书籍能慰藉心灵，也能毒害心灵。好读书，也要读好书。
Books aren’t medicine. They’re more powerful than that.
Who can forget the terrible climax of Howards End, when Leonard Bast is killed by a deluge(洪水)of books? Death by books holds a horrible irony for poor Bast, as he had thought they were his salvation(拯救), seeking to escape ‘the abyss’ of poverty by reading Ruskin in the evening and trying to impress the middle-class Schlegel sisters by listing his favourite titles. (对于可怜的巴斯特而言，死于书籍是一种可怕的讽刺：他曾以为书籍可以拯救他，认为在傍晚阅读拉斯金可以逃离贫困的“深渊”，还曾列出自己最喜爱的书目来引起施莱格尔姐妹的注意。)Try as he might, he can only fail, as E.M. Forster shows books to be extremely treacherous(阴险狡诈的): they don’t save Leonard Bast, they kill him.
The power of books is all too often lauded(赞扬) as a healing force, rather than something potentially lethal(致命的). The University of Warwick has just launched a free online course, ‘Reading for Wellbeing’, to explore ‘how poems, plays and novels can help us cope with times of deep emotional strain’. Rachel Kelly wrote movingly about ‘how words healed me’ — how poetry eased her depression — in her memoir Black Rainbow. At Alain de Botton’s School of Life, a ‘bibliotherapist’ will prescribe you a ‘novel cure’ to ease any ailment(疾病). But if we are to consider books as medicine, we must consider them as poison too.
When Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther was published in 1774, more than 2,000 young male readers reportedly committed suicide, inspired by the protagonist’s example. So extreme was this mania(疯狂行为) that 200 years later, an American sociologist coined ‘The Werther Effect’ to describe the way that suicide can be contagious(有传染性的), if it is dramatically and widely publicised. The world’s second most popular suicide location is Japan’s Aokigahara Forest, where a young lover commits suicide in the novel Kuroi Jukai (‘The Black Sea of Trees’) by Seicho Matsumoto.
So far, so dangerous, and we haven’t even touched on crime fiction. In Australia, American Psycho is considered so noxious(有害的) that it can only be sold shrinkwrapped(用收缩塑料薄膜包装的), to over-18s. Such restrictions can only do so much. Theodore Kaczynski, the ‘Unabomber’, who killed three people and injured 23 by posting homemade bombs to addresses he associated with modern technology, was obsessed with the work of Joseph Conrad — especially The Secret Agent, in which an academic turned anarchist (无政府主义的)attempts to bomb the Greenwich Observatory. To think that a 1907 novel could inspire terrorist attacks three-quarters of a century later is a horrifying example of a book’s latent (潜在的)power. As Antony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange, wrote regarding the potential harmful influence of literature: ‘I begin to accept that, as a novelist, I belong to the ranks of the menacing.’
Even the most mundane(世俗的) reading can be menacing in its power. When your head is in a novel, it is all too easy to indulge that which society proscribes. On reading Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, for instance, I don’t empathise with the young, naive and wholly good protagonist, as she struggles to cope with being married to Max de Winter at Manderley. Instead I am seduced by the ghost of Rebecca, far more powerful, even from beyond the grave, than the new Mrs de Winter will ever be. The allure(诱惑) of this mysterious adulteress can be felt in something so minor as her handwriting — ‘black and strong’ with her ‘tall and sloping R’ — and certainly at her boathouse, where she had her way with whomever she desired. I’m sure I’m not the only woman who, after reading Rebecca, somewhat longed for a boathouse of my own.
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