政治隐喻和文本矛盾:重读《芭巴拉少校》

Political Allegory and Textual Contradiction:A Revisit to Major Barbara

萧伯纳的代表作《芭巴拉少校》具有高度政治隐喻性质,它暗中回答了19世纪以来马修·阿诺德等文人和学者热衷于探讨的一个重大社会问题:未来的英国由谁来统治?安德谢夫家族企业的继承人问题,本质上是未来英国统治阶级的人选问题。作为工业资产阶级的典型代表,安德谢夫无往而不胜,各个方面取得了成功。然而,令他(萧伯纳)始料未及的是,他所选中的库森斯不可能是一个合格的接班人,因为,历代安德谢夫所秉持的传统足以表明,像库森斯这种中产阶级出身、缺少"狼性"的人文知识分子是无法承担起英国工业资本主义的历史使命的,19世纪末以来的英国工业资本主义发展史已经证明了这一点。就此而言,可以说,萧伯纳在无意中写出了英国资本主义当时暗含的重大危机:工业精神的衰落。

George Bernard Shaw＇s representative play Major Barbara is in essence a comedy of political allegory,for it tacitly tackles and answers the question vehemently discussed by a series of men of letters and cultural critics including Matthew Arnold from the 19 thcentury onwards： who shall inherit England？ The problem of finding the qualified inheritor for the Undershafts is in actuality that of choosing the best candidates for the future ruling class. As a representative of industrial capitalist class,the powerful Andrew Undershaft achieves overwhelming victories in almost every social aspect,but beyond his（ Shaw＇s）expectation,the choice of Cusins,a professor of Greek and his future son-in-law,as his successor,is doomed to be a failed decision： unlike the previous generations of the Undershafts,Cusins is not a foundling in any real sense,but a humanist intellectual born into a middle class background,and has never experienced social sufferings,thus lacking the hungry spirit or aggressiveness,which is fundamental to the prosperity of industrial capitalism; in this sense,he is not a qualified successor of Andrew Undershaft and will inevitably fail to carry out the historical mission of English industrial capitalists,just as the histori-cal development of English industrial capitalism from the second half of the 19 thcentury to the present day has already demonstrated. Thus it can be concluded that George Bernard Shaw unconsciously reveals the serious crisis latent in English capitalism of that time： the gradual decline of industrial spirit.