Not many people know that Charles Dickens was an actor as well as a writer. A workaholic who was haunted by memories of his impoverished childhood, when he worked in a blacking factory, Dickens was never the most emotionally stable of men at the best of times, never mind at the worst. In 1857 his friend Wilkie Collins wrote a play about a failed Arctic expedition. Dickens became obsessed with it and, like a rapper who's tired of the recording studio, volunteered to play the role of the villain. Then he fell in love with his 18-year-old co-star and left his wife.
You couldn't exactly say that Dickens is hot right now, but something is going on with him. Not just with his work, but with Dickens the person. So far this year he's turned up as a character in Dan Simmons' Drood and Matthew Pearl's The Last Dickens, both of which deal with his final, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Writers love to prey on their own kind anyway, but what's so intriguing about Dickens is the disconnect between his life and his art. His novels are full of last-minute redemptions and neat resolutions, but his life was a mess worthy of reality TV.
This year's third (!) and most ambitious novel about Dickens is Wanting, by the Australian--or if you like, Tasmanian--writer Richard Flanagan. Wanting begins when Dickens is mourning the death of his ninth child, Dora, and feeling increasingly alienated from his wife and from himself. "They say Christ was a good man," he cracks, "but did he ever live with a woman?" Flanagan's Dickens is a man who has only ever lived emotionally through his novels. Acting in Collins' play, which was called The Frozen Deep, he sets free feelings he was accustomed to keeping tightly confined, and his co-star, the toothsome Ellen Ternan, finds herself right in the splash zone.
The Frozen Deep was based on the disastrous Franklin Expedition, which furnishes Wanting with a secondary plot (it has three in all). Launched in 1845 under the command of Sir John Franklin, its purpose was to discover the fabled Northwest Passage. Franklin's ships were fitted with the bleeding edge of English naval technology, but the Arctic swallowed them and their crews with hardly a trace. Later explorers found evidence that Franklin's men had resorted to cannibalism before they finally died of hunger, disease and exposure.
What the stories of Franklin and Dickens have in common is the issue of wanting. Under what circumstances do men and women give in to forbidden desires--Dickens, a man starving for love, and Franklin, a man just plain starving? "We all have appetites and desires," Dickens says, "but only the savage agrees to sate them." The revelation that the stuffy Victorians had desires and acted on them isn't a particularly shocking one (nor would it have shocked an actual Victorian). But Flanagan makes the matter more interesting by posing it in the form of an insoluble dilemma: Which is worse, giving in to desire or keeping it locked up inside? "If you turn away from love," Franklin's widow asks, "did it mean you no longer existed?" Each one can lead to its own kind of disaster.
To balance things out, Flanagan also gives us an actual savage, a young Tasmanian Aborigine named Mathinna. Earlier in his career, Franklin and his wife had adopted Mathinna, an orphan, and then tried to make her into a good Victorian girl. But she ends up a lost plaything, at home nowhere, a novelty like her own pet albino possum, batted this way and that by the rich white people who dote on her and then discard her. Mathinna is Flanagan's most successful creation, and his saddest. She's a savage ruined by the desires of the cultured English--an irony lost on everyone but the reader.
可能许多人并不了解，19世纪的英国文坛巨匠查尔斯·狄更斯还是一位演员。狄更斯早年贫困，曾在鞋油厂做工，这段挥之不去的记忆使他工作十分卖力，而情场中的狄更斯却并不沉稳，顺风顺水的时候尚且如是，时乖命蹇就更是如此了。1857年，他的朋友威尔基克林斯写了个剧本，讲述一次失败的北极探险。狄更斯对这部剧极为着迷，就像是一位说唱乐手厌倦了录音棚里的生活，他主动要求出演剧中的反面角色。后来狄更斯竟与联袂主演的年仅18岁的搭档坠入情网，把妻子都抛弃了。
如今的狄更斯谈不上是什么炒作热点，但也绝非无人问津，而且不仅是关于他的作品，还有关于他本人。仅今年，截至目前已有两部作品中出现狄更斯这一角色：丹·西蒙斯的《德鲁德》和马修波尔的《最后的狄更斯》，二者均以狄更斯最后一部未完成的小说《神秘的埃德温德鲁德》为题材。作家总是喜欢拿同行说事，这也不足为奇，不过狄更斯的奇特之处在于他的真实生活和文学作品截然不同。他的小说结尾总是生机重现，或者问题解决，干净利落，而他的生活却是一团糟，简直都可以拍成电视真人秀。
来自澳大利亚的（或者说来自塔斯马尼亚岛的）理查德·弗兰纳根献上了本年度第三部（同时也是最具野心的）狄更斯系列小说：《欠缺》。小说开篇，狄更斯的第九个孩子朵拉去世，悲伤之余，他感到与妻子越来越疏远，甚至对自己也越来越陌生。弗兰纳根开玩笑说：“克里斯（基督？）是个好男人，可是他真的和女人生活过吗？”弗兰根纳笔下的狄更斯只是活在自己作品的情感起伏中。狄更斯出演的这部克林斯剧作名叫《极度深寒》，在剧中狄更斯一贯压抑的情感获得了释放，而那位靓丽的搭档艾伦·特南则被卷到这场情感漩涡的中心。
剧作《极度深寒》取材于弗兰克林探险队遇难的故事，这也是小说《欠缺》的第二条主线（全书共有三条主线）。探险队由约翰·弗兰克林爵士指挥，1845年出发，前往北极寻找传说中的西北航道。弗兰克林顿船队具备当时英国最为先进的航海技术，但整个船队最终被北极吞噬得无影无踪。其后的探险者发现，有证据表明弗兰克林的队员甚至不得不靠食人肉来求存活，但由于饥馑、疾病的双重围困，加之暴露于严寒之下，最终无一生还。
弗兰克林和狄更斯的故事有个共同点，就是欠缺。狄更斯缺乏的是爱，弗兰克林急需的是食物，究竟在什么情况下男男女女会向自己压抑的欲望投降呢？狄更斯说：“我们都有欲望和需求，但是只有野蛮人才会充分去寻求满足。”古板的维多利亚人同样有着种种欲望而且会付诸行动，这也不算什么惊人的发现（即使一个真正的维多利亚人也不会感到吃惊），不过弗兰纳根摆出了一个无路可走的两难之境：欲望，是该屈从还是压抑？哪个更危险？这使得一切更耐人寻味。剧中弗兰克林的遗孀问道：“如果远离了爱情，你的生命是否还有意义？”无论作何选择，可能都是灾难。
为求平衡，弗兰纳根还在剧中加入了一个真正的野蛮人角色，即年轻的塔斯马尼亚原住民玛蒂娜，弗兰克林夫妇很早就收养了玛蒂娜，想把这个孤儿调教成一个标准的维多利亚淑女。然而就像她宠爱的小白鼠一样，无以为家的玛蒂娜沦为有钱白人的玩物，被他们玩来玩去，最后弃如敝屣。玛蒂娜是弗兰纳根创造的最为成功也最为伤感的形象，正是英国文化中的欲望毁灭了这个野蛮人——剧中人物似未察觉，但读者岂会无视这一反讽？ |
