“The
machine of consumerism is designed to encourage us all to believe that
our preferences are significant and self-revealing; that a taste for
Coke over Pepsi, or for KFC over McDonald’s, means something about us;
that our tastes comprise, in sum, a kind of aggregate expression of our
unique selfhood.” Eleanor Catton’s
essay about elitism in literature would be indelible for that one beautifully articulated observation alone, but the rest of it is pretty brilliant, too.
Catton, author of the Booker Prize-winning novel
“The Luminaries,”
was prompted to write it by a complaint from a fellow Kiwi about an
article on the Paris Review website. The reader objected to the writer’s
use of the word “crepuscular,” condemning the piece as “elitist” for
that reason. Catton’s essay (which originally appeared in New Zealand’s
Metro magazine last spring and was reposted in December) treats the
reader’s ire as a symptom of the creeping consumerist attitude in our
response to literature. That attitude includes the desire to be pleased,
catered to and flattered by the products we consume and the companies
who supply them, and an increasing intolerance of cultural experiences
that make any demands on us.
I agree with Catton on almost every
point. I’ve encountered a good bit of this mind-set among readers I’ve
met, as well as where Catton found it in abundance: in Amazon customer
reviews. But I also think Catton misses something important about the
gripe that initiated her essay. The reader who found a writer’s use of
“crepuscular” to be elitist wasn’t just annoyed at stumbling across a
word he didn’t recognize and being made to take the trouble of looking
it up. As Catton herself points out, when you’re reading online, the
definitions of words are extremely easy to get. It seems doubtful the
reader was, as Catton seems to think, put off by the “inconvenience” of
this. Rather, I surmise, he was angry because the Paris Review piece
made him feel ignorant.
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Another
reader, also unfamiliar with “crepuscular,” might have reached the same
point, invoked the digital dictionary and thought, “Cool. New word!”
Learning something — including new and potentially useful words — is one
of the reasons people read, after all. To decide instead that the
appearance of the word “crepuscular” is the writer’s way of signaling
that only people already fully conversant with all the synonyms for
“shadowy” need apply to the select society of his blog post (and the
rest go hang themselves!) is quite a leap. In truth, the only way an
encounter with a strange word can make you feel ignorant is if you
already fear and suspect that you really are ignorant.
Intellectual
insecurity is, alas, a pervasive problem in the literary world. You can
find it among fans of easy-to-read commercial fiction who insist (on
very little evidence) that the higher-brow stuff is uniformly fraudulent
and dull, and you can find it among those mandarin bibliophiles who
dismiss whole genres (on equally thin evidence) out of hand. One of the
favorite gambits of people secretly uncertain about their own taste is
identifying some popular book of incontestably lower quality than their
own favorites and then running all over the Internet posting extravagant
takedowns of it and taunting its fans. Yeah, I’m not crazy about “Fifty
Shades of Grey,” either, but I’m not going to invest that much energy
in proclaiming this sentiment to the world. To do so suggests you’re
less interested in championing good writing than you are in grabbing any
chance to feel superior to somebody else.
Why do some people
overreact to “crepuscular” or to bestselling lady porn or to any number
of other minor irritants involving tastes more or less refined than
their own? Why do they take offense so easily when another reader turns
up his nose at a book or genre they love or insists on loving a book
they deem substandard? When I get the chance to quiz someone who seems
disproportionately passionate about the snobbishness of literary critics
or the rabble’s appetite for trash, there’s usually some highly charged
personal history behind their indignation.
A teacher, a parent, a
romantic partner, a friend, a roommate, even a co-worker has made them
feel ashamed over a book or genre of books they enjoy or admire. They
were told to put away the comics or teased for de-stressing with a
romance novel on coffee break. Or, conversely, they might dream of being
included in some tony, brainy (and possibly entirely imaginary)
community of letters while at the same time worrying that they won’t
make the grade. There are those whose fantasies of leading a “literary”
life largely involve having their own superior discrimination and
erudition admired by other superior minds. The result of all this
baggage is a preposterous, resentful pecking order in which readers get
way too much pleasure out of pissing on other readers’ preferences
and/or jumping, on the slightest pretext, to the conclusion that their
own are being ridiculed.
Catton does have a dog in this fight. She
wrote a long, complex, moderately challenging and critically acclaimed
novel, one that has gone on to garner its own share of bewildered and
testy Amazon reviews. Perhaps anticipating these, she laments the
thinness of the one-star reviews attached to similar titles, responses
that strike her as depressingly similar, reducible to “(1) this book was
confusing; (2) this book was boring; and (3) this book was badly
written.” None of these objections are engaged or expressive enough to
constitute real criticism, Catton maintains, and when she finds a review
that amounts to “If I had understood/enjoyed/been interested in this
book, it would have been better,” she confesses that she is “always
tempted to reply: ‘If you had understood/enjoyed/been interested in this
book, you would have been better.’”
True: We’re all better for
having understood and been interested in a work of art than otherwise.
Part of what Catton defends here is the often unacknowledged creativity
and collaboration involved in the art of reading. And yes, you do often
get more out of reading a book when you put a lot into it, which is what
distinguishes reading from consuming a product. But not always, and
just because a reader isn’t able to articulate why a book has failed her
doesn’t mean that she didn’t give it a decent try. Some difficult books
really aren’t worth the effort.
You can see why rudimentary
reviews like “Maybe the rest of the book has some merit but I had to
stop reading because it was so tedious and seeming to take too long to
go anywhere” (from an Amazon review of “The Luminaries”) would annoy an
author like Catton. Her novel (which I loved), is a work of immense
consideration, and the response in this instance is so lazy, slapdash
and indistinct — not to mention ungrammatical. Why even bother to write a
review if you have so little to say? Why try to rate a book according
to a star system as if it were a blender or deodorant? This seems, as
Catton memorably puts it, as “hopelessly beside the point as giving four
stars to your mother, three stars to your childhood or two stars to
your cat.”
But I think that Catton underplays the degree to which
our relationship to any given book is also a relationship to its
reputation — which is just another way of saying a relationship to
everyone else’s relationship to the book. We know it was well-reviewed,
that our smart friends praise it, that it won a prize. But let’s say
this celebrated book really, really doesn’t work for us. Perhaps we
simply shrug our shoulders and move on because life is short and there’s
so much to read and so much joy to be had from reading other books. But
if we happen to be less sure of ourselves, less comfortable with the
stubborn vagaries of taste and a lot more defensive about our own
judgments, we might feel compelled to protest that all the acclaim
heaped on this alleged masterpiece is a hoax — and, for that matter, so
is the whole rotten system it came out of.
To make it personal: I
can’t, for the life of me, tell what people see in “The Adventures of
Augie March.” I’m not even interested enough in it to explain why I find
it tedious, but I feel about it the same way that Amazon reviewer feels
about “The Luminaries.” I’d never, however, assert that the novel has
no merit. Obviously it does to many, many people, some of whom are
smarter and more discriminating than I am (and also some of whom are
not). I certainly don’t hold the novel and those who love it in
contempt. No doubt, as Catton would have it, I have failed this book,
rather than the other way around. I’m also fortunate enough not to fear
that such a failure proves me an ignoramus and vulgarian (even if I did also
enjoy those horribly written Stieg Larsson novels). You can go ahead
and call me those things, Saul Bellow fans, but fair warning: I’m not
going to agree with you.
If, however, I did fear, deep inside,
that my inability to appreciate any celebrated book betrayed my complete
intellectual and aesthetic inadequacy, I would probably be pretty
angry. I’d feel the need to stick my oar in and announce that “The
Adventures of Augie March” is actually a crap novel, that it is
objectively boring and that the critics who praise it are charlatans.
Even if I couldn’t explain exactly why I dislike it, I might want to
register that dislike because somebody should be speaking out against
this hoax being perpetrated on the public by the literary establishment.
I’d resent that establishment and the snooty, Bellovian way it
expresses itself, with fancy words like “crepuscular.” And I’d want
everyone else who, like me, could see through this emperor’s new clothes
to know that they are not alone, and get them to tell me I’m
not alone. It’s usually those with the least faith in their own opinions
who become the most outraged when the consensus does not agree with
them.
If I did feel that way, it also probably wouldn’t be my
fault. If I had such attitudes, chances are it would be because at some
early — or even later — stage in my life, someone with similar anxieties
would have taken them out on me and made me feel small and stupid and
tacky. And to make myself feel better, I might do something similar to
someone else: for example, mock my little brother for reading George
R.R. Martin. Petty abuses like this get passed on in pretty much the
same way the bigger ones do. All the same, even if we’re not to blame
for our insecurities, we are responsible for recognizing them for what
they are. And for growing up and getting over it.
is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site,
.
Robin Williams in "Dead Poets Society" 
Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com.
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