Book Review : Another Cultural Frame of Reference

The Graywolf Annual Five: Multi-Cultural Literacy, edited by Rick Simonson and Scott Walker (Graywolf Press, P.O. Box 750006, St. Paul, Minn. 55175: $8.50)

As Jenny and I watched television one early evening last week, I was struck once again by the cultural cannibalism of the electronic mass media.

A children’s game show inflicts physical humiliation on kids who cannot rattle off the names of the “stars” of today’s look-alike family comedies. On one sitcom, a young waitress delivers a line in conscious homage to a character on a hoary old sitcom of the ‘70s: “Kiss my fries.” On another show, a character is played, inexplicably, as a gesture-for-gesture impersonation of Jack Benny--an allusion to what passes for the classics on television, I suppose.

Television, as the single most pervasive--and perhaps the only--common cultural experience of three generations, has become its own frame of reference. Art, literature, history, religion, science and philosophy have disappeared from its vocabulary, and from our own. The terrifying realization that we are losing touch with the foundations of our own civilization has prompted a number of best-selling literary jeremiads in recent years, including Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind,” and E. D. Hirsch’s “Cultural Literacy,” with its gimmicky list of 5,000 words and phrases that supposedly define “What Literate Americans Know.”

The Latest Entry

Now comes “The Graywolf Annual Five: Multi-Cultural Literacy,” an anthology of essays that calls not merely for a knowledge of the fundaments of traditional Western civilization, but for the opening of the American mind to all ages, all peoples, all cultures. Each contributor to “Graywolf Annual Five”--including the late James Baldwin, Wendell Berry, Ishmael Reed, Carlos Fuentes, and nine other authors, poets, scholars and essayists--writes from his or her own cultural perspective, all without specific reference to the Bloom-Hirsch controversy. But the editors of the anthology openly condemn Bloom and Hirsch for an “overridingly static, and so shallow, definition of culture” which suffers from “a particular white, male, academic, eastern U.S., Eurocentric bias . . . that limits the concept of American culture.”

And the Graywolf editors even provide a list of their own, despite--they say--”our own best judgment.” To Hirsch’s list of “What Literate Americans Know” (“The Beatles . . . Bronze Age . . . macho . . . realpolitik . . . tectonic plates . . . Ty Cobb . . . Verdi . . .”), they add King Sunny Ade, Buchenwald, Bhagavad Gita, John Cage, cinema verite, condom, and so on down through Mary Wollstonecraft, Wounded Knee, Yiddish and Zulu. The point of these parlor games, I suppose, is to provide some kind of benchmark for “cultural literacy”--or, in the case of the Graywolf list, an elbow in the ribs of the self-appointed defenders of Western civilization.

Clever Lists

All of these clever lists, which make for such amusing cocktail party chatter, have attracted a lot of attention in the press and especially the review media. But the substance of “Graywolf Annual Five” is its collection of essays by various writers--some living, some dead, some famous and some obscure--who, at least in the eyes of the editors, fall outside the clubby circles of cultural chauvinism. All of the essays have appeared elsewhere, and none appear to have been written as a direct rebuttal to the Bloom-Hirsch controversy. Indeed, many of the contributors engage in a kind of special pleading for one cultural perspective or another. But each essayist adds something intriguing, something challenging, to our comfortable assumptions about what constitutes American civilization.

Thus, for example, Paula Gunn Allen allows us to understand the historical continuities that link traditional American Indian culture and contemporary feminism: “How odd . . . must my contention seem that the gynocratic tribes of the American continent provided the basis for all the dreams of liberation that characterize the modern world.” David Mura muses on the meaning of racial and cultural conflict in America to “a middle-class third-generation Japanese-American”--”What Frantz Fanon recognized and taught me,” he observes, “was the liberating power of anger.” And the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano issues a manifesto for a revolutionary literature of the Third World: “The primordial function of Latin American literature today is the rescue of the word.”

Provocative and Sublime

All of the essays in “Graywolf Annual Five” are worthy, readable, and provocative--a few are sublime. Gloria Anzaldua’s “Tlilli, Tlapalli: The Path of the Red and Black Ink,” for example, is an invocation of both the craft and the powerful magic of storytelling, especially as practiced in ancient Aztec and contemporary Mexican cultures: “I sit here before my computer, Amiguita , my altar on top of the monitor with the Virgen de Coatlalopeuh candle and copal incense burning,” she writes. “This work, these images, piercing tongue or ear lobes with cactus needle, are my Aztecan blood sacrifices.”

I came away from “Graywolf Annual Five” with a sense that its editors, for all of their rhetorical trumpet-calls, are far less radical than their own contributors. The editors are skirmishing rather politely with Bloom and Hirsch, trading blows in the form of escalating list-making; many of the essayists themselves are in the trenches of a rather grim cultural war.

“The editors of this ‘Graywolf Annual’ agree with Hirsch, Bloom, and the editorial writers of America that education should be among the highest of national priorities,” write editors Rick Simonson and Scott Walker. “We do take issue with Hirsch’s and Bloom’s definitions of what (or whose) culture should be taught. . . .”

But it is the late James Baldwin who reminds us of what is truly at stake: “One of the paradoxes of education is that precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience,” Baldwin wrote in a 1963 essay, “A Talk to Teachers,” “you must find yourself at war with your society.”