Last weekend I attended two events at the Cambridge Literary Festival which made me think about how discussions of books and ideas are framed, and who comes to hear from prominent current thinkers. The first event was an annual celebration of Virgina Woolf’s ‘A Room of One’s Own’; the second, an opportunity to reflect on the current State of the Nation. Both, therefore, opportunities for speakers to come up with some big picture thinking about contemporary society.
Turkish-British novelist, Elif Shafak, is well-known for a series of intricately-crafted books with themes related to history, spirituality and social justice, as well as for her activism on women’s issues. She spoke eloquently of the continuing relevance of Virginia Woolf’s analysis of the barriers faced by women writers. Financial Times journalist and author, Gillian Tett, (who is also the second woman to head up King’s College, Cambridge) addressed the current state of Britain in the – digital – world.
What caught my attention was not only overlapping themes in the two lectures, but also an informative divergence in who attended them. Looking around the audience at Elif Shafak’s talk, I couldn’t help noticing that around 90% of attendees were women. Conversations about the persistent downgrading of women’s intellect and writing, and the need the move towards a more diverse and egalitarian future, will inevitably involve thinking about men, and should be of interest to them. However, in this audience they were few and far between. There, was, nonetheless, a wide range of ages, with women of student age sitting among those of middle age and older. Women are the principal readers of fiction, and discussion of identity and politics in Shafak’s work, is as likely to appeal as much to young, as to older, readers.
Shafak looked at how Virgina Woolf radically claimed women’s right to intellectual thought in a world which often dismissed their concerns as domestic or trivial. Woolf analysed how difficult it was for women to attain a room of one’s own in order to record those thoughts and participate in public life. Patriarchy has constrained both the material circumstances of women, and their psychological ability to put themselves and their intellectual goals first. Unlike the canon of men’s writing, Woolf argued that women’s contributions were ‘scattered’, uncollected throughout history, and as such represent a ‘counter-memory’ of history when unearthed by later scholars. Shafak herself has explored how hard it would have been for a woman to become an Arabian or Turkish Shakespeare, as poet Fuzuli did, because of material and cultural restrictions on her freedoms.
By experimenting with form, Woolf transformed storytelling conventions, and she encouraged appreciation of diversity and multiple perspectives – phenomena which can be flattened, even viewed as burdensome, in a polarised, digital world. Elif Shafak went as far as to say that literature, with its ‘slow’ meanings and ambiguities, can serve as an antidote to the superficialities of our information age, where we often experience information overload, without fully understanding what to do with the information we have.
Meanwhile, the FT’s Gillian Tett appeared in front of a crowd that was probably at least 40% male, and almost uniformly middle-aged or older, as she herself noted. The Financial Times – when it is not being accused of being a ‘friend of the Deep State’ by Liz Truss – is the paper of C-suite professionals, the readership described as including ‘the most influential people in business and politics and some of the wealthiest and most discerning consumers in the world’. This readership skews male and older – the average age of its subscribers is 48 – though the lecture audience leant older still. Tett painted a picture of a Britain where those in middle age and older, had seen the pillars of political economy which acted as driving forces in their youth, undermined by developments in technology and politics. She talked about how democracy, free markets, globalization and innovation, had all lost their shine since the long Nineties, following the Cold War, to be replaced by an untrusting culture, where life online had encouraged a ‘pick and mix’ approach to all aspects of our lives, including politics.
Tett drew on the writing of the economist Keynes – who was part of Virginia Woolf’s circle – to show how British elites failed to learn the lessons of the First World War and the inequalities it highlighted. Like today, progressive values at this time were under threat and new technologies were making an impact; both democratic values and international law were shown to be fragile.
An important contrast between then and now, however, is a shift in how we see ourselves as individuals in society – thanks to the digital lives which have enabled us to ‘curate’ our experiences. We choose how we consume everything from music to the news – picking and mixing as our personal tastes dictate. We choose where we stand on everything from Brexit to climate change. On the positive side, this gives individuals agency and voice – especially online. More negatively, ‘pick and mix’ politics makes policymaking more difficult, as picking a side on an issue is different from appreciating the trades-offs which come with particular decisions or legislation. Moreover, as ‘top-down’ party politics declines, the tribalism of echo chambers encourages trust between like-minded crowds, rather than trust in leaders who must take positions on multiple issues at once. Old-fashioned notions of authority are harder to uphold in a fragmented landscape.
In response to the pick and mix culture, Tett argued that we as voters must champion the values we wish to see in society – to speak up for democracy, and the power of scientific innovation, as continuing engines of progress – if that is what we believe in. As I digested this message from within the older audience for the lecture, it occurred to me that perhaps there was a missing trick from the words of Elif Shafak. If literature is the antidote to information overload, then perhaps, as well as valuing the role of science, we should also be encouraging engagement with the arts. After all, it was a novelist that younger people came to hear from, amid the political uncertainties of today.
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