Up From Elitism: The Aesthetics of Popular Fiction

UP FROM ELITISM: THE AESTHETICS OF POPULAR FICTION Ray R. Rrowne* When Adam delved and Eve span Who was then the esthetician? The question of the esthetics of popular fiction is tied in with many complex drives, most of which reflect man's apparent necessity to arrive at and maintain some kind of pecking order that places him above somebody else. Although snobbery, the feeling of superiority and inferiority—like death and the exploitation of the poor—has always been with us, it probably received its most famous and longlasting boost in the person of the nineteenth-century Rritish poet and essayist Matthew Arnold, who insisted that culture was something only a few fortunate individuals were born with or could ever achieve; some people had it while others did not; in definition, culture was the best thoughts of mankind most beautifully expressed. Arnold's most articulate followers in our day have been such individuals as Dwight MacDonald, Edmund Wilson, Stanley Kauffmann , and William Gass, among many others. They base their thoughts on the philosophy of Plato, the political attitudes of Edmund Rurke, Ortega d'Gasset, to name just a few. These critics insist that there is a great chasm between high and low culture—between highbrow , mid-brow, low-brow, or mass-brow, and I suppose, folk-brow (whatever one wants to call the brow hierarchy) and that as the gap gets larger, it is the role of the conscientious critic to fight to the death to save, resurrect, revitalize the elite. Anything but elite culture—and strangely and romantically folk culture—is deplorable. Mass culture, popular culture, and everyday culture of a large majority of people, is to the elite critic ignorant, visceral, mindless, cheap, tawdry, and driving to self-destruction while it drags civilization with it. Elite culture is to these people avant-garde and "intellectual." The attitude of these people can perhaps be correctly summed up in that of one of the high priests. F. R. Leavis, who wrote in a small pamphlet, Mass *Ray B. Browne is a Professor of English and Popular Culture at Bowling Green State University, where he is also the Editor of theJournal ofAmerican Culture, theJournal of Popular Culture, and the Journal of Regional Cultures. He is currently working on a book of fetishes and fetishism in American culture. 218Ray B. Browne Civilization and Minority Culture (1930), that the small minority of proper critics in the world "constitute the consciousness of the race" and must save the world from "popular fiction" and other damning influences . "Art," he insisted, is "the storehouse of recorded values and in consequence there is a relationship between the quality of the individual 's response to art and his general fitness for a humane existence." Such an attitude is loaded with nonsense, of course, from the very basic assumption that the critic should arrogate the right to be the aesthetic conscience of the world. Further, the attitude is based on the assumption that critical attitudes are immutable and therefore aesthetic standards are unchangeable. Experience demonstrates continually the contrary. Yesterday's classic often is today's forgotten work—unless it is artificially kept alive in the classroom. And yesterday 's elite critic is generally looked upon now as a historical curiosity, hard to understand even in a society of the past which might have been freer to accept such pomposity as truth. Yesterday's best-seller—which was duly consigned to the dust heap by the elite critics—is often today's classic: Dickens' works, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Gone With The Wind, Dorothy L. Sayer's The Circular Staircase, Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Jack Shaeffer's Shane, Graham Greene's The Quiet American, Wilkie Collins' Moonstone. The list goes on and on. Leavis' attitude is filled with many other assumptions which are only half truths. That it is only the "serious" work that is avant-garde is subject to many corrections. Although popular culture is undoubtedly the backbone of conservatism and maintains and furthers the status quo, it is sufficiently broad and amorphous as to allow and even encourage all kinds of newness. Leslie Fiedler is surely partially correct when he said that popular...