Hopefully this doesn't come out too bad as I've had far too much tequila tonight... but your post called to mind some of the ideas I've been mulling over recently. T.S. Eliot's
Wasteland has long been a favorite work of mine. In many ways it was an elegy to what Eliot saw as the collapse of the collective or shared narratives of Western civilization. Greco-Roman and Christian narratives had become "a heap of broken images." I agree with Eliot... to an extent. What Eliot may or may not have recognized... and likely would have rejected... was the fact that with the great cultural upheavals that resulted in the shattering of long-held collective narratives, new narratives arose. With the developments in technology, individuals who in the past were not afforded the ability to preserve and/or disseminate were now able to do so. The poor, Black jazz musician who could not read and write music could now record his musical performances and share these via recordings and the radio. Film, radio, television, magazines, comics books... Popular Culture... began to establish a new body of collective or shared narratives. Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Superman, Batman, Wonderwoman, the Munsters, etc... may seem crude and vulgar in comparison with the narratives of "High" culture... but one suspects that the Christian narratives must have appeared equally crude when they first began to replace the Greco-Roman narratives. Weren't the first novels panned as vulgar low-class literature best left to women? I exhibited a painting entitled
Tyger, Tyger... that portrayed two women in Catwoman masks. Everyone "got" the Catwoman reference... but almost no one "got" the allusion to William Blake's most famous poem. I had several viewers assume that I had simple spelled "Tiger" wrong.