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A man talking to a skull. A monologue about suicide, at the porous border between sanity and madness. A girl drowning in a brook, grief-stricken for her father. If David Lynch had made Twin Peaks 400 years ago, he might have come up with something similar. But this was William Shakespeare. In 1596, his son Hamnet died at the age of 11 – and five years later, as the playwright was finishing his tragedy Hamlet, Shakespeare’s father suffered a serious illness. He was to die in September 1601. 一个男子对着头盖骨喃喃自语。他在清醒与疯狂的边界游离，吐出一段关于自杀的独白。一个被小溪淹没的女孩，因为父亲患病而悲痛欲绝。如果大卫·林奇在400年前拍摄《双峰》，他可能也会想出相同的情节。但这是莎士比亚的作品。1596年，莎翁年仅11岁的儿子哈姆雷特去世；5年后，当这位剧作家即将完成悲剧《哈姆雷特》时，他的父亲患上了重病，并在1601年去世。
“Something must have been at work in Shakespeare, something powerful enough to call forth this linguistic explosion,” writes Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt. “As audiences and readers have long instinctively understood, passionate grief, provoked by the death of a loved one, lies at the heart of Shakespeare’s tragedy.” The death of his son and the impending death of his father “could have caused a psychic disturbance that helps to explain the explosive power and inwardness of Hamlet”. What is revered as one of the greatest works in literature is likely to have sprung from a place of intense emotional suffering. “莎士比亚一定发生了改变，而这改变足以让他的文学才华迸发，”哈佛教授史蒂芬·格林布拉特写道。“就像观众和读者们早就感受到的那样，深爱之人的死亡带来的强烈悲伤，是莎士比亚悲剧的核心。”爱子之死与父亲随时即将到来的死亡“可能引起了心理上的波动，这也就解释了《哈姆雷特》的爆发力与本质。”这部文学史上最了不起的作品之一，可能是强烈情感折磨的结果。
The crucible in which Hamlet was forged might help explain why the tragedy continues to speak to audiences around the world four centuries on. It came eighth in BBC Culture’s Stories that Shaped the World poll, with voters praising its extraordinary insight into human nature. Hamlet is “the play that exemplifies Shakespeare’s profound understanding of the human psyche in so much of its nuanced extremity… our simultaneous blending of genius and self-sabotage, our capacity for love and hate, creativity and destruction,” claims the US poet, novelist and critic Elizabeth Rosner. According to the UK author and critic Adam Thorpe, it’s a story that has “influenced the way we think about our muddled selves. We enter Hamlet’s inner core and emerge rinsed of illusion.” Hamlet reveals how much stories can teach us about ourselves. 创作《哈姆雷特》的痛苦背景也许能解释，为什么这个悲剧能在四个世纪内引起世界各地读者的共鸣。《哈姆雷特》在BBC文化“塑造世界的作品”中位列第八，支持者赞扬了它对人性卓越的洞见。《哈姆雷特》体现了“莎士比亚在其细致入微的极端中深刻理解了人类的心灵——我们身上同时有着天才与自我毁灭；有着爱与恨、创造与毁灭的能力。“英国诗人、小说家兼批评家伊丽莎白·罗莎尔（Elizabeth Rosner）如此写道。英国作家、批评家亚当·索普（Adam Thorpe）则说，这是一部“影响我们如何思考自身复杂性的作品。我们进入哈姆雷特的内心，将幻象冲洗得一干二净。”《哈姆雷特》告诉我们，文学作品能告诉我们多少与自身相关的信息。
As the philosopher Noam Chomsky has said, “we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology” – something the critic and author David Lodge has explored. In his 2004 book Consciousness and the Novel, Lodge argues that “literature is a record of human consciousness, the richest and most comprehensive we have… The novel is arguably man’s most successful effort to describe the experience of individual human beings moving through space and time. 哲学家诺曼·乔姆斯基曾说过，“要了解人类生活和性格相关的知识，小说告诉我们的永远比心理科学要多。”这也是批评家、作家大卫·隆戈的发现。在他2004年出版的《知觉与小说》一书中，隆戈说道：“文学是人类自我认知的记录，它最丰富，也最全面…小说可以说是人类在描述每一个个体在不同时间、地点的经历中，最成功的方式。” Lodge argues that “The crises are basically the same: we all have the same wishes and the same hopes… in fiction you get models of how other people react” 隆戈认为“危机仍然是一样的：我们都有着一样的愿望和希望…在小说中你会习得他人的反应模式。” On one level, it’s the ability to spy on other people’s thoughts that gives literature this insight. “We do not really know what anybody else is actually thinking at any time – consciousness is a very private thing – and we partly go to literature in its various forms to make up or compensate for the necessary solipsism of our own inner lives,” Lodge tells BBC Culture. “Fundamentally, the reason why we read literary texts is that it gives the impression, if it’s successful, of enabling you to understand how other people think. We know what we feel and what we think, and what we hope for and fear, but we don’t really know how other people process these feelings and observations.” 从某种程度上来说，是对他人思想细致入微的观察赋予了文学这样的洞察力。“我们不知道其他人在所有时刻的所思所想，这一点是千真万确的。感知是非常私密的事，我们阅读各种形式文学的部分原因就是为了弥补我们自身生活的唯我论。”隆戈告诉BBC文化：“总体上，我们阅读文学文本是因为它会告诉我们别人是怎么思考的。我们知道自己的感受、想法；期待、害怕的事物，但是我们其实并不了解别人会如何处理这种感情与观察。”
As Greenblatt argues, in Hamlet, Shakespeare “had perfected the means to represent inwardness… coming in the wake of Hamnet’s death, it expressed Shakespeare’s deepest perception of existence, his understanding of what could be said and what should remain unspoken, his preference for things untidy, damaged, and unresolved over things neatly arranged, well made, and settled”. 如同格林贝特说的那样，在《哈姆雷特》中，莎士比亚“表现本质的方式已经炉火纯青，哈姆雷特死后的那一段表现了莎翁对于存在最深层的感知，应该直白表达什么、应该对什么隐而不发，他偏爱杂乱、损坏、悬而未决，而非整洁、精美、井井有条。” No one, before or since Shakespeare, made so many separate selves – Harold Bloom 莎翁是创造众多独立自我的第一人，空前绝后——哈罗德·布鲁姆 The critic Harold Bloom has gone so far as to claim that “Shakespeare will go on explaining us, in part because he invented us”. The playwright’s characters, Bloom argues in his 1998 book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, “are extraordinary instances not only of how meaning gets started, rather than repeated, but also of how new modes of consciousness come into being… no one, before or since Shakespeare, made so many separate selves”. He credits his own passion for books as stemming from the access they give him into the minds of others: “I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.” 批评家哈罗德·布鲁姆（Harold Bloom）甚至说，“莎士比亚的作品创造了我们，因此将继续阐释我们。”布鲁姆在自己1998年的作品《莎士比亚：创造人类》中说到：“莎翁笔下的人物是创造意义、而不是重复意义的绝佳证明，作品也体现了新的认知模式是如何产生的——莎翁是创造众多独立自我的第一人，空前绝后。”布鲁姆说，正是因为书能使他洞察他人思想，他才如此热爱书本。“我足够无知，不能非常深入地了解足够多的人，所以要手不释卷。” Ways of seeing 看世界的方式 That impulse can go beyond simply understanding who we are: reading can shape our sense of ourselves. “Whether it’s Dante when I turned 60 or Alice in Wonderland when I was an adolescent, these stories were for me autobiographical,” Alberto Manguel, writer and director of the National Library of Argentina, tells BBC Culture. “I understood perfectly what Alice felt in the world of absurd adults, where she tries as politely as she can to ask intelligent questions, when everything around her seems absurd. That helped me understand the mad world I was in – and later, when I discovered the political world and the Mad Hatter says there is no room at the table, and Alice points out that the table is set for many people and there is lots of room, I felt that was exactly what I was seeing in society, where a group of people like the Mad Hatter were saying to others who were starving that there’s no room at the table.” 这样的动力也会超越仅仅理解自身的局限——阅读可以塑造我们对自我的认知。“无论是60岁时读的但丁还是青少年时期读的《爱丽丝梦游仙境》，这些作品对我来说都像自传一般。”《阿根廷国家图书馆》的作者兼导演阿尔伯特·满格尔（Alberto Manguel）对BBC文化这样说道。“我完全理解爱丽丝在成人世界中的感受。当周围一切都显得荒诞无理时，她试着用尽可能礼貌的方式问一些机智的问题。这帮助我理解了我所在的这个疯狂世界。——随后，我知道了到政治世界。书中，疯帽子说位置已经满了，而爱丽丝指出这张桌子是为很多人准备的，位置还有的是，我觉得这就是我在社会中见到的情形：一群像疯帽子一样的人对忍饥挨饿的人说，桌子上已经没有位置了。”
“Words reveal to Alice that the only indisputable fact of this bewildering world is that under an apparent rationalism we are all mad,” writes Alberto Manguel “别人的话让爱丽丝明白，这个疯狂世界唯一不变的事实就是我们都是疯狂的，”阿尔伯特·满格尔写道。 He insists that reading has given meaning to his life experiences. “I’m certain that if I hadn’t read Alice in Wonderland and Dante, I wouldn’t understand so many aspects of myself.” In his book Curiosity, Manguel claims he might not be able to identify himself in a police line-up: “I’m not sure whether this is because my features age too rapidly and too drastically or because my own self is less grounded in my memory than the printed words I’ve learned by heart.” 他坚信，阅读让他的生活经历有了意义。“我确定，如果我没有看过《爱丽丝漫游仙境》与但丁的作品，我不会了解到自己身上这么多面。”在他的《好奇》一书中，满格尔说，如果在警局，和一列嫌疑人站在一起，他可能认不出自己。“我不确定这是因为自己的面容老去得太快、太突然还是因为我对自己的记忆并不如脑海中印刷的字眼印象深刻。”
Identification with a story can come in unexpected ways. Preti Taneja’s debut novel We That Are Young reimagines King Lear in modern-day Delhi. Studying the play at school in the UK, she felt a profound connection – one that surprised her. “In King Lear I recognised the Indian extended family I was used to visiting in Delhi each summer,” she has written. “Shakespeare somehow recognised the part of my life my English friends had no idea about – the Indian part, in India.” 与文学作品产生共鸣的方式可能出人意料。普雷提·塔内加（Preti Taneja）的第一本小说《年轻的我们》以如今的德里为背景，重构了《李尔王》的故事。在英国学习这部剧时，塔内加体会到了一种深厚的连结——这种连结使她惊讶。“在《李尔王》中，我看到了自己过去每个夏天都会去的印度家庭。”她写道。“莎士比亚某种程度上看到了我的英国朋友完全不了解的部分——印度人的那一面，在印度的故事。” King Lear helped her to think about the Partition of India(1). “No one talked about it at school, yet there was this definite sense that there was a huge story that had brought us to this country, that was the reason I’d been born here – and then suddenly there it was, in Shakespeare of all things,” Taneja tells BBC Culture. “This story of partition that leads to civil war, this story of daughters who are forced into performing well for family honour and duty – which is the situation many second-generation immigrant women face.” 《李尔王》帮她理解了印巴分治。“学校里没有人讲这个，但所有人都感觉到，一定有一个事件把我们带到这个国度，这个背景正是我出生在这里的原因——而突然，在莎翁的作品中就找到了这一点。” 塔内加告诉BBC文化，“它是一个有关于分裂导致内战的故事、一个女儿们被迫为了家族荣誉和责任必须好好表现的故事。后者正是许多移二代女性必须面对的情况。”
“Literature can make us think about how patterns are repeated… generational damage is something that we have to work so hard to reverse,” says Taneja “文学可以让我们思考模式是如何重复的…代际的损害是我们必须努力逆转的东西，”塔内加说。 By turning king into beggar, obedient daughters into villains, loyal daughter into banished exile, legitimate son into outcast and illegitimate son into insider, King Lear messes with ideas of fixed identities. “There’s an aspect in which almost every character is cast into a position of otherness to themselves,” says Taneja. “Everyone gets swapped around. This play really is about alienation from the self, and exploration of the other within the self – how we reconcile those two sides, and come to terms with the fact that we’re all hybrid beings, and that society isn’t a fixed thing.” 把国王变成乞丐，把顺从的女儿变成反派、把忠诚的女儿流放、把婚生子边缘化、把私生子变成心腹，《李尔王》混淆了固定身份的概念。“从某种角度上来说，几乎里面所有角色都变成了自己的对立面，”坦纳加说：“每个人都发生了翻天覆地的变化。这部剧讲的是与自我脱离、探索自己的另一面——我们如何调和两个极端，如何认识到我们都是混合的个体，以及社会不是一成不变的。”
Bloom touched on thiswhen he said that “Shakespeare will not make us better and will not make us worse, but he may allow us to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves… he may teach us how to accept change in ourselves as in others, and perhaps even the final form of change.” With characters who gauge what they seem like from others’ perspectives, and then adapt their behaviour accordingly, he believes the plays reveal the process of self-revision – the ability “to change by self-overhearing and then by the will to change”. 在说到“莎士比亚不会让我们变得更好，也不会让我们变得更差，但他能让我们听到与自己对话时的那个自己…他能教会我们如何接受自身和他人身上的变化，可能甚至是最终的改变形式。”时，布鲁姆说到了这一点。角色们丈量着他人眼中的自己，并随之调整自己的行为。他相信这部剧体现出了自我调整的过程，“通过自我监测进行改变，而后自愿改变”的能力。 A light in the dark 暗处的光明 But as well as identifying with characters, we read to find out how people profoundly different from us think. “The canon I was introduced to at school included Philip Larkin(2), JM Coetzee(3) – all these men writing about masculinity and writing about society with a very particular gaze,” says Taneja. “It felt to me like what I was learning was how I was seen. This is what the male characters they are voicing think of me, and of the world of others that I belong to. There were lots of epiphanies in that – Coetzee is one of my favourite writers because his work is so sharp – it taught me about the way that a certain kind of patriarchal masculinity sees me in the world.” 但当我们与角色产生共鸣的同时，也会发现人与人之间想法的差异。“在学校时，我读的精选集中有菲利普·拉金（Philip Larkin）、约翰·库切（JM Coetzee）的作品——这些男性都会写到男子气概、写到从一个非常特殊的角度看到的社会，”塔尼贾说。“对我来说，我了解到了社会对我的看法，也就是他们笔下男性角色对我、对我所属的那个他人的世界的看法。我从中获得了许多顿悟——库切是我最喜爱的作家之一，因为他的文章非常犀利——他的作品告诉我，父权社会对我的看法。”
According to Manguel, “the quest to find out who we are… is responsible, in some measure, for our delight in the stories of others” 满格尔认为：“找到自我的渴求……责任重大，从某种程度上来说，正是我们享受他人故事的原因。” Storytelling has an evolutionary role in fostering empathy. As Atticus Finch said in To Kill a Mockingbird, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view – until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” Reading encourages us not to reduce others to caricatures. “Unconsciously we begin to accept that the other is always a mystery and that easy characterisations lead nowhere,” says the Greek writer Amanda Michalopoulou. “Literature transforms amorphous fear and pity into individualities. It tells us: the other is not what it seems.” 文学对培养同理心有着颠覆性的作用。就像《杀死一只知更鸟》中阿蒂克斯·芬奇说的那样：“你永远没法真正了解一个人，除非你从他的立场看待问题，除非你钻进他的心里，在里面走一圈。”阅读鼓励我们不把他人简化成漫画形象。“不知不觉，我们就会接受，他人永远是一个谜团，简单的脸谱化毫无意义。”希腊作家阿曼达·米恰洛叵罗（Amanda Michalopoulou）说。“文学把无形的恐惧与遗憾转换成个性，它告诉我们：别人并不像看起来那么简单。”
Fiction can place us in uncomfortable positions too. At BBC Culture’s Stories that Shaped the World event, the author Colm Tóibín argued that it should “show you evil so that you would know it”. In the case of Clytemnestra in the Oresteia(4), he said: “I need to show you someone who was once good… how easily she could become corrupted, what a monster she could become – where you’re almost following her when she comes to murder her husband Agamemnon, thinking ‘I want you to do this’ – you’re pushing the reader’s imagination into areas where the reader might not want to go.” 小说也会把我们带到不自在的处境中。BBC文化“塑造世界的作品”活动中，作家科尔姆·托宾（Colm Tóibín）认为文学作品应该“展现邪恶，从而使读者了解这种邪恶”。在评价《奥瑞斯提亚》克吕泰墨斯特拉这个角色时，托宾说：“我要指出，一个曾经的好人…有多么容易被侵蚀，又能变得多么禽兽不如——读者几乎能完全理解她杀死丈夫阿伽门农的行为，想着“我想让你这么做”。这时，作者就在把读者的想象推到读者可能不愿意去的地方。”
And just as stories demonstrate that humans are neither straightforwardly ‘good’ nor ‘evil’, they also remind us how quickly we change. “Our readings are never absolutes: literature disallows dogmatic tendencies,” writes Manguel. “Instead, we shift allegiances… if we recognise ourselves in Cordelia today, we may call Goneril our sister tomorrow, and end up, in days to come, kindred spirits with Lear, a foolish, fond old man. This transmigration of souls is literature’s modest miracle.” 文学作品告诉我们，没有绝对的好人或坏人，它也提醒我们，人改变的速度可以很快。“我们的阅读从不是绝对的，文学拒绝教条倾向，”满格尔（Manguel）写到。“我们支持的角色会变化…今天，我们在考狄丽娅身上看到了自己的影子，明天我们可能会把贡纳莉看成自己的姐妹；而后来，再过上几天，可能会和昏聩、温柔的老李尔王产生共鸣。在各个灵魂之间切换正是文学微不足道的奇迹。”
Perhaps most importantly, reading can reaffirm a feeling we all have – that who we are as humans varies from moment to moment. In response to the question posed by the Caterpillar – “Who are you?” – Alice says: “I-I hardly know, Sir, just at present. At least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have changed several times since then.” 也许，最重要的是，阅读会重新强调我们都有的一种感觉——作为人，我们时时刻刻都在发生着变化。毛毛虫问“你是谁？”时，爱丽丝回答：“我——我不知道，先生。至少现在我不清楚。今天早上起床时，我明白自己是谁，但从那以后，我已经变了好几次。” |
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