62．The author writes
this article to .
A．point out the urgency of drafting
international ocean law concerned
B．warn people of the cause of a new
age of colonial war
C．criticize the coastal countries
D．encourage the crowded countries to exploit
the oceans
D
“Making
money is a dirty game”, sums up the attitude of British novelist towards
business. The IEA has just published a collection of essays (“The
Representation of Business in English Literature”) by five academics describing
the hostility of the country’s men and women to the sordid business of
making money. The implication is that Britain’s economic performance is delayed
by an anti – industrial culture.
Rather
than blaming workers and unable managers for Britain’s economic worries, then,
we can put George Orwell and Martin Amis in the trial instead. From Dickens’s
Scrooge to Amis’s John Self in his 1980s novel “Money”, novelists have
described a group of mean, greedy money
- men that have not supported t heir readers from the noble pursuit of
capitalism.
The
argument has been well made before, most famously in 1981 by Martin Wiener, an
American academic, in his “English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial
Spirit”. Lady Thatcher was a devotee of Mr. Wiener’s, and she led a reform to
improve the “entrepreneurial euhure” which the liberal elite had looked down
upon. Gordon Brown sounds as though he agrees with her. At a recent speech to
the Confederation of British Industry, he declared that it should be the duty
of every teacher in the country to “Communicate the virtues of business and
enterprise”.
Certainly,
most novelists are hostile to capitalism, but this repetition risks
seapegoating (替罪羊) writers for failings for which
they are not to blame. Britain’s culture is no more anti – business than that
of other countries. The Romantic Movement was born and flourished in Germany,
but has not stopped the Germans from being Europe’s most successful
entrepreneurs and industrialists.
Even the
Americans are guilty of blackening business’s name. Smersh and Specter went out
with the cold war. James Bond now takes on international media stars rather
than Rosa Kleb. His films have sown downtrodden (压迫) moral heroes against the evil of faceless corporatism. Yet none of
this seems to have reduced America’s eager for free enterprise.
The irony
is that novels flourished as an art form only after, and as result of, the
creation of the new commercial classes of Victorian England, just as the modem
Hollywood film can exist only in an era of mass consumerism. Perhaps the moral
is that capitalist societies consume literature and film to let off seam rather
than to change the word.
