Page 42 - Cultural Theory and Popular Culture an Introduction

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26 Chapter 2 The ‘culture and civilization’ tradition

It is difficult to see how such questions, rather than encouraging ‘discrimination
and resistance’, would invite anything other than a critically debilitating and self-
confirming snobbery.
In a temporary escape from the ‘irreparable chaos’ of the present, Leavisism looks back
longingly to a cultural golden age, a mythic rural past, when there existed a shared cul-
ture uncorrupted by commercial interests. The Elizabethan period of Shakespeare’s the-
atre is often cited as a time of cultural coherence before the cultural disintegration of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. F.R. Leavis (1933) writes of Shakespeare belong-
ing ‘to a genuinely national culture, to a community in which it was possible for the
theatre to appeal to the cultivated and the populace at the same time’ (216). Q.D.
Leavis (1978), in Fiction and the Reading Public, has charted this supposed decline. Her
account of the organic relations between populace and cultivated are very revealing: ‘the
masses were receiving their amusement from above. . . . They had to take the same amuse-
ments as their betters. . . . Happily, they had no choice’ (85). According to Q.D. Leavis,

the spectator of Elizabethan drama, though he might not be able to follow the
‘thought’ minutely in the great tragedies, was getting his amusement from the
mind and sensibility that produced those passages, from an artist and not from
one of his own class. There was then no such complete separation as we have . . .
between the life of the cultivated and the life of the generality (264).

What is interesting about their account of the past is what it reveals about their ideal
future. The golden age was not just marked by cultural coherence, but happily for the
Leavisites, a cultural coherence based on authoritarian and hierarchical principles. It
was a common culture that gave intellectual stimulation at one end, and affective plea-
sure at the other. This was a mythic world in which everyone knew their place, knew
their station in life. F.R. Leavis (1984) is insistent ‘that there was in the seventeenth
century, a real culture of the people ...a rich traditional culture ...a positive culture
which has disappeared’ (188–9). Most of this culture was, according to Leavisism,
destroyed by the changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution. The last rem-
nants of the organic community, however, could still be found in rural communities in
nineteenth-century England. He cites the works of George Bourne, Change in the Village
6
and The Wheelwright’s Shop, as evidence of this. In the opening pages of Culture and
Environment, F.R. Leavis and Thompson (1977) offer a reminder of what had been lost:

What we have lost is the organic community with the living culture it embodied.
Folk songs, folk dances, Cotswold cottages and handicraft products are signs and
expressions of something more: an art of life, a way of living, ordered and pat-
terned, involving social arts, codes of intercourse and a responsive adjustment,
growing out of immemorial experience, to the natural environment and the
rhythm of the year (1–2).

They also claim that the quality of work has also deteriorated with the loss of the
organic community. The growing importance placed on leisure is seen as a sign of this