Hierarchies of Literature

From “Anatomy of Criticism” by Northrop Frye:

 

“Every deliberately constructed hierarchy of values in literature known to me is based on a concealed social, moral, or intellectual analogy. This applies whether the analogy is conservative and Romantic, as it is in Arnold, or radical, giving the top place to comedy, satire, and the values of prose and reason, as it is in Bernard Shaw. The various pretexts for minimizing the communicative power of certain writers, that they are as obscure or obscene or nihilistic or reactionary or what not, generally turn out to be disguises for a feeling that the views of decorum held by the ascendant social or intellectual class ought to be either maintained or challenged. These social fixations keep changing, like a fan turning in front of a light, and the changing inspires the belief that posterity eventually discovers the whole truth about art. 

 

“A selective approach to tradition, then, invariably has some ultra-critical joker concealed in it.”

 

Just as most people choose their novels to meet their emotional needs, social groups rank novels by its needs as well.

 

When I was a kid, I devoured Asimov, Heinlein, and Star Trek fan fic (that Paramount endorsed to profit off of in book form) because those kinds of novels suited my emotional need to spend a few hours in a world in which intelligence was linked to heroism. As I grew older, I read more difficult texts like Tolkien, Donaldson, and Rand, but the basic idea was the same. I also read Jane Austen because she seemed to be the only woman author who liked intelligent, sensitive, guys such as myself.

 

I’ve also had a period of my life when I only read books by authors whose name I couldn’t pronounce. That was literally my criteria because I wanted to read authors from other cultures. I also spent a year reading popular books just to figure out why they were popular. I read lots of Chinese literature while living in China, as a way of engaging with the culture and having a ready topic of conversation with the people around me.

 

And I could be a snob about it; I maintained my own ego by making sure I was reading “better and more interesting” books than other people. As a writer, a friend of mine teased me about all the kick ass Asian heroines in my novels, and it’s occurred to me that I was writing about women who are strong enough to be the heroes of their own stories; these women kill their bad guys. Marrying such a woman myself would relieve me of the need to be the hero of her story and give me time for my hobbies instead, which I suspect many actual women would resent.

 

And professors like promoting books that are hard to understand; being hard to understand as a virtue in literature keeps professors employed. Proving that books are best understood in the context of other books also keeps professors employed.

 

Bestselling and unpublished authors alike have reasons to argue over the relationship of quality of literature and quantity of sales.

 

If you think the most important quality in a novel is characterization, might you also think individuality is a more important virtue?  If you think the best thing about a book is the plot, might you also think an active and purposeful life is more important? Doesn’t the very assumption of ‘heroes’ place too much stress on individualistic heroism and deemphasize collective action?

 

I don’t have the answers to those questions. Tolstoy thought he did, disregarding his masterpieces in favor of novels that used emotional intimacy with characters to impart moral lessons.

 

One of the ironies of Frye’s position is that sometimes the Powers That Be who rank books don’t know what they are talking about. Back in the 90s, in that brief decade of domestic policy’s triumphal ascendance over foreign policy in the news, there was a lot of argument over ‘the canon’ being taught. Conservatives wanted to keep the established classics as the focus of literary education, which basically meant living white guys wanted dead white guys’ books being taught in college classrooms, while liberals wanted books by women and minorities added.  What conservatives probably didn’t realize was that books that are established canon today were, even if written by white guys, radical in their day. The canon includes Marx, Sinclair, and Steinbeck; the majority of writers in the canon are at the very least liberal anyway. This leaves me to suspect that the true reason we have greater literary freedom today is that the sort of people who would ban books are too busy watching television to know what we’re up to. “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” probably did more for gay rights than any novel.

 

And the hierarchy is more complex than before.  Publishers and readers have a chicken and egg relationship in determining which writers get published; editors have to really push to get a different sort of book published.  With the triumph of marketing research and methods over criticism and editing, the cultural determinants over writers are the publishers’ perceptions of what people will buy.  Book sales, television ratings, and elections are not pure evidence as to the desires and norms of society, since they are often manipulated, but word of mouth, grassroots movements, and social media still demonstrate public desires that eventually demonstrate what we want from our writers, no matter their medium.