Cultural Cringe.

Yesterday, one of my workmates expressed incredulity that another workmate had never heard of Ebenezer Scrooge. It’s kind of odd to be bringing up A Christmas Carol for the second time in a short while, but that’s what prompted me to compose this post. Or rather, the ignorant workmate’s response, which was a withering refusal, on being told it was by Dickens, to even consider reading “anything like that”, prompted me to compose this post.

This particular book is an especially good example: “scrooge” has entered the English language as a by-word for an unpleasant miser, and the basic plot of the novel has been adapted and repurposed so many times (most recently by Doctor Who a couple of weeks ago) that it has become a trope in its own right. Yet wilful, dismissive ignorance of the novel seems to be not only acceptable to, but encouraged by, the culture I find myself in.

I’m not setting out here to defend Dickens from anyone who doesn’t like him. I myself have only read a few of his works. My problem is not that this person doesn’t like a “classic”. Any honest person who reads enough “classics” is bound to find one he doesn’t like — I don’t care for To Kill a Mockingbird, and I find much contemporary “literature” to be pretentious and near unreadable. Even with works I enjoy, I can see how others might not; Les Misérables is both beautifully written and superbly detailed, but the plot is very obviously an excuse for Hugo to comment on early-nineteenth-century French society. But I recognise the place that To Kill a Mockingbird has earned in the canon. The problem I have is the attitude that because something was released before last year, or written by somebody dead, or in any way associated with tradition, it’s worthless.

Not only are you missing out on a lot of things you might otherwise enjoy, but your enjoyment of a huge number of more recent works is severely diminished if you can’t see on whose shoulders they are building. The Princess Bride is a great story in its own right, but so much of its humour comes from playing with various fairytale tropes. And it’s even funnier if you’re familiar with Les Misérables, as Goldman works in a wonderful parody of the style of that novel.

The sheer incoherence of a culture that sneers so at its own foundations baffles me. Such an attitude can only lead to cultural impoverishment. We can hold that off for a little while by importing things from other cultures — as indeed we do, as foreign cultures are held in much higher regard (in a lot of cases) than our own or its closer relations, if only for fear of offending those who are not yet so postmodern and cynical as to be ashamed of their own culture. But even this doesn’t stop us from losing sight of the giants on whose shoulders we are privileged to stand.

I’m a big fan of multiculturalism, and of cultural progress, and of new traditions and techniques and tropes, but this doesn’t have to mean throwing our own traditions and treasures out if they’re worth keeping, just because they’re old. If they’ve survived this long, it’s well worth asking why. They might not have much to offer us any more, but usually a concept, or a story, that’s lasted has lasted because it is still useful, or entertaining, or enlightening.