I didn't mention, in the course of Part 1, that my use of the word "unobvious" was derived from a famous essay by George Orwell, in which he defended Rudyard Kipling from a scathing critique from T.S. Eliot. To be sure, the way Orwell defended Kipling might be deemed a "left-handed compliment," since Orwell defined the author's work as a "graceful monument to the obvious."
The fact that such a thing as good bad poetry can exist is a
sign of the emotional overlap between the intellectual and the ordinary
man. The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in
certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time. But
what is the peculiarity of a good bad poem? A good bad poem is a graceful
monument to the obvious. It records in memorable form--for verse is a
mnemonic device, among other things--some emotion which very nearly
every human being can share. The merit of a poem like 'When all the world
is young, lad' is that, however sentimental it may be, its sentiment is
'true' sentiment in the sense that you are bound to find yourself
thinking the thought it expresses sooner or later; and then, if you
happen to know the poem, it will come back into your mind and seem better
than it did before. Such poems are a kind of rhyming proverb, and it is a
fact that definitely popular poetry is usually gnomic or sententious.
Orwell's 1942 essay may not be the earliest example of someone bracketing the words "good" and "bad" as if they were strangely complementary rather than exact opposites, but it's the earliest known to me. Therefore, I deem Orwell the unintentional ancestor of the whole idea of "good bad" entertainment, probably most popularized by the 1978 book FIFTY WORST FILMS OF ALL TIME.
Now, Orwell's criterion hinges entirely upon the distinction he makes between the tastes of "the intellectual" and "the ordinary man," though the essayist is not entirely clear about what that distinction entails. Clearly Orwell deems himself to be an intellectual, and from that the closest thing one can come to a definition from this essay alone is the idea that intellectuals alone are discriminating enough to know when poetry (which I assume should include all fiction-making endeavors, not just verse) is "sentimental" or "sententious." The ordinary man implicitly does not possess such discrimination, and yet, because both ordinary man and intellectual are human beings, they can share an "emotional overlap." At the same time, in other sections of the essay, Orwell seems to admit that having artistic discrimination can deceive its owner as to aesthetic perspicacity.
Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and
aesthetically disgusting. It is better to start by admitting that, and
then to try to find out why it is that he survives while the refined
people who have sniggered at him seem to wear so badly.
And yet, having said this, Orwell also criticizes those who jump to erroneous conclusions:
And yet the 'Fascist' charge has to be answered, because the first clue
to any understanding of Kipling, morally or politically, is the fact that
he was NOT a Fascist. He was further from being one than the most humane or the most 'progressive' person is able to be nowadays.
It would appear from this essay that Orwell serves two masters. On one hand, he tends to judge Kipling in terms of intellectual verisimilitude, as to whether the author has, say, correctly reported on the power politics of the British Raj. Yet he appreciates Kipling's ability to come up with highly memorable "gnomic" assertions, which is something not all artists can do.
So Orwell offers, as a left-handed compliment to Kipling, the observation that Kipling could speak to the emotions shared by both intellectuals and ordinary people. This is a familiar contrast between intellect and emotion-- one might almost call it a standard "trope" of basic philosophy. But I don't think it helps to see Kipling's genius-- even if it was confined to gnomic assertions, which I don't think to be the case-- as purely "emotional" in nature.
Without going into a diatribe about my formulation of "the four potentialities," I certainly think that Kipling is more important for his skills with mythopoesis than with purely dramatic emotion. Orwell barely discusses anything but verse poetry in the essay, and that's to be expected as Orwell was reacting against the Eliot polemic on Kipling's verse. But of course, everything Kipling wrote-- verse, novels, short stories, and non-fiction essays-- proceeded from the same source. Thus he's tapping into deeper sources than simple emotional oppositions when he imagines how animals might speak to one another if they were capable of so doing, as in THE JUNGLE BOOK, or imagining the entire history of "The Female of the Species."
But it's perhaps pointless to critique Orwell for not being aware of mythopoetic dimension of art, for he was, in keeping with his own self-identification as an intellectual, his primary concern was with didactic thought, and this shows in the two books for which he's most remembered: ANIMAL FARM and 1984. These are largely didactic presentations of ideas, while THE JUNGLE BOOK, though it like ANIMAL FARM personifies lower animals, is far more about understanding what each animal means as a mythic presence.
So, since I disagree with Orwell defining "the obvious" purely in terms of some common "emotional overlap" between ordinary people and intellectuals, I have a different take on what is "obvious" in literature vs. what is "unobvious"-- which I'll address in Part 3.
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