Is the rise of the image in our culture to blame for the decline in reading? Liz Lopatto raises that question in her wonderful entry on Tuesday’s blog, arguing that it is “the decline of cultural competency, and not the ascendance of images, that . . . is killing writing.” But what exactly do we mean by cultural competency? Is the problem really that advertising images demand no acts of complex interpretation? It’s hard to argue that the latest American Apparel ad campaign demands much from the viewer, but does this diminish our cultural competency, and so make us impatient with the higher demands of literature, or could one make the claim that it requires a different form of cultural competence, the ability to see through images?
The idea of “cultural competency” is based on a body of shared knowledge that makes one feel like an insider, a member of the club, sufficiently in on the joke to smile at a phrase like “more cowbells” or recognize a literary allusion when you step in it. The pleasure of such moments is based on a sense of exclusivity, as we feel that we’ve earned our right to interpret as members of an educated audience, but let’s not forget that, until very recently, one might have described literacy in exactly these terms. We live in a nation that takes the idea of universal literacy for granted, to the extent that the very existence of adult illiteracy in America is viewed as an indictment of our educational system, but anyone who studies the literature of earlier periods has to contend with the fact that until the middle of the last century literacy was a rare privilege, so that the act of reading literature of any kind was largely an upper-class privilege. By some historians’ estimates, London may have had a literacy rate as high as 60% in 1603, the year of the first printing of Hamlet, but the functional literacy rate throughout England in that year hovered in the range of 30% for men and 10% for women. (Even several of the players in Shakespeare’s company could only scratch their mark, suggesting the important role that auditory memory played in the actor’s craft during the period.) To read anything was to know oneself one of a select class of educated men (and an even more select class of women) who had access to the collective memory and imagination of the culture. For the rest, they were capable, as Hamlet suggests, of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows. (Or, presumably, American Apparel ads.) But that also suggests something about the complexity of images in pre-literate cultures. Imagine the importance of images on the streets of any Elizabethan city: “getting it with a minimum amount of effort (or none at all)” wouldn’t represent a sign of cultural decline, but rather an essential survival skill, and one might even suggest that such a culture would demand a graphic literacy with its own complex codes and layers of meaning. Literacy may have given us Shakespeare and Dante, but one might just as easily argue that the shift to literary narratives cost us the complex visual culture that shaped religious art during the Italian Renaissance. Where are all the narrative painters? And do we really “get” any advertising image on first glance? Part of my job when I teach film courses is to make my students slow their eyes down enough to recognize that there’s much more to any visual image than one initially sees, even with (or rather, especially with) the jaded eyes of a generation raised on visual culture.
But it’s also important to recognize that universal literacy doesn’t lead to a greater role for literature in the collective consciousness. There’s a powerful argument to be made that literature retreats into inaccessibility as universal literacy gives more of the population access to it. So do we really want others to share our sense of cultural competency, or does part of the pleasure of such experiences lie in the knowledge that only a few of us can play? One predictable response among the literate classes in London to the Education Act of 1870, which made elementary education mandatory in England and Wales, was not to celebrate that all would now be able to share the cultured pleasures of literature, but rather to predict the degradation of all literary standards by the rise of a popular literary culture. What could one expect from the half-educated masses, critics asked, but “aimless, promiscuous, vapid reading” or “the poisonous inhalation of mere literary garbage and bad men’s worst thoughts.” And can we really say they were wrong? I’m sure we can all agree that we live in a bad moment for literary publishing, as the major New York publishing houses have vanished, one by one, into the vast and insatiable jaws of media conglomerates. But let’s face it, literary publishing has always been less a viable business than a modern form of patronage, in which publishing houses financed serious writing by selling the true objects of our collective desire between lurid covers. Unfortunately, that’s not a business model that stands up to the scrutiny of a corporate board in Frankfurt, so should it really surprise us that ??? in an age when virtually everyone can read ??? you can’t find anything worth reading on the shelves of your local Barnes and Noble? The effect of universal literacy has been to make books into mass-market commodities, and it’s left up to the nonprofits ??? like The Kenyon Review ??? to keep the insurgent flag of literature flying. But instead of mourning the death of literature, I’d suggest that we see this as affirming literature’s crucial role in our culture: not to reward our sense of cultural competency but to challenge it by compelling us to see not only what we already know, but all that we still have to learn.
In his essay, “A New Literacy,” which will appear in the Winter 2007 issue of The Kenyon Review, George Steiner muses that the Last Judgment might prove to be a concours run by French Examiners. It’s a delicious thought, given our current cultural climate, to imagine that heaven might have an entrance exam, and one presumably no less difficult than that required for admission to the ??cole Normale Sup??rieure. All that I can add is my hope that it is an essay exam.