Cultural literacy, I likes it!

[blamebrampton]

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 ;-)

Comments

Part 2 of why that analysis is utter balls.

[wemyss.livejournal.com]

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.