Posted on 04/10/2012 2:14:07 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Willa Cather wrote an American literary masterpeice - so did Fitzgerald, Bellow, and Mailer - but Clancy's Red Storm Rising is just commercial junk.
Take a university English course offered under a summary like "The American Novel" or "A Survey of American Literature" and you find that before the 1930s the great American novel was written by people like Mark Twain, Nathanial Hawthorne, and Henry James - but literary greatness after that period devolved to people like Philip Roth, John Barth, and Paul Auster.
So why is the Life of Pi great literature and Cardinal of the Kremlin just paplum? It's not the writing: Pi is incoherent, characterless, illiterate drivel; Cardinal is literate, complex, coherent, and filled with people drawn from life.
The answer is that the criteria for greatness changed during the 1930s: from a focus on the quality of the work, to a focus on the acceptability of the message - and that message, of course, is not just actively taught in freshman English classes across America, but defines reality for many aspiring young journalists struggling through four years of college or University.
Thus I doubt whether a million Americans could even name three Faulkner novels, but his work provides the canonical democrat, NYT, image of the southern republican - just as the self loathing in Bonfire of the Vanities is foundational to their understanding of the ethical relationships between the urban poor and the nouveau riche in market economies.
Two things seem clear about the differentiation of good literature from bad:
The rules on which judgements are made about what constitutes good literature allow for a great deal of flexibility, but the rules on what cannot be considered are completely inflexible. Thus Norman Mailer's personal life compensates for some weaknesses in his messaging; novels about nothing are as acceptable as bad grammer; profanity is expected but not mandatory; and it's still possible to write literature without an explicit gay scene or authorial lifestyle - but Clancy's positive portrayal of military values is sufficient to place anything he writes so far beyond the pale that recognizing his name is considered a serious faux paux among the educated.
In great literature race and class count, in commercial junk they don't.
Clancy's characters have nationality and purpose - but in great literature they're black, or jewish, or gay or rich or poor or from carefully delineated classes. The conflicts Clancy's characters face tend to come from their commitments to goals above and beyond themselves: so they fight fear, exhaustion, and each other on behalf of their countries or their ideals, but share their essential humanity, personal values, and character traits. In contrast, characters in great literature are usually conflicted only by the boundaries of their racial and class isolation - generally achieving nothing for anyone in the process of discovering that they're nobody.
Thus Bonfire is literature where Red October is judged worthless because the values in the two books are virtual mirror images: the commercial junk builds involvement in the lives of achievers working through a specific event within a framework defined by personal commitment to truth, honor, and country where the Classic American Novel endlessly revalues the pointlessness of a life isolated from reality by a kind of post stalinist consumer euphoria.
What it comes down to is this: prior to the 1930s, great American literature had a lot in common with today's commercial junk: it was well written; the characters had individual weaknesses but a kind of group subscription to human equality and shared values in which the response to class issues of color, religion, birthplace, and parentage is mainly factual - thus Huck Finn, like Jack Ryan, can tell black from white, but reacts to the person, not the color.
After the 1930s, however, great literature diverged from this standard: from Hemmingway and Steinbeck to Roth and Auster, racial, sexual, and religious lines are sharply drawn and deeply internalized by onanists wishing themselves driving abuse, pity, or apathy across immutable class lines.
Think of the difference as that between a Sarah Palin rally with its excited, involved, and real Americans; people just like Huck Finn and Jack Ryan - versus a typically scripted Gore or Obama event with the usual deeply committed, and deeply serious, organizers; carefully scripted impromptus; and the nearly complete absense of spontenaity or enjoyment among the Augie Marches bulking up the crowds.
So what's this mean for republicans? The superficial message is this: the fact that millions of Americans devour each new Clancy novel demonstrates an enormous market for republican ideas - but the more subtle message is that the values taught aspiring journalists are dramatically out of sync with their markets and therefore that republicans should first work to get some Clancy novels into the curriculum, and secondly give some serious thought to the likelihood that millions of Americans consider themselves ill served by the news media choices available to them.
“That might get me to actually watch her for once - out of curiosity.”
Don’t bother. When I retired 15 years ago I sat myself down and watched Oprah——twice. That was it for me.
Unfortunately even A Christmas Carol is losing its universality: The more I’m acquainted with modern welfare society, the more I like the pre-conversion Scrooge. “Are there no poor houses...”
“It is a classic from 1931.”
Freshman English summer reading!
Interestingly, poor houses were one of the first components of what was to become welfare state socialism.
That's not to say that all ‘great’ literature is bad, obviously it is not. But so much of it motivated by Marxism, Freud, and such is garbage, whose pages aren't fit to use as toilet paper. I don't have a PhD in lit, although I do have a PhD, and I've read enough of the stuff to know.
I am now too old to read what I do not like, and so I don't.
Service is good. I also recommend Henry Herbert Knibbs
Although the stories are trvial, P. G. Wodehouse has a marvelous mastery of language and humor
Agreed. I think P.G. Woodhouse is a great writer. I read the Jeeves stories first, but the Blandings Castle novels are even better.
The Allegory of Love is indeed a great book. I never read anything by Lewis that I didn’t enjoy or profit from.
I like all his fiction, including Narnia and the SF trilogy, but I think that Till We Have Faces is his greatest novel.
Hard to say which is better.
I loved “The Great Sermon Handicap”, I think the name of the story was, and who can forget the time Bertie was treed by the swan?? And Bertie’s good aunt, Aunt Dahlia, and the famous cow creamer?
All good stuff. I can’t say that I cared particularly for the Psmith tales. But the golf stories are hilarious.
I never meant that people here didn’t understand the complexities—I wasn’t trying to offend any Freepers. I just hear my own area of expertise attacked often as being “outdated” and that literature is constantly moving forward, so we need to lump past epochs of literature into one massive conglomeration.
Someone in my field is expected to know 1,000 years of medieval lit and history and you’d damn well better know Renaissance lit and dabble in some other area as well.
Yes, a lot of literature is based off of Marxist literature, but really only in the last one hundred years or so. There have also been many reactions against Marx. I am a staunch New Historicist (as many medieval scholars are—it may be a dead critical theory in other eras of literature, but not for us), so I reject Marx by default as anachronistic. I also reject feminist theory on the same grounds. Anyways, a bit of a rant, but I do think that canonical works are canonical for a reason. With that said, I am more conservative than many of my liberal colleagues who completely reject putting literature into some sort of categorical chronology. Accepting canonical works of literature is a decidedly conservative stance to take.
Mark Twain’s “On The Literary Offenses of Fenimore Cooper” was hilarious!
Ed
However, so many of the English and Literature people that I have met seem to think that if you say that you don't like a certain book, or a certain writer, then you must not understand it. Maybe, maybe not.
But at least we understand enough to know that the writer is trying to offend everything that we believe, so why waste time being miserable? Life's too short. Unless we are still searching for the answer. I've found it, at least for me.
On another note, what do the New Historicists think, what are their theories??
One of the changes that I have seen is that many of the pieces of great literature of the past had their share of action and conflict. The modern great novel is not great but simply intellectual musings set to paper. Boring as all get out.
Modern Great Literature = chic lit. Usually involves chamomille tea and internal doubts and questions.
Junk literature = guy literature. Usually involves “Arkon the Gratiutously Cruel” and some big bombs...in other words, real conflict.
I’ll take the latter and leave the former to the remainder bin.
Wedding song: “I like big T_ts!” Ala the old favorite “I like big butts......et al”....
Atlas Shrugged
Comments?
Agree completely. Stoicism was just fine before Christ. But we’re living in A. D. I was furious that Wolfe’s Man in Full read Marcus Aurelius for his moral guidance. And I hated the ending.
Bombs, cruelty, conflict . . . sounds like Ernest Hemingway or Ian Fleming, neither of which I'd put in the "junk literature" category. Heck, even Life of Pi is a shipwreck story with some rather graphic animal-on-animal violence. I'd hardly put it on the chamomile-and-lesbians stack, either.
I think there's a lot more muscular literary fiction out there than you give credit for. The reason we tend to hear more about the effeminate stuff is, I suspect, thanks to the influence of Oprah and similar media mavens.
Here in Canada, the CBC runs an annual competition called "Canada Reads," in which well-known Canadian personalities defend a Canadian novel they think everyone should read. Sure, there's a fair share of feminist sludge, but two notable winners in the mid-2000s were Rockbound by Frank Parker Day, and The Last Crossing by Guy Vanderhaeghe. The former is a 1928 novel about a feud between two fishing families living a harsh life on a remote Nova Scotia island; the latter is a turn-of-the century Western/survival story. (It begins with a man stuffing himself into the warm carcass of a dead horse to keep warm during a blizzard—as far as I'm concerned, anyone who cribs from The Empire Strikes Back for a period Western will get my vote too.)
I think there's a lot more meaty literature out there than much of this thread gives credit for.
Ah, The Good Earth. Read it many, many years ago, while I was in high school. It wasn’t assigned, I just picked it up in the library. One of those books that really makes an impact. I was talking about it just the other day.
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