In this country, school is unlikely to have prepared us to make educated choices in our reading. While most of us are taught the mechanics of reading, you may, if you’re lucky, get a teacher who instils a love of books in his pupils and encourages you to use the school library (if, these days, it’s got any books in it); (1) you may have parents who read to you as a child, or who’ve lobbed the odd book in your direction, or who may even have a decent home library of their own (assuming they don’t think reading is the exclusive province of nancy boys). Then comes the compulsory GCSE in English Lit, where you’re typically required to master two set texts chosen by the examining board’s literary gurus.
And that, for most people, is all the help they get, which, on its own, would make falling in love with Ian McEwan’s novels an unlikely future event. Even those who go on to ‘AS’ and ‘A’ Level, need only read another 4 set books in order to pass the exam, which is rather scary. You can be cast adrift on a sea of words at age 16 without knowing the sharp from the blunt end of the ship, having read 2 books, or at 18 having read 6, but with a qualification in English Literature. Small wonder that the reading matter in many British homes is confined to an unopened set of encyclopaedias, a bound Orbis partwork on the Second World War, the latest cookbook from a TV chef and the Reader’s Digest Book of English Villages. Esteemed publications all, but not much there to stimulate the imagination.
So assuming the spirit’s willing, where on earth do you turn next? I would argue, unfashionably perhaps, it’s those who are at the business end of book retailing who are currently adopting the most visible (and some would argue, effective) strategies to break down the barriers which have been erected to prevent potential readers engaging with Literature (with a big ‘L’). It’s only natural they should be in the vanguard of the popularization of all forms of reading, since they stand to make money from it. They want more readers, and they want more sales. And ‘Literary Fiction’, without a doubt, is an underperforming area of the catalogue.
As the song goes, Thems that knows know that they know, but thems that don’t know, don’t know they don’t know. If you see what I mean. So wouldn’t it be good to target thems that don’t know, and introduce them to some fantastic literature? (I dare you to answer ‘no’ to that question).
But before we look at the techniques they’re using, let’s examine what can put the mockers on people reading Literature before they reach the first hurdle, since it’s all tied up with Meaning. In fact, it’s our Big Theme #2 resurrected - that of ‘High’ and ‘Low’ Meaning.
Book Snobs
Earlier in this section, I made the distinction between the sorts of reading we may undertake for the purpose of self-improvement, and that which simply gives us pleasure. And there’s the rub. These represent two worlds in reading - the ‘Literary’ and the ‘Popular’ respectively, a situation that’s been a reality ever since mass production made it possible for books to be manufactured cheaply enough to attract those with little money, but one that’s only been intellectually schematized since histories of literary consumption started to be written less than a hundred years ago.
In major studies of popular fiction, ranging from QD Leavis’s 1932 magnum opus ‘Fiction and the Reading Public’ to Joseph McAleer’s ‘Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain: 1914-1950’ which appeared in 1993, researchers have tended to conclude that romances and thrillers are simply opiates for the masses, and, unlike, say, poetry or ‘literary’ fiction, quite deliberately reflect conservative social values and employ straightforward techniques to communicate their meaning. On our Meaning Line, their model looks like this:
Meaning---------------------------------------------------------------Significance
Popular Literary
Easy Challenging
Romance/ Thriller Literary Fiction/ Poetry
But what really upset the Cultural (with a large ‘C’) applecart is when the publishing industry started to show dangerous signs that they wanted to make money by pandering to this low-effort economy. That development, according to McAleer in particular, made publishers unwilling to take a chance on new or ‘difficult’ authors, and encouraged the dumbing down of literature as a whole. Not good, although as we’ve already noted, using the example of the Romance genre on page -- above, it’s clear this situation that existed in Britain since at least the eighteenth century, although the real mass market didn’t begin to emerge until the 19th.
For a start, far more people were learning to read; by the late 18th century, it’s estimated around 60% of men had attained a decent standard of reading literacy, and women weren’t far behind. This compares favourably with today’s figure, believe it or not. Which only goes to show how complacent we’ve become in promoting the ideal of a lterate population. Anyway. From his coffee house in London, Doctor Johnson opined that Britain was becoming “a nation of readers”; in bookseller James Lackington’s view, “All ranks and degrees now READ”. You can contest these assertions (and historians have) but there’s now little doubt that they’re broadly correct. Someone must have been borrowing books from the 1,000 circulating libraries we know were operating by the end of the 18th century. Supply and demand and all that.
Second, as printing technology became more sophisticated in the nineteenth century, so the cost of producing a book grew less, and those savings were passed on to readers by a new breed of entrepreneurial publishers. In the first half of the 19th century, the publishing industry favoured small editions and high prices for copyright texts. For example, Walter Scott's novel ‘Kenilworth’ was issued in 1821 priced at 31 shillings and 6 pence, or a guinea and a half as it then was. This was the normal price for new books published in the 1840s, which was way beyond the pocket of the average reader, whose weekly wage packet would be a few shillings (certainly under 50p) if he was lucky.
But from the 1830’s onwards, a wide variety of literature started to be made available at prices ranging from a penny to sixpence.
At the lower end were the ‘penny dreadfuls’ (melodrama, crime, gothic novels and pornography) - but there was also some quality stuff being distributed; the publisher John Cooke issued editions of British poets in sixpenny parts; George Newnes started the Penny Library of Famous Books (and had a print run of 100,000 copies a time); and Charles Tilt produced inexpensive illustrated classics. And last but not least was the habit of producing novels in monthly instalments in magazines and periodicals, which was largely responsible for the success of Charles Dickens (among many others), since the pricing policy of part-works more accurately reflected the cashflow in the majority of households. And these could be bought pretty much everywhere. When W. H. Smith opened their first railway bookstall in 1848 there was already a fair assortment of low-priced reprints on display, such as the Railway Library, the Travellers Library, and the Run and Read Library.
But let’s press on. More people were reading more books. And you can’t argue with the fact that in Queenie Leavis’s time, popular writers like Edgar Wallace, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Agatha Christie and Angela Brazil supplied the bulk of the fiction consumed by the British public, just as Jackie Collins, John Grisham and Jeffrey Archer do in McAleer’s. What’s more important is the conclusions both critics draw about the respective audiences for popular and literary writing.
Typically (and this goes for Leavis and McAleer, and we can add George Orwell and Virginia Woolf to the list here too), there was perceived to be very little mobility between the two; readers of “trash fiction”, says McAleer, “tend not to graduate to 'high-brow' novels and non-fiction".
Now look at that verb ‘graduate’, which, in all its innocence, begs three huge questions about meaning:
Þ Does popular fiction by its very nature mean anything less than literary fiction?
Þ Is the amount of effort you put into reading and/or understanding a work of literature directly correlated to the worth of its meaning?
Þ Is one genre of writing intrinsically superior to another?
To which, if you answered ‘Yes’ to all three of the above must be added:
Þ Do you automatically equate the word ‘Popular’ with ‘Bad’
and then the killer, which comes with its own reply:
Þ ARE YOU A SNOB? YES YOU BLOODY WELL ARE!
Underlying this model is the assumption that the more you have to work for your meaning, the better it is. You have to earn your enlightenment - the writer shouldn’t be spoon-feeding you, or else, somehow, the book’s not doing you as much good as if you are wrestling with it. Like a cryptic crossword, some readers relish the chance to actively struggle with meaning - how else to explain the classic status of ‘Finnegan’s Wake’, written by an author whose own wife asked him, “Why don’t you write books people can read?” The critic William Empson actually gave it a name; it was he noted the “puzzle interest” in art. It’s as if by selecting “difficult” material, the reader equates effort with value, and, ultimately, meaning (“I won’t be defeated!”, he resolves). The book therefore becomes a gauntlet, seemingly thrown down by the writer as a challenge it would be cowardly to decline. It’s an interestingly Puritical idea, that meaning not earned is bought cheaply and therefore of little value. So those who read for entertainment purposes are just downright lazy. And what they’re reading can’t be wholesome. And then, because we’re in Britain, the issue of class raises its ugly head and you can write the rest yourself.
Of course, this model isn’t just exclusively owned by literary historians: there are people who wouldn’t be seen dead with a Jackie Collins novel because of what they imagine it says about them; similarly, there are those who wouldn’t dream of picking up an Ian McEwan because they’ve heard he’s “difficult”. But while the former is a simple case of Hyacinth Bucket-itis that’s probably terminal, the latter aversion can be cured in a number of ways, as we’ll see in a moment.
But this bifurcation is still very compelling, and while the majority of us just get on with reading what we like, there are those who are desperately worried that the ubiquity of popular literature, and the populist strategies publishers are using to sell ‘literary’ works is diluting literature’s gene pool. It’s not as special as it was. The PLBOAMS is becoming a tin of beans.
It’s a point of view championed in a book entitled ‘Serious Poetry’, published in 2003, by Peter McDonald whose argument I’ll précis here, since, at 40 quid a pop, I don’t reckon many libraries or bookshops are going to have copies available for consultation. (2)
McDonald is convinced that only by a process of continual experimentation will literature remain vital. And for “experimentation”, read “difficult”.
Those, he argues, who make “popular acclaim their last refuge of value” ultimately narrow the scope for intellectual rigour - it’s actively disabling the spirit of poetic innovation as well as critical enquiry into that innovation.
There are two types of poems: one (the majority) courts approval and necessarily ingratiates itself with as wide an audience as possible; (3) the other goes it alone, refusing to play by these rules and confronts “the finally uncontrollable difficulty and complexity of language”. What will survive of us, says McDonald, is words, and not the “personality” of the poet. Words, after all, are where meaning resides. He then constructs a template of one such meretricious lyric:
Such a poem will be in the first person (at least to begin with); it will demonstrate wry knowledge of what is most current in speech or reference . . .;it will tell some kind of anecdote . . . ; finally, it will find an image or images that transcend the situation, and that constitute an unspecific, apparently secular, epiphany. The poem will cultivate a knowing irony in relation to everything but its own control of language.
Ouch. Some well-aimed barbs in that one. And most of us who’ve read any modern verse will see what he means; the poem will be written in a matey tone, takes nothing terribly seriously and commits itself to no particular point of view (other than its own of course). Most crucially, perhaps, you don’t have to read it 20 times to get the gist. By contrast, he says, poetry that is worth the name heroically works “against the grain of opinion, or in a complex and guarded relation to it”, and is less concerned with currying favour than the rigorous exploration of unfamiliar intellectual territory, caring not one jot for those it alienates on the way. (4)
Whether you consider McDonald’s ideas viciously satirical or a load of reactionary old toss is an issue we’ll address in Part 4. But it does remind me of the amusing arguments that used to rage in the field of orchestral music, between those who insisted on referring to it as “serious music”, and those who were quite happy using “classical”, albeit for the most part inaccurately. In the same vein Australians, of all people, were outraged when it was proposed that their Radio 3 equivalent should cease being called ‘ABC Fine Music’ and rebranded ‘Classic FM’. You would have thought the bottom had dropped out of their world. And in a funny kind of way, it had, because someone, without asking permission, had monkeyed around with the circumstantial meaning of what they loved, and, in their view, debased the currency.
Footnotes:
1. In 2000/2001, the average primary school in England spent a pathetic £3,834 on books. And at the time of writing (2003), this figure is widely predicted to go DOWN. Book spend is three times higher in independent schools, incidentally. In the state sector, the situation’s so bad, many schools rely on supermarket loyalty schemes to stock their libraries. So parents shop at Tesco’s to obtain book vouchers so pupils don’t have to share set texts. Pathetic, isn’t it?
2. This works out at almost 18 pence a page. There’s an interesting game being played here, which is directly relevant at this point in the argument. No-one, except the odd university library and the writer’s immediate family, are going to pay that much for a slender volume such as this, no matter how good it is. So, by their pricing policy, the publishers are effectively consigning this book to oblivion; they’re sticking by the old industry adage that because it’s ‘difficult’, no-one’s going to want to read it, so they’ll only print a few copies and charge the earth for them. This is, of course, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe this doesn’t bother Peter McDonald; it is, after all, consistent with the argument of his book - but then again, he’s only lauding intellectual barriers to understanding, not fiscal ones.
3. So presumably the young McDonald, if invited, wouldn’t have addressed schoolteachers by their first name. Such tactics represent a short-term (and indeed patronizing) ploy to get chummy with the kids at the expense of the teacher’s traditional authority.
4. Maybe he doesn’t have many friends, and this is his way of coping with the ugly truth.
