I was brought up, as I would bet most of us were, with a couple of specific verities–tolerance for the opinions of others and the understanding that if you really don’t like something that’s presented to you, and you have the opportunity to, you can always turn the page (change the channel, leave the room, etc).
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I take the position that any revisionist view of culture (your culture or mine) is straight fascism. I further refute the concept that literature, or culture, needs any revision at all. What an ongoing, evolving society must teach includes context–so that we can appreciate (or disagree with) a given work in its appropriate historical and sociological perspectives–and it must also teach us how to create work that will show future generations how we thought, and what were the true and specific issues and attitudes that shaped us. If the 25th century only finds us as editorial critics of past cultures we will, in fact, have not existed as a culture at all. (That may be true anyhow).
If Shakespeare, or Sappho, or Ibn Khaldun, or Black Elk, or the Lady Murasaki, or anyone who ever created work of value to their own society is to be called upon today we must try to understand them as in their own time–not as a reflection of, or comment upon, today’s society and its attitudes. It does less than no good at all to try to put a contemporary “political” spin on any of this. They were not us as we are not them.
You can all do the same thing. If enough people turn away from anything it can eventually lose its value. Or it can remain of value to some . . . and that’s fine. It’s the core of a multicultural society. But do you understand that Mr. Martin?
