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 Three - you know the drill.

[wemyss.livejournal.com]

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.