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.
I don’t see the universality of a lot of “literature.” I’m not likely to pick up Dickens or Melville if there is a Clancy to read... even if I’ve read it before.
On the other hand, Sherlock Holmes is great stuff. Is that considered literature?
Bonfire’s EXACTLY like Sanford. Except that the protagonist (unfortunately for the national media) isn’t a stockbroker. But we’ve got everything else—black so-called reverends ginning up hate, the complete blackout by the media of anything questionable about the killed “student,” villification of the killer, courts/prosecutors/advocates all in a tither because of the racial overtones. It just goes on. I paid special attention to those book-scenes because they were created in Mayor Dinkens’ New York City. I drove through that city at night into potholes, rearranged or utterly destroyed traffic signs, and no street-lights. All I could think of then was that it was like Escape from New York (a movie, for those of you who don’t know, about Manhattan’s new status as a penal colony whose leaders have kidnapped the president). Now that I think of it, it’s kinda like what’s happened to our country in recent years.
Same here I don’t think I’ve read an Oprah book club book. I really enjoyed reading Tom Wolfe’s books - searing and meaty great feasts for the mind and also Clancy’s books, entertaining and festive as a 4th of July barbeque. Actually they would make an interesting combo if someone could foist them on Oprah as “must reads.” That might get me to actually watch her for once - out of curiosity.
In my freshman year, we started with Homer and went on to Shakespeare. My sophomore class, at a different school, focused on world literature--more Shakespeare, Dostoevskii, Orwell, Dickens, Karel Čapek, etc.
As a junior, we focused more on American literature, including Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (Boston: Ticknor, 1850), Herman Melville's Moby Dick (New York: Harper, 1851), and The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (New York: Appleton, 1895). The class also covered poetry by Walt Whitman, Dorothy Parker, E. E. Cummings, T. S. Eliot, etc.
To fulfill assignments, I read on my own books by George Stewart, a professor at UC Berkeley whose mid-twentieth century bestsellers are today largely forgotten, and Hector C.Bywater's The Great Pacific War: A History of the American-Japanese Campaign of 1931-1933 (London: Constable, 1925).
I graduated just in time. Not long afterwards, this curriculum began to be dumbed down and made politically correct.
Marxists took over the academy, destroying art and literature, among other things, while promoting vice, perversion and ugliness.
Tom’s time is past. He can still write but I don’t think people don’t want to read about the Government much anymore.
Lame defense of bad writing, as that is what the likes of Clancy, Steel, Crichton have produced. Cartoon characters, cliche ridden sentences, simpleminded stuff all over.
“...simpleminded stuff all over.”
It is what America reads at the beach...Tartuffe just doesn’t go with sand.
It's a safe bet that Dickens' Christmas Carol will be read and performed long after Clancy has been forgotten. And references to Melville's Moby Dick still pop up in popular culture from time to time.
And almost all of the main characters are richer than Midas and therefore able to pull off feats that you and I would never attempt.
My guess is that the author isn’t old enough to comprehend living in a time when there was only one enemy and descriptions of the technology in Clancy’s novels were like sci-fi themselves.
Any attempt to compare those writings to literature classics is dysfunctional analysis.
The Allegory of Love is one of the seminal works of medieval criticism. It’s still very relevant, and I remember using it in my master’s thesis years ago—I was writing about Chauceriqn allegory and poetics at the time. Now I deal more with early medieval English where Lewis’s work isn’t as important—but it is still a great work price of scholarship and he was so young when he wrote it!
Clancy doesn’t compare to the classics, for example:
The Count of Monte Cristo
Les Miserables
A Tale of Two Cities
Crime and Punishment
anything by Dickens
i loved it. in fact 20 years later i sometimes called my newborn Wan Lo because he had asiatic features ( i guess the mongols took some liberties ) with my ancestors.
Penny Dreadfuls
Right, he couldn't spell Pablum right!
For those of you under 50 or so, Pablum was a baby food, very bland. So very bland literature became Pablum.
Right, he couldn't spell Pablum right!
For those of you under 50 or so, Pablum was a baby food, very bland. So very bland literature became Pablum.
I also loved “The Right Stuff” but hated “A Man in Full”.
Wolfe is so clever——and those white suits fascinate me.
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