The King of Lowbrow?.
From [Hit & Run] comes this excellent discussion of the recent literary brouhaha around Stephen King and the National Book Award. I'm a little late with this, but has anyone caught the controversy over Stephen King's National Book Foundation medal for distinguished contribution to American letters -- the latest in the other culture
wars? (Highbrow vs lowbrow, Jonathan Franzen vs Oprah,
etc.) To some literati, the award is another breakthrough for the
barbarians at the gate. I will admit that unlike many of my
fellow Reason-ers, I am rather sympathetic to "traditional"
hierarchies of cultural value and to the notion of artistic excellents
that transcends market success. But the intellectuals'
hand-wringing on this occasion does not generate much sympathy.
In an interview with the Boston Globe,
Croatian emigre Dubravka Ugresic compares the tyranny of the literary
marketplace to that of Stalinist socialist realism, to which she deems
King to be a modern Western heir. (Shouldn't expats
from ex-Communist countries know better?) Meanwhile, in the Nov.
24 Time, another ex-Eastern European, Lev Grossman, should have
the last word when he declares, "Books aren't high or low. They're just
good or bad." Since Grossman's brief, cogent essay is no longer
available online for free, here's the excerpt that sums up the main
idea: How did America's reading
habits become so radically polarized, so prissily puritanical, that at
best a quarter of what people read (or at least what they buy)
qualifies as legitimate literature? It hasn't always been like this. As
recently as the mid--19th century, historians of the novel tell us,
there was only one heap. Dickens wrote best-selling novels, but they
weren't considered 'commercial' or 'popular' or 'your-euphemism-here.'
They were just novels. No one looked down on Scott and Tennyson and
Stowe for being wildly successful. No one got all embarrassed when they
were caught reading the new Edgar Allan Poe over lunch. But
by the time modernism kicked in, in the early part of the 20th century,
things had changed. The year 1922 saw the publication of both T.S.
Eliot's The Waste Land and James Joyce's Ulysses, two of the greatest
literary works in Western history, but also two of the first that are
impossible to understand without (and, arguably, with) compendious
footnotes and critical apparatuses. All of a sudden you knew something
was literary because it was difficult. You either got it or you didn't,
and if you didn't, you didn't admit it. As much as Americans like to be
democratic in our politics, we have become aristocratic in our
aesthetics. This was something
strange and new. Reading literature and having a damn good time had
become quietly but decidedly uncoupled. And yet we think of this state
of affairs as normal, and it has left us with a set of perverse biases
that persist to this day. We have a high tolerance for boredom and
difficulty. We praise rich, complex, lyrical prose, but we don't really
appreciate the pleasures of a well-paced, gracefully structured plot.
Or, worse, we appreciate them, but we are embarrassed about it.
Somewhere along the line, we learned to associate the deliciousness of
a cracking good yarn--that ineffable sense of things falling into place
and connecting with one another in an accelerating, exhilarating
cascade--with shame, as if literature shouldn't be this much fun, and
if it is, it isn't literature. I'm sure some psychiatrist somewhere has
a name for associating pleasure with shame, but I think we can all
agree that it's a little sick. Hear, hear. Of course, it should be noted that a lot of popular 19th Century literature was (justly forgotten) junk. Popularity is not, in my view, proof of excellence; but is shouldn't be a mark of shame, either. That
last sentence sums it up well. As an English major, I've been in both
camps. When I was in school, I did tend towards the snobbish end of
things. But the truth is books, or movies, or whatever, can be good for
a wide variety of reasons. And the "literary" work Vladimir Nabokov
once said, “I am not interested in groups, movements, schools of
writing and so forth. I am interested only in the individual artist.” Of course Nabokov was an arch enemy of poshlost, and may not be too happy with the use to which I've put his quote.
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