The headline from last week’s article reveals the problem as well as anything else might: “King: Writers with Commercial Success Need Recognition.”
AP writer Hillel Italie’s article goes on to inform us of Stephen King’s recent acceptance speech for an honorary lifetime achievement award from the Nation Book Foundation during which he called for literary critics to pay more attention to popular writers. The most obvious question this brings up is why? What on earth do these popular writers need attention for? They already have popularity; why do critics need to champion them?
Granted, the more literary-minded books, often created by those who teach creative writing at such respected institutes of higher learning as EastWestern University, may be just as subject to trends, whims, fashions, and formulae as their better-selling counterparts, but at least these authors are trying. Literary pretentions indicate literary ambitions, and popular writers, wisely, stay away from those. They don’t, after all, want to alienate their audiences with post-feminist narrative self-referentiality, say. It might hurt sales.
Those who are less concerned with maintaining a fan base can spread their literary wings a bit and venture a little closer the Sun. The critics champion this because it’s doing something, not just trying to better the last book.
This really isn’t an issue of “good” or “bad” literature, however. Such pronouncements aren’t up to us to decide, though we’ll invariably argue endlessly over them anyhow. The declaration of greatness belongs to those who will be reading fifty or a hundred years from now, those who are able to determine what’s still good. And those writers may be people writing now who have not even been discovered, perhaps writers like Bean Newton, who pass on before they have found their place and need critics like myself to resurrect them.
You may be saying that King’s notion has some merit. I mean, millions of people can’t be that wrong, and after all, weren’t some of the truly great writers of the past also popular? Dickens was all the rage in his day, and Shakespeare himself wrote as much for the groundlings as the elite up in the boxes.
Laying aside the notion that millions of people can be wrong, the rest of that is true. But for all the popular writers who happen to be great, there are an equal number of unpopular or unkown ones of whom we have come to realize the greatness. Some of them, like Dickinson and Kafka, tried to avoid the public eye entirely. For every Whitman trumpeting his yawp into the public ear there is a Gerard Manley Hopkins, toiling away at his churchly duties. Then there are the “literary” writers, those who wrote for the elite unapologetically, we still revere: Eliot, Pound, Joyce–people who are difficult to access, but worth studying because thier work is rewarding and because their work changed the face of literature itself and helped to advance the art.
So popular writers relly don’t need literary critics to advance them. And anyway, they might not be too pleased with what the critics have to say.
Watching the Victoria’s Secret Fashion show on CBS the Wednesday before last confirmed the following stereotypes:
1. Models are stupid.
2. Models, rather than having astoundingly sexy bodies, barely have bodies at all. They really are just coathangers.
3. The uniformity of the models’ bodies makes watching a lot of them in succession merely banal–the nudity, or near nudity, is not only not surprising nor exciting, it is simply uniform, like watching a succession of paper clips march down the runway with impossible underwear attached.
4. Yet, knowing all this, and realizing it even as I watch, I watch. I can’t keep my eyes off of it, can’t keep the drool from pooling on the carpet.
5. Except when Sting came on. Then I got up to get a beer.
So just now on Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Frylock said something like “That’s it. It’s postmodern.” And Shake replied, “Yeah, definitely from the village.” Did we just get referenced? Is my life complete — have I made it to Cartoon Network . . . without leaving my bedroom?
On the corner of the cardboard insert that comes with batteries was a little cartoon and a caption reading, “Cat in the Hat / See the movie!” Prior to its release this movie has already received high profile promotion on numerous entertainment channels, hosted shows, and television commercials, in movie theaters though trailers, posters, and displays, in newspaper advertisements, reviews, and informational blurbs, and doubtlessly through some toys offered by a fast-food chain.
The advertising of a totally unrelated consumer expense on this product is unnecessary and excessive, serving more as a simultaneous patting on the back between Rayovac and Hollywood. As consumers become numbed to the level of advertisements at the current moment, the commercial world ups the ante by further infiltrating every aspect of an average citizen’s life with its presence. There is no opportunity for individuals to avoid the extraneous contact employed, and so many get used to it, even expect it.
I’ve known people whose sole source of conversation was repeating segments of commercials and sitcoms from TV. It becomes a way of life–just like letting the faucet run, leaving multiple lights on in the home, or driving when the destination is within walking distance is a way of life for many. There is an affluent notion that what we want is what we need, and what we need is what we deserve. And with a consumer driven economy–what we deserve is either things or money.
In the third case of which I was a prospective juror, a young woman accused her middle-aged employer of sexual misconduct. She allegedly experienced continuous humiliation and shame during her employment, and yet did not complain about it or seek a minimum wage job elsewhere. Now she wants monetary compensation for feeling embarrassed. Now, I understand that not all lawsuits are frivolous, and that inappropriate behavior in the workplace should be addressed. But, you’d be hard pressed to find any young woman who hasn’t been ogled by a superior or heard a joke she didn’t like. I worked briefly for someone who repeatedly called me “honey” in a way that was obviously meant to be derogatory and degrading, but how would collecting some of his cash right that wrong? Money can not help you regain a sense of integrity or restore lost confidence. Money isn’t going to prompt a revelation on the part of the employer about the appropriateness of his actions. There is just no correlation between financial restitution and psychological amends. I think that if that young woman working at the doggy daycare really did suffer from her employer’s treatment what she should have wanted was a contrite apology.
Maybe this is why I was dismissed as a juror. If the claimant suffered no financial loss from the situation, whether due to injury and medical bills or damaged property, I cannot feel that monetary compensation is justified. The caliber worth of money has slid liberally into the judicial system from a society that values money even when no tangible thing is damaged, ignores what would be sufficient redress for that intangibility, and feels they deserve that money wad to excess. I mean, think of all the things she could buy with her victory. Or maybe she really believes a new wardrobe will repair her roughened self-worth. It won’t. It never will.
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