死神永生

方寸之间，深不见底啊。

安娜·卡列尼娜

世上的一切都是污秽丑恶的。

看不见的女性

西蒙娜·德·波伏瓦在1949年写下了著名论断：“人类是男性的，男人不是从女人本身，而是从相对男人而言来界定女人，女人不被看作一个自主的存在。（……）男人是主体，是绝对，而女人是他者。”译者在这里翻译“他者”很有意思，这里的“他者”指的是女性。与前文“男人不言而喻，女人不被提及。因为当我们说到人类，总的来说，我们指的是男人。”相合，可谓绝妙的讽刺。与后文“不加说明即为男性”则更是精妙！当作者用“通用阳性词”这一现象来论述“看不见的女性”时，译者转手用了通用阳性词来指代女性。这本书真真是被译者翻译出了另一个高度！

如何读，为什么读

Melville was not a Christian, and tended to identify with the ancient Gnostic heresy, in which the creator God of this world is a bungler and impostor, while the true God, called the Stranger or Alien God, is exiled somewhere in the outer regions of the cosmos.Early, major Faulkner is a kind of unknowing Gnostic; West, Pynchon, and McCarthy in their different ways are very knowing indeed. My subject is how to read their best fiction, and why, and not how to instruct my own readers in ancient heterodoxies (at least not here!), but the first sequence of four novels that I have chosen, in the wake of Melville, achieve their negative splendors in modes parallel to Gnostic visions, as we will see.