A Pilgrim’s Digression

One constant in the life of a parent is that children control the music in the car. I have 3,210 songs and podcasts on my iPod, but on a family roadtrip, or even a trip across town to the grocery store, Brendan determines the two or three albums we actually listen to. Again and again, we listen to the same music. Dare to select something different, and one risks a miserable voyage.

Right now, there are four albums we listen to: the soundtrack to the film O Brother, Where Art Thou [links will open iTunes]; the new Dan Zanes album Catch That Train; a collection of children’s music by various artists, including Bob Dylan, titled Gather Round: Songs For Children and Other Folks;and finally, Bruce Springsteen’s new album, We Shall Overcome.

These are all great albums for both adults and children. On the Gather Round CD, the Jerry Garcia version of “Freight Train” is one of Brendan’s favorite songs, and it is a rather emotionally weighty piece, since it deals with the subject of death.

“Big Rock Candy Mountain” from the O Brother soundtrack has been a staple of bedtime singing since Brendan was just an infant, and the song is so deeply ingrained in his being that if he hears any version other than the 1927 Harry McClintock version, he makes us change the song. For example, the version sung by Burl Ives in the nineteen-fifties is probably the more common version of the song, but Brendan won’t hear it. There is only one “Big Rock Candy Mountain.”

Recently, while listening to the Springsteen album with Brendan I had some thoughts on the subject of what it means to be literate in contemporary society. I’d like to write down a few of those thoughts here and gather some feedback on what my readers think about the subject. We often hear people bemoan the fact that we live in a “post-literate” age, apparently because no one reads Shakespeare anymore, and I want to propose that this assumption is based on an antiquated notion of what it means to be literate.

In fact, most recently I heard a host of a podcast refer to our era as “post-literate.” The podcast I was listening to was the New York Times Book Review. Needless to say, this seemed a bit ironic, or at least, from the perspective of the Book Review, self-defeating to bemoan illiteracy while making a podcast.

My reflections on the subject of literacy were prompted specifically by the song “Jesse James” as sung by Bruce Springsteen.  The song is a traditional ballad from the 19th century that has been covered probably by hundreds of artists.  Brendan  himself sings a version of it, which he has alternatively titled “Jesse in his Grave,” based on a line from the chorus.

For me, listening to the song reminded me of a Brady Bunch episode I saw a couple times when I was a kid. In the episode “Bobby’s Hero” from February 1973, Bobby Brady becomes unduly obsessed with Jesse James, whom Bobby believes to have been a Robin Hood-like hero. Mike Brady arranges for him to speak to an elderly man whose parents were murdered by Jesse. Bobby subsequently has a nightmare in which Jesse James robs a train on which the Bradys are riding. Jesse kills all the Bradys while Bobby looks on. Bobby wakes up, lesson learned.

This could be merely an unremarkable anecdote relating a connection I made between a modern cover version of an old song and a corny television show of the nineteen-seventies. Yet for my brain to make that connection and then deduce a conclusion from it, i.e. that Springsteen is singing the “Bowdlerized” (as opposed to Brady-ized) version of James’s life, required certain a priori knowledge one might very well call literacy.

It is not an unremarkable feat to make the connections I made between these two pieces of popular culture. I say that not out of a sense of my own superiority, but because I believe that ordinary people make similar cross-referential connections every day, and that this is an example of what I would term literacy. It is really no different than when a traditionally “literate” person reads T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and recognizes the poet’s allusions to classical literature and mythology.

Consider another connection I made, albeit erroneously. Until I Googled the episode of the Brady Bunch in question, I thought it was Peter who had the obsession with Jesse James, which prompted a whole other series of associations. Today, the actor who played Peter stars in a “reality” show, My Fair Brady, in which he and his fiancée allow their arguments and intimate moments, as well as their wedding plans, to be filmed and broadcast on TV.

Of course the very term “reality show” is an oxymoron. When a person steps before the camera, their whole demeanor and mindset changes, as anyone knows who has shot a home movie. An early Edison film from 1900, shot in Paris at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, shows people still fairly innocent of the movie camera acting as people do today. They cannot pass by without looking into the camera; they are almost compulsively drawn to mug and otherwise put on a show.

Yet it is appropriate that a Brady (funny how we don’t know them by their real names) should star in a “reality” show. The Brady Bunch remains one of the most notoriously artificial shows ever produced. Even as a kid, I could not help but wonder why the yard was made of astroturf instead of grass. How much more appropriate would it have been if Peter, not Bobby, was the character with the Jesse James obsession?

Typically, when educated people refer to literacy, we mean not merely the ability to read and write, but the ability to understand what one reads within a social and historical context. To my mind, this should also include the act of understanding the socio-historical context of the myriad of pop culture references that abound in our society today. There is an implicit snobbishness in a definition that privileges the written word, and books more specifically. Such a limited definition allows a group of academic elites to define what is “high” or “low” in our culture; it allows them to establish a canon, which typically includes only the works they are familiar with and enjoy, and no matter how broad-minded or egalitarian a canon might be, it is still exclusionary.

Thus though “literacy” as it is used today refers primarily to the printed word, I would propose that literacy goes far beyond the cloistered realm of the page and the vocabulary of a few great authors, to include the artifacts of culture. Film, TV, video games, songs (both commercial and non-commercial folk or Alternative music), even television commercials. I use the word “artifacts” deliberately because, to create a perhaps inept simile, TV shows such as the Brady Bunch are like the spots one sees after glancing at the sun. They are artifacts that imprint upon the memory, often sub-consciously but with greater persistence than, say, one of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

A sonnet takes a long time and many readings to imprint. A Brady Bunch episode may imprint quickly and well-nigh permanently, though not perfectly. I misremembered that it was Peter, not Bobby who had the Jesse James obsession, for example. Yet, why did I remember the episode at all? I have remarked here previously that despite all my reading, I remember very little of it. I’ve read Shakespeare, but cannot quote you any of it. Names of characters, plot points, themes, all have dissipated with time. Yet all things considered, I have a pretty decent memory of an episode of a bad television show I watched probably more than twenty years ago. In fact I remember many such episodes, not just of the Brady Bunch, but of other shows as well.

TV shows, comic books, commercials, movies, toys, catch phrases, jokes, clothing styles, music…these artifacts are not detritus of the brain, as commonly supposed. They are the cultural language with which I communicate with other people, and specifically with people of approximately my own age. With people of some education, I may communicate in other terms, the language of literature and philosophy, for example, but mostly I speak in the “vernacular.”

Why is that considered ignorance, or an example of illiteracy? To me, such elitism stinks of the same kind of cultural colonialism which tried to stamp out native languages and culture in the 19th century in favor of the language and culture of “civilization.”

The way in which we communicate with each other in the language of culture was illustrated to me just this past Saturday, when my wife, my son, and myself accompanied our pastor’s wife and her boys to the theater, where we saw Monster House.

It was quite a good movie, incidentally. Though animated, it was a serious film about the consequences of being cruel to others who are different. Near the beginning of the film, however, is a scene in which one of the characters is shown playing an Atari. The name of the video game system is not given, but the viewer clearly sees the boy playing Pong, and immediately with one image, the entire setting of the movie is changed from the present time to twenty-five years ago.

The reference to the Atari is probably lost on many viewers of the movie; it seemed to me to be aimed specifically at people of my age or slightly older. But for the audience at which it was aimed, it would be quite a powerful allusion, recalling all sorts of memories and feelings from a distant past on the cusp of technological revolution.

With one carefully placed allusion, the director established time and place and in doing so established a deeper reference point for his movie.  What does it mean that Monster House is apparently set in the early eighties, before the Macintosh computer and iPod revolutionized our world?  After establishing the era in which the movie takes place, the childrens’ rooms seem remarkably bare, their free time more free because it is not encumbered with our modern addictions: Internet, computer, cell phone.  Even the fat kid plays basketball as well as Atari.  Yet the presence of the Atari is almost an ominous, as well as nostalgic reference, since one can easily imagine the fat kids modern counterpart remaining inside, growing daily fatter, instead of going out with friends to discover the mystery of the haunted house next door.

I cite this movie and this example because to me, it illustrates the power of what I call cultural artifacts to build the same kind of system of allusion and meaning that we usually only associate with literature and, in some cases, film.  I am sure I am not the only person who caught the Atari reference and, perhaps, thought deeply about it.  My contention is that every time we “illiterates” turn on the TV or go to the movies or listen to a new Bruce Springsteen album, we engage our minds in a  game of highly complex analysis and synthesis.

Every episode of “Gilligan’s Island” we watched, every song we have listened to, adds another entry in our mental index of our culture and our mutual experience as Americans living in this era.  There may be some caveats to my theory, however, and I want to mention those briefly here.  My readers can address these, if they wish.

Typically, intellectuals have privileged the works of culture which they value by speaking of “timelessness” or “universality.”  Is there such a thing as universality, and if so are the artifacts of culture, as I call TV shows, universal?  Need they be?

Does it really take much brain power, or literacy, to watch an episode of “The Family Guy” and pick up on and understand the myriad of cultural references that litter that program?  My contention is that the comedy of the show cannot be understood without a high level of literacy, or at least a more than passing familiarity with nineteen-eighties television.

Am I just making excuses for my own laziness?  Am I merely trying to justify the piles upon piles of television garbage that clutter my mind?