【英文原声版84】Nicholas Dames：Middlemarch

一共是100集英文，100集中文，100集翻译节目。

每周更新一集中文精制，一集英语原声，一集英文翻译，已经买过的就可以永久收听。

若遇到国内、海外节假日（包括但不限于新年、感恩节、圣诞节等）会暂停更新一次，敬请谅解。

英文文稿+中文翻译

Zachary Davis: By the time we reach middle age, our lives have taken certain paths. Sometimes these paths are close to what we imagined in our youth. But more often, they’re dramatically different.  We come to realize that there are larger, invisible forces that tend to have just as much a say, or more, in how our lives go as we do.

扎卡里·戴维斯：人到中年时，我们的人生已经走上了某条道路。有时候这些道路和我们年少时所想的一致，但是更多时候是大不相同的。我们意识到，人生究竟走向何方，其实会受到一股更大的、无形的力量影响，与我们自己的影响相比，只会有过之无不及。

Zachary Davis: In her 1871 novel Middlemarch, the English writer George Eliot explored this experience of ‘middleness’—a time halfway between what has already happened, and what has yet to happen. A time when we feel more sharply our own limitations.

扎卡里·戴维斯：《米德尔马契》是英国作家乔治·艾略特在1871年创作的小说。在这本小说中，艾略特探索了这种所谓“中间”的体验——也就是介于已发生的事和未发生的事之间的时间。在这段时间里，我们能更清晰地感受到自己的局限性。

Nicholas Dames: It's not necessarily a kind novel to the ambitions of young people. It's a novel that gains, not just with perspective, the perspective of rereading, but perspective on one's own life and on the paths one's life has taken, particularly the paths one's life has taken that you didn't necessarily will.

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：这本小说并不一定跟年轻人的抱负相关。小说非常客观地思考了人生，思考了人生所走过的道路——尤其思考了没有命运的驱使就不一定会选择的道路，因此非常值得重读回味。

Nicholas Dames: I'm Nicholas Dames. I am a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia. 

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：大家好，我是尼古拉斯·戴姆斯，是哥伦比亚大学英语与比较文学教授。

Zachary Davis: Eliot’s interest in ‘middleness’ extended beyond just middle age. 

扎卡里·戴维斯：艾略特对“中间”这个概念很感兴趣，它不限于中年的概念。

Nicholas Dames: Middles are very important to Eliot. And that means both Middle England, where the book is set, the middle of the century, importantly, the middle classes. This is a novel that is significantly colored by characters who belong to one or another subvariety of the middle class, and also middle age. That is, not necessarily middle age in a contemporary sense, but that is no longer being young, having made certain choices that have put your life in a certain direction. And also being in the middle of an experience. So she's very interested in putting characters in the middle of of a long term experience, either a failing marriage or being in a career with uncertain prospects, or accumulating debt that you're not sure if you're ever going to be able to pay off, and not thinking about how those experiences necessarily start or finish, but what it's like to be in the middle of those. 

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：“中间”这个概念对于艾略特来说很重要。一方面，“中间”指的是小说的背景设定在英格兰中部地区，时间设定在世纪中叶。最重要的是，人物的出身设定是中产阶级。小说的一大特色就是，其中的人物都来自于中产阶级之下的各个分支，并且都是人到中年。当然，这里“中年”的概念并不一定是现在我们所说的“中年”，其实指的就是一个人不再年轻，已经做了特定的选择，人生走上了一条特定的道路，而且人也处在一段经历之中。因此，艾略特也很喜欢把笔下的角色放到一段长期的经历中，可能是婚姻不幸，可能是事业前景不定，也可能是负债累累，不清楚自己到底能不能还清。艾略特关注的不是这些经历如何开始、如何收场，而是处在这种经历中究竟是怎样的。

Zachary Davis: Welcome to Writ Large, a podcast about how books change the world. I’m Zachary Davis. In each episode, I talk with one of the world’s leading scholars about one book that changed the course of history. For this episode, I sat down with Nicholas Dames to discuss George Eliot’s Middlemarch.

扎卡里·戴维斯：欢迎收听：改变你和世界的100书，在这里我们为大家讲述改变世界的书籍。我是扎卡里·戴维斯。每一集，我都会和一位世界顶尖学者讨论一本影响历史进程的书。在本集，我和尼古拉斯·戴姆斯教授一起讨论乔治·艾略特的《米德尔马契》。

Zachary Davis: Can you tell us about George Eliot's remarkable life?

扎卡里·戴维斯：您能和我们聊聊乔治·艾略特的传奇人生吗？

Nicholas Dames: George Eliot, of course, is a pseudonym. Her birth name is Mary Ann Evans. She's born in the Midlands, in the English Midlands in Warwickshire, in a small town called Nuneaton, which is right outside of Coventry, and which happens to be the setting of most of her novels, including Middlemarch. 

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：乔治·艾略特是作者的化名，她的真名叫玛丽·安·伊万斯，出生于英格兰中部地区华威郡一个名叫纳尼顿的小镇。这个小镇就在考文垂外围，而她很多小说，包括《米德尔马契》的背景都设定在考文垂。

Zachary Davis: Growing up in the English midlands at this time would be comparable to growing up in the midwest United States. It was very agricultural, but not totally cut off from the wider world. There was a main road in the town that ran directly to London. People would often pass through Eliot’s hometown of Nuneaton on their way to London. 

扎卡里·戴维斯：当时英格兰中部地区和美国中西部地区很相似，当地以农业为主，但也不算是完全与世隔绝。镇上有条主干道，能直通伦敦。当时很多人如果要去伦敦，都会经过艾略特的家乡，也就是纳尼顿。

Nicholas Dames: That the sense of middlemiss is very important. The sense of being at the heart of national imaginary I think is also important. And being slightly distant from metropolitan centres, in Eliot’s case London, but you know, where an ambition would take you to those metropolitan centres. If you were a particularly ambitious person, you'd want to leave. 

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：这种“中间感”是很重要的。当然，处在国家想象的中心、稍稍远离大都会中心也都很重要。对艾略特来说，远离大都会中心就是要远离伦敦。一般来说，有野心的人会想要到大都市去。但如果你是一个“特别”有野心的人，你反而会想离开大都市。

Zachary Davis: Eliot was “in the middle” in another way, too: she grew up in the middle class. 

扎卡里·戴维斯：艾略特的“中间”在她自己身上还有另外一重含义，那就是她是在中产阶级中长大的。

Nicholas Dames: She's the third and youngest child of Robert Evans, who is a land agent or estate agent for a wealthy family, the Newdegate family. And an estate agent is somebody who collects rents on behalf of the landlord, maintains the land, does some surveying. Evans is a former carpenter. And this is kind of like an intermediate position between the estate owners and the tenant farmers. And it gave Elliott a perspective on sort of both of those worlds because her father is constantly shuttling between those two. 

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：艾略特在家中排行老三，是最小的孩子。她的父亲名叫罗伯特·伊万斯，是当地富户纽德盖特家族的地产管理人。地产管理人的工作一般就是代表地主收租、养护土地，做做调查。艾略特的父亲以前当过木匠，因此身份就介于地产主和佃农之间。由于父亲一直在这两个身份之间转换，因此艾略特对于这两个世界也都有所了解。

Zachary Davis: Eliot was raised in a very religious Anglican household. She attended various girl’s schools, where she studied things like French, music, and geography.

扎卡里·戴维斯：艾略特一家是虔诚的圣公会教徒。她上过各种女子学校，学习法语、音乐、地理等课程。

Nicholas Dames: You could also call her, I suppose, an autodidact, because through her father, she had the run of the Newdegate Family Library in the Great House and therefore read a lot at a very young age. After 16, in fact, she was then quite progressively by her father, allowed a tutor. And it's from a tutor who she learned German, among other things, which became very important in her eventual intellectual development. 

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：艾略特也可以说是自学成才。因为父亲的缘故，她可以进入纽德盖特家族宅邸里的图书馆，所以很小的时候就读了很多书。在她16岁之后，父亲慢慢地允许她跟着家庭教师学习。她从家庭教师那儿学会了很多东西，比如德语。她后来在知识上有好的发展，跟德语有很大的关系。

Zachary Davis: Where does the next phase of her life take her? 

扎卡里·戴维斯：她人生的下一阶段是怎样的呢？

Nicholas Dames: The next phase of her life is her decision to detach herself from Christianity. Largely through the reading she detaches herself from it and actually gives up Christianity. At the age of 21 she announces she will no longer be accompanying her father to church. And this led to a rift, a very serious rift with her father that only her brother Isaac's intercession helped heal. They worked out a deal whereby she would accompany her father to church but not take communion, which seemed to work for both parties. 

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：下一阶段就是她决定要脱离基督教。她主要是通过阅读将自己从基督教中抽离出来，并且最后放弃基督教信仰。21岁的时候，她宣布不会再和父亲一起去教堂了。这也导致她和父亲之间生出了很深的隔阂，在她哥哥艾萨克的调解下才得以愈合。她和父亲后来达成一致，还是会陪父亲去教堂，但是不会领圣餐。这样一来两边都能接受。

Nicholas Dames: But that detachment from Christianity leads her, ultimately leads her into a circle of wealthy, influential, free thinking radicals in Coventry. This couple, Charles and Cara Bray, who are the sort of center of that circle. And Bray actually arranges to have some of Elliot's early writing published, some reviews of books. And it also connects her in ways that then allow her to take up the job of translating, translating from German. And she begins to translate the work of major humanist figures from German. David Strauss, whose book, The Life of Jesus, she translates and then Ludwig Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity. And these are books that are, you know, would be known as “the higher criticism”. That is books that think about Christianity as a historical phenomenon, but not as revealed religious truth. And this humanist doctrine really does become the origins of her intellectual life, and colors everything she writes after that.

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：正是因为脱离了基督教，她进入了考文垂一个很富裕、很有影响力的圈子，里面的人都是思想自由的激进分子。圈子里的核心人物是查尔斯·布雷和他的太太卡拉·布雷。布雷夫妇还帮艾略特出版了一些早期的作品，主要是一些书评。后来她能接到德语翻译的工作，也和进入这个圈子有关系。她后来开始把人文大家的作品从德语翻译成英语。艾略特先后翻译了大卫·施特劳斯的《耶稣的一生》、路德维希·费尔巴哈的《基督教的本质》。这些作品都是“更高级的批评作品”。这些书都是把基督教当成是一种历史现象来探讨，而不是神启的宗教真理。这条人文主义信条也奠定了艾略特的思想生活，影响了她此后的创作。

Zachary Davis: What was this circle discussing? So they were radical in their rejection of Christianity, and did certain political ideas flow from that as well?

扎卡里·戴维斯：这个圈子里的人都谈些什么呢？除了激烈反对基督教，这些人谈不谈政治呢？

Nicholas Dames: I mean, I think we would now call that circle in Coventry left-wing. We would now say that dispensing with Christianity as the central pillar of national life or political life had certain consequences for them. It had consequences about suffrage, it had consequences about democratic representation, certainly the separation between church and state. And those are all consequences that are at that point in her life, Eliot seems to have embraced. But it's interesting, actually, she very quickly becomes more politically skeptical than those circles that she was with in her 20s and early 30s. And she becomes very politically hard to place, but she doesn't necessarily become the kind of explicitly left-wing thinker that her mentors were, even though she largely exists within what we would, I think, now call the kind of left-wing milieu.

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：现在来看，考文垂的这个圈子就是左翼的。他们反对基督教作为国民生活或者是政治生活的支柱，这点确实对他们产生了特定影响，影响了选举权，影响了民主代表，也影响了政教分离。当时的艾略特是很乐于接受对这些变化的。不过有一点很有意思，艾略特从20多岁到30岁出头一直和一些圈子有往来，但她在政治上的怀疑态度很快就超过了圈子里的这些人。她的政见很难归类，虽然她确实身处我们现在所说的左翼群体，但是不像她的前辈们那样算是明确的左翼思想者。

Zachary Davis: During this time, calls for reform were in the air. For nearly 400 years, Britain’s electoral system had remained largely unchanged. Political representation across the country had grown heavily unbalanced, and only a small fraction of the population had the vote. Riots periodically broke out and in 1832, the British government passed The Great Reform Act to try to resolve the crisis. 

扎卡里·戴维斯：在这段时期，改革的呼声已经流传开来。在此前将近400年间，英国的选举体制都没有什么变化，全英的政治代表性非常不平衡，只有一小部分人有选举权。因此动乱时有发生。在1832年，英国政府通过了《1832年改革法案》，试图借此解决这场危机。

Zachary Davis: The Great Reform Act redistributed some seats in Parliament and did marginally increase the size of the electorate. But even with these changes, the voting class was still a small percentage of the country’s entire population. 

扎卡里·戴维斯：《1832年改革法案》重新分配了议会席位，也略微增加了选民人数。但是就算做出了这些改变，有选举权的人在全国人口中所占的比重还是非常低。

Zachary Davis: Many remained unsatisfied and organizations such as the Reform League rose up demanding universal male suffrage. In 1867, they achieved most of their goals when Parliament introduced the Second Reform Act. 

扎卡里·戴维斯：很多人还是非常不满，像“改革联盟”之类的组织崛起，要求获得男性普遍选举权。在1867年，议会拿出了第二项改革法案，满足了他们大部分的诉求。

Nicholas Dames: And The Second Reform Act doubled the electorate. It essentially gave the vote to the urban male working class. And that somewhat reduced the power of the landed gentry. But it was very far still from universal male suffrage, let alone the vote being extended to women. But it was a shift, and it accentuated, I think, the sense among a lot of observers that the social underpinnings of British society were changing and shifting ever more decisively to cities. And so it's in the process of kind of living through The Second Reform Act, she begins to think back to The First Reform Act which was really, the first in centuries, the attempt to redistribute political representation because of all the major demographic shifts that had happened in Britain in the intervening period. 

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：《1867年改革法案》把选民的人数增加了一倍，将选举权给到了城市里的男性工人阶级，也因此减小了乡绅的权力。但是这样还远远算不上是给了男性普遍选举权，更别提女性选举权了。不过这起码也是一个转变，而且这让很多观察人士更深刻地感受到英国社会的根基在转变，重心正在明显向城市转移。在经历《1867年改革法案》的过程中，艾略特开始重新思考《1832年改革法案》。这次《法案》确实是几个世纪以来第一次根据当时英国主要的人口变化，重新分配政治代表。

Nicholas Dames: Now, the other major thing of course, is that, that process of reform to the British Constitution and to the British electorate is slow and each time is felt to be both kind of too radical and unsatisfactory. And it happens through legislation. And everyone has their eyes on the continent. 

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：当时还有另外一件大事。英国宪法和选举权的改革进展太过缓慢，每次都显得很激进，又不够令人满意，而且改革还是通过立法进行的。因此当时人人都在关注欧洲。

Zachary Davis: In the mid-19th century, revolutions erupted all over mainland Europe. In France, Germany, Italy, and the Austrian Empire, people were revolting against the monarchy in what would later become known as the Revolutions of 1848. But those revolutions didn’t spread to Britain.

扎卡里·戴维斯：在19世纪中期，革命横扫了欧洲大陆。在法国、德国、意大利、奥地利帝国，人们纷纷站起来反抗君主制，这段历史就是后来所说的“1848年欧洲革命”。但是革命的火苗并没有烧到英国。

Nicholas Dames: And so I think one of the questions that Eliot had, certainly in the late 1860s, but I would say actually at any point after 1848 is, why isn't there any revolutionary force in British society? Why didn't the revolution happen in Britain the way it had in essentially every other European nation? And that is a question that divides thought. Some people thinking this is the kind of unique genius of British political life, that it prevented those acts and some thinking actually, and continued to think this well into the 20th century, that it was actually the unique and somewhat damaging stubbornness of British political life, its enduring conservatism that was impervious to revolution. And Elliott is of many minds about this, but I think that comparison to the continent and the revolutionary energy which is really lacking in the Britain of her life is very important.

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：所以我觉得，在19世纪60年代末——或者说在1848年之后，艾略特脑海中就一直有一个问题，那就是为什么英国社会没有任何革命力量呢？为什么革命几乎席卷了所有欧洲国家，但是独独没有发生在英国呢？在这个问题上大家有不同的见解。有些人觉得这就是英国政治生活独特的天才之处，能防止出现这些革命、这些思潮。这种想法一直持续到了20世纪。英国政治生活有一种顽固性，非常独特，甚至是有点毁灭性。正是这种顽固，还有长期的保守主义，制止了革命的发生。艾略特对此有很多想法，但是我觉得，英国和欧洲大陆在政治上的差异、以及英国革命力量的缺失，对她的人生都很重要。

Zachary Davis: Even though Britain didn’t experience the Revolutions of 1848, this was still a time of radical cultural change in the kingdom. The industrial revolution was transforming the economy and nearly every area of social life. 

扎卡里·戴维斯：虽然英国没有经历1848年欧洲革命，但是这段时间内在英国还是出现了很多根本性的文化变革。工业革命当时正在改变经济和社会生活的方方面面。

Nicholas Dames: It was a shift from what later 19th century sociologists would call community, the idea of these relatively stable, tight knit, small social units moving to what would become society, right? A society made up of individuals that have no intimate connection with one another, no daily connection with each other, but that are actually simply brought together on the basis of an economy, the kind of cash nexus by their occupation and also by technology. 

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：用19世纪社会学家的话来说，这种变革就是从“社区”这种相对稳定、关系亲密的小型社会团体转向人与人之间彼此疏离、没有日常联系的“社会”。社会里人们都是在经济的基础上聚到一起，通过职业、技术建立起金钱关系。

Nicholas Dames: I mean the major shift that is just apparent in Middlemarch and is one of the reasons she sets it back when she does, is the appearance of the railroads for the first time, which began to infiltrate the countryside in the early 1830s. By the time Eliot is writing Middlemarch, the railroad is the dominant technological fact of British life. But she is thinking back to its early days and thinking back to what is both gained and lost in this transition from something like community to something like a more alienated society. And that involves urbanization. But it even happens in smaller towns, right? It even begins to alter the fabric of life in smaller towns, which is actually her interest not in the city, but in how this changes even quasi rural life.

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：当时的一大转变就是第一次出现了铁路，这在《米德尔马契》中有很明显的体现，也是艾略特搁置这部小说创作的一个原因。在19世纪30年代，铁路开始渗透到乡村。到艾略特创作《米德尔马契》的时候，铁路已经成为了英国生活的主导性科技。但是艾略特思考的是铁路刚出现时的样子，思考的是当“社区”转向更加疏离的“社会”时，人们到底有哪些得失。其中就涉及了城市化。哪怕是在小镇上，也有城市化进程。城市化甚至都开始改变了小镇的生活结构。所以说，艾略特真正感兴趣的不是城市，而是城市化如何改变了这种半乡村式生活。

Zachary Davis: When did she make the decision, you know, to be a writer full time? And how did the rest of her career unfold?

扎卡里·戴维斯：艾略特是什么时候决定要当全职作家的呢？她后来的职业生涯又是如何发展的呢？

Nicholas Dames: It happens largely as a result of her father's death. And so in her early 30s, she sets out for London to become a writer, to enter intellectual life and, you know, a tremendously courageous act and one that actually was successful. So she immediately becomes the assistant editor of a magazine called the Westminster Review. And we would probably now call this a kind of left-wing intellectual journal. 

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：这个主要和她父亲过世有关。在她30岁出头时，她去了伦敦，当了一名作家，开始了知识分子的生活。这非常需要勇气，她成功了。她很快当上了《威斯敏斯特评论》杂志的助理编辑。现在看来，这本杂志就是有点左翼色彩的知识分子杂志。

Nicholas Dames: In her 30s she's an editor. She's a writer of nonfiction, but primarily an editor. She turns to fiction in her late 30s, actually. So she's always an inspiration for writers who start a little bit later in life, but is an immediate success. And it's in the process of turning to fiction that she takes up the pen name George Eliot, and a name that her published fiction would go by until her death, and still does actually, right? One of the sort of unusual traits is that we still use that pseudonym in ways we don't for other 19th century writers who use pseudonyms.

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：艾略特在30多岁的时候已经是一名编辑了。她也会写纪实作品，但主要还是当编辑。她其实是到快40的时候才开始写小说。因此，她的故事一直能激励那些事业起步较晚、但是一起步就大获成功的作家。也是在开始创作小说时，她取了乔治·艾略特这个笔名。在她去世前，她所有的小说都是以这个笔名出版的，而且现在也是如此。比较不寻常的一点就是，有些19世纪的作家也使用笔名，但现在的人们已经不再提起他们的笔名，但乔治·艾略特这个笔名却不一样。

Zachary Davis: Eliot likely chose her pen name as a tribute to the French novelist Amantine Dupin whose pen name was George Sand.  

扎卡里·戴维斯：艾略特这个笔名很有可能是致敬法国的小说家阿曼蒂娜·杜班，因为杜班的笔名叫乔治·桑。

Nicholas Dames:So that might have been her immediate inspiration for it. It's not a pen name that's adopted because she would have found difficulty getting published necessarily, which would have been the case with, let's say, the Bronte sisters who take pseudonyms to mask their identity as women in the hopes that that would ease their path to publication. 

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：她取这个笔名最直接的原因可能就是这个。当然，她取这个笔名并不是因为用原名出书难，不过勃朗特姐妹倒确实是用化名来掩盖自己是女性的身份，减少出版作品的难度。

Nicholas Dames: Eliot had somewhat more personal reasons for adopting a pseudonym, and that was that at the age of 35, she had fallen in love with and started to live with the man who would become essentially her partner for over 20 years, G.H Lewes, a fellow intellectual. We would now call him, I suppose, a scientist, although he was also a literary critic and writer on the arts. But the difficult element there is that Lewes was in what we would now call an open marriage with his wife. He and his wife lived apart. They had three children together that they more or less co-raised, although Lewes seems to have been slightly more responsible for their raising. And his wife had four other children with the man she was living with and the artist Lee Hunt. 

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：艾略特用这个化名还有她自己的原因。35岁那年，她爱上了G.H刘易斯，开始和他同居，一住就是20多年。刘易斯同样是个知识分子，虽然他也是文学批评家、艺术作家，但是现在我们主要觉得他是个科学家。和刘易斯相爱的难处就在于，刘易斯有妻子，而且和妻子的关系算是现在所说的开放婚姻。他们平时分居，不过也算是一起抚养他们的三个孩子，只是刘易斯对孩子们要稍微上心一点。他的妻子另外还有四个孩子，是她和当时同居的男人、以及艺术家李·亨特生的。

Zachary Davis: At this point, Eliot is in her mid 30s. She’s not legally married, but she is living with Lewes essentially as husband and wife. It was very hard to divorce during this time so it was easier for Lewes, his wife, and Eliot to continue on in this way than to separate and remarry. But this situation isolated Eliot. 

扎卡里·戴维斯：当时的艾略特35岁左右，法律上来说是未婚，但是她和刘易斯住在一起，就像是丈夫和妻子一样。当时要离婚很难，所以对刘易斯、刘易斯的妻子和艾略特来说，维持这种状态要比分居、再婚来得简单。但是这种状况也让艾略特遭到了孤立。

Nicholas Dames: It particularly cut her off from polite female society. She, within polite society, was kind of unvisitable. She certainly considered it a marriage. She called Lewes her husband. She even legally changed her name to Mary Ann Evans Lewes. And she referred to herself and others referred to her as Mrs. Lewes and Lewes’s children even called her, their name for her was mutter, the German word for mother. But this was nonetheless a scandal. And I think in part, to detach herself from that scandal, both for her own behalf and on behalf of the publishers who would be publishing her work, she adopts the pseudonym.

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：尤其是她就被上流女性的圈子拒之门外。在上流社会，没人愿意和她来往。艾略特自己觉得她和刘易斯也算是婚姻关系。她称呼刘易斯为丈夫，把自己的法定姓名改成了玛丽·安·伊万斯·刘易斯。她自称是刘易斯太太，其他人也是这么叫她的。而且刘易斯的孩子也喊她“母特（mutter）”，就是德语里“妈妈”的意思。尽管如此，这还是一桩丑闻。我觉得她之所以会取这个化名，有一部分原因是为了从这桩丑闻中抽身出来。既是为她自己考虑，也是为了给她出版作品的出版社考虑。

Zachary Davis: Despite the difficulties of this arrangement, it was nonetheless a very fulfilling time for Eliot and Lewes.

扎卡里·戴维斯：虽然这样困难重重，但是对艾略特和刘易斯来说，这段时光还是非常令人满足的。

Nicholas Dames: They were a sort of intellectual powerhouse. Lewes is a physiologist, a comparative anatomist. And we have stories about the two of them working in adjoining rooms where Lewes is dissecting frogs in one room and in the next room, Elliot is writing her fiction, and in the middle of the day, they would compare notes and, you know, they'd read each other's work, certainly. And in fact, Elliot probably helped Lewes with a lot of his scientific work, including probably writing whole passages for him. And he had a lot of comment to make on her fiction and was really responsible for getting her to write in the first place. So, you know, it was tremendously intellectually nourishing for both of them. 

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：他们俩思维都很活跃。刘易斯研究生理学和比较解剖学。据说他们俩会在相邻的房间工作，刘易斯在房间里解剖青蛙，艾略特在隔壁房间里写小说。中午，他们会把笔记拿出来放一起，读读彼此写的东西。其实，艾略特可能在刘易斯的科学作品上帮了他很多，甚至很多文章可能整篇都是艾略特写的。刘易斯对艾略特的小说也会发表很多评论，他对开启艾略特的写作生涯有着重要的意义。这段时间里，他们给了彼此非常丰盛的思想滋养。

Zachary Davis: So she found immediate success, even with this later start. Did that success lead to financial success? Were people just dying to get her latest novel? 

扎卡里·戴维斯：她虽然起步晚，但是一起步就大获成功。那她有没有因此赚很多钱呢？当时的人有没有非常热切地盼望她的新作呢？

Nicholas Dames: Yes, she was not only an immediate success, but remarkably financially successful with her work. In fact, one of the very rare cases in Victorian Britain of a writer who did have financial success with her work.

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：没错。她不光立刻取得了成功，而且靠着作品赚了很多钱。其实，在维多利亚时期的英国，她也是少数几个真的靠作品赚了钱的作家。

Zachary Davis: Eliot was also heavily influenced by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

扎卡里·戴维斯：艾略特也深受查尔斯·达尔文进化论的影响。

Nicholas Dames: So The Origin of Species comes out in 1859 and throughout the 1860s leading up to her starting work on Middlemarch, it's one of the truly major intellectual influences on her because it fundamentally altered her sense of how change happens. So Darwin's was a very persuasive model of how change operates through the aggregation of countless small, maybe even unintended effects, you know, well beyond the power of any particular single entity or any particular agency. 

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：《物种起源》一书于1859年问世。从19世纪60年代开始，到她开始创作《米德尔马契》的这段时间里，《物种起源》对她的思想有很深刻的影响，从根本上改变了她对变化发生方式的认识。进化论非常有说服力，它认为无数小的、甚至意想不到的影响整合到一起，才会导致变化出现，这是任何单个的实体或者任何特定机构都办不到的。

Nicholas Dames: And so Elliot starts thinking seriously about how that account of species evolution would have to change how we tell purely human stories, you know, stories about communities and their changes over a period of time and perhaps even stories about a nation and its change. And it does make her a bit more of a skeptic about attempts toward wholesale change in social arrangements. It puts her in that sense a little bit more, you know, the word I'm tempted to use is something like conservative, but I don't mean that necessarily in a contemporary sense. I mean literally in the sense of conserving, of being careful about the pace of change, of worrying about the effects of change that is too rapid over too short a period of time. And it is something she's playing with throughout the 1860s. And I think Middlemarch is her way of constructing a story in a world whose principles of change look much more like Darwin's evolution than they do anything like revolution, I suppose.

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：因此，艾略特开始认真思考一个问题，也就是关于物种进化的描述会如何改变我们讲述人类故事的方式，比如说和社区有关的故事、社区在一段时间内的变化，甚至可能是国家、和国家变化有关的故事。这也确实让她对社会安排上的大规模变革持有更加怀疑的态度。这让她变得更加“保守”吧，但不一定是现代意义上的“保守”。其实，字面上理解的“保守”会很在意变化发生的速度，会担心如果短时间内发生剧变会产生什么样的影响。这是她在整个19世纪60年代都在思考的事情。我觉得就《米德尔马契》这个世界里所发生的变化而言，其背后的原理看起来更像是达尔文所说的进化，而不像是革命。

Zachary Davis: What does the title Middlemarch mean?

扎卡里·戴维斯：书名《米德尔马契》是什么意思呢？ 

Nicholas Dames: So Middlemarch is a really interesting title and peculiar for its moment because it's neither an abstraction like Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility, nor is it a name like, you know, Jane Eyre or David Copperfield. It's a town. it's the town around which most of the action of the novel occurs. But it's also a title with some symbolic echoes. 

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：《米德尔马契》这个书名非常有意思，在当时听起来非常奇特。因为这个书名不是《傲慢与偏见》、《理智与情感》这样的抽象概念，也不是《简·爱》、《大卫·科波菲尔》这样的人名。米德尔马契是一个小镇，小说的大部分情节都围绕着这个小镇发生，不过这个书名也是有一些象征意味的。

Zachary Davis: For a novel this big, as hard as it is, could you try to tell listeners, what is it broadly about? What is the story?

扎卡里·戴维斯：要探讨这么宏大的一本书肯定很难，但是你能不能大致讲讲，这本书主要内容是什么？里面的故事是怎样的？

Nicholas Dames: It's set in the English Midlands from 1829 to 1832. So those are the years of The First Reform Act. Those are the years when the railways are first coming into the Midlands. It's just before Victoria takes the throne in 1837. So it's within, probably for many of her readers, it's in their childhood, you know, 40 years past. She starts writing the novel as actually two separate novels. 

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：故事发生在1829年到1832年的英格兰中部地区，当时正好处在《1832年改革法案》时期，也是铁路首次进入中部地区的时候，发生在维多利亚女王1837年登基不久之前。所以，对于当年的很多读者来说，这个时间正好是40年前，差不多是他们的童年时代。艾略特开始创作的时候，实际上写的是两本独立的小说。

Nicholas Dames: There's a novel called Middlemarch she's writing, which is more centered on the folks who live in town, who are more securely middle class. And there's a second novel she starts writing called Miss Brooke, which is about the county families, the slightly more quasi aristocratic, or the families from the gentry that exist in the surrounding areas around the town. She's writing these simultaneously, thinking of them as independent units and kind of runs into a dead end with both of them and then has this eureka moment in 1869 where she thinks, what if I put them together? What if I actually suture them together? And so that's the work that she does throughout 1870, is actually knitting these things together, rewriting them entirely to make them one connected story. 

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：一本名叫《米德尔马契》，侧重的是住在城里的人，是实打实的中产阶级。另外一本是《布鲁克小姐》，讲的是更接近贵族的上流家庭，或者是镇子周围的贵族家庭。两本书是一起写的，写的时候各自独立，但是两本书的创作都走进了死胡同。然后在1869年，她忽然灵光一闪，心想：我能不能把两本书合并呢？能不能把两个故事接缝在一起呢？然后，在1870年一整年的时间里，她把这两本书并到一起，全部重写成一个相连的故事。

Zachary Davis: The connected story is made up of four independent strands that eventually come together.

扎卡里·戴维斯：这个连接起来的故事是由四条故事线构成的，最终这些故事线汇聚到了一起。

Nicholas Dames: So the first strand is where the novel begins with a young woman named Dorothea Brooke, who's fairly wealthy, beautiful, in a sort of inwardly directed, intense way. Eliot actually calls her ardent, that's her favorite adjective for Dorothea, who is passionately interested in what we might now call social justice. She lives with her uncle and desires something to which she can dedicate her life. And very quickly, as the novel begins, she meets an older clergyman and scholar named Casaubon, who will, in short order, propose marriage to her. And it's a marriage everyone around her cannot endorse. There's a disproportion of age, Casaubon is not exactly prepossessing as a person, and so it's not a love match. But in a typically passionate way, Dorothea imagines Casaubon as this passport to a world of ideas and high ideals and thinks of herself as a potential help me in his work. He's a researcher in comparative mythology and as a way to educate herself and give her life a kind of purpose. 

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：小说的第一条线从一个名叫多萝西娅·布鲁克的年轻女子开始。她相当有钱，也很漂亮，内在的能量非常强烈。艾略特最喜欢用“热情”这个词来形容多萝西娅，因为她对我们现在所说的“社会正义”充满了兴趣。她和叔叔住在一起，渴望找到可以为之奉献一生的东西。在小说开头，她遇到了一位年长的牧师兼学者，名叫卡苏朋。卡苏朋很快就向她求婚了。但他们年纪差太大，卡苏朋也不讨人喜欢，而且两人又不是恋爱结婚，所以多萝西娅身边的人都不赞成这桩婚事。可多萝西娅还是满怀热情，认为卡苏朋能带他进入思想的世界，接触更崇高的理想，她还觉得自己能给卡苏朋的工作提供帮助。卡苏朋研究比较神话学，也以此来教育多萝西娅，给予她生活的目的。

Zachary Davis: But both the reader and other characters know, this marriage does not seem very promising. 

扎卡里·戴维斯：但是读者和书里的其他角色都知道，这段婚姻没什么希望。

Nicholas Dames: The second strand is more involved with the town, and that's that a character who's a young doctor and medical researcher named Tertius Lydgate has just arrived in town full of plans to take this small but bustling Midland's town and make it the base for a renewal of medical science—both research into the fundamentals of human tissue and practical matters. He wants to build a hospital for fever patients, typically for patients suffering from cholera. So it's not just pure research, but it's also applied research. But he very quickly meets the daughter of the town mayor, who is a very conventionally pretty young woman who's looking for a way to escape the tradesman's milieu of her family.

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：第二条线和小镇的联系更密切。里面的角色是一位年轻的医生兼医学研究人员，名叫泰尔提乌斯·利德盖特。他刚刚来到小镇，踌躇满志，计划把这座不大但繁忙的中部小镇变成医学复兴的基地，既要研究人体组织的基本原理，也要解决实际的医疗问题。他想专门建一所医院，收治发烧的病人，尤其是得了霍乱的病人。所以他想做的不光是纯粹的研究，也是应用型研究。但他很快就遇到了市长的女儿，是个传统意义上很漂亮的年轻女子，正在想办法摆脱商人的家庭环境。

Zachary Davis: And like the first strand, this marriage also seems unpromising.

扎卡里·戴维斯：和第一条线一样，这桩婚姻也没什么前途。

Nicholas Dames: The third strand is the mayor's son, Fred Vincy, the brother of the woman who will marry Lydgate, who's smart and somewhat feckless. He's a Cambridge undergraduate who's fast getting himself into debt. He has hopes of an inheritance that he thinks are going to solve his problems, but not at all certain he’s going to actually get that inheritance. He's been attached since he was a child to a woman named Mary Garth, who's smart, somewhat plain, witty and maybe even acerbic at times and is the daughter of a local estate agent that is very close to Eliot herself. And very quickly, he actually defaults on a debt which had been consigned by Mary's father and plunges Mary's family into financial difficulties. 

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：第三条线是市长的儿子弗雷德·文森，就是快要和利德盖特结婚的那个女人的兄弟。他人很聪明，但是又有些无能。他在剑桥大学读了本科，但是很快就债台高筑。他很希望能拿到一笔遗产，觉得这样就能解决问题，但又根本不确定自己是不是真的能拿到遗产。他从小就爱缠着一个叫玛丽·加思的女人，这个女人聪明机智，长相平平，说话有点尖刻。她是当地一个地产管理人的女儿，这个地产管理人和艾略特本人的经历很像。很快，弗雷德没能偿还欠玛丽父亲的债务，让玛丽一家遭遇了财务困难。

Nicholas Dames: And then lastly, there's this figure, Bulstrode, who's the town banker, who is an evangelical, a sort of strenuous evangelical, who thinks he's a tool of God's design on Earth. But he has a mysterious past. He is funding the construction of this fever hospital and takes on Lydgate as essentially his medical adviser in the construction of this hospital. But very quickly, his whereabouts are discovered by a figure from his past and he finds himself being blackmailed. So those are the complications with which the novel starts, which are both somewhat independent from each other. But as the novel proceeds, get ever more tightly bound up with each other as we go on.

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：最后一条线里有一个角色叫布尔斯特罗德。他是镇上的银行家，是一个非常狂热的福音派教徒。他觉得自己就是上帝在地球上设计的一个工具。但是他的过去非常神秘。前面说的专治发热的医院，就是他出钱建造的，而且在建这家医院的时候，他聘请利德盖特当自己的医疗顾问。不过很快，以前认识他的一个人发现了他在这个小镇，然后用他以前的事来敲诈他。小说开头就是这些棘手的情节，而且这些情节彼此之间是没什么关系的。但随着小说的发展，这些线索之间的联系就越来越紧密。

Zachary Davis: Each of these threads is centered around the question of who gets to stay in this town, Middlemarch, and who is forced to leave.

扎卡里·戴维斯：每条故事线索的核心都是，谁能留在米德尔马契，谁又要被迫离开。

Nicholas Dames: Who's sort of expelled by this area, who gets to remain? Because this is in some sense a Darwinian question. Right. It's, in other words, how is this place called Middlemarch going to reproduce itself and who are going to be the people who reproduce it? And with the exception of Fred Vincy and Mary Garth, all the other characters I just mentioned find themselves having to leave by the novel’s end. And now some of them leave for fates that we might think are not necessarily disastrous. Others in some cases, when after his exposure, for instance, Bulstrode leaves, we don't actually know what happens to him. He's an older man by that point and we heard nothing more of him. But it is a question of do you get to stay here or not? 

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：谁会被驱逐出去？谁又能留下来呢？这个问题有点达尔文主义的色彩。换句话说就是，米德尔马契这个地方会如何延续？哪些人又会在这里延续小镇的生命呢？除了弗雷德·文森和玛丽·加思之外，我刚刚提到的所有角色在小说的最后都得离开。有的人离开，是命运使然，当然也不一定就是什么厄运。其他人的离开，比如说布尔斯特罗德在自己的丑闻被曝光之后离开了这个小镇，我们并不清楚他身上到底发生了什么。他离开的时候已经是个老人了，此后音信全无。但是这说到底还是谁能留、谁得走的问题。

Nicholas Dames: I think in a bigger sense, though, what is common to all of these plot strands is something that, it may be too strong a word but I think it's accurate, would be something called failure. All of these figures fail at some project they set up for themselves. And she is interested in failure. She's interested in almost what you might call the kind of second life you have, the life you have after first failure, after a failed marriage, after a career ambition ceases to be possible for you, after there's some hokey plan for yourself that didn't work out, some image you had of yourself that you're having to detach yourself from and what you make of life after that. And it's not so simple as leaving it behind for Eliot, because I think the way she tells the story is that you continue to have a relation to that other self that didn't happen. You're still connected to that story of yourself—the person you didn't become or the choice you didn't take, that actually colors the life you do lead. So that failure in the ways in which one responds to it, I think, is the common thread in some ways between all these stories.

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：我觉得，从更广的层面来看，这些故事线都有一个共同点，那就是“失败”。我用的这个词可能语气有点强，但是我觉得还是挺准确的。这里面的每个人给自己定下了要做的事，但是都失败了。而艾略特对失败、对所谓的“第二段生命”很感兴趣。“第二段生命”就是第一次失败后的人生，比如婚姻失败，或者是事业上的野心落空，或者自己定了个荒谬的计划但是没成功，或者是自己对自己有过什么想法但是现在不得不放弃。此外，人们如何看待失败之后的人生，也是艾略特的兴趣所在。在她看来，人们不是直接把这个没能实现的另一个自己抛诸脑后不管了。根据她叙事的方式可以看出，人们还是会和另一个自己有联系，还是会和另一个自己的故事有联系。不管是没能成为的人也好，还是没能做出的选择也好，这些都会丰富我们真实的人生。所以我觉得这些故事线索之间有一条共通的线索，就是人们如何应对失败。

Nicholas Dames: I think that the ethic we can call this, the ethic that that is attempting to generate is this word sympathy. The idea of attempting to see things through the lens of the other, understanding, as she often says, that other people have a center of gravity that is as powerful as yours and things will look very different to them. How do you understand the world if you take that very, very seriously? And that is something that novel is trying very hard to do, which is why it's not a biographical novel. It's not a novel told about a single figure. It is constantly shifting between these different figures. And so it rejects the idea of a single version of events that could account for even this relatively small town and what happens within it in a relatively small amount of time, which is a little over two years.

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：我觉得这背后的伦理目的就是让人产生“同情”，就是试图从别人的视角来看待事情。用艾略特的话说，就是要理解别人和自己一样，每个人都有和别人不同的生活重心，所以同一件事在不同人眼里会非常不同。如果非常认真地去理解这一点，我们又会怎样理解这个世界呢？这就是这本小说努力想要做到的一点，这也是为什么这本小说不是一本自传式小说。这本小说不是围绕一个角色展开的，而是在各种角色之间不停切换。哪怕是讲述这个规模不大的小镇的故事，而且时间跨度也只有短短两年多的时间，艾略特也不希望小说里只有一个版本的故事。

Zachary Davis: So having so many characters with different protagonists, you know, the reader can't quite grasp onto one single, kind of heroic protagonist making their way through the world.

扎卡里·戴维斯：但是书中有那么多角色，每个故事线有不同的主角，读者就不能抓住唯一的主角，很快进入书中的世界。

Nicholas Dames: So every character in this novel has, or certainly the more important characters in the novel has a project. They have an ambition. And that ambition in one way or another gets frustrated in the course of the novel. But one really key thing about Eliot is the way in which she complicates, is really intentionally trying to complicate the ways in which we might know the world once we have to take others into account in a profound way. And one way that gets complicated by Eliot is her, I would say that it's the question of how much knowledge is too much knowledge of someone else? It's not so simple in Eliot as to say that the more you know someone, the more you understand them and the more you understand the world. Actually, it's possible to know too much. Often this thinking happens through metaphors and often scientific metaphors in the novel. 

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：这本小说里的每个角色，或者说是比较重要的角色，都有自己的计划。他们都有自己的野心，也随着故事的展开而受挫。但是对艾略特来说，真正关键的点在于她是如何把事情变得复杂的。艾略特在我们很认真地把别人纳入考虑中时，故意把我们认识世界的方式弄得很复杂。有一点被艾略特变复杂的是：我们对别人的了解限度在哪里？在艾略特看来，肯定不是说对一个人知道越多，了解就越深，也就能更好地认识这个世界，肯定没这么简单。其实，我们也可能会对别人了解过分深入。书中对这个问题的思考一般是通过暗喻——尤其是科学暗喻——展开的。

Nicholas Dames: So at one point she says, “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrels' heartbeat, and we should die of that roar, which lies on the other side of silence.” That's actually a scientific idea because she's referring there, I think, also to the invention of the stethoscope. But the idea that you might actually become too sensitive and take in too much information too soon, and actually prevent yourself from grasping anything around you might be traumatic. 

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：所以她曾说过：“如果我们对所有普通人的生活都有敏锐的洞察力和感受，那就像是能听到草生长的声音，听到松鼠的心跳，我们会死于这些喧嚣的声音，而这种喧嚣，是沉寂的另一面。”我觉得这实际上是一个科学暗喻，指的就是发明了听诊器。但同时也是在说，如果一个人太敏感，一下子接受了太多信息，就没法理解周围的一切，这是非常痛苦的。

Nicholas Dames: The other question that she has is a related question would be something like, “How close is too close? What's the right proximity or distance from a phenomenon or a person to understand them?” And she is continually modulating between metaphors about microscopes and metaphors about telescopes to show us that, in fact, we always need to be moving our perspectives back and forth, we always need to be both trying to get in a little closer and also trying to pull back from someone or something to understand them. But again, it's not so simple as saying you just need to get closer, you just need to understand ever more intimately. Because that might, in its own way blind you. There might be things you're not seeing. 

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：艾略特的另外一个问题和我们刚谈过的问题也有关系，就是“多近的距离是太近？离一个现象、一个人保持怎样的距离才能理解他们？”她不断用显微镜和望远镜的暗喻向读者表示，其实我们需要不断前后移动自己的视角，时而靠近一些，时而远离一些，才能理解有的人、有的事。所以，一味地靠近，一味地产生越来越亲密的理解也是有弊端的，因为这样反而会蒙蔽自己，有些事情就没法儿看到。

Nicholas Dames: So this is part of what makes the novel so complicated is that, she does not have a single recipe to offer. You know, even sympathy is not a single idea that you can easily use in your own life. It's constantly being complicated by this restless attempt to move you around different distances, different relations between people to try to understand not just where is the best place to stand, but is there a way to aggregate all those places to stand into something? 

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：这本小说的情节之所以变得复杂，部分原因就是艾略特针对这些问题，并没有什么单一的解决方法。就算是“同情”，也不是我们自己生活中能很容易用起来的。艾略特不断地让读者在不同人物距离、不同人物关系之间切换，把这些关系合而为一，以此来找到这些关系中最合适的位置。这也就让小说变得更加复杂了。

Zachary Davis: I think that’s maybe a good place to start to talk about its reception. So was it a success when it first came out in England?

扎卡里·戴维斯：聊到这儿，我们可以来谈谈这本书当时的反响。小说在英格兰刚出版的时候，是不是很成功呢？

Nicholas Dames: It was a success, actually, and partly it was a success because her previous two novels had been less so because she tried different things with those previous two novels. 

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：确实很成功，比她前两本书要更加成功，部分原因是前两本小说里她尝试的东西不一样。

Nicholas Dames: So with Middlemarch, it felt like a return to her natural territory. We're back in the Midlands. We're back in a rural setting, or quasi rural setting. And certainly there's an element of traditionalism about the novel, a select few families in a non urban setting that felt right. And so it was greeted well. 

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：所以《米德尔马契》这本小说就像是回到了艾略特的主场，回到了英格兰中部地区，回到了乡村，或者说是接近乡村的场景设定。当然，书里也是有一点传统主义色彩的，因为小说的设定不在城市，而且只有少数几个精英家庭，整体氛围很好，所以反响也很好。

Nicholas Dames: But there were things that were disliked about it. There was a lot of concern about the difficulty of Elliott's language, which I think is a bit harder for us to now see, because what would have been considered overly technical or overly scientific language in Eliot’s time has become a little bit more naturalised for us. But these metaphors about microscopes and telescopes and and even stethoscopes, the constant recourse to scientific ways of thinking was thought to be inappropriate in fiction and unnecessarily difficult. Over time, of course, as I said, that became less of a problem and it eventually became kind of quasi sanctified. 

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：因此，当时有些人不太喜欢小说中的科学暗喻，他们觉得艾略特的语言太难懂，这一点我们现在可能觉得不可思议。因为在当时看来难以理解的技术语言、高深晦涩的科学术语，现在的人已经可以非常轻松地理解它们了。在当时看来，书里有关于显微镜、望远镜、甚至是听诊器的暗喻，不断诉诸科学的思考方法，这些都不适合出现在小说里的。但是正如我刚刚说的，随着时间的流逝，这些问题会被渐渐淡化，最终会被神化。

Nicholas Dames: So one of the more famous sentences about the novel is Virginia Woolf’s who said that, “Middlemarch is the first English novel written for grownups.” Meaning that it's not a heroic story of a young person's triumphing over circumstances to marry the person they want to marry or have the kind of life they want to have, but is that story of grownup disappointment or having made a choice and being forced to stick with that choice through all the kinds of vicissitudes that come. And that, I think, has been still the kind of dominant feeling about Middlemarch and helped maintain it in the canon of novels that one should read if one is interested in the history of the novel. 

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：关于这部小说，弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫说过一句很有名的话。她说：“《米德尔马契》是第一部为成年人写的英文小说。”也就是说，这不是什么英雄故事，不是讲一个年轻人如何战胜了环境，娶了他们想娶的人，或者过上了他们想过的生活。这是关于成年人失望的故事，讲的是成年人如何做了一个选择，然后被迫在各种变迁中都只能坚守这个选择的故事。我觉得即便是现在，《米德尔马契》给人的整体感受也是如此。因此这本小说一直都是对小说史感兴趣的人必读书目之一。

Nicholas Dames: With Eliot, for the first time at least an English fiction, we get the lives of characters who are propelled by ideas. So they have intellectual ambitions. It's really central to the fabric of their lives that they want to change the world in certain ways and in ways that are not risible, they're not silly and they're are not limited to social assent or their erotic life, but their ambitions of the mind. And that almost inevitably courts disappointment and failure in Eliot.

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：正是因为有了艾略特，起码在英国小说中，人们第一次看到了受想法驱使的角色是如何生活的。这些人有思想上的野心，他们生活的中心是希望能以某种方式改变世界，而且不是用什么荒谬可笑的方法。他们不是头脑简单的人，也不受社会共识或自身欲念的支配。他们更在意的是思想上的雄心和抱负。而这也非常迎合艾略特内心对失望、失败的兴趣。

Nicholas Dames: It's interesting that the only successful project in Middlemarch is Middlemarch itself. But all the other projects, more or less have to be other. You have to accept a kind of compromise with what you set out to do or you have to give them up in some case. So giving characters this different sort of existence, this idea of intellectual ambition fundamentally changes how we think about how a story can be told and what it is about one's own story that matters to you when you come to sort of account for success or failure at the end of it. 

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：有意思的一点是，在《米德尔马契》这本小说中，唯一成功的就是米德尔马契这个小镇本身，小说里其他所有的计划都没顺利进行。对于一开始想做的事情，角色们不得不接受妥协，或者全部放弃。艾略特赋予她笔下的角色这种不同的生活方式，赋予他们思想上的野心，会从根本上改变我们对故事叙事方式的理解，也让我们重新思考，在成功或失败后想要回头做解释的时候，究竟什么才是重要的。

Zachary Davis: After Middlemarch, Eliot continued writing poetry and fiction. She published a handful of poetic works and one more novel called Daniel Deronda.

扎卡里·戴维斯：在写完《米德尔马契》后，艾略特继续创作诗歌和小说，出版了很多诗歌，还出版了一本名为《丹尼尔·德龙达》的小说。

Zachary Davis: What does the final chapter of her life look like in her death?

扎卡里·戴维斯：艾略特人生的最后一段路是怎样的呢？

Nicholas Dames: So Lewes predeceased her, which I think was a definitely traumatic event for her. And she very quickly, after Lewes's death, actually married legally, a much younger man named John Cross, who would eventually become her first biographer, although that marriage doesn't last long because Elliott dies, I think only two years after she marries him. 

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：刘易斯在她之前过世也给了她很大的打击。在刘易斯去世后，她很快和一个名叫约翰·克劳斯的人结婚，这个人比艾略特小很多，后来艾略特的第一本传记就是他写的。他们这段婚姻没有维持多久，因为艾略特在婚后两年就去世了。

Nicholas Dames: She was never in particularly good health in the last 20 years of her life. Her writing becomes ever more experimental and ever more strangely politically radical. Or her last novel is actually a novel whose central character is a member of the British aristocracy who discovers his own Judaism and eventually departs for Palestine to work toward the construction of a Jewish state. And these were political and intellectual ideas that were very, very far from the mainstream. And she was pushing ever farther, I think, in that direction at her death.

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：她生命最后20年里的健康状况一直不太好。奇怪的是，她作品的试验性反而越来越强，而且政见上也越来越激进。她最后一本小说里的主角是一个英国贵族，后来发现自己其实是犹太人，于是他离开英国，去了巴勒斯坦，想要建立一个犹太国家。这些政治、思想上的想法离主流想法非常遥远。而艾略特在她濒死之际，也离主流方向更远了。

Zachary Davis: George Eliot’s masterpiece Middlemarch reminds us that there are forces greater than ourselves that shape our lives and the world we live in. That realization doesn’t have to lead to despair. Instead, we can gain an appreciation for our interdependence, an awareness of the constraints that all people live under, and a commitment to do our best to love and serve our communities, even if those acts are small or unseen. 

扎卡里·戴维斯：乔治·艾略特的杰作《米德尔马契》不断提醒人们，有一股比我们自身更加强大的力量在塑造着我们的生活以及我们所处的世界。不过，即便我们意识到这一点，也不必绝望，因为它可以让我们可以更好地明白人与人之间需要相互依赖，能够让我们意识到所有人都生活在约束之下，也能帮助我们倾注自己的全部去热爱、去服务我们的社会，即便我们所做的事情微不足道，没人看得见。

Zachary Davis: I love the final line of the novel, which reads:

扎卡里·戴维斯：我很喜欢小说的最后一句话，是这样写的：

Zachary Davis: “The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

扎卡里·戴维斯：“世上善的增长，一部分也有赖于那些微不足道的行为，而你我的遭遇之所以不致如此悲惨，一半也得力于那些不求闻达，忠诚地度过一生，然后安息在无人凭吊的坟墓中的人们。”

Nicholas Dames: A novelist owes something to a broader canvas than a single individual and in the broader sense of consciousness than what's in one person's mind. And that's an almost ethical duty. And that defines, I think, still for people, a sense of the cultural importance of fiction and the cultural importance of novels in particular.

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：比起一个普通人——或者更广义而言，一个普通人的想法，小说家更应该承担起在白色画布上进行创作的职责。这可以说是小说家的伦理责任。这也为人们明确了小说——尤其是长篇小说的文化重要性。

Nicholas Dames: I think Middlemarch changed the way in which change itself gets narrated. After Middlemarch, it becomes harder to speak of change as something that any one person or even any one text can really do. We become much more of a skeptic, and I think we are still now cultural skeptics about change driven from the top or change driven by a single individual or change happening all at once. And Middlemarch is maybe the onset of that idea that change is much slower, much more complicated, much more inadvertent than we might think and requires an entirely different toolkit of skills and a different toolkit of narrative ideas of how narratives get built to account for that.

尼古拉斯·戴姆斯：我觉得《米德尔马契》改变了我们描述变化的方式。在这本小说之后，我们更难把变化说成是一个人、一个文本能做到的事情。我们会对个体持有更加怀疑的态度。我觉得现在，针对自上而下的变化，我们还是扮演着文化怀疑论者的态度。对于某个人推动的变化，或者忽然之间发生的变化，我们的态度也是如此。可能就是从《米德尔马契》开始萌生了一种想法，那就是变化比我们想的要慢很多、复杂很多、偶然很多，因此要解释变化，就需要用和平常写作完全不同的手段、不同的叙事想法和技巧。

Zachary Davis: Writ Large is a production of Ximalaya. Writ Large is produced by Jack Pombriant, Liza French, and me, Zachary Davis. Script editing is by Galen Beebe. We get help from Feiran Du, Ariel Liu and Monica Zhang. Our theme song is by Ian Coss. Don’t miss an episode. Subscribe today in the Ximalaya app. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

扎卡里·戴维斯：本节目由喜马拉雅独家制作播出。感谢您的收听，我们下期再见！