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

And the last bit.

[wemyss.livejournal.com]

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.