ADAPTATION FOR THE MILLIONS

Inasmuch as I typed a long example of adaptation for one respondent, who failed to respond to it, I may as well transfer it here as a basis for further exploration as to why Marx Got Everything Wrong:

'I sometimes wonder if Marx's education went any further back than the 18th century. I can't see how anyone who had a classical education-- as I gather was given to almost everyone who got to the higher rungs of learning in his day-- could come up with this stuff.

I assume he knew, at least as a raw datum, that literature was oral before it became written, but possibly back then studies of oral literature were in their infancy. Today, however, we know that wherever you have traveling bards, they alter their stories to fit whatever audience they encounter.

I don't imagine the ancient bards had a word for it, but I'd call it "adaptation" sooner than "commodification."

And the practice hasn't died out, even in its oral manifestation. Here's a real-world example for you: in the 80s Harlan Ellison-- who had some background as a stand-up comic, BTW-- spoke before a packed auditorium at a Houston SF con I attended. I forget what led up to this bit, but at one point he said something like, "And I know you Houstonians will appreciate such-and-such, because everyone knows that Houston... is batshit crazy!"

Appreciate laughs and applause from the audience. Probably everyone there, contra Michael Fleischer, was pleased to hear Ellison call them crazy.

Did Ellison mean it? Probably not. He probably knew next to nothing about Houston.

Did he later go to Austin and use the same routine on Austinites? I'd bet the farm on it, because that's what traveling comics do. They tell jokes to suit one audience and then modify them to suit another one."

In many ways Karl Marx is the perfect example of the intellectual who can't see the Moira for the Themis. Here's a man who was exceptionally well-read but whose most sustained piece of literary analysis was a short essay on Sue's LES MYSTERES DE PARIS, a book which might interest some comics-fans in that the novel contains a crusading aristocrat who in general description bears some resemblance to a certain scion of the Wayne Family. Why is this man's etiology of what was later called "mass culture" so persuasive, given that he gives no evidence of knowing anything about the subject?

Marx seems to have known nothing about the demands placed on artists by their audiences, whether those audiences were seen directly, as they were for traveling bards and are still for traveling comedians, or whether the audiences make their pleasures and displeasures known indirectly, as through letters, letter-bombs and other gestures. Instead Marx elides the audience to a greater extent than did any aristocrat or petit-bourgeoise, by the simplistic stratagem of supposing that the ignorant masses have no tastes of their own, but are simply responding according to their training by their moneyed overlords.

Most Marxist literary critics have continued to follow the path of elitist paranoia, with Adorno going so far as to say that even "light art" like folksongs are but a substitute for the authentic art that the bourgeoise keep for themselves. So, even long before the printing press or the television tube, the masses were huddled before their fires, yearning (though they did not know it) for the authentic art of Nabokov, but *forced* to endure the curse of "light art."

Pardon me while I vomit. More later.