Tuesday
I’m currently completing my book on literature’s impact, which has been years in the making and which I’m currently entitling Does Literature Make Us Better People? Surveying a 2500-Year Debate, from Plato and Aristotle to Bertolt Brecht and Martha Nussbaum. (The title keeps changing.) In the book I seek to answer three sets of paired questions, of which the second one is
–Is there a difference between the effects of great literature and lightweight literature?
–If so, is great literature good for us and lightweight literature bad?
It’s amazing how many answers people have given to that pairing. I briefly summarize some of them today.
What I call lightweight literature, incidentally, the French call “un roman à quatre sous” (a story worth four sous) and the Germans “U-Literatur” (for “unterhaltung” or entertainment and contrasted with E-Literatur, with the E standing for “ernste” or serious.) [Thanks to colleagues George Poe for the French and Reinhard Zachau for the German.]
One of my favorite terms is the Slovenian “trivialna literature,” while means what it looks like.
John Dryden and Alexander Pope – It appears that people first started attacking lightweight literature in the late 17th century when middle class readership exploded. John Dryden’s MacFlecknoe and Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad called out large numbers of bad writers, which they feared were destroying all standards. The Dunciad concludes with an apocalyptic vision:
Nor public flame, nor private, dares to shine;
Nor human spark is left, nor glimpse divine!
Lo! thy dread empire, Chaos! is restored;
Light dies before thy uncreating word:
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And universal darkness buries all.
Percy Shelley—While Shelley doesn’t talk about lesser literature, his distinction between the greatest literature and the runners-up helps set the terms of later discussions. The greatest poets (Homer, Dante, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Milton) see to the very essence of humanity while figures like Euripides, Tasso, Lucan, Spenser, Voltaire and Rousseau get sidetracked by local concerns.
Marx, Engels and later Marxist scholars – Engels once complained about novels that, because they seek to be politically correct, fail to grasp actual historical conditions. He and Marx both claimed that they learned more about history from a genius royalist like Balzac than from novels written as socialist propaganda. Terry Eagleton builds on this idea, arguing that sometimes reactionary authors like Joseph Conrad and T. S. Eliot capture the crisis of capitalism better than many progressive writers.
W.E.B. Du Bois –Although he once said, “I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda,” Du Bois actually took a stance similar to the Marxists. Pointing out how Blacks have been stereotyped in many works of literature, he thought the author’s responsibility was to describe them truthfully, even if the resulting images offended readers, black as well as white.
The Frankfurt School – Marxists, because they were interested in the masses, were the first scholars to make a concerted study of popular culture. They would also prove to be particularly critical of it, calling lightweight lit the opiate of the masses. In One Dimensional Man, Marcuse accuses such literature of leveling rather than raising the public.
Feminism – Feminists have grappled with the issues raised by lightweight literature, with many arguing that Harlequins and other formulaic romances socialize women into patriarchal modes of thinking. Others, more sympathetic, argue that these works allow women to voice deep grievances. Although many such works feature an attractive but imperious man who humiliates the heroine (think Pride and Prejudice), he often then suffers a reversal and must be saved or nursed by to heath by her. Yet even feminists who detect revenge and empowerment at work in this fantasy worry that, in the end, the woman sacrifices too much for a supposed happy ending.
Freud, Jung, and Their Descendants – To the extent that literature plays Aristotle’s therapeutic role, the question is whether great literature does a better job at this than lightweight literature. A good case can be made that stories that offer cheap wish fulfillments and formulaic hero’s journeys simply perpetuate neurosis whereas great literature shows a genuine way forward.
Ethical Criticism – Wayne Booth, who is one of my favorite theorists, compares books to friends and says that great literature helps us “improve our desires—to desire better desires.” The problem with lightweight literature is that, like a shallow friendship, it doesn’t get us to aspire to anything greater. In fact, it gets us to desire less, as can be seen with Peter Benchley’s bestselling novel Jaws:
[I]t is on the scales of otherness and range that this friend really lets me down. The range is extremely narrow—physical survival and physical pleasure are good; physical destruction or self-denial are bad. And whatever is really “other” is simply to be feared, not understood. Here we are, average, normal, comfortably familiar folks, and there they are, the threat. In short, my time with this friend so far has been a narrowing time, a time of bifurcating my world into stereotyped victims and stereotyped, villainous “others.” What had looked like a harmless bit of escape literature, useful for killing an hour or two with some excitement, appears in this view considerably more threatening to the spirit than Benchley intended with his sharks….The story tries to mold me into its limited shapes, giving me practice, as it were, in wanting and fearing certain minimal qualities and ignoring all others. I am to become if I enter this world, that kind of desirer, with precisely the kinds of strengths and weaknesses that the author has built into his structure.
Jane Austen on Lightweight Literature–Jane Austen takes regular potshots at lightweight literature, which she sometimes sees doing active harm. To summarize briefly one of the chapters in my book, she shows how
–gothic potboilers lead Catherine Morland astray in Northanger Abbey;
–Marianne and Willoughby indulge in the romantic sensibilities of William Cowper and Sir Walter Scott while admiring Pope “no more than is proper”;
–the Bertrams and Crawfords in Mansfield Park are led astray by the steamy German melodrama Lovers’ Vows, which allows them to vicariously imagine illicit love. By the end of the novel, Maria Bertram and Henry Crawford will literally engage in such love.
–Captain Benwick seeks solace for his lost fiancé in the poetry of Scott and Byron. We see how ultimately shallow he is when he chooses a woman who shares his reading tastes (Louisa Musgrove) over the sublime Anne Elliot.
I think of lightweight lit the way I think of donuts: they’re fine from time to time but one mustn’t make a steady diet of them. Healthy foods taste so much better anyway.
