Libraries’ Leading Roles: On Stage, on Screen and in Song

By Bob Mondello

Libraries’ Leading Roles: On Stage, on Screen and in Song

By Bob Mondello1

When I was 9, I spent a lot of time at a public library2作者童年時住在馬里蘭州的貝塞斯達，他經常去的是附近馬薩諸塞大道的小瀑布圖書館。just down the street; I was already a theater nerd, and it had a well-stocked theater section. Not just books, but original cast albums for Broadway shows old and new. One day, an addition: The Music Man31957年上演的百老匯音樂劇。, about a salesman who was crazy about a girl named, as one song put it, “Marrrrrrrion, madam librarian.”

[2] I just assumed our librarian, who was maybe 23, was that most regrettable of midcentury things, a “spinster.”Later I learned that The Music Man was spoofing that idea, by making Marian young—maybe 23—and sexy once she let down her hair and utterly irresistible to the traveling salesman, who’d presumably had many a fling.

9歲時，我在街那頭的公共圖書館消磨了不少時光；那時我已經迷上了看戲，而這家圖書館收藏著豐富的戲劇資料。這里不僅有圖書，還有經典和新編百老匯舞臺劇的原聲唱片。有一天，新進了張唱片《音樂奇才》，講的是推銷員瘋狂愛上一個姑娘的故事，姑娘的名字就像歌里唱的“圖書館員瑪——麗——安”。

[2]我們的圖書館員大概23歲，我想當然地以為她是20世紀中期最不幸的角色：一個“老姑娘”。后來我才知道，《音樂奇才》嘲諷了這種成見，劇中瑪麗安放下頭發的時候，看起來年輕性感（大概23歲），把生性風流的旅行推銷員迷得神魂顛倒。

[3] But then of course the Spinster Librarian is a durable literary construct and hardly the only one I picked up from pop culture. Others include librarians as detectives, libraries as fortresses protecting us from ignorance, whole science-fiction worlds devoted to the storage of ideas and history. Like, say, the deserted planet in an early episode of Star Trek4派拉蒙公司制作的科幻影視系列。that seems the only remaining trace of an entire civilization.

[4] It’s hardly surprising that writers, who deal all the time with words, would find fascination in great repositories of them—Jorge Luis Borges, imagining the universe as a “Library of Babel” containing all possible books; Neil Gaiman stocking Lucien’s Library, in The Sandman, with every volume anyone has ever dreamed of writing but never written; George Lucas imagining holobooks and datasticks for his Jedi Temple library; a whole universe’s worth of knowledge stored in Doctor Who on a planet-sized library that contains whole continents of biographies.

On earth as it is in the heavens

[5] These are all otherworldly libraries, not much resembling the Terran ones where you can actually check out a book. But pop culture is littered with those, too. Sometimes they’re pictured as dreadful dead ends, as in It’s a Wonderful Life, when Clarence reveals to George Bailey that without him around, his wife Mary Hatch would never have married; instead she’d ’ve spent lonely evenings closing up the library after everyone had gone home. Happily, that was the same year an eager young bibliophile was haunting her local bibliotheque in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, trying to read every book on the shelves in alphabetical5alphabetical 按字母順序的。order, so she would know“everything in the world.”

[3]不過當然，老姑娘圖書館員是個經久不衰的文學題材，這可不是我從流行文化中找到的唯一一個。還有其他題材，包括圖書館員當偵探，圖書館成為保護我們免遭愚昧侵襲的堡壘，整個科幻小說界都致力于描寫這個儲存思想和歷史的地方。比如說，在《星際迷航》早期的一集中，荒蕪星球上的圖書館似乎是整個文明遺留的唯一痕跡。

[4]整日和文字打交道的作家會沉迷于這些巨大的知識寶庫，也不足為奇。豪爾赫·路易斯·博爾赫斯把宇宙想象成“巴別圖書館”，藏書應有盡有；在漫畫《睡魔》中，尼爾·蓋曼為呂西安的圖書館收集了人們夢想撰寫卻從未寫出的每本書；喬治·盧卡斯為他的絕地圣殿圖書館構想了全息書和數據棒；在電視劇《神秘博士》中，整個宇宙的知識都儲存在行星大小的圖書館里，這里收藏著世上所有的傳記。

人間天堂

[5]這些都是超脫塵世的圖書館，不太像你真正可以借書的人間圖書館。然而，流行文化里也到處都有此類描寫。有時候，圖書館被描述成令人生畏的絕境，就像電影《生活多美好》里的那樣，天使克拉倫斯提醒喬治·貝利，如果他從未來到世間，他的妻子瑪麗·哈奇將永遠都嫁不出去，她會在人們回家后關上圖書館的大門，度過孤寂的黑夜。幸運的是，同年上映的電影《布魯克林有棵樹》中，有個熱愛讀書的小女孩在本地圖書館流連忘返，打算按照字母順序讀完書架上的每本書，這樣她就能了解“世間萬物”。

[6] Knowing everything in the world would make her—well, a librarian, more or less. They know so much, in fact, that they can even beat computers, or at least Katharine Hepburn could in 1957’s Desk Set6二十世紀?？怂构镜南矂‰娪?，由凱瑟琳·赫本和斯賓塞·屈塞主演。. Admittedly, while she could quote Longfellow from memory, she was also a little high-strung. Happily, Spencer Tracy was around to calm her down.

[7] The notion of librarians as obsessive and almost devout about books leads naturally to connections between religion and libraries. In literature, that’s reflected in, say, the illiterate monks of A Canticle for Leibowitz, who archive what’s left of civilization after an atomic war. Or the friars in The Name of the Rose, a medieval mystery in which a Franciscan7Franciscan 方濟各會修士。realizes that a series of priestly suicides may be related to what cannot be found in the monastery’s library.

[6]如果了解了世間萬物，差不多會讓她當上——圖書館員。實際上，圖書館員知識淵博，甚至可以打敗電腦，至少凱瑟琳·赫本在1957年的電影《電腦風云》中做到了。當然，雖然她能憑借記憶引用朗費羅的詩句，但她也容易情緒激動，幸好斯賓塞·屈塞可以讓她平靜下來。

[7]圖書館員對圖書的迷戀和近乎虔誠的觀念，自然引出了宗教與圖書館的淵源。這在文學作品中也有所體現，比如科幻小說《萊博維茨的贊歌》中從未受過教育的僧侶，在核戰爭爆發后保存了文明的遺跡?；蚴恰睹倒逯分械男奘?，在這部講述中世紀故事的神秘小說中，一位方濟各會修士意識到，接連發生的修士自殺案也許與修道院圖書館中不見蹤影的書籍有關。

“Where are the books?” he wonders, as the author turns the abbey’s library into a maze, in both a literal and a literary sense, providing fun for readers and lending the stacks an air of excitement they don’t always possess.

[8] That complements the cool factor that teen fiction has bestowed on libraries, which often offer a little something extra in that genre—the dragon section Harry Potter could consult at Hogwarts, for instance, and the towering bookshelves Belle fell for before she fell for the Beast who owned them. The archive where Batgirl was a librarian. And of course, the school library perched atop a hellmouth at Sunnydale High, where the point is less getting students to read than it is giving Buffy8電視劇《吸血鬼獵人巴菲》的主角。and her vampire-slaying buddies the tools to fight for their lives.

When a school failed a giant, a library offered refuge

[9] There are few weapons more powerful than facts and ideas, and as libraries are full of those, they naturally appeal to firebrands9firebrand 狂熱分子。. Playwright August Wilson, for instance, who wrote Fences, The Piano Lesson and the eight other plays in a decalogue that’s among the crowning achievements of American theater. As a 1960s teenager, Wilson practically lived at his local library, which turned out to be great for his writing, less great for his grades. He penned one paper on Napoleon that was so well researched, his history teacher rejected it.

“書都藏哪兒了？”他滿心疑惑，而作者把這座修道院的圖書館打造成語言和文學的迷宮，為讀者帶來了推理的樂趣，也讓圖書館蒙上不常有的驚悚氛圍。

[8]這是對青春小說給圖書館帶來的前衛元素的補充。青春小說里的圖書館往往有些另類：比如，哈利·波特可以在霍格沃茨圖書館查閱關于龍的資料；美女先是喜歡上巍峨的書架，然后才愛上書架的主人野獸。蝙蝠女也當過圖書館的管理員。當然，還有位于地獄口上方的太陽谷高中圖書館，這個地方與其說是讓學生們讀書，不如說是為巴菲和她的吸血鬼獵人同伴提供為生存而戰的武器。

文學巨匠在學校碰壁，卻在圖書館得到庇護

[9]幾乎沒有比思想和真相更有威力的武器，由于圖書館里不乏思想和真相，自然會吸引那些充滿激情的人。比如劇作家奧古斯特·威爾遜，他編寫了《籬笆》《鋼琴課》和其他8部戲劇作品，憑借10部佳作取得了美國戲劇界的最高成就。早在20世紀60年代，少年威爾遜幾乎生活在當地圖書館里，顯然，這對他的寫作很有好處，對他的學業沒什么幫助。他寫了一篇深入研究拿破侖的論文，卻遭到歷史老師的否定。

“He didn’t think I had written it,”remembered the playwright many years later, adding that at 15, this so infuriated him that he threw it in a wastebasket and stomped out of school, never to return.

Where he went instead—avoiding truant officers for three years, while getting an education good enough to inspire Pulitzer Prize-winning art—was Pittsburgh’s public library.

[10] Germaine Greer wrote that“a library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity,” and songwriters have joined poets and philosophers to offer their own takes on that notion—from Jimmy Buffett, in his song “Love in the Library,” to Tori Amos, who on her album Tales of a Librarian arranged the tracks according to the Dewey Decimal System.

“他認為這不是我寫的。”這位劇作家很多年后回憶道，年僅15歲的他大為光火，把文章扔進廢紙簍，憤然離開了學校，再也沒有回去。

相反，在躲避逃學訓導員的三年時間里，他在匹茲堡的公共圖書館接受了良好的教育，足以激勵他寫出榮獲普利策獎的藝術佳作。

[10]杰曼·格里爾寫道，“圖書館是你不用失去童貞就會丟失天真的地方”。歌曲作者也像詩人、哲學家那樣，表達自己對圖書館的看法：吉米·巴菲特演唱了歌曲“愛在圖書館”；托麗·阿莫斯則按照杜威十進制圖書分類法，為自己的專輯《圖書館員的故事》安排歌曲順序。

[11] In songs and books and movies and art, libraries are sanctuaries, places of bustling quiet, storehouses of ideas that fuel the imagination.

[12] “When you’re growing up,” a wise man once said, “there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you.”

That wise man was Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, who ran up thousands of dollars in overdue-book fees.

[13] Don’t believe me? I know where you could look it up. ■

[11]在歌曲、圖書、電影和其他藝術作品中，圖書館是神圣的殿堂、享受安靜的處所、激發想象力的思想寶庫。

[12]“在成長的過程中，”有位智者曾這樣表示，“有兩個地方對你的影響最大：一個是屬于上帝的教堂，另一個就是屬于你的公共圖書館?！?/p>

這位智者就是滾石樂隊的基思·理查茲，他曾因圖書逾期未還而被罰數千美元。

[13]你不信嗎？我知道你在哪兒可以找到這句話。 □

戲劇、電影和歌曲中的圖書館

文/鮑勃·蒙代洛 譯/孟潔冰

美國電影評論家。本文是他為美國國家公共廣播電臺撰寫的評論。