Hi Everyone!
Today I'm going to talk about an issue where for the most part what most people assume has turned out to be wrong. All long as I can remember, there has been talk about how young people just didn't appreciate fine literature anymore. And in a way, this post is setting the ground to write about my own experiences with neo-conservatives before we took them seriously.
Certainly the idea that interest in classic literature is one the decline has been around since 1951, when Ray Bradbury wrote the book "Fahrenheit 451", but my guess would be that it goes back further than that. However, the astonishing thing about Ray Bradbury's own view of his book is that in his mind the story was not about censorship. This came as a surprise to many readers of the book, who saw the very idea of firemen burning books with or without the owner's consent, the constant wars, and the fact that people who memorized books have to live on the Lam as hobos, as very clear indications of social repression. Yet, Bradbury says that despite having written in the McCarthy era, that the book was about how television would destroy all interest in literature and turn people into a bunch of narrow minded morons. That he NEVER had any real concerns about censorship per se. However, this picture of very violent social repression where the problem was not a dictator but a sort of "tyranny of the majority" where no dissent is tolerated, and where ordinary people are both so ignorant and so out of control that they can't even see their own condition or their own brutality falls right in line with neoconservative political theory.
Although to my knowledge Ray Bradbury has no direct connections to any neo-conservative organizations, and while much of his iconoclastic romanticism would put him at odds with the harder neo-con political thinkers such as Leo Strauss, William Kristol, or Harold Bloom, there is a common set of assumptions involved. Basically the assumption goes that codes of human behavior are a fragile thing and can easily be disrupted or destroyed by bad ideas, or even more openness to imagery, technology, and such than "the masses" can really handle. Furthermore, that our basic humanity and the ability to recognize atrocities depends on either full inculcation into these finer things in life, or some form of social control. And that a human being without either a very conservative style of education or strong social constraints would be capable of committing terrible atrocities without knowing that they were wrong. That ordinary citizens who had not committed these crimes as of yet, and maintain that they would not slaughter, gas, or torture simply lacked the self-awareness to know how readily they would do so.
This may sound crazy, and it is. But several key architects of the Bush administration including Karl Rove as well as the heads of PNAC, all believed in these theories. In their minds the most dangerous tyranny was the result of a society that was too open as far as free speech and freedom of thought. And loss of interest in fine literature was one of the troubling early symptoms of this decay.
As a youngster who was at the same time very taken by both "Fahrenheit 451" and Oliver Stone's "JFK" (which had just come out), I had no idea how much the the neoconservative ideas hinted at in the novel would conflict with the movie's idealistic notion that truth for its own sake mattered. And that is very much at the heart of why classic literature's demise has been greatly exaggerated. Let me explain.
In the 90's there were basically two camps as to why literature was "simply no longer appreciated". There were those who welcomed this change and those who did not. The reasons that the neo-cons were concerned has already been outlined. Some paleocons, moderates, and liberals lamented the loss of "fine literature". Some liberals shared this lament often blaming underfunded schools and social problems. Others say the "decline" in more neutral or even positive terms, saying that this was inevitable with a more diverse society. Some even advocated for throwing the "dead white males" out of the curriculum entirely.
And yet,
Early in the Bush years a unsuspected truth came to light: That the death of the classics has not just greatly exaggerated, but entirely wrong. And I remember reading this article and looking upon it as a rare tidbit of great news, in grim times. After years of hearing classics dissed as "dead white males" or having their supposed demise blamed on the "liberal agenda", it was nice to hear that through it all classic literature was bringing more profits to book publishers than they realized. How would a corporation not notice what was making them money? Part of the reason was the force of conventional wisdom. But part of it, is ironically it took newer computer technology for the figures to become apparent. I say ironically because it was the very technologies that were predicted to render classics anachronistic and "irrelevant" to young people, that have made it all possible. As younger member of Gen-X who relates well with Millenials, I can tell you that TV, movies, and pop culture have had a real role in attracting young interest in reading the classics. Furthermore, it was the internet and computer technology-another predicted literature killer-that alerted publishers as to how popular some of these novels actually are. And what I find even more impressive about these sales figures, is that they not only exclude academic/school publishing but have showed up in the context of the books having been around for if not at least a hundred years. Anyone who's browsed used bookstores can figure out that books that have been in continuous print for a long time are generally easiest and cheapest to find-and you even get a choice of multiple editions. Plus with so many students buying these books (but excluded from the sales figures) there is probably also a lot more people who already have a copy in the house than with a bestseller that just came out.
During the late 90's, I remember having to wait four months to borrow a copy of "Les Miserables" even though the local library had five copies of it.
Of course, a lot of people misconstrued this finding as a "revival" of interest in these books. But really the only thing revived is publisher interest in promoting them. The actual popularity has been going on under the radar for decades, at least. Some of my militant Latina feminist friends in the anti-war movement were skeptical of my happiness at the finding and suggested that this "resurgence" reflected a "return to dead white males" in neoconservative times. One rather dour woman suggested that it probably came down to money, grim economic times. That classics were generally cheaper on a per page/per pound basis than more modern titles. And that books written in the past tended to be "denser" and have a bigger "bang for page" in terms of both effort and reward. A few Russians I knew pointed out that during Soviet times people read the classics (Pushkin et al!!) simply because there were few modern fictional titles-and the Politburo liked it that way. And that American publishing in their view was starting to develop a similar quality in a hidden way. That beneath the large fancy bookstores with their beautiful wood decor, fake fireplaces, and mini cafes selling so many coffee confections that there are dramatically fewer titles than there were in plain old Waldenbooks back in the 80's-when said Russians came to America. Other the other hand many say that libraries offer much more than they did 40 years ago, and not just in terms of both classic, modern, children, young adult (much more sophisticated these days than in the past), foreign language, and other titles, but in terms of lectures, public forums, and more.
So how do we make realistic comparisons on these things? To start out one has to evaluate the claims and arguments as to what is desirable.
One claim I've debunked is the idea that young people "just aren't interested in these books anymore". Not as the result of technology, or TV, or school budget cuts, or feminism, or liberalism, or an increasing number of people who are "not of European ancestry". As for the last, they were saying similar things about Germans, Irish, Italians, Swedes, Poles, Greeks, Hungarians, and Jews not too ago. But what about the idea that books are better appreciated by people of the same color, national origin, ethnic background, gender, class, religion, cultural background, and/or sexual orientation as the writer? Or that Shakespeare is simply "not relevant" to anyone who isn't a middle class WASP male? Personally, consider these claims to be fairly groundless. It is true that some evaluation was in order for the recognition of authors who maybe were overlooked due to various prejudices and didn't get the recognition they deserved. But at the same time Shakespeare was once scorned for not speaking Latin. And Dickens was once looked upon as a low class radical. Some feminists have made an interesting argument that sexism and an unsophisticated concept of racism influenced the fact that "Huck Finn" is considered such a great American novel-despite recurrent campaigns to ban it- while "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is relatively ignored by comparison. But these sorts of debates are very different from arguing that writer and reader need to come from similar backgrounds.
For the most part these sorts of debates are healthy. Because I've concluded from the evidence that the classic endure not for lack of interesting contemporary literature, nor because of some deep need to glorify dead white males, nor because of nostalgia or commitment to neoconservative thinking. They endured the late 20th and into the 21st century for the same reasons they made it that far in the first place, which to say by being truly great works of literature. And they are in no danger of being rendered irrelevant by social or technological change nor interest in non-English speaking and non-Western classics. Ordinary people with a modicum of education ARE much more capable of appreciating literature for its humanity and the desire to understand worlds other than the here and now, much more than the panicking of conservative thinkers, nor any dismissive ideas about "relevancy" and identity politics, ever came close to recognizing.
Say Goodnight Readers!!
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