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  3. A quarter century ago, the sensation of the season was the children’s book M

A quarter century ago, the sensation of the season was the children’s book M

游客2024-11-21  5
问题     A quarter century ago, the sensation of the season was the children’s book Masquerade, by British artist Kit Williams. This story of a hare’s quest to deliver a message between moon and sun incorporated dazzlingly archetypal illustrations and bits of many myths collapsed into the inscriptions framing the fifteen pictures.
    Masquerade became a media event because it presented in code the location of a golden hare sculpture Williams had buried. Once revealed, the code was disappointingly simple: " To solve the hidden riddle you must use your eyes," the book’s opening words, meant that eyes in the paintings pointed to words in the margins. The dazzling imagery was only filler, albeit hauntingly mysterious filler. Sensitive readers still felt that the visual mystery had to have meant more than this literal mapping.
    An equally unanticipated publishing phenomenon, Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code, suggests that already existing buildings and works of art, some of them famous, are codes conveying a specific message. Once again, the public longs for implications deeper than those borne out by the text. This time, debate centers on whether those implications might actually be there.
    After two years at the top of the lists, Brown’s bestseller spawned a late-2004 "Special Illustrated Edition" featuring color photos of the artworks and architecture mentioned in its pages. For Brown’s "symbologist" hero, works of art and architecture hold genuine clues to unsuspected mysteries, and Brown’s readers have wanted to see the works his novel so frag-mentarily describes. The illustrated edition gratifies their wishes and, of course, increases sales.
    The novel’s main source of popular fascination is its combination of thrillerdom with the supposed revelation that early Christianity suppressed secrets of sacred femininity. The Catholic Church would seek to keep these secrets suppressed for political reasons, while esoteric societies like the Priory of Sion seek to reveal them, also for political reasons. What is of interest in our context is the ancillary aspect, the use of the interpretation of the painting — The Last Supper by Leonardo Da Vinci — to advance the plot leading to this revelation.
    In one sense, The Da Vinci Code is the heretical flip side of the national obsession with fact-based faith, the opposite half of the impulse that made Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ a movie-going phenomenon. At bottom, America’s historic mix of Enlightenment with radical Reformation encourages Americans to expect "just the facts" , and to believe that facts are ultimately unambiguous. As Michelle Cottle notes in the March 20th issue of The New York Times, " depending on which poll you consult, between one third and one half of Americans identify themselves as biblical literalists." It scarcely requires Vincent Crapanzano’s anthropological investigation to puzzle out the impact of this on the other half of Americans.
    Prefacing his novel with a capitalized declaration of "FACT" , Brown uses mystery-novel conventions to assert an alternate religious history in which hard facts lie behind emotionally gripping symbols. The idea that symbols simply conceal facts has become a popular obsession: the same books — Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh’s 1982 Holy Blood, Holy Grail and Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas’ 1997 The Hiram Key — both inspired Brown’s trilogy-in-progress and fueled the brief but explosive success of the film National Treasure’s Disneyfication of hidden spiritual histories.
    In practice, archaic connections between the symbolic and the real persist in such issues as flag desecration, claiming for national emblems a sanctity reserved in other cultures for purely religious ones. Religious symbols have generated passions of their own: When latter-day Catholic Andres Serrano combined religious statuary with body fluids, the confusion of symbol with fact returned with a vengeance.
    In art as in everything else, Americans show a perennial preference for symbols synonymous with daily reality. Norman Rockwell’s paintings are shorthand for complex social relations, but Americans love him, not for this, but because his well-composed sentimentality allows the belief that he’s just showing "the way things are". Pop culture also misreads Andy Warhol as a hipper version of Rockwell, another purveyor of unambiguous surfaces.
    In a way, The Da Vinci Code embodies a Rockwellian approach to art gussied up in gorgeously mysterious trappings. Art can’t possibly be a place where contradictory possibilities collide: it must mean only one thing, although cash or prestige value can come into play alongside meaning.
    Despite wide-ranging interests, Dan Brown represents the presuppositions of most Americans. He doesn’t present the intellectual universe his Harvard-based hero would inhabit: Brown’s protagonist Robert Langdon uses symbols to solve puzzles, but not in the way scholarship actually works.
    However, this fictionalized scholarship has led many readers to look at works of art as something more than incidental decoration. That in itself is an advance in terms of popular awareness of the uses of the visual. Thus it might seem to be an excellent time to initiate the public to the more ambiguous uses of symbolism, were it not that The Da Vinci Code is largely impervious to such ambiguities. [br] Which category of writing does the passage belong to?
选项 A、A book review.
B、A movie review.
C、A book report.
D、A news feature.
答案 A
解析 综合题。本文主要内容是关于The DaVinci Code一书的书评，故A是正确答案。
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