Meanjin Company LtdISSN: 0025-6293 https://meanjin.com.au/autumn-2016/ Are We There Yet? In Mario Vargas Llosa’s 2006 novel The Bad Girl, his character Ricardo Somocurcio says repeatedly that he wants to live in Paris and go on living there because ‘in Paris, living was living, France was the country of culture’. ‘That’s what I want: to live here. Does it seem like a small thing to you … My only ambition is to go on living here, just as I’m doing now,’ Ricardo says throughout this little novel of constancy in love. Ricardo did not want to be a writer or a musician, an actor or even a revolutionary, he wanted to be swallowed up in the culture of Paris for all of his life. He could not have said, though, what this culture was, exactly, or where it might be found at its best. Ricardo’s ideas about culture were either so superficial that we, the readers, see him as no more than a cliché, or his ideas were so profound they resisted the superficiality of intellectual analysis. The novel, cleverly enough, does not lead us to define the culture that Paris represents or finally come to a judgement about Ricardo’s devotion to it. When Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei reflected upon living in New York for ten years from 1983 to 1993, he commented, ‘I felt totally free there, and I was poor but desperate.’ Far from being a criticism of the West, this is the way all societies should be, he argues. When the emergent extremist Islamic group ISIS (Daesh) funded and inspired coordinated terrorist assaults upon Paris on 13 November 2015, the targets were a football stadium, a rock music concert and cafés and bars in central Paris. Sam Jones, security editor of the Financial Times, reported that ISIS justified their targets as those that represented the worst ‘abominations and perversions’ of Paris. In other words, the action was justified as an attack upon Western culture as much as it was an attack in reprisal for French military action in Syria and central Africa. The Parisian and Western response has been in terms of a defence of the cultural values of freedom, liberty and tolerance—values that Western culture explicitly stands for beyond the surface glitz and apparent shallowness of football, heavy metal rock and drinking in bars—and beyond the exploitation of minorities, ethnic and economic, that Ai Weiwei experienced in New York. We seem to live in two worlds at once: the real, violent and exploitative world and another one that cultural values gesture towards. ••• After two world wars in his lifetime, and amid a fallow period in his writing, almost on the eve of being presented with the 1948 Nobel Prize for Literature, the then world famous poet and playwright T.S. Eliot published a long, rambling essay, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. His aim was to ensure the survival of culture in a new postwar European civilisation. It seemed to Eliot he was living in a period of cultural decline, when the word needed rescuing or at least resetting so that some clarity might be brought to understanding what it was we lived for. Sometimes Eliot’s essay made complex, organic and down-to-earth good sense as he strove to describe what it might be that infused a culture with life and worthwhileness. He identified the achievements of scholars, intellectuals and artists as essential to one particular understanding of culture, but noted that none of these by themselves could lead to anything but a kind of automatism. The arts must be linked to scholarship and to intellectual enquiry if they are not to become vacuous, for example. Culture, he wrote, should mean to the individual something for which one strives. It is never wholly coherent, always trailing elements of the recent and primitive past into the present, never pure. A people must be neither too united nor too divided, he wrote. He reflected late in his essay on the decline of German culture from 1933 onwards, when as editor of the Criterion he experienced how little of interest came from the conformity of a Nazi-dominated culture. At times in his essay he explored the relation of religion to culture, and here his essay was at its most mystical and confusing. There must be something we believe in, for without belief, he wrote, there can only be boredom and despair. He surmised that while culture is not religion, it might be the incarnation of religion. Famously, commenting upon the calamitous decline of European civilisation into two world wars in the first half of the twentieth century, Eliot wrote, ‘I see no reason why the decay of culture should not proceed much further, and why we may not even anticipate a period, of some duration, of which it is possible to say that it will have noculture’ . The great Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature, has responded to Eliot in his essay Notes on the Death of Culture, published first in Spanish in 2012. He is writing to announce that Eliot’s prediction of a society ofno culture has come to pass in today’s hedonistic, debased, faithless, ephemera- soaked, celebrity-studded, media-obsessed, adulterated forms of spectacle that have replaced culture. He argues we are experiencing the death of culture. His essay is framed by Eliot’s, to which he gives considerable attention, and it is linked to Eliot’s via the 1970 George Steiner critique of Eliot, In Bluebeard’s Castle: Notes Towards the Re- definition of Culture. Both Steiner and Eliot agreed that religion is at the core of culture. Nazism and the Holocaust represented for Steiner the ultimate act of a godless culture. What use was high culture alone when barbarism came? Vargas Llosa surveys the ideas of Lipovetsky and Serroy on global culture and Frédéric Martel on the replacement of culture by mass entertainment. What Vargas Llosa sees is a maelstrom of traumatic change ‘in which a new reality has appeared that contains only scant traces of what it has replaced’. The new reality is the society of the spectacle. In the name of democratisation culture no longer has a meaningful elite, culture no longer requires work, education, refinement, reflection or belief. Culture has come to be anything that contributes to ‘a pleasant way of spending time’ (26). Vargas Llosa rails at the amount of space that cooking and fashion take up in the cultural pages of newspapers and magazines, space that might have once gone to scientists or philosophers. In matters of literature and criticism, Edmund Wilson has been replaced by Oprah Winfrey. In a series of sizzling pages of prose radiant with disappointment, Vargas Llosa aims his wit and disdain at almost every element of contemporary life. Drugs are no longer used creatively to explore states of mind, revolutionary stances or new styles of vision, but merely for ‘quick and easy pleasure’ that immunises against worries and responsibilities. Religions ‘that have stood the test of centuries’ might be loosening their restrictive grip on the masses, but at the cost of a rise in cults, sects and superficial alternative spiritualisms. Intellectuals have disappeared from public debates. Special effects in films are now more important than ideas or originality. Half-witted critics confer false prestige on spurious artworks. Among politicians eyebrows become as important as arguments. Sex can be had now without love, eroticism or imagination. It is only lifestyle journalism that has a mass audience. In universities, English departments are now staffed by con artists. Fulfilling the dream of all dictatorships, politics has become a mediocre and grubby activity in the eyes of most people. You get the picture. The dinner party has stopped. The speaker has a lot to get off his chest, and it is urgent and cogent, unreasonably perfect in its phrasing, stripping the skin from his victims mercilessly, and unanswerable because there is so much to answer to. Forks are poised, faces are turned to him. Is this the late-night raving of a disappointed old man or the pronouncements of a wise, learned and much honoured thinker and writer? Or a mix of both? Does the Nobel Prize give Vargas Llosa permission to make pronouncements upon the planet’s cultural life? Is the calamity so urgent that we need to hear the worst from someone who sees clearly what has gone wrong? The problem with the essay at this point is that it is wholly impressionistic, the argument carried by the passionate indignation one might feel after spending too long at the end of an internet news feed. Strangely, this outrage resonates with those who see the West and its libertarian, secularist, individualistic culture as the work of the devil, or as the incarnation of a decadence that can have no future. What is it, essentially, that has disappointed, worried and upset Vargas Llosa so much? As far as I can understand, he is disappointed by the shallowness he sees everywhere: ‘our fickle, ludic culture’, he calls it, or ‘the playful banality of the dominant culture’. It represents an abandonment of seriousness and difficulty. ‘Most representative literature of our times is “light”, easy literature’. Of music concerts he complains that they are ‘like the Dionysian pagan festivals that celebrated irrationality in ancient Greece, are collective ceremonies of excess and catharsis’. He condemns the trance-like dancing, drug taking, and the pervasiveness of advertising that he calls massification. He attacks the primitive mass phenomenon of football, though admits he is one of its fans.