Center and Margin, Major and Minor Culture

...I am inclined to think of important art and culture as consisting of significant ideas and strong forms, as work that embodies, recalls or represents, or makes possible complex and important experiences...I am inclined to think of great work as that which is comprehensive and suggestive, impossible or nearly impossible to exhaust for meaning and relevance...Yet, I find the significance I am looking for in literature, film, music, and visual art, usually. Yet, the greatest aspects of culture are often elements and experiences that only a few persons have regular access to: for most people, opera, ballet, European classical music, jazz, visual art, literature, and philosophy, are not consistent features of their lives, if they are present at all. What, then, defines that kind of greatness, if it is uncommon, if it is unknown, to many or most people? It's not popularity. It must be the form and content of the work, its depth, its style, its wisdom; and that the work offers something of insight and use to those who know it, and offers beauty to those who want it. It is both impersonal and intimate...

I have been thinking about the impersonality, the necessary impersonality, of art and culture. Someone I know, a personal acquaintance, confused a fiction I wrote with a personal memoir, a rather unlikely but true confusion: and he was glad to have a statement about my "personal" relations after so much of my commentary about "cultural" matters. It was a weird appreciation, as for me, whatever concerns me, whatever pleases or stimulates me, is personal. I have liked and loved, disliked and loathed, all sorts of people, those with and without beauty, education, or money; but I am most favorable to those who have knowledge and kindness. I like James Baldwin and Toni Morrison much more than I like people I have shaken hands with or seen daily for years. I prefer the lines of Shakespeare and Henry James to any religious text. I get more pleasure from watching a film than I do from listening to most people describe their family or love relations. I want meaning, not gossip. I want significance, not pettiness. I want knowledge and logic, not mindless emotion or prejudice...

Living in one of the world's great cities, such as New York, it is easy to believe that one comes in contact with important culture--that the museum show one is seeing matters, that the writer one is listening to matters, that the concert one remembers matters, that the proposal one has just heard for a new project matters...And, it is more difficult, sometimes, despite the sometimes too emphatic declarations, to believe that what is occuring in a small town, such as a small Louisiana town or village, is something that matters, even when it involves culture or politics that seem to engage one's neighbors. One wants to examine the evidence more closely. One wants to see and hear how and why something matters--how much work went into an event, fact, or work; how many effects result from engaging with that thing; how long lasting is the attention the phenomenon inspires...Life in Louisiana is, quite probably, more like life in much of America, than life in New York; and yet small town life is not typically presented as representative in public culture (it does not carry the same aura of importance, of symbolic or practical significance, that life in a metropolis does). There is so much here, in Louisiana, that is worth attention, beginning with the land itself. There is unique language, food, and music. There is a unique history, cultural and political. Is what is unique always important; or must it be made important: by an equally unique and creative sensibility; or by powerful institutions?

I have been thinking about what makes culture major, and what makes culture minor, trying to clarify the terms, the situations, the examples...

I tend to think that grievance literature almost always connotes a minority perspective, though it is true that much great literature contains a complaint against humanity (minority literature often includes particular historical charges, not simply general, recognizable protest against human nature or human society, such as against human cruelty or ignorance or selfishness).

I tend to think that great literature contains so many different kinds of experiences it cannot be reduced to one idea, to one emotion. It can be read as a hero's journey, a family saga, a social history. It can be read as a rumination on landscape or furnishings. It can be read as a meditation on manners. It can be read as a philosophy of being and perception. It can be read for comedy or tragedy. It is not ever just one thing...