9/23/12

(Sông của Nguyễn Ngọc Tư) Từa tựa sự thật (1)

Nghe tiếng mưa khi mưa hãy còn xiêu xiêu ngoài sông, rồi mưa băng qua bờ lá có căn chòi hoang ở phía Nam cồn, ào vào bãi đất xơ rơ những thân lau sậy cháy, giờ thì mưa đã dội trên mái nhà, trượt theo những đuôi lá mục mưa thả mình vào đất. Khe vách rách rã chẻ mỏng những ngọn gió ướt, chém ngọt qua người, lạnh rởn từng lỗ chân lông.
Nguyễn Ngọc Tư: Khói trời lộng lẫy

Note: Gấu chưa đọc Sông. Nhưng Khói trời lộng lẫy thì có đọc, trên net. Tuyệt.

Cuốn tiểu thuyết đầu tay coi bộ gây chia rẽ độc giả, kể cả trong số những fan của tác giả.
Cái sự quyết tâm rứt ra khỏi cánh đồng để đi tìm một dòng sông, làm độc giả... hụt hẫng?
Rất có thể.
Tuy nhiên, cái tít bài viết về Sông, “từa tựa sự thật” thì lại làm Gấu nhớ tới… Faulkner, [lại F.] và bài điểm sách sau đây, của Borges về The Unvanquished [Kẻ không bị đánh bại] của ông.
Trong đó, Borges "thuổng" cái ý “từa tựa sự thực” của NL!

JORGE LOUIS BORGES
William Faulkner, The Unvanquished

It is a general rule that novelists do not present a reality, but rather the memory of one. They may write about true or believable events, but these have been revised and arranged by recollection. (This process, needless to say, has nothing to do with the verb tenses they employ.) Faulkner, however, at times wants to recreate the pure present, neither simplified by time nor polished by attention. The «pure present" is no more than a psychological ideal-and thus some of Faulkner's decompositions are more confused- and richer-than the original events.
    In earlier works, Faulkner has played powerfully with time, deliberately shuffling chronological order, deliberately complicating the labyrinths and ambiguities. He did it to such an extent that there were those who insisted that his virtues as a novelist were entirely derived from those involutions. This novel-direct, irresistible, straightforward-will estroy that suspicion. Faulkner does not try to explain his characters: he shows us what they feel and what they do. The events are extraordinary, but his narration is so vivid that we cannot imagine them any other way. "Le vrai peut quelquefois n'être pas vraisemblable," said Boileau. (What is true may sometimes not be plausible.) Faulkner heaps his implausibilities in order to seem truthful, and he succeeds. Or more exactly: the world he imagines is so real that it also encompasses the implausible.
    William Faulkner has been compared to Dostoevsky. This is not unjust, but the world of Faulkner is so physical, so carnal, that next to Colonel Bayard, Sartoris or Temple Drake, the explicative murderer Raskolnikov is as slight as a prince in Racine .... Rivers of brown water, crumbling mansions, black slaves, battles on horseback, idle and cruel: the strange world of The Unvanquished is a blood relation of this America, here, and its history; it, too, is criollo.
    There are books that touch us physically, like the closeness of the sea or of the morning. This-for me-is one of them.
[EW]
Borges: Selected non-fictions

[TV sẽ có bài chuyển ngữ, sau]