It was the poet Ezra Pound who is said to have coined the word paideuma meaning “the tangle or complex of the inrooted ideas of any period” or in plainer terms the intellectual baggage carried at any cultural epoch by the producers or consumers of Kulchur (that’s you and me). In a sense it is what you need to know or ought to know to make sense of what is put before you.
Watching recently a quite delightful BBC programme called The Assembly in which the Welsh actor Michael Sheen was interviewed by a group of neurodiverse teenagers I was struck by the way in which their cultural reference points were all media and popular culture related. Bake-off not Bach. Since they were interviewing an actor who has been on the telly that shouldn’t of course be surprising but I know many more grown up young people whose life similarly revolves exclusively around media references (often of the schlock variety) and social media images and themes. Generalisations about whether younger people are reading books (my sense from observation on trains and buses is that very many are) or instead spending their lives heads down over Apple products are always shaky and sometimes pronounced with a superior sense of disapproval.
But there are very many people – and I am one of them – who read not just what is promoted or approved by the current media but writing from other eras. I have always had a particular fondness for medieval literature and art because there is so much richness there: poetry, religious and mystical texts, legends, fanciful saints’ lives, everything by Chaucer etc etc. Coming across recently C.S. Lewis’s The Discarded Image: an introduction to medieval and renaissance literature (1964) I dived in, feeling the need of some overall context for what I was reading in my usual random way. The Preface begins very promisingly, with Lewis’s characteristic lucidity and directness.
Reading this, you will surely want to read on and that’s an excellent point about the treacherous passages that look easy but aren’t because we don’t realise what we are not seeing. But as I read on (I am currently about half way) I realised that in spite of the author’s wonderful clarity and concreteness there was so much that I didn’t know. Yes, I have heard of Chaucer, Dante, Plato and Aristotle but what of Macrobius and Chalcidius? Lewis writes as though we are familiar with these early authors and with the Latin and Greek tags he strews about (not always translating them). For all its cheerful reader-friendliness, The Discarded Image presumes a large range of reference not just to names of writers and thinkers but to ways of writing and thinking, to languages that were still part of his natural equipment. I am old enough to have studied Latin at school to “O” level and to have a tiny amount of Greek that enables me to at least transliterate but most undergraduates today won’t have these dead languages or even any modern languages. I was told not long ago by a professor of English that students of English now read Chaucer in translation. In sixth form at the end of the 1960s at my local Liverpool grammar school we were reading him in the original. If you are a cultural decline Cassandra this is more evidence of the relentless march of dumbing-down but isn’t it just as much an inevitable historical shift in the content of the paideuma, of what we can assume that people know, or need to know? I am as baffled by many contemporary cultural allusions as many of my contemporaries are baffled by classical references. (I have never seen Bake-Off or Strictly but I feel as though I don’t need to have seen them; they are part of our collective consciousness.)
There’s nothing new about any of this. Philip Larkin – or was it Amis – decades ago derided “the myth kitty” on which poets were expected to draw. There is much more to know – about the cosmos, about science, about climate, about world politics – than was the norm for tweedy literary scholars in 1950s Oxford and which now competes for our attention and not necessarily in negative ways. But as I have said before in previous posts the key thing is to keep our minds open, to explore, to go for the things we didn’t know, to experience new things. To resist cultural conformity in favour of diversity.
So I’ll press on with the second half of The Discarded Image and I have already found in a charity shop a copy of Robert Graves’ Penguin translation of Lucan’s Pharsalia and I hope I understand – and enjoy, because I am a hedonistic reader – just a little more of my medieval matter and its own sources and influences.
Read on!