I HAVE spent the last month or so taking the bestseller as seriously as it takes itself. Books are commodities bought and sold on the free market, and money is the only available index of their value. Some of the books I have been reading must be very valuable indeed. Their authors and publishers and agents are enriched by them and are driven to a unitary view of value.
The term ‘value’ as used by the older type of philosopher was recognised as capable of several interpretations, but the metaphysicians outmoded by the logical positivists preferred to divorce it from the marketplace. When my old professor Samuel Alexander produced his book Beauty and Other Forms of Value, he defined value as something that had nothing to do with the world of subsistence. The world of subsistence is the world of consumption, and consumption is regulated by the laws of the market. Outside subsistence lie beauty, truth and goodness, and these cannot be bought and sold.
Now, literature, being art, is concerned with the creation of beauty, but as it is a verbal art and words are a vehicle of truth and morality, it must touch the other values as well. It is not properly concerned with value as the markets teach it, but it is a commodity, and it is bought and sold. It is natural for those who sell it to think more of the utilitarian meaning of value than the metaphysical one. A first volume of poetry may scale the heights of beauty, which is a value, but the book itself may have little value. This is the kind of contradiction that I have been trying – in these last weeks of bestseller perusal – to resolve.
The term ‘bestseller’ itself is an awkward counter to deal in the game of appraisal. It has not too many meanings and hence no real meaning. When it was coined in America in the 1890s, it meant merely the book that sold best. Now the book that has always sold best is the Bible, but it would be regarded as vaguely blasphemous to call it a bestseller. This is because we assume for sound psychological and historical reasons that bestselling novels are frivolous and sensational. They appeal to a mass audience, and a mass audience has no desire for uplift.
What the mass audience does desire, apparently, is escape from the conditions that make it a mass audience – namely the dullness, grind and anxiety imposed by industrial society on the masses that sustain it. The mass literacy that is one of the products of industrialism operates on a mainly utilitarian level. Language must denote rather than connote. It must be tied to simple referents. In other words, it must not be literary.
The bestseller, then, may not be judged in the aesthetic terms that apply to literature, which is concerned with the exploitation of language. The bestseller ought to be subliterary. If its appeal may not be aesthetic, then it must attract through subject matter. Such subject matter ought to excite the imagination by drawing on dreams of escape – escape to exotic locales, to the exercise of lusts and passions that urban industrialism keeps quiescent. The bestseller that specialises in such arousals performs a classic Aristotelian task – it artificially excites primitive emotions, of which combined pity and terror is only one, and it artificially discharges these emotions through the device of a plot.
‘Bestseller’ thus becomes a term descriptive of genre, not merely a kind of integer in the arithmetic of the market. But clearly this definition breaks down when we consider that some books that have sold sensationally well patently fulfil the conditions of literature. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita was a bestseller, and no more rarefied literary exercise could be imagined. Here evidently the mass audience was attracted by the subject matter – an extension of the conventional bounds of sexuality – and it ignored the technique. Indeed, it failed to understand the true theme of the novel, misread the definition of ‘nymphet’ and was ready to apply (facetiously) the name Lolita to any girl of precocious puberty. ‘Lolita’ was a bestseller by mischance. High literature was mistaken for pornography.
But what can we say of Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose, which climbed the bestseller charts almost in spite of its publisher? The story of crime and detection in a medieval monastery made no concessions to the hunters of sensation, had no sex in it, though plenty of violent death, and was highly intellectual, to say nothing of theological. Moreover, it was a translation from the Italian, except for those passages that were in Latin. Clearly, a mass audience was looking for something other than titillation. The book offered exotic escape, but one could imagine more alluring boltholes than an ascetic all-male community. What it offered more abundantly was information. Mr Eco instructed the reader exhaustively on the life of medieval monks, but he made the way in easy by contriving a cunning anachronism. His William of Baskerville is a Sherlock Holmes transported to the past, and his Conan Doyle provenance was spelled out in his very name.
The readers of bestsellers seem, then, to require not only titillation but also instruction. This would seem to explain the popularity of James A. Michener’s Texas, the reading of which was one of my self-imposed duties. Texas is just one of a series of huge novels by Mr Michener that present, with unassailable scholarship, the history of a place in fictional form. That form makes the assimilation of information easy, and the sense of being instructed mitigates the possible guilt of the reader as reading a mere novel. ‘Only a novel,’ said Jane Austen, and the disparagement of the form is still with us.
If we remember James Joyce’s literary aesthetic, as propounded by Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, we will find a certain piquancy in the anxiety of the bestseller readers to avoid the static aesthetic emotion and seek the uplift of the didactic or the sly stimulation of the pornographic. The aesthetic lies on a continuum whose extremes are the pornographic and the didactic, and it frequently shades into one or the other of those forbidden zones. It is hard for the artist to stay with pure art. But the most acceptable book for a mass audience ignores that static middle, takes the line of the continuum and bends it into a circle, so that the didactic and the pornographic meet. If fictionalised information about the history of a state, the mysterious operations of banks or pharmaceutical firms, the truth about politicians or doctors, can be tempered with a little sexual sensationalism, then the conditions of bestsellerdom have been fulfilled.
I have been reading Arthur Hailey’s Strong Medicine with some pleasure and, if his information is accurate (which it usually is), with some profit. Here he presents the inner workings of an American pharmaceutical firm in a loose fictional saga. He follows a formula he has made his own. His novel Hotel has little literary merit (nor would Mr Hailey, who knows what he is doing, claim such merit), but it is informative enough about the running of hotels to have become an assigned text in colleges where hotel management and catering are taught. His Airport, Moneychangers and Wheels do respectively for airports, banks and the Detroit automobile industry what Hotel does for hotels. The novels are readable and even thrilling. What they are not is literature. Yet it would be churlish to demand something more Jamesian or Joycean than Mr Hailey’s plain homespun récit and occasionally improbable dialogue (improbable because it is primarily a device for imparting exhaustive information, while real-life speech is primarily phatic).
Mr Hailey is readable, but there are many bestsellers that are not, and this is, paradoxically, what makes them bestsellers. Buyers of Mr Hailey’s books must be disappointed to find them difficult to put down. Once read, they are discardable, and the buyer feels he has wasted his money. An unreadable book can be put on a shelf and join the household furniture. It is an investment. Many a household has a copy of Don Quixote or War and Peace, unread or partly read but reserved for a mythical time in the future when it shall be read. The purchaser feels far more comfortable with such a possession than with a vacuum cleaner, which is too utilitarian to represent that margin of the useless that defines opulence; a vacuum cleaner, moreover, will break down and have to be replaced. The unread Tolstoy or Cervantes becomes a family heirloom.
Leslie Fiedler, the Clemens Professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo, published a few years ago a book called What Was Literature? It says in effect that literature is morphology, a mass of cadavers to be laid on the pathologist’s slab. Literature is a name for what the professors find profitable to dissect; it is the raw material of the critical trade. Outside literature lie other genres of imaginative communication – science fiction, the comic strip, above all the best-selling novel. These are what the bulk of the population peruses, but there is no academic discipline – other than sociology – qualified to take them seriously.
Perhaps the time has come for the development of a criteriology that can, by taking the popular sub-literary forms seriously, help to elevate them into literature (which, despite Mr Fiedler, does not merely languish in the chill vaults of the autopsy department). Criticism exists not merely for the reader but for the writer as well. My own personal acquaintance with the practitioners of subliterature leads me to believe that they would welcome the unfacetious attention of the critics. Meanwhile, the book trade is largely sustained by genres that the professional appraisers ignore. This ought to worry us more than it seems to. ‘A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit.’ All these vague terms require redefinition.
New York Times, 1 June 1986