blamebrampton | Cultural literacy, I likes it!

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postmodernism

Cultural literacy, I likes it!

I had a strange discussion with a person on the internet (god forbid!) over the concept of cultural literacy. Her thesis was that it wasn't important, that popular culture was more useful, and that no one could agree on what one needed to know to be culturally literate anyway.

We exchanged a number of comments, and she was a thoroughly decent person to argue with, but I can't help thinking that we come from opposing starting positions on this one. To start with, she's literally half my age. But she also went to school all through the period where one text was interchangeable with another, whereas I went to school in the days when you had to learn about great literature before they let you mess around with the other stuff.

And yeah, I do mean great and other. I know this will have some of you demanding I turn in my Credentialled Postmodernist badge, but some texts are better than others. They last longer, they impact more, they're Penicillin rather than Cialis, the Periodic Table as opposed to Phlogiston. To my mind, there are certain texts you should have a grounding in if you want to be a culturally literate person.

The problem is, of course, that the idea of their being 'certain texts', a canon, if you will, has become problematic. Harold 'Groper' Bloom's The Western Canon is often held up to ridicule by people who call it a roll-call of dead white men. But I think that's because they couldn't be arsed reading it. He talks positively about Austen and Woolf, Mary Shelley and not one but two Brontës (though how he could choose Emily over Anne is a mystery to me), among other women, and has a good set from the Ancient world as well as Persian and Asian sources. He is weaker on the Orient, I wanted The Tale of Genji at least, but when he sat down to think 'Who has influenced what we think about literature in the West', he genuinely seems to have done so on the basis of the works, not who wrote them.

To me, the idea that we should not privilege some texts over others is ridiculous. No one would argue that there is no difference between a Skoda Octavia and a Bugatti Veyron, or between salad cream and hand-made mayonnaise. It's fine to like and enjoy trashier texts, Skodas and salad cream, but to argue that they should be given the same weight as their opposing numbers is something I cannot agree with.

And the case is more certain with literature than with salad cream. If you only know salad cream, you don't know how delicious aioli is. But, to use an example given, if you are familiar with Harry Potter and not Hamlet, not only do you miss out on Hamlet, but you miss out on the myriad Shakespearean references and jokes within Harry Potter. And while I think it's certainly possible to enjoy Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire if you have no classical education, I suspect it is not possible to do so without a constant feeling that there are certain levels of the text that are passing over your head. Without the cultural literacy that allows you to do so, some authors are wholly unapproachable: Laurence Sterne, Jasper Fforde and the entire Monty Python output, to start with.

Some people have absolutely no urge to cultural literacy, which I can see as a valid choice, but it cuts you off from a lot of reading. I would argue that you cannot say that you are a keen reader or keen consumer of film and television if you are also avowedly against cultural literacy, because it is like saying that you are a biochemist who doesn't believe in valences. However, this could all just be another sign of me becoming an old fogey.

What about you lot? Especially you young folk? Do you still have that frisson of glee I used to have when I uncovered secret references in texts as I read and learned more and more? Or is that so appallingly 20th century that I should just dig out a corset and start worrying about those commies?

On a final pomo note, Happy 50th Birthday, Severus, and Happy 75th Elvis! May you continue to bring joy to your fans for many years! And happy Real Birthday to

tnumfive ! You're in good company ;-)

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I was linked to this post by a friend, hope you don't mind if I butt in with a few points.

I think you're ignoring on some points here, which I'll go through briefly because basically the last century of cultural analysis has already done this. I'm just flagging some key issues. Since you claim to be a postmodernist, I'm sure you know all this already. I just don't understand how you could know it and then ignore it.

1. The Canon
Who gets to choose the "best"? The most popular culture, reflecting the taste of the "masses", has endured a tradition of being academically devalued, devoid of cultural status. I have never yet found a single reason for this other than people, like you, who talk about "high" literature and say "but this is good, and that is bad". The evidence they produce is the exact same as yours: because "high" literature lasts. You don't see a certain problem with that? That people in positions of cultural power choose what "good" literature is, thereby ensuring that it is taught academically and in schools, allowing it to be read and reread, ensuring that it lasts? It doesn't last just because it is "good", it lasts because certain people say it is good, and the people who say it are people in positions of cultural power. It is important to interrogate how and why that cultural power is wielded, and to what end; it is naive to think that it is just in order to make sure people read good books. Cultural power occurs at certain intersections of class, race and gender. It is eternally struggling to maintain itself. This is why modernist writers felt embattled and besieged by the popular; this is why they saw the masses as threatening. (This is why people like Yeats supported eugenics and why DH Lawrence suggested gassing the lower classes in the Crystal Palace.) Power is and always should be contested, and the power to fix "taste" in literature is not exempt from struggle, nor should it ever be.

Arthur Conan Doyle and PG Wodehouse are interesting in this regard: both were considered low literature at the time of their publication and are now considered classics. Conan Doyle refused to see "the masses" as indistinguishable and threatening--Holmes' ability to read distinct and unique aspects of people's lives from their clothing and demeanour was a political strategy on Conan Doyle's part to specifically counter the idea that people from the working class were indistinguishable; PG Wodehouse made literature out of slang. It does make you wonder what we might write off now as non-literature--and why we do so--which might be very much valued in the future.

2. Taste and Power
No one would argue that there is no difference between a Skoda Octavia and a Bugatti Veyron, or between salad cream and hand-made mayonnaise. It's fine to like and enjoy trashier texts, Skodas and salad cream, but to argue that they should be given the same weight as their opposing numbers is something I cannot agree with. - You might notice some issues here. The Skoda Octavia is an affordable family car; the Bugatti Veyron is an expensive sports car. Salad cream is affordable and easily available; hand-made mayonnaise is expensive to buy and time-consuming to make. Your parallels echo my point above: the expensive stuff, the "good" stuff, is aligned with those who clearly have financial power to purchase it; the "not good" stuff is for people without such power. So here, again, "taste" and power are clearly aligned. I think here it is important to remember that a Bugatti Veyron cannot fulfil the same function as a Skoda Octavia, so if I'm looking for a family car with room for the kids and some luggage, then the Veyron is actually not as good. You can't fix the meaning of "good" without answering the question, "for whom and for what purpose?".

(tbc, as I am apparently tl;dr.)

3. Cultural Literacy
if you are familiar with Harry Potter and not Hamlet, not only do you miss out on Hamlet, but you miss out on the myriad Shakespearean references and jokes within Harry Potter. - So what? If you are not familiar with Stargate: The Movie and Farscape, you miss out on a lot of jokes in the 200th episode of Stargate: SG-1. If you don't know Star Wars episodes 4, 5, and 6, you miss out on a lot of meaning in episodes 1, 2 and 3. Cultural literacy does not only apply to references to the classics; cultural literacy is contextual. So your argument that people should know the classics in order to understand references in other texts is rather hollow; continue along that argument, and you end up in a situation where you really should know every text ever, in case you miss a reference to something.

you cannot say that you are a keen reader or keen consumer of film and television if you are also avowedly against cultural literacy

You need to specify what culture. You keep assuming that "cultural literacy" refers only to "high" culture; it doesn't. Cultural literacy occurs in any form of culture. Therefore anyone who reads a lot or watches a lot of films will be culturally literate, just not necessarily in the texts that you decide are important. And why do you get to decide for other people?

No, that's pop cultural literacy, which has a halflife of about five years. Hang out with people who were teenagers in the 50s and see how many of their jokes you get. It's not possible to stay abreast of it all as contemporary cultures are as prone to movement and ephemera as slang. But since an enormous amount of pop culture makes reference to canonical texts, there you can invest your reading time and expect rewards for years to come.

As a middle aged Englishwoman in New South Wales (I admit a pop culture reference or two can be fun), I take it for granted that the people (my flist for the most part) I am conversing with on my own lj read my default as British culture with an occasional overlay of Australian. While I admit that in a perfect world I would have tackled this entry as a 50,000 word thesis, I am not going to start writing every entry with an eye to mass market audiences, because this is my lj, not work.

And again, you will not find a single reference to high culture in my post. It's an idea that you have brought to your reading, in such strength that it has actually overwritten the original text. That's your right as a reader, but I rather wish you had chosen to engage with my ideas rather than with what you thought they were.

What you are missing is the idea that to engage with literature at anything above a casual level, you do need a basis in canonical texts (even though few of us these days have the extensive coverage that someone like Bloom would argue for). It is the same as needing to be good at valences before you can become a chemist, or algebra before you can become a mathematician. In no other field than literature would people argue that it is a good and productive idea to dispense the basic language on which all else is built.

And I don't mind you popping in to argue, you are always welcome to. But could you be a little more polite next time? I don't believe it's reasonable to tell people what they need to do in their own journals.

Forgive me if I seem rude, I don't mean to be. But just a couple of final points before I quit bothering you, which I am about to do (quit, that is):

What you are missing is the idea that to engage with literature at anything above a casual level, you do need a basis in canonical texts (even though few of us these days have the extensive coverage that someone like Bloom would argue for).

I really can't see how that's true.

I think, to basically go back to my original point, it depends on the function of literature, and we have differing ideas of function. I think of literature in terms of how it works sociopolitically. So when you say, Canon is an historic document that is written based on the evidence that emerges over following decades, I see that as a very problematic statement. It's a sleight of hand. The canon doesn't emerge like something with its own agency; people decide, consciously and less consciously, what the canon will consist of, and there are many cultural pressures on these decisions. The investments and strategies behind those pressures are what interest me, and it always bothers me when I come across arguments like yours and don't see them interrogated, since you are claiming the authority to say what people should read.

Edited 2010-02-12 15:23 (UTC)

people decide, consciously and less consciously, what the canon will consist of, and there are many cultural pressures on these decisions

That's true, but the cultural pressures aren't, as your first comment discussed, those imposing a 'high' culture from a position of power. They're the general users of the language. As an example, most Shakespearean works were performed most authentically as puppet shows touring the provinces in the centuries after his death.

The verve of Shakespeare's storytelling and the richness of his language was recognised by these audiences, many of whom were illiterate, and his plays, with most of their big speeches intact, were popular entertainments. In what you would describe as the bastions of high culture, whole plays were revised by people like Nahum Tate as they were seen as being in 'poor taste'.

This is one of the things that irritates me about the imposition of philosophies like Bourdieu's onto English culture. There is no Academy jealously guarding our literary history. It has been produced by audiences and marketplaces, not by a small number of men personified by Satre and to be reacted against. The model does not fit. (British culture is a more difficult question, as it can be argued that there are Academy equivalents for Welsh culture at the very least.)

Admittedly, many of the competing lists that seek to define the English canon have some works on them that have not been popular with audiences for years, or were never so in this country, but they earn their place through either massive impact at the time of publication (in the case of someone like Smollett (big general readership) or Woolf (taken to the breast of early twentieth century women across the country)), or in the revolutionary effect on writing and language following (the Genji writer, and, one could argue, Marlowe and Kyd (though you could also argue that those two were the James Cameron and Martin Scorseses of their day).

And I disagree with your assertion that I am claiming the authority to say what people should read: I neither do this nor claim the authority to say that 2 must be the number after 1. People can read whatever they like! My argument is that, just as we have a common mathematical language we use if we want to be able to do mathematics in a comprehensive way, so we have a common literary language we use if we want to engage with literature deeply.

Do you need any of this to be a successful barrister, accountant, sociologist, doctor or footballer? No. But to be a good writer, literary theorist or critic? Yes. And why? Because these are professions that engage with the art of words and how they work. To suggest that this can be done well with a background only in trash (which, as I keep saying, can as easily be literary fiction as mass market, in fact I have often thought the former genre more prone to innate incoherence) is to expect your barrister to argue effectively with no experience in torts.

A side note, as I'm not certain on one point, if you were talking about me recommending books when you say 'claiming authority', yes I do that a lot, mostly for YA or speculative fiction, and on the grounds of everything from 'this was really enjoyable' to 'this writer redefines the genre'. I would disagree that this is me imposing any authority, more doing what every keen reader does.

Except that's just not the case.

The idea of 'canon' is one that necessarily cannot be contemporaneous because it is only defined in retrospect. Canonical texts are ones that have massive impacts on the ones that follow them, that shape the language after they are published (and yes, in this day and age there are whole other essays that could be written on what I mean by language and published, but I'll worry about them another time.)

You state that canon is divisive, yet not a paragraph later you are talking about Conan Doyle and Wodehouse, to whom I would du Maurier, Shelley and numerous others, all of whom are 'low culture' as you put it, yet all of which are absolutely parts of the English canon. Hell, Wuthering Heights is up there, and it's the Twilight of its day, but without it, we would not have had melodrama, nor, indeed, Twilight (DAMN YOU Emily Bronte!)

This is the essential point that you are missing. Canon is not a matter of high vs low culture, it is a matter of good works of art vs trash. A lot of literary fiction is trash, as is a lot of mass market fiction. What defines trash is not who wrote it nor what shelf it sits on in a bookshop (because publishers are often the worst judges of quality), it is the lack of substance in the text.

You are making the mistake that canon = high culture and trash = low culture, and I am not sure why you are making it when I expressly say that it does not, in either my definition nor Bloom's.

This is why the Octavia/Veyron comparison works, because people like to read crap fiction, whether it be Twilight or two thirds of Booker Prize winners. People also like to drive reliable family cars. That's fine, like is absolutely unrelated to to this argument. But no one goes to the Octavia to help them think about how to build a better car (market, perhaps, but again, a different discussion). What canon is, what the cultural literacy I argue in favour of is, is the equivalent of a Veyron's elegant engineering solutions. They spark new ideas and solutions and provide groundwork for new developments. The Octavia is a car that benefits from this evolution, but which is not integral to it.

And your argument that what you insist on referring to as high culture = power does not stack up to reality. Literary authors earn about 10,000 pounds per annum from their books if they are doing well. James Patterson, Stephenie Meyer and their colleagues earn that before lunch on a good day. And if you seriously believe the corridors of power are filled with erudite people judging you on whether you have read Proust, then I would contend that you may never have had a discussion with an actual politician.

Moving on to your next comment, as I believe I am about to run out of room here, too.

it is a matter of good works of art vs trash

But this is the central point that you are missing: who gets to define "good" and "trash", and why?

I would contend that you may never have had a discussion with an actual politician.

And I would contend that you've never encountered Pierre Bourdieu.

Edited 2010-02-12 14:53 (UTC)

The next generations of writers! The people who use the language! Canon is an historic document that is written based on the evidence that emerges over following decades. This is why no one would argue that Wolf Hall was essential to an understanding of English literary history, but it is now quite reasonable to say that The Handmaid's Tale is essential to understand North American literature as a whole.

I have, actually, but I far prefer Derrida.

I rather doubt that the entirety of the last century has been devoted to anything so daft, actually. Let us assume however that the SCR of every redbrick-cum-plate-glass jumped-up former poly in Christendom (I am dismayed to see that you are apparently a TCD person, and thus want to know better) believe that critical judgments in literature and the arts are always all of them wholly and entirely a function of power politics, class, and All That. So be it. These distinguished academics may then leave their holes and gather at Avebury and Stonehenge on the equinox every year, in their sandals and hempen clothing, doubtless sacrificing muesli pigs and bulls made of soya-bean to the chthonic deity Postmodernismus, and chant that claim until they’re hoarse; they can all agree all the time about all of it – and it’s still utter balls.

Were one to name two tellers of tales – to use RLS’s formulation – who have had the deepest and lengthiest impact upon Western civilisation (we shall come to other civilisations in a moment), one would quite likely be forced to give the prize to a slave and to a blind bard living in primitive conditions. The figure of Æsop and the tales attributed to him live on, not because the maxims of his fables are universally ‘useful to the magistrate’ (a redaction of Gibbon, as I should hope you recognise): many of them are what you would doubtless seize upon with glad cries as ‘subversive, yay!’, but because they are in every sense popular: they are Hellenistic Hausmärchen. Homer (or of course another man of the same name) has eclipsed Hesiod, let alone Chersios, Theognis, and the rest, not because the powerful took up his poetry, but because the people did. The Hellenistic world quoted ‘the Poet’ – there was only one, so far as the people were concerned: rather as we speak of the Bard or earlier generations referred to Aristotle simply as the Philosopher – in season and out, with a saw or a tag for every occasion; they quoted the Poet rather as Americans quote the Authorised Version. As to why – well, wait for it: we shall discuss Shakespeare soon enough.

Or, again, the search for the roots of the novel as a form has in the West gone back to Egyptian tales and Chariton’s Chæreas and Callirrhoe; yet beyond that close horizon, it can only be concluded that it emerged fully formed, as from the brow of Zeus, in the work traditionally attributed to a woman often called ‘Lady Murasaki’; and her tale of the Shining Prince is more mature and better realised than anything of far later date in the West. Sir Willoughby Patterne, Pamela, even Mr Datchery, stand in the shade when seen beside Hikaru no Kimi.

And this raises a point I made earlier in another thread: that it is simply false to assert that the canon, whatever that may be when it’s at home, is not populated by what one commenter listed as ‘women, people of all colo[u]rs, people with disabilities, and queer folks’. In fact, it always has been. As I noted,

There’s the Analects, and Lady Murasaki, and Mary Shelley (three works and we’ve already ticked two boxes each for, firstly, women, and, secondly, non-Western / non-‘white’); Apuleius, Augustine, and possibly Terence were of part, or wholly of, Berber descent, so far as once can determine, and Tertullian and Macrobius both seem to have been North African; Pushkin and Dumas should be considered by academics as people of colour today, I think (odd how modern bien-pensant liberalism has readopted the ‘one-drop’ rule); Homer and Milton were blind or partially so, as, in later years, were Borges and Aldous Huxley; most of the Greeks and some of the Romans on the Usual and Customary List were bent as a nine bob note – and did we mention Sappho, who ticks two boxes here? – and I suppose most people had put either Wilde or Housman on the list if not both (and Byron, to be sure).... I rather think the list that gets reeled off has always included people in your various categories.

Hi! You know the Empire? You might have heard of us. We wrote back. But do feel free to keep colonising a past and places not yours for your literary history and precious canon; it's not like anything has stopped you before, right? Keep up the old humanist project. Well done, and good evening.

I say, that's hardly Trinners talk. More suited to The Clonskeagh Polytechnic, I would have thought. </jest>

But, more seriously: I think you're being a little unfair with regards to what makes classics classic, and how such works remain in the contemporary consciousness. Yes, political factors play a role in which works become notable and how they stay notable. A work cannot be a classic of the Western Canon if nobody's read it because, say, the author couldn't get published. There are without doubt many worthy works which have fallen to obscurity, and many of the lauded titles may not deserve such praise (*cough*Waiting for Godot*cough*, oh God how awful it is).

But there is also a point to be made that the writers who incorporate elements of literary culture into their work have, you know, read those Great Books. And some may have done so because they were only educated about those Great Books, but surely others have done so because the Great Book spoke to them in some way, or illuminated for them an aspect of the human condition, or struck them in some other way? Not that I'm saying that the only good books are Great Books, but that for a book to remain Great, and for its Greatness to have permeated every literary aspect of out culture, its author had to be doing something right.

lol, it's totally Trinners talk. :) First year undergrad. There's still the old guard there, of course, but over my 5 years there (undergrad & mphil) I gravitated towards the more modern, more politically aware courses, including a lot of postcolonialism. I think it's that that informs my wariness of an idea of a canon, you know? I mean, once you have a set canon, and it becomes something fixed or understood to be fixed, you are immediately going to have opposition and struggle. In the past, that struggle (the Empire writing back, feminist movements) hasn't happened because it's all about good books, it's happened because writers and theorists have recognised the political power of the freedom to make lists and to name what is good and what is not.

So I am all for great writing, but I am not for a list of it, identifying what belongs and, by default, denying entry to everything else. When the author above talks about "great literature" that you have to look at before "they let you mess around with the other stuff", well, that's setting up an opposition that I feel always needs a bit of interrogating. Even judgements that seem to be made on aesthetics alone, i.e., the identification of great writing, are not free from politics.

That's really all I'm saying. I don't think I was clear yesterday, for which I am sorry, but I hope that's clarified my own perspective.

And some may have done so because they were only educated about those Great Books, but surely others have done so because the Great Book spoke to them in some way, or illuminated for them an aspect of the human condition, or struck them in some other way?

Sure, I absolutely recognise that this happens. But there's an awful lot going on behind all that too, more than just a recognition of some common human condition. In fact, the idea of the human condition itself is historically situated and has been interrogated and deconstructed and would be rejected by many writers and theorists today (i.e., feminists, postcolonialists, poststructuralists), so again there are myriad things going on that intersect with certain political axes even in the use of this phrase.

However, I understand not everyone needs to take things apart to see how they work, so I'll leave it at that. And just to clarify it for everyone: Trinity has feminists, postcolonialists and poststructuralists too!

When we speak of Homer and Hesiod, and still more when we come to Vergil, we are of course dealing with what has survived. I would maintain however that the brute fact that Homer and Hesiod, Sophocles, Æschylus, and Aristophanes, Menander, Vergil, Ovid, and Horace, say, did not come down to us (as others have done) as three dubious fragments apiece, is itself a measure of their popular influence: their influence with the people. Certainly, Vergil is uncomfortably celebratory of the Augustan Settlement and the schemes of that gangster Octavian, and was rather by way of being a court poet. But the works of court poets do not survive their political circumstances unless those works are able to stand on their own, by giving pleasure. And that the authors whose works survived the cataclysms of the post-Hellenistic and Roman worlds, the several crises of the Roman principiate, the fall of Rome, and the Middle Ages, were popular with a significant number of all who could read them – and more to the point, who could copy and thus preserve them, and chose to preserve these works and not others in transmissible quantity – is proof enough that the work was accounted good by the reading public as a whole. (It must never be forgotten, although it all too commonly is, that the mediæval Church, that preserved and transmitted these works, was the most meritocratic and democratic of institutions, in which the ploughboy and the villein’s son, simply by getting his letters at the abbey, could rise to be a professor at university, chancellor of the realm, or indeed the pope, so far as his talents could take him.)

By surviving, these works have informed and permeated and inspired all the works that have come after, as Homer fathered Vergil; yet it is equally true that it was because these works influenced the works of later writers, the originals were made newly popular or popular anew, contributing to their survival. The means whereby older works were preserved for most of human history, by the way, puts paid to the puerile and ahistorical assertion that ‘people in positions of cultural power choose what “good” literature is, thereby ensuring that it is taught academically and in schools, allowing it to be read and reread, ensuring that it lasts’, I may add.

I had occasion in an earlier thread here to note that Cranmer’s prayer-book, the Authorised Version, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Shakespeare, and quite likely Milton in the fifth place, are quoted by the English-speaking peoples every quarter hour even in everyday speech.

In fact, as I did not at that time get ’round to pointing out, this is easily demonstrable:

Ah, dearly beloved: do you find life to be a moveable feast? Or do have a tender conscience? Perhaps you have left undone those things which you ought to have done, and done those things which you ought not to have done? There was that time you skived a family obligation – your bounden duty – to finish PD James’ Devices and Desires, say, or watch a rousing Navy film such as In Which We Serve. But that seems to be the way of it, for the quick and the dead both: all sorts and conditions of men. It’s our daily bread, if you will, at all times and in all places, in sickness and in health: indeed, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, until the Sea shall give up her dead. (Even without battle, murder, and sudden death.)

If any of this is at all familiar to you, you need look no further than to the Book of Common Prayer.

As for the English Bible…. It was more to the English-speaking peoples than Luther’s Bible was to the Germans or Dante to the Italians: it did not only fix the language, it yet permeates it, from your brother’s keeper to the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last. So fight the good fight for literacy.

After all, though it be dark as pitch, we needn’t find ourselves in the slough of Despond, as even Mr Worldly Wiseman should realise, or the keepers of Vanity Fair. Bunyan is the source of, it sometimes seems, quite half our homely proverbs that have passed into our daily speech.

And that self-same Milton, in his minstrelsy, jubilant and ornate, his carol and his chant, rich as his orient imagery or humid scenes of Hell in murky hue, remade English in a palpable fashion: without him, we would be much more bland, not as facile in our diction, reluctant to reach to epic heights: a situation to which I in my ire would be hostile indeed.

Shakespeare, of course, is a foregone conclusion, too thoroughly saturating our tongue for us to wait for a thousand examples with bated breath.

Now, the English Bible was in its origins popular, demotic, and subversive. Like Cranmer’s BCP, it draws upon underground, samizdat texts – Wycliffe, Coverdale when the wheel turned against him, and all the rest – and was initially itself the text of a subversion of the old order. Milton was a revolutionary the victory of whose cause, politically, was short-lived, and who even when Noll was on top was regarded with suspicion and remained a noted member of the officer’s mess of the Awkward Squad. Bunyan of course was quite unapologetically a man of the people, a distillation of Dissent, and a Radical before there were any real Radicals.

And then there is Shakespeare. One might, by a good deal of stretching, trimming, and intellectual dishonesty, place him amongst the mere court poets and playwrights; if so, he remains a classic sample of the court poet whose works survive on merit well after the politics of the day are as dust. (Who, after all, reads Seneca for pleasure?) It was the groundlings and the understanders who made Shagsper rather than Jonson or Not Only Beaumont But Also Fletcher (there you have it: that, as Julian and Sandy might have said, that’s yer actual pop-culture reference right there, that is) the Bard of our Bardolatry: and it was not in despite of, but because of, his celebrations of the national mood, to a generation that agreed wholly with the Crown and the court on such essentials as the Destiny of These Isles, the Protestant Succession, the Tudor Triumph, and that, when the bloody Dons launched a papist Armada, Deus sufflavit: God blew, and they were scattered by a Protestant wind.

The situation is still clearer when we turn to the visual arts, to architecture, and to music, all part of the culture, high or low. Mozart escaped his patron to become an ‘independent contractor’, purely because of his talent and the response of the public to it (magical flutes, anyone?). Handel never lost his popularity, precisely because he, like Willy the Shakes, was attuned to the popular mood. Bach suffered a popular eclipse until Mendelssohn presented him anew to the people, not the princes, but he was always the resource from which other great composers quarried their materials; Elgar and RVW suffered eclipses of popularity immediately after their deaths when the political connotations that had been accreted to their works, without their really wishing them to be, ceased to command upper-middle-class suburban respect, yet both re-emerged wholly on merit and upon the strength of their works unadorned by political fashion or the preferences of the powerful.

Still more interestingly, Raffaele Sanzio did not become Raphael by staying on as a court painter in Urbino: indeed, he, like Buonarotti and ‘that-bloke-Lenny-the-one-from-Vinci’ ended by dictating terms to popes and kings. Vermeer, Cuyp, Calraet, Hals, and indeed Rembrandt, like the Brueghels, the Holbeins, and van Eyck before them, have lasted in both popular and critical esteem when the fashionable chocolate-box painters of the era have been forgotten – just as, although Leighton got a peerage and Alma-Tadema got a K, it is Constable and Turner whom we cherish now, and always shall (and Stubbs, I may add). This is the more notable as painters have always been peculiarly reliant upon patronage.

As for architecture – well. I am, sadly, daily reminded that K, that dear man, and dear old Alec Clifton-Taylor, have lived in vain. Nevertheless, the fact of the matter is that architecture imposed by those in power is almost always unsuccessful. Some showpieces do come off, of course, if you’ve a patron of taste and an architect of genius (Balthasar Neumann, say). Yet breathes there a man with taste so dead who would not prefer the local plasterer’s work in the Vierzehnheiligen, for all Neumann’s high tinkering, to the entirety of Cuvilliés’ Amalienburg – or East Anglian pargetting to either? A landscape even of Kedlestons and Chatsworths and Wilton Houses, denuded of villages and cottages and packhorse bridges and parish churches, would be desiccated and ugly. And far more often, buildings erected for the powerful to celebrate power are simply vile on any æsthetic: most of Paris, for example. And if this was so – and it was – in times of less grim and deliberately contemptuous and inhuman architecture, how much more so is it now. Corbusier and that shower, and the Brutalists and their gang, are not worth a single brick from Burcombe Village Hall. Previously, hacks ran up buildings to flatter semi-enlightened despots, and the buildings reflected their pitiable origins in their poverty of invention and uneasy air of pastiche. Today it appears that persons granted public commissions to use public monies in the public interest seem to think themselves licensed to erect academic jests for the delectation of the tittering classes. When Frank Newbould turned, in 1939, from railway posters to his iconic evocations of ‘Your Britain: Fight for it now’, he unerringly chose to depict, not the stately homes of England or the royal palaces, not the House or the House, but fairs and shepherds upon the downs and cathedrals and cottages.

No. If indeed every provincial – in both senses – university (so-called) in the realm were truly to maintain, to a man – I do apologise, Miz Harman MP: person – that ‘[t]he most popular culture, reflecting the taste of the “masses”, has endured a tradition of being academically devalued, devoid of cultural status’ and ‘people in positions of cultural power choose what “good” literature is, thereby ensuring that it is taught academically and in schools, allowing it to be read and reread, ensuring that it lasts’ and ‘it lasts because certain people say it is good, and the people who say it are people in positions of cultural power’, then these univocal cries from the provincial remain simply uninformed, deliberately pig-ignorant balls, and no sober historian – or, indeed, anyone who has the sense to leave the arid lecture halls in which this rubbish is taught and potter about the countryside – can possibly accept these dubious and ill-informed claims, or the very poor reasoning that derives them.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Cultural literacy, I likes it!

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That ‘the last century of cultural analysis has already done this’ is hardly encouraging, is it.

Re: That ‘the last century of cultural analysis has already done this’ is hardly encouraging, is

Re: That ‘the last century of cultural analysis has already done this’ is hardly encouraging, is

Re: That ‘the last century of cultural analysis has already done this’ is hardly encouraging, is

Part 2 of why that analysis is utter balls.

Part Three - you know the drill.

Part ye IVth.

And the last bit.