'Sire, The People Are Hungry!' ‘Let Them Have Symbols!' Literary and Linguistic Studies in the 20th and 21st Centuries

Extract

This title is playful, of course. It is designed merely to attract curiosity and attention … It dates back to a childhood game of which I have forgotten both rules and stakes. An imaginary sovereign was roused from his indifference and responded with an approximate repetition of Marie-Antoinette's suggestion that if the people were hungry, food should be thrown to them. I took such caricatures of kings as anti-models, replacing bread with symbols. Now we are all too disturbed, individually and collectively, by the economic discomfort which is a generalized hunger and, in too many parts of the world and - not only in the third world - by actual famines, not to be aware, on a daily basis, of the responsibility it is to cultivate and transmit to others substance which is purely symbolic. Certain statistics, which now form part of our daily life, are capable of discrediting definitively the ivory tower which our universities are accused of representing, or of having represented in the past. In my own country, Canada, one child in five lives in poverty. The economic worth of the poorest forty-eight countries in the world is equal to the combined wealth of the ten richest individuals. There were twenty million refugees in 1997. One billion two hundred million human beings are short of fresh water this year, etc. This type of figure is, sadly, all too familiar. And it is a case of preaching to the converted to assert the extent to which culture, education and all their constituent disciplines are nourishment of a different order to physical food, because intellectual work is genuine work, providing a living for those who work at it professionally, and above all also those who benefit from its immediate and continuing fruits - i.e. ideally, the whole of society, and in all countries. In this respect - and this is implicit, but through depending habitually on what is implicit nothing is ever sufficiently explicit - it is generally acknowledged (thanks to UNESCO in particular) to what extent the development of economic resources is linked with the advancement and communication of knowledge, on a scale which is regional as well as national, within cities, rural communities, families.