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Literachoor and the Culture
Wars
“It is natural for us to seek a Standard of
Taste; a rule, by which the various sentiments of men may be reconciled; at
least, a decision, afforded, confirming one sentiment, and condemning another.”
David Hume, 1757
The
assaying of value in literary matters which used to be left exclusively to
academics, influential critics, reviewers and well known writers of Mr. Lane’s
and Mr. Vidal’s stature, these days occurs in forums of every sort. From monthly book groups meeting in living
rooms around the country, to Amazon.com and book blogs, it’s a rough and tumble
world of critical evaluation and argument.
Everyone is now entitled to
their own electronic opinion and may post their thoughts on innumerable websites
frequented by fervent readers of every stripe. At no time during the forty years I’ve been
immersed in the literary world have I seen so much democracy at work, so much
earnest public debate over aesthetic matters. While academic literary criticism
continues to circle off into ever more lofty and airless regions, actual
readers are enthusiastically climbing aboard their soapboxes to tout their
favorite novel, or express their disappointment in a writer’s latest
effort. And on many occasions these
discussions and reader reviews show as much insight and passion for a writers’
body of work as many professional reviewers demonstrate. Good for them. Good for all of us.
Although
value-driven arguments can be exhilarating and enlightening, ultimately, like
it or not, a book succeeds or fails in the marketplace for many reasons other
than merit. To try to claim a relationship, inverse or
direct, between a book’s success and its worthiness is ultimately futile. One reason, of course, is that the very idea
of worthiness is itself so subjective as to disintegrate into fine powder if we
stare at it too hard.
Try as critics might to
assign some defining empiricism to their judgments, all discussions of artistic
value are fatally slippery. Is thinking
more worthy than feeling, as Mr. Lane suggests? Is impenetrable complexity more worthy than
accessible simplicity? Brooding tragedy
more worthy than light-hearted comedy?
Is lush, elegant prose more admirable than its plain transparent
cousin? Is a convoluted plot better than
a simple one? What about
characters? Are stock characters really
inferior to those so complex that it takes a thousand densely packed pages to
plumb their depths? Are Lamborghinis
better than Fords? We can have our preferences
but there simply is no universal truth in matters such as these.
So how does the critic who
slams the bestseller list as demonstrative of the lowest rank of cultural taste
explain the presence on past year-end lists of such card-carrying luminaries as
Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Anne Porter, Mary McCarthy, Ernest
Hemingway, William Faulkner, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, William Styron,
Philip Roth, John Fowles, Pat Conroy, E.L. Doctorow, Chaim Potok, Toni
Morrison, Barbara Kingsolver, John
Irving, Amy Tan, and John Updike?
For me the answer to that
question seems simple enough. American
readers have stubbornly democratic tastes.
We are looking for entertaining stories and characters who arouse their
passions, and to satisfy these desires, we are willing to embrace a broad range
of novels, from high culture to low. As
James Surowiecki puts it in The Wisdom of Crowds, “ …chasing the expert
is a mistake, and a costly one at that.
We should stop hunting and ask the crowd (which, of course, includes the
geniuses as well as everyone else) instead.
Chances are, it knows.”
Dollars vs.
Respectability
Leslie Fiedler, one of
America’s celebrated literary critics, noted a classic remark by Melville on
this point. “Dollars damn me…all my
books are botches.” Fiedler goes on to say
that “implicit in (Melville’s) melancholy cry from the heart is a belief, as
strong and pertinacious as any myth by which we live, that the authentic writer
is neither drawn to nor confirmed in his vocation by the hope of marketplace
success, the dream of becoming rich and famous, but can only be seduced by
lucre, led to betray or prostitute his talent.”
A little later in the same
essay, Fiedler neatly summarizes the playing field of modern literary
warfare. “For a century and a half,
those writers who aspired to critical acclaim and an eternal place in libraries
have therefore felt compelled to struggle not just for their livelihood but for
their very existence against the authors of ‘bestsellers’ who they secretly
envy and publicly despise.”
Speaking of envy, a few years back when
Stephen King was honored with the National Book Foundation’s lifetime
achievement award for fiction, more than one defender of the literary canon
roared in protest. No less than that
high-culture lion Harold Bloom called King’s award “another low in the shocking
process of dumbing down our cultural life.”
Book editors around the country weighed in, almost all on the side of
the high culture values it is their sworn duty to uphold. In the Washington Post, Linton Weeks
posed the argument this way: “The issue: what to make of the gap in our culture
between bestselling and well-written literature. The popular and the proper. The slew and the few.”
King tossed gasoline onto
this bonfire in his remarks at the award ceremony. “For far too long the so-called popular
writers of this country and the so-called literary writers have stared at each
other with animosity and a willful lack of understanding. This is the way it has always been. But giving an award like this to a guy like
me suggests that in the future, things don’t have to be the way they’ve always
been. Bridges can be built between the
so-called popular fiction and the so-called literary fiction.”
Well, I hope this book will
serve as some small attempt at the construction of that bridge, but I predict
that passing freely back and forth between the land of good taste and the
province of low brow will always expose one to such cultural snipers as Vidal,
Lane and Bloom and literature professors like my own younger self.
It’s clear enough that
Stephen King is not alone among popular writers in yearning for a literary
prize or two to set atop their mountains of cash, or at the very least a front
page NY Times Book Review as some validation of their worth. And while their highbrow cousins might never
admit it publicly, I suspect their hankering is just as strong, only the prize
they dream of is something closer to a hefty movie deal.
The math of publishing, like
that of the music and film businesses, gives us an insight into the dependence
of the American entertainment industry on the blockbuster. Roughly ten percent of the books on any
publisher’s list pay for the other ninety percent which either break even or
lose money. Given this calculus, Stephen
King and his trash-writing colleagues deserve more than a few silver
chalices. It’s books like theirs that keep
the industry afloat. Stephen King and
his kind are the lifeblood of publishing.
Simple as that.
Much of what we take as the
given state of affairs in the book world, including the very existence of the
Sunday New York Times Book Review and the well-stocked superstores and
Amazon.com and the lofty jobs of book reviewers and publishing giants would be
shockingly altered, if they managed to survive at all, without those ten
percent of the books which flood the marketplace with tidal waves of cash.
It’s more than a little odd for
an industry that depends so much on its most popular producers, to treat them
with such disdain. In Linton Weeks’ Washington
Post piece on the Stephen King affair, he claims that great novels “…change
lives. They challenge our notions and
afflict our comfort at the time they were written and for untellable time to
come. They cut through time and space,
to the hearts and souls of readers.” In
other words great books challenge us and are immortal.
To declare that anyone could
possibly know a book to be immortal rather than simply of faddish interest is
to claim a prescience no mortal can possess.
Yes, as Robert Frost observed, on a strictly personal level we can often
sense when we read a work of literature that we’ve taken “a mortal wound” and
that book or poem will linger with us as long as we live.
But who can say that Peyton
Place, or Gone with the Wind don’t meet both those criteria for a
great many people? Did Grace Metalious’s
shocking expose of the sexual underbelly and hypocrisy of a small New England
town not challenge its readers? You bet
it did. And it damn well placed itself
squarely at center stage for at least a good long time in our cultural history. As did Gone with the Wind and a host
of other popular books. Though it might
fly in the faces of the high priests of literary culture, my money is on Gone
With the Wind over Humboldt’s Gift in the race to last another
century or two, because of its hold on so many readers’ imaginations.
Raunch
Lovers
When Stephen King says “this
is the way it has always been,” he’s exactly right. The tension between popular literature and
the high culture has existed since the very birth of the English novel in the
eighteenth century.
Planted in the beginnings of
the novel form are the seeds of the current contentious rivalry between high
culture and low. Then as now, a large
part of what fueled that rivalry was simple class prejudice. Defoe was not a gentleman born, but he
aspired to become a gentleman by other means.
His novels appealed to a class of readers who, like Defoe, were eager to
improve themselves through the accumulation of wealth and possessions and
insider knowledge, in short to learn the ways and imitate the habits of their
so-called betters.
His eager audience read his
roguish tales not just for titillation, but because his stories pointed a
hopeful way forward. Many of those early
novels were Horatio Algeresque how-to portrayals of lower class heroes and
heroines who prevailed over poverty and the enormous obstacles placed in their
path by an elite culture indifferent to their problems and contemptuous of
their dreams.
Writing in The Guardian
in 1713 about the increase in the reading audience that novels were bringing
about, Richard Steele sounds a little like his snobbish descendants three
centuries later: “…this unsettled way of
reading…which naturally seduces us into as undetermined a manner of
thinking…That assemblage of words which is called a style becomes utterly
annihilated… The common defense of these people is, that they have no design in reading but for pleasure, (my emphasis)
which I think should rather arise from reflection and remembrance of what one
had read, than from the transient satisfaction of what one does, and we should
be pleased proportionately as we are profited.”
These new readers had no
other purpose but to seek a pleasurable reading experience! Ye, gads, can the apocalypse be far behind?
From the outset a great many
novels were raunchy and rebellious, nose-thumbing tales written and read by
nose-thumbing, raunch-loving middlebrow citizens. Although to compress two centuries of
literary history into a single sentence is to invite ridicule, it’s safe to say
that the schism between the literary novel and the popular one began at the day
of the novel’s birth and has continued to widen as academics and scholars and
book critics, eager to assert their own usefulness, inserted themselves into
the process.
These days a harmless tale
like Huckleberry Finn that nearly every twelve year old boy or girl in
previous generations read with utter fascination and complete understanding,
has been hijacked by the academic establishment and rendered into a sanctioned
classic that requires professional exegesis.
God save us from the critics who turn simple pleasure into intellectual
labor.
When millions of readers, whether
they are formally educated or not, have expressed their separate opinions by
buying and delighting in a particular novel, there is some larger wisdom at
work. It seems self-evident that it
would behoove a lover of literature to lower his guard, temporarily put away
his Harold Bloom, and ask one simple question.
What is it about this or that enormously popular book that inspires such
widespread fervor and devotion?
So You Want
to Write a Bestseller
Some might wonder if this
book is intended to be a primer for writers who might wishwishing to take a
swing at writing a blockbuster themselves.
To that I can only say that this book is more about why we read them
than how to write them. However, it’s obvious that reading and studying books
in careful detail—books like the one she wishes to write—should be a central
feature of any writer’s apprenticeship. And
naturally, if an apprentice in any field wanted to succeed commercially, why
wouldn’t they spend at least a little time studying the most commercially
successful products of their age?
Of course there will always
be those fussy folk who fret that if they pay even the slightest attention to
John Grisham or Stephen King or William Peter Blatty their palates would be sullied,
tongues befouled. Good gracious, their
taste buds might never recover. To those good people I suggest that this book
may not be for you.
It is not my purpose to make
a case about the “worth” or “artistic value” of the novels under discussion
here. Nor is this book an attempt to erase the line between high art and
low. If anything I’d simply like to argue
that that line is now and always has been a whole lot hazier than my highbrow
friends would like to admit.
As Louis Menand, critic at
large for the New Yorker, put it in a 2009 article on that
metafictionist Donald Barthelme:
“What killed the distinction (between high culture and low) wasn’t
defining pop art up. It was defining
high art down. It was the recognition
that serious art, too, is produced and consumed in a marketplace. The point of Warhol’s Campbell’s soup-can
paintings was not that a soup can is like a work of art. It was that a work of art is like a soup
can: they are both commodities.”
Robert Kincaid, the
sensitive Marlboro Man hero of The Bridges of Madison County agrees
whole-heartedly. He finds it to be the
same sad slog in his profession, the photography biz.
“That’s the problem in earning a living through an art form. You’re always dealing with markets, and
markets—mass markets—are designed to suit average tastes. That’s where the numbers are. That’s the reality, I guess. But, as I said, it can become pretty
confining.”
It’s amusing to find a
card-carrying literary critic in such firm accord with a character from a
schlocky novel. Whether it’s high
culture or low, whether it’s in good taste or bad, highly refined or vulgar,
like it or not, it’s all for sale.
