文坛隐士的营销启示 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.

如今我们每个人都是营销者。得益于社交网络的发展，任何拥有智能手机的人都可以将自己的希望、梦想、计划以及方案告知身处任何地方的人——在任何时间。

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，尽管我们身处在一个联通的世界，有时候玩消失是值得的——不交际、不参与全民讨论、不自我推销，锁上门、关上电脑、不问世事。

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月某一周美国多家主要报纸的头版来证明我的上述观点。这些报纸不约而同地将大幅版面献给了一位来自美国最南部、身材矮小的老妇人，过去半个多世纪以来，她保持了在她所处的那种特殊状况下所能做到的最大限度的低调。

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.)

这位老妇人便是现年89岁的哈珀丠(Harper Lee)。她创作了美国历史上极受喜爱的小说——《杀死一只知更鸟》（To Kill a Mockingbird）。我少年时代便拜读过这本书，观看过很多遍该书改编的电影，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这部电影的男主角，已故影星格里高利派克(Gregory Peck)，即便是这都让我激动得说不出话来。（这个人从头到脚无一寸不是个电影明星，他有大概75英寸高，按照国际通用度量衡是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，哈珀丠葧不问世事，几乎与她的成就一样声名远扬。1960年，她为世人献上了她创作的《杀死一只知更鸟》，接着便停止出版新书。她于1964年称她的志向是做“南阿拉巴马的简攠斯汀(Jane Austen)”，之后便不再接受任何采访。几十年来，她一直与读者保持着距离，她的沉默与她笔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说——《设立守望者》，多多少少打破了她长久以来的沉寂。《设立守望者》(Go Set a Watchman)是《杀死一只知更鸟》的续篇，故事设置在20年后——上世纪50年代美国南部的梅岗城。

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).

尽管是新作，《设立守望者》成书却是在很久以前。根据官方的说法，哈珀丠先写的是《设立守望者》，不过当时编辑催促她专心写另一个故事（也就是后来的《杀死一只知更鸟》），她便把前者搁置起来。她的律师称自己偶然在保险箱里发现了这份早年的手稿，并在征得她同意后将其出版（这一点我们无法确定，因为哈珀丠卧前居住在辅助生活中心，我们无法直接与其联系）。

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.

通常来讲，我觉得从故纸堆里找东西出版是令人沮丧的。就在不久前，美国人还认为我们这一代中会有人写出伟大的美国小说（The Great American Novel，J.W. Deforest 对它的定义：“一部描述美国生活的长篇小说，它的描绘如此广阔、真实、并富有同情心，使得每一个有感情、有文化的美国人都不得不承认它似乎再现了自己所知道的某些东西”——译者注）。然而，如今我们的期待越来越小，公众已经不再认同“真有某个美国人可以在当前的历史背景下完成如此重要的任务”这一观点了。同时，我们的出版商也吝于在此问题上做过多的争论，而且他们看起来满足于在当前的文学作品库中翻找，寄希望于某本伟大的美国小说就藏在某个书桌的抽屉里。

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，我仍然感动于公众对《设立守望者》的出版表现出的感性反应。读者们对哈珀丠豧祔笔下的人物表现出了极为深切的关心。首先，他们担心这本书的出版是否她的真实意愿。其次，他们对主人公阿提克斯芬奇（Atticus Finch）（即派克在1962年的同名电影中饰演的角色，他因此荣获奥斯卡奖）身上发生的事情感到震惊。

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”.

《杀死一只知更鸟》中的阿提克斯在他女儿斯考特童稚的眼睛中，是一位正直的律师，勇敢到能在上世纪30年代实行种族隔离的美国南方，为一名被控强奸白人妇女的黑人辩护。然而，在《设立守望者》中，斯考特长大了，大名叫琼㈠易丝(Jean Louise)。整篇小说以第三人称叙述，阿提克斯按照如今的标准来看，已经变成了一名种族主义者，他告诉女儿，南方的黑人“是一个还处于低幼期的种族”。

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.

这或许是看待阿提克斯这样一个人物的一种更为成熟的方式。在上世纪50年代，美国人整体上向右转——就连罗纳德里根(Ronald Reagan)在30年代也曾是民主党人——在南方白人中，情况更是如此。然而，令人吃惊的是，阿提克斯的变化让不少美国人深受打击（我并没有夸张）。他们心中的英雄形象坍塌了，这让他们深感受伤。

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.

这也让我好奇，如果JD帠靘格(JD Salinger)的两位传记作者所言属实，我们能在今年至2020年间读到这位于2010年逝世、享年91岁的文坛隐士的一些新作品，我们会不会发现霍尔登考尔菲尔德(Holden Caulfield)长大后也成了个伪君子？弗兰妮(Franny)和祖伊(Zooey)长大后依然苦闷吗？几年前的一些信息暗示，比起后两个人物，我们能获知的关于前者的信息更少。然而，没人确切地知道会发生什么，因此要做好准备。

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，从商业角度来看，这种结果对哈珀丠豧幔靘格来说是一种奇特的胜利。在这两位文坛隐士停止自我宣传后的这么多年，大家仍然看不厌他们的作品。

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.

他们没有冲着镜头微笑，没有听着主持人的调侃哈哈大笑，没有现身奥普拉(Oprah)秀，也没有加入社交网络、发布推文。就像亨利戴维梭罗(Henry David Thoreau)、马丁路德金(Martin Luther King)和默尔哈格德(Merle Haggard)，或者蝙蝠侠(Batman)、超人(Superman)和原野奇侠(Shane)一样，他们只是做了分内的事。而我们是如此想念他们。