In Fact, We're Dumbing Up

By Pico Iyer

The obvious point to make about American culture today is that it's going to the dogs. That is, of course, the obvious point to make about every culture every day. Still, the indicators are alarming: magazines read more and more like tabloids, and newspapers treat foreign affairs as if they referred to overseas friendships. The Internet bombards us with more data than knowledge of how to make sense of them, and in certain parts of Los Angeles, 89% of the citizens at age 18 can't read. I am often to be found on street corners declaiming about the days before speed-of-light machines confined our minds to the space of a tiny screen and left us lost in terms of the big picture.

The only trouble is, if anyone's losing touch, it's me. The most striking thing about our culture, to an outsider today, may be that Harold Bloom's 745-page scholarly exegesis of Shakespeare's plays is on the best-seller list (joining a history of the makers of the Oxford English Dictionary), and an updated version of Les Liaisons Dangereuses is at the cineplex. In certain respects the country around us seems to be dumbing up, presenting us on a daily basis with texts and thoughts that give no indication of a nation suffering from attention deficit disorder.

Every time I return to California, for example, from my sometime home in Japan, I find that every current movie not based on Thomas Hardy seems to be derived from Henry James. The only reason not to catch Victor Hugo onscreen is that we caught him on Broadway a few years ago. This week sees Ally McBeal venturing into an "Athenian" forest in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Indeed, the hottest writer of treatments in Hollywood (as he was three years ago) is that high-concept old guy Shakespeare. Keanu Reeves in Shamela? Bette Midler and Stephen Dorff in The Merry Wives of Windsor? Who knows where it will end?

Now the simple response to this is that the very explosion of ancient literary props in Hollywood shows just how impoverished our contemporary imagination has become: the only way we can find good stories is by going back to Titus Andronicus. Clueless directors find their inspiration in Jane Austen. But this doesn't get around the fact that we're seeing full-dress, four-hour versions of Hamlet now, with Dostoevsky's life story, in The Gambler, on its way this August. And these are not just the playthings of the black berets in art houses; to my alarm, the Academy Awards for three straight years now have gone to films I've actually liked for their classical power, humanity and intelligence.

I wonder sometimes if there may not in fact be a correlation between the tyranny of the instant, in our accelerated, data-filled information culture, and the longing for those graces that belong to a more spacious time. Perhaps people crave, and are demanding, a return to something deeper, or less of the moment. The surprise best seller of two years ago--a serious literary novel by a first timer, no less--was a retelling of The Odyssey in the culture of the Civil War (with a flavor directly taken from the Taoist hermits of old China). It was replaced by another debut novel set, for nearly all its 428 pages, in the teahouses of Kyoto in the 1930s. Just as last year, during the Capitol soap opera, the American public showed itself wiser than its rulers, so in our free time, it's proving itself more discerning than those who would wish to take it to the cleaners.

This is not to say the culture is growing smarter or more sophisticated for having 800-page novels written in 18th century English on the best-seller list (Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon is more often on the coffee table than the bedside table anyway); only, perhaps, that there are certain human standards that are not so easily compromised or exploited. Los Angeles' most glittery new attraction is neither a theme park nor a movie studio but a home for fine art. The latest places people go for vacation are monasteries and retreats that offer stillness. Left to its own devices, the American public is seeking Romeo and Juliet stories set in Kerala (courtesy of Arundhati Roy) and unvarnished accounts of Shackleton's exploration of the South Pole.

Perhaps, in an age of speed, there is a special appeal to slowness; and perhaps in a time of special effects, we long more than ever for classical stories that take us somewhere else. Something in us rebels against being turned too quickly into surfaces. And it's worth remembering too that when the Bronte Sisters brought out a book of poems 150 years ago, it sold all of two copies. I'm sure I'll continue yelling that the culture's going to the dogs--but when I do so, I should probably bear in mind that that's what people were saying when first they saw the clunky puns of The Taming of the Shrew, or filed out of the sex- and violence-filled soap opera that was the latest from the scriptwriter called Aeschylus.