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Popular and Highbrow Literature: A Comparative View Peter Swirski Music historians record that when ardent admirers mobbed Verdi at the opening of one of his operas, brown-nosing him that it was sublime, the maestro said only, “Fine. What was the ticket sale?” Seconded by no less a champion of literary sense and sensibility than Doctor Johnson, famed for quipping that no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money, Verdi’s brazenly mercantile attitude challenges one of the most dogged myths about art. The Pure Art myth wants us to believe that high art abides in the realm of creation untainted by the cupidity of its lower caste cousins. Like Disney’s Seven Dwarves, who typically hang out in a troop, this myth does not dwell alone in the forest of literary and cultural misconceptions. On most days it can be seen having cocktails atop the Ivory Tower with a small but influential coterie: the myth that the Novel Is Dead, the myth that People Don’t Read Books Anymore, the myth that the Paperback Is a New Kid on the Block, the myth that Reading Pulp Fiction Is Bad For You, and the grand myth that We Can Ignore Popular Literature. In what follows I would like to take a closer look at some of the ways in which highbrow literature and popular fiction relate to each other. My aim is to take stock of select sociological data and aesthetic arguments that have accrued between the birth of popular literature—the term I will use interchangeably with fiction—in the eighteenth century and its drosophila-like explosion in the twentieth century. Its career may be all the more remarkable in that, for the most part, it has taken place without the sanction of the “eliterati” or literary scholarship in general. Like a backyard fungus, mass fiction conquered the world without the benefit of a gardener’s pruning knife (in 183 the shape of systematic criticism) or clods of fertilizer (art grants, writer in residence funds, poet laureate stipends, government subsidies, etc.) which midwife the efforts of highbrow littérateurs. More than two hundred years of fruition in all corners of the world warrants the examination of popular literature as a literary phenomenon, rather than as a mere cultural nuisance. In one of his inspired cartoons, Gary Larson depicted a bunch of hyperactive animals in a jungle clearing, all swaying and dancing to a blasting transistor radio. The caption read: “What Sloths Do When No One Is Around.” I suspect that being at once an aficionado of “serious” literature and a buff of pulp fiction may be the lot of many scholars, students, and critics of literature. Professing the classics and, when no one is around, languishing over a wellthumbed copy of a Simenon, LaPlante (of Prime Suspect fame), or a McMurtry, may be typical symptoms of a literary split-personality syndrome. One is reminded of a playful scene from Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, in which a small-time stockbroker, Binx Bolling, tries to conceal the book he reads at work from the eyes of his secretary (for Percy, see Mills ). With a full professional mien, he thus buries himself in Arabia Deserta enclosed in a Standard & Poor binder. In another incarnation, it seems, he might be reading Tom Wolfe’s new (old) social novel A Man in Full inside the covers of Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again (for Wolfe, see Farrar et al. ; for background, see, e.g., Varsava). Such professional dereliction/curiosity/openness (choose one) is not too likely, however, to be tolerated/accepted/encouraged in contemporary departments of literature. Many appear not to have heard of the large corpus of scholarship about Trivialliteratur or paralittérature in German and French scholarship, let alone the existence of such studies in comparative literature. The sentiment expressed to me by a senior English professor at a major North American university may be typical in this regard. Asked why literary scholars by and large ignore popular literature, he replied that this is not really the domain of departments of literature but of cultural studies. This strikes me as a grave abdication of professional responsibility. Any demarcation of a field of study that leaves 97% of its subjects camping outside the city gates must be regarded as methodologically suspect. A chemist contending that the proper domain of chemistry is only one element, even one as valuable as gold, would surely not be worth...

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