beyond the borders of France, and beyond the pages of a book. Most plans to conquer the whole world with a story go awry. Les Misérables is a wonderful exception.'

Occasionally the claims become embarrassing. Hugo's visit to Bicêtre prison, just south of Paris, in 1828 – he was 26 at the time – doubtless provided him with the knowledge of the way an iron collar is riveted around a convict's neck (the fate of Les Misérables's hero, Jean Valjean), and more immediately inspired his campaign against the death penalty as well as his novel The Last Day of a Condemned Man (1829). But Bellos isn't satisfied. The death penalty was abolished in France, he observes, 'in 1981, after a century and a half of campaigning that had its source in the visit made by Victor Hugo to the prison of Bicêtre'. No mention is made of Cesare Beccaria's study On Crimes and Punishments, published in France in 1765 to great acclaim. Beccaria attacked both torture and the death penalty as inhumane and counterproductive.

Imprecisions leap to the eye. Dickens is said to have 'spent his teenage years putting shoeblack into pots'. In fact the 12-year-old Dickens worked in a relative's factory for about a year before resuming his middle-class education. In excited response to Hugo's use of merde in the Waterloo episode of Les Misérables, Bellos insists that not only is the forbidden word 'a nutshell expression of the linguistic, historical and human message' of the novel but that it had 'never been seen in print in a literary work before'. Search Rabelais's Gargantua et Pantagruel (1542) and you will find merde occurring 15 times. Such errors make one a little wary of the other material on offer, and this is a shame because much of the context Bellos provides, on the meaning of the colours red, blue and white in early 19th-century France, on the bead factory Valjean sets up as he passes with miraculous rapidity from destitution to wealth, on the different coins the characters of Les Misérables use and the various means of transport they adopt, is useful for getting a fuller sense of what is going on in the book. Bellos never fails to complete these comments with a reminder of Hugo's reforming zeal. 'The fact that it went without saying that rich and poor used different words for money is both sign and substance of the social injustices that Les Misérables sought to dramatise and to protest.'

To a large degree, then, it appears that Les Misérables is a good novel because its purpose is good. This is seen, Bellos explains, in the ingenious title. Originally Les Misères – 'the miseries' or 'woes' – the novel became Les Misérables, a word that can switch its 'value from positive to negative without notice'. Bellos compares it with 'wretched': 'a wretched person is worthy of pity but may just as well be beneath contempt.' In the way it draws attention to a failure to discriminate, the word misérables actually pushes the reader towards an act of discrimination: are the poor, the destitute and the outcast morally at fault, or victims of bad luck and social injustice? All this seems obvious enough. But having established the near equivalence of 'the wretched' and 'les misérables', Bellos then tells us that there is 'no way of reinventing' the 'inclusiveness' of Hugo's title 'in any other tongue. That's why Les Misérables remains Les Misérables' in English editions.

This is not the case. Translated as Die Elenden in German, Sefiller in Turkish, Отверженные in Russian, Jadnici in Croatian (and so on), Les Misérables keeps its French title in English because the word has an attractive, exotic ring to the English ear. It is a question of marketing. Les Misérables sounds more romantic than The Wretched, a title that was initially placed alongside it in explanation. If anything, the use of the French title obscures the moral discrimination Hugo is asking us to make, since for the English the ideas of misery and miserable are to the fore, not the accusation: Misérable! 'Scum!' It also suggests that what we're talking about is largely a French affair, a series of predicaments that don't concern British society; in that sense the foreign word is reassuring.

The character names are also, we are reminded, brilliantly invented. Bellos ponders the origins of Fantine, the name of the single mother who falls into prostitution: 'The first syllable is a contraction of enfant, "child", so the name itself suggests a meaning close to that of "kid girl".' Fantine, Bellos points out, had 'no parents to name her and no formal identity at all'. The name is part of her status as a misérable. Cosette, Fantine's illegitimate child and later Valjean's adopted daughter, might be confused with chosette, a 'small thing', or nothing in particular. Again it is a sign she is one of the dispossessed. Bellos doesn't remark on the irony that these names, while elaborately suggesting a blurred identity at the semantic level, are in fact highly idiosyncratic and wonderfully memorable. It's in this sense that they are so clever. There are any number of Emmas, only one Fantine. The name is for ever associated with Hugo's novel. Conversely, Jean Valjean, Bellos explains, couples France's most common Christian name with a surname that amounts to a contraction of 'Voilà Jean!', suggesting 'somebody or other, anybody, a nobody'. 'It's as heart-rending,' he tells us, 'as a slumdog answering to the name of "Heyou".' Some readers may struggle to feel this.

Hugo began the novel in his early forties in Paris, where he was already a prominent and highly controversial public figure; after some three years he broke off writing during the turmoil of the 1848 revolution and resumed in December 1860, nine years into his long exile, which at this point had taken him to the island of Guernsey. Moving back and forth both in history and inside the novel itself, Bellos sketches in the key events in Hugo's tumultuous life and the novel's possible relation to them. In 1845 Hugo, who had always sought favours from whatever monarch was on the throne, was made a member of the Chamber of Peers, something that would enable him – though not his married lover Léonie Biard – to avoid jail, when caught in flagrante in an act of adultery a few months later. As a young man, he had been romantically conservative and insanely jealous, to the point of insisting that his teenage beloved, Adèle, keep every inch of her ankles properly covered. But after his early marriage to Adèle, in 1822, at the age of 20, five children in rapid succession and the realisation that his wife had had an affair with his friend, the critic Sainte-Beuve, Hugo, in 1833, secured himself a lifelong mistress and worshipper in the actress Juliette Drouet, then in 1844 began his passionate seven-year affair with Biard.

The discovery of his adultery exposed Hugo to ridicule around the time he began Les Misérables, a book that opens, we remember, with a long account of a man who having 'given the best years of his life … to worldly pursuits and love affairs' becomes a priest, a prelate and ultimately a kind of saint. 'People joked,' Bellos remarks, 'that [Hugo] must be doing penance for his unsaintly behaviour,' but declares himself sceptical of this 'moralising approach' or of any idea that a troubled Hugo might have looked for 'refuge in an uplifting tale'. Rather, 'the main impact of the Biard affair' was to convince Hugo to 'write about everything except that'. The novel 'is unusual … for not talking at any point about adultery or even sex'.

This is almost true. Fantine enjoys a brief affair with a privileged young man who disappears leaving her pregnant, disgraced and indigent, problems she seeks to solve first with factory work, then with prostitution. So there are references to sex in the book, but it is always disreputable, destructive sex. This is one of the things that must put a question mark over the novel's achievement: a narrative claiming to offer 'the social and historical drama of the 19th century', should surely have something to say about the impulse that was absolutely central not only to its author's life, but to life in general. Despite passing from poverty and vulnerability to wealth and power, Valjean not only remains celibate, but appears to have no problem doing so. Sex never so much as occurs to him, or indeed to those who adore him – this while Valjean's creator was enjoying the charms of every chambermaid he could lay his hands on and recording his encounters with compulsive delight in a coded diary. Les Misérables is built on a gesture of simplification, even denial.

Hugo in 1853

And on another, of reversal. Elected to the National Assembly after the collapse of the monarchy in 1848, Hugo found himself at the centre of things when Parisian workers rebelled against the new government's decision to introduce conscription for the unemployed and threw up barricades across the city in response. Though at this point he was claiming that the future lay with the people, Hugo first agreed to visit the barricades and demand they be dismantled, then, when the rebels wouldn't obey, exceeded his brief by ordering the National Guard to open fire. For three tumultuous days and at great personal risk, Hugo, unasked, led government attacks on the barricades. 'He was a dutiful man,' Bellos remarks. Hugo's biographer Graham Robb puts it more brutally. 'This means that [Hugo] was directly responsible for the deaths of untold numbers of workers.'[*]​＊

Les Misérables also offers a barricade melodrama, though set in the minor and earlier uprising of 1832. Here the book's narrator appears to be entirely on the rebels' side, though their enterprise is presented as doomed and perhaps futile. In the fictional version, one of the main threats to the barricade is the manically dutiful, law-obsessed psychopath Javert, the policeman who makes Valjean's life impossible, while Valjean himself rescues his daughter's beloved from the jaws of death as the rebels are overwhelmed. The scene is such a complete inversion of Hugo's own experience that the notion the author might be seeking redemption, or cleansing his conscience, by rerunning events in this way hardly seems far-fetched.

Turning to the novel itself, aside from the immediate pleasure of its steady forward movement, lively metaphors and acute observations, what strikes the reader is Hugo's determined schematism. Everything is understood as either good or evil, renunciation or indulgence, generosity or small-mindedness. The casual playboy Monsieur Myriel becomes the bishop of Digne, renouncing earthly pleasures to serve the poor and write a book on the idea of duty. Released from the galleys where he has served 19 years for stealing a loaf of bread, Valjean is first treated abominably by a society that sees him as irredeemable, then with sublime generosity by the bishop. The only complication in this essentially Manichaean vision is that petty crimes of the sort carried out by Valjean and others, while evil in themselves, are actually products of a greater evil – poverty – that society, while believing itself good, continues to perpetrate. The supposed moral superiority that the haves enjoy at the expense of the have-nots is the cause of infinite suffering. Hugo does everything possible to expose this state of affairs and to validate the consequent reflection that one need only eliminate poverty and crime will be largely eradicated. Everything is pushed to extremes, the dice heavily loaded, the reader determinedly manipulated. Valjean is polite and inoffensive as he seeks shelter at the beginning of the book, magnifying the unpleasantness of the innkeepers and bourgeois householders who reject him, then ferociously aggressive towards the bishop, pointing up the saintly man's extraordinary charity.

The pattern is sustained throughout the book. Once 'converted' and transformed into a wealthy industrialist and mayor of Montreuil-sur-Mer, Valjean is unbelievably thoughtful and philanthropic, sneaking into the houses of the poor to leave gold coins on their kitchen tables. Crime within his jurisdiction is drastically diminished. Meanwhile, Fantine is treated with scandalous cruelty, first by her boyfriend, then by her fellow factory workers. Placing Cosette in the care of others, she inevitably chooses the most exploitative family imaginable, arguably the only family portrayed in the book. Evil in themselves, not as a result of their poverty, the Thénardiers actually take advantage of the socialist theory that poverty causes crime to excuse their own behaviour. Supreme manifestation of insane inflexibility, the policeman Javert goes to incredible lengths to uphold the view that anyone who has committed even the smallest crime is incorrigibly evil and should be punished for all eternity. In doing so he engages in a struggle not so much with Valjean as with Hugo himself and his progressive ideas. And the reader, who is on Hugo's side.

*

Beyond the obviousness, or we might say clarity, of the enterprise (is it really a positive thing for a work of art to be entirely calculated by its creator?), what impresses and endears the book to the reader, almost despite himself, is Hugo's evident and immense pleasure in dramatising the extremes of this mental scheme. He loves rubbing in the world's cruelty: Fantine sells her beautiful hair and teeth, then descends into prostitution where, alas, none of her clients resembles that charming womaniser Victor Hugo; they are all universally, splendidly, brutal. He revels in Javert's dastardly ubiquity and triumphant self-righteousness. He adores the Thénardiers and their fantastic determination to wring every last sou out of a girl who has nothing. Equally – one pleasure feeds the other – he is thrilled when the bishop or Valjean does something so self-sacrificing, so unutterably altruistic, as to leave normal folk quite speechless. Valjean's eyes 'nearly popped out of his head' when the bishop not only forgives the ex-convict for walking off with his silverware, but tells the police he gave it to the man to help him rebuild his life. Javert is 'thunderstruck' when Valjean, now mayor, intervenes on Fantine's behalf after she's accused of offending a gentleman: 'thought and speech both failed him.' In one of the novel's strongest scenes, Valjean interrupts a trial to confess his identity and save a man about to be condemned to the galleys in his place; the court is seized by a 'kind of religious terror' on witnessing this 'simple and magnificent story'. 'The peculiarity of sublime spectacles,' Hugo enthuses, 'is to seize all souls and make all witnesses spectators … no doubt none of them told himself he was seeing a great light shining there in all its splendour; but all felt inwardly dazzled.'

Hugo loves imagining this and knowing that he is the creator of this sublimity. The reader feels it, shares his pleasure and duly signs up to be dazzled. For all Bellos's insistence that Hugo did careful research and has his facts right, we are very far from realism. To turn to Madame Bovary, published six years before Hugo's novel and equally interested in the hypocrisies of the middle classes, is to find oneself in a world of social and psychological subtlety that simply isn't there in Les Misérables, isn't attempted. Essentially, Hugo has split society into innocent and loveable victims (viewed in great detail), callously complacent middle classes (who remain, for all their proper Christian and surnames, an anonymous chorus) and magnificent (Hugo-like), strangely powerful saints. While Valjean oscillates from victim to saint, one or two anomalous figures – Javert, the Thénardiers – are given the task of rendering the saintliness of the saints ever more visible. Coincidences abound. Hugo isn't embarrassed by them; they allow for endless turns of plot with just a few central characters who never stop meeting, harming and helping one another. This is why Les Misérables is so successful not just as a film, but as a musical, in a way that Anna Karenina, Middlemarch and the many other fine novels of the time never could be. It is a story of extravagant gesture and irrepressible underlying optimism. Hugo believes in progress. Despite its title, the novel is never a downer.

Occasionally, a digression will remind us of the more bizarre aspects of the author's thinking:

It is our conviction that if souls were visible to the naked eye, we would clearly see the strange phenomenon whereby every individual member of the human race corresponds to one of the species of the animal kingdom … Animals are nothing more than the forms our virtues and our vices take, trotting around before our very eyes, the visible phantoms of our souls. God reveals them to us to give us pause for thought. Only, since animals are mere shadows, God has not made them educable in the complete sense of the word. What would be the point? On the contrary, our souls being what is real and having a purpose unique to themselves, God has endowed them with intelligence, that is, the possibility of being educated. Public education, when it is good, can always bring out the latent usefulness of a soul, no matter what it is like to start with.

Exiled in the Channel Islands, Hugo had excogitated a new religion. Between transforming his homes into gothic castles; keeping wife, mistress and casual sexual partners apart; spending hours staring at the sea; recording household expenditures to the last sou; showering naked on the terrace in full view of the locals; and writing volume after volume of poetry that is far more exciting than his prose, Hugo found time for spiritualism and séances. Just as a daughter wrote down everything the great man said over meals, so a son kept the minutes for the dead. Dante, it seems, congratulated Victor on his poetry. Jesus Christ conceded that the French genius's new religion would replace his own. Juliette Drouet, arguably Hugo's first disciple, addressed her unfaithful lover in daily letters as 'my Christ'.

Bellos offers some of these details, but his account is sketchy and their connection with Les Misérables so intriguing one turns to a full-length biography – I chose Robb's excellent Victor Hugo – to get a deeper sense of what Hugo is up to. Like Bellos, Robb has allowed his writing to be infected by Hugo's, but in an altogether different way. Where Bellos's rhetoric is a hollow echo of Hugo's more sonorous and accomplished self-importance, Robb seems to have borrowed the poet's facility for metaphor. He uses it not to inflate Hugo, but to show he has his measure and isn't going to be overwhelmed: 'By now,' he tells us, 'Hugo was not just a real person with several masks, but a limited liability company of egos.' Where Bellos is a fan, Robb is admiring and aghast. 'His campaign against the death penalty was also a cloak of respectability which allowed him to feast his eyes on punishment and cruelty, and to imagine his own execution.' Where Bellos appropriates the labours of others for Hugo, Robb wryly observes how Hugo himself had perfected the 'post facto appropriation of every significant change in French poetry and theatre since the 1820s'.

It is not so much that a different Hugo emerges, more that one is made aware of the many possible responses (between total submission and violent resistance) when confronted with a phenomenon as daunting, seductive and coercive as Hugo. On the question of religion, while Bellos remains vague and preacherly (Hugo's 'natural religion' encourages reconciliation and the 'movement from conflict to harmony' which is the 'purpose' of Les Misérables), Robb provides the details: 'The central pillar of [Hugo's] system is the belief that the entire universe is sentient … anything possessing weight and substance is the product of original sin … The worst evil inhabits stones … Man is an intermediate, crepuscular creature, suspended between the light of heaven and the murk of the bottomless sewer … "Good deeds are the invisible hinges of heaven's door."' 'It is impossible not to notice,' Robb concludes, 'that this is a supremely convenient religion for a poet. It turns the universe into an infinite library of living symbols marshalled by a cataloguing system which is all the easier to use for being based on subjective impressions.'

On one question, however, Robb and Bellos speak with the same voice. Neither will hear a word against Hugo's strategy for publishing Les Misérables; this involved dumping his regular publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, insisting on an enormous 300,000 francs for an eight-year licence (around £3 million today, Bellos calculates), then orchestrating a huge book launch with more or less simultaneous publication in various countries, an equally huge publicity campaign (the novel's content was kept a secret until the last moment) with queues at the bookshops and so on. And the man who borrowed heavily to effect this huge leap forward in book promotion, Albert Lacroix, had not even read the novel when he signed the deal, since he was in Brussels and the manuscript in Guernsey. Such was Hugo's celebrity, literary and political, that Lacroix was convinced he could make the novel a must-read work across Europe before anyone even knew what was in it. And he was right.

For Bellos this feat, the complex logistics of copying, proofreading, printing, translating and distributing such a huge text over a short period of time, is part of the reason the book is 'the novel of the century'. 'Les Misérables,' he tells us, 'stands at the vanguard of the democratisation of literature and of the use of venture capital to fund the arts.' Robb quotes the Goncourt brothers observing wryly that Hugo had got all that money 'for taking pity on the suffering masses' and complains that this set 'a trend of innuendo which has dogged Les Misérables to this day'. In fact, Robb claims, Hugo was doing other writers a favour by establishing 'the idea that serious writing could be a respectable, money-making profession'. Earlier he noted that Hugo secretly persuaded a publisher to delay a friend's collection of essays so they would not draw attention away from a publication of his own.

Whatever Hugo's motives, it remains a fact that the huge payment for Les Misérables reinforced the already rapidly consolidating connection between liberal posture and financial success in the arts. Of course if, as Bellos believes, works like Les Misérables genuinely lead to social reform, one could hardly complain. Others might argue –Leopardi put forward the view in his Zibaldone years before Les Misérables was written – that compassion in literature simply allows the reader to congratulate himself on his humanity without producing any change in behaviour. It encourages people to believe, Muriel Spark commented more recently, 'that their moral responsibilities are sufficiently fulfilled by the emotions they have been induced to feel'. In short, it is a substitute for charity.

Of the two positions, optimistic and pessimistic, I suspect both have an element of truth, but I fear the pessimists have the larger part. Hugo's great book sold millions of copies, but did not radically alter social conditions in France, or halt Napoleon III's drift towards despotism, or stop the thousands of executions after the collapse of the Commune in 1871. Audiences leave West End performances of Les Misérables and walk past the beggars on the pavements much as they always have. Back in Guernsey, though, in the 1860s, Hugo set a charming new trend in philanthropy by inviting the poor children of the island to regular garden parties. He loved children and wrote wonderful poems about his grandchildren, though he did not generally keep track of his illegitimate offspring. At death he left less than one per cent of his considerable fortune to charity. Miserable.

Evernote helps you remember everything and get organized effortlessly. Download Evernote.