Culture - a Selfish [double sic] view

[french frank]

A wide-ranging and and thought-provoking piece on language, and culture generally, by Will Self. I particularly liked:

"Both general readers and specialist critics often complain about my own use of English - not only in my books, but also in my newspaper articles and even in radio talks such as these. "I have to look them up in a dictionary", they complain - as if this were some kind of torture. "

"The problem is that at the same time these [i.e. moral] victories were being won another province was being abandoned without a fight, and this is the realm where films, paintings, novels and even newspaper articles, radio and television programmes are intellectually [my italics] challenging.

"I don't for a moment mean to suggest that no-one produces anymore cultural artefacts that are "difficult" in this sense - of course they do - it's just that these works are no longer regarded as the desiderata that any well-cultivated person aspires to an appreciation of. Rather, "difficult" works are parcelled off, and the great plurality and ubiquity of our media means that their specialist audience can be readily catered to - whether they are foot fetishists, or Fourierists or anything else."

"In the literary world, books intended for child readers are repackaged and sold to kidult ones, while even notionally highbrow arbiters - such as Booker judges - are obsessed by that nauseous confection "a jolly good read"."

"Take the American cultural critic Dwight MacDonald, who coined the expression "midcult" to refer to those works which "pretend to respect the standards of high culture, while in fact (they) water them down and vulgarize them". "

"But the most disturbing result of this retreat from the difficult is to be found in arts and humanities education, where the traditional set texts are now chopped up into boneless nuggets of McKnowledge, and students are encouraged to do their research - such as it is - on the web."

And finally:

"The contrast with sport is instructive: in both realms of human endeavour, the consumers are largely passive, but at least sports fans - unlike cultural ones - don't protest against elite athletes, or bar them from competing on the grounds that they are too fast, too strong, or too limber.

"On the contrary, we are repeatedly told by the likes of Sebastian Coe that athletes capable of the most difficult feats offer vital inspiration to couch-potato kids.

Let the same be the case for mental athletics, because without the bar to jump over set high, we'll all end up simply playing in the sandpit. "

[Serial_Apologist]

I heard this - always a good slot to catch after enduring Sunday Platitudes - and, as so often, Will Self was spot-on.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

yes but can any one tell me what this book under review is actually about and why it might have been written [i am very demented this weekend?] because my suspicion is that the fog of difficulty once cleared we will be left looking at a small toy ....

[amateur51]

An interesting piece about an important subject. However, Self misunderstands what 'sesquipedalian' really means; is unhelpfully fingerwagging about the idea of "a jolly good read"; and the article offers links to the OED so that we can look up the difficult words that are identified, but unfortunately the link doesn't work.

[DracoM]

The trouble is that Will Self has been just a teeny tad complicit in casting himself as the white-faced-clown intellectual eccentric, maybe because that is sadly the on;y way he can keep getting exposure, such that what he says becomes less important than how he says it. Which is dismayng. As FF's quotes admirably reveal.

[cloughie]

A [URL="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17777556"]
"The problem is that at the same time these [i.e. moral] victories were being won another province was being abandoned without a fight, and this is the realm where films, paintings, novels and even newspaper articles, radio and television programmes are intellectually [my italics] challenging.

Notice he omits music from this, maybe a genuine onmission or is Mr Self not into music?

[aeolium]

I think Self is in danger of treating difficulty as a virtue in itself, which I don't think is the case. In non-fiction, for instance, I look for the greatest possible clarity and lucidity that is consistent with the complexity of the subject under discussion - especially in historical studies, but I think it's probably desirable as a general rule. In a work of art I don't think there are really any guidelines. Would Shakespeare's plays have been considered difficult in his own time, given that he was writing them for a varied audience? Isn't much of the difficulty simply due to the passage of time and the present unfamiliarity with the Bible story and classical myths? His work was looked down on by contemporary intellectuals. Also there is a difference between the difficulty of a work in terms of its comprehension and its creation - something that appears very simple, like some Schubert songs or a Blake poem, may be very difficult to write. Some of the cult of difficulty seems to have originated with that late C19/early C20 distrust of the popularisation of culture, with intellectuals like Ortega y Gasset (and earlier Nietzsche), a movement which coincided with the growth of the eugenics movement. Nowadays the wheel has turned and there is pressure to popularise works of 'high' culture.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

ok so assume an intellectual ability or cognitive complexity of a level shared by 10% of the people [slightly less than two standard deviations above the mean IQ eg] [i use this since vocabulary is a very good measure of IQ and the ability to handle difficulty]

in 1900 this meant that there were circa 100m souls on the planet with such a level of ability and 900m not possessed of it
however in 2015 there are 700m such souls with the cognitive capability and 6.3bn without it .....

the relative size of the markets for cultural products does it eh?

[amateur51]

Anthony Burgess was a great one for using unusual words but I always felt there was a joy in his use of language that added to the reader's pleasure - almost a sense of his glee that he was sending many of us off to the dictionary. I feel that with Joyce too - and both were very fond of making words up too.

It doesn't make his ridiculous comb-forward forgivable tho'

[french frank]

Well, it's 'thought-provoking', literally, rather than just in a vague 'isn't this interesting?' use of the term.

You can object to individual points but if Self feels that there is a mot juste - it conveys 100% what he wants to say - then he is right to use it: it is enriching; and people reveal something about themselves if they object. (I confess to reading Lowry's Under the Volcano and feeling he was sitting with a dictionary alongside him, or a thesaurus of interesting words.)

Underlying it, though, surely is a protest that anything regarded in some influential circles as ' too intellectual' has to be shoved into a backwater or processed to make it more accessible. And with that, a collusion with the generality of 'consumers' who want popularisation and an infantilised culture.