Questioning authority is not particularly postmodern. Presumably younger people have questioned the authority of older people since time immemorial, prefatory to their taking over those positions of authority themselves. In fact, if there was a perceived process of progress throughout history, this might have been a factor in that process, the challenging of old ideas and either their acceptance or their synthesis into new ideas. Nor is the challenging of the authority of critics particularly newfangled. Writers have complained about critics for at least a few hundred years now, to my own knowledge, and for all I know even Plato grumbled when he read the reviews of Republic in the Athens Daily Tribune. I was reading last night about the Post-Raphaelites, who formed in the early 19th Century quite directly, albeit among other reasons, as a challenge to the art critics of the day. So the idea of a theoretically institutional disregard of critics, or a theoretical disregard of institutional critics, predates even modernism (unless one regards the PRB as early modernists, which is probably not an untenable position).
But in postmodernity it is not simply that there is a disregard or challenge to critical authority, but there is a removal of that authority because we know that critics have achieved it entirely based on the power derived from their special knowledge about their field, as compared to some inherent force of, simply put, good taste. Kant does talk about the aesthetics of art as something objective that we must be trained to appreciate, thus enabling a group of aesthetic overlords or an aesthetic intelligentsia. But this approach to aesthetics has completely broken down in the postmodern condition. We no longer believe in objective beauty, so we no longer accept that there may be people more trained than we to perceive this beauty. The burden on artists is to create art that either incorporates subjective rather than objective beauty into the work, or is interested in issues other than beauty. This is a challenge that Rembrandt, for instance, didn’t have to face.
Last time out I was applying this line of reasoning to the field of movies. My own field, however—books— provides perhaps an even clearer example of what I’m talking about. In the postmodern condition, we don’t rely on critics, or more to the point, everyone’s a critic as bona fide as everyone else. How has that worked in literature?
First of all, we have lost the canon. Not that long ago, there was a collection of books that one simply had to read to be educated. These were the Great Books of Civilization, chosen by generations of academics as the core of knowledge. But the postmodern realization that these were primarily the words of Dead White Men challenged their positions, and the canon was flooded out by the waves of other books from other countries and traditions. Who was to say that only some European males were capable of creating literature? And regardless, books from other traditions and cultures might be more meaningful for a variety of reasons, literary value notwithstanding (which is not to suggest that they are not valuable in a literary sense, only that their proponents were indifferent at times to their literary credibility). So the idea of books selected by some fustian intelligentsia disappeared from the academic landscape. (In fact, those DWM books began to be raked over the coals precisely because of their DWMness. Why wasn’t Dickens more sympathetic to the plight of South African diamond miners, the bastid!!!) And the idea of teachers maintaining the canon was similarly washed away in the flood. There was no longer any power to wield derived from special knowledge of the canon because the Kantian trained aesthetic sense could no longer apply. Other tools, to be found in the (what I think of as semi-literate, language-abusing, unpardonably incomprehensible) bag of pomo teaching tricks, took over in the educational environment. Fortunately there does seem to be a movement toward, dare I suggest it, a post-critical approach to teaching this literature, but the core point of the postmodern critical approach in the first place, that is, the critiquing of the provenance of the old canon, is a fixed and finished reality. Whether the language in the classroom is easy or hard to understand, French-sourced or something else, is merely a matter of fashion, which answers to no dialectic other than the fickle mind of the human animal.
As a body of prescribed literature, and ways of teaching it, disappeared in academic circles, so did the presence of the book critic in general. “The Book of the Month Club” is the perfect example of this. BOMC was founded on the principle that one needed to keep up with the latest books, obviously at a rate of one hardcover a month, which was commercially viable for all parties in the transaction. That magic, must-read book was selected by a hoity-toity board of critics comprising writers, scholars, publishers—a regular Who’s Who of High-Toned Literature of the day. These august living white males (I don’t think there were, at least originally, any women among them, given the hoo-ha BOMC made in the 70s when they finally hired a female honcho) knocked their eggy heads together once a month, after countless hours poring over manuscripts in the darkest of garrets, with only bread and water and a threadbare blanket to keep out the chill, selecting for the great unwashed THE book of the month. A thankful public applauded in gratitude.
Obviously this concept is based on a paradigm of great thinkers (i.e., scholars) expanding the canon into modern times. It wasn’t necessarily true—BOMC had its share of daily grind readers sifting through the slush pile, and the board’s literal participation in the selection process was always suspect, not to mention that the books chosen were not always up to the standard of, say, Anna Karenina—but that didn’t matter. The paradigm was accepted. But, as the scholarly idea fell apart in academia, so too did it fall apart outside of academia. No longer can these so-called great minds at BOMC be trusted to pick books for the general public, because there are no longer any reliable great minds according to a recognizable scholarly paradigm, just as there are no longer any reliably great books according to a recognizable scholarly paradigm. The BOMC concept went bust. The organization still exists, but as a shadow of its former self, with no pretensions to dictate the tastes of a vast American reading public.
But reading didn’t go away. And while the American public may not believe in the value of the egghead critic anymore, that public still is looking for a good book to read. So what comes along today? In addition to the clunky recommendations of, say, the Amazon software tools? And aside from the fact that the bestseller list, once a homogenous collection of general titles is now an atomized collection of specialized titles? One word: Oprah. Oprah Winfrey has become the most powerful force in American letters. She can sell more books than anyone, period. Because she is accepted as a critic? Of course not. Because she is accepted as “one of us” by the people who accept her recommendations. They don’t read Oprah’s picks because she knows more than they do, they read Oprah’s picks because they know as much as she does. If she likes it, odds are they’ll like it, much as, very honestly, if my daughter likes something, odds are I’ll like it, because we have similar tastes. Oprah has the great unaffected, unscholarly tastes of the average reader (otherwise her picks would have gone bust long ago, when people read the books and didn’t like them). Her very lack of academic credentials works in her favor.
I haven’t followed what Oprah’s up to lately. After a few years of Oprah’s Book Club she retired the idea, for one reason or another. Then she revised the concept, but slightly changed, in that she and her audience, instead of reading Wally Lamb or the like, would read the aforementioned Anna Karenina, a voyage of discovery for her and her fans. Which is curious indeed, as it is obviously an attempt to digest the canon! Oprah and fans embarked on a tour of DWMs (and, right off the bat, sold more of Count Leo’s book that first month than for years previously), but without the guides of the scholars. This may be the most postmodern event in literature since the birth of Robbe-Grillet!
So literature has gone from canon, to the tastes of Everywoman, to canon with Everywoman as guide, and God knows whence from there. But that is the postmodern condition. Good books aren’t what someone from on high tells us are good books. Good books are what we (or YOU as Time would have it) say they are.
I wonder.
No comments:
Post a Comment