Why Are So Many Contemporary Novelists Not Naming the Narrator?
Often, I don’t notice it: the nameless narrator.
我常常没有注意到：无名的叙述者。
Because I write nonfiction, I rarely include my own name.
因为我写的是非小说类作品，所以很少写上自己的名字。
Why would I?
我为什么要这么做？
It’s right there.
就在那里。
It’s only when I finish a novel and try to Google a question that I realize I don’t know how to search it.
只有当我读完一本小说并尝试用谷歌搜索一个问题时，我才意识到我不知道如何搜索它。
I’ve spent hundreds of pages with this character.
我花了数百页的篇幅来描述这个角色。
I might know what sex they have and what sex they wished they had.
我可能知道他们的性别以及他们希望的性别。
More often than I’d like, I know their defecation habits.
我比我想象的更了解他们的排便习惯。
I might know things about them that no one in their life knows, but I don’t know the one thing about them that everyone knows.
我可能知道他们一生中没有人知道的事情，但我不知道关于他们的一件所有人都知道的事情。
I have no idea what to call them.
我不知道该怎么称呼他们。
If you, like me, enjoy plot-light, vibe-heavy novels, you’ve probably spent a lot of time with unnamed narrators.
如果你像我一样喜欢情节轻松、氛围浓厚的小说，那么你可能花了很多时间与不知名的叙述者相处。
In 2015, the phenomenon was widespread enough for Sam Sacks to label it an “epidemic” when he traced its history in the New Yorker .
2015 年，这种现象十分普遍，萨克斯 (Sam Sacks) 在《纽约客》上追溯这一现象的历史时，将其称为“流行病”。
And it hasn’t slowed down in the years since.
从那以后的几年里，这种趋势并没有放缓。
Nameless narrators show up in some of the most discussed literary fiction of the past few years: Audition by Katie Kitamura, Transcription by Ben Lerner, My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein by Deborah Levy, and, most recently, Life of M by Rachel Cusk.
无名的叙述者出现在过去几年讨论最多的一些文学小说中：凯蒂·北村的《试镜》、本·勒纳的《转录》、黛博拉·利维的《我与格特鲁德·斯坦在巴黎的一年》，以及最近雷切尔·卡斯克的《M的一生》。
Of course, these only represent one species of nameless narrator.
当然，这些只是代表一种无名叙述者。
The convention is also popular in apocalypse novels, where social systems that make names useful have collapsed; in Christian allegory, where all of humanity is implicated; and in thrillers, where withholding a name can set up a plot twist.
这种惯例在末日小说中也很流行，在这些小说中，使名字有用的社会制度已经崩溃。在基督教寓言中，全人类都受到牵连；在惊悚片中，隐瞒名字可能会导致情节转折。
But I see these as separate lineages from the ones I keep running into: narrators wandering around a city, isolated not by the fall of society, but their own ruminations.
但我认为这些是与我不断遇到的不同的谱系：叙述者在城市中徘徊，不是因为社会的衰落，而是因为他们自己的沉思而孤立。
To be clear, I enjoy these books, and I think brooding on the subway is cool and fun.
需要明确的是，我喜欢这些书，而且我认为在地铁上沉思很酷很有趣。
I don’t mind the nameless narrator as a convention.
我不介意无名叙述者作为惯例。
I just don’t know what they want from me, or what they’re asking me to notice.
我只是不知道他们想从我这里得到什么，或者他们要求我注意什么。
* Names are often proxies for identity, and the same can be said for their absence.
* 名字通常是身份的代表，没有名字也同样如此。
In Rebecca , one of the most famous examples, the second Mrs. de Winter is unnamed, and her lack of a fixed self is arguably the novel’s central wound.
在最著名的例子之一《丽贝卡》中，第二任德温特夫人没有名字，她缺乏固定的自我可以说是小说的中心伤口。
She imagines herself mostly as a replacement for the first Mrs. de Winter, Rebecca—a woman who, by contrast, has a name and agency so overwhelming that she titles the book.
她把自己想象成第一任德温特夫人丽贝卡的替代者——相比之下，丽贝卡的名字和代理权是如此压倒性，以至于她给这本书起了标题。
Audition , too, explores the instability of self, narrated by an unnamed actor who seems to experience two consciousnesses at once: “Not a splitting of personality or psyche, but the natural superimposition of one mind on top of another mind.”
《试镜》也探索了自我的不稳定性，由一位不知名的演员讲述，他似乎同时经历了两种意识：“不是人格或心灵的分裂，而是一种思想自然地叠加在另一种思想之上。”
I don’t mind the nameless narrator as a convention.
我不介意无名叙述者作为惯例。
I just don’t know what they want from me, or what they’re asking me to notice.
我只是不知道他们想从我这里得到什么，或者他们要求我注意什么。
One common reading is that anonymity serves as a vessel the reader can step into—an idea sometimes linked to Everyman , the Christian allegory, and, more recently, to Everyman , the Philip Roth novel.
一种常见的解读是，匿名是读者可以进入的容器——这一想法有时与基督教寓言《普通人》有关，最近又与菲利普·罗斯的小说《普通人》有关。
But I’m not sure how effective that is.
但我不确定这有多有效。
For me, at least, it isn’t the presence or absence of a name that keeps me from identifying with the narrator of Fight Club , so much as the fact that I don’t want to be punched in the face.
至少对我来说，并不是名字的存在或缺失使我无法认同《搏击俱乐部》的叙述者，而是我不想被打在脸上。
I think of a friend who once said he struggles writing fiction because he always gets stuck on the names.
我想起一位朋友，他曾经说过，他写小说很困难，因为他总是被名字所困扰。
As soon as you choose one, he said, you implicitly lock in all this other information: age, ethnicity, gender.
他说，一旦你选择了一个，你就隐含地锁定了所有其他信息：年龄、种族、性别。
Our other friends teased him about this: surely he’d have to know something about his own characters.
我们的其他朋友为此取笑他：他肯定必须对自己的角色有所了解。
Did he expect to write a person outside of time, with no race, background, or relationship to gender, and expect that to resonate with anyone?
他是否期望写一个超越时间、没有种族、背景或性别关系的人，并期望能引起任何人的共鸣？
This is, of course, the paradox: leaving out specificity creates a sense of vagueness, while universality is built in detail.
当然，这是一个悖论：忽略特殊性会产生一种模糊感，而普遍性则建立在细节之上。
If anything, a withheld name collapses the distance between narrator and author—not narrator and reader.
如果说有什么不同的话，那就是隐瞒的名字缩小了叙述者和作者之间的距离，而不是叙述者和读者之间的距离。
When a text is plausibly autofiction, the name often serves as a dial the author sets for how autobiographically we’re meant to identify the character with the writer.
当一篇看似合理的自传小说时，名字通常会成为作者设定的一个刻度盘，让我们从自传的角度来识别作者的角色。
But then maybe I’m getting off track.
但也许我偏离了轨道。
Maybe I’ve been distracted by the question of how namelessness reshapes the narrator’s identity, and forgotten the other half of it.
也许我一直被无名如何重塑叙述者身份的问题所困扰，而忘记了它的另一半。
* Here’s something that matters: these nameless narrators actually do have names.
* 重要的是：这些无名的叙述者实际上是有名字的。
The narrator of Rebecca , for example, has one that we’re told is “lovely and unusual.” Maxim knows it.
例如，《丽贝卡》的叙述者有一个我们被告知“可爱且不寻常”的人。马克西姆知道这一点。
The staff at Manderley know it.
曼德利的工作人员都知道这一点。
It’s only the reader who is left in the dark, unable to see the narrator through the eyes of another person.
只有读者被留在黑暗中，无法通过另一个人的眼睛看到叙述者。
A name is, after all, the simplest way someone exists for others.
毕竟，名字是一个人为他人存在的最简单的方式。
The withheld name, then, marks a shift in narrative position as much as it does identity.
因此，隐匿姓名不仅标志着身份的转变，也标志着叙事立场的转变。
It’s not that the character is “everyone” or “no one,” or even “the author,” but that their external form isn’t revealed to us.
这并不是说这个角色是“每个人”或“没有人”，甚至不是“作者”，而是他们的外在形式没有向我们透露。
The story is shot from a camera mounted on the narrator’s chest.
这个故事是由安装在叙述者胸前的摄像机拍摄的。
It’s probably relevant that I started reading a run of contemporary nameless-narrator novels right after I finished Mrs Dalloway, and then listened to a bunch of podcasts about modernism.
这可能与我读完《达洛维夫人》后开始阅读一系列当代无名叙述者小说有关，然后听了一堆关于现代主义的播客。
Mrs Dalloway is in many ways the quintessential modernist text, using free indirect discourse to approximate the movement of thought.
《达洛维夫人》在很多方面都是典型的现代主义文本，使用自由的间接话语来近似思想的运动。
But before modernism emerged, the nineteenth-century realist novel dominated.
但在现代主义出现之前，十九世纪的现实主义小说占主导地位。
These books were told by an omniscient narrator who observed characters from the vantage point of God.
这些书是由一位无所不知的叙述者讲述的，他从上帝的角度观察人物。
It was a stable intelligence surveying a world that could, at least in theory, be comprehensively known.
这是一种稳定的情报，正在调查一个至少在理论上可以被全面了解的世界。
But secularization, industrialization, and the horror of World War I interrupted old ways of thought.
但世俗化、工业化和第一次世界大战的恐怖打断了旧有的思维方式。
Freud was stoking enthusiasm about the subconscious and interior realities.
弗洛伊德激发了人们对潜意识和内在现实的热情。
An objective God’s-eye-view no longer seemed quite right, and so, modernism’s inward turn began, and the novel’s world was filtered through the individual.
客观的上帝视角似乎不再完全正确，因此，现代主义开始向内转向，小说的世界通过个人进行了过滤。
More and more, the camera moved inside the character.
镜头越来越多地移动到角色内部。
All this—modernism, names, the visual scope of a novel—was already on my mind when I started reading Transcription , and so I saw it everywhere.
当我开始阅读《转录》时，所有这些——现代主义、名字、小说的视觉范围——就已经在我的脑海里了，所以我到处都能看到它。
The unnamed narrator’s 90-year-old mentor gestures toward the possibility that the self is created, at least in part, when it’s seen by someone else: “Did you know all melanin is brown,” the mentor asks, “It is how the light strikes the iris, how it is reflected to the eyes of the other, that gives them color.” If a name is the tool by which we conceptualize the other, removing it obstructs that external vantage point.
这位不愿透露姓名的叙述者的 90 岁导师指出，自我至少部分是在被别人看到时被创造出来的：“你知道吗，所有的黑色素都是棕色的，”导师问道，“光线照射到虹膜上，反射到对方眼睛上的方式，赋予了它们颜色。”如果一个名字是我们用来概念化另一个名字的工具，那么删除它就会阻碍外部的有利位置。
Should the narrator’s eyes be blue, they will never be blue for us.
如果叙述者的眼睛是蓝色的，那么对我们来说它们永远不会是蓝色的。
It seems like the question—are we looking or being looked at?—has a fraught cultural valence right now, at the same time as our narrators are losing their names.
似乎这个问题——我们在看还是被看？——现在具有令人担忧的文化价值，同时我们的叙述者正在失去他们的名字。
If the modernist novel lets readers inside consciousness, the unnamed narrator continues this project by refusing to let the reader step back outside of it.
如果现代主义小说让读者进入意识内部，那么无名的叙述者就会拒绝让读者退到意识之外，从而继续这个项目。
Conveniently, my next book, My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein , was a novel in which an unnamed narrator researches modernist pioneer Gertrude Stein.
方便的是，我的下一本书《与格特鲁德·斯坦因在巴黎的一年》是一本小说，其中一位不知名的叙述者研究了现代主义先驱格特鲁德·斯坦因。
When the narrator writes about Stein, the desire to escape the vantage point of the others seemed core to Stein’s mission: “If we create ourselves with and through language, it seems to me that Gertrude Stein’s project was to dismantle herself and a whole century through language, to uncreate herself as she had been created by her father, by her sneering professor at Johns Hopkins, by her brother, to undo the manner of the nineteenth century.” What faster way to shed the self someone else chose for you than by shedding a name?
当叙述者写到斯坦因时，逃离他人有利位置的愿望似乎是斯坦因使命的核心：“如果我们用语言并通过语言创造自己，在我看来，格特鲁德·斯坦因的计划就是通过语言拆除她自己和整个世纪，取消她自己的创造，就像她的父亲、她在约翰·霍普金斯大学冷嘲热讽的教授、她的兄弟创造的那样，以消除十九世纪的方式。”还有什么比放弃名字更快地摆脱别人为你选择的自我呢？
But today’s authors aren’t twentieth century modernists.
但今天的作家并不是二十世纪的现代主义者。
In My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein , Levy writes about the limitations of trying to describe a new era with an older century’s vocabulary: “Every century needs an artist to dismantle coherence as we have been taught it and make a space for something new to happen.” As Stein’s work was shaped by her own changing century, the nameless “epidemic” is borne of this one.
在《我与格特鲁德·斯坦因在巴黎的一年》中，利维写到了试图用旧世纪的词汇来描述新时代的局限性：“每个世纪都需要一位艺术家来打破我们所被教导的连贯性，并为新事物的发生腾出空间。”由于斯坦因的作品是由她所处的世纪变化所塑造的，因此无名的“流行病”就是由这个世纪带来的。
What is it about our world that inspires novelists to write this way?
我们的世界是什么激发了小说家这样写作？
Transcription is largely a book about the way that technology “structures experience even when quiet.” And there’s something to be said about that—the way that smartphones and social media make us conscious of the distance between the person we experience ourselves as being and the person others see.
《转录》主要是一本关于技术如何“即使在安静时也能构建体验”的书。关于这一点，有一些话要说——智能手机和社交媒体让我们意识到我们所经历的自己与他人所看到的人之间的距离。
There’s also the fact that as work and daily life become less communal, the self becomes something we define privately.
还有一个事实是，随着工作和日常生活变得越来越不那么公共化，自我就变成了我们私下定义的东西。
I’ve seen a million cat memes screaming “PLEASE DO NOT PERCEIVE ME!!!” It does seem like the question—are we looking or being looked at?—has a fraught cultural valence right now, at the same time as our narrators are losing their names.
我见过一百万个猫表情包尖叫着“请不要察觉我！！！”这个问题——我们是在看还是被看？——现在似乎具有令人担忧的文化价值，同时我们的叙述者正在失去他们的名字。
The unnamed narrator is inherently mysterious, resistant to being fully known.
这位无名的叙述者本质上是神秘的，不愿被完全了解。
But I know what happens when I read them, or rather, when I realize after the fact that I never learned their name: my eye is drawn off the page, and the narrative walls become visible.
但我知道当我读到它们时会发生什么，或者更确切地说，当我意识到我从未知道它们的名字之后会发生什么：我的视线从页面上移开，叙事墙变得可见。
I become more aware of what was held back, that there is always something held back from me.
我更加意识到什么被阻碍了，总有一些东西被阻碍了。