Frantic Panoramas: American Literature and Mass Culture, 1870–1920 (review)

Reading the introduction to Nancy Bentley’s Frantic Panoramas, I suddenly remembered “Farm Film Report,” the SCTV spoof starring John Candy and Joe Flaherty. In one episode, the two criticize some recent French films because nothing blows up in them. The movies they prefer are those in which things “blow up real good.” Bentley’s introduction reminded me of SCTV because she discusses when 40,000 people turned out near Waco, Texas, in 1896 to witness a bizarre entertainment: two locomotive trains in a head-on collision. This staged crash was successful; those trains blowed up real good. The historic event and the SCTV sketch reflect our fascination with crashes and explosions, yet “Farm Film Report” is an appropriate touchstone for Frantic Panoramas for another reason: both illustrate the tensions between mass culture and high culture.

Bentley mentions the Texas train crash in her first paragraph. In her second, she starts talking about “culture,” which she defines as (groan!) “the domain of aesthetic expression and convention.” In other words, before two paragraphs pass, she shifts her discursive mode from narrative to critical analysis. Unwilling to let the crash pass so quickly, I turned to Bentley’s notes, where I noticed she took her information from a Texas website. She apparently never examined contemporary newspapers for more detail. Relying on the research of others, she analyzes the work of several turn-of-the-century American authors by applying her modern critical methodology, largely derived from the writings of Jürgen Habermas, whose ideas have become the latest clichés of literary criticism. Bentley’s emphasis may be misplaced. Instead of concentrating on literature, she might have written a cultural history of the phenomenon of violent kinetic experience from the 1896 crash to David Cronenberg’s 1996 Crash, which could have been fascinating.

To be sure, it would be more interesting than the book Bentley did write. In ho-hum fashion, Frantic Panoramas examines how American authors incorporated aspects of popular culture in their writings—cinema in W. E. B. Du Bois, consumerism in Kate Chopin, newspapers in Henry James, spectacle in Henry Adams. Strangely, Frantic Panoramas says almost nothing about panoramas, a hugely popular form of entertainment that greatly influenced nineteenth-century visual culture. In terms of both outlook and content, Bentley’s book differs little from “Literary Forms and Mass Culture, 1870–1920,” the chapter she wrote for volume 3 of The Cambridge History of American Literature (2005). Bentley still ignores some of the period’s major authors. She just briefly mentions Stephen Crane and avoids Frank Norris altogether. Her neglect of Norris is especially disappointing: he made significant use of popular culture in McTeague and created one of the greatest train crashes in American literature as part of The Octopus.

Just as Bentley felt no need to look through old newspapers for details about the Texas train crash, neither does she scan contemporary sources for other information, which could have helped her study significantly. Consider what the New York Times (21 May 1877) said about the conclusion to The American. Henry James should have “blown the convent up with nitroglycerine, and had Newman carry off Mme de Cintré on an engine captured and managed for that purpose by the hero himself.” The fact that James did not give his novel a happy ending by destroying the convent (which woulda blowed up real good) indicates his resistance to mass culture. This example suggests that Bentley might have enhanced Frantic Panoramas by searching contemporary sources. Her failure to do so greatly hinders this book. If she had read a little more Waco Semi-Weekly Tribune and a little less Jürgen Habermas, she could have created a much more original and important study.