The New Hellenism

July 21, 2023   •   By Crispin Sartwell

ACADEMIC PHILOSOPHY HAD reached a pretty pass by 2010. In the previous decade, many of the most eminent figures of the late 20th century—including Willard Van Orman Quine, Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Hadot, Donald Davidson, David Lewis, Jean Baudrillard, Bernard Williams, Hans-Georg Gadamer, John Rawls, and Paul Ricœur—had departed for parts unknown. Both analytic and continental philosophy had long been in a period of codification and refinement rather than wild creativity or revolutionary overturning. No one was anticipating the thunderclap arrival of the next Wittgenstein or Heidegger; everyone seemed content to qualify or apply the results of their predecessors, and re-air the debates among them. Like other disciplines, and more thoroughly than most, philosophy seemed to have been successfully professionalized and contained within academia. Most of the work published in journals in almost any style was relatively inaccessible to nonspecialists. By 2010, the jargons of continental and analytic philosophy had been elaborated and refined for a century. Philosophers couldn’t speak even to one another, let alone communicate with the public. Among other things, this might have made it hard to attract students. And if you can’t attract students, administrators won’t hire professors.

Analytic philosophy itself had been a response to a previous professional crisis of academic philosophy that arose in the early 20th century, a new direction for the discipline sometimes referred to as the linguistic turn. Addressing the anxiety that 19th-century philosophy (dominated by Hegelianism and Kantianism) was uselessly metaphysical and lacked criteria of truth or plausibility, the great 20th-century figures, partly through the logical analysis of language, succeeded in laying out an arena in which professional competence could be demonstrated, relevant skills were well understood and broadly shared, and specialists could emerge in subdisciplines of the field, as they had done in the sciences. By 2000, philosophers were spending their whole careers in the contemporary technical literature on the free will problem, or on the late thought of Michel Foucault, or on what recent results in modal logic indicate about whether we can speak sensibly about the future.

It seemed more like filling in the corners than answering the Big Questions. Incremental progress was made in a variety of areas (metaethics, for example), but the insularity kept narrowing the audience. The writing, too, had grown far from the swaggering confidence and consciously shaped, stylish prose of a Bertrand Russell or a Jacques Derrida, toward a professionalized language suitable for academic journals and hence for helping anxious junior professors attain tenure.

Starting around 2010, however, there was a striking change, surprising to someone trained in the 1980s. Some philosophy professors began to write a lot more personally; they tried to show how philosophical ideas had affected and might affect their own lives. Some started writing what came to be thought of as philosophical self-help: for instance, how William James dealt with his debilitating depression and how you can too, or how a dose of Stoicism can make you less miserable. They started, as well, trying to write for general audiences, addressing the most urgent contemporary issues as they emerged, and teaching classes that would draw students from every major.

Such figures as Agnes Callard, John Kaag, Clancy Martin, Skye Cleary, Justin E. H. Smith, Kieran Setiya, and Costica Bradatan, I would say, are far more conscious and better writers than the professors of my generation who may have been their teachers. They are far more accessible writers, but more than that, they are literary stylists, still-emerging or mid-career literary stars. I don’t think you could have said that of any of the professional philosophers who, like me, are currently in their sixties. The new philosophers have, as well, returned systematically to various aspects of the history of philosophy that the 20th century tended to neglect as it drove itself forward into scientific-style progress.

As the new movement emerged, essays and even whole books were arriving of a sort that had hardly existed before. Kaag’s American Philosophy: A Love Story (2016), in addition to being published by a top trade press (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), framed personal and intellectual histories with a deft writerly craft that made it a pleasure for nonphilosophers to read. It was a true-life romance, a coherent narrative, and an excellent treatment of American pragmatism, among other things. A couple of years later, Kaag was “hiking with Nietzsche,” in a book that combined travel writing, memoir, and eternal recurrence of the same into a most readable philosophy. He made the project of understanding Nietzsche a positive pleasure, though the book was also very much about Kaag facing his own darkness.

Or consider Callard, who’s probably got a more interesting, intense, and bohemian personality than anyone else who emerged in academic philosophy in the 1980s or ’90s. A classical scholar who seemed to be gearing up to teach ancient philosophy at the University of Chicago and publish her work in academic journals for the rest of her life, she has instead gained considerable attention in broad literary and intellectual culture of a kind that philosophers of the previous few decades rarely did. It’s hard not to be engaged by Callard’s rollicking prose and the surprising ideas it expresses. In The New York Times, she published essays such as 2022’s “If I Get Canceled, Let Them Eat Me Alive”:

What should my friends do if I am being canceled?

A decade ago, when I was a nonpublic philosopher writing only for a small group of academics, it would never have occurred to me to ask myself this question. But things have changed. These days, anyone with a public-facing persona must contemplate the prospect of having her reputation savagely destroyed.

She has more than faced that down, as essays by her and portrayals of her in places like The Point and The New Yorker make abundantly clear.

Or consider Clancy Martin, who has written astonishingly personal and intense book-length essays on both love and suicide (“My first attempt to kill myself was when I was a child,” begins a recent essay on the right to end one’s own life). The confessional tone of Martin’s work is anything but gratuitous, however. Even if that sort of memoir has also been in fashion outside philosophy, it is directly connected to the most traditional and deepest philosophical questions. The sort of revelations that Callard and Martin give about themselves might, if made public, have ended an academic career in the mid-1990s. But today, they are central to motivating traditional philosophical questions anew.

The new philosophy, then, is partly encompassed and explained by wider cultural and literary developments. Memoir and personal essay were dominant literary forms by the 1990s, of course; this led to some widely admired masterpieces, such as Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club (1995), which often focused on the author’s struggles with addiction and mental illness and the ways these were ameliorated or overcome, at least enough to write the book. Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997) showed that a high-end intellectual approach to self-help could land on bestseller lists, and it gave everyone, even younger philosophers, a template: “How [Insert Your Favorite Philosopher Here] Can Change Your Life.” Each such foray was an assertion that philosophy wasn’t merely an intellectual exercise or an abstract pursuit of truths at the highest level of generality, but something potentially useful, even “life-changing.”

These figures often demand that we think about ideas as serious practical matters, matters of life and death. Indeed, Costica Bradatan’s Dying for Ideas (2015) focused on “the dangerous lives of” thinkers such as Socrates, Hypatia, Giordano Bruno, Thomas More, and Jan Patočka who did just that. This is definitely not the way 20th-century geniuses like Saul Kripke or Jean Baudrillard conceived the task. But the intellectual life as a source of sanity as well as suffering, a scene of heroic self-overcoming or self-affirmation, is just how the ancient philosophers Epicurus and Epictetus, for example—the so-called “Hellenistic” philosophers—conceived their purpose, as Pierre Hadot argued in his sneakily and steadily influential 1995 book Philosophy as a Way of Life. One useful way to think of these developments, in other words, is as a new Hellenism.

As they reconsider the history of philosophy, the new philosophers have ignored the 20th century completely, with a couple of exceptions: the existentialists (explored in multiple dimensions by Cleary in particular) and the pragmatists (brought back into the fold by Kaag and others). These are schools that later professional philosophers found almost embarrassing for the sheer fact that they had evident practical implications. Indeed, the existential and pragmatist philosophers themselves insisted on that: their philosophies were not supposed to be confined to the ivory tower. That is one reason they were unfashionable in 2003 and are fashionable in 2023.

But the new philosophers also turned back toward the whole history of philosophy, and also to some extent toward non-Western philosophies, to find material that was useful for their new, practically oriented projects. This, too, was a rather remarkable shift, as analytic philosophy in particular, long dominant in the United States and United Kingdom, had on principle largely ignored the history of the discipline in its attempt to redefine it as a contemporary quasi-scientific academic field.

In effect, every aspect of philosophy is being transformed or reimagined today, just as Epicurus produced letters or Epictetus aphorisms rather than Aristotelian treatises on logic. The basic forms are not the 20-page journal article with 123 footnotes or the bristlingly dry and difficult 400-page monograph, one-third of which is “scholarly apparatus.” Rather, what you get from Agnes Callard or Justin Smith is a sharp, unexpected 2,500-word essay in a blog or newspaper.

One of the shaping influences on the development of public philosophy, the personal/philosophical essay, and intellectual self-help was the New York Times philosophy column The Stone, originally dubbed a “blog” when it arrived in 2010, just in the nick of time. Edited by Peter Catapano, with professorial assistance and inspiration from Simon Critchley, it gave philosophers access to a very large audience. In 2010, every American professor, more or less, read The New York Times, and by a couple of years later, every American philosophy professor, more or less, read The Stone every time it appeared. At first, it featured eminent figures such as Arthur Danto and Martha Nussbaum, but as the column went on, it cultivated younger and less well-known voices as well.

Now, if you were going to write for The Stone, you had to accept certain baseline realities (I know them from personal experience). For one thing, you had to write in such a way that the average New York Times reader could immediately see what you were saying. You had to find a topic that would “hook” people: a philosophical question raised by a news story, or something about a contemporary figure or film. And, pretty quickly, you had to give readers something to take away: a concise nugget of useful truth or an intriguing question that needed addressing. You were not going to do what you may well have done in your last five academic papers, for example: quibble with one of your fellow specialists about the interpretation of some figure or passage on whom or which you specialize.

All the people I mentioned above wrote essays for The Stone; all of them are in one or more of the three anthologies of the column that have been published (the column itself, alas, is no more as of 2022). Catapano helped shape many of the essays, and perhaps their writers as well, not in the sense of altering the experiences or assertions they encompassed but rather in processing academic language into felicitous prose, and in working patiently with the authors to shape a voice true to themselves but also effective on an opinion page. The Stone continued to publish many senior figures, but younger ones who enjoyed this editorial process came back again and again. The Stone developed talent, in other words, and others who never wrote for it learned from reading it how to write like people contributing to it. Writing instruction was never part of graduate training in philosophy in the late 20th century, but Catapano taught many lessons if you read carefully.

The Stone crystallized developments that were already in process. It didn’t invent the personal essay, the professorial opinion essay, or the how-X-can-change-your-life concept. But it encouraged, gave an outlet to, and shaped the ways these developments have proceeded. And proceed they have. Now philosophers such as Justin E. H. Smith, who is about as rocking a writer as you can find inside or outside philosophy, sound pointedly contemporary. And in their tone lies a commitment to engagement: to provoking and enlightening a wide readership.

This, it strikes me, is a—or perhaps the—question for the new philosophy: how intellection can be integrated into life. The ideas of William James or Simone de Beauvoir might really help you figure some things out in your life and become less miserable and improve your relationships. Self-reflection goes better in the company of world-champion self-reflectors: Pascal or Montaigne, Nietzsche or Kierkegaard. I think that epistemology might have some interesting things to say about internet disinformation, for example, or about the effects of racial violence on knowledge. Philosophers of this century have been intent on proving philosophy’s usefulness in such projects.

But as my undergraduate professor in ancient philosophy asked about the old Hellenists, they may have written lovely prose, better than Aristotle, but did they make any progress on philosophical questions? People probably felt better after they read Zeno of Citium or Lucretius, but did they go beyond Plato and Aristotle on the nature of truth, goodness, justice, and beauty? Or was the Hellenistic era, in that sense, a period of decline? My professor meant this as a rhetorical question. He took the answer to be obvious. And, though he perhaps underrated some Hellenistic philosophers, and very much underrated the project of learning to live a decent or tolerable life, the question of disciplinary progress as traditionally understood is a valid one.

I imagine that as Catapano and Critchley conceived The Stone, they weren’t thinking about how to start a new style or period or school of philosophy but about how the existing insights of the discipline could be used to address contemporary issues in a way that newspaper readers would find both absorbing and useful. Still, it’s worth asking whether the work of the new philosophers is doing much to advance the projects of philosophy as traditionally understood. Perhaps it’s a little hard to imagine, from here, how to surpass Wittgenstein or Derrida, and that would be an awful lot to expect from Kaag or Callard. That’s what the Hellenists sometimes thought about themselves as well, as did Thomas Aquinas, or the Confucianists and Taoists of the Han dynasty: how can we ever surpass the greatest thinkers of the past?

Then again, these new ways of writing and of using philosophical ideas are only getting started. They may well have significant implications about the nature of knowledge or the free will problem, come to think of it. Perhaps the personal and the public will provide essential routes of progress for traditional questions, or will lead to new sorts of answers. But maybe that hasn’t quite happened yet. Either way, however, and even as philosophy as an academic discipline is again endangered by budget cuts and considerations of prestige and practicality, there is no doubt that the new philosophy has brought in its train a much-needed renewal of urgency, energy, and sense of practical purpose. And it certainly brings the field some much better writing and some much more pleasurable reading.

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 ESSAY

Nobody Ever Read American Literature Like This Guy Did

Inflamed, impertinent and deeply insightful, D.H. Lawrence’s “Studies in Classic American Literature” remains startlingly relevant 100 years after it was originally published.

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Every American is “a torn divided monster,” D.H. Lawrence wrote, in a book that saw in the nation’s literature a key to its soul.Credit...Fine Art Images/Heritage Images, via Getty Images

https://www.nytimes.com/by/a-o--scott

By A.O. Scott

July 29, 2023

It has been a hundred years since D.H. Lawrence published “Studies in Classic American Literature,” and in the annals of literary criticism the book may still claim the widest discrepancy between title and content.

Not with respect to subject matter: As advertised, this compact volume consists of essays on canonical American authors of the 18th and 19th centuries — a familiar gathering of dead white men. Some (Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman) are still household names more than a century later, while others (Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Richard Henry Dana Jr.) have faded into relative obscurity. By the 1950s, when American literature was fully established as a respectable field of academic study, Melville’s “Moby-Dick,” Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter,” Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” and Crèvecoeur’s “Letters From an American Farmer” had become staples of the college and grad school syllabus, which is where I and many others found them in the later decades of the 20th century. Thank goodness Lawrence got there first.

This is not going to be one of those laments about how nobody reads the great old books anymore. Not many people read them when they first appeared, either. My point is that nobody ever read them like Lawrence did — as madly, as wildly or as insightfully.

That’s what I mean about the gap between the book and its title. “Studies in Classic American Literature” is as dull a phrase as any committee of professors could devise. Just try to say those five words without yawning. But look inside and you will be jolted awake.

Lawrence’s deep reading and idiosyncratic learning are abundantly evident — he tosses off snippets of French, German, Italian and Latin, sprinkling his pages with allusions to ancient poetry and modern philosophy — but his tone is the opposite of scholarly. With its one-sentence paragraphs (“Flop goes spiritual love.”), jabbing exclamations (“Freedom!”), semi-rhetorical questions (“But what of Walt Whitman?”) and heavy use of italics and all-caps, the book can read like a scroll of social-media rants. Its manner is neither respectable nor respectful. Lawrence harangues his subjects in the second person (“Nathaniel!”), and subjects them to parodic paraphrase and withering, ad hominem judgment. “I do not like him,” he says of Benjamin Franklin. Benjamin Franklin!

The irreverence is refreshing, but these studies are far from frivolous. Lawrence’s bristling, inflamed, impertinent language provides a reminder that criticism is not just the work of the brain, but of the gut and the spleen as well. The intellectual refinement of his argument — fine-grained evaluations of style and form that still startle with their incisiveness; breathtaking conceptual leaps from history to myth and back again — is unthinkable without the churn of instinct and feeling beneath it. This is the work of a writer whose fiction — including his briefly banned masterpiece “The Rainbow” and his long-suppressed “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” — makes much of the conflict between decorum and desire.

In that respect, the book is the mirror of its subject. Each of the writers under scrutiny, like the culture that spawned them, is a divided soul, pulled between contrary impulses. On one side, there is a moralizing, do-gooding, civilizing imperative, a force that Lawrence variously identifies with idealism, “saviorism” and democracy, none of which he much cares for. Franklin is one avatar of this tendency — “the pattern American, this dry, moral, utilitarian little democrat” — which explains Lawrence’s dislike:

Here am I now in tatters and scratched to ribbons, sitting in the middle of Benjamin’s America looking at the barbed wire, and the fat sheep crawling under the fence to get fat outside, and the watchdogs yelling at the gate lest by chance anyone should get out by the proper exit. Oh America! Oh Benjamin! And I utter a long loud curse against Benjamin and the American corral.

But Franklin is not the only American writer bound by the constraints of careful morality. Even the wildest of Lawrence’s specimens — the feverish Edgar Allan Poe, the restless Melville, the ecstatic Whitman — are corralled by various forms of propriety and high-minded sentiment.

The thorniest part of Lawrence’s argument — the strain in the book that feels scandalous, even dangerous, at present — is that he identifies those sentiments with what many Americans would consider the positive substance of our national identity. His hostility to the idea of democracy and the ideal of equality partly reflects a general philosophical bias. “Damn all ideas and all ideals,” he rails, seeing such abstraction as an impediment to authentic human connection: “If only people would meet in their very selves.” But this idea of authenticity is bound up with a mystical ideology of race, sex, blood and destiny that is apt to trouble 21st-century sensibilities.

Or maybe not. Like some other modernist writers — W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis — Lawrence, who died in 1930, dabbled in a mode of aesthetic anti-liberalism that may be making a comeback. His critique of America, where he had traveled in the early 1920s, living for a time in Taos, N.M., was a broadside against the nation’s progressive traditions. Its writers were both his antagonists and his allies. Or rather, their expressed beliefs were anathema, while their work revealed what to him was a more congenial truth.

“The artist,” he writes in one of the most frequently quoted passages, “usually sets out — or used to — to point a moral and adorn a tale. The tale, however, points the other way, as a rule. Two blankly opposing morals, the artist’s and the tale’s. Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.”

The tale that classic American literature tells, in the aggregate, is largely one of violence, conflict and cruelty, whether it unfolds on Cooper’s frontier, in Hawthorne’s Salem, in Poe’s fantastical mansions or on Melville’s South Seas. There is a remorseless clarity to Lawrence’s perception of this bloody tapestry, summed up in his description of Cooper’s Natty Bumppo:

But you have there the myth of the essential white America. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer. It has never yet melted.

This is a hard formulation to accept, but it is also not an easy one to dismiss. Much as we may wish to deny it, racial violence is a central fact of our history. And as distasteful as it may be to imagine this country defined by Cooper’s “essential American” on one hand and Franklin’s industrious, positive-thinking “pattern American” on the other, the tension between them might be more than just a literary conceit. Without it, American literature might not exist at all.

What Lawrence saw in his eccentric, passionate reading of that literature was division, polarization and contradiction. Not so much among factions, parties, regions or races — ordinary politics doesn’t really enter his field of vision — as within individual hearts and the collective soul. Every American is “a torn divided monster,” he writes at one point.

And elsewhere, a century ago that might as well have been last week: “America has never been easy, and is not easy today.”

A.O. Scottis a critic at large for the Book Review. He joined The Times in 2000 and was a film critic until early 2023. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism."More about A.O. Scott

「可畏的想像力」：思想．小說．世界——王德威專訪

 https://today.line.me/hk/v2/article/3N8O5mB

【明報專訊】事隔廿年，繼《跨世紀風華：當代小說20家》（2002）以後，王德威教授再次推出當代華語小說代表作的序論文集《可畏的想像力：當代小說31家》，堪稱小說研究的指標之作。書中31位作家各處不同歷史時空，卻在書內形成共時性的對話。王教授以「可畏的想像力」的概念指引門徑，讓我們重新思議當代小說的不可思議之力。

丘：丘庭傑（香港中文大學中國語言及文學系講師）

王：王德威（哈佛大學東亞系暨比較文學系Edward C. Henderson講座教授，中央研究院院士，美國藝術與科學研究院院士）

丘：首先恭喜王老師新書出版。書名「可畏的想像力」，概念來自漢娜．鄂蘭，王老師借以探視當代小說與政治的關係。可否請您解釋一下，現世中的病毒、核污染、戰爭、政治亂局……難道現實還不夠「可畏」嗎？為何還需要在小說裏找「可畏的想像力」，它又如何帶我們迎向未來的危機與挑戰呢？

王：謝謝，我很樂意去解釋「可畏的想像力」（the fearful imagination）的概念，靈感來自於漢娜‧鄂蘭（Hannah Arendt）的論述。首先，中國文學與政治之間的相互影響，自有其傳統，尤其是在晚清，小說這種文類出現在現代文學的地平線上，帶來了「不可思議的」或我所謂「可畏的」想像力，足以引起社會、讀者群體的不安與思考，或是期待巨變的可能。在現當代的亂局之下，為何還需要鍛煉「可畏的想像力」呢？我們可以回到鄂蘭的思想體系及其終極關懷。她寫作《極權主義的起源》的歷史淵源當然來自於猶太人千年以來的受難史，尤其是1930、1940年代發生在納粹德國的大浩劫（Holocaust），以及當代左右極權主義肆虐。然而，她把這一種經驗上升到一個形而上的、具有哲學意味的層次。她提出來的「可畏的想像力」並不只是那些在我們能力範圍以內、憑着現世經驗所接觸的可怕或不可思議的經驗，像病毒、核污染等，反而，她督促我們去想像那些無從想像的、各種各樣「惡」的可能性。面對病毒、核污染等眼前的問題，我們可以用藥物治療、預防措施甚至抗議方式來處理，但在鄂蘭的觀點來看，這還遠遠不夠。假如我們不能先歷史怪獸一步，不能夠先想像歷史、政治或種種權力鬥爭所產生的不可思議的邪惡的話，那麼，在真正的災難爆發的時候，我們又怎麼有能力去判斷和應對呢？所以，這裏存在着一種悖論（paradox），「可畏的想像力」不只是居安思危或胡思亂想而已，它驅使我們去想像那不可想像的，言說那不可言說的，藉以探勘生命無明和無常的種種變貌，思考人間可為與不可為的種種選項。

對於鄂蘭，或晚清推動小說作為文類的學者來說，這種「可畏的想像力」有其倫理和政治的承擔。我們明白，世界上許多事情，要發生就發生，即所謂「歷史偶發性」（historical contingency）的問題，人很可能是無從反抗的。但假若我們能運用敘事的力量，用鄂蘭的話就是「講故事」的力量，相互連結，或許我們可以防患於未然。

「幽黯意識」與「幽暗意識」

丘：除了「可畏的想像力」，書裏也用上了「幽黯意識」這個詞語，近年王老師在不同場合都有犀利的發揮。「幽黯意識」和張灝先生的「幽暗意識」有何關係呢？它跟小說又如何相關？

王：我深受張灝先生的影響，用「幽黯意識」一詞顯然是向張灝先生致敬，但概念上又稍有一點不同，因此在寫法上又故意用上了「黯」或「闇」來區別。據張灝先生對「幽暗意識」的定義，它是「發出對人性中或宇宙中與始俱來的種種黑暗勢力的正視和省悟」，「因為這些黑暗勢力根深柢固，這個世界才有缺陷，才不能圓滿，而人的生命才有種種的醜惡，種種的遺憾」。張先生在1980年代提出「幽暗意識」和思考中國民主進程時所依據的理論根源，我相信是一個廣義的古典自由主義傳統，也包括受到韋伯（Max Weber）一派的影響，其背後基本上是以人性論作為考量。對於這個概念在中、西語境下的理論背景，我在英文專著Why Fiction Matters in Contemporary China（2020）的第四章有較詳盡的分析和討論。另外，我也受到新儒家的影響，像牟宗三先生所說的「良知的自我坎陷」，就是一種首先對自我的設限，然後再思考更可能實現的一種民主的願景。

不過，在我的運用下，我更期待把「幽黯意識」視為不僅是倫理、道德或自我反省的一個起點——那當然是重要的，但我更願意把它看作為一種理性主義者在思維的論辯過程裏必需的技術、知識或方法。我說的「幽黯」比較不側重在人的善惡道德這種倫理潛在議題的定義，它不一定要立刻與倫理、道德作連接，而更多是一種思考現實、和理性辯證的一種方法學。意思是，在我們理性所能及的範圍之外，有着無限可能之種種，包括是知識的運作、情感的衝動、所謂的無意識或潛意識的動能等，當然還有歷史和客觀環境的偶然性。我們必須正視這樣的一種更大的、人所無從企及的領域或空間，而我以為小說恰好能夠幫助我們去認識這一面。

所以，在文學的空間裏，或在小說這種文類裏，所謂的「想像力」是「可怕」的，但同時又是「可行」的。在小說或文學裏面，我們可以有各種上天入地的想像，這點在其他專業像歷史、經濟等的行規裏，可能是不可容忍的，正好體現了文學和小說的獨特性。所以，我和張灝先生的用法不太一樣，可是相同的是，我們都會認為在表面上充滿光明的時代，其實在幽黯的另一面，不管是在認識論或感觀論上，都具有着潛在的（自我）批判甚至解構力量，都是一個無懈無限的場域。從不同的知識譜系來看，我們也可以參考中國傳統的道家所說的「知白守黑」的哲學，人對於「窈窈冥冥」、「昏昏默默」的世界，需要保持相對敬畏的姿態。在現當代文學領域中，幽黯意識最重要的代言人應該是魯迅。

「當代」作為具批判力的時間意識

丘：王老師在序裏特別提到「當代」一詞的界定，認為它不限於「此刻當下」或「四九以後」，而更指涉一種敏銳、具批判力的時間意識。為何會強調這樣的時間性？

王：我先來說明一下「當代」的幾種不同定義。第一是「此刻當下」，就是2023年的當代，你我所生存的一個時空，第二是所謂「四九以後」，是中國共產論述對於新中國成立之後歷史階段的命名。這裏其實產生了一種自我矛盾：「當代」本是指涉日新又新的此刻當下，卻又是1949年以後、直到今天長達74年的時空，所謂「當代」的時間彷彿是定格了，或者千秋萬世了。我要指出的第三種定義，必須承認，是受到了本雅明（Walter Benjamin）的影響。本雅明教導我們，在看待事物的現代性的時候，關注的不僅是此時此刻的當下、一剎那的變動，而且我們還需要具有歷史感來回溯歷史。歷史過去的某一個時刻，因緣際會，與此刻當下相遇，並產生了一種爆炸性——其實也就是我剛提到的「幽黯意識」，過去所蘊藏的力量，居然在某一刻的「今天」「現在」爆發出來，給予了我們新鮮的、震撼的、「革命」的感覺。我也從阿甘本（Giorgio Agamben）的論述得到啟發：所謂當代感，就是時間皺褶中所發生的「不合時宜」（untimely）的現象；就是從直面現實，在光明中看到黑暗，而在黑暗中反而看見不能逼視的光束的能量。

因此，《可畏的想像力》以31位作家示範了第三種定義下的「當代」，來自作家面對歷史大勢或主流的種種「不合時宜」。具體而言，在本書的版圖裏，我特別把某一段故事和某一些時間點連在一起，使之產生前所未見的、新的意義。例如臺靜農的《亡明講史》和施明正的《島上愛與死》，前者作於1940年代抗戰中期，後者作於六七十年代，皆因種種原因，延宕至本世紀才問世，卻竟然毫不過時。如此的「不合時宜」也造就了「當代」的結構性扭轉，並產生了新的力量。

故事與歷史的張力

丘：書裏討論到臺靜農的《亡明講史》，這部小說在陳獨秀看來有所不足，「望極力成為歷史而非小說」，揭示出敘事——說（好）故事——與歷史之間的張力。臺靜農卻視歷史猶如小說，把沉重題材寫得輕浮滑稽。這種故意與大敘事保持距離，或有意抗衡，甚至尋找逃逸路線的方式，是否當代作家的特質呢？

王：當代作家的創作方式有千萬種，這是其中之一。臺靜農深受魯迅《故事新編》的影響，而《故事新編》恰恰就是我剛才解釋的本雅明所謂「當代」意義的最好例證，把過去古典的東西重新挖掘出來，在此刻當下裏爆發出一個似曾相識而不曾如此清晰的信息。所以在這點上，可以看出臺靜農和陳獨秀在小說美學或小說政治學上的絕對差距。陳獨秀的文學立場是保守的，他希望《亡明講史》像一個歷史敘事，中規中矩，但是臺靜農深明過去那種以保守的寫實主義作為標竿的小說寫作方式，已經不能回答他正身處的「當代」的危機（抗戰）了。尤其在當時的政治大敘事與意識形態的壓力之下，必須用一個不同的方式來說明。他選擇了嬉笑怒罵、輕浮滑稽的方法去寫。你可以說這是「逃逸路線」，這當然是比較時髦的德勒茲（Gilles Deleuze）的詞語。但在另一方面來說，可以說歷史本就如此複雜，於是他就採用了從自己的角度來看，最能揭露時代黑暗面的一種敘事。因此，我覺得臺靜農體現出絕對的現代性，在抗戰、愛國的敘事中寫出了一個最奇怪的故事。所以這是否逃逸，逃逸隱藏的爆炸性到什麼時候才能爆發出來，我沒有標準答案。這等於是一篇小說，藏在抽屜裏面80年以後，我們突然了解了，有了後見之明，而且落在不同地域空間裏，會產生各自的感想。

「輕」與「重」的華文文學

丘：從《跨世紀風華：當代小說20家》（2002）到《可畏想像力：當代小說31家》（2023），見證華語小說的嬗變。總體而言，王老師覺得華文文學是「輕」還是「重」呢？

王：20世紀以來，中國所面臨的歷史的大動盪和分合，絕對顯現在不同時期、文類的創作上。在我的閱讀經驗裏，深刻體會到政治對於過去百年的小說所帶來的或輕或重的影響。政治的干預本身帶來的輕與重，可能影響到小說家與讀者之間的生態。比如1949年至1978年之間大約30年，這是一段不可承受之重，創作變成多麼艱難的事情。到了1980年代，華語小說不論是在中國內地、台灣、香港，都有一種好像解放的感覺，一下子有了各種交流，促進了不同文類與風格之間的互動。我認為曾經有過那麼一個兩岸三地或四地非常反覆互動的時代，回想來看，果真是一個眾聲喧嘩的時代。1990年代以後，經過各種各樣的政治歷史經驗的起伏，我想這些經驗都在文學上留下了許多的痕迹。這些痕迹不見得只是主題或風格而已，也印證了整個文學生產的現象，包括出版過程所遇到問題和壓力等，還有今天我們所面臨的網絡文學生態，影響着我們對於文學的定義以及文學消費的方式。這是我在過去30年一直觀察與見證的文學生態變化。

文史之間的互動，這是千百年來我們無法迴避的一部分。現在的挑戰，不比我們在文學史的任何一個時期來得少，好像是一個文學解放的時代，同時又在種種遮蔽與禁忌、說與不說的選擇之間，再次對於「文」的涵義有所思考。（丘：很同意，像閻連科、陳冠中的小說，出版生態就很複雜。）對，這些個案都很特別，各有其盤根錯節的複雜現象，不應簡化。每一個時代都有它自己生存的法則，文學藝術創作者有着他們的——用張愛玲形容上海人的話——「奇異的智慧」。這些文學生態，我覺得不需要過分地以悲觀看待。

香港新故事，如何說下去？

丘：在31位作家裏，據說最讓王老師「可畏」的作家是陳冠中。最近陳冠中在一篇訪問（〈香港的新故事可怎麼寫？——訪香港作家陳冠中〉，《明報》7月2日）裏分享了他對於香港、香港文學相對不太悲觀的看法。王老師又對香港的文學發展與城市前景有什麼看法呢？論香港新故事，又有哪些作家值得我們去關注的呢？

王：對我來說，最「可畏」的作家一定是陳冠中。讀每一本陳冠中的小說，一方面都讓我覺得有意思，另一方面又讓我每每震驚：他居然可以讓小說這麼寫。我想我應該算是一個專業讀小說的人吧，可是我每次讀他的小說都會受到刺激，而且猜不到他下一本小說會怎麼寫。他也讓我想到了梁啟超1902年發明「新小說」這個文類的年代。回到陳冠中不太悲觀的看法，我是同意的。你我生活在當代的此刻當下，難道這麼多的人，就沒有一個方式把一個不同的故事繼續講下去嗎？回到鄂蘭最基本的定義，所謂的「講故事」就是在一個公共的領域裏面，人與人互相溝通、有意義的敘述行為。講故事不是講過去的故事、現在的故事，也是在講未來的故事。所以你問到香港的文學前景，理論上，香港還有很多故事可講。當然，陳冠中講的故事不是每個人有膽量和智慧能講，但同時有很多別的年輕作家在講各種各樣的故事。我今年在港科大的演講就介紹過幾位香港年輕作家：王証恒（著有《南歸貨車》），是一位青年左翼作家，繼承的是陳映真的傳統；李維怡（著有《行路難》）有立足社區充滿公共意識的創作；謝柏齊〈疫區調查〉（收入《暗流體》）是一則香港寓言，非常精彩；黃可偉的《偽雙城繪圖誌》寫青蛙城前世今生，藏有淡淡的憂鬱。這些作家都還在努力地講故事。用鄂蘭的話來總結，當一個社會有講故事的能量和意願的時候，這是一個公民社會；只有一種故事可講的話，那就不是公民社會了。我樂意去相信，香港新故事不只有一種講法，我們目前尚有很多講故事的辦法，而其中最值得講的是「可畏」的故事。

訪問、整理•丘庭傑

王程韡｜《实验室生活》在中国

 文︱王程韡

去年10月，法国著名哲学家、人类学家、社会学家拉图尔（Bruno Latour, 1947-2022）与世长辞，享年七十五岁。身为霍尔伯格奖（Holberg Prize, 2013）和京都奖（Kyoto Prize, 2021）两项世界级人文社会科学重要奖项的得主，拉图尔甚至从未申请到过巴黎高师这样的法国精英大学的教职。“在很长一段时间里，他在他的祖国相对不为人知，甚至是一些学术敌意的目标。”（Steve Woolgar, Bruno Latour [1947–2022], Nature, 2022, 611 [7937], p.661）

但他所处的时代却被这样一个人和他的后继者们不可逆转地改变了：长久以来，科学社会学曾对实验室中的日常科学实践视而不见。今天，这种近距离地“用社会学家的显微镜观察”（J. Salk, Introduction, B. Latour, S. Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986, p.12）实验设备、记录、纸张痕迹、材料样本、引文、研究资助，以及实验室里“灵长类动物”的科学人类学进路，毋庸置疑地成为了STS（science and technology studies），特别是“实验室研究”（laboratory studies）的“权力的新源头”（B. Latour, The Pasteurization of France, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988, p.40, 133）——宛若他笔下的法国著名微生物学家巴斯德（Louis Pasteur, 1822-1895）。科学家可以被“围观”，甚至可用研究“前现代人”的方式来“冷眼审视”他们（A. Kofman, Bruno Latour, the Post-Truth Philosopher, Mounts a Defense of Science, New York Times, 2018）。我们需要的，只是走进实验室去勇敢地跟随曾拥有着无比光环的他们。一切变化的起点，便是拉图尔的《实验室生活》（以下简称《生活》）。

初识《生活》

“实验室研究”在西方世界如火如荼地开展之时，刚刚打开大门的中国学术界却对此一无所知。大部分的人还要依靠《自然科学哲学问题（丛刊）》（1979-1989）、《科学与哲学（研究资料）》（1979-1986），或是更通俗的“走向未来”丛书的译介，才能够稍微了解到波普尔、库恩等科学哲学家的思想。直到1987年，情况才稍微有了变化。

当年10月31日至11月13日，《科学的社会研究》（Social Studies of Science）杂志的创刊副主编、历史学家麦克劳德（Roy MacLeod, 1941-）应中国科学院科技政策与管理科学研究所的邀请到北京访问。在11月4日下午和10日两天，麦克劳德教授向中国同行介绍了后库恩时代“科学社会学”研究的新进展。根据后来整理的“学术动态”报道，麦克劳德教授在讲座中提到了爱丁堡学派“重视对实验室科研步骤的实地体验”的做法。他甚至还在推荐书目中明确提到了《实验室生活》（王德禄、郑宇建：《澳大利亚科学社会学家麦克劳德来华访问》，《自然辩证法通讯》, 1988年第一期,70-72页）。这也是这本书，连同拉图尔的名字第一次进入中国学术界的视野。

麦克劳德教授的访问为当时中国的自然辩证法（科技哲学）研究打开了局面。国内学者开始大量仿照使用“科学的社会研究”这类表述（陈光：《科学社会学的新转向》，《科学》, 1989年第四期，288-292页）。值得注意的是，沿着麦克劳德报告的传统，南开大学的刘珺珺专门发文介绍了“新的科学知识社会学”流派——爱丁堡学派。按照她的解释，爱丁堡学派是：

在库恩的哲学思想影响下，在批判了传统的实证主义科学观之后，研究科学知识的相对性和社会内容的学派。（刘珺珺：《科学社会学的研究传统和现状》，《自然辩证法通讯》,1989年第四期，21页）

但不同于麦克劳德（或其转述者）错误地将拉图尔归入爱丁堡学派，刘珺珺认为：

法国哲学家布鲁诺·拉都尔（Bruno Latour）代表着另一种发展路线……以法国为代表的、从微观角度研究科学知识的建构过程的研究方法，有人称之为微观倾向发生学方法或建构主义纲领。（同前）

也是在这篇文章里，《生活》的内容得到了进一步的披露。刘珺珺重点关注了《生活》的两部分内容（分别是原书的第二、第五章）：第一，注意到实验室的本质是“由机器、仪器和实验技术人员综合在一起的装置组成”，而这些装置存在的意义在于“进行文学标记（literary inscription）”。第二，科学家从事科学的目的并非默顿学派所言的奖励（rewards），而是“可信用性或借贷能力（credibility，即信用）”的一种投资。

尽管刘珺珺自谦，上述文字只是“个人的学习所得，并不是全面的综述”。但她还是尖锐地将矛头指向了第一版《生活》中的建构主义色彩，认为拉图尔的信用“循环仍然在认识的循环之外”，从而未能履行并碰触到其“研究科学的最重要的内容——科学知识”的承诺。殊不知早在1986年，《生活》就已经出了改版。新版的最显著特征之一，就是将副标题中的“社会建构”明确地改为了“建构”。刘珺珺的综述性工作影响是深远的。一个很重要的表现就是后来的很长一段时间，拉图尔都被延续地译为拉都尔（见施雁飞：《西方科学哲学的现状和趋向（上）》，《哲学动态》，1990年第九期，33-35页；方卫华：《科学知识社会学评述——对建构主义的分析》，《自然辩证法研究》1992年第一期，34-39页；樊春良：《科学知识的制造——谢廷娜的建构主义科学知识社会学》，《科学学研究》,1992年第一期，18-23页；张锦志：《两种形而上学标准之争——对布鲁尔与拉都尔论战的哲学考察》，《自然辩证法研究》，2001年第七期，21-24、72页）。

实际上早在1987年，刘珺珺就打算写一本科学社会学的书（而并非仅仅是一篇介绍性的文章）。但没想到：

书籍和论文资料……远远不够，不得不请求外国朋友或在国外的中国朋友寄来……再加上教学任务缠身，竟使这本书写写停停达三年之久尚未完成。（刘珺珺：《科学社会学》，上海人民出版社，1990年，第3页）

作为“新学科丛书”（1986-1990）的最后一本，刘珺珺在《科学社会学》中系统性地介绍了科学社会学的研究对象、历史发展以及同其他学科之间的关系。但如她本人坦陈，囿于资料等方面的限制，全书的后半部分还是使用了大量的篇幅介绍了默顿学派的工作，包括科学社会体制、科学家的行为规范以及科学奖励制度和权威结构等。仅仅在最后一章“科学知识社会学”中提到了爱丁堡学派和拉图尔的内容。特别是后者——

主张通过对科学实验室的人类学研究看穿这些“黑箱”。（《科学社会学》，258页）

尽管只是1988年文章的扩展，刘珺珺第一次明确地将拉图尔的工作归结为人类学方法，并单独给了拉图尔一个小节的篇幅。在“科学知识社会学的人类学方法。拉都尔”中，刘珺珺进一步介绍了《生活》第一、第三两章的部分内容——特别是促甲状腺释放因子的案例，作为“文学标记的功能就在于说服读者”观点的补充。考虑到只有这部分才“是主要的社会学内容”，扩展最多的部分是“可信用性”。她甚至还不惜篇幅，将《生活》中的信用循环图片（B. Latour, S. Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts, Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1979, p.201）照搬了过来（却将“资助”误译成了“赠款”，《科学社会学》，282页）。不过她也在后记中坦言：

这个学派的基本思想和若干观点，目前还很难接受……对于要以科学技术推动工业化而奋力直追的中国人民来说，恐怕是完全不合时宜的思潮。（同前，291-292页）

无论如何，这大概都构成了《生活》在中国的第一个“粗糙和仓促”的部分译本。

法文译本

2000年，中国社会科学院哲学研究所成立了“哲学与文化研究室”。刚刚调任到研究室的霍桂桓决定和同事鲁旭东一起策划一套“知识与社会译丛”，系统性地介绍科学知识社会学（SSK）的工作。彼时，江西教育等部分出版社已经开始零星地译介SSK的作品。刘华杰评价，这“中国首次全面引入SSK……在中国学术出版史上应当记上一笔”（刘华杰：《浅谈近几年SSK在中国的传播》，《中华读书报》2002年6月26日）。

按照鲁旭东的说法，“SSK代表了国外学术界在认识论、社会哲学以及科学社会学等方面研究的新方向”（鲁旭东：《“科学社会学：理论与争论”编者按》，《哲学译丛》2000年第一期，第5页）。但和刘珺珺的《科学社会学》情况类似，系统性地译介SSK的经典并不容易。如鲁旭东在受访中所言，

科学社会学在中国刚刚起步，国内相关的学术资料很少，翻译的过程中，尤其是在翻译类似这种在国内刚刚开始建设的学科领域的学术著作时……经常会遇到一些意想不到的困难，有时候甚至会被一句话或者一个术语困扰很长时间。（陈菁霞：《鲁旭东：学术翻译对20世纪中国文化的影响》，《中华读书报》2021年5月26日第七版）

事实上，《生活》（以及拉图尔的另一本书《科学在行动：怎样在社会中跟随科学家和工程师》）是这套译丛里出版最晚的一批。可能正是由于对SSK整体上的不熟悉，在发现《生活》存在英、法两个语种的版本后，张伯霖、刁小英两位译者选择了后者，尽管很牵强，但其原因是：

拉图尔是法国人，所以我们最后决定由法文译为中文。（张伯霖、刁小英：《译后记》，[法]布鲁诺·拉图尔、[英]史蒂夫·伍尔加：《实验室生活：科学事实的建构过程》，东方出版社, 2004年，299页）

根据拉图尔在“致读者”中的陈述，他“意译第一章，并删去了英文第二版中的序言和跋”。然而两个版本的细节方面仍存在着些许的不一致，比如题献的部分法文版就只提到了索尔克研究所和吉耶曼教授，全然没有提到富布莱特和北约奖学金对研究工作的资助。第二版序言实际上也是索尔克本人为《生活》专门撰写的。跋则更多展示了他对本书理论定位的反思，以及对维斯特鲁姆等人批评（R. Westrum, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts, by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar [Book Review], Knowledge, 1982, 3 [3], p.437）的回应。显然在拉图尔看来，这些节外生枝的信息并非法国的读者要知道的。

对于法国读者而言，异域情调的美国本身就有足够的吸引力：

作为哲学家，我以合作的方式在法国服兵役……有幸……遇到了……人类学家。我来到萨尔克（原文如此，通常译为索尔克）研究所。这个研究所看起来像个掩体，除了宽敞的水泥掩蔽所外，附近别无他物……我从他（索尔克）的办公室走出来。在海岸边的峭壁前，一艘巡洋舰已离开锚地圣迭戈。（2004年译本，第4-5页）

显然，这种写作方式非常的列维-斯特劳斯（Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1908-2009）。如同列氏名著《忧郁的热带》，拉图尔希望给法国读者展示的就是他某种意义上的游记。

尽管不忘提到实验室里令人印象深刻的中国人（拉图尔坦陈读科学论文简直就像读中文）和“红棕色头发的……矮胖子”，拉图尔却并没有将全部笔墨浪费在投喂猎奇上。相反，他尖锐地指出以巴什拉尔（Gaston Bachelard, 1884-1962）为代表的法国哲学已经被英国同行所超越——SSK正以一种对称性的方式同等地对待科学史中的成功和失败者，这与巴什拉尔“不断地嘲笑十八世纪伪科学家”（2004年译本，14页），形成了鲜明的对照。而他自己做的，正是为法国人扳回一局：英国的科学社会史家“拘泥于档案（文献、文章、谈话纪要)”；他，一个法国人，不但去现场记录了“对科学家工作的直接观察”，还编纂了“实验室的第一部人类文化学志”（同前，第9、13、15页），而且最关键的是：

在我们结束调查后的一年以后，R·吉耶曼由于阐明TRF的特征而荣获诺贝尔奖。对，这是正规科学，不是边缘科学。（同前，23页）

而且他所运用的方法正是法国人所熟悉的人类学方法（他甚至还在《生活》中引用了列维-斯特劳斯的《野性的思维》）。

如果承认一个25岁的年轻的男人和女人能够深入地了解他们所陌生的实践和世界，那么……[这种方法也]完全适用于萨（索）尔克研究所。（同前，17-18页）

法文版《生活》出版之时，拉图尔的《法国的巴斯德化》——他职业生涯中第二部标志性的作品已经付梓。也许是经历了改版和多年来对批评的回应让他的思想更加成熟，拉图尔果断地放弃了英文版中“盎格鲁-萨克逊的论战风格”。甚至在很多时候，拉图尔的论证是简单粗暴的。比如上面一段文字在英文版中被更明确地表述为陌生化策略，即“尽可能让实验室活动显得陌生”（Latour and Woolgar, 1979, p.30）。相比之下，法文版里只是在字面意义上稍微提到了作为陌生化理论来源的常人方法学（ethnomethodology，原译“人类文化学方法论”有误）。

可惜囿于各方面的限制，《生活》和那个时代的大部分译著类似，翻译质量并不是太高。甚至在一些情况下会引发误解。比如：

这样，我们人类学家观察者就遇到了一个奇怪的部落，这个部落正度过自己编码、做标记、读与写的最光辉的时代。从表面看, 这些活动与做标记、书写、编码和修订并无关系，那么，这些活动有什么意义呢？例如，我们在照片4上看到两位照管老鼠的年轻妇女。（2004年译本，34页）

对照英文版，正确的表述应该是：

因此，我们的人类学观察家所面对的是一个奇怪的部落，部落里的人们每天要花费大部分的时间来编码、标记、修改、纠正、阅读和书写。那么，那些显然与标记、书写、编码和纠正无关的活动，比如照片4中显示的两名年轻女性正在处理大鼠，其意义又是什么呢？（Latour and Woolgar, 1979, p.49）

无论如何，法文版《生活》的译介为中国学术界打开了一扇大门。学生和学者们如饥似渴地从中寻找着概念和理论资源。渐渐地，“拉都尔”的译法被历史遗忘，“拉图尔”的正统译名取而代之。

重译《生活》的意义与遗憾

2023年，《生活》依照英文第二版得到了重译（这无疑是目前最好的一个译本）。读者终于可以一睹它的全貌，包括此前被法文版删去的索尔克题写的序言和反身性色彩浓厚的跋。尤其是前者，索尔克用精炼的语言勾勒出整本书的重点：

他们的一个主要观点是，并非社会世界存在于一边，而科学世界则存在于另一边……他们声称的主要成就是揭示了“人类的诸方面”被排除在“事实生产”最后阶段的那种方式。（J. Salk, Introduction, p.13）

尽管从对称性的角度出发，两位作者承认“未来对其陈述进行重新评估的可能性依然存在”（Latour and Woolgar, 1986, p.88），尽管索尔克本人还是对这种思维方式仍心存疑虑，但他还是认为，《生活》始终朝着一个“正确的方向迈进”，即消除了“被认为围绕着我们（科学）活动的神秘感”（J. Salk, Introduction, p.14）。

的确，和人类学家一样，科学的成员们所面临的难题也是：

说服论文（以及组成它的图表和图形）的读者，其陈述应被接受为事实。为此，大鼠才被放血和砍头，青蛙才被剥皮，化学品才被消耗，时间才被花费，职业发展之路才被筑起或是破坏，inscription devices才在实验室中被制造出来并积累下去。事实上，这正是实验室存在的理由。（Latour and Woolgar, 1986, p.88）

作为全书的一个核心概念，inscription devices在新版中被翻译成“铭文装置”。这大体沿用了赵万里在其博士论文（导师为刘珺珺）中“铭写装置”的译法（赵万里：《建构论与科学知识的社会建构》，南开大学, 2000年）。有趣的是，在三个版本中，这个词分别被译为“（标记）装置”“记录器”和“铭文装置”。尽管“翻译即背叛”的情况在所难免，究竟哪一个译法更接近《生活》的本意呢？

按照两位作者的说法，inscription devices本质上依赖于apparatus或是apparatus的特定组合。从实验室中A、B两个区介绍的情况来看，apparatus的含义更接近通常意义上的仪器而非福柯意义上的装置——或可统称为机器。其作用是“将物质实体转化为办公空间的成员可以直接使用的图形或图表”。有了这些图形或图表，

中间的物质活动，以及通常漫长而昂贵的这个转化过程的所有方面……都可以闭口不谈。（Latour and Woolgar, 1986, p.51）

这实际上也是实验室研究的成果以论文的形式在科学家共同体中传播（科学计量学通常关注的部分），并实现陈述类型转换——甚至最终成为科学事实的前置条件。

因此如法文版译文所言，inscription的核心含义是（书面地）记录。如两位作者所言，“文字记录（literary inscription）的功能是成功地说服读者，但只有当所有的说服来源（即说话者）都看似消失时，读者才会完全信服”（Latour and Woolgar, 1986, p.76）。

与记录相对的是说话者必须在场的表达（expression，参见第二章注释2）。《生活》的第四章实际上展现了实验室中的各种表达，比如：

史密斯：你有信心她（实验室中的一位年轻的博士后）能做五只(更多的动物)吗？

瑞克特：是说她的诚实吗？

史密斯：不是诚实……她做其他工作，你有信心吗？

瑞克特：哦，没有，在诚实的意义上，她倒是十分可靠的。（Latour and Woolgar, 1986, p.163）

为避免“得不偿失”，史密斯和瑞克特最终决定不继续发表他们的摘要。但除非进入信用循环，比如写进这位博士后的推荐信，上述表达是永远不需要被记录的。

考虑到全书并没有单独使用devices的例证，这个概念绝不是apparatus的同义反复。《生活》的第二章使用了大量的篇幅证明科学文本（除了标注参考文献）几乎和文学文本并无二致，我们最好也从文学的对称性角度去尝试理解。如同索尔克也这样认为并在序言中开宗明义地指出的：非科学家写科学批评，同非小说家或诗人写文学批评本质上是一回事。

在文学的语境下，literary devices通常被译作“文学手法”，是指用来传达文章内容的结构和技巧。因此当两位作者使用inscription devices这个概念时，他们试图传达的含义也是记录手段（或按照法国哲学社会科学的传统译为“策略”）——无论是科学家（或者其实验员助手）用来总结的痕迹、斑、点、柱状图、录入的数字、光谱、峰值等，还是人类学家在民族志中所援引的（田野）笔记，所呈现的实境照片。

除了一些小瑕疵，关键概念上的“背叛”恐怕是包括新译本在内的全部三个译本共同的遗憾。但如同在科学研究中有时不得不使用间接证据的怪物（monster，Latour and Woolgar, 1986, p.116），对科学知识本身的研究也不得不使用“既能使怪物得到遏制，又能在我们的事业中占有一席之地的文字表达诸形式”（B. Latour, Postscript to Second Edition, Latour and Woolgar, 1986, p.283）。从某种意义上讲，这些可以被“重新评估”的新概念本身也只能是一种权衡。

作者、译者退场。未来可期。 

---

王程韡

中国科学技术大学

科技史与科技考古系特任教授

 

'One blow after another ... and finally something snapped'

This is an edited version of "The Other Side of Paradise, Scott Fitzgerald, 40, Engulfed in Despair" by Michel Mok, first published in the New York Post, September 25 1936

Long ago, when he was young, cocksure, drunk with sudden success, F Scott Fitzgeraldtold a newspaper man that no one should live beyond 30. That was in 1921, shortly after his first novel, This Side of Paradise, had burst into the literary heavens like a flowering Roman candle.

The poet-prophet of the post-war neurotics observed his 40th birthday yesterday in his bedroom of the Grove Park Inn here. He spent the day as he spends all his days - trying to come back from the other side of paradise, the hell of despondency in which he has writhed for the last couple of years.

He had no company except his soft spoken, Southern, maternal and indulgent nurse and this reporter. With the girl he bantered in conventional nurse-and-patient fashion. With his visitor he chatted bravely, as an actor, consumed with fear that his name will never be in lights again, discusses his next starring role. He kidded no one. There obviously was as little hope in his heart as there was sunshine in the dripping skies, covered with clouds that veiled the view of Sunset Mountain.

Physically he was suffering the aftermath of an accident eight weeks ago, when he broke his right shoulder in a dive from a 15- foot springboard. But whatever pain the fracture might still cause him, it did not account for his jittery jumping off and on to his bed, his restless pacing, his trembling hands, his twitching face with its pitiful expression of a cruelly beaten child.

Nor could it be held responsible for his frequent trips to a highboy, in a drawer of which lay a bottle. Each time he poured a drink into the measuring glass on his bedside table, he would look appealingly at the nurse and ask, "Just one ounce?"

Each time the nurse cast down her eyes without replying. Fitzgerald, for that matter, did not attempt to make his injury an excuse for his thirst.

"A series of things happened to papa," he said, with mock brightness. "So papa got depressed and started drinking a little."

What the "things" were he refused to explain.

"One blow after another," he said, "and finally something snapped."

Before coming to North Carolina, however, his visitor had learned something of Fitzgerald's recent history from friends in Baltimore, where he lived until last July.

The author's wife, Zelda, had been ill for some years. There was talk, said his friends, of an attempt at suicide on her part one evening when the couple were taking a walk in the country outside Baltimore. Mrs Fitzgerald, so the story went, threw herself on the tracks before an oncoming express train. Fitzgerald, himself in poor health, rushed after her and narrowly saved her life.

There were other difficulties. Mrs Fitzgerald finally was taken to a sanatorium near this city, and her husband soon followed her, taking a room in the rock-built Park Grove Inn, one of the largest and most famous resort hotels in America.

But the causes of Fitzgerald's breakdown are of less importance than its effects on the writer. In a piece entitled Pasting It Together, one of three autobiographical articles published in Esquire, which appeared in the March issue of that magazine, Fitzgerald described himself as "a cracked plate".

"Sometimes, though," he wrote, "the cracked plate has to be retained in the pantry, has to be kept in service as a household necessity. It can never again be warmed on the stove nor shuffled with the other plates in the dishpan; it will not be brought out for company, but it will do to hold crackers late at night or to go into the ice box under the leftovers.

"Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering - this is an all-weather beatitude for gloom in general and fairly salutory daytime advice for every one. But at three o'clock in the morning ... the cure doesn't work - and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day. At that hour the tendency is to refuse to face things as long as possible by retiring into an infantile dream - but one is continually startled out of this by various contacts with the world.

"One meets these occasions as quickly and carelessly as possible and retires once more back into the dream, hoping that things will adjust themselves by some great material or spiritual bonanza. But as the withdrawal persists there is less and less chance of the bonanza - one is not waiting for the fade-out of a single sorrow, but rather being an unwilling witness of an execution, the disintegration of one's own personality ..."

Yesterday, toward the end of a long, rambling, disjointed talk, he put it in different words, not nearly as poetic but no less moving for that reason:

"A writer like me," he said, "must have an utter confidence, an utter faith in his star. It's an almost mystical feeling, a feeling of nothingcan- happen-to-me, nothing-can-harm-me, nothing-can-touch-me.

"Thomas Wolfe has it. Ernest Hemingway has it. I once had it. But through a series of blows, many of them my own fault, something happened to that sense of immunity and I lost my grip."

In illustration, he told a story about his father.

"As a boy, my father lived in Montgomery County, Maryland. Our family has been mixed up quite a bit in American history. My greatgrandfather's brother was Francis Scott Key who wrote The Star- Spangled Banner; I was named for him. My father's aunt was Mrs Suratt, who was hanged after the assassination of Lincoln because Booth had planned the deed in her house - you remember that three men and a woman were executed.

"As a youngster of nine, my father rowed spies across the river. When he was 12 he felt that life was finished for him. As soon as he could, he went west, as far away from the scenes of the civil war as possible. He started a wicker-furniture factory in St Paul. A financial panic in the 90s struck him and he failed.

'We came back east and my father got a job as a soap salesman in Buffalo. He worked at this for some years. One afternoon - I was 10 or 11 - the phone rang and my mother answered it. I didn't understand what she said but I felt that disaster had come to us. My mother, a little while before, had given me a quarter to go swimming. I gave the money back to her. I knew something terrible had happened and I thought she could not spare the money now.

"Then I began to pray. 'Dear God,' I prayed, 'please don't let us go to the poorhouse; please don't let us go to the poorhouse.' A little while later my father came home. I had been right. He had lost his job.

"That morning he had gone out a comparatively young man, a man full of strength, full of confidence. He came home that evening, an old man, a completely broken man. He had lost his essential drive, his immaculateness of purpose. He was a failure the rest of his days."

Fitzgerald rubbed his eyes, his mouth, quickly walked up and down the room.

"Oh," he said, "I remember something else. I remember that when my father came home my mother said to me, 'Scott, say something to your father.' I didn't know what to say. I went up to him and asked, 'Father, who do you think will be the next president?' He looked out of the window. He didn't move a muscle. Then he said: 'I think Taft will.'

"My father lost his grip and I lost my grip. But now I'm trying to get back. I started by writing those pieces for Esquire. Perhaps they were a mistake. Too much de profundis. My best friend, a great American writer - he's the man I call my artistic conscience in one of the Esquire articles - wrote me a furious letter. He said I was stupid to write that gloomy personal stuff."

"What are your plans at the moment, Mr Fitzgerald? What are you working on now?"

"Oh, all sorts of things. But let's not talk about plans. When you talk about plans, you take something away from them."

Fitzgerald left the room.

"Despair, despair, despair," said the nurse. "Despair day and night. Try not to talk about his work or his future. He does work, but only very little - maybe three, four hours a week."

Soon he returned. "We must celebrate the author's birthday," he said gayly. "We must kill the fatted calf or, at any rate, cut the candled cake." He took another drink. "Much against your better judgment, my dear," he smiled at the girl.

Heeding the nurse's advice, the visitor turned the talk to the writer's early days and Fitzgerald told how This Side of Paradise came to be written.

"I wrote it when I was in the army," he said. "I was 19. I rewrote the whole book a year later. The title was changed, too. Originally, it was called, The Romantic Egotist.

"Isn't This Side of Paradise a beautiful title? I'm good at titles, you know. I've published four novels and four volumes of short stories. All my novels have good titles - The Great Gatsby, The Beautiful and Damned and Tender Is the Night. That's my latest book. I worked on it four years.

"Yes, I wrote This Side of Paradise in the army. I didn't go overseas - my army experience consisted mostly of falling in love with a girl in each city I happened to be in.

"I almost went across. They actually marched us on to a transport and then marched us right off again. Influenza epidemic or something. That was about a week before the armistice.

"We were quartered at Camp Mills, in Long Island. I sneaked out of bounds into New York- there was a girl concerned, no doubt - and I missed the train back to Camp Sheridan, Alabama, where we had been trained.

"So this is what I did. Went to the Pennsylvania station and commandeered an engine and a cab to take me to Washington to join the troops. I told the railroad people I had confidential war papers for President Wilson. Couldn't wait a minute. Couldn't be entrusted to the mails. They fell for my bluff. I'm sure it's the only time in the history of the United States army that a lieutenant has commandeered a locomotive. I caught up with the regiment in Washington. No, I wasn't punished."

"But how about This Side of Paradise?"

"That's right, I'm wandering. After we were mustered out I went to New York. Scribners turned my book down. Then I tried to get a job on a newspaper. I went to every newspaper office with the scores and lyrics of the Triangle shows of the two or three previous years under my arm. I had been one of the big boys in the Triangle Club at Princeton and I thought that would help. The office boys were not impressed."

One day, Fitzgerald ran into an advertising man who told him to stay away from the newspaper business. He helped him to get a job with the Barron Collier agency, and for some months Fitzgerald wrote slogans for street car cards.

"I remember," he said, "the hit I made with a slogan I wrote for the Muscatine Steam laundry in Muscatine, Iowa - 'We keep you clean in Muscatine.' I got a raise for that. 'It's perhaps a bit imaginative,' said the boss, 'but still it's plain that there's a future for you in this business. Pretty soon this office won't be big enough to hold you.'"

In This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald had one of his principal characters take a crack at the popular authors of the period - some of whom are popular still - in these words:

"Fifty thousand dollars a year! My God look at them, look at them - Edna Ferber, Gouverneur Morris, Fannie Hurst, Mary Roberts Rinehart - not producing among 'em one story or novel that will last 10 years. This man Cobb - I don't think he's either clever or amusing - and what's more, I don't think many people do, except the editors. He's just groggy with advertising. And - oh, Harold Bell Wright and Zane Grey, Ernest Poole and Dorothy Canfield try, but they are hindered by their absolute lack of any sense of humour."

And the lad wound up by saying, it was no wonder that such English writers as Wells, Conrad, Galsworthy, Shaw and Bennett depended on America for over half their sales. What does Fitzgerald think of the literary situation in this country today?

"It has improved a lot," he said. "The whole thing broke with Main Street. Ernest Hemingway, I think, is the greatest living writer of English. He took that place when Kipling died. Next comes Thomas Wolfe and then Faulkner and Dos Passos.

"Erskine Caldwell and a few others have come up just a bit after our generation, and they haven't done quite so well. We were products of prosperity. The best art is produced in times of riches. The men who came some years after us didn't have the chance we had."

Has he changed his mind on questions of economics? Amory Blaine, the hero of This Side of Paradise, predicted the success of the Bolshevik experiment in Russia, foresaw eventual government ownership of all industries in this country.

"Oh, but I made an awful boner," said Fitzgerald. "Do you remember I said publicity would destroy Lenin? That was a fine prophecy. He became a saint. My views? Well, in a pinch they'd still be pretty much towards the left."

Then the reporter asked him how he felt now about the jazz-mad, gin-mad generation whose feverish doings he chronicled in This Side of Paradise. How had they done? How did they stand up in the world?

"Why should I bother myself about them?" he asked. "Haven't I enough worries of my own? You know as well as I do what has happened to them. Some became brokers and threw themselves out of windows. Others became bankers and shot themselves. Still others became newspaper reporters. And a few became successful authors."

His face twitched.

"Successful authors!" he cried. "Oh, my God, successful authors!"

He stumbled over to the highboy and poured himself another drink.

·Copyrighy the New York Post, 1936. Excerpts from the New York Post are reprinted courtesy of the New York Post.

 

Outbreaks of Poets

Robert Crawford

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n12

The Treasuries: Poetry Anthologies and the Making of British Culture by Clare Bucknell.Head of Zeus, 344 pp., £27.99, February, 978 1 80024 144 2

W

hen I was young I thought poetry and poetry anthologies could change the world. ‘If a man were permitted to make all the ballads,’ Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun wrote, ‘he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.’ But nationality still mattered: Seamus Heaney’s reaction to his inclusion in Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion’s 1982 Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetrywas ‘My passport’s green.’ Heaney, preoccupied with ‘the government of the tongue’, was drawn into the arguments about cultural identity, language, gender and inclusiveness stirred up by the 1991 Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, which covered 1500 years of work in Latin, Norman French, Gaelic and English. Les Murray’s New Oxford Book of Australian Verseand Anthology of Australian Religious Poetryincluded traditional work translated from Aboriginal languages as well as modern verse in English by poets from a range of racial and linguistic backgrounds. Growing up in Scotland, I took it for granted that linguistic diversity was integral to a national culture: Burns and MacDiarmid in Scots and English, Sorley MacLean in Gaelic – and Edwin Morgan veering into Loch Ness Monsterese and Mercurian.

In this spirit, I edited or co-edited four anthologies during my thirties. All contained work in English, Scots and Gaelic. The two largest – The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945(co-edited with Simon Armitage) and The Penguin Book of Scottish Verse(co-edited with Mick Imlah) – included Welsh. The early section of the Scottish Verseanthology also pulled in medieval Latin, Old Norse, Old English and Old French. American academic anthologists acted similarly. Since 1962, the Norton Anthology of English Literature, edited by M.H.Abrams and others, had held that ‘the medieval period in English literature extends for more than 800 years’ and included Old English as well as Middle English poetry. By the late 1990s, the Norton Anthologyhad seen off the rival Oxford Anthology, produced by heavyweight academics including Frank Kermode and Harold Bloom, and the deep histories of English and British culture were being re-scripted. A revised edition of the Norton Anthologycommissioned a translation of Beowulffrom Heaney, and David Damrosch’s Longman Anthology of British Literatureadvocated a linguistically complicated idea of what ‘British’ meant. Sean Shesgreen’s ‘Short History of The Norton Anthology of English Literature’, published in Critical Inquiryin 2009, quotes Stephen Greenblatt’s emails to his Norton co-editors, telling them that Damrosch aimed to include ‘many texts by Welsh, Irish and Scottish writers, to show that multiculturalism, as it were, begins at home’.

But in England itself it was too often taken for granted that ‘English’ was a straightforward term, and that poets in ‘minority languages’ would not be included in ‘English’ or ‘British’ anthologies. My favourite example involves the British anthology The Terrible Rain: The War Poets 1939-45, edited by Brian Gardner and published in 1966; not only did it exclude Gaelic work, but its sole mention of Sorley MacLean (who lived until 1996) occurs when Gardner lists him among poets killed in action during the Second World War. As the end of the 20thcentury brought political devolution to the United Kingdom, and the arguments that would lead to Brexit simmered, I wanted to edit an anthology called The Poetry of England. This would have included verse in Middle English, Latin, Old French and Old English as well as the language of Robert Browning (‘Oh, to be in England’), Linton Kwesi Johnson (‘Inglan is a Bitch’) and T.S.Eliot (‘History is now and England’). I had got as far as setting out the rationale for such a book in a lecture at the British Academy when the Penguin and Oxford anthologies of English verse edited respectively by Paul Keegan and Christopher Ricks appeared. Like their predecessors, they exclude most of the Middle Ages; feature no work (even in translation) from Latin, Old English or French; and co-opt Irish, Scottish, Welsh and American verse as ‘English’. Since the appearance of these anthologies, no other major British publisher has challenged their dominance.

What does Clare Bucknell mean by ‘British culture’? The first chapter of The Treasuries: Poetry Anthologies and the Making of British Culturecovers a four-volume series of anthologies, Poems on Affairs of State, published from 1689 until 1707. The editors included poems addressing wars, taxes, the court and government, but also those that took aim at individuals, particularly Charles IIand the ‘pimps, priests, buffoons’ and other corrupt characters that surrounded him. It’s an odd starting point and the material is dry, but Bucknell does a decent job of spicing it up, starting with an account of a hanging and quartering in the prison yard at Oxford Castle and citing some of the more puerile satirists, including one who succeeded in rhyming ‘true EnglishHeart’ with ‘a Fart’. More pertinent to her subtitle, she asks ‘What happened to Poems on Affairs of Stateafter 1707?’ but says nothing about the crucial nature of the date ‘1707’ to British culture. The 1707 Act of Union marked the birth of the new British Parliament and involved riots and pamphlet wars; eventually, it led to such songs and poems as James Thomson’s ‘Rule, Britannia’ and Robert Burns’s ‘A Parcel of Rogues’. A digital search shows that the words ‘Scots’ and ‘Scotland’ occur nowhere in the London-published 1707 Affairs of State. This tells us something more important about ‘British culture’ at the time than jokes about the duchess of York’s asparagus breath, and Bucknell might have asked why it was so.

Each of The Treasuries’ eight chapters considers a particular anthology or group of anthologies; together they cover 300 years, arriving at the present day. Bucknell doesn’t claim that her book is anything other than highly selective – her focus is those anthologies popular enough to be considered ‘literary equivalents of public museums or galleries’ – but nonetheless it’s a shame to find its contents almost exclusively centred on England. Irish poetry is occasionally alluded to (Yeats is mentioned twice; Heaney in a footnote). Welsh poetry fares even worse. There is no discussion of Hugh MacDiarmid, whose 1940 Golden Treasury of Scottish Poetrybroke the mould by treating Gaelic and Latin as part of a national body of verse. When she does mention Scottish anthologists, editors and publishers – John Bell (The Poets of Great Britain), Robert Anderson (Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain) and Thomas Campbell (Specimens of the British Poets) – Bucknell doesn’t comment on the way they promoted through their works’ titles a ‘British’ culture, rather than one badged as ‘English’. In the wake of Yeats’s Book of Irish Verse(first published in 1895, a decade before the founding of Sinn Féin) and R.L.Mackie’s Book of Scottish Verse(published in 1934, the year the Scottish National Party was founded), major English publishers including Oxford, Penguin and Faber increasingly published anthologies of Scottish, Welsh and Irish verse, complicating the notion of what an ‘English’ or ‘British’ verse anthology might be, and strengthening the notion that British culture and English culture were different entities. These books, like MacDiarmid’s Golden Treasury, were often bound up with nationalist energies, and encouraged the climate of Irish independence and British devolution.

At the heart of Bucknell’s book is an examination of Francis Turner Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language(1861), which Ezra Pound denounced three-quarters of a century later as a ‘stinking sugar teat’, but which sold very well from the outset and, as Bucknell points out, ‘became a model for the heavyweight collections that came after it, household fixtures such as The Oxford Book of English Verse(1900) and The Faber Book of Modern Verse(1936)’. In his 1991 edition of The Golden Treasury, Christopher Ricks called it ‘the best-known and the best-selling anthology of English poetry ever’, adding: ‘It is the best, too.’ Bucknell contends that Palgrave’s anthology was ‘as British as the poetic landscapes between its covers’, which included those of Shakespeare, Thomas Gray, Wordsworth and the Border ballads. But it was British in a determinedly monolingual way (Palgrave even worried about including Burns’s Scottish dialect). He included nothing medieval (none of his poets was born before the 1550s), and, after a minor tussle with Tennyson, excluded anyone who was still alive in 1861. There were no Americans or other writers from outside the British Isles. Formally, he narrowed things down, too. Though its sense of what constituted a song or lyrical poem was elastic, ‘The Golden Treasuryhas been profoundly effective,’ as Ricks writes, ‘just because it at once ministers to and mitigates the ordinary reader’s belief that essentially poetry isthe lyric.’

Giving a useful biographical sketch of Palgrave (an Oxford pal of Matthew Arnold and Arthur Hugh Clough, and an admirer of Tennyson), Bucknell relates his professional work in English adult education to a growing passion for ‘England’s native literature ...English history and the values of the English people’. After all, ‘England’s literature, its poetry in particular, was considered one of the characteristic achievements that had made the country what it was.’ Bucknell makes Palgrave seem in some ways more Anglocentric than he was. The Golden Treasuryincludes as many poems by Scott as by Keats, and more than 10 per cent of the poets it includes are Scottish. Though it contains few Victorian writers, the anthology certainly indicates aspects of Victorian taste: oodles of Robert Herrick, but only one poem attributed to John Donne; seven poems by William Drummond, but just one by George Herbert; more than ninety men, but just five women (three of them Scots); far more poems by Wordsworth than by anybody else.

Palgrave assembled his anthology while working in London as a civil servant at the Education Office. Bucknell speculates that for him as well as for his readers, putting the word ‘golden’ in front of ‘treasury’ was a way of evoking ‘a vision of glittering riches, a metaphorical version of the real Treasury in London where the nation’s wealth was safeguarded’. Yet the title – crucial both to Palgrave’s book and to Bucknell’s own – has further resonances. Palgrave’s anthology was designed, as Emily Tennyson put it, ‘to beat’ the Irish poet-anthologist William Allingham’s 1860 Nightingale Valley, subtitled ‘A Collection, including a Great Number of the Choicest Lyrics and Short Poems in the English Language’. Allingham, who came from the north of Ireland, included living and American poets in his anthology, whose introduction presents its contents as ‘a jewel’, creations that serve, in Allingham’s Emersonian phrase, ‘to brighten the sunshine’. Palgrave’s ‘golden treasury’ seeks to outshine Allingham’s jewel in its promise of abundant riches: ‘Poetry gives treasures “more golden than gold”,’ he wrote in his 1861 preface, ‘leading us in higher and healthier ways than those of the world, and interpreting to us the lessons of Nature.’ The phrase he quotes – ‘more golden than gold’ – is attributed to Sappho by the rhetorician Demetrius in his treatise On Style, and Palgrave’s use of it is a nod to a classically educated elite among his readers.

Palgrave’s sense of the golden had more to it even than that, however. This is because, as David Latané and others have pointed out (though neither Ricks nor Bucknell mentions it), the book’s title seems to have been lifted (either by Palgrave or by his publisher, Macmillan) from Karl Heinrich von Bogatzky’s early 18th-century Güldenes Schatzkästlein der Kinder Gottes. Translated into English in 1754 as A Golden Treasury for the Children of God, this anthology of religious texts sold well throughout the 19thcentury. An 1856 article in the Timesstates that ‘Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progressand Bogatzky’s Golden Treasuryalways find a ready sale.’ Published five years later, Palgrave’s Golden Treasurywas an attempt to wrest this title away from Bogatzky’s religious anthology and attach it instead to secular English lyric poetry – and it succeeded, thanks not least to Macmillan’s marketing. Within months of launching Palgrave’s volume, Macmillan announced that, ‘uniform with the Golden Treasury’, it was about to publish The Children’s Garland, a selection ‘from the best Poets’ edited by Coventry Patmore. Soon, Macmillan was advertising a ‘GOLDENTREASURYSERIES’ of volumes.This story is not just a piece of publishing history, but part of the shift from sacred to secular culture in 19th-century Britain, aligning with Matthew Arnold’s sense that poetry was coming to replace religion.

E

nteringthe 20thcentury, Bucknell surveys what she calls ‘the battle of the anthologies’, showing, among other things, that Arthur Quiller-Couch’s Oxford Book of English Verse(1900), as Paul Fussell put it, all but ‘preside[d] over the Great War’. With a sharp eye and a sense of wit, Bucknell picks out items others might have missed, such as a 1917 Daily Mailarticle declaring ‘A Serious Outbreak of Poets’ (‘it is at least a possibility that Germany and England may have to “stop the war” in order to stop the poets’). One modern bibliography lists 2225 men and women who published verse during the Great War; much of it found its way into newspapers and anthologies with titles such as Songs and Sonnets for England in War Time, Poems of the Great War, Soldier Poets: Songs of the Fighting Menand The Muse at Arms, which was, Bucknell tells us, ‘the largest collection of soldier poetry produced during the war’. She is alert to the way the ground for such anthologies was prepared not just by Quiller-Couch’s selection, but also by W.E.Henley’s 1891 popular collection for boys, Lyra Heroica, which bolstered notions of ‘the glory of battle and adventure’, ‘the sacred quality of patriotism’ and ‘the beauty and the blessedness of death’. There was also J.W.Mackail’s Greek Anthology– a text used at Eton and elsewhere – which was full of praise for the young noble dead.

Conscious that the term ‘anthology’ brings together the Greek for ‘flower’ and ‘word’, Bucknell is good on the way ‘the act of dying’ could be seen as something that ‘made England flower too’. She might have drawn our attention to the attempts of 20th-century publishers to fuse their own imprint with the noble contents of poetic tradition. Victorian poetry anthology publishers usually kept their imprint out of their books’ titles, which is why we still speak about Palgrave’s Golden Treasuryrather than Macmillan’s. But The Oxford Book of English Versewas followed by many other ‘Oxford Books’, and spurred numerous anthologies branded with their publishers’ names. One of the most noteworthy was The Faber Book of Modern Verse(1936), edited by Michael Roberts. In 1932, Roberts, a contributor to the Criterion, had edited for the Woolfs at the Hogarth Press a poetry anthology called New Signatures– a symptom of an international rush towards the ‘new’. Geoffrey Grigson’s magazine New Verseappeared in 1933, the same year as Roberts’s manifesto-like book on literature and politics, New Country, and the year after F.R.Leavis’s New Bearings in English Poetry. A.R.Orage’s long-running magazine the New Ageand Ezra Pound’s injunction (filched from lettering on a Chinese emperor’s bathtub) to ‘Make It New’ might be to blame, or perhaps The New Poetry, an Anthology of 20th-Century Verse in English, edited by Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson for Macmillan in New York in 1917, spurred this eagerness for newness in poetry anthologies in particular. Eliot had set out his own ideas about ‘the new (the really new) work of art’ in his essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, and the use of the word ‘modern’ rather than ‘new’ in the title of The Faber Book of Modern Versemade it sound just a little different and also avoided the word ‘modernist’, which Eliot disliked in the context of poetry, yet still suggested a distinctive up-to-dateness. In his American youth Eliot had also been suspicious of the word ‘modern’. ‘Cousin Nancy’, a poem from his first collection, juxtaposed the 19th-century classics keeping watch from ‘glazen shelves’ with the suspect behaviour of someone the poet refers to as ‘Cousin Nancy’:

Miss Nancy Ellicott smokedAnd danced all the modern dances;And her aunts were not quite sure how they felt about it,But they knew that it was modern.

By the mid-1930s, however, Eliot the publisher, who had by then become what Geoffrey Faber called, with a glint of English nationalism, ‘an English subject’, could see the value of bringing out a Faber Book of Modern Verse. Roberts shared his interest in Elizabethan literature but was also linked to the ‘new’ poets and had just become engaged to the anthologist Janet Adam Smith, a former assistant editor of the Listener,a magazine associated with that newfangled thing, radio. He was just the person to do the job.

Bucknell tracks Roberts’s trajectory from left to right and situates him in a milieu where ‘style wasn’t just style, it was politics.’ She connects his work as an anthologist with Auden’s poetry and his 1930s anthologies The Poet’s Tongue(co-edited with John Garrett) and The Oxford Book of Light Verse, and discusses such projects as Charles Madge’s ‘Oxford Collective Poem’ – an experiment in collaborative authorship. Roberts’s published correspondence with Eliot over The Faber Book of Modern Verseshows the way the anthology complicated notions of ‘British culture’ by proposing not only the inclusion of some Americans (Pound, Marianne Moore, John Crowe Ransom, though not William Carlos Williams) but also of the greatest working-class modernist poet, Hugh MacDiarmid. He was part of Roberts’s original core of poets; Roberts was less sure about Stevens, Yeats and Hopkins. But Stevens, Yeats and Hopkins ended up in the book and MacDiarmid was left out. How involved was Eliot in that decision? While Roberts was working on the book, Eliot turned down MacDiarmid’s long poem ‘Mature Art’. By having Faber agree to include the whole of The Waste Land(something denied to all other anthologists), Eliot helped ensure the significance of Roberts’s anthology, as well as his own centrality within it.

B

ucknell’s discussionof the world of The Mersey Sound(published by Penguin in 1967) lets her escape Oxford and London. She is interested in anthologies that were bestsellers, and The Mersey Sound, which contained work by the performance poets Roger McGough, Brian Patten and Adrian Henri, was certainly that, selling more than half a million copies. But, shared by just three poets, it was not an anthology in the usual sense. Rather, it was Volume 10 in the Penguin Modern Poets series, launched in 1962. Bucknell considers it alongside The Liverpool Scene, Edward Lucie-Smith’s short 1967 small-press anthology of ‘pop poems and interviews recorded live along the Mersey Beat’ and other works of performance verse. In retrospect, few would argue that the Mersey beat of these poets was better than the Mersey beat of the Beatles, and some might agree with Lucie-Smith that this was ‘essentially oral poetry’, better suited to gigs than to the page. Bucknell discusses the way the poets were encouraged by Tony Richardson, their editor at Penguin, to piggyback on the Beatles’ success, using a ‘sales pitch’ that transposed the notion of a ‘Mersey sound’ from pop music to poetry, and cites a number of critics who pointed out that the Liverpool poets’ dalliance with the language of consumer culture risked (as Roy Fuller put it) ‘junketing with the very forces designed to limit the imagination’. It would have been worth saying more about Lucie-Smith (who compiled several Penguin anthologies, including British Poetry since 1945), not least because he was the first person from the Caribbean to edit major British anthologies. It would have been good, too, to hear a little more about the women who edited British poetry anthologies: Janet Adam Smith, Anne Ridler and Helen Gardner. Who were the first British female anthologists? Why didn’t they have the success of American anthologists such as Amy Lowell and Harriet Monroe?

Allingham claimed in the preface to Nightingale Valleythat poetry had the power to ‘soothe grief’. Some modern champions of ecopoetry may feel something similar, and the idea of poetry as a soothing, healing form of achieved attunement – Allingham called it a ‘mystic relation with the Universe’ – has a long history. Bucknell presents Robert Graves’s early 20th-century contention that ‘a well-chosen anthology’ functions as ‘a complete dispensary of medicine for the more common mental disorders’ as an example of this way of thinking. She makes an excursion into American anthologies to discuss the now forgotten musician and poet Robert Haven Schauffler’s 1925 anthology The Poetry Cure: A Pocket Medicine Chest of Verse. Schauffler claimed that he had long ‘studied, collected and tried the effects of various sorts of verse on patients in my poetic clinic’, and Bucknell positions his anthology as a fore-runner of a range of modern popular anthologies, which Andrew O’Hagan, writing in the LRBof 4 November 2004, saw as very different from what he called ‘the old “Treasuries”’.

O’Hagan wrote about recent ‘popular anthologies’ that ‘seemed to be focused not on poems but on readers: they presented poetry as a species of self-help, a tool of personal growth like any other, valuable as a plumbable well of advice, reassurance and emotional uplift.’ Bucknell says that O’Hagan, along with other critics including Robert Potts and Mark Ford, saw this phenomenon as part of the ‘rebranding [of] poetry as a “lifestyle accessory” for the worried middle classes’ – a sort of ‘lavender bath oil’ and ‘state of the art therapy’. Several of these anthologies were edited by Daisy Goodwin – 101 Poems That Could Save Your Life(1999), 101 Poems to Get You through the Day (and Night)(2000) and 101 Poems to Keep You Sane(2001) – and, as Bucknell shows, a plethora of similarly titled collections followed. She relates these anthologies to the Victorian fashion for books about self-improvement and places 21st-century ‘poetry pharmacies’ alongside ‘bibliotherapy – the practice of connecting literature and healthcare by encouraging people to read books to improve their well-being’. She points out that almost a century earlier, Schauffler dedicated The Poetry Cureto ‘the noble army of CREATIVELIBRARIANS, PRACTITIONERSALL ...OFTHEPOETRYCURE’. Drawing on recent work by Leah Price, Bucknell looks more widely at ways in which poetry and literature have become medicalised in recent years. Books can be prescribed, poetry taken not just as a spoonful of sugar but as the medicine itself.

‘Medicinal verse,’ Bucknell writes, ‘requires dosage instructions.’ Jonathan Bate, Paula Byrne, Sophie Ratcliffe and Andrew Schuman urge the reader of their Stressed Unstressedanthology to ‘make yourself comfortable,’ and go on to say that ‘by entering into the harmonised world of the poem, you have momentarily escaped your own world of stress and worry.’ This is not so far from Allingham. We can snigger at the language used by Allingham or by the editors of Stressed Unstressed, but both are alert to poetry’s work of attunement. As Bucknell explains, ‘the question poetry therapy asks, in other words, isn’t “What do you think it means?” but “What does it mean for you?”’ This risks an interpretative solipsism, even if ‘curative reading’ is meant to be ‘a collaborative process’, and Bucknell ends with a glance towards ‘online technologies’ and ‘personal anthologies’ culled from the web in acts of ‘self-curation.’ Other books, such as Can Poetry Save the Earth?, Earth Shattering: Ecopoems, 101 Poems to Save the Earth, The Ecopoetry Anthology, Poems for the Planetand Earth Songsdirect attention away from self-help and self-curation towards global environmental issues. I admit to hankering after the older ‘treasury’ model – anthologies that claim, as Palgrave did, to present ‘the best’ poems. But they seem to be in eclipse. The most recent ‘golden treasury’ to be published was the polylingual Golden Treasury of Scottish Verseedited by Kathleen Jamie, Don Paterson and Peter Mackay in 2021. As far as I can see, it got no print reviews at all.