May 22, 2014
Source: Shutterstock
So I was in the downstairs study, idly surfing the Web while the Mrs. watched TV in the next room. The door was open”gotta keep “em in sight”so TV noises drifted in.
Among the indrift I caught the tail end of a commercial. I don”t know what was being advertised; some labor-saving device, I guess. The punch line was: “… so you can concentrate on writing the great American novel.”
It sounded quaintly antique. Are there still people who think of literature in those terms? Are there people who think about literature at all, other than schoolteachers and college professors who are paid to do so, and their captive audiences? So far as the rest of us are concerned, hasn”t fiction pretty much completed its migration from print to the visual media: movies, TV, Hulu?
For most who are much under sixty, I”m sure it has. The reason I”m sure is that until twenty years ago it was a common thing for people”people not employed in edbiz, I mean”to say: “Have you read X? Oh, you”ve gotta read it, it’s really good!” At the bond brokerage where I worked in the late 1980s, everybody”including paralegals and secretaries”was reading Bonfire of the Vanities (which Steve Sailer thinks may actually be the great American novel). OK, Bonfire‘s about a bond trader. But Lonesome Dove got a not-much-inferior reception from the same audience at roughly the same time, and that’s about cowboys.
I haven”t heard “Have you read X?” from a nonacademic since the mid-1990s. What I do hear a lot is: “Did you watch X?” Most recently I heard it from a family friend in regard to the TV series Breaking Bad. My own interest in TV is close to nil; but our friend enthused, my wife was curious, so we”ve been renting the thing from Netflix, one disc per week.
Not bad, once you”ve swallowed some implausibilities. (A schoolteacher with no health insurance? Does such a thing really exist in the U.S.A.? New York City schoolteachers don”t just get full coverage, they get it for free.) Breaking Bad has a good narrative pull that keeps you watching, making it whatever is the video equivalent of a page-turner.
We geezers still like to turn actual pages, though. I”m taken with the urge every few weeks, and treat myself to a good thick middlebrow novel. I”m currently halfway through Ken Follett’s historical blockbuster The Pillars of the Earth, which is about 12th-century England.
Likewise not bad, though I don”t feel at all sure Follett gets into the mentality of the period. Did Norman kings really hug their earls on meeting? (Page 453.) Did aristocratic youngsters speak in psychobabble (Page 388)?:
“Is it because of Father?” said Richard sympathetically.
“No, it’s not,” Aliena replied. “It’s because of me.”
Follett certainly hasn”t caught the weird intensity of medieval religious belief; but then, perhaps no one could. Consider Fulk the Black’s penance, for example (A World Lit Only by Fire, Chapter 2):
Shackled, he was condemned to a triple Jerusalem pilgrimage: across most of France and Savoy, over the Alps, through the Papal States, Carinthia, Hungary, Bosnia, mountainous Serbia, Bulgaria, Constantinople, and the length of mountainous Anatolia, then down through modern Syria and Jordan to the holy city. In irons, his feet bleeding, he made this round trip three times”15,300 miles”and the last time he was dragged through the streets on a hurdle while two well-muscled men lashed his naked back with bullwhips.
Follett keeps me turning the pages, though, and that’s what I”m mainly seeking. In my youth I had aspirations to be highbrow, and I still now and then make a sally in that direction. For the most part, though, coasting down to the finishing line, I”m content with middlebrow entertainment.
I think I was always that way inclined. Sure, I read Ulysses“well, most of it”but I preferred Somerset Maugham, the quintessential middlebrow novelist.
