Contemporary Culture and Literary Art

Although English studies is a varied and complex discipline, those of us who work under the aegis of the English Department share many values. Whether we are poets, novelists, essayists, literary scholars, composition specialists, teachers, folklorists, or rhetoricians, we are all writers. We take our language seriously, knowing that it can be artfully arranged to convey human ideas and experiences. We value story. We are aware that literature both shapes and is shaped by culture.

It is these values that I would like to address. In the past year, I have heard two stories arising within our contemporary culture that have haunted me for different reasons. The first I heard from my husband Cless Young, a chaplain in the Air Guard. Last year he spent four months at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, the military hospital where the injured soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan are evacuated as soon as they are stabilized.

What Cless shared about these soldiers taught me to respect them greatly. In each unit a deep loyalty develops among the soldiers because they trust their lives to each other. Many re-enlist for second and third assignments because they feel their absence might make their buddies less secure. If someone in their unit is killed, they experience tremendous guilt for surviving and keep asking themselves if there wasn’t something they might have done. Their work is extremely difficult. On patrol they wear body armor and a rucksack that together weigh fifty pounds in temperatures reaching 115 degrees. In such conditions they patrol roads and neighborhoods and try to tell the difference between those Iraqis or insurgents who are trying to kill them and those who are just trying to live their lives. They may come under fire at any moment and are constantly on guard.

That background makes even more poignant the story my husband told me about one of these soldiers, an LDS woman. One day on patrol in Ramadi, this soldier was assigned to operate the machine gun mounted on top of the Humvee. Patrols were carried out in convoys so that if one vehicle was attacked the others could come to its defense, and her Humvee was the last in the file. Suddenly, a local vehicle (I imagine a vegetable truck or an old van) pulled into the street between her and the next Humvee and then stalled. The rest of the convoy continued, and when the stalled vehicle was finally moved out of the way, the convoy was long gone. To make matters worse, her driver turned into the wrong street, which got narrower and narrower. It was a tactic of the Iraqi fighters to separate one vehicle from the group and then attack it, so this soldier was intensely alert. She scanned the street ahead, trusting the second gunner, inside the vehicle and facing backwards, to take care of the rear. Then a young boy of ten or eleven darted into the street and ran towards her. The insurgents regularly used children to carry and throw bombs, and this boy held his right arm behind his back, hiding something. She called to him to stop, but he just smiled and kept running. She was well trained; she did not hesitate to point the machine gun to shoot the kid, but when she squeezed the trigger, the gun jammed. Then she tried to pull out her nine-millimeter pistol as she simultaneously yelled to the other gunner to turn around and shoot the boy. Her pistol stuck in its holster—no matter how she yanked, she couldn’t get it out—and the other gunner didn’t hear her. By then the boy had reached the vehicle. He held up what he had been hiding—a vase he wanted to give her. She later showed the vase to my husband, a small brown glass ornament decorated with beads.

I think this is an incredibly important story: Because this soldier didn’t shoot a child who was trying to bring her a gift. Because the child might have been carrying a bomb that could have killed them all. Because, unfortunately, war being what it is, other soldiers probably did shoot the child, or the pregnant woman, or the elderly man who thought of Americans as liberators and tried to welcome them in a way the soldiers did not understand.

I would like to contrast this story with another I heard on the national evening news about the economic downturn and sacrifices Americans were having to make. To illustrate, the reporter interviewed a woman in Los Angeles whose business was to plan parties for wealthy corporations and individuals. Hard economic times had cut her clientele in half, she said. In turn her income was way down, and she had to cut back on her own expenses. For example, she was no longer able to have her eyebrows waxed. The story then moved to the eyebrow waxing salon to reveal that it was closing for lack of business. The reporter, before returning us to the studio, commented on how the economy was hurting all Americans. I hope you are all with me on this, but just to make it clear, I was appalled that a journalist could present the loss of eyebrow waxing as an economic sacrifice.

I have been as aghast at the second story as I was absorbed by the first. To consider them together is to reveal something about the culture of these United States in the twenty-first century: on the one hand there are very serious concerns being enacted in our culture, but on the other hand the excesses of American consumerism have made many aspects of our lives incredibly trivial. When physical appearance is elevated over every other value, then eyebrow waxing becomes not a silly indulgence but a necessary beauty ritual.

And this is but one area in which contemporary American life has been trivialized. The media and the internet bombard us with so much information at such speed that it is hard to pick out the significant from the insignificant. As an experiment, I clicked through television channels two to twenty-five on an ordinary weekday at 9:10 in the morning. Here are some of the fragments I heard: . . . as close as you can get to the price without going over . . . . . . how to cope with a clingy kid . . . . . . This car will turn into a dinosaur or a turtle or an elephant . . . . . . Club de la moda— cambia su vida! . . . . . . Men move at a snail’s pace when it comes to emotional intimacy . . . . . . spots and age spots until she underwent facial resurfacing . . . . . . Look at how shiny the stove’s surface is . . .

As Tony Hoagland has said, “the contemporary civilized world feels to me like a wild, disparate, disorganized cascade of data, merchandise, noise, stimuli, selves—quite horrible in its volume if not its particulars” (164); life in a first world culture at the start of the twenty-first century . . . is so corrupted, distorted, so informationally dense, and so disconnected, it elicits a longing for perspective” (165).

These cultural conditions ought to concern those of us who care about English studies and consider them to be both useful and important. Literary art has always reflected the age in which it was written. In 1916 Amy Lowell wrote, “The exterior world is changing and with it men’s feelings, and every age must express its feelings in its own individual way” (16). Thirty-two years later, in 1948, William Carlos Williams said, “what we are trying to do is . . . to seek . . . a new measure or a new way of measuring [the poetic line] that will be commensurate with the social, economic world in which we are living as contrasted with the past. It is in many ways a different world from the past, calling for a different measure” (52– 53). Similar quotations could be provided up until the present day. They lead to the question I ask: What types of poetry, fiction, and essay are appropriate for our age?

Given the trivial nature of much of our culture, it is to be expected that a similar trivialization would occur in our literature, and, indeed, there has been, for the last several years, a movement towards literature that is witty, intelligent, and playful, but dissociated, fragmented, and random; literature that refuses to assert value or even discernable meaning. To use poetry as an example, Tony Hoagland describes what he calls “the skittery poem of our moment”: “Systematic development is out; obliquity, fracture, and discontinuity are in. Especially among young poets, there is a wide-spread mistrust of narrative forms, and, in fact, a pervasive sense of the inadequacy or exhaustion of all modes other than the associative” (173–74). These poems are based in the play of language and often express cultural excess but engage their content only superficially, randomly, and without emotional connection. They are much easier to write than poems that have an emotional center and try to communicate something about experience, or about the value or difficulty of human life. In fact, I can use one of my own as an example: The American Shopper Fish strips at the mall, creole gumbo, jambalaya. Rattlesnake jerky with jalapeno jelly. Swank streets outside, slippers on the freeway, an azure duck, obviously. Chaka Kahn, Bill Murray, do you dance the salsa? Amber. Turquoise. Baby teeth, bicuspids. Alligator pears. Alligator-skin wallet. Alligator farms. Alligator tears. Ritalin. Feng-shui. Avalanche probe. Eucalyptus-steam sauna. Green tea. Iguana. Navajo blanket. Inuit totem pole. Bolo ties, earbuds. Election aftermath. After math and poolside, Italian ice. Hundred-thousanddollar- credit-limit clothing catalogues. Backlogged American tackle sports, allencompassing, all starred.

I hope this poem points out that in our country cultural productions are reduced to consumer goods, indeed that everything is for sale. I hope you noted the clever word play and interesting rhythms. Nevertheless, “The American Shopper” is merely a list that never explains why the random availability of all goods might be hurtful, or in which situations such goods mean something, and to whom they are important. I hate to criticize my own poem, but what Tony Hoagland wrote of another poem of this type applies to mine as well: “The poem . . . has no consequence, no center of gravity, no body, no assertion of emotional value” (179). Furthermore, because the poem is an ironic negation, I negate myself as its author: my own values and assertions are nowhere present. Poems like this one trivialize not just the cultural moment, but the people who live in that moment, including those who have written the poems. To trivialize people I think is the greatest danger of this type of literature.

Because despite what our culture tries to tell us, we are not trivial. “If there be two spirits,” said the Lord to Abraham, “and one shall be more intelligent than the other, yet these two spirits . . . have no beginning; they existed before, they shall have no end, they shall exist after, for they are . . . eternal” (Abraham 3:18). And speaking to Moses, God said, “behold, this is my work and my glory–to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man” (Moses 1:39). As we are God’s work and the source of His glory, He must not consider us trivial. Nor would He want us to lead shallow, superficial lives.

Furthermore, I don’t think that any individual considers himself or herself inconsequential. We are important to ourselves. We care about earning high grades, being accepted into prestigious graduate programs, getting our papers into the best scholarly journals. We care about our dating relationships blossoming into love, our marriages bringing deep and abiding happiness, our children being healthy and finding joy in their own lives. We care about each other, about working and serving in meaningful ways, about the well-being of our Church, our country, and our culture, and about our relationships with our Father in Heaven and our eternal selves. We care about these serious and significant aspects of life even as we join in many of the trivial pursuits our culture throws before us. And so, despite the cultural excess we live in, we should care about expressing these extremely significant concepts in our art.

As Latter-day Saint writers and literary scholars, we should, it seems to me, resist the trivialization of our culture and our literature. How will we do it? That’s not a question that is easily answered. I can’t give you five quick solutions; I can only ask you to think at some length about this question: What type of poem or story or essay—in language, form, and content—is appropriate to our culture and can say what needs to be said to help us re-imagine it?

It won’t do to pretend that we don’t live in this cultural moment, but, remembering the story about the soldier in Iraq, I find there is much to write about that is of great consequence in individual experience.

It has always been the province of the next generation to rebel against established conventions, as Amy Lowell did in 1916 and William Carlos Williams in 1948. I hope you students, poised to take over the production and consumption of culture, will say, “The conventions of the current literary moment are in every way inadequate to convey what I have to convey. In my art, I will do the difficult work of indicating what I value. I refuse to represent life as so bereft of meaning that readers will experience themselves as superficial, inconsequential, and shallow and seek fulfillment in acquisitions rather than relationships; in jolts of sensationalism rather than the exploration of ideas and a growing understanding of truth; in appearance rather than service and self-knowledge.”

Finally, we can read and study, and learn from art that we perceive to be significant. With that purpose in mind, I’d like to conclude by quoting the last part of Elizabeth Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses.” The beginning of the poem is Bishop’s detailed observation of a scene at the fishhouses: an old man repairing a net as he sits in the midst of fish tubs and wheelbarrows near a boat ramp that goes down into the water, and then the sea itself, silver in the evening light. The poem’s conclusion focuses on the sea, which becomes a metaphor expressing the great worth of the essential and hard-won knowledge that gives value to our lives. Bishop describes the sea as “Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,/element bearable to no mortal” (ll. 47–48). The poem continues: The water seems suspended above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones. I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same, slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones, icily free above the stones, above the stones and then the world. If you should dip your hand in, your wrist would ache immediately, your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn as if the water were a transmutation of fire that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame. If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter, then briny, then surely burn your tongue. It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world, derived from the rocky breasts forever, flowing and drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, flowing and flown. (ll. 65–84)

In a few years most of the students assembled here tonight will be scattered across the world, engaging in our profession as parents, teachers, scholars, editors, and writers. We all have different gifts and will serve in different places. Many of you will do more substantial, more influential work than any of your professors. Most of you will be in the minority, wherever you are, in terms of your religious community and your values about literature and art.

It might seem that you can make little difference, in your small world, regarding what literature people value, what they read. But consider Christ’s answer to the question, “Whereunto shall I liken the kingdom of God?” “It is like leaven,” he said, “which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened” (Luke 13:20–21). A bread recipe calls for just a half-ounce of yeast to be combined with six cups of flour and several other ingredients. That tiny amount of yeast can make the dough rise so that it becomes two loaves of delicious bread. Think of yourselves as the yeast, that little substance that brings about great change. I have faith that you students—your generation—are of the stature to meet the considerable challenges of your future, and that you will make contributions in the various disciplines of English studies. By suggestion, by what you write, by your scholarship, and by the works you teach and promote, be the yeast that will help contemporary literature rise into a wholly different thing than it might be without you. -Susan Elizabeth Howe