文壇隱士的營銷啓示 The Harper Lee school of antisocial marketing
We are all marketers nowadays. Thanks to the expansion of social networks, anyone with a smartphone can inform people anywhere on the planet of their hopes, their dreams, their plans and their schemes — 24/7.
如今我們每個人都是營銷者。得益於社交網絡的發展，任何擁有智能手機的人都可以將自己的希望、夢想、計劃以及方案告知身處任何地方的人——在任何時間。
Nevertheless, there are times in this wired world of ours when it pays to play hard to get — to be antisocial, to avoid the national conversation and eschew self-promotion, to lock the door, shut off the computer and turn away from it all.
然而，儘管我們身處在一個聯通的世界，有時候玩消失是值得的——不交際、不參與全民討論、不自我推銷，鎖上門、關上電腦、不問世事。
By way of evidence, I would point to the front pages of the leading US newspapers this week. They have been devoting an incredible amount of space to a little old lady from the deep south who has spent the past half-century or so keeping just about as quiet as one possibly could under her unusual set of circumstances.
我想用7月某一週美國多家主要報紙的頭版來證明我的上述觀點。這些報紙不約而同地將大幅版面獻給了一位來自美國最南部、身材矮小的老婦人，過去半個多世紀以來，她保持了在她所處的那種特殊狀況下所能做到的最大限度的低調。
She is Harper Lee, 89, and she wrote one of the best-loved novels in US history, To Kill a Mockingbird. I read it as a boy, saw the film many times and always felt the same way when I was done: grateful. I once ran into the film’s leading man, the late Gregory Peck, on the street, and even that choked me up. (He was every inch a movie star — and there were about 75 ins to that guy, or 1.9m, globally speaking.)
這位老婦人便是現年89歲的哈珀丠(Harper Lee)。她創作了美國曆史上極受喜愛的小說——《殺死一隻知更鳥》（To Kill a Mockingbird）。我少年時代便拜讀過這本書，觀看過很多遍該書改編的電影，每次看完，心中都有相同的感受：感激。我曾有一次在街上偶遇這部電影的男主角，已故影星格里高利派克(Gregory Peck)，即便是這都讓我激動得說不出話來。（這個人從頭到腳無一寸不是個電影明星，他有大概75英寸高，按照國際通用度量衡是1米9。）
Yet Ms Lee became nearly as well known for what she didn’t do as for what she did. Ms Lee gave the worldMockingbird in 1960 and then stopped publishing. She said in 1964 that her ambition was to be “the Jane Austen of south Alabama” and then gave up on interviews. For decades, she has maintained a distance from the reading public rivalling that of her least verbal character, Arthur “Boo” Radley (hey, Boo!).
然而，哈珀丠葧不問世事，幾乎與她的成就一樣聲名遠揚。1960年，她爲世人獻上了她創作的《殺死一隻知更鳥》，接着便停止出版新書。她於1964年稱她的志向是做“南阿拉巴馬的簡攠斯汀(Jane Austen)”，之後便不再接受任何採訪。幾十年來，她一直與讀者保持着距離，她的沉默與她筆下最沉默寡言的角色阿瑟“布”拉德利（Arthur “Boo” Radley）不相上下（嘿，布！）。
Ms Lee’s long silence was finally broken in a fashion this month when HarperCollins published her second novel — Go Set a Watchman, a sequel to Mockingbird, set two decades later in the small-town south of the 1950s.
哈珀柯林斯出版社（Harper-Collins）7月出版了哈珀丠葧第二部小說——《設立守望者》，多多少少打破了她長久以來的沉寂。《設立守望者》(Go Set a Watchman)是《殺死一隻知更鳥》的續篇，故事設置在20年後——上世紀50年代美國南部的梅崗城。
As new works go, Ms Lee’s is rather old. According to the official version of events, Ms Lee wrote Watchman first and then put it aside at the urging of her editor to focus on the story that became Mockingbird. Ms Lee’s lawyer says she chanced upon the earlier manuscript in a safe-deposit box and maintains it has been published with Ms Lee’s consent (we don’t know for sure, since she is residing in an assisted living centre and we haven’t heard from her directly).
儘管是新作，《設立守望者》成書卻是在很久以前。根據官方的說法，哈珀丠先寫的是《設立守望者》，不過當時編輯催促她專心寫另一個故事（也就是後來的《殺死一隻知更鳥》），她便把前者擱置起來。她的律師稱自己偶然在保險箱裏發現了這份早年的手稿，並在徵得她同意後將其出版（這一點我們無法確定，因爲哈珀丠臥前居住在輔助生活中心，我們無法直接與其聯繫）。
Normally, I find this kind of cultural recycling depressing. It wasn’t so long ago that people in the US imagined that one of us was going to write The Great American Novel. But in our age of diminishing expectations, the public no longer buys the idea than an actual American could be doing something so important in our historical context. Meanwhile, our publishers are too parsimonious to put up much of an argument and seem content to rummage through our literary basement in the hope that if there is a Great American Novel, it is hidden in some desk drawer.
通常來講，我覺得從故紙堆裏找東西出版是令人沮喪的。就在不久前，美國人還認爲我們這一代中會有人寫出偉大的美國小說（The Great American Novel，J.W. Deforest 對它的定義：“一部描述美國生活的長篇小說，它的描繪如此廣闊、真實、並富有同情心，使得每一個有感情、有文化的美國人都不得不承認它似乎再現了自己所知道的某些東西”——譯者注）。然而，如今我們的期待越來越小，公衆已經不再認同“真有某個美國人可以在當前的歷史背景下完成如此重要的任務”這一觀點了。同時，我們的出版商也吝於在此問題上做過多的爭論，而且他們看起來滿足於在當前的文學作品庫中翻找，寄希望於某本偉大的美國小說就藏在某個書桌的抽屜裏。
But I was moved by the public’s emotional reaction to the release of Watchman. People just cared so deeply about Ms Lee and her characters. First, they worried about whether she had really wanted the book to be released. Then there was shock about what had happened to her hero, Atticus Finch, played in the 1962 film by Peck, who won the Academy Award for his work.
然而，我仍然感動於公衆對《設立守望者》的出版表現出的感性反應。讀者們對哈珀丠豧祔筆下的人物表現出了極爲深切的關心。首先，他們擔心這本書的出版是否她的真實意願。其次，他們對主人公阿提克斯芬奇（Atticus Finch）（即派克在1962年的同名電影中飾演的角色，他因此榮獲奧斯卡獎）身上發生的事情感到震驚。
The Atticus of Mockingbird is seen through the eyes of his prepubescent daughter Scout as a righteous attorney, brave enough to defend a black man accused of raping a white woman in the segregated south of the 1930s. In Watchman, Scout has grown up and is called Jean Louise, the narration is done in the third person and Atticus, by the standards of our day, has become a racist, telling his daughter that southern blacks “are still in their childhood as a people”.
《殺死一隻知更鳥》中的阿提克斯在他女兒斯考特童稚的眼睛中，是一位正直的律師，勇敢到能在上世紀30年代實行種族隔離的美國南方，爲一名被控強姦白人婦女的黑人辯護。然而，在《設立守望者》中，斯考特長大了，大名叫瓊㈠易絲(Jean Louise)。整篇小說以第三人稱敘述，阿提克斯按照如今的標準來看，已經變成了一名種族主義者，他告訴女兒，南方的黑人“是一個還處於低幼期的種族”。
This was probably a more adult way of looking at a fellow like Atticus. Americans generally speaking were turning to the right during the 1950s — even Ronald Reagan was a Democrat in the 1930s — and that was particularly the case for white southerners. But the amazing thing is that the update on Atticus left more than a few Americans traumatised and I am not using the world lightly. Their hero had fallen, and it really hurt.
這或許是看待阿提克斯這樣一個人物的一種更爲成熟的方式。在上世紀50年代，美國人整體上向右轉——就連羅納德里根(Ronald Reagan)在30年代也曾是民主黨人——在南方白人中，情況更是如此。然而，令人吃驚的是，阿提克斯的變化讓不少美國人深受打擊（我並沒有誇張）。他們心中的英雄形象坍塌了，這讓他們深感受傷。
It makes me wonder how people will feel if we receive new works from JD Salingerbetween this year and 2020 — as two biographers of the reclusive author, who died in 2010 at age 91, claimed we would. Will we find out that Holden Caulfield grew up to become just another phoney? Or that Franny and Zooey remained in a funk? The hints from a couple of years ago were that we would receive less detail about the former than the latter two, but one never really knows and should prepare.
這也讓我好奇，如果JD帠靘格(JD Salinger)的兩位傳記作者所言屬實，我們能在今年至2020年間讀到這位於2010年逝世、享年91歲的文壇隱士的一些新作品，我們會不會發現霍爾登考爾菲爾德(Holden Caulfield)長大後也成了個僞君子？弗蘭妮(Franny)和祖伊(Zooey)長大後依然苦悶嗎？幾年前的一些信息暗示，比起後兩個人物，我們能獲知的關於前者的信息更少。然而，沒人確切地知道會發生什麼，因此要做好準備。
From a business perspective, however, the result is an odd sort of victory for Ms Lee and Salinger. The public still can’t get enough of the two comrades in seclusion, all these years after they stopped advertising themselves.
然而，從商業角度來看，這種結果對哈珀丠豧幔靘格來說是一種奇特的勝利。在這兩位文壇隱士停止自我宣傳後的這麼多年，大家仍然看不厭他們的作品。
They didn’t look into the camera and smile. They didn’t laugh at the host’s jokes. They didn’t open up on Oprah, join a social network or tweet. Like Henry David Thoreau, Martin Luther King and Merle Haggard, or Batman, Superman and Shane, they just did what they had to do. And we miss them so.
他們沒有衝着鏡頭微笑，沒有聽着主持人的調侃哈哈大笑，沒有現身奧普拉(Oprah)秀，也沒有加入社交網絡、發佈推文。就像亨利戴維梭羅(Henry David Thoreau)、馬丁路德金(Martin Luther King)和默爾哈格德(Merle Haggard)，或者蝙蝠俠(Batman)、超人(Superman)和原野奇俠(Shane)一樣，他們只是做了分內的事。而我們是如此想念他們。
