Marrying Absurd （I）

荒唐的婚礼（一）

Joan Didion

琼·迪戴恩

1. To be married in Las Vegas, Clark County, Nevada, a bride must swear that she is eighteen or has parental permission and a bride-groom that he is twenty-one or has parental permission. Someone must put up five dollars for the license. (On Sundays and holidays, fifteen dollars. The Clark County Courthouse issues marriage licenses at any time of the day or night except between noon and one in the afternoon, between eight and nine in the evening, and between four and five in the morning.) Nothing else is required. The State of Nevada, alone among these United States, demands neither a premarital blood test nor a waiting period before or after the issuance of a marriage license. Driving in across the Mojave from Los Angeles, one sees the signs way out on the desert, looming up from that moonscape of rattlesnakes and mesquite, even before the Las Vegas lights appear like a mirage on the horizon: “GETTING MARRIED? Free License Information First Strip Exit.” Perhaps the Las Vegas wedding industry achieved its peak operational efficiency between 9:00 p.m. and midnight of August 26,1965, an otherwise unremarkable Thursday which happened to be, by Presidential order, the last day on which anyone could improve his draft status merely by getting married. One hundred and seventy-one couples were pronounced man and wife in the name of Clark County and the State of Nevada that night, sixty-seven of them by a single justice of the peace, Mr. James A. Brennan. Mr. Brennan did one wedding at the Dunes and the other sixty-six in his office, and charged each couple eight dollars. One bride lent her veil to six others. “I got it down from five to three minutes,” Mr. Brennan said later of his feat. “I could’ve married them en masse, but they’re people, not cattle. People expect more when they get married.”在内华达州克拉克县拉斯维加斯结婚的条件是，新娘必须宣誓她年满十八岁，或经父母同意，新郎必须宣誓他年满二十一岁，或经父母同意；还必须预备五元钱办理证书。（周日和节假日为十五元。克拉克县法院颁发结婚证书的时间可以在除以下时段外的任何时间，无论白天还是夜间：正午至下午一点、晚上八点至九点、早上四点至五点。）此外再无其他条件。在美国这些州中，内华达州是唯一既不需要婚前验血，也不需要在办理结婚证书之前或之后等上一段时间的。从洛杉矶驾车穿越莫哈韦沙漠过来，甚至拉斯维加斯地平线上那海市蜃楼般的点点灯光尚未出现，你就会看到一路上沙漠里的那些标牌，从遍地响尾蛇和豆科灌木的荒寂景象中由远及近逐渐显现：“要结婚吗？免费登记信息第一赌城大道出口”。也许拉斯维加斯的婚典业在1965年8月26日的晚上9点到午夜时分曾达到它办事效率的顶峰；这天原本是个平平常常的星期四，却因为总统的一道命令，这天成了任何人只要结了婚，即可改善其征兵条件的最后期限。那天夜里共有一百七十一对男女依照克拉克县和内华达州的法律被宣布结为夫妇，其中六十七对是同一名法官办理的，他就是詹姆斯·A·布伦南。布伦南先生在鸟丘海滩[1]主持了一场婚礼，其余六十六场都是在他办公室里主持的。每对新人收费八元。有一个新娘曾把她的面纱借给了六个其他新娘。“我五到三分钟就把它揭下来了，”布伦南先生后来这样讲述他的战绩：“我本来可以给他们一起举行婚礼的，但毕竟他们是人，不是牲口。人们在结婚时总有更多的期待。”

2. What people who get married in Las Vegas actually do expect—what, in the largest sense, their “expectations” are—strikes one as a curious and self—contradictory business. Las Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification, a place the tone of which is set by mobsters and call girls and ladies’ room attendants with amyl nitrite poppers in their uniform pockets. Almost everyone notes that there is no “time” in Las Vegas, no night and no day and no past and no future (no Las Vegas casino, however, has taken the obliteration of the ordinary time sense quite so far as Harold’s Club in Reno, which for a while issued, at odd intervals in the day and night, mimeographed “bulletins” carrying news from the world outside); neither is there any logical sense of where one is. One is standing on a highway in the middle of a vast hostile desert looking at an eighty-foot sign which blinks “STARDUST” or “CAESAR’S PALACE.” Yes, but what does that explain? This geographical implausibility reinforces the sense that what happens there has no connection with “real” life; Nevada cities like Reno and Carson are ranch towns, Western towns, places behind which there is some historical imperative. But Las Vegas seems to exist only in the eye of the beholder. All of which makes it an extraordinarily stimulating and interesting place, but an odd one in which to want to wear a candlelight satin Priscilla of Boston wedding dress with Chantilly lace insets, tapered sleeves and a detachable modified train.在拉斯维加斯结婚的这些人所真正期待的——即从最大意义上讲他们的期待，是一个令人费解又自相矛盾的行业，简直令人吃惊。拉斯维加斯是最极端、最有象征意义的美国定居地——奇特、美丽，唯利是图、及时行乐，这里的基调是由那些地痞流氓、应召女郎和制服口袋里装着亚硝酸戊酯[2]小药瓶的女卫生间侍者们决定的。几乎人人都注意到，在拉斯维加斯是没有“时间”的，无所谓昼、夜，无所谓过去、未来（不过，拉斯维加斯的赌场中没有一个像里诺[3]的哈罗德夜总会那样无视正常的时间观念的，在那里曾经发行一种油印的“快报”——发报的时间也是在白天或夜间的非正常时段，上面刊载一些来自外部世界的消息）；也没有任何理性的方位概念。你正站在一片一望无际的荒漠中间的一条公路上，看着一块八十英尺的标牌，上面闪烁着“太虚幻境”或“凯撒宫殿”的字样。是的，可这又能解释什么呢？地理上的虚幻又增强了人们的这样一种感觉，即这里所发生的一切都跟“真实”的生活没有关系。内华达州的一些城市，像里诺、卡森，都是牧场城市、西部城市，在这些地方的背后有着某些历史的诫命。但拉斯维加斯似乎只存在于其青睐者的眼中。所有这一切都使它成为一个极为刺激和吸引人的地方，但是对那些一心要穿带有尚蒂伊[4]镶边、紧身袖子和可拆卸新式拖裙的波士顿普里西拉[5]丝光绸婚纱的人来说，它却很古怪。

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