Bleak House(凄凉的房子) 简介:
《荒凉山庄》最核心的部份，说的是英国古老的「大法官庭」（Chancery），它是司法体制顢頇、邪恶、无能的象徵。狄更斯早年曾在律师事务所当过见习生，对法律体系的虚假不义，律师假借公义之名而行讹诈、欺瞒之事早有了亲身的体验，并在他以前的作品里陆续提及，但在这部作品里则做了全面的揭露。因此，我们也可以说，《荒凉山庄》乃是第一本「法律小说」。
小说一开始，狄更斯就细细描述伦敦的雾，那是一种泌入人心深处的黑暗，是一种披天盖地的氛围，而雾即是司法的象徵。
在小说里，英国的「大法官庭」受理了一桩遗产诉讼官司，法官和律师们围绕着这个案子，像兀鹰般的用诡辩、拖延等各式各样的方式，分享着这个案子的利益，最后纠缠数十年，期待从这个案子得到遗产利益的，死的死，疯的疯，案子在耗尽了遗产后，才自动「永远结束」。
而除了这起遗产官司外，它还駢生出了另一条轴线，那就是一个戴洛克男爵（Leicester Dedlock）的妻子，早年曾经失足，与一个上尉军人生下私生女艾瑟‧萨莫森（Esther Summerson）。艾瑟纯真善良，后来和一对表兄妹被与该遗产案有关的「荒凉山庄」主人约翰‧詹狄士（John Jarndyce）收为「被监护人」。在一个偶然机会里，男爵夫人的私生子丑闻被那一群律师兀鹰得知，於是刨根究柢的扒粪遂告开始。他们并不只是为了邪恶的好奇，而是要藉此来对男爵夫妇威胁图利。在整个过程里，他们无所不为，包括整死了无辜的流浪少年，藉着挑拨分化而剥夺着许多人际关係，最后是其中的一名律师被他所利用的人杀害，男爵夫人离家出走，死於风雪中，而那起遗产官司也因诉讼标的被完全耗光而自动结案。
《荒凉山庄》里有关司法和律师为恶的这个部份，狄更斯其实已展现出无比的透视力。在这里他看到了司法权力在自我不断生产后，已自动的成了一匹邪恶的怪兽。它肆无忌惮的吞噬着一切与它有关的人与事。那是一种体制化之后的暴力与邪恶之源。它已非关个人的是否善良，而成了一个自动化的机制。狄更斯对恶律师的那些精準描述，以及由此而延伸出来的「体制性邪恶」，单单这个部份，就足以让这部作品不容或忘。
而做为人道写实主义高峰的狄更斯，当然不会只停留在这种消极的层次上。在这部小说里，像「荒凉山庄」男主人约翰‧詹狄士，私生女艾瑟，以及另一美丽善良的被监护人艾达‧克莱尔（Ada Clare）都是纯真，无机心的正面人物，他（她）们不把人际关係视为一种可以剥削利用的资产，因而心存善念。这是人性的光明之源，穿透了那茫茫黑雾，成了救赎人性的起点。而这种在黑暗里仍能看到光的呈现方式，也正是狄更斯作品的特性。
因此，《荒凉山庄》乃是一部非常好看的真正经典之作。
在小说叙事上，它开创出了一种「双重叙述」的表现手法。小说在主乾部份是第三人称的全知叙述，而另一部份则由主角之一的私生女艾瑟以自叙方式来表现，它衔接完整，相互呼应，从早期理论家切斯特顿（G.K. Chesterton）到晚近的哈洛‧卜伦（Harold Bloom）都推崇这是一种高难度、高表现的突破。
而在故事细节上，英国现代警察侦探制度始於一八四二年，比这本小说早了十年，因而对世事知之甚深的狄更斯，遂将现代侦探推理的逻辑用来做为呈现真相的过程，这使得作品的悬疑性大增，只有读到终卷，才有恍然之感。这种把世界视为一个神秘文本而加以细读的推理方式，也使得阅读本身增加了许多悲喜交集的气氛。这也是近代文本理论喜欢把这部小说当做一个范例的原因。
至於最重要的，当然仍在於这部作品在宏观角度上对价值与社会变迁上所做的细部观察和愿景呈现了。它除了指出司法的体制性邪恶和所造成的体制性压迫外；对维多利亚时代那些颓废没落的贵族阶级，以及仰赖贵族的寄食阶级，都做出了罕有其匹的细腻描写，狄更斯文笔之美之準，纵使优秀诗人亦不一定可望其项背。而更独特的，乃是小说里对伦敦贫民窟的「废墟书写」，乃是一种首创，道德与人际关係的败坏，社会的压迫，使得它成了黑雾中的黑暗中心，予人无比的惊惧之感。但也就在看到贵族没落，城市败坏的同时，狄更斯也看到了资本工业文明的新合理性，这种新的合理性，加上书中念兹在兹的善良纯真，遂成了拯救沉沦的起点。当然更别说小说里有关纯真之爱，舍己为人之爱等有关高尚价值的呈现了。
《荒凉山庄》精采好看，它拥有小说一切最好的元素，无论价值视野，小说情节，以及细部的文采，都让人虽然捧着这部超过六十万字的巨着，但却毫无沉重之感。也正因此，当我们读与谈狄更斯的时候，不要避重就轻的疏忽掉《荒凉山庄》了！
In Chancery
ondon. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord
Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable
November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the
waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it
would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or
so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke
lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle,
with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes―gone into
mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs,
indistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to
their very blinkers. Foot-passengers, jostling one another’s
umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their
foothold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot-
passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if
this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust
of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and
accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green
aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among
the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and
dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights.
Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the
yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on
the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and
throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the
firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon
pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly
pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on
deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into
a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a
balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.
Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets,
much as the sun may, from the spongy fields, be seen to loom by
husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours
before their time―as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard
and unwilling look.
The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and
the muddy streets are muddiest, near that leaden-headed old
obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-
headed old corporation: Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in
Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High
Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.
Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud
and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering
condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of
hoary sinners, holds, this day, in the sight of heaven and earth.
On such an afternoon, if ever, the Lord High Chancellor ought
to be sitting here―as here he is―with a foggy glory round his
head, softly fenced in with crimson cloth and curtains, addressed
by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an
interminable brief, and outwardly directing his contemplation to
the lantern in the roof, where he can see nothing but fog. On such
an afternoon, some score of members of the High Court of
Chancery Bar ought to be―as here they are―mistily engaged in
one of the ten thousand stages of an endless cause, tripping one
another up on slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in
technicalities, running their goat-hair and horse-hair warded
heads against walls of words, and making a pretence of equity
with serious faces, as players might. On such an afternoon, the
various solicitors in the cause, some two or three of whom have
inherited it from their fathers who made a fortune by it, ought to
be―as are they not?―ranged in a line, in a long matted well (but
you might look in vain for Truth at the bottom of it), between the
registrar’s red table and the silk gowns, with bills, cross-bills,
answers, rejoinders, injunctions, affidavits, issues, references to
masters, masters’ reports, mountains of costly nonsense, piled
before them. Well may the court be dim, with wasting candles here
and there; well may the fog hang heavy in it, as if it would never
get out; well may the stained glass windows lose their colour, and
admit no light of day into the place; well may the uninitiated from
the streets, who peep in through the glass panes in the door, be
deterred from entrance by its owlish aspect, and by the drawl
languidly echoing to the roof from the padded dais where the Lord
High Chancellor looks into the lantern that has no light in it, and
where the attendant wigs are all stuck in a fog-bank! This is the
Court of Chancery; which has its decaying houses and its blighted
lands in every shire; which has its worn-out lunatic in every
madhouse, and its dead in every churchyard; which has its ruined
suitor, with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress, borrowing
and begging through the round of every man’s acquaintance;
which gives to monied might, the means abundantly of wearying
out the right; which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope;
so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart; that there is not an
honourable man among its practitioners who would not give―who
does not often give―the warning, “Suffer any wrong that can be
done you, rather than come here!”
Who happen to be in the Lord Chancellor’s court this murky
afternoon besides the Lord Chancellor, the counsel in the cause,
two or three counsel who are never in any cause, and the well of
solicitors before mentioned? There is the registrar below the
Judge, in wig and gown; and there are two or three maces, or
petty-bags, or privy purses, or whatever they may be, in legal court
suits. These are all yawning; for no crumb of amusement ever falls
from JARNDYCE AND JARNDYCE (the cause in hand) which
was squeezed dry years upon years ago. The short-hand writers,
the reporters of the court, and the reporters of the newspapers,
invariably decamp with the rest of the regulars when Jarndyce
and Jarndyce comes on. Their places are a blank. Standing on a
seat at the side of the hall, the better to peer into the curtained
sanctuary, is a little mad old woman in a squeezed bonnet, who is
always in court, from its sitting to its rising, and always expecting
some incomprehensible judgement to be given in her favour.
Some say she really is, or was, a party to a suit; but no one knows
for certain, because no one cares. She carries some small litter in
her reticule which she calls her documents principally consisting
of paper matches and dry lavender. A sallow prisoner has come
up, in custody, for the half-dozenth time, to make a personal
application “to purge himself of his contempt;” which, being a
solitary surviving executor who has fallen into a state of
conglomeration about accounts of which it is not pretended that he had ever any knowledge, he is not at all likely ever to do. In the meantime his prospects in life are ended. Another ruined suitor,
who periodically appears from Shropshire, and breaks out into
efforts to address the Chancellor at the close of the day’s business,
and who can by no means be made to understand that the
Chancellor is legally ignorant of his existence after making it
desolate for a quarter of a century, plants himself in a good place
and keeps an eye on the Judge, ready to call out “My Lord!” in a
voice of sonorous complaint, on the instant of his rising. A few
lawyers’ clerks and others who know this suitor by sight, linger, on
the chance of his furnishing some fun, and enlivening the dismal
weather a little.
Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has,
in course of time, become so complicated, that no man alive knows
what it means. The parties to it understand it least; but it has been
observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five
minutes, without coming to a total disagreement as to all the
premises. Innumerable children have been born into the cause;
innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old
people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found
themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, without
knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary
hatreds with the suit. The little plaintiff or defendant, who was
promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce
should be settled, has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse,
and trotted away into the other world. Fair wards of court have
faded into mothers and grandmothers; a long procession of
Chancellors has come in and gone out; the legion of bills in the suit
have been transformed into mere bills of mortality; there are not
three Jarndyces left upon the earth perhaps, since old Tom
Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in
Chancery Lane; but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its weary
length before the Court, perennially hopeless.
Jarndyce and Jarndyce has passed into a joke. That is the only
good that has ever come of it. It has been death to many, but it is a
joke in the profession. Every master in Chancery has had a
reference out of it. Every master in Chancery has had a reference
out of it. Every Chancellor was “in it,” for somebody or other,
when he was counsel at the bar. Good things have been said about
it by blue-nosed, bulbous-shoed old benchers, in select port-wine
committee after dinner in hall. Articled clerks have been in the
habit of fleshing their legal wit upon it. The last Lord Chancellor
handled it neatly when, correcting Mr Blowers the eminent silk
gown who said that such a thing might happen when the sky
rained potatoes, he observed “or when we get through Jarndyce
and Jarndyce, Mr Blowers;”―a pleasantry that particularly tickled
the maces, bags, and purses.
How many people out of the suit, Jarndyce and Jarndyce has
stretched forth its unwholesome hand to spoil and corrupt, would
be a very wide question. From the master, upon whose impaling
files reams of dusty warrants in Jarndyce and Jarndyce have
grimly writhed into many shapes; down to the copying clerk in the
Six Clerks’ Office, who has copied his tens of thousands of
Chancery-folio-pages under that eternal heading; no man’s nature
has been made better by it. In trickery, evasion, procrastination,
spoliation, botheration, under false pretences of all sorts, there are
influences that can never come to good. The very solicitors’ boys
who have kept the wretched suitors at bay, by protesting time out
of mind that Mr Chizzle, Mizzle, or otherwise, was particularly
engaged and had appointments until dinner, may have got an
extra moral twist and shuffle into themselves out of Jarndyce and
Jarndyce. The receiver in the cause has acquired a goodly sum of
money by it, but has acquired too a distrust of his own mother,
and a contempt for his own kind. Chizzle, Mizzle, and otherwise,
have lapsed into a habit of vaguely promising themselves that they
will look into that outstanding little matter, and see what can be
done for Drizzle―who was not well used―when Jarndyce and
Jarndyce shall be got out of the office. Shirking and sharking, in
all their many varieties, have been sown broadcast by the ill-fated
cause; and even those who have contemplated its history from the
outermost circle of such evil, have been insensibly tempted into a
loose way of letting bad things alone to take their own bad course,
and a loose belief that if the world go wrong, it was, in some
offhand manner, never meant to go right.
Thus, in the midst of the mud and at the heart of the fog, sits
the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.
“Mr Tangle,” says the Lord High Chancellor, latterly something
restless under the eloquence of that learned gentleman.
“Mlud,” says Mr Tangle. Mr Tangle knows more of Jarndyce
and Jarndyce than anybody. He is famous for it―supposed never
to have read anything else since he left school.
“Have you nearly concluded your argument?”
“Mlud, no―variety of points―feel it my duty tsubmit―
ludship,” is the reply that slides out of Mr Tangle.
“Several members of the bar are still to be heard, I believe?”
says the Chancellor, with a slight smile.
Eighteen of Mr Tangle’s learned friends, each armed with a
little summary of eighteen hundred sheets, bob up like eighteen
hammers in a pianoforte, make eighteen bows, and drop into their
eighteen places of obscurity.
“We will proceed with the hearing on Wednesday fortnight,”
says the Chancellor. For, the question at issue is only a question of
costs, a mere bud on the forest tree of the parent suit, and really
will come to a settlement one of these days.
The Chancellor rises; the bar rises; the prisoner is brought
forward in a hurry; the man from Shropshire cries, “My lord!”
Maces, bags, and purses, indignantly proclaim silence, and frown
at the man from Shropshire.
“In reference,” proceeds the Chancellor, still on Jarndyce and
Jarndyce, “to the young girl―”
“Begludship’s pardon―boy,” says Mr Tangle, prematurely.
“In reference,” proceeds the Chancellor, with extra
distinctness, “to the young girl and boy, the two young people.”
(Mr Tangle crushed.) “Whom I directed to be in attendance
today, and who are now in my private room, I will see them and
satisfy myself as to the expediency of making the order for their
residing with their uncle.”
Mr Tangle on his legs again.
“Begludship’s pardon―dead.”
“With their,” Chancellor looking through his double eyeglass at
the papers on his desk, “grandfather.”
“Begludship’s pardon―victim of rash action―brains.”
Suddenly a very little counsel, with a terrific bass voice, arises,
fully inflated, in the back settlements of the fog, and says, “Will
your lordship allow me? I appear for him. He is a cousin, several
times removed. I am not at the moment prepared to inform the
Court in what exact remove he is a cousin; but he is a cousin.”
Leaving this address (delivered like a sepulchral message)
ringing in the rafters of the roof, the very little counsel drops, and
the fog knows him no more. Everybody looks for him. Nobody can
see him.
“I will speak with both the young people,” says the Chancellor
anew, “and satisfy myself on the subject of their residing with
their cousin. I will mention the matter tomorrow morning when I
take my seat.”
The Chancellor is about to bow to the bar when the prisoner is
presented. Nothing can possibly come of the prisoner’s
conglomeration, but his being sent back to prison; which is soon
done. The man from Shropshire ventures another remonstrative
“My lord!” but the Chancellor, being aware of him, has dextrously
vanished. Everybody else quickly vanishes too. A battery of blue
bags is loaded with heavy charges of papers and carried off by
clerks; the little mad old woman marches off with her documents;
the empty court is locked up. If all the injustice it has committed,
and all the misery it has caused, could only be locked up with it,
and the whole burnt away in a great funeral pyre,―why so much
the better for other parties than the parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce! |
