2021年高考英语江苏卷 – 阅读理解D

Mark Twain has been called the inventor of the American novel. And he surely deserves additional praise: the man who popularized the clever literary attack on racism.
马克·吐温被称为美国小说的发明者。他肯定值得更多的赞扬：他推广了对种族主义的巧妙文学攻击。

I say clever because anti-slavery fiction had been the important part of the literature in the years before the Civil War. H. B. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is only the most famous example. These early stories dealt directly with slavery. With minor exceptions, Twain planted his attacks on slavery and prejudice into tales that were on the surface about something else entirely. He drew his readers into the argument by drawing them into the story.
我之所以说聪明，是因为在南北战争之前的几年里，反奴隶制小说一直是文学的重要组成部分，H.B.斯托的《汤姆叔叔的小屋》就是最著名的例子。这些早期的故事直接涉及奴隶制。除了一些小的例外，马克·吐温把他对奴隶制和偏见的攻击植入了表面上完全是关于其他事情的故事中。他把读者吸引到故事中来，把他们吸引到争论中去。

Again and again, in the postwar years, Twain seemed forced to deal with the challenge of race. Consider the most controversial, at least today, of Twain’s novels, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Only a few books have been kicked off the shelves as often as Huckleberry Finn, Twain’s most widely read tale. Once upon a time, people hated the book because it struck the mass rude. Twain himself wrote that those who banned the book considered the novel “trash and suitable only for the slums”. More recently the book has been attacked because of the character Jim, the escaped slave, and many occurrences of the word nigger. (The term Nigger Jim, for which the novel is often severely criticized, never appears in it.)
在战后的岁月里，马克·吐温似乎一次又一次地被迫应对种族的挑战。至少在今天，想想马克·吐温的小说中最具争议的一部，《哈克贝利·费恩历险记》。只有少数几本书像马克·吐温最广为人知的故事《哈克贝利·费恩历险记》那样经常被下架。从前，人们讨厌这本书，因为它给大众留下了粗鲁的印象。马克·吐温自己写道，那些禁止这本书的人认为这本小说是“垃圾，只适合贫民窟”。最近，这本书因为逃跑的奴隶吉姆这个角色以及许多黑鬼这个词的出现而受到攻击（小说中经常受到严厉批评的“黑鬼吉姆”一词从未出现在小说中）。

But the attacks were and are silly—and miss the point. The novel is strongly anti-slavery. Jim’s search through the slave states for the family from whom he has been forcibly parted is heroic. As J. Chadwick has pointed out, the character of Jim was a first in American fiction — a recognition that the slave had two personalities, “the voice of survival within a white slave culture and the voice of the individual: Jim, the father and the man.”
但这些攻击过去和现在都很愚蠢，没有切中要害。这部小说强烈反对奴隶制。吉姆在奴隶州寻找被迫与他分离的家庭，这是一种英雄行为。正如J·查德威克所指出的，吉姆这个角色是美国小说中的第一个——这是对奴隶有两种人格的认可，“白人奴隶文化中生存的声音和个人的声音：吉姆、父亲和男人。”

There is much more. Twain’s mystery novel Pudd’nhead Wilson stood as a challenge to the racial beliefs of even many of the liberals of his day. Written at a time when the accepted wisdom held Negroes to be inferior to whites, especially in intelligence, Twain’s tale centered in part around two babies switched at birth. A slave gave birth to her master’s baby and, for fear that the child should be sold south, switched him for the master’s baby by his wife. The slave’s light-skinned child was taken to be white and grew up with both the attitudes and the education of the slave-holding class. The master’s wife’s baby was taken for black and grew up with the attitudes and intonations of the slave.
还有更多。马克·吐温的推理小说《傻瓜威尔逊》甚至挑战了他那个时代许多自由主义者的种族信仰。马克·吐温的故事是在公认黑人不如白人的时候写的，尤其是在智力方面，故事的部分中心是两个婴儿在出生时发生了变化。一个奴隶生下了她主人的孩子，因为担心孩子会被卖到南方，所以他的妻子把他换成了主人的孩子。奴隶的浅色皮肤的孩子被认为是白人，在奴隶阶级的态度和教育下长大。主人妻子的孩子被视为黑人，在奴隶的态度和语调中长大。

The point was difficult to miss: nurture, not nature, was the key to social status. The features of the black man that provided the stuff of prejudice - manner of speech, for example - were, to Twain, indicative of nothing other than the conditioning that slavery forced on its victims.
这一点很难忽略：决定社会地位的关键是后天培养，而不是天性。例如，对马克·吐温来说，黑人的特征提供了偏见的言论方式，这只表明奴隶制对受害者施加了条件。

Twain’s racial tone was not perfect . One is left uneasy, for example, by the lengthy passage in his autobiography about how much he loved what were called “nigger shows” in his youth - mostly with white men performing in black-face - and his delight in getting his mother to laugh at them. Yet there is no reason to think Twain saw the shows as representing reality. His frequent attacks on slavery and prejudice suggest his keen awareness that they did not.
马克·吐温的种族论调并不完美。例如，他的自传中有一段很长的话，讲述了他年轻时是多么喜欢被称为“黑鬼秀”的节目——大多数是白人扮演黑人——以及他很高兴能让母亲嘲笑这些节目，这让人感到不安。然而，没有理由认为马克·吐温认为这些节目代表了现实。他对奴隶制和偏见的频繁攻击表明，他敏锐地意识到事实并非如此。

Was Twain a racist? Asking the questioning in the 21st century is as wise as asking the same of Lincoln. If we read the words and attitudes of the past through the “wisdom” of the considered moral judgments of the present, we will find nothing but error. Lincoln, who believed the black man the inferior of the white, fought and won a war to free him. And Twain, raised in a slave state, briefly a soldier, and inventor of Jim, may have done more to anger the nation over racial injustice and awaken its collective conscience than any other novelist in the past century.
马克·吐温是种族主义者吗？在21世纪问这个问题和问林肯的问题一样明智。如果我们通过现在深思熟虑的道德判断的“智慧”来解读过去的话语和态度，我们只会发现错误。林肯认为黑人是白人中的下等人，他打了一场战争并赢得了胜利。马克·吐温在奴隶国家长大，曾短暂地当过士兵，也是吉姆的发明者，他可能比过去一个世纪的任何其他小说家都更能因种族不公而激怒这个国家，唤醒这个国家的集体良知。