【英文原声版24】Joshua Bennett：Their Eyes Were Watching God

​Nice to meet you again, Zora

佐拉，有幸再次相遇

Zachary Davis: Today, Zora Neale Hurston is recognized as one of America’s greatest authors. Her novel TheirEyesWere Watching God is taught in classrooms around the United States. And critics love it, too—the BBC said it was one of the 100 books that shaped our world.

扎卡里·戴维斯：如今，佐拉·尼尔·赫斯顿被公认为美国最伟大的作家之一。她的小说《他们眼望上苍》在美国各地的课堂上被讨论。评论家也很喜欢它。BBC把它称作“塑造世界的100本著作之一”。

Zachary Davis: But during her lifetime, her work was not as widely celebrated. She butted heads with other figures in the Harlem Renaissance, a 20th century literary movement that produced some of the most influential Black artists and thinkers in American history.

扎卡里·戴维斯：不过在生前，她的作品并没有广受赞誉。她与哈莱姆文艺复兴的其他代表人物理念相左。这场文艺复兴是20世纪的一场文艺运动，当时涌现出一批在美国历史上颇有影响力的黑人艺术家和思想家。

Zachary Davis: When she died, she was buried in an unmarked grave. It seemed like her work, and her memory, would be lost forever until the writer Alice Walker came along. In 1975, Walker flew to Florida to find Hurston’s grave. She wrote about the journey for Ms. magazine, in an essay called “Looking for Zora.”

扎卡里·戴维斯：她去世后被埋葬在一个无名墓下。若不是作家艾丽斯·沃克，她和她的作品恐怕要永远埋没在历史中。1975年，沃克飞往佛罗里达寻找赫斯顿的坟墓。她为《Ms.》杂志撰写了一篇题为《寻找佐拉》的文章，讲述了自己的寻墓之旅。

Joshua Bennett: And it's pretty incredible just on its own as a narrative. I mean, Walker lies about being Zora Neale Hurston's niece, flies to Eatonville, where she's been corresponding with the dissertation student who's writing on Zora Neale Hurston in an attempt to find Zora's unmarked grave and mark it.

约书亚·贝内特：这篇故事本身挺不可思议的。沃克对别人谎称自己是佐拉·尼尔·赫斯顿的侄女，飞到了伊顿维尔，在那儿与一位写关于赫斯顿的毕业论文的学生通信，那个学生想要找到佐拉的无名墓，给墓刻上名字。

Zachary Davis: In her nine page essay, Walker describes her time in Florida, trying to locate Hurston’s unmarked grave. She gathers clues through conversations. These word-of-mouth accounts reveal the myth and mystery that surrounds Hurston’s life.

扎卡里·戴维斯：在这篇长达九页的文章中，沃克描述了她在佛罗里达的经历，如何试图找到赫斯顿的无名墓。她通过交谈收集线索，这些口口相传的描述揭开了赫斯顿神秘生活的一角。

Zachary Davis: For example, Walker spoke with Sarah Peek Patterson, the director of the Lee-Peek Mortuary that buried Hurston. Patterson believed Hurston died from malnutrition, when in fact she had a stroke.

扎卡里·戴维斯：比如，沃克拜访了Lee-Peek停尸房主任莎拉·皮克·帕特森，这家停尸房安葬了赫斯顿。帕特森相信赫斯顿死于营养不良，其实她是死于中风。

Joshua Bennett:And that is a fitting beginning point for this journey, because after that, it's unclear even where her unmarked grave is in the segregated cemetery where they go to find her, right? So there's this beautiful moment where Walker calls out to her. She says, "Zora, not going to spend all day out here with this high grass and these snakes trying to find you, so tell me where you are." And in this gorgeous moment of narration, Walker stumbles upon this sunken place in the ground and realizes that this is where Hurston is buried.

约书亚·贝内特：这作为寻墓之旅的第一站非常合适，可是之后，她们还是不清楚在她们要去的黑人公墓里，她的坟墓究竟在哪儿。沃克在这里高声呼唤的时候，出现了一个非常奇妙的场景。她呼唤道：“佐拉，我不想整天在这片有蛇的高高草丛里找你，快告诉我你在哪儿吧。”故事在这里转入了高潮：沃克被地面上有块下沉的区域绊倒，她意识到这就是赫斯顿被埋葬的地方。

Zachary Davis: Walker purchases a headstone and has it engraved with:

Zora Neale Hurston

A Genius of the South

Novelist, Folklorist, Anthropologist

1901-1960

扎卡里·戴维斯：沃克买了块墓碑，在上面刻下了这样的话：

佐拉·尼尔·赫斯顿

南方的天才

小说家、民俗学家、人类学家

1901-1960

Joshua Bennett:So that's how it happened. It was a labor of love with a little bit of lying thrown in there, you know, to help make it possible.My name is Joshua Bennett. I'm the Mellon Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College, where I teach courses in African American literature, environmental studies, affect theory, and American poetry.

约书亚·贝内特：这就是当时的情况。这番寻找饱含热爱，不过也掺杂了一点点谎言，以便能找到无名墓。我是约书亚·贝内特，是达特茅斯学院的梅隆英语与创意写作系助理教授，我教授非裔美国文学、环境研究、情感理论、美国诗歌这几门课程。

Zachary Davis: Walker succeeded in marking Hurston’s grave—and more. Thanks to her and other Black writers and academics, Hurston’s works found a new audience. Her 1937 novel, Their EyesWereWatching God has become her most popular work.

扎卡里·戴维斯：沃克成功地给赫斯顿的墓刻上了名字，她做的不止于此。多亏了她和其他黑人作家、学者，赫斯顿的作品才有了新的读者。赫斯顿1937年出版的小说《他们眼望上苍》已成为了她最受欢迎的作品。

Joshua Bennett: And so I've been trying to make sense of, I think for a long time, especially in my life as an educator, what it means that very few people in our country knew this woman's name for such a long time. And now it's one of the most widely taught books in American curricula.

约书亚·贝内特：在很长一段时间里，尤其是我从事教育的这段时间，我一直在试图弄清楚，很长一段时间里赫斯顿在美国都鲜为人知，这究竟意味着什么。不过现在她的这本书已经成了美国课堂上教得最多的书了。

Joshua Bennett: And I think that's a pretty incredible transformation. A lot of people, many of whom are still living, they're still among us, a lot of artists, activists, and academics worked very hard to make that the case. And so I think it's a unique case study of what that sort of collective action can make possible. We can really honor ancestors, and we can bring that work back to life.

约书亚·贝内特：我认为这是个挺不可思议的转变。很多人都在努力发掘赫斯顿的作品，他们中许多人还活着，生活在我们周围。很多艺术家、活动家和学者都在努力做这件事。我觉得这可以当作一个特殊案例来研究，探讨这种集体行动可以实现什么。我们真的可以向前辈致敬，也真的可以让这部作品重现光芒。

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 today’s episode, I sat down with poet and Professor Joshua Bennett to discuss Zora Neale Hurston’s Their EyesWereWatchingGod.

扎卡里·戴维斯：欢迎收听：100本改变你和世界的书，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探讨一本影响历史进程的书。在本集，我和约书亚·贝内特教授一起讨论《他们眼望上苍》。

What does the book tell?

这本书讲了什么故事？

Zachary Davis: And for those who haven't read it, can you give us a synopsis of what this story is about?

扎卡里·戴维斯：为了照顾一下还没有读过此书的听众，您可以给我们概括一下书里的内容吗？

Joshua Bennett:Sure. So Janie Crawford is a young woman living in Eatonville, Florida. She is married off in large part due to pressure from her grandma who's called Nanny in the book to a man named Logan Killicks. Logan is seen as a good man. He owns land. He will ostensibly take good care of her. And this should be seen as, you know, a kind of come up for our protagonist, a way for her to secure a respectable life.

约书亚·贝内特：没问题。珍妮·克劳福德是一个年轻女子，住在佛罗里达州的伊顿维尔。珍妮在她称为“阿妈”的祖母给她施加的压力下嫁给了洛根·基里克斯。洛根看上去是一个好男人，他拥有一片土地，似乎会好好照顾珍妮。在阿妈看来，这段婚姻可以确保我们的女主人公过上优渥的生活。

Joshua Bennett: She has a difficult relationship with Logan, in no small part, because she finds him to be very controlling and as one that doesn't... There's no emphasis on intimacy, kindness or kinship in her relationship with Logan. He understands her as kind of an extension of his property in many ways. Though, I think there's a real generosity.

约书亚·贝内特：但她与洛根的关系并不好，部分原因是她发现洛根的控制欲很强，而自己并不喜欢这样。她与洛根之间并不亲密，也没什么温存，洛根在很多方面都只把她看作自己的一部分财产。尽管如此，书里在人物刻画上还是有宽容的一面。

JoshuaBennett:There is a more generous reading available to us in terms of how we understand what Logan is doing in the novel. He just seems like kind of a basic guy. He just wants to wake up and do chores. And for him, that's what marriage is. It's another hand on the plow, right? But Janie wants romance,  and she's willing to pursue that for herself.

约书亚·贝内特：书里提供给我们一种宽容的视角，来理解洛根的所作所为。他似乎只是个平凡无趣的人，只是想着醒来干活。对他来说，婚姻生活就是如此，不过是种地时候多个帮手。但珍妮想要的是浪漫，她情愿为自己求得浪漫。

Joshua Bennett: So another man comes into town, Jody Sparks, and he's says, who's the mayor of this town? And they say, we don't have a mayor. He's like, well, I think I'm gonna be mayor. And Jody takes it upon himself, right, he's much more industrious. And he's more inspirational rhetorically. I mean, Hurston was so great with language. So she gives us a completely different pitch for Jody—The language in which he's written, in the way he talks. You can almost see quite clearly how Janie's taken with, not just this younger man, but one that has a real zest. He's excited about life.

约书亚·贝内特：后来，另一个男人乔·斯塔克斯来到了小镇。他问人们，这个镇的镇长是谁？人们说，我们没有镇长。乔就觉得，那我要来当镇长。乔自己承担起镇长的职责，他比洛根勤奋得多，说话也更鼓舞人心。我觉得赫斯顿对语言驾驭能力非常强。所以作者赋予了乔完全不同的语言特征——他说话、写作的方式都和赫斯顿完全不同。你可以清晰地看到珍妮是如何爱上他的。他更年轻，也更富有腔调，对生活充满激情。

Joshua Bennett:So she leaves Logan to become a kind of first lady of the town, the mayor's wife. And that, you know, is well enough for some time until Jody, too, comes to find that Janie is too big for him. He wanted someone that would shrink next to him, that wouldn't take attention from him, because to his mind, he's worked quite hard. He's charismatic, he's brilliant. He runs the town. And especially there's this moment where he and Janie have a kind of public argument in which she just undresses him rhetorically, completely embarrasses him. Everyone laughs at him.

约书亚·贝内特：于是她离开了洛根，成为镇上的第一夫人，也就是镇长的妻子。然而美好的生活并没有持续多久。乔发现他管不住珍妮。他想要的是一个小鸟依人的、不会抢他风头的妻子。因为在他看来，自己工作这么努力，有魅力又聪明，把小镇治理得井井有条。一次，珍妮和他公开地争了起来，打碎了他的权威，把他奚落得底朝天。使得每个人都嘲笑他。

Joshua Bennett: And Hurston says, you know, it's the worst thing a woman can do to a man is throw down his armor before men. And so from that moment forward, their relationship really just sort of collapses and dissolves. And then one day there's a man named Tea Cake who comes into the shop that she owns with Jody, and sweeps her off her feet, but largely through friendship because he takes her seriously as a person. They play checkers together. They, you know, talk junk at the shop. And they are people that grow close to one another in no small part because they feel very alone. They don't really have anyone else.

约书亚·贝内特：赫斯顿说，对男人来说，女人做的最可怕的事就是当着自己的面扯开自己的铠甲。所以从那一刻起，他们的关系就土崩瓦解了。有一天，一个叫甜点心的男人来到她和乔的店铺里，把她给迷住了。不过他们在一起更像是朋友，因为甜点心认认真真地把她看作平等的人。他们一起玩跳棋，在店里聊天。他们走得很近，一部分原因是他们都觉得很孤独，没有其他人陪伴。

Joshua Bennett: And eventually she runs away with Tea Cake to a place called the muck, which is essentially, how do I even describe this? I mean, it's another world. You know, there is no post office on the muck. You don't work a day job. You sort of labor in the mud. You grow what you can and you gamble and drink and dance and carouse at night. And eventually, there's a hurricane on the muck, and during the course of that hurricane, a rabid dog attempts to bite Janie.

约书亚·贝内特：最后她和甜点心一起来到了大沼泽地区，这个地方……怎么说呢，完全是另一个模样。大沼泽没有邮局，没有什么正式工作，只能辛苦劳作。你种点能种的作物，晚上赌博、跳舞、喝酒、寻欢作乐。最终，一场飓风袭来，飓风中一只疯狗想要咬珍妮。

JoshuaBennett:Tea Cake grabs the dog, is bitten by the dog, contracts rabies, tries to kill Janie, and Janie has to shoot him in the chest, is then brought back to Eatonville to stand charges for Tea Cake's murder, is found not guilty, and then just has to sort of walk off into the sunset alone, but also with a sense of independence that I think people have rightly interpreted, but also a real heartbreak.

约书亚·贝内特：甜点心抓住了狗，被狗咬了，得了狂犬病。一天，他想要杀死珍妮，珍妮不得不朝他胸口开了一枪。后来，珍妮被带回伊顿维尔，被指控谋杀甜点心，但最后被判无罪。她独自走进了夕阳的余晖中，身上带着被诠释得恰如其分的独立，也饱含着心碎。

Joshua Bennett: I don't think Hurston lets us off the hook with any sort of clean ending, like, you know, she killed her last lover tragically, but now she doesn't need anyone. And that's not how it ends. It really seems to me to be about the tragedy of life and how one survives what one must, you know, which I think is what Zora did herself.

约书亚·贝内特：我觉得赫斯顿不会让我们看到一个纯粹无瑕的结局。珍妮杀死了自己的爱人，但现在珍妮不需要任何人了。但这并不是书的结局。在我看来，这本书讲述的是人生的悲剧以及个体如何在必经苦难中活下去，我觉得这就是佐拉做的事情。

Zachary Davis: Aspects of this book—and many of Hurston’s other works—were autobiographical, but the facts weren’t always clear.

扎卡里·戴维斯：这本书的许多地方都带有自传色彩，赫斯顿的许多书都是如此。但事实的部分并不总是很明显。

Joshua Bennett: Part of what's so complicated about Hurston, I think, is you let her tell it, you wouldn't know when she was born. You wouldn't know what was fact and what was fiction, and even in her genre work that's considered fiction, so many really incredible autobiographical details slip through. So someone named Joe Clark in the historical record becomes Jody Sparks in the novel. So she gives you that sort of clue. But she's able to take those everyday details from her life and weave them quite beautifully through her writing.

约书亚·贝内特：我觉得赫斯顿之所以如此复杂，部分原因是你任由她讲故事，也不知道什么时候她自己的经历会冒出来，你不会知道哪些是事实、哪些是虚构的，甚至她那些被认为是虚构的通俗小说中，也贯穿着许多惊人的自传性细节。于是真实历史中名为乔·克拉克的人，在小说中摇身一变，成了乔·斯塔克斯。她给你提供了这种线索。她能够从日常生活中提取细节，在写作中把它们漂漂亮亮地串在一起。

Zachary Davis: Yes. So she grew up in Florida.

扎卡里·戴维斯：没错，所以她在佛罗里达长大的。

Joshua Bennett: Yes.

约书亚·贝内特：没错。

How did Zora getstared as awriter?

佐拉是如何开启写作之旅的？

Zachary Davis: How did her genius get recognized, and how did she get started?

扎卡里·戴维斯：她的天赋是如何被发掘的，她是如何踏上写作之旅的呢？

Joshua Bennett: Yeah. So, I mean, there's a moment in her essay How ItFeels to be Colored Me, where she talks about getting a scholarship to go to a school in Jacksonville and how that was the first time she thought of herself as a Black person in the way many people mean that. It was the first time she found race. In part because Eatonville, Florida, where she grew up, was a predominantly Black town. So for her, it was completely normative, normal, everyday neutral to be a Black person. And it wasn't until her educational acumen, right, launched her from that place to somewhere else.

约书亚·贝内特：嗯，她在《如何给我上色》一文中提到过一个时刻。她在书里谈到，那时候自己得了奖学金，要去杰克逊维尔的一所学校读书，那时候她才第一次意识到自己是别人口中所说的“黑人”。那时候她才第一次有了种族的概念。这一部分是因为她从小生活在佛罗里达伊顿维尔，小镇人口主要都是黑人。所以对她而言，黑皮肤是完全正常的、不低人一等的。直到她为了接受更多教育，搬到了别的地方，才发现事实并非如此。

Joshua Bennett: So, that was one lesson she learned, to be brilliant as she was meant that in the eyes of dominant society, she would have to leave the people that she was from. She would have to learn new ways of writing and speaking and moving through the world. So that's part of how she got her start, right, that she had to leave Eatonville. But how I think she really got her start in terms of being a popular writer was that she refused to let Eatonville leave her.

约书亚·贝内特：她从中学到了一条经验，要想实现社会主流观念中的成功，她就不得不远离家乡的人们，学习新的写作、说话以及走访全球的方式。她的写作之旅就是这么开启的，从她不得不离开伊顿维尔开始。不过我认为，她之所以能成为一名受欢迎的作家，是因为她拒绝抛下关于伊顿维尔的印象。

Joshua Bennett: So she took those stories and really threaded them quite powerfully into all of the narratives that she created, she'd never let go of the idea that poor people and especially poor Black people had this vibrant culture that the world needed to know about. She was willing to think about it on the global stage.

约书亚·本内特：她借用了那些故事，将它们极力融入到自己的小说中。她永远坚信穷人、尤其是黑人穷人也有值得全世界了解的、多姿多彩的文化。她想要让它登上世界舞台。

Joshua Bennett:So she started as a little girl on scholarship, eventually became an adult woman on scholarship to Barnard, right, to study under Franz Boas. And from there really just took off, always living by her pen, right? Quite rarely sort of working a traditional day job, but really made her way in the world as a writer.

约书亚·贝内特：起初她是一个获得奖学金的小女孩，成年后，她最终获得了巴纳德学院的奖学金，在弗朗茨·博厄斯门下学习。从那时起，她的文学事业真正起步了。她一直以写作为生，很少从事传统的日常工作。不过作为作家，她确实享誉世界。

ZacharyDavis: Hurston was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, the cultural rebirth of African-American arts. This movement was centered in Harlem, in New York City, from the late 1910s to the mid-1930s. The Harlem Renaissance helped to define Black American literature and arts and gave birth to many prominent authors including Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay. Many of these writers shared a goal: to elevate black culture politically and socially. Hurston agreed, but she had her own way of going about it.

扎卡里·戴维斯：赫斯顿是哈莱姆文艺复兴运动的重要人物，这场运动让非裔美国人的文化艺术重新焕发生机。运动主要发生在纽约的哈莱姆区，从1910年代末持续到1930年代中期。它定义了美国黑人文学与艺术，催生出许多著名作家，如理查德·赖特、兰斯顿·休斯和克劳德·麦凯。他们当中，许多人都有一个共同的目标，那就是从政治和社会方面发扬黑人文化。赫斯顿赞成这个目标，但她的实现方式却有所不同。

Joshua Bennett: So part of the Harlem Renaissance, right, part of the ideology behind it is the idea that we're going to clarify the extent to which this particular American population, right, has been victimized by American society. Justly so. Very sort of righteous way to think about what literature is supposed to do.

约书亚·贝内特：哈莱姆文艺复兴背后的思想主题是，要展现美国黑人这一特殊群体在美国社会中受到了多少伤害。这种想要发挥文学应有之义的做法非常崇高。

JoshuaBennett: Now, for Zora, part of the issue there, I think at least, is she believes we lose the full spectrum of human beauty, complexity, and capacity when that is the sole aim of literary work, right? She's saying, well, what about evil? What about characters that are highly flawed? Do not Black Americans also deserve to have those sort of characters portrayed in literature?

约书亚·贝内特：而在佐拉看来，问题在于，她是否认为文学作品若是将反映悲惨遭遇视作唯一目标，那我们就难以全面认识人类的美好、复杂性与才能。她说，丑恶的一面呢？有重大缺点的人物形象呢？文学中为什么不能塑造这类的美国黑人形象？

Zachary Davis: To get the full picture, Hurston looked beyond literature.

扎卡里·戴维斯：为了了解全貌，赫斯顿将目光投向了文学之外的地方。

JoshuaBennett: So I think part of her interest in anthropology was thinking what kind of disciplinary lens will allow me to give language to that full breath. And also, how can I—if I'm going to say something about Black Americans on the global stage, I have to study the globe. I have to travel, not just throughout the African diaspora, but to Latin America. I have to see the world and think about what are the threads that connect this particular subset of American people to people all over the world. Oppressed peoples, of course, but just to humanity. And I think anthropology became one way for Zora to do that and to undertake that labor.

约书亚·贝内特：我觉得她之所以对人类学感兴趣，是因为想要弄明白采取何种学科视角才能清晰地阐述全貌，以及如果她要让美国黑人登上世界文化舞台，就必须研究整个世界。她认为，必须要走访全球，不仅要走访所有流落在外的非裔族群，还要走访拉丁美洲。必须要去全世界看看，思考美国这一特殊群体是如何与世界各地的人联系起来的。他们固然是被压迫的一群人，但也不乏人性的光辉。我觉得佐拉正是通过研究人类学来实现这一点，开展这些工作。

Zachary Davis: Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were WatchingGodin just seven weeks while she was on a Guggenheim fellowship, researching spiritual healing practices in Haiti.

扎卡里·戴维斯：在获古根海姆基金会资助、赴海地研究灵魂愈疗术期间，赫斯顿用了短短七个星期写下了《他们眼望上苍》。

Why did her book receive a cold welcome?

为什么她的书遭受了冷遇？

JoshuaBennett: I mean, as a working writer, one imagines there is some financial component to that. Right? Is that you're like, look, I need to turn around a popular novel that people are going to read, and that's really going to resonate in no small part, because that's where I'm at in my life. That's how I, you know, I butter my bread. And sadly, that's not how it worked out. It only sold about 5,000 copies in its time.

约书亚·贝内特：作为一名职业作家，她写这本书会不会有经济方面的考虑？你会想，我要写一本人们愿意读的流行小说，它在很多地方都会引发共鸣，因为我会将自己的生活细节融入其中。比如，我就这么给面包抹黄油的。可惜最后书没能大卖，当时只卖出了大概五千本。

Joshua Bennett:And to give some kind of comparison to this, in 1940 Richard Wright's NativeSon will be a book of the month club selection and will go on to sell, well over 300,000 copies. So there are still units moving in this time period, even for Black American authors, and Zora's work does not sell well by comparison.

约书亚·贝内特：与之相对地，1940年，理查德·赖特的《土生子》入选“每月读书会”的推荐名单，并持续热销，销量超过30万册。所以即使对美国黑人作家来说，这段时间里仍然有某类题材颇受青睐。而与之相比，佐拉的书则销量惨淡。

ZacharyDavis:Why do you think the work did struggle to find an audience initially, and what was the critical reception like?

扎卡里·戴维斯：您觉得，为什么这本书最初读者很少？批评家们是怎么看这本书的？

Joshua Bennett:The critic reception was poor. So on the one hand, the idea was that it wasn't sufficiently political. She's written this love story about a woman's coming of age in Florida. Two failed marriages, right? Arguably three, depending on what you think of her final marriage to a man named Tea Cake. There's all this vibrant life.

约书亚·贝内特：评论家们的评价很差。觉得它一方面缺乏足够的政治性。她写了一个佛罗里达的女子在成长中经历的爱情故事。不过是两次失败的婚姻，对吧？也可以说是三个，这取决于你如何看待主人公和甜点心最后的婚姻。它仅仅展现了生机勃勃的生活。

Joshua Bennett: But for someone like Richard Wright, he said explicitly, this is a depiction of Black life in the United States as the white reader already imagines it, he says that it keeps them in that comfortable space, quote, between laughter and tears. So for him, he's saying this actually isn't teaching us anything new about Black people, it's minstrelsy, what you've put forward, it's not sufficiently political and it's not sufficiently serious.

约书亚·贝内特：但理查德·赖特等人认为，这仅仅展现了白人读者想象中的美国黑人的生活。他说，这本书将人物置于舒适区中，介于“欢笑与痛苦之间”。在他看来，这本书并没有展现关于黑人的任何新鲜的一面，不过是在轻嘘微语，缺乏足够的政治性和严肃性。

Joshua Bennett: There are white critics that are saying some of the same things. But from some of the white critics, what they're saying as well is that there's great color and vibrance. So it's fine, but it's not spectacular. You know, it's not a triumph.

约书亚·贝内特：有些白人评论家也作了类似的评价。不过某些白人评论家认为，这本书妙趣横生、充满活力，不错但称不上伟大，所以算不上成功之作。

Joshua Bennett:And there you see what is sort of a persistent theme of African-American culture and life. This idea that one has to be twice as good. You can't just write, you know, this beautiful—cause it's gorgeous, right? I mean, it's—lyrically, it soars, this novel. But that's not enough. It's supposed to do a certain kind of sociopolitical work in order for it to be viable, and so it falls out of favor, not just in its cultural moment, but even in the years to come.

约书亚·贝内特：你能从中看到什么是非裔美国人文化生活的永恒主题。你的作品必须得双倍地好。写得漂亮是不够的。这本书写得确实漂亮，很富有诗情画意。但这还不够。它还应该展现社会政治方面的主题，不然没法热销。于是这本书失宠了，不仅在当时的文艺圈是如此，在后来的几年也不怎么受欢迎。

JoshuaBennett:As Black studies, you know, from 1968 forward becomes a kind of institutional enterprise where you have colleges and universities where these works are taught. Zora Neale Hurston is somehow still not part of the conversation until she's recovered by Alice Walker, you know, later in the 20th century.

约书亚·贝内特：1968年开始，在教授这些黑人作品的大学里，黑人研究开始成为一个门类。然而佐拉·尼尔·赫斯顿仍然鲜被提及，直到20世纪后期艾丽斯·沃克重新发掘了她的作品，情况才有所改变。

Zachary Davis: How did Alice Walker know that that was indeed her grave?

扎卡里·戴维斯：艾丽斯·沃克怎么知道那确实是她的坟墓？

JoshuaBennett: I mean, so in the essay, it seems like it's kind of a mystical event, right? Like she says, there was no other spot that it could have been based on this entire field that I had surveyed. And then when she knew, she knew. Which for me, too, seems, you know, fitting enough, you know, because we do know that Zora was buried there in that grave site. And I'm willing to take Walker's word for it.

约书亚·贝内特：在沃克那篇文章里面，寻墓之旅似乎挺扑朔迷离。正如她所说，她仔细探究了那块地方，佐拉的墓不可能在别处。她知道是那样，那就是那样了。对我来说也可以接受，因为这下我终于确切地知道佐拉埋在那块墓下了。我愿意相信沃克的话。

Zachary Davis: Walker’s essay ends with a conversation. She spoke with one of Hurston’s neighbors, and he told her that Hurston lived with her dog, Sport, and had a beautiful garden full of flowers, including her favorite: azaleas.

扎卡里·戴维斯：在沃克那篇文章的结尾有一段对话。她与赫斯顿的一个邻居交谈，邻居告诉她赫斯顿与自己的狗“斯波特”住在一起，她有一个美丽花园，开满了鲜花，其中就有她最喜欢的杜鹃花。

Joshua Bennett:There's something about that lasting image of her that was recovered, not from any archival document, but from a conversation, that I think it's quite fitting, because that's how Zora Neale Hurston built her career, was off of conversations with everyday people, which she believed, I think held the shimmering ore of human experience. Anything you needed to know about human beings you could find by talking to a poor person making their living from the land.

约书亚·贝内特：佐拉深入人心的形象不是从什么档案文件中找到的，而是从谈话中得来的。我觉得这样很好，因为佐拉·尼尔·赫斯顿就是这么来写作的，她相信在人们的日常交谈中闪耀着人生百态。和务农的穷人谈上一会，你就能了解到所有关于人类的知识。

What’s the price she pay for her human vision?

为了坚持人类主义的视角，她承受了什么？

Zachary Davis: So let's dig in to the tension that I think Zora's career in reception reveals, which is there were some Black intellectuals and artists who probably wanted to create elite culture and then some who wanted to in some ways elevate ordinary Black life culture, and how did Zora navigate those two tensions? I mean, she was at Barnard. She was well received by many critics and yet retain this devotion to Eatonville and the stories there.

扎卡里·戴维斯：我们来谈谈佐拉作品的遭遇展现的意见之争吧。有些黑人知识分子和艺术家想要培育精英文化，而有些人希望以某种方式提升普通黑人的文化生活。佐拉如何应对这场意见之争呢？她是在巴纳德学院上的学，也收获了不少批评家的好评，但她心底里仍然热爱着着对伊顿维尔和那儿的故事。

Joshua Bennett:Yeah. I mean, I think she, she paid the price, for that reason. I think part of even what you can trace from the reception is a suspicion of her because she was in an elite space. The idea was that she's putting on this act. Someone like Richard Wright, I mean, didn't finish high school, like, taught himself how to write while working in the post office.

约书亚·贝内特：没错，我觉得她为此还付出了一些代价。看着她作品遭受的待遇，你会发现，她因为接受过精英教育而饱受质疑。人们觉得她在装腔作势；而像理查德·赖特，他高中都没读完，还是在邮局工作时自学的写作。

Joshua Bennett: I mean, was really self-made in a certain kind of way, whereas you have Zora Neale Hurston with her elite education. And the idea is, if she's writing like this, she's writing in this kind of a Floridian dialect. I mean, this must be for a white audience. This can't be—because of some idea that you can recover a Black culture that exists for its own purposes, sort of not even outside of a white gaze, but almost indifferent to it, ambivalent about it.

约书亚·贝内特：赖特的确是自学而成的作家，而佐拉·尼尔·赫斯顿接受的则是精英教育。人们觉得她如果用精英的方式去写作，那肯定在用佛罗里达的方言来写。这面向的会是白人读者。而他们觉得，要复兴黑人文化，就要仅仅为黑人自己而写，别说过滤掉白人的看法了，就应该压根不考虑他们的看法。

Joshua Bennett:I mean, I think that's one of the best ways to characterize her entire oeuvre, with a real sort of ambivalence. Right. So Zora really had a human vision in the idea that her racial identity made it her responsibility to speak to a very specific kind of political identity. I mean, that just seemed very silly to her. She said I'm writing, I'm imagining worlds.

约书亚·贝内特：我觉得这么说可以很好地概括她所有作品的特征：里面有种矛盾的情绪。人们觉得她是黑人，所以有责任表现出具体的政治倾向。对于这种观点，佐拉展现出了广阔的人类视角。在她看来这似乎挺可笑的。她说，我写作的时候，思考的是整个世界。

JoshuaBennett:And I think...I mean, I keep saying some version of this phrase, she paid the price for it. It really does strike me that she could have very easily written a very different sort of fiction. I mean, she had political ideas. She wrote speeches that were anti-colonialist in nature, but the fiction itself, it strikes me, had just a very different tone and texture to it, you know.

约书亚·贝内特：我一直在想这句话的其他表述方式。她确实为此付出了些代价。我很惊讶的一点是，她竟然可以毫不费劲地写出风格不同的作品。她也有政治观点，她写的演讲本质上都是反殖民主义的，但她的小说给人的印象和质感完全不同。

Zachary Davis: So of all her works, why has this one received the most attention? Why did it make it into my high school curriculum at Dixie High School in St. George, Utah. What was it about this one among all the others?

扎卡里·戴维斯：那么在她的所有作品中，为什么这一部作品受到的关注最多？为什么会把它纳入我的高中母校，也就是犹他州圣乔治的迪克西高中的课程中。这部作品与其他作品有什么不同？

Joshua Bennett: There's something about Janie Crawford's coming of age and the way this novel ends and the way she takes her own life in her hands, that I think coincides quite beautifully with second wave Black feminism and its emergence in the United States, with womanism which is a kind of political ideology that Alice Walker creates, as she calls the sort of lavender. If feminism is purple, then womanism is lavender. It has a specific sort of focus on Black women's concerns.

约书亚·贝内特：我觉得，珍妮·克劳福德的成长经历、小说的结局以及珍妮的生活方式，与美国的第二波黑人女权主义浪潮非常吻合，也与艾丽斯·沃克所说的妇女主义思想非常吻合。沃克认为妇女主义之于女权主义，有如薰衣草的紫色之于薰衣草。妇女主义尤其关注黑人女性关心的事情。

Joshua Bennett: My sense is that its emergence in that moment has something to do with the way it's then taken up as a really powerful avatar for Black women's experiences writ large. Not just Janie, but also this author whose work was completely overridden, mostly by the critical voices of men in her time, was recovered by this Black woman who had to engage in all sorts of fugitive maneuvers even to find her grave, much less resuscitate her corpus, her body of work.

约书亚·贝内特：这本书后来之所以饱受关注，是因为显然需要用它来反映黑人女性的经历。代表她们的不仅仅是珍妮，更是这个饱受打压的作者。打压她的大多是同时代的男性批评家，而发掘她的则是一位黑人女性。仅仅为了找作者的坟墓，她就用了各种偷偷摸摸的办法，更不用说发掘她的作品需要费多大功夫了。

Joshua Bennett: And I think those forces really combined in that moment to say we have to recover this. This is central. And also the work of prominent Black academics. Not just Skip Gates, but Kwame Anthony Appiah, I mean, there were a number—June Jordan—a number of voices of people that said this needs to be taught. And I think that's why it's held its place, you know, because people refused to let it fade again, right? It did once. And they said never again. We're gonna make this push so that young people can read it, you know, and be influenced by it for years to come.

约书亚·贝内特：我觉得当时，这些合力推动着人们发掘这部小说，把它看得至关重要。许多著名黑人学者，如亨利·路易斯·盖茨、夸梅·安东尼·阿皮亚、琼·乔丹，他们都认为需要教授这本书。我认为这就是为什么它能享有这么高的地位，因为人们不想再让紫色褪色。紫色一度褪去了，但今后再也不会这样了。我们要大力推崇这本书，这样年轻人才会读到它，才会在今后受其熏陶。

How did the bookopen up our ideas?

这本书如何赋予我们新的思考？

ZacharyDavis:Could you tell us a little bit about how this work has changed your thinking and opened up ideas for you?

扎卡里·戴维斯：您可以说说这本书如何改变了您的想法，赋予您新的思考吗？

Joshua Bennett: I think almost the entirety of my formal education has militated against the idea that I should ever write seriously about people where I come from. So I was born in the Bronx. Grew up in South Yonkers, and reading Hurston's work in college and then again in graduate school. It gave me an idea that I haven't been able to shake, which is that I should be able to write beautifully about marginalized people in the language that we ourselves use to describe our conditions, if that makes sense. That Hurston never wrote about the people in Eatonville as if they were pitiable or as if they weren't resourceful or brilliant or imaginative or mentally dexterous or creative or worthy of praise.

约书亚·贝内特：我觉得在我受过的几乎所有正规教育中，都没有提倡过认真写关于家乡人们的故事。我出生在布朗克斯，在扬克斯南部长大。大学时候，我读了赫斯顿的作品，研究生时候又读了它。它让我坚信，如果可以的话，我们要用自我描述时使用的语言，来精彩地描写非主流群体。赫斯顿从来没有写过伊顿维尔的人，似乎他们只是群可怜人，没什么才华和想象力，思维迟钝、创意贫乏，不值一提。

Joshua Bennett: And I think my first book of poetry is quite academic. I think I, you know, I sort of wrote it that way on purpose, I was finishing my dissertation at the time, and that's what a serious American poet is supposed to do. And I think a lot of my newer work... I hope, you know... It's been influenced by Hurston in a very different way. I think I'm allowing myself to let much more of the music of the places that raised me seep into it. So that's one way that the work has changed my life.

约书亚·贝内特：我觉得我自己的第一部诗集非常学术化。我想我是故意这样写的，当时我正在写毕业论文，觉得严肃的美国诗人就应该这么写。而我的许多新作品在赫斯顿的影响下则截然不同，希望是这样吧。我在其中融入了家乡音乐的特色。这是这本书对我的一个影响。

Zachary Davis: Seems like she has this extraordinary capacity to describe and depict full human beings.

扎卡里·戴维斯：她似乎有充分刻画全人类的非凡才能。

JoshuaBennett:Yes.

约书亚·贝内特：没错。

ZacharyDavis:And it seems like what she was rebelling against was a politically inspired reduction, and it's challenging because, of course, one can be sympathetic to the goals of political liberation, but an artist is attentive to kind of deeper expressions of soul and struggle and triumph.

扎卡里·戴维斯：她似乎与当时的黑人政治运动背道而驰，这么做很有挑战性，因为人们显然会支持社会解放运动的目标，但艺术家会注重展现灵魂、人的挣扎与胜利这些更深层次的主题。

Joshua Bennett: Yes. Wasn't interested in clean categories, you know, sort of easy victims and heroes, captives and captors. Zora was trying to live in the muck of it all, the messiness of human experience. She's writing this way in the 30s. Mind-blowing, right? I mean, emancipation is not even 70 years old, and Hurston is writing and thinking this way.

约书亚·贝内特：没错。他们对规规矩矩的内容不感兴趣，比如形象扁平的受害者、英雄和俘虏。赫斯顿想把所有东西都混杂到一起，呈现出人生百态的复杂一面。在20世纪30年代的时候，她就以这种方式在写作了。多振奋人心啊。那时候黑人解放了还不到70年，赫斯顿就能这么想、这么写。

Joshua Bennett: She's saying, OK, I live in the afterlife of slavery, I'm trying to make sense of what Blackness means, and I promise it's nowhere near as simple as you want me to make it. And I believe that everyone, not just Black people or white people, everyone is complex enough to deal with that complexity. I'm gonna write it as messy as it actually is, not with a particular political agenda that I know in advance that is completed by the end of the work. That just wasn't interesting to her. And I think, I mean, I'm completely open to arguments that needs to be done, that we need propagandists, that we need polemic, but that can't be the work of everyone that's here, everyone in the room.

约书亚·贝内特：她说，好吧，我生活在黑奴制瓦解后的时代，我试图弄明白黑皮肤意味着什么，我保证这远远比你想要我知道的更复杂。我相信每个人，不只是白人或黑人，每个人都足够复杂，足以应对复杂的人生百态。我要把它写得越复杂越好，而不仅仅是在书的结尾安上个早已心知肚明的政治口号。这对她来说没什么意思。我是说，我很乐意看到那些需要争论的内容被提出来，我们需要宣传和辩论的人，但不可能所有人都来做这些事。

Joshua Bennett: But she believed something about life on Earth and about writing as a real vocation, writing as a calling. And when writing is your calling, you're responsible for people and you're responsible for what you say. So I think you have to write with a aesthetics and an ethics that echo what you believe. Not your... I'm not saying you have to write a manifesto every time you step to the page, but I think even when you create fictional worlds, fictional characters, you are responsible for what they do and say and you want to communicate something about humanity, I imagine, when you create that work, I think.

约书亚·贝内特：但她相信关于地球生命的事情，相信写作是真正的职业，是她的使命。当你把写作看作一项使命时，你就要对读者负责，对你写下的话负责。所以你必须带着你深信不疑的美学与道德准则去写作。我不是说你每次写作都要写个誓言，但我觉得即使在你构建虚拟世界、刻画虚拟人物时，你也要对他们的言谈举止负责。当你写下那部作品时，你会想要传达一些关于人性的内容。

Joshua Bennett: That's my sense, at least, of her project or any project that would make me want to commit my life to writing. So yeah, she didn't want to fit into the box. You know, no matter what. I think she also didn't think that gets you to freedom. I think she's right. Those debates are still happening. I think those debates are even more electrified now in the social media age. It just seems like--.

约书亚·贝内特：至少我是这么看待她的作品、或是我想要倾注毕生心血写成的作品的。她无论如何都不想把自己限定在一个框子里。但她也不觉得这会让你全然自由。我觉得她想得没错。那些争论时至今日还存在。在如今这个社交媒体的时代，这种争论似乎更加激烈。

ZacharyDavis: You can get canceled.

扎卡里·戴维斯：似乎别人一气之下就会删你好友。

JoshuaBennett:Yeah. You have to sort of make a clean claim. And that claim also has to be tied to all of your identity categories at once. It just has to be like, look, you are, you know, a poor, non-disabled Black person from a certain part of the world, thus, your politics needs to look like this, and if they do not, then we reserve the right to keep you from being able to feed yourself.

约书亚·贝内特：对，你不得不明确站队。而且你站队的表态还会立刻跟你的其他身份属性相挂钩。就好像是，你是世界上某个地方贫穷残疾的黑人，所以你的政治倾向必须是这个，不然我们可要砸你饭碗。

Joshua Bennett: And it, I mean, the first people I ever taught were incarcerated. And so some of this for me feels so deeply carceral as well in a way that's very, very strange. It's that someone said the wrong thing 10 years ago. Now I don't want to talk to them, and you shouldn't want to talk to them either. And we shouldn't read anything they ever wrote.

约书亚·贝内特：我教过的第一批人进过监狱。我觉得这非常可怕，也特别奇怪。就好像有人十年前说错话了，于是现在我跟你都不想和他说话，我们也不应该看他写的任何东西。

Joshua Bennett: And I've had students ask me that about particular authors, you know. We're reading Whitman? Isn't he canceled? Is it--an author cancelled? What does that even...What would that even... He's dead! Like, what would that even entail, and why is that something we want to pursue?

约书亚·贝内特：我有些学生会问我关于某个作者的问题。比如，我们为什么要读惠特曼啊？他没给划掉吗？他甚至都死了！这还有什么必要啊？我们为什么要追求这个啊？

Joshua Bennett:Even if we don't agree with their views, isn't that more the reason to read it? If we're gonna critique it, why don't we have the most robust language possible to say what we disagree with, which requires us to engage the idea, you know.

约书亚·贝内特：即使我们不同意他们的观点，我们难道不更应该去读读它吗？如果我们要对它做文学批评，那为什么不用最慷慨激昂的语言来阐明我们不同意哪些点，这都需要我们去了解这些观点。

ZacharyDavis: No, I think, uh, I mean, it just shows how alive the debates were back then.

扎卡里·戴维斯：呃，我的意思是，这表明了当时的争论有多激烈。

JoshuaBennett:For sure.

约书亚·贝内特：没错。

ZacharyDavis: And that they haven't really gone away.

扎卡里·戴维斯：而且这些争论还没有完全消失。

Joshua Bennett: No way. I don't even think her critics are operating in bad faith. That's the thing, too. At least many of African-American critics. I mean, it really struck me that they were saying we have a tight window here, all right, to get people to believe we're human beings. We don't have time for the fanciful love story stuff. We need you to hit hard with sociological data that shows we are people that have families and, you know, and Hurston's invested in wildness.

约书亚·贝内特：不会消失的。我甚至觉得批评家对她并非出于恶意。不过这也是问题所在。我很震惊地发现，不少美国非裔批评家说，我们这儿只有一个小小的窗口，来告诉别人黑人也是人。我们没空沉浸在甜蜜的爱情故事中，我们需要你去用社会学数据反击他们，告诉他们我们也是人，也有家人。而赫斯顿把笔墨放在对自然的描写上。

Joshua Bennett:She's invested in wildness, she's not invested in a kind of normative framing of Black life. She's like, part of the beauty of it is that our exclusion from the modern world has produced all these forms of relation that are quite incredible, and now I think, as we return to it, were like--are more ecologically sustainable, too.

约书亚·贝内特：她把笔墨放在这里，没有放在对黑人常规生活的叙述上。她似乎觉得，自然之美在于将我们从现代世界中抽离，构建起所有这些奇妙无比的关系。如今我觉得，我们回到自然的怀抱之后，我们在生态上也更可持续。

How did the book change the whole society?

这本书如何影响整个世界？

Zachary Davis: Once it got taken up again by Alice Walker, post 74, how did this book start to shape other artists? How did it shape society as a whole? How can we start to think about the influence of this great work?

扎卡里·戴维斯：1974年以后，这本书被艾丽斯·沃克发掘出来。此后它是如何影响其他艺术家的呢？它又是如何影响整个社会的？我们要如何看待这部伟大作品的影响？

JoshuaBennett:I see its influence in some of the most prominent African-American novelists today. So someone like Jesmyn Ward, I think is a really good example. So two of her first three novels won the National Book Award. All right. Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied,Sing. And when you read her, she's writing not about Eatonville, Florida, but about a fictional place called Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, which would be French for "wild wood."

约书亚·贝内特：我发现它还影响到了当今最杰出的一些非裔美国小说家。其中之一就是杰丝米妮•瓦德。她的前三部小说中有两部都获得了美国国家图书奖：《拾骨》和《歌唱吧，未葬者，歌唱吧》。读了她的作品，你会发现她写的不是佛罗里达州伊顿维尔之类的地方，而是一个叫“博瓦索瓦奇”的地方，这个词是“原始树林”的法语说法。

Joshua Bennett: She's very much interested, like Hurston, and what you were saying earlier, what the South in particular, the poor Black South—I don't want to lose the class element of this, because it's key. We're talking specifically about a certain strand of human poverty. What that has to teach us about love and about kinship, over and against a world that says those people have no love, they have no kinship.

约书亚·贝内特：她和赫斯顿一样，都对你之前所说的南方很感兴趣，特别是贫困的、以黑人为主的南方小城。我不想忽略这儿的阶级因素，因为这点很关键。我们谈论的是人类贫困的一面，谈论在贫苦中我们如何学会相亲相爱，反驳所谓的穷人不懂爱、和亲人关系淡漠的观点。

JoshuaBennett: They're addicts and alcoholics who don't take care of themselves. If they did love themselves and love their kids, they would give up on those folksy ways, and come into the modern world and put on our suits, you know. And I think we're seeing the resonances of that kind of work all across contemporary African-American writing, and the poetry, too.

约书亚·贝内特：他们嗑药、酗酒，自顾不暇。但只要他们确实爱自己和孩子，就会戒掉这些臭毛病，变得文明起来，把自己收拾体面。而且我觉得，我们在整个当代非裔美国人的文章和诗歌中都能找到类似的共鸣。

ZacharyDavis: And do you see some of its influence in other Black cultural forms or feminist cultural forms or just American...?

扎卡里·戴维斯：您觉得它影响到了其他黑人文化形态、女权主义文化形态乃至美国文化形态吗？

Joshua Bennett: Issa Rae is a great example of that with a show like Insecure, really saying that this Black woman's love relationships can be the premise of an entire HBO show, and we're just gonna follow the way that she navigates it. And, like with Zora, like race is always in the room, but it's not...The racial politics of that show are kind of, you know, not the point, necessarily, right? It's really just about Black people being alive, which is the same thing Donald Glover says about Atlanta. He says it's the Black Seinfeld.

约书亚·贝内特：伊莎·蕾主创的剧《不安感》就是个很好的例子，剧中黑人女性的爱情故事可以作为这个HBO剧的背景，剧情都是根据她对恋爱关系的处理来推进的。与赫斯顿一样，这个与种族有关的故事讲的还是家长里短，政治方面的内容并非重点。它其实就讲了黑人的生活，就像唐纳德·格洛沃对美剧《亚特兰大》的评价一样，他说《亚特兰大》不过是黑人版的《宋飞传》。

Joshua Bennett: Well, that's sort of a strange comparison until you really dig into it. It's like, oh, wait, it's just about you being alive with your friends. There is no larger political project, right. Or maybe there is. I mean, maybe the political is that you're just live on TV, sitting on the couch.

约书亚·贝内特：乍一听你可能会觉得这么类比很奇怪，不过深入研究的话会发现还挺在理的。它似乎只讲了你和朋友的日常，没有什么宏大的政治方案。或许有，但也仅限于你坐在沙发上，看电视里的政治新闻。

Zachary Davis: Yeah. I can't help but keep coming back to the question, like, I wonder if you, you achieve your political goals better by giving a full portrait of the humanity of whatever group you're trying to, you know, actively elevate rather than—I mean, all modes are wonderful. There's probably many different ways, but it's actually harder to achieve, but much more powerful to tell a story that any human being can identify with.

扎卡里·戴维斯：没错。我忍不住要再问一下这个问题：我想知道，不管是想提升哪个种族的地位，去描绘这个种族的人性之美是否会更好地达成这个政治目标呢？当然所有方案都很棒，可能会有不同方案。这个方案可能更难实现，但效果会好得多，因为这些故事能引发所有人类的共鸣。

Joshua Bennett: Yes. And that—but you have to believe that's possible. And that's tough. I do--I want to be clear here. And that's very, very difficult. Like, part of what someone like Donald Glover, Issa Rae is up against is a symbolic order in which Blackness is meant to signify nothing or has meant to signify slave-hood, emptiness, chaos. And being brave enough to say no, I'm just gonna tell this story with no tropes you're familiar with.

约书亚·贝内特：没错，你要相信这是可能的，虽然确实很难。我想说明一下，这么做非常非常难。唐纳德·格洛沃、伊莎·蕾他们反对的是一种象征秩序，在这种秩序下，黑皮肤仅仅象征着奴隶命、空洞无物和混乱无序。他们说，我要勇敢说不，告诉你这个充满新奇比喻与仿拟的故事。

Joshua Bennett: To say you think you're familiar with these tropes, but you're actually not. These aren't minstrel characters. It's just the way Black people in my small Florida town actually talk, and I'm not going to, quote unquote, clean up the way they talk so that I can make them seem, you know, advanced or something like, this is it's not primitivist in its aims. I'm just writing it the way I hear it. And that to me is incredibly courageous.

约书亚·贝内特：假设你熟悉类似的故事，不过其实你并不熟悉。这些人不是黑脸秀的演员，只是我所在的佛罗里达小镇的黑人，他们就是这么说话的。我不打算包装他们说的话，让他们显得文质彬彬，那样就达不到我最初的目的了。我听到了什么，就写下来什么。在我看来，这么做非常大胆。

Joshua Bennett: It's like the old Chris Rock joke about integrating baseball. He's like, baseball's not integrated with Jackie Robinson. Baseball's integrated once you start getting mediocre Black baseball players. Like, that's, that's equality, right? That's maybe in some ways a certain vision of justice: room to fail, right?

约书亚·贝内特：就像克里斯·洛克讲的关于棒球的老梗一样。他说，仅仅有杰基·罗宾森的话，棒球资源没法整合，只有吸纳了天资平平的黑人棒球运动员，才能整合资源。这像是说，这就是平等。或许从某种程度上看，这也是某种公正的表现，即让失败成为可能。

Joshua Bennett: Not just, you know, the most sterling incredible figures are taught in schools. Yeah, of course. Martin Luther King's birthday... I mean, but that brother was like a singular rhetorician, human being, activist, thinker, writer. What would it look like instead to have a net that's wide enough, right, that just sort of everyday people can have their stories brought into the classroom, brought into literature, brought into television. What would that world look like?

约书亚·贝内特：要知道，最不可思议的人物是在学校里教出来的。确实如此。马丁·路德·金就是一个非凡的演说家、活动家、作家。如果每个人都广泛联系在一起，世界如今会是什么样呢？每个人的事迹都会在课堂上提及、在文学作品中出现、在电视上播出。那么这个世界会是什么样？

ZacharyDavis: I guess it comes back to this confidence to tell your own stories. That it's a love story.

扎卡里·戴维斯：我猜大家会勇敢地讲述自己的故事。赫斯顿便讲了一个爱情故事。

Joshua Bennett: Mm hmm.

约书亚·贝内特：嗯。

Why can something ordinarybeextraordinary?

为何它平淡无奇，却也不同凡响？

Zachary Davis:It's a coming of age story. It's a love story. And it's ordinary in many ways, but the artistry itself is extraordinary.

扎卡里·戴维斯：这是个关于成长的故事，也是一个爱情故事。它在许多方面都很普通，但具有非凡的艺术性。

Joshua Bennett: Yes. To tell the stories of ordinary people I think is emboldening. Because even when we ask people about--I mean, you just asked me to give a synopsis and it's, yeah, someone falls in love a bunch of times and it fails every time. And then the story ends. And we don't know what happens to Janie, but we imagine she figures it out. That it's really just about the life and times and the failures of this, you know, ordinary and extraordinary, you know, extraordinary spirit, but ostensibly ordinary Black woman living her life.

约书亚·贝内特：没错。我觉得讲述普通人的故事，这点非常鼓舞人心。要问我这个故事大概讲了什么，其实就是一个人开启了几段恋情，但每段恋情相继告终，故事就这么结束了。我们不知道珍妮最后会怎样，但猜想她应该会走出来。这本书仅仅讲了一个看似平凡、但精神世界丰富的黑人女性过着怎样的生活、处于何种时代背景中、又如何对待生活中的不如意。

Joshua Bennett: And I think there's just something to that that was inspiriting and emboldening for generations of Black writers. All right. That emboldened someone to get on a plane and fly to Florida and find an unmarked grave and mark it. I mean that to me is part of the proof right there, is Alice Walker's writing and life and legacy, as saying you...you deserved better, but also your story is not over. That we can add to it. All right.

约书亚·贝内特：这本书鼓舞了几代黑人作家，鼓舞了沃克登上飞机，飞往佛罗里达，找到了一个无名墓并立上墓碑。在我看来，艾丽斯·沃克的作品、生平和留给我们的宝贵财富都证明了这本书的影响力，仿佛在说，你值得被更好地铭记，而且你的故事不会结束，我们会续写接下来的篇章。

JoshuaBennett:So I think the book really opened up space for us to say there needs to be an archival impulse. That's part of the work we do, implicitly. We are in the business now of recovering ancestors and of singing their beauty and brilliance.

约书亚·贝内特：所以我觉得，这本书确实为我们开启了一片天地，让我们觉得有必要汇总往昔的资料。显然我们也在这么做。我们在发掘前辈的作品，歌颂他们的美妙与智慧。

Joshua Bennett: So I think that's part of how it changed everything. It was saying it's not just at the canons have gaps, it's that they have sort of enforced absences. People that were pushed out actively of our collective memory. And we have to go get those people. And that's the only ethical way, maybe, to be a writer right now, is to have that work as part of your labor.

约书亚·贝内特：我觉得这就是这本书带来的一些影响。它并非填补了其他作品的空白，而是关注了一些被刻意忽视的题材，关注了那些被遗忘在我们集体记忆之外的人。我们需要走访那些人。这或许是当今成为作家的唯一高尚途径，那就是将汗水凝结成作品。

ZacharyDavis: This was part of Hurston’s work as well. She had two professions: writer and anthropologist. She studied and documented Black cultural practices in the Caribbean and the American South. She found stories that might be erased from the historical record—stories that mattered. In a way, Alice Walker continued that legacy, traveling to the South to document the life and death of Hurston herself, and writing it back into history, this time in permanent ink.

扎卡里·戴维斯：这也是赫斯顿工作的一部分。她有两个身份：作家和人类学家。她研究并记录了加勒比海地区和美国南部的黑人文化习俗，发掘了可能从历史记录中抹去的一些重要故事。在某种程度上，艾丽斯·沃克继承了这一精神，前往美国南方记叙了赫斯顿本人的生平，将她的名字重新写进了历史，这次她的名字将被永远铭记。

Joshua Bennett: I just don't imagine it falling out of favor again, in part because there really is a kind of universal story here, as Janie moves from Logan Killicks to Jody to Tea Cake, it really is someone trying to think about what love is for, what love makes of us, and how to navigate it. What parts of yourself do you keep? What parts of yourself do you lose when you fall in love? When does love need to be left? How have and how can Black women survive the modern world?

约书亚·贝内特：我想这本书不会再失宠了，因为它的确讲了一个普适性的故事。珍妮从嫁给洛根·基里克斯、到乔、再到甜点心，期间确实在思考爱是为了什么、可以带给我们什么、应当如何处理爱情。当你坠入爱河时，你会保留哪部分自我，又会失去哪部分自我？什么时候需要抛下爱情？黑人女性如何在现代社会生存？

Joshua Bennett: I mean, these are themes that I think are just explored so elegantly in the book and with such care, Every time I read it, I find something new. So, it's gonna be around. It'll be with us for a while. I don't think we'll lose it again. We won't let that happen.

约书亚·贝内特：这些主题在书中以优雅谨慎的方式徐徐展开，每次阅读时，我都会有新的发现。所以这本书会一直陪伴我们，我们不会再失去它，也不会让这种事情发生。

Zachary Davis: Writ Large is a production of Ximalaya. Writ Large is produced by Galen Beebe, Jack Pombriant and me, Zachary Davis, with help from Feiran Du, Ariel Liu, Wendy Wu, and Monica Zhang. Our intern is Liza French. 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！