N.B.: This is a far more thoughtful response to Feodor's complaint about my remarks concerning Marcel Proust. If this doesn't satisfy him, well, I'll buy him a subscription to Dissent.
One point George Scialabba made last evening with which I profoundly disagree (for obvious reasons) is the effect of the internet on literacy. I find this odd, in particular, since so much of what happens on the internet has to be read. Perhaps a better way of putting it, or perhaps this is what he meant, is the decline of a particular type of literate culture that, indeed, has been in decline for a few decades, and lamented by conservative intellectuals for quite some time.
Much of the ballyhoo in higher ed over curriculum reform, emerging canons versus older canons, and what not seem to me to be, at least in part, a contest over what constitutes a literate person. For decades, there was an agreed-upon understanding, if not definition, that a literate person was one who could converse knowledgeably about particular pieces of fiction - Proust, Faulkner, Joyce - that constituted a particular modernist narrative about western society and its discontents. As time went on, and more and more literature from around the world became available, it was obvious that this particular set of writings was inadequate to describe an understanding of the world that purported to be cosmopolitan and open. Whether it was emerging writers such as John Barth, Philip Roth, or even Norman Mailer (late editions to that original canon in most places); to African-American writers such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neil Hurston, the poet Countee Cullen, and Toni Morrison; to non-western authors including Chinua Achebe, Vikram Seth, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez; the pressure to include voices that were strange, occasionally non-English-speaking, and offered a perspective that was both different and illuminating increased.
With the advent of the internet, the opportunity for exposure to voices and sources outside what is considered acceptable increased exponentially. While it is always necessary to have cultural gate-keepers whose task is to sift through the mass of writings, both popular and literary, to find those nuggets that are truly worth keeping, the possibilities of exposure to all sorts of ways of looking at the world has democratized in a way that makes it much more difficult for those who see their task as holding the gates against the culture-Philistines.
All the same, I believe that the whole idea, what it means to be a literate individual, has been and continues to undergo a change. I believe that relieving ourselves of an ossified, strictly enforced canon of works defined as "literate" is a good thing. I do not for one moment believe this means we as a culture are, somehow, becoming more stupid. On the contrary, all it means is that we are constantly re-evaluating what it means to be literate and, therefore, the sources for understanding what that means, who we are, how we understand ourselves, is evolving. The change isn't a vertical one, from more to less intelligent and thoughtful. The change is horizontal, or perhaps a change of set. We are merely moving from this set of understandings to that set, without, in the process, losing any intellectual heft.
Part of the problem with the old canon, as I see it, is its narrow focus. While modernism was in full swing, these works were not just important; they were necessary for any understanding of the world beyond one's own very limited vision. As the ability to reach beyond the boundaries of the west opened our collective ears to voices as yet unheard, many of the ideas that shaped our sense of ourselves as a unified, even unitary culture, began to break down.
This is not to say that more contemporary, or non-Western, writers are better or worse. The only way to evaluate that is on the merits. This is not to denigrate any particular author, or set of authors. It is, rather, to ask the vitally important question - Who are we? How do we see ourselves? What is important to us? As the answers to these questions change, so, too, the sources that give us clues to those answers. This process is one that is necessarily in flux.
I was far too flip, and insulting, in a recent comment on the novelist Marcel Proust. In the process, I violated one of my own rules - I made a particularly personal point-of-view something far more than just a personal observation. I, therefore, apologize for that particular bit of childishness. While I cannot, for the life of me, crack the nut of Proust's narrative style, I would never deny his importance as a figure in western literary culture.
It is, however, necessary to ask the question, without making it facile, of the relevance of this particular, almost quintessentially modernist author. If the answer is that reading Proust is still necessary to get a grip on who we are (it is without a doubt necessary for an understanding of who we were at one time), then I would insist that he be read. Along with Anthills of the Savannah.
