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The Pattern of Narratives: Literature and Popular Culture
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17596 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1990 |
5,319 Words |
| Author
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Kurt W. Back
Kurt W. Back is James B. Duke professor of sociology at Duke
University. |
The present age can claim to be the post-everything period. In art and literature this naming may have started with Postimpressionism and has continued with postmodernism, postcolonialism, post-Marxism, post-Vietnam, post-Cold War. This language evokes a society that knows where it has been, that knows what it is not, but does not want to acknowledge any current commitment to ideas, and is not likely to do so in the future.
The core of a society that consciously defines itself only in a negative way is, obviously, very slippery to grasp. These core values and ideas are often symbolized in a society's art and literature; but a negative identity will not be represented in manifestos or appealing symbols. Although literature still can act as a social indicator, it will do so in an indirect way.
It follows that using literature to understand contemporary ideas has its own peculiar problems. A historian giving a picture of a distant society can cite that era's literature as part of his evidence. He can use, of course, only part of the fiction then current - for example, choosing to discuss Hamlet as representative of the awakening of individual consciousness and self-doubt in the Renaissance, or Daisy Miller as victim of the clash between American and European self-concepts. Obviously, one can use only that literature which has survived; this would mean, almost exclusively, literature that has been written down and thought worth preserving. Much of Elizabethan writing has been lost, and so have many nineteenth-century ephemeral works. Some of the transmission would be due to chance, but in great part, contemporaries and future generations would want to preserve what they thought to be valuable; so we are left, then, with literature that has "stood the test of time." The whole corpus of literature thus omits many of the stories people have told each other, which somehow, have not been found worth preserving. Much of this material has existed only in oral tradition or in so few manuscripts that no copies have survived.
Using literature to assess contemporary events has an immediate disadvantage: One cannot profit from hindsight by comparing whole periods of literature and history, or even by using works of a later period to substantiate the general direction of trends. In our own society the situation is different; we have more material available, ephemeral and popular tales as well as works that would have been transmitted in earlier times. Thus we are exposed to the future classics and the future lost literature at the same time. We cannot be certain how to distinguish them, although we have a good idea of what
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