A Novel Marketplace. Evan Brier
avant-garde depiction of the flight from banal American “mass society” in The Sheltering Sky to Ray Bradbury’s nightmare science fiction portrayal of a future dominated by television in Fahrenheit 451 to Sloan Wilson’s reputedly conventional novel, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, about a man who begins work in a debased profession (public relations) for a debased institution (a television network). Even Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place, itself typically though again regrettably viewed not as a novel but as a mass-culture scandal, mocks the conventional, mass-produced romance novel.
These representations are essential to the story this book tells, but the impact of mass culture on American novels was more far-reaching and less obvious than any or all of them might indicate. Between 1948, when television began its commercial ascendancy, and 1959, when Random House, an American publishing house founded in the commercial heyday of literary modernism, became a publicly owned corporation, the way American novels were written, published, distributed, and marketed changed considerably, in ways rarely visible to the reading public at the time and rarely discussed since by cultural historians or literary scholars. This absence of discussion might reflect a continuing scholarly-critical discomfort with viewing novels as participants in a cultural and an economic arena that also includes movies and television shows. Although it is conventional to treat Hollywood movies or American magazines from an economic perspective, as competitors vying for an audience with limited amounts of money and leisure time—both topics have been the subject of numerous scholarly studies—postwar novels, at least in discussions by literary scholars in relation to other forms of commercial culture, are still often studied as though they exist outside the realm of commerce; they are still often treated solely as commentators on the commodification of culture.6 Novels are indeed commentators, and they should be treated as such, but they are also themselves commodities that inhabited the cultural and economic field that the emergence of television unsettled in the 1950s.
The idea that literature exists outside the economic realm is in a sense inherited from the prewar modernists, whose project of separating so-called high art from commerce—as a matter of ideology, not fact—was carried into the postwar era in the form of famous attacks on mass culture by such figures as Theodor Adorno, T. S. Eliot, and Clement Greenberg.7 These attacks have rightly been read as corollary to the postwar novelist’s concern with culture over class, and they have become a touchstone of scholarship about the 1950s.8 In the early postwar era, mass culture (or the culture industry, or masscult, as it was also known), along with its detested offshoot middlebrow culture, was inevitably depicted in essays and symposia, by critics with vast political differences, as a threat to American democracy or to the brand of high culture that the modernists had created or to both. In one of several iterations of his evolving theory, Dwight Macdonald wrote in 1953 that what he called masscult “threatens high culture” (“Theory” 61) and that its creators “exploit the cultural needs of the masses in order to … maintain their class rule” (60). The standard-bearers of anti–mass-culture theories were followed by many critics who, in sometimes painstaking detail, delineated the ills of mass culture through close examination of its artifacts. Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America (1957), edited by Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, is one collection of these critiques; it features four essays on detective fiction (two on Mickey Spillane alone), four on comic books, six on movies, and five on television and radio. The degree of attention that so many critics devoted to forms of culture they ostensibly deplored prompted art critic Harold Rosenberg, in a review of the anthology, to accuse: “They play in this stuff because they like it, including those who dislike what they like. I never heard of one who to meet his duty to study best-sellers or Tin Pan Alley tore himself away from Walden Pond” (260).
This same spirit of suspicion is found in Richard Yates’s novel Revolutionary Road (1961), an example of the cultural concerns shared by critics and novelists in this era. In Yates’s corrosive account of suburbia, the television set has already seduced not just the children but also their purportedly highbrow parents. In the Wheelers’ living room, “the wall of books … might as well have been a lending library” and “only one corner of the room showed signs of pleasant human congress … the province of the television set” (31), this despite the fact that Frank Wheeler is himself a mass-culture critic, or a parody of such a critic, given to lengthy assaults for his wife and neighbors on the ills of suburbia, where “the television droned in every living room” (65). As Yates describes the Wheelers’ social rituals: “With the pouring of second or third drinks they could begin to see themselves as members of an embattled, dwindling intellectual underground…. Even after politics had palled there had still been the elusive but endlessly absorbing subject of Conformity, or The Suburbs, or Madison Avenue” (59). But they are frauds. Late in the novel, Frank and his wife April watch a television show together, “which he found wholly absorbing and she declared was trash” (206). In satirizing these reactions—his presumably undeclared absorption and her felt need to declare the television show trash—Yates, like Rosenberg, has it both ways, savaging mass culture while mocking its most vociferous critics for doing the same. By the end of the 1950s, Yates’s novel and Rosenberg’s essay suggest, the mass-culture critique, as a topic for novels and essays, was itself a cliché. For Yates, though, as for Rosenberg, casting it as a cliché seems an effort to present himself as a more authentic critic, purer than his characters in his contempt for television and for the suburbanites who watch it. The consequences of the characters’ hypocrisy, moreover, are severe: “The children,” Yates writes of Frank and April’s son and daughter, “lay silenced by television” (135).
Over the course of decades, the attitudes of Greenberg and Macdonald and Rosenberg and Yates have come to seem old-fashioned at best, but to a considerable and lamentable degree they continue to dictate the terms of our conversation about American culture. The rhetoric of cultural crisis in which, Rosenberg suggested, critics wallowed has since been called the discourse of the “great divide” (Andreas Huyssen’s term), which purportedly separates high culture from mass culture: the idea that high art and low art exist not on a continuum but on separate planes, that there is a “categorical distinction” between them that it is the critic’s role to guard and maintain (viii). The discourse’s unabashed snobbery has made it an irresistible target. Contemporary cultural-studies scholars and theorists of popular culture have drawn attention to mass culture’s subversive potential, what Andrew Ross calls its “contradictory power and significance … for its users and consumers” (52). In this revisionist account, the artifacts of mass culture are seen to have uses beyond the control or intentions of their makers, who are as nefarious as Macdonald suggested they were in the late 1940s but far less powerful. Mass-culture products may be intended, as Macdonald suggested, to function as instruments of class rule, but their makers cannot control the way they are ultimately used by their audience, and that audience—the people, not an unthinking mass—create, in a process John Fiske calls “excorporation,” their own authentic culture out of game shows or romantic comedies (15); it is for this reason that “mass” culture is advisedly renamed “popular” culture.9
Where do novels fit into this intergenerational debate about the relationship between and the relative values of mass and high culture? It depends, and that fact in itself reveals something of the debate’s inadequacy to the story of the postwar novel. As Thomas Hill Schaub and others show, the postwar era brought renewed attention to the novel, from both New Critics and the New York intellectuals, as a form of high culture.10 But as Rosenberg and White’s Mass Culture anthology makes plain, the 1950s also brought attacks on certain novels as examples of mass culture; in addition to the essays on detective fiction, a separate group of chapters focused on the problems posed by “mass literature.” According to both the original and the revisionist mass-culture critics, some novels qualify as high culture whereas others are defined as popular, and the criteria for classifying a novel as one or the other are elusive; as C. W. E. Bigsby observes, “Popular culture … can apparently be transformed into ‘high’ art by a simple act of critical appropriation … a fact which applies not only to individual artists but to genres (theatre, novel, film), subgenres (farce, science fiction, detective fiction) and styles” (qtd. in Kammen 6). The idea of a cultural division between high and low (or mass) forms of literature is sometimes helpful: for one thing, it enables making the case for the specific