DON'T FEAR THE FURNITURE PART II

In the previous installment of this essay I think I explained everything I meant to explain, except the title.

"Furniture," as I mentioned, was my metaphor for whatever elements of a narrative were strictly functional in terms of getting a story told, such as the sort of purely-denotative concept of "a door" through which Joyce characters must walk as much as do Jerry Siegel characters.

However, I didn't explain "fear," though now I think "hate" might've been more appropriate.

I would like to think that I've got to a point where I don't feel anything but simple disappointment when coming across a work that seems merely functional, without any special character of its own, be it the early scripts of Jerry Siegel's SUPERMAN, discussed here, or the foot-dragging frustrations of BLACKEST NIGHT, briefly reviewed here. I can easily accept that for creators who make their living from trying to create things, often the Muse flies away and there's nothing to do but move the old narrative furniture around in order to keep food on the table.

Still, in elitist circles it's often fashionable to hate, and possibly fear, the threat posed by what is viewed as conservative creativity. That's why Clement Greenberg, quoted here, resorts to military metaphors by viewing mere popular art as a "rear guard" action taken in response to the advancements of the "avant garde." In such circles the myth of the "barbarians at the gates" is often invoked, despite the logic of a writer like James Twitchell, who points out that the barbarians are always at the gates. Freudian Twitchell thinks this enemy is always "us," in the form of the up-and-coming "younger generation," and there is some truth in this. The unsophisticated literary tastes of the young do wield considerable clout over the market of fiction in many if not all modern media.

That said, lack of cultural sophistication is not the same as the lack of culture. Indeed, arguably modern pop culture has become the functional culture of most Americans, and possibly of the majority of other nationalities as well, with the "high cultures" of great literature and religion apparently losing more ground with every new generation.

Possibly there can be no peace between high and low, as the elitists generally aver. For the elitists, the world of pop art is an undifferentiated mass, a "babble," as Northrop Frye called it in the early 1950s. However, modern elitists might take some instruction from Frye's turnabout on this matter in the early 1960s, where this critic, never a devotee of poplit as such, nevetheless came to appreciate the links between high and low. Noting first that "all art is conventionalized"-- a statement that would probably provoke the ire of Clement Greenberg-- Frye goes on to state:

"One normally rejects a convention by saying that the individual works which belong to it are all like... if one is interested [in the convention], one accepts the convention and makes the most of the variety within it."-- A NATURAL PERSPECTIVE, "Mouldy Tales," page 5.

The notion of variety being enfolded within the typical is possibly too great a conundrum for many elitists to wrap their brain about it. Nevertheless, the constant search for such variety by fans of "the conventional" seems a good deal more plausible than the notion that all of these fans are simply slaves of some elitist's concept of a "false consciousness," which I briefly satirized in my response to this Jeet Heer blogpost.

Critically speaking, there's nothing wrong with asserting that a given work-- say, BLACKEST NIGHT-- is the literary equivalent of moving one's furniture about. But it's absurd to state, as Greenberg does, that this is all that *ever* happens in the world of popular art. It's far more likely that the fans are perceiving a variety in their chosen entertainment-- even those who may like BLACKEST NIGHT-- to which the elitist critics are literally blind, because they are not "interested." Unable to speak to the fans on the fans' terms, the elitist's usual refrain devolves to, "You should like what I like instead"-- and we all know where that gets us.

Even I, a pluralist, would rather read works that strike me as "super-functional" rather than only functional. But that which is purely functional informs every narrative ever conceived, if only insofar as all narratives need the denotative as a buttress for the connotative. So fearing and/or hating the functional is, in the final analysis, not much more profound than the activity of moving around one's old furniture.