If a person were to write some books of poetry or essays or serious fiction or a play, the person might be denominated as “literary,” a word signaling a connection with the deep sustenance of literature, an entity not to be confused with entertainment. As a quality, the word is complimentary, but how the quality translates into the society-at-large, if it translates at all, is hazy since the word has a self-sufficient, unto-itself quality. Even when the subject matter may be mean, a degree of elevation attends the word. The “literary” shadows the meaningfulness of religious texts but is free, as the product of random talents, to go its undefined way. Yet the way is defined by a sense of particular importance, a gathered articulateness and artfulness that can, at its best, speak across centuries, if not millennia.
A whiff of earnest gentility has accompanied the word in the United States, perhaps a vestige of the Boston/Cambridge/Concord ethos that stood for literature in the first half of the nineteenth century and remained as a high-minded cultural reminder into the second half of that century. To be sure, even at the dawn of American literary culture, various pieces did not fit in the puzzle. Whitman was decidedly not genteel, although he looked to Emerson for approval. Thoreau, even as he lived in Concord, respected and trusted the Native take on how to live. Poe was an outlier who took some of his cues from outlaw writers like De Quincey. Dickinson was born into the genteel world of Amherst but lived another life in her poetry. Then there was Frederick Douglass writing his autobiography. The fractures are there from the beginning, which is no surprise when one considers the isolating, riven, commercial nature of the society. The nation-at-large had other things on its collective mind than literature. Patriotism in the sense of the nation embracing its poets was never a factor. Indeed, most Americans remain indifferent to Whitman and Dickinson. How could such long-ago people matter? Did they sell much?
Somehow, culture and literature should matter. The first instinct is to cite official entities and take refuge there – academies and institutions of higher learning. The United States, however, is a far-flung place. Any central anything is doubtful for many Americans, beginning with the very fact of a central government. Agreement, as we know all too well at this point in time, comes hard. Also, any whiffs of elitism are grounds for suspicion if not outright dismissal. As to universities and colleges, they have been mixed up variously with religion, science, athletics, and business. Literature was once thought of some required worth for first-year students but that was a while ago. As to culture, commerce has been glad to supply myriad pop varieties. What is the written word beside various glowing screens, large and small, and the allure of celebrity?
Culture holds societies together and gives people reasons to live beyond sheer survival. Culture can be – and often is – nothing more than nationalism, which tends to be narrow if not downright vicious. We think of the Nazis and their putative culture, a culture based on destroying “wrong” cultures. We think of empires and how many indigenous cultures they destroyed. What is perplexing about culture, and especially about literary culture, is that it often stems from fugitive sources, as with the Americans I cited earlier in this essay. Monarchies created official cultures through the king and his court. So did ideological societies such as the Soviet Union, which even as post-Soviet Russia has tended to kings, courts, censorship, and proclamations. An identity-obsessed, perpetually scrambling democracy such as the United States has few official cultural outlets. How could it? A significant portion of the population finds the whole notion of culture repugnant, which is to say pretentious and unwanted.
The paradox in the United States is that a society based on individualism really has little to no use for true individualism in the sense of honoring the unique sensibility and worth of each of its citizens. The radical Separatists who came to New England in the 17th century believed passionately in the worth of each testifying soul, but that sense of value has, over centuries, metamorphosed into the individual as consumer in a mass society, a switch from the internal to the external. The value of the individual at this point in time is notional and sentimental, something to be nodded at but not taken seriously. If it were taken seriously, schools would be very different places from what they are, as would discourse in the society-at-large. Schools would emphasize the culture available to Americans and seek to nurture that sense in each student. After all, each student is an American. Doesn’t that matter beyond saluting the flag? The answer is “No.” The society is content to let commerce decide what culture is and, in the spirit of benign neglect, let the past shift for itself, which, by definition, the past cannot do.
Hence the impotence that surrounds the “literary,” a sense of a ghetto declaring itself to be a whole city or county, a sense of asserting that something matters when in the eyes of many it doesn’t matter at all. Kid Rock does just fine. For those who treasure words, this situation makes for a degree of frustration, a degree of doubt, and a degree of denial. The present day seems something like alive and well since, like clockwork, prizes are given out and reputations bruited. The relevance of hundreds of years of American literature, however, remains untouched, as if the nation, transfixed by technology and dysfunctional politics, didn’t need to consult its own writers. And amid the demands of anyone’s work week, all the “busyness” the society promotes, how much time is there for such engagement? Culture winds up as the pabulum of idealism, an easily dismissed impracticality. Meanwhile, people “die miserably every day” (to quote William Carlos Williams) because they have no idea of the sustenance that is denied them. As more than one American writer has testified, the nation’s geographic bounty represents a whole lot of nowhere, a place bounded by the poignant, the overbearing, the infantile, and the tragic.
YES!