Popular Fiction as Liberal Art

Abstract

Popular fiction is escape, opium, palliative, cover-up, a distraction or a diversion in the etymological sense of a device to draw or turn our attention from its proper objects. Or popular fiction is a manifestation of a people's preoccupations, an affirmation of their values and choices, even, in some cases, the vehicle for a symbolic act of defiance against oppressive conditions.' We might call the first of these views the elitist, and attribute it to such critics as Max Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno, Dwight Macdonald and Edmund Wilson. second might best be called the populist, and its exponents include Richard Slotkin, John G. Cawelti, and Janice Radway. In what follows I will outline several versions of both positions, show how they can be applied to a currently popular detective novel, and argue for what I take to be the most productive approach to this kind of fiction. proponents of the elitist point of view usually consider popular fiction bad art. Friends, trumpets Edmund Wilson, represent a minority, but Literature is on our side. With so many fine books to be read, so much to be studied and known, there is no need to bore ourselves with this (397). rubbish referred to is detective fiction, and Wilson's argument against it amounts to an assertion of the moral superiority of high literary taste. Wilson does not like detective stories; they are therefore vicious: My experience with this second batch of novels has, therefore, been even more disillusioning than my experience with the first, and my final conclusion is that the reading of detective stories is simply a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between crossword puzzles and smoking (395, emphasis mine). Wilson is simply claiming that his taste is better than other people's, and that other people should therefore defer to his judgments. His final paragraph makes this even clearer. In light of the war-time paper shortage, he argues, we should discourage the squandering of this paper which might be put to better use. As Wilson certainly knew, but preferred perhaps for the moment to forget, the great consumers of paper, and particularly of detective paperbacks, 1. See Bigsby's The Politics of Popular (5) for a similar but not identical analysis. See Edwards' High Minds, Low Thoughts: Popular Culture and Intellectual Pastoral for a critical view of the kind of project I am here undertaking.