April 19th, 2011 / 4:42 pm
Power Quote
Christopher Higgs
Power Quote
Power Quote: Steven Moore
Do you want to know a secret? Literature is not for everyone. People grant that about other arts — serial music isn’t for everyone, nor is Balinese shadow dancing — but when it comes to fiction, there’s a democratic assumption that anyone with a basic education should be able to read and enjoy any novel…Why this bleeding-heart concern for “the mass of readers,” “the common reader?” (page 24)
probably because literacy rates are included in the HDI as if everyone who can decode a shipping manifest or an inter-office memo should be able to sign on for any/all secrets & complexities darting around behind the plain faces of words even though language was as much created for poetic purpose as plastic cups were created so fourth graders could stack them and unstack them really fast
“but when it comes to fiction, there’s a democratic assumption that anyone with a basic education should be able to read and enjoy any novel…”
Really? Who holds this assumption? Even if we could assume the “any novel,” which is a hazard in itself, it’s even less safe in that all novels are meant to be read for enjoyment.
He’s just setting them up to knock them down.
“Do you want to know a secret? Literature is not for everyone.”
It should be. Not in the narrow sense of “novels” or “fiction”. In the sense of “textual information”. Being able to handle Literature, in the broad sense of the term, is the only way to access the knowledge necessary to understanding the world. The faddish rush to welcome or “concede” “post-literacy”, in which information becomes more imagistic than textual, is an evil, dangerous and deliberate maneuver for pushing the masses back into the middle ages. Here, Serfs: have some porn!
Image-based information is surface-encoded; textual info can be many levels deep (at an inverse proportion of storage-space required). if you want to flash-breed a hundred million idiots, stint on the text while lavishing them with images. Images can’t convey much complex info, but they pack a powerful punch to the emotions: ideal for propaganda.
Even now, with more literacy around than not (in the “developed” industrial nations), I find it’s common for people to have strong, very emotional, opinions on issues about which they know almost *nothing*. They get their info from soundbites, headlines, videos and opinion-dispensers (the Pundit has to be the fastest-growing profession of the 21st century). The truth is, you have to be in a position to read and comprehend a few hours’ worth of textual info a week to know enough about what’s going on (and the situations are, on the whole, fucking incredible) to *not* be a clueless mammal being led around the farm by a rusty ring through its nose. Which is why they fill our schedules up with picture-gazing. And tell us things like “Literature is not for everyone”… as though it’s the natural state of things. It takes an unnatural effort for *anyone* to learn to read well. Everyone might as well do it.
How did we get from the North American human chattel, who risked torture and death, in the late-19th century, to solve the guarded riddle of the written word… to “Literature is not for everyone”… a little over a hundred years later? We need a time machine to go back and get a few of those slaves to teach in our high schools.
I won’t even go into the fact that people once wrote “non-fiction” with the same attention to style they addressed their “fiction” with (in other words, even reading “info” was once a pleasure for the elites who could read well).
And I sure as fuck ain’t a “bleeding heart”.
Well beardobees, the notion of the “Common Reader” goes back at least to the eighteenth century (concurrent with the rise of the novel) and is still deployed by critics today, including most notably James Wood, widely hailed (unaccountably to me, but I’m in a minority) as this country’s “foremost literary critic,” and who writes almost exclusively about novels. The reading of some novels also continues to be included in every high school curriculum I’ve heard of (as a former teacher myself and friend of many others). Yes Moore knocks them down in his excellent book (thanks for the quote, by the way, Mr. Higgs!), but he sure didn’t set ’em up.
The novel has traditionally been an anti-elitist form, disreputably so for much of
its history. So the point of view being disputed here doesn’t seem self-evidently misguided to me. Nor do the comparisons offered for the sake of contrast seem all that relevant: Balinese shadow-dancing may be a popular form in Bali, for all I know, while serial music is an elitist form par excellence.
What? For most of the history of the novel it was considered low art for the middle class. Balinese shadow puppetry originated as folk art and remains a hugely popular form of entertainment. Serial music had highbrow/theoretical roots but the general sound was quickly co-opted by Hollywood. It sounds like Disney movies now. I wonder if this quote is taken out of context? Or maybe Moore just lives out of context? Because it only helps make his case if you have no idea what he’s talking about.
Saying that literature isn’t for everyone is just a blunt way of saying that not everyone has the intelligence, sensitivity, acuity or whatever else is necessary to appreciate complexly written narratives. This isn’t a traumatizing argument, right? It’s akin to saying that not everyone’s palette is structured in such a way to find Tobasco pleasing. What Moore is really offering here is a value calculus — not everyone appreciates literature, which is somewhat different from understanding or interacting with it. Literature ins’t democratic; our commitment to what we hate, however, certainly is.
Well, as expressed in this excerpt, it’s an absurd analogy anyway, isn’t it?: because “serial music” is (ironically?) a (tiny) minority pleasure, so too must novels be. literature : music :: novel : “serial music” ??
I’m pretty sure the wayang kulit (the ‘theater’ of puppet ‘shadows’ cast from behind onto a mostly opaque screen – is this what is meant by “Balinese shadow dancing“?) is for everybody in the village to enjoy – absolutely “democratic”.
I think you’re right, beardobees: the claim of “democratic assumption” is a straw pitchfork.
What’s generally ‘assumed’ is that “basic education” should be founded on literacy (and numeracy, and practice in putting forward argument with empirical support and logical consistency (and, with logical consistency, attacking argument for lack of same)), and what’s “democratic” about this “assumption” is that this “basic education” should be the structure of youthful socialization for the whole of the community, regardless of political-economic privilege (or any other identity, what, commitment).
So, yes; any ‘educated’ person “should be able to read” most novels. (Every numerate person doesn’t understand – whether they ‘can’ or not – the partial differential equations that quantum mechanics calls for.) – and every child should be shepherded through this basic literacy grounding, because even intellectually dull people need to be able to read newspapers (for example) to be citizens in a ‘democracy’. (Are many walking, talking American taxpayers not really “citizens”? Well, hell . . .)
But “enjoy” “any” novel??? People who argue for an actual, commercially evident ‘common reader’ don’t make either of these assumptions of response or unanimity, respectively.
I think arguments – or, more directly but with less intersubjective horizon of agreement, actual tastes – for ‘difficulty’ or ‘quality’ easily co-exist with an argument for egalitarian opportunity to find and “enjoy” even difficult books. The argument would be for the practicability and the fairness of making what one person writes available to some particular other person, which, in the case of, say, V. or Possession or Cloud Atlas, would entail the literacy level that people reasonably expect from a high school “education”.
The novel is popular music. The novel is the movies. These are broad, popular forms, Godard, Ornette Coleman, and Samuel Beckett notwithstanding.
I agree about the “broad”, but that would include both “popular” and ‘niche’, right? (- as your examples exemplify.)
I’d meant, by calling the analogy “absurd”, to suggest that “novel” is, for this discussion, practically as capacious a category as “literature”. There are extremely short forms of “literature” – or of ‘writing’, anyway – that it’s difficult to find a “novel” that’s ‘like’ (eg. haiku, aphorism, graffito, tweet, and so on), but from romance and spy to the abstrusest puzzle-labyrinth, “novel” includes every degree of “elite” from the He-man Woman Hater’s Club to the Four Sigma crowd, eh?
No, I disagree.
Ornette Coleman played jazz. Jazz is a kind of popular music. He played a sophisticated variant of an established popular form.
Movies are a popular art form based on mechanical reproduction, mass distribution, etc. It developed historically in relation to a popular audience. That doesn’t mean there can’t be art movies.
Yes, there’s both “novels” (“literature) and “jazz” (“music”) – that is, in these (and most of the others that I can quickly think of) categories of “literature” and “music” – that are popularly popular and also other particular expressions that are only niche-popular. Likewise with film, there’s both mass-pleasing and only-a-few-pleasing movies. (- and every shade between “mass” and “few”.)
So, “novels”, “music”, and “film” are all ‘broadly’ popular, in that they have lots of particular expressions that are successful with mass audiences, but also admit of many particular expressions that are only favored by ‘narrow’ audiences.
What did I say that you don’t agree with?? – that I think that “mass popularity” is a kind or group of kinds of “elitism”, like more obviously snobbish “elitisms”?
Well, I was arguing that the novel is a popular art form. So I disgree with your assertion that it is not one.
Also, “elite” and “sophisticated” are not equivalent to “few,” “narrow,” and “niche.”
Lyric poetry, belles lettres, and academic philosophy are examples of literary forms that are not, or at least are no longer, popular forms.
I’ve long been wanting to read Moore’s book, which looks amazing. But parsing this quote, Chris, I’ve got some reservations (about the quote, not the book). Literature may not be for everyone, but narrative is, insofar as it seems to be an inherent characteristic and currency of humans in all cultures, societies, throughout recorded time. We might even say that fiction itself is–certainly Brian Boyd makes a fairly compelling case for it in On the Origin of Stories. The rub lies in knowing when it becomes “literature,” which is clearly not synonymous with narrative, though it depends upon and builds upon narrative (as narrative depends upon and builds upon, for instance, event recognition and causality, while not being reducible to it). What is literature? That’s a question Marjorie Garber grapples with in The Use and Abuse of Literature I haven’t read this one either, but it sounds pertinent. What makes something classifiable as literature (in the bookstore, the canon, the popular imagination) is contentious, the borders in flux. When a show like “The Sopranos” comes along, the highest homage we can pay to it is to start throwing around the l word (I believe this is Garber’s point, but others have made it too). In short, telling stories is remarkably intuitive and widespread, akin to the development of language itself. If playing with shadows in the Balinese style or whistling in microtones were commonplace among children and found rampantly across cultures, I think we’d probably argue that their full-blown versions should be accessible to everyone too. I could only wish for such a universe, alas.
I’ve long been wanting to read Moore’s book, which looks amazing. But parsing this quote, Chris, I’ve got some reservations (about the quote, not the book). Literature may not be for everyone, but narrative is, insofar as it seems to be an inherent characteristic and currency of humans in all cultures, societies, throughout recorded time. We might even say that fiction itself is–certainly Brian Boyd makes a fairly compelling case for it in On the Origin of Stories. The rub lies in knowing when it becomes “literature,” which is clearly not synonymous with narrative, though it depends upon and builds upon narrative (as narrative depends upon and builds upon, for instance, event recognition and causality, while not being reducible to it). What is literature? That’s a question Marjorie Garber grapples with in The Use and Abuse of Literature I haven’t read this one either, but it sounds pertinent. What makes something classifiable as literature (in the bookstore, the canon, the popular imagination) is contentious, the borders in flux. When a show like “The Sopranos” comes along, the highest homage we can pay to it is to start throwing around the l word (I believe this is Garber’s point, but others have made it too). In short, telling stories is remarkably intuitive and widespread, akin to the development of language itself. If playing with shadows in the Balinese style or whistling in microtones were commonplace among children and found rampantly across cultures, I think we’d probably argue that their full-blown versions should be accessible to everyone too. I could only wish for such a universe, alas.
“Saying that literature isn’t for everyone is just a blunt way of saying that not everyone has the intelligence, sensitivity, acuity or whatever else is necessary to appreciate complexly written narratives.”
It’s not for *everyone*, but I wonder what the natural proportions are. Are the people who (naturally; ie, owing to irremediable limitations) don’t have the intelligence, sensitivity, acuity, etc., in a very small minority? Or is it the (flattering to “us”) other way around? I’m not taking exception to anything in the featured book (which sounds damned interesting, esp. with EC’s recommendation)… just picking up the thread of a debate the citation implies.
Because: are we too delighted about being in an artificial (imposed-from-above, or by structural coincidences) minority? Isn’t it better for “us” to try to increase our numbers? Picture an army that prides itself on being as small as possible…
But it’s admittedly tricky to talk about this without breaking it down into separable threads (eg: a chat about having a taste for avant garde lit; a chat about the political ramifications of text-aversion in the “masses”; a chat about the difference between inclination and natural ability; a chat about how things are vs how they can be; a chat about exclusion as an atavistic tribal identity strategy, and so on).
My own pet theory: I think we can increase (vastly) the membership of the esoteric monastery of avant-garde-lit-lovers by increasing (rather than decreasing) the ranks of the regular readers (people who read for pleasure every day, though the material is not “fancy”). Because I think a love of the avant garde is not a genetic quirk but the natural result of becoming *bored* via an over-familiarity with the standard tropes. People who only read on special occasions still think of the standard tropes as beguiling. As in: people who rarely have sex never tire of the miss. poss.
I’m interested in reading Moore’s book, but that power quote is too vague in its terminology (while being very saucy) to do anything but trigger some very confusing skirmishes…! Cover’s nice.
I do not assert that the novel “is not [a popular art form]”! I say that it’s both “popular” and “elite”; both Ludlum and Proust wrote “novels”. That’s what I meant when I said that the novel is “as capacious a category as [is] ‘literature'”.
The ‘equivalence’ you object to is not an assumption of mine, either.
???
I say that “literature” has forms – like the “novel” – that have instances that appeal (successfully) to mass audiences and instances that only narrow and small audiences favor.
(I also think that those audiences – large or small – tend to define themselves as audiences in terms of one “elitism” or another, whether they use the word “elite” or not.)
I didn’t say, but agree, that there are “literary forms that are not […] popular”.
[Lyric poetry certainly is still a “popular form”, though its “popular” expressions are rarely labeled “lyric poetry”.]
Are you sure you disagree with something I said?
Lyric poetry (and I am talking about the kind of thing that is normally called lyric poetry) is not a popular form. It may have been a hundred years ago, but I am inclined to argue that it never was.
deadgod, you are saying that the novel cannot be called either a popular form or an elite form because it encompasses works produced for both popular and elite audiences.
I am saying it’s a popular form, established in relation to a mass audience. Lyric poetry, as a literary (i.e., written) form, is by contrast an elite one. The novel encompasses sophisticated variants produced for elite readerships but the form that is being adapted in these instances is a popular one.
You may not agree with this understanding but can you at least acknowledge that it is a different point of view so that we can both move on?
alan, I’m saying that “the novel” must be called both a “popular” and an “elite” form.
A particular novel could be called “popular”, “elite”, both, and/or neither, but, given this elasticity in the category “novel”, the category “novel” would have not to be called “either” the one “or” the other, no? That was the “view” that I can’t see that you’ve “differ[ed]” from.
Popular song is certainly a “written form”; Robert Johnson is not simply a ‘lyricist and melodicist’ – he’s a “lyric poet”. (Cole Porter, Bob Dylan, Kurt Cobain – all “lyric poets” in the way that Psappho and Pindar are; namely, ‘writers of verse-to-be-sung’.)
I realized that that wasn’t the meaning of “lyric poetry” that you were using, and I’d wanted to make clear that what we mean when we say “lyric poetry” does – and ought to – include the “lyrics” of popular song.
In terms of the “establish[ment of the novel] in relation to a mass audience”, what percent of Latin speakers were literate at the time of the Cena Trimalchionis? what percent of Spanish speakers were literate at the time of Don Quixote? How many English people could read in the hundred years after Robinson Crusoe was written? I think that the (modern) bourgeois genealogy of the novel is often mischaracterized in relation to a notionally “mass” audience.
– but sure, there must be perspectives rival to mine.
I think you will find that Don Quixote takes as its theme the recent emergence of a mass, non-elite readership.
Just pretend that “lyric poetry” means what I intend it to mean. That (the thing I am referring to) is an example of an elite literary form.
Since you won’t agree that we disagree, we’ll have to to disagree to disagree or something. Would you at least agree to that?
No, the theme of Don Quixote, if it has only one, is the (generally humiliated) place of imagination in society. Don Quixano himself, a small-time member of the “elite” – an aristocrat – , is an obsessive student of chivalric Romance, but most of the other people he meets – peasants, tradesmen, and so on – don’t know what he’s going on about. I don’t think most of the people in Spain 400 years ago were bigger readers than most of the people in La Mancha seem to want to be, though maybe most of them were.
The thing you mistakenly limit “lyric poetry” to – short poems written in books (?) – is less of an “elite literary form” than dramatic or epic poetries are – wouldn’t you say that (at least) two out of five teenagers try to write poems? – , but it does seem to be a minority enthusiasm to take any poetry seriously as an adult. Just stop pretending that you don’t know what a “lyre” is, ha ha.
We definitely “disagree” as to many facts, but I think, from what you’ve said, that we agree that the excerpt is misguidedly glad to assert the novel’s “elite” credentials.
Literacy rates in Spain at the turn of the seventeenth century were among the highest in Europe. There was a wide readership that included the lower classes and prose romances were popular, an enthusiasm which is openly satirized in Cervantes’ novel.
Literature is stuff “written in books” or otherwise primarily disseminated in written form, yeah.
Literacy rates in Spain at the turn of the seventeenth century were among the highest in Europe. There was a wide readership that included the lower classes and prose romances were popular, an enthusiasm which is openly satirized in Cervantes’ novel.
Literature is stuff “written in books” or otherwise primarily disseminated in written form, yeah.
Hi, Tim. Sorry I’m late to respond. I got bogged down with school, and the comment thread here seemed to have gained its own momentum.
Pulling this quote out of context was purposefully provocative. It comes from a part of the introduction where Moore is making a case for difficult (in response to Franzen’s article on Gaddis) or experimental (in response to Dale Peck and other critics who besmirch such writing) literature as opposed to more conventional, mainstream, or popular fiction. I suppose in a sense it’s an argument akin to making a distinction between “films” and “movies.” Moore shows how some critics (like Franzen and Peck, amongst others) seem to hold great contempt for the former (i.e. Literature/Film) and see only the latter (i.e. Fiction/Movies) as a valid or worthwhile endeavor. You’re right though, it does come down to a question of what is literature. For Moore, literature is fundamentally experimental, difficult, and not for everybody.
I’m unfamiliar with Garber’s book, but I will put it on my list. & that Boyd book seems to always come up…like it’s following me around and constantly tapping me on the shoulder, going…hey, you need to read me!
You’re simply wrong about “[l]iteracy rates in Spain at the turn of the seventeenth century”; despite the fabulous influx of wealth into the Iberian peninsula during the 16th century, Spain, along with the rest of southern Europe, lagged behind northern European countries in education generally and literacy in particular. (cf. The History of Literacy and the History of Readers; Carl F. Kaestle [in Perspectives on Literacy, edd. Kintgen, Kroll, Rose]) You can also check Antonio Vinao Frago (The History of Literacy in Spain) and, less concentratedly (he’s an economic historian), Carlo M. Cipolla on the imbalance between aristocratic and Church wealth and anything like ‘mass literacy’ in 17th c. Spain.
– or, go here: http://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/1409/Spain-HISTORY-BACKGROUND.html , where you’ll find, in the paragraph beginning “During the fifteenth century, […]”, these sentences:
What’s “satirized” in Don Quixote is one aristocrat’s demented ‘hallucinations’, stimulated by immersion in depictions of mediaeval aristocratic concerns; as I’ve said, the “lower classes” in Cervantes’ novel don’t share the Don’s reading at all.
Not even a ‘nice try’, alan!
The lyrics to even the lamest pop songs on the radio were first scribbled on paper; those lyrics are “literature”, yeah yeah yeah.