“The value of a work of art does not depend on the real-life feelings contained in it or on the perfection achieved in copying the subject matter but is solely based upon the unity of a construction of pure formal elements.”
- Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy)
Real quick before I begin: The Taco Psychosis is finally ready to purchase! Apologies, fans, for the delay. There was a printing error. But it’s resolved now. I encourage everyone looking for a good laugh to click the above button (Where There’s Peat, There’s Fire!) and get a copy. Enjoy!
Though I risk going down in history as a snob for saying so, there is a difference between high culture and low culture. And it’s not simply a matter of taste. Objective conditions over the centuries ensured that high culture and popular culture followed very different paths. Paths not easily reconciled even today when everything is dismissed as a “construct” and it is assumed that calling something a construct is like a “gotcha!” moment that somehow renders said “construct” redundant forever. (Of course it doesn’t and anyone who makes that argument has the intellect of a child)
While popular culture has won for now in America - classical music lovers quietly go to the opera house while jazz aficionados are fewer in number than ever before - the fact remains: no matter how one tries to reconcile it, one can’t pass off Beethoven as lowbrow culture. Unless, of course, you take a disco artist and record “A Fifth of Beethoven.” But that’s an interpretation. Beethoven’s music itself is unquestionably highbrow. It’s impossible to change that. With jazz, similarly, attempts to downplay its merits as “jungle music” and so on failed precisely because it was a lie.
While from the popular perspective it appears that high culture has vanished, it hasn’t: the media landscape has simply become popularly driven, topically speaking (as opposed to upper-class-driven) while high culture has quietly receded from the greater limelight (with music), lost its path (with painting) or suffered a major setback in the millennia-long feud between the highbrow and the lowbrow. (with literature, excepting high fantasy for unique reasons)
The unique experiment of American equality also meant that in the long run, high culture would be socially unwelcome outside all but a few circles due to its perception as both an ideological threat and a supposed celebration of hierarchy and privilege by elites who believed themselves to be superior than the others. Of course it goes without saying that appreciating Beethoven symphonies is not a matter of class or superiority, but sublimity; although highbrow demographics do tend to appreciate classical music more than others. More that American culture’s historical attempt to pretend it has no real hierarchies (at least compared to Europe) has resulted in a country too far removed from the original context to perceive Beethoven symphonies as anything but just another flavor at the buffet of equalized music.
Because Americans don’t have aristocrats or - how should I put it? - an “organic” highbrow demographic and haven’t had one since the days of Louis Auchincloss, the reason Americans perceive the high arts as being a false elevation of certain art forms and artists by snobs and elitists is because in a country that lacks a high class, only snobs and elitists tend to have the shrewdness - or curiosity plus shrewdness - to recognize what Europeans have known for millennia and still know to this day: that high culture is not just a class flavor but an aspiration toward the highest heights of sublimity. The rest of the country on one hand doesn’t care, and on the other hand resents the snobs and elitists for understanding this. Practitioners of the high arts are conscious of their understanding, including jazz musicians who couldn’t have innovated bebop without it; in contrast, practitioners of the lowbrow arts are conscious of popular appeal to the exclusion of all else. This does not make popular culture lesser per se, though on the spectrum of sublimity high culture is objectively greater; it simply means that popular culture has a different artistic agenda.
Popular literature, for its part, is a lot better at selling millions of copies than high literature. From a certain point of view, that makes highbrow fiction the lesser. Superiority is nothing but a point of view. Just as there are private school snobs, there are also “public school snobs” who believe themselves superior for having had the more “common” socio-educational experience. I’ve met them. And they are just as insufferable as the elitists on these matters.
Fans of Avatar: The Last Airbender may remember an episode from Season 1 where Avatar Aing and his friends must cross an enormous canyon while accompanied by two antagonistic clans of people fleeing the Fire Nation’s wrath: the Zhangs, who are low-class and filthy-looking but simple, down to earth and possessed of a certain kind of common sense. And the Gan-Jin who are fancier, more artistically-inclined, cleaner, better-mannered and proprietary, though shrewd enough to not have their heads in the clouds. One difference between them is that the Zhangs take the summer weather for granted and choose not to set up a rain cover over their tents; because “why bother?” While the Gan-Jin, even as they recognize the unlikely chance that it will rain, still choose to set up rain covers over their tents because “you never know.” One of those things where there is no right way of doing it. While the Zhangs view the Gan-Jin as “fancy snobs” and the Gan-Jin view the Zhangs as “dirty,” when it comes to the essentials of life both ultimately represent a different perspective that is no more or less “better.”
In other words: it’s not about one being better or worse. It is only through the shackling metrics of class and hierarchy that this division becomes vertical. It would be more accurate to regard high culture and popular culture as existing on separate planes of artistic creation; the former in castles and towers, cathedrals and opera halls; (though sacred arts now form their own category) the latter in the village, in the town, in open spaces. Planes that need not be seen by either horizontal or vertical metrics, just as the differences between the Gan-Jin and the Zhangs need not be regarded as two vertically-aligned extremes but worldviews in and of themselves. For this is what high culture and low culture ultimately are.
It is also for this reason that high culture and low culture sometimes manifest differently in other cultures. Here are a few examples.
In the United States, Bret Harte and Mark Twain - in their own ways - paved the path toward the ultimate popularization of American literature. In this sense, postmodernism was a logical mechanism for destroying American high culture because it could pose as the kind of “intellectual anti-intellectualism” that inspires American intellectuals to be smart and sophisticated while still reacting to Europe because in the American mind, the Revolutionary War never truly ended. Because of this relationship, even people like me - from the lower middle class - will ultimately have to use some snobbery to crawl out of the postmodern quagmire the way people in ice caverns need ice axes to pick their ways out. Because of Twain and Harte’s influence - otherwise a net positive - only a token few American writers have made genuine contributions to highbrow culture. And more often than not, these authors have done so while living abroad.
In France, the powerful Roman Catholic tradition meant that even after the French Revolution, Catholic literature continued as its own domain long after the vaginal blood from the rape that was the Vendée genocide had dried up so as to give birth to the secular West. (Mythically speaking) It is a high literature with a religious appeal transcending high culture bubbles.
In the Czech lands, the Battle of Bílá Hora (White Mountain) led to the liquidation of the ethnic Czech aristocracy and the urban middle class, relegating Czech culture to the peasantry for several centuries. When Czech culture revived in the 19th century it reclaimed its place in high culture, most notably in music with Bedřich Smetana, Antonín Dvořák, Leoš Janáček and Bohuslav Martinů, among others. A couple authors, like Jaroslav Kvapil, also brought Czech literature back to the higher levels. But the greater result was for Czech literature to create a simultaneously high and low, old-school and avant-garde form of literature. (Vladislav Vančura expressing this the best) It is no coincidence that the Czechs are one of the rare people to contribute a popular novel - The Good Soldier Švejk - to the domain of high literature. Like Švejk, much of the best of Czech literature simultaneously occupies high and low levels but at the cost of a more concentrated pursuit of sublimity. This indifference to sublimity is why many Westerners don’t hold Czech literature in high regard, even as they claim to love lowbrow lit and the avant-garde. It screws too much with what people think they know about literature.
The Slovaks started from a similar place as the Czechs but chose to “elevate the lowbrow,” so to say. Authors like Martin Kukučín, Timrava and Jozef Cíger-Hronský uplifted village life to a new level within the sphere of the popular. A lot of other Slovak cultural production follows the same path. Incidentally, some of the Slovaks’ former countrymen in Hungary - like Zsigmond Moricz - followed similar paths. On the O’Sullivan/Lampedusa spectrum, Moricz - though well educated - doesn’t rank high because his inspiration was ordinary people. Moricz - and his Slovak counterparts - sought the sublimity of real people. Perhaps this topic should get its own post?
Ireland was once comprised of numerous kings, all of whom had their own bards. This made high culture “common” without losing that which made it “high.” This has been one of the ancient, underlying factors setting Irish literature apart from the European mainstream where most of Europe had a clearcut high/low division. It is also why Irish authors who went to Britain - Oliver Goldsmith, Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, Bernard Shaw - often ended up in the highbrow category almost as a matter of course. It is only an Irish author like James Joyce who could tell such a “lowly” story as Ulysses - occupied as it is with gossip, defamation and “low-class” sex - and make it an outstanding contribution to high literature. This would have been impossible for an American or a non-Irish Briton. (In part because an American author would have had the bejesus sued out of them for including so many real people)
While the two planes don’t exist in a vacuum - they, in fact, have depended upon one another many a time throughout history - I propose that society abandons the class-driven view of high and low arts and adopts, instead, a 3-dimensional view of both on their own terms. To take them as they are while recognizing the strengths inherent in both forms of cultural expression. With that in mind, here are a few major distinctions that set high culture and low culture apart. Distinctions that pertain to artistry first and class or hierarchy secondarily, if at all.
Literary Humanism is Simultaneously 2-D and Irrelevant in Popular Fiction
Long-time readers will notice that while I mention literary humanism and its importance frequently, it is always in reference to literary fiction. This is because high culture, following the French Revolution and its alterations to the Western psyche, had to fill the void followed by the collapse of the authority of the Bible.
When Czech author Bianca Bellová wrote “I guess we’re all just trying to retell the Bible,” it is not a mere personal sentiment but a reflection of one of the simultaneously visible and invisible roles of the author since 1789. But while Bellová’s context is the process of artistic production, on the societal level fiction in fact sought to fill the void. The importance of 19th-century fiction on Western society relied on secular society’s need for a Biblical replacement, which in turn resulted in a response of equally “Biblical” proportions from the era’s best authors.
The result: for a time - until 1945 and a brief time afterward - the greatest classics filled that void left in the high culture that, ordinarily, was filled by coherently understood Christian values originating from the Bible. This was assisted by combining literature’s newfound search for meaning with literature’s traditional objective: to entertain, to teach moral lessons and/or both. The idea of artists, scholars, philosophers and thinkers serving God through their pursuit was lost in the search to serve Man, though many of the geniuses - especially in Russia - did not lose that understanding. Even so, the special attention given to literature at its prime resulted in the uplifting of the art of literature from its storytelling/moral teaching status into a high art with profound philosophical import.
The result: literary humanism.
Born during the era of William Shakespeare and Lope de Vega and systematized in the novel form by Miguel de Cervantes, literary humanism persisted in an embryonic but increasingly profound state until The Sorrows of Young Werther unleashed the beginning of the Golden Age of literature in the form of the Romantic era. As the focus of society turned away from God and toward Man - embodied so powerfully by Goethe’s other masterpiece, Faust, where Mephistopheles serves “us” instead of God - literary humanism became a natural candidate: like Christianity from whom much of its morality derives (or derived long ago), it is concerned with transcendent morality but through material Man, not God. Spearheaded by the Enlightenment, literary humanism, in the service of Man, was malleable and allowed every great author (and many lesser authors with sublime moments) to leave their mark. The Bible, it must be remembered, is an anthology: all the different works within it are their own “books” even if, like Jonah or Job, some are short. A collection of the great classics might be longer than the Bible. But its function is identical.
It is worth noting that during this time, American literature made very little impact on the greater tradition of literary humanism. Authors who did were either forgotten in their day (Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman) or had to make an impact in Europe. (Henry James, T.S. Eliot) But when America became the world’s superpower and brushed aside the authority of Europe’s weary culture, it tried, for a time, to fill the void.
It was unsuccessful.
American literature followed a different directive: an aspiration toward the popular that began with the great authorial dualism of Mark Twain - who allowed American literature to go its own way - and Bret Harte who, as the first authorial celebrity, unintentionally discovered that the fate of cultural greatness, literary or otherwise, lay in popular appeal. During the modernist era, Hemingway’s prose set the course for simplicity rather than complexity, a literary “rule” that reigns in force today among American writers. To be sure, Cold War diplomats continued to promote the best high culture abroad as part of its propaganda arsenal. But once television came around in the late 1950s - and the rock & roll revolution around that time - it became subconsciously clear that literature, like classical music, was not America’s strength except when measured by quantity. A proud country like America could never admit that even to itself; after all, no one could call America “the greatest nation in the history of the world” if that was so. Instead, without a word, television and music became the dominant cultural forces. Literature subsequently collapsed when deconstruction ravaged the art of literature and turned it into the mess it is today.
During this time, popular literature continued literature’s primeval goal of entertaining its audience. It accepted innovations of high literature insofar as popular authors found them useful; and in rare occasions, popular authors - like Eugene Sue and the popular storytellers of the legend of Faust - had an impact on high literature. Popular literature is extreme in that it can be very moralistic on one hand, and very anti-moralistic on the other. But it is very often cliche, second-hand and - in today’s world - politically correct. It will not accept a deviation from conformity with the reader, at least not on its own. Unaffected by the highs and lows up above and interested only in attracting the greatest number of readers possible, its natural ability to thrive in a free market society like America that is popularly driven was remarkably unaffected by postmodernism. At least until William Gibson brought postmodern sensibilities to the science fiction genre with Neuromancer and cyberpunk. Even then, unlike high literature, it enhanced the genre rather than undermining it.
For that reason, American literature today is dominated through and through by popular literature as an all-encompassing cultural singularity. High culture has lost the plot in the eyes of Americans because it is an extension of the core, fundamental American belief that Europe has lost the plot. Since, at the same time, we believe America to be a part of the West (more on that in a future post) many authors have tried to change that; the problem is, American authors do this even as they agree with their countrymen and women about high culture losing the plot, causing them to subconsciously generate a feedback loop of self-sabotage. There is no way this feedback loop can formulate the kind of artistic chemistry needed to jumpstart the rebirth of American high culture in literature. It needs more. And it especially needs the highest level of authorial commitment. The author cannot be afraid of coming off as a snob or elitist. Especially as those things are side-effects of authorial commitment, not the purpose or the end goal.
The rise of the Internet and its iron orientation toward popular validation is currently cementing the victory of popular literature in the name of the progress religion. In a mob-driven environment like cyberspace, literary humanism cannot endure unless it has the enthusiastic support and numbers of a very popular influencer or the mob. A lot of what some literati consider to be high literature - Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow, for instance - is really popular literature that has assimilated enough high literature characteristics to pass as highbrow. This is not to insult the novel - I enjoyed it, in fact. Merely to call a spade a spade.
(An aside for those who want to bring up Graham Greene: he was a highbrow and unquestionably a literary humanist of the highest caliber. Those who think he is lowbrow only think so because they conflate accessible prose with being lowbrow. This is a false conflation. Just because highbrow literature can be dense doesn’t mean there’s an iron requirement stating that it should be dense all the time.)
The jury is probably still out on the last work of high literature produced by an American author. I would hazard Infinite Jest, at least if we’re talking about not just the good but the great; No Country For Old Men and Cormac McCarthy’s last two novels are also good candidates. Any other nominations are welcome in the comments.
What this means for writers today is quite simple. If an author wants thousands, even millions, to read their book they need to entertain their readers and entertain them well, like a crazed monkey. If they want to be literary humanists, however, they had better be prepared to either 1) give up, or 2) remain unknown until after their death. Or until someone, somehow, causes enough Americans to aspire toward high culture in a way that resuscitates the role of literary humanism as a great moral force in the culture. It is worth remembering that the prophets of the Bible, as representatives of the Mosaic faith, were also despised in their time. While it’s somewhat blasphemous to frame it this way, the state of our society is such that a writer must seriously consider the following choice: a Prophet or a Pharisee.
Literary Fiction Isn’t Committed To The Happy Directive, Even When It’s Happy
It’s pretty much a stereotype that literary fiction isn’t happy. I would call it simplistic if I didn’t already foresee that I’d be called the same for coining a term called the ‘happy directive.’ The concept of the ‘happy directive’ is admittedly simple to understand: certain societies - including American society - require their arts to have happy endings, remain happy all the time and try as much as possible to prevent their consumer from being “sad.” For happy directive driven societies, making the reader “sad” is a crime in all but the law. This is where the concept of the happy directive abandons simplicity with the roar of an old engine. It is not a simple thing to be happy.
The rigidity of popular literature makes it virtually impossible for a popular novelist to excise the happy directive in a game of Operation. (Which is not the same thing as having a sad ending) Popular literature has only ever eschewed the happy directive by mistake or if society becomes so glum that literature without the happy directive paradoxically satiates society’s need for the happy directive by providing misery; like a person with more than ten toes, popular literature without the happy directive is a radioactive aberration. Though in other arts - and remarkably so - sometimes whole genres forsake the happy directive for a long time. Country music and blues music are two such examples. Both share a commonality in that they are (or were in the beginning) rural art forms with rural audiences. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was an environmental correlation waiting to be discovered where the more urbanized cultures become, the stronger their dependence on the happy directive.
From Aesop to Andersen, fairy tales have been versatile while also following certain patterns. They entertain - and that included adults until Disney changed that. They are also concerned with morality. While we have been fortunate to have great practitioners of the fairy tale, they originate as popular literature. The lessons followed from fairy tales ensure that their readers are equipped with the knowledge to live a happy life.
Seen here, the happy directive - much as I criticize its contemporary manifestation - originates from a place of practicality and common sense. Irrespective of how comfortable any one society may be at any stage in history, humanity shares a common goal of trying to live a happy and fulfilling life. In the past that happiness was sought spiritually as well as materially; since 1789 it started to become solely material. For popular literature, it was a mere matter of adapting.
The makeup of the happy directive changed; the directive itself never did. Even when science fiction turned its attention from Man to Machine - a key reason why, post-Karel Čapek, sci-fi was kicked out of high culture Eden - the happy directive was merely transferred from a happy pursuit for the purpose of Man to the happy pursuit of the goals of the machine, deus ex machina, human becoming machine, etc. Some authors, like Stanisław Lem, Brian Aldiss, Ursula K. Le Guin and Philip K. Dick, brought sci-fi back to Man. But they were exceptions, not the rule. And successful as they were, they could not fully wrench the happy directive away from the Machine. It merely diverged into two sub-directives that sought Man and Machine simultaneously. Dick’s underrated novel We Can Build You is one of the most naked examples of this phenomenon in sci-fi.
The Bible as a book is perfect. It is the Word of God, of course. But I also mean that literarily. Its writing is timeless and sublime even if we look past the spiritual. (Which, in any case, is impossible) It is versatile yet consistent, though it isn’t always obvious to those unfamiliar with its spiritual and theological dimensions. Some books of the Bible are less accessible: but the same has been said about Dostoyevsky. And most important here: by being the Word of God, the happy directive is irrelevant insofar as storytelling is concerned. The Prophets, after all, were not always popular in their day among the Ancient Israelites. One gets vague flashes of that structure in Jonah and Job; but even if the atheist jibe of “fairy tales” was taken seriously the Bible bears little resemblance to the Grimm Bros. and Hans Christian Andersen.
With respect to our beloved fairy tale masters, it is the great books of the Western canon, not Grimm and Andersen, that bear the closest resemblance to the Bible. (Of course the Bible is one of them) The need for atheists to downgrade the Bible to the perceived lowly level of fairy tales comes from the unwillingness of atheists to admit that the Bible is the most important of the Great Books of the West.
Don Quixote, as a tragicomedy, neutralized the happy directive in order for our hero’s quest to take on the tragic dimensions it needed to take on. Later, when the Golden Age began in earnest, it must have been intuitively understood that to replace the Bible, great literature couldn’t just aspire to put a smiley face on people’s faces. Christian joy is a deep, transcendental experience that doesn’t come from dopamine, but from The Truth. The Prodigal Son, for instance, sought the happy directive in the form of worldly pleasures but could not find happiness; that being the happy directive’s great deception. Just as we need night to take place before we see more daylight, so too did highbrow authors eschew the happy directive so as - to roughly quote Carl Jung - to “master one’s shadow.” The old formula of comedy/tragedy certainly helped enable this.
Again: if one wants to sell millions of copies of their book, popular literature will ensure that the happy directive gives readers the pharmaceutical sustenance they need. But if one wants to bring the joy of sublimity to people without being a priest - assuming they have the talent and skill to do so - you’ll have to be content with doing that for only a few people. It’s tough being a Prophet.
Popular Literature Must Be Pharmaceutical (Moving Paean of Hope)
Speaking of pharmaceutical sustenance…
The greatest waste of time I ever encountered with a book was Paulo Coelho’s kitschy-as-fuck novel The Alchemist. I abhor that book on so many levels. But what makes me abhor it the most is how naked its pharmaceutical qualities are. Its chemical mixture of the happy directive, politically correct narratives, a love story as cliche as it was stupid and its implicit yet cheap moralizing (don’t drink kiddos! Even though the protagonist wasn’t a drunk) constitutes one of the most perfect pharmaceutical formulas to be found in popular literature. It is what I call a “moving paean of hope;” though not all “moving paeans of hope” are chemical in nature, this is one of the crucial distinctions between this medicinal hope and…”classic hope,” I suppose I should call it. The hope that drives Don Quixote to lead a knightly life. The hope of Christmas and the birth of Our Savior that wins over Scrooges soul in A Christmas Carol. The hope that eventually finds its way into Raskolnikov’s soul when justice for his crime is at hand.
It’s no wonder the Brazilians I meet (and many more from what I hear) don’t just disagree as a matter of taste: they despise Coelho for giving their country this image of kitschiness abroad. But much as I wish Jorge Amado was that internationally beloved Brazilian author and not Coelho, it’s hard to imagine any other scenario. In our screwed up, meaningless and failed world order, it would be too much for many people to wake up and smell the coffee. The emptiness of our civilization is extremely hard to bear and is even as nihilistic as Jose Saramago’s crowning triumph of nihilism, Blindness. (I recognize that this sounds very similar to The Matrix: the Wachowski brothers weren’t wrong, I’ll just say that)
The Alchemist, on the surface, doesn’t appear to be doing anything different from a fairy tale. But fairy tales give moral instructions so as to handle the negativities of life. Kind of like that expression where you give a man a fish and feed him for a day, while teaching the man to fish ensures he never goes hungry. The Alchemist is equivalent to giving a man a fish. Only instead of a fish - which, while delicious, has no narcotic properties that I’m aware of - The Alchemist functions as an anti-depressant with no redeeming moral lessons to teach. (Except, at one point, an implicit chide that Muslims are morally superior to Christians) While I hear that Coelho is a nice person and hate to bash him more than is necessary, in this capacity Coelho - in his function as the author of The Alchemist, at the least - is not an author but a drug dealer.
Literary fiction cannot function this way even if it wanted to. (The Doors of Perception was an essay, not a novel) True, highbrow consumers of culture do feel beautiful feelings when encountering sublimity. But like Christian joy sublimity isn’t meant to be addictive, any more than the highbrow consumer of fancy wines is meant to chug them like a 40 oz. A few people do get what I like to call Erasmus Syndrome - the addictive need to prioritize book buying before life’s other essentials. I confess to being a victim of Erasmus Syndrome myself. But that need isn’t related to a narcotic need for sublimity. One can just as easily satiate one’s Erasmus Syndrome with pulp fiction.
On this front, literary fiction cannot compete with the ever-malleable, metamorphic popular fiction. It is this, more than anything else listed here, that will ensure literary fiction’s marginal status as long as the current status quo remains in force.
Popular Fiction Must Service The Reader (Cliches & Tropes, Low Common Denominator, Etc.)
While I sort of brushed upon this in the previous ones, it is worth repeating: popular fictions singular goal is to please the reader. Service the reader if need be. While the phrase “customer is king” is meant to be most applicable to restaurants and those kinds of businesses, popular literature does share that directive. Another reason why American literature today is popular; its authors are basically restaurant owners.
Star Trek fans might recollect an episode of Next Generation where the USS Enterprise prematurely causes a female from one of two warring planets to hatch from a kind of golden holographic-looking chrysalis. She is a metamorph and is designed to do everything her male mate wants. She, in the process, biologically becomes an extension of her partner’s wants and desires and, after being exposed long enough to a certain man, becomes “permanently his” and always able to see to his wants and needs. Her behavior, as a result, switches between every man on the Enterprise (she is in her third and most pheromonal stage of development, of course). Each individual interaction produces a different reaction from her. For a sleazy guy, she becomes a sleazy woman. For a cultured man, she becomes cultured and assists the cultured man in his cultured endeavors. And so on.
Popular fiction is like the metamorph. When done right, it becomes the extension of the reader’s wants and desires. If literature was a woman, popular fiction would be the obedient woman who does everything for her husband without agency. Except that popular literature does this for women as well. The real reason why Fifty Shades of Grey offends literati like myself isn’t the sex. It is its function as a metamorph that offends: we see the tastes of the wider public reflected in this poorly written, low common denominator excuse of a novel. When there is so much fine literature we’d prefer to see in our metamorph.
Here is another metamorph conundrum that comes to mind.
A lot of writing advice I encounter advises the author to use real information in order to teach the reader something. In general, I have nothing against this advice as long as it doesn’t compromise one’s artistry by, for instance, looking like Wikipedia entries integrated into the prose. But those who share this advice do lack a certain kind of awareness.
Namely: a work of fiction will never compete with a work of nonfiction when it comes to the basic task of disseminating facts. Period. End of story. Popular literature, therefore, finds itself in a bit of a conundrum here: on one hand, it is trying to be second in Rome when it should remain first in its own domain. But on the other hand, it is still following its prime directive: give the reader what he or she wants. In a way, literature then becomes caught in a trap of its own making provoked by the wants and desires of society.
Like a circus monkey, popular fiction has to go through all kinds of hoops to please its audience. Literary fiction, on the other hand, doesn’t have to do that and can, like Bartleby the Scrivener, simply say: “I would prefer not to.” It is one of literary fiction’s greatest strengths. We could lament Cormac McCarthy’s obscurity for the first three decades of his career all we like. But at the end of the day, he was not a circus monkey and we appreciate him all the more for not succumbing to such “theatrics.” He followed his own path, as every author of highbrow fiction should. The audience doesn’t like this because the circus monkey isn’t behaving in the entertaining manner they “paid for.” In other words, the metamorph is not servicing her “husband” the way she should. Literary fiction’s greatest strength is that - when successful - it makes the audience come toward it and seek it out. Not vice versa.
Because literary fiction is nothing if not comfortable with experimenting, it can take on circus monkey mannerisms if it has an artistic objective of that kind in mind. An example being Witold Gombrowicz’s Trans-Atlantyk, which satirized the old gaweda style of literature popular among the country gentry of Poland in the good old days. But if literary fiction’s authors seriously aspire toward circus monkey mannerisms, the result is a catastrophe. Not only will it fail to satisfy the needs of even the most open-minded highbrow readers; its inability to service the popular fiction reader will guarantee that no one will care about this hybrid. Like a mermecolion, it cancels itself out.
To learn what a mermecolion is, check out Jorge Luis Borges’ The Book of Imaginary Creatures. You want your novel to be a lot of things. But even if you don’t know what it is, trust me: the last thing you want your novel to be is a mermecolion.
Popular Literature is for the Moment; Literary Fiction Is A Contribution to Eternity
While this rule is not ironclad circumstantially speaking - after all, some great masterpieces like Virgil’s poetry and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen were originally written to please a monarch in the moment - literary fiction’s quest for sublimity is simultaneously a quest for eternity. This means that a high culture writer has to take into account the fact that their “target audience” might not be alive today. That has certainly been true for many of the greatest authors. American literature in particular is extremely dependent on that rule, as seen with its greatest novel Moby Dick. A novel that was dismissed by critics in its time as being “too dark.”
It is curious to speculate how minds back then processed unrecognized classics. Did the darkness give them nightmares? Was their something about their mindset that simply didn’t process what was sublime about them? Or were they simply offended? I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on that in the comments. If you’re reading a book today that you think of as meh but that in twenty years becomes widely recognized as a great classic, what do you think in your mind prevented you from seeing it that way? (A tricky question, I know)
It is with this quality that the error of so many American authors (and creative writing program automatons) becomes plainly clear: authors of literary fiction are pursuing the goals and objectives of popular fiction while hoping to remain “high;” to have their cake and eat it too. They’ve seen the marketplace and decided - unwisely - that if they 1) market literary fiction as popular and treat it like their Instagram profile, 2) do all the circus monkey tricks, and 3) aspire to the singular goal of selling as many copies as possible, it won’t affect their artistry. And in the meantime, these authors tell themselves, ‘I write literary fiction but I’m not an elitist or a snob. I believe in democracy. Therefore, I command reality to bend its rules and make my highbrow work lowbrow enough to sell tons of copies to God-blessed America without losing its fancy artistic European cred.’
That mistaken mentality (and its close, synonymous derivatives) couldn’t be further from the truth. Literary fiction authors have to completely own up to the fact that they are being highbrow. They have to risk being called snobs and elitists. (Assuming they’re not chicken) Most of all: they have to be artists, not pharmaceutical drug dealers. Much as we like to bash Fifty Shades of Grey - or, as I just did, The Alchemist - their authors, to their credit, don’t pretend to be Shakespeare. They’re honest about what they write. No amount of pretending one’s highbrow style book is lowbrow will bring you the $95 million that E.L. James made in one year from Fifty Shades.
Fortunately, there is a solution. As Witold Gombrowicz and Georges Simenon indicate, it is possible to be both lowbrow and highbrow if one can set the divisions firmly apart in ones minds. Gombrowicz, for his part, authored a popular gothic novel (The Possessed) and published it under a pseudonym to earn money. He successfully kept his secret until his deathbed, when he admitted to having written it. For him, his flirtation with popular fiction had to be completely separate.
Georges Simenon’s career did not require such discretion. His output - extremely prolific - can be divided into two categories: his literary fiction and the Inspector Maigret series. The latter is detective/police fiction and, though literary, carries the trappings of popular fiction. (The French, lucky them, can afford to up the quality of popular fiction somewhat) While the former is literary fiction. Inspector Maigret functioned as a singular outlet for all Simenon’s popular fiction needs and desires. Leaving the way clear for his other work to be literary.
An author can be a popular author out to sell millions of copies. An author can be a highbrow literary artist who places art before profit. And, on occasion, an author can do both at the same time as long as they are kept unambiguously separate the way, for instance, the Lithuanian great Mikolajus Contantinus Čiurlionis kept music composition and painting separate. But they CANNOT cook both in the same dish. Nor is a conscious mermecolion hybrid successful. As much as the progress religion dictates that we must have one solution for everything triumph for the rest of history, it doesn’t change the fact that there are apples and there are oranges. Why not just enjoy each fruit as they are?
Which kind of author fits your profile? Will highbrow fiction ever return to the US? Let me know in the comments below! And remember: there is no shame in either choice. Only demands.
Relatedly, I just read Jonathan Franzen 2002 article about difficult vs non-difficult literature, in which he critiques himself by way of a reader comment to him about his use of difficult words, and his own experience reading William Gaddis. Franzen divides literature into social contract work and status work, with status being earned by the "difficult" label, and is at best high art or author-personal expression... whereas social contract literature emphasizes connection with an audience (which itself could be high or low in artistic ambition). He comes down in favor of contract literature. There are non-paywalled versions of the essay floating around the internet, which I can't seem to find now. It even has its own wikipedia article?!
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/09/30/mr-difficult
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Difficult
Most of my local friends do not read fiction by taste (men), or because they are exhausted from work (women). One woman friend only reads, due to stress, as she will state openly, positive-themed women's empowerment books. The other, who has a master's degree, only reads romance novels, due to stress. I observe this and feel a humbling force at work, pressing down on literature, but I don't want to crumble. I regularly meet with an old college male friend, fellow English major and rugby player, online to chat about novels. I do feel rigid, proud disdain for some difficult novels, but others I delight in working through. Taste may be a factor. I think I have an instinct or willingness to judge that helps me through, and am okay making judgements that keep me moving forward to the next book. Some of my decisions on this I couldn't defend philosophically or with a schematic; they're just taste.
Franzen's essay plunges into Gaddis and splashes up and down again. But without stating simply, he seems to draw a line after "The Recognitions" as a worthy difficult novel (900 some pages), and the ones afterward. It doesn't really make sense in his essay, about his own decision (he says) to choose social contract as a writer of novels. But he writes insightfully about Giddis. So I picked up The Recognitions and also a social contract novel from Franzen's list, Halldór Laxness. I still haven't read any Franzen. Recommendation where to start?
Felix if I may jest, you haven't mention Musil's The Man Without Qualities in a long time, I hope all is okay! Cheers--
Wow. This one is loaded with insights, Felix.
I think that J.R.R. Tolkien showed that an author in the 20th Century could produce a sublime high-brow novel that was also quite popular.
I think that the four great novelists since the rise of Modernism in the 1920s are Tolkien, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vasily Grossman and Elie Wiesel. Is it because all four dealt with the most tragic events in the West in the 20th Century? I'm not sure. Fifth I'd place Hermann Hesse, whose novels overflow with insight into human consciousness, human nature.
Two other great novels of the last century -- Doctor Zhivago and All Quiet on the Western Front -- deal with tragic events of the 20th Century. Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits plunges in its last 100 pages into the tragedy in Chile in 1973.
Two great novels that do not touch on the Big Tragedies are Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, a murder mystery set in a monastery in the 1300s, and, as you mention, David Foster's Wallace's Infinite Jest, which merits a future piece by you.
Looking at this list, I'm not sure that a traditional Judeo-Christian author of the 20th Century achieved what the East-leaning mystic Hesse achieved -- providing new insight into human consciousness / nature without plunging into the Great tragedies of the 20th Century West. Tolkien, Solzhenitsyn, and Wiesel carried on the Judeo-Christian Western tradition in literature in the face of those tragedies.
But I wonder if I'm too hard on the authors since the 1920s who didn't write about the West's 20th Century Big Tragedies.