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作者童年时住在马里兰州的贝塞斯达，他经常去的是附近马萨诸塞大道的小瀑布图书馆。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年上演的百老汇音乐剧。, 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岁时，我在街那头的公共图书馆消磨了不少时光；那时我已经迷上了看戏，而这家图书馆收藏着丰富的戏剧资料。这里不仅有图书，还有经典和新编百老汇舞台剧的原声唱片。有一天，新进了张唱片《音乐奇才》，讲的是推销员疯狂爱上一个姑娘的故事，姑娘的名字就像歌里唱的“图书馆员玛——丽——安”。

[2]我们的图书馆员大概23岁，我想当然地以为她是20世纪中期最不幸的角色：一个“老姑娘”。后来我才知道，《音乐奇才》嘲讽了这种成见，剧中玛丽安放下头发的时候，看起来年轻性感（大概23岁），把生性风流的旅行推销员迷得神魂颠倒。

[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视系列。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 按字母顺序的。order, so she would know“everything in the world.”

[3]不过当然，老姑娘图书馆员是个经久不衰的文学题材，这可不是我从流行文化中找到的唯一一个。还有其他题材，包括图书馆员当侦探，图书馆成为保护我们免遭愚昧侵袭的堡垒，整个科幻小说界都致力于描写这个储存思想和历史的地方。比如说，在《星际迷航》早期的一集中，荒芜星球上的图书馆似乎是整个文明遗留的唯一痕迹。

[4]整日和文字打交道的作家会沉迷于这些巨大的知识宝库，也不足为奇。豪尔赫·路易斯·博尔赫斯把宇宙想象成“巴别图书馆”，藏书应有尽有；在漫画《睡魔》中，尼尔·盖曼为吕西安的图书馆收集了人们梦想撰写却从未写出的每本书；乔治·卢卡斯为他的绝地圣殿图书馆构想了全息书和数据棒；在电视剧《神秘博士》中，整个宇宙的知识都储存在行星大小的图书馆里，这里收藏着世上所有的传记。

人间天堂

[5]这些都是超脱尘世的图书馆，不太像你真正可以借书的人间图书馆。然而，流行文化里也到处都有此类描写。有时候，图书馆被描述成令人生畏的绝境，就像电影《生活多美好》里的那样，天使克拉伦斯提醒乔治·贝利，如果他从未来到世间，他的妻子玛丽·哈奇将永远都嫁不出去，她会在人们回家后关上图书馆的大门，度过孤寂的黑夜。幸运的是，同年上映的电影《布鲁克林有棵树》中，有个热爱读书的小女孩在本地图书馆流连忘返，打算按照字母顺序读完书架上的每本书，这样她就能了解“世间万物”。

[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 Set6二十世纪福克斯公司的喜剧电影，由凯瑟琳·赫本和斯宾塞·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 方济各会修士。realizes that a series of priestly suicides may be related to what cannot be found in the monastery’s library.

[6]如果了解了世间万物，差不多会让她当上——图书馆员。实际上，图书馆员知识渊博，甚至可以打败电脑，至少凯瑟琳·赫本在1957年的电影《电脑风云》中做到了。当然，虽然她能凭借记忆引用朗费罗的诗句，但她也容易情绪激动，幸好斯宾塞·屈塞可以让她平静下来。

[7]图书馆员对图书的迷恋和近乎虔诚的观念，自然引出了宗教与图书馆的渊源。这在文学作品中也有所体现，比如科幻小说《莱博维茨的赞歌》中从未受过教育的僧侣，在核战争爆发后保存了文明的遗迹。或是《玫瑰之名》中的修士，在这部讲述中世纪故事的神秘小说中，一位方济各会修士意识到，接连发生的修士自杀案也许与修道院图书馆中不见踪影的书籍有关。

“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电视剧《吸血鬼猎人巴菲》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 狂热分子。. 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.

“书都藏哪儿了？”他满心疑惑，而作者把这座修道院的图书馆打造成语言和文学的迷宫，为读者带来了推理的乐趣，也让图书馆蒙上不常有的惊悚氛围。

[8]这是对青春小说给图书馆带来的前卫元素的补充。青春小说里的图书馆往往有些另类：比如，哈利·波特可以在霍格沃茨图书馆查阅关于龙的资料；美女先是喜欢上巍峨的书架，然后才爱上书架的主人野兽。蝙蝠女也当过图书馆的管理员。当然，还有位于地狱口上方的太阳谷高中图书馆，这个地方与其说是让学生们读书，不如说是为巴菲和她的吸血鬼猎人同伴提供为生存而战的武器。

文学巨匠在学校碰壁，却在图书馆得到庇护

[9]几乎没有比思想和真相更有威力的武器，由于图书馆里不乏思想和真相，自然会吸引那些充满激情的人。比如剧作家奥古斯特·威尔逊，他编写了《篱笆》《钢琴课》和其他8部戏剧作品，凭借10部佳作取得了美国戏剧界的最高成就。早在20世纪60年代，少年威尔逊几乎生活在当地图书馆里，显然，这对他的写作很有好处，对他的学业没什么帮助。他写了一篇深入研究拿破仑的论文，却遭到历史老师的否定。

“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.

“他认为这不是我写的。”这位剧作家很多年后回忆道，年仅15岁的他大为光火，把文章扔进废纸篓，愤然离开了学校，再也没有回去。

相反，在躲避逃学训导员的三年时间里，他在匹兹堡的公共图书馆接受了良好的教育，足以激励他写出荣获普利策奖的艺术佳作。

[10]杰曼·格里尔写道，“图书馆是你不用失去童贞就会丢失天真的地方”。歌曲作者也像诗人、哲学家那样，表达自己对图书馆的看法：吉米·巴菲特演唱了歌曲“爱在图书馆”；托丽·阿莫斯则按照杜威十进制图书分类法，为自己的专辑《图书馆员的故事》安排歌曲顺序。

[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、图书、电影和其他艺术作品中，图书馆是神圣的殿堂、享受安静的处所、激发想象力的思想宝库。

[12]“在成长的过程中，”有位智者曾这样表示，“有两个地方对你的影响最大：一个是属于上帝的教堂，另一个就是属于你的公共图书馆。”

这位智者就是滚石乐队的基思·理查兹，他曾因图书逾期未还而被罚数千美元。

[13]你不信吗？我知道你在哪儿可以找到这句话。 □

戏剧、电影和歌曲中的图书馆

文/鲍勃·蒙代洛 译/孟洁冰

美国电影评论家。本文是他为美国国家公共广播电台撰写的评论。