《针对人类的阴谋：恐怖的诡计》谁在那里？/ 来者何人？

[ 经典 ]

作者：托马斯·利戈蒂（Thomas Ligotti）
译者：0suffering（注：译自英语原著The Conspiracy Against The Human Race: A Contrivance Of Horror）

Who Goes There?

谁在那里？/ 来者何人？

本章小节

Uncanniness I（诡异 I） | Ante-Mortem（临终前）

Uncanniness I

诡异 I

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No philosopher has ever satisfactorily answered the following question: "Why should there be something rather than nothing?" It seems a fair enough question on its face. But that it should even be asked may seem to some of us as inexplicable, even preposterous. What the question suggests is our uneasiness with Something. Alternatively, there is nothing troubling about Nothing, because we cannot give it consideration. Something allows or necessitates our experience of the uncanny. Whether we are speaking of something that evolved naturally or was made by the digits and opposing thumbs of humanity, whether it is animate or inanimate, that something may become uncanny to us, a contravention of what we think should or should not be.

没有哪位哲学家曾令人满意地回答过这样一个问题：“为什么会有某物，而不是虚无？”这个问题本身看起来相当合理。但对我们当中的某些人来说，这个问题竟会被提出，本身就似乎难以理解，甚至荒谬可笑。这个问题所暗示的，是我们对“某物”的不安。相比之下，“虚无”则毫无令人困扰之处，因为我们无法对其进行思考。有了“某物”，我们便有了体验“诡异”的可能或必然。无论我们所说的是自然演化而来的事物，还是由人类的手指与拇指所造之物，无论它是有生命的还是无生命的，这个“某物”都有可能变得令我们感到诡异，成为对我们所认为的“应当”或“不应当”的一种违逆。

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In the same way that most of us share a general pattern of feeling about what is right or wrong in a moral sense, we also share a general pattern of feeling about what is right or wrong with respect to the world and ourselves—an internal authority that judges entities and events as within or outside of customs of reality. In experiencing the uncanny, there is a feeling of wrongness. A violation has transpired that alarms our internal authority regarding how something is supposed to happen or exist or behave. An offense against our world-conception or self-conception has been committed. Of course, our internal authority may itself be in the wrong, perhaps because it is a fabrication of consciousness based on a body of laws that are written only within us and not a detector of what is right or wrong in any real sense, since nothing really is right or wrong in any real sense. That we might be wrong about something being wrong would in itself be wrong according to our internal authority, which would then send out a signal of the uncanny concerning its own wrongness that would be returned to it for another round of signaling on the principle that everything it knows is wrong, which is to say that Something is always wrong. For the welfare of our functioning, however, we are insured against the adverse effects of an ever-cycling signal of uncanny wrongness by our inability to recognize it, although it might be going on all the time, thus accounting for our uneasiness about Something. But we may still perceive other phenomena to be on the wrong side of right and wrong—things that should not happen or exist or behave in the way we feel they should.

就像我们大多数人在道德意义上对“对”与“错”有一种普遍的感觉模式一样，我们对世界以及自我何为“正确”或“错误”也有一种普遍的感觉模式——一种内部的权威，会判断某些存在或事件是否符合现实的习俗。当我们体验到“诡异”时，伴随而来的是一种“错误感”。某种违规行为发生了，它惊动了我们内在的权威，让我们觉得某事的发生、存在或行为方式“不该如此”。这是一种对我们世界观或自我观念的冒犯。当然，我们的内在权威本身也可能是错的，或许它只是意识编造出的体系，基于某套仅存在于我们自身内部的法则，而不是某种能真实侦测对错的机制，因为在真实意义上，并没有什么真正的是“对”或“错”。然而，若我们对于某件事“是错的”这一判断本身就是错的，那在我们的内在权威看来，这也是一种错误，从而引发一种“关于自身错误的诡异感”信号，再将这信号回传给它自己，如此循环往复，依据的原则是：它所知的一切都是错的，也就是说，总有什么地方是错的。为了保障我们的正常运作，我们免于遭受这种诡异错误信号的不断循环所带来的不良后果，是因为我们无法察觉它的存在，尽管它也许一直都在发生，这或许能解释我们对“某种不对劲的东西”的持续不安。然而，我们依然可以察觉某些现象落在对与错的界限之外——那些在我们感觉中本不该如此发生、存在或表现的事物。

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Even the most unexceptional things may impress us in this way. In no time at all they may cease to be seen the way we usually see them and come to be seen as something else, something we may not be able to name. This unsteadiness of quality and meaning in something—a puppet doll, for instance—repels our lasting inspection of it, for the longer this inspection goes on the more we become lost in a paradoxical state of knowing and not knowing what was once known and familiar. And it is then that the question "Why should there be something rather than nothing?" may become lost in the inexplicable, even preposterous, ambition to resolve it without losing our minds to the uncanny.

即便是最平凡无奇的事物，也可能以这种方式令我们感到震撼。它们可能在极短的时间内脱离我们习以为常的视角，不再以原有的面貌呈现，而变成某种别的东西——一种我们也许无法命名的东西。这种在事物中出现的不稳定的性质与意义——比如一个木偶娃娃——会使我们无法长时间注视它，因为凝视得越久，我们就越会陷入一种矛盾的状态：既知道又不知道那个曾经熟悉且明了的东西。而也正是在这种时刻，“为什么会有某物，而不是虚无？”这一问题，可能会在我们试图解答它的过程中迷失于某种无法言明、甚至近乎荒诞的企图之中——一个不想在面对诡异之物时失去理智的企图。

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Everyday objects seem curiously liable to being perceived as uncanny, because we see them every day and "know" how they should be and should not be. One day those shoes on the floor of your clothes closet may attract your eye in a way they never have before. Somehow they have become abstracted from your world, appearances you cannot place, lumps of matter without a fixed quality and meaning. You feel confused as you stare at them. What are they? What is their nature? Why should there be something rather than nothing? But before your consciousness can ask any more questions, you dial it back so that your footwear seems familiar again and not uncanny in its being. You select a pair of shoes to wear that day and sit down to put them on. It is then that you notice the pair of stockings you are wearing and think of the feet they conceal . . . and the rest of the body to which those concealed feet are connected . . . and the universe in which that body is roving about with so many other uncanny shapes. "What now?" a voice from the other side of being seems to say. And what if you should look at yourself—the most everyday object there is—and feel at a loss to attach a quality and a meaning to what is being seen or what is seeing it. What now indeed.

日常物品似乎格外容易被感知为诡异之物，正因为我们每天都在看见它们，“知道”它们该是什么样，不该是什么样。某天，你衣橱地板上的那双鞋忽然吸引了你的目光——它们以前从未这样引起你的注意。它们仿佛已被从你的世界中抽离出来，变成了无法归类的外观、没有固定性质和意义的物块。你盯着它们看，感到困惑：它们是什么？它们的本质是什么？为什么会有某物存在，而不是虚无？但还没等你的意识提出更多问题，你就已经下意识地将这种状态调回正常，使那双鞋再次变得熟悉，不再在存在层面上令人感到诡异。你选了一双鞋准备穿上，坐下身来，这时你注意到自己正在穿着的袜子，又联想到那被袜子遮蔽的双脚……以及这双脚所连着的身体……还有这个身体所游荡其中的宇宙，那里也充满了许多同样诡异的形体。“现在怎么办？”一个来自存在彼岸的声音似乎这样问道。而如果你看向自己——这个最日常的“物品”——却又无从为所见之物或所见之“者”附着上任何性质或意义，那又该怎么办呢？确实，现在该怎么办呢。

Uncanniness II

诡异 II

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A sense of the uncanny can be activated in the average mortal under various conditions. Principal among these conditions are those which cause us to feel that we are not what we think we are, which was touched on at the close of the previous section. In his groundbreaking essay "On the Psychology of the Uncanny" (1906), the German physician and psychologist Ernst Jentsch analyzes this feeling and its origins. Among the examples of uncanny experience Jentsch proffers in his essay is one where individuals cease to appear integrated in their identity and take on the aspect of mechanisms, things of parts that are made as they are made and are all clockwork processes rather than immutable beings unchanging at their heart. As Jentsch explains:

在多种情况下，普通人都有可能产生一种怪异感。这些情况中最主要的是那些让我们感到我们并非我们自认为的那种情况，这在上一节结尾已经提到。在德国医生和心理学家恩斯特·延奇（Ernst Jentsch）于1906年发表的开创性文章《论怪异心理学》（On the Psychology of the Uncanny）中，他分析了这种感觉及其起源。延奇在他的文章中列举的怪异体验的例子中，有一个是关于个体不再显得身份统一，而是呈现出机械的方面，成为由部件构成的物件，它们像钟表一样运作，而不是内心不变的永恒存在。正如延奇解释的那样：

[A] confirmation of the fact that the emotion being discussed [the uncanny] is caused in particular by a doubt as to the animate or inanimate nature of things—or, expressed more precisely, as to their animatedness as understood by man’s traditional view—lies in the way in which the lay public is generally affected by the sight of articulations of most mental and many nervous diseases. Several patients afflicted with such troubles make a quite decidedly uncanny impression on most people.

关于所讨论的这种情感——即“诡异感”——是由对事物究竟是有生命还是无生命的性质产生怀疑所引起的这一事实，有一个证据，或者更准确地说，是对“生命状态”（animatedness）这一概念在人类传统观念中的理解产生怀疑。这一证据体现在：普通人在看到某些精神疾病或多种神经疾病的表现时，往往会感到不安甚至毛骨悚然。许多患有这类疾病的病人，确实会给大多数人留下一种明显诡异的印象。

What we can always assume from our fellow men’s experience of ordinary life is the relative psychical harmony in which their mental functions generally stand in relation to each other, even if moderate deviations from this equilibrium make their appearance occasionally in almost all of us: this behavior … constitutes man’s individuality and provides the foundation for our judgment of it. Most people do not show strong psychical peculiarities. At most, such peculiarities become apparent when strong affects make themselves felt, whereby it can suddenly become evident that not everything in the human psyche is of transcendental origin, and that much that is elementary is still present within it even for our direct perception. It is of course often in just such cases that much at present is generally accounted for quite well in terms of normal psychology.

我们总可以从他人日常生活的经验中假定：他们的各种心理机能之间通常处于一种相对的心理和谐状态——即使几乎所有人偶尔也会出现对这一平衡的轻微偏离。这种行为模式构成了人的个体性，并成为我们判断个体性基础的一部分。大多数人并不会表现出强烈的心理特异性；充其量，这些特异性只会在强烈情绪显现时才变得明显，从而突然使人意识到：并非人类心灵中的一切都具有先验的、超验的来源，实际上，其中仍然存在大量原始的、基本的成分，甚至可以直接被我们感知。当然，恰恰是在这类情况下，如今许多现象通常都能够通过正常心理学很好地加以解释。

But if this relative psychical harmony happens markedly to be disturbed in the spectator, and if the situation does not seem trivial or comic, the consequence of an unimportant incident, or if it is not quite familiar (like an alcohol intoxication, for example), then the dark knowledge dawns on the unschooled observer that mechanical processes are taking place in that which he was previously used to regarding as a unified psyche. It is not unjustly that epilepsy is therefore spoken of as the morbus sacer [“sacred disease”], as an illness not deriving from the human world but from foreign and enigmatic spheres, for the epileptic attack of spasms reveals the human body to the viewer—the body that under normal conditions is so meaningful, expedient, and unitary, functioning according to the directions of his consciousness—as an immensely complicated and delicate mechanism. This is an important cause of the epileptic fit’s ability to produce such a demonic effect on those who see it. (Translation by Roy Sellars)

但如果这种相对的心理和谐在观察者自身身上明显地遭到破坏，而所处情境又既非琐碎可笑、也非某个无关紧要事件的结果，或并非某种人们已然熟悉的状态（例如酒精中毒），那么，对于那些未经训练的旁观者来说，一种阴暗的领悟便会悄然浮现——他原本习惯视为统一整体的“心灵”，其实正发生着某些机械性的过程。因此，人们将癫痫称作“圣病”（*morbus sacer*）并非毫无道理：这是一种不源自人类世界，而是来自陌生而神秘领域的疾病。癫痫发作时的痉挛状态，会将人类身体呈现给观看者——这个在正常状态下显得富有意义、目的明确、协调统一、听从意识指挥的身体——暴露为一个极其复杂而精密的机制。这正是癫痫发作之所以能在目击者心中引发强烈“魔性”印象的一个重要原因。

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The brilliance of Jentsch's example is that it explicates the uncanny not as an objective quality of something in the outside world, but as a subjective experience of a perceiver of the outside world. This is how it is in real life: The uncanny is an effectof our minds—and nothing else. And yet, at least for the average onlooker in this case, the uncanny effectively originates in an objective stimulus, something that seems to have about it a power of its own. In the example given, the objective stimulus is an animate individual observed as behaving against "animatedness as understood by man's traditional view," the offender here being an epileptic exhibiting unusual bodily motions in the midst of a seizure. The subjective reaction to the seemingly objective stimulus of the uncanny is the gaining of "dark knowledge" about the workings of individuals, including the onlooker of the epileptic in the midst of a seizure. More expansively stated, not only is the epileptic perceived as uncanny by the onlooker (unless the onlooker is a physician who understands epileptic seizures by the lights of modern medicine and not according to a "traditional view") but the onlooker also perceives himself as uncanny because he has been made conscious of the mechanical nature of all human bodies and, by extrapolation, of the fact that "mechanical processes are taking place in that which he was previously used to regarding as a unified psyche." Neuroscientists are now familiar with some of these mechanical processes, as was Zapffe, who wrote in "The Last Messiah": "All things chain together in causes and effects, and everything [man] wants to grasp dissolves before the testing thought. Soon he sees mechanics even in the so-far whole and dear, in the smile of his beloved." The knowledge that we are not the idealized beings we thought, integral and undivided, does frighten some people, including physicians and neuroscientists. Yet even though we are not as we usually perceive ourselves to be, we can still continue in our accustomed ways if only we can quash the sense of being uncanny mechanisms in a world of things that may be transformed anytime and anywhere. Such quashing is not often a problem in the so-called real world. But it must be a problem in the world of supernatural horror.

延斯奇这个例子的高明之处在于，它阐明了“恐怖感”（the uncanny）并非外部世界中某种客观事物所固有的属性，而是一种感知者面对外部世界时主观产生的体验。现实中正是如此：“恐怖感”完全是我们头脑中的一种效应——除此之外别无其他。尽管如此，至少对这个案例中一般的旁观者来说，这种恐怖感似乎确实起源于某种客观刺激，即某种似乎自身就带有某种力量的东西。在延斯奇给出的例子中，这个客观刺激是一位表现出“违背人类传统观念中对‘有生命状态’的理解”的行为的活人；这里的“犯规者”是一个癫痫患者，在发作时表现出异常的身体动作。对这种表面上是“客观刺激”的“恐怖感”的主观反应，体现为对个体（包括作为癫痫发作目击者的旁观者本身）运作机制的“黑暗知识”的获得。更广义地说，癫痫患者不仅被旁观者视为“恐怖”的存在（除非这个旁观者是一位能够以现代医学的眼光理解癫痫发作的医生，而不是依据“传统观念”来判断的人），而且这个旁观者也会将自己视为“恐怖”的存在，因为他被迫意识到人类身体的机械本质，并由此推演出一个事实：即“在他曾习惯于视为统一心理的存在之中，也正在发生机械过程”。神经科学家如今对这些机械过程已较为熟悉，扎普夫对此也有所了解。他在《最后的弥赛亚》中写道：“万物皆因果相连，一切[人类]想要掌握的东西在经过思维检验后都会化为泡影。很快，他甚至在那些曾经完整而亲切的事物中看到了机制的影子，比如他所爱之人的微笑。”我们并非自己以为的那种理想化的、有机的、不可分割的存在，这一知识的确令一些人感到恐惧，包括医生和神经科学家在内。然而，尽管我们并不是我们通常所感知的那样，我们仍然可以继续以习惯的方式生活，只要我们能压抑对自身是“世界中的不安机制之一”的感觉。这种压抑在所谓现实世界中通常并不成问题。但在超自然恐怖的世界里，它却必定是个问题。

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