The Writer as a Celebrity: Some Aspects of American Literature as Popular Culture

THE WRITER AS A CELEBRITY: SOME ASPECTS OF AMERICAN LITERATURE AS POPULAR CULTURE John G. Cawelti University of Chicago In treating of American literature (by which I take it we mean primarily the canon of our "major authors") and its relationship to popular culture (those cultural forms, patterns, and processes most broadly characteristic of the American people), there are a number of problems worth extended treatment. For example, we might consider the interplay between the work of major authors and popular formulaic patterns like the detective story, the western, or the sentimental romance. Such a discussion would explore how popular formulas usually originate in some particularly successful work of a major writer which is imitated by others. In time, these imitations produce a standardized genre with conventions well known to writers and expected by an audience which has come to enjoy this particularkind of story. So the western orginated in the great success of Cooper's Leatherstocking Saga. Cooper's frontier hero and his plots of chase and pursuit through the wilderness became the basis of hundreds of novels and dime-novels in the nineteenth century and ofinnumerablefilms and television programs in the twentieth. In a similar way the detective story sprang from the Dupin stories of Edgar Allan Poe, while the sentimental romance originated with the novels of Samuel Richardson. We would see, in tracing the relation between popular formulas and serious fiction, how the most long-lasting formulas have undergone many transformations , frequently being revitalized by the influence of more original writers. In such a fashion, the western was given a new lease on life at the beginning of the twentieth century by Owen Wister, the detective story was transformed in the early 1930s by Dashiell Hämmert and Raymond Chandler, and the sentimental romance was continually reshaped by the impact of major authors like the Bronte sisters. Our examination of this problem would also touch on the influence of established popular formulas and conventions of those writers we have come to think of as our major authors. We would want to study, with William Veeder, how Henry James exploited the stylistic and narrative conventions of popular romance in creating such major 162John Cawelti works as The American and Portrait of a Lady, or with Richard Slotkin, Edwin Fussell, and others, how the myth of the frontier was used by Hawthorne and Melville. Finally, we would want to look very carefully at that increasingly important tradition of American fiction which has employed a parodistic or ironic version of popular formulas as the formal basis for complex treatments of American cultural myths. Melville's Pierre, with its burlesque of sentimental romance, Twain's treatment of the western formula in Roughing It and the detective story in Pudd'nhead Wäson, and the contemporary novels of Thomas Pynchon, Thomas Berger, and Kurt Vonnegut, would be a few of the landmarks in that terrain. Another quite different problem is the use of popular culture as a subject for serious fiction. Under this rubric we would need to trace the emergence of popular types and the vernacular as material for serious fiction. Fortunately much of this work has already been done for us by students of American humor like Walter Blair and of style like Richard Bridgman. These scholars have shown how experiments with the American language and a growing array of popular stereotypes like the Yankee pedlar, the Davy Crockett frontier roarer, the minstrel show Black, the spinster, etc., developed in the early nineteenth century and reached an initial literary culmination in the work of Mark Twain. The use of popular culture as a subject in the twentieth century has been less thoroughly examined and there is much that needs fuller treatment such as the role of Hollywood and other institutions of modern mass culture in fiction, the emergence of ethnicity as a subject, the role of sports as subject and symbol, and fictionalizations of popular movements like the counter-culture. Still another approach to the relation between American literature and popular culture can be found by looking at the impact on writers of the ideology of a democratic popular culture. This ideology itself has undergone a considerable evolution from the...