Over the past few years, we have heard a good deal about a possible and desirable “science of literature” that would have linguistics as its principal model; and it would be reasonable to maintain that we have seen marked advances in descriptive and taxonomic techniques, especially in the analysis of narrative. Unprecedentedly large numbers of people now seek, or are compelled to undergo, formal instruction in literature, and part of the motivation of this new science is undoubtedly a desire to develop a systematic body of information that can be taught and learned. Another part is the wish to establish a decent claim to exactness; for in the modern university, whatever is spent on the “humanities” must be obtained at the expense of the natural sciences, with their insatiable appetite for money.
There is nothing very new about such desires and claims; in some form or other, they have existed ever since the vernacular literatures were admitted as subjects for study in the universities. In former times, the model for imitation might have been classical philology or comparative philology; more recently, it has been post-Saussurean linguistics. Yet there has always existed, along with these scientific aspirations, a strong current of “antipositivism,” a conviction that the study of literature could only be frustrated by attempts to ape either the exactness or the utility of the hard sciences. And this opinion has survived along with all the latest things in “theory.” Over the past few years, we have seen the successful publication of new kinds of literary criticism that are frankly incomprehensible—and of course totally without interest—to nonprofessional readers, and it ought not to seem surprising that they have produced a backlash. The protesters argue that the business of literary criticism, however they may define it (as the common pursuit of true judgment, the elucidation of works of literature, and so forth), is certainly not the arcane and pretentious affair it is represented as being by the latest “theorists.” And as often as not, they will at this point refer to Samuel Johnson as a great critic seraphically free from the taint of theory, and remind us that Johnson said that he rejoiced to concur with the Common Reader, implying that all good critics must do likewise.
Johnson concurred, specifically, with the opinion of the Common Reader on Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” and added this: “By the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours.” And it is to this Common Reader, endowed with common sense but innocent of subtlety and learning, that many refined, subtle, dogmatic, and learned literary critics now profess to cede all judgment.
It is as well to be clear about what Johnson meant. In rejoicing to concur with the Common Reader, he was of course making it evident that he himself was a different animal altogether, though capable of understanding judgments that were unprejudiced and incorrupt. That he could speak so of the consensus of unspecialized opinion is an indication that he was talking about a state of affairs historically very different from our own. Johnson was not a teacher of literature in the modern manner, and critics who nowadays say that they yield to the authority of the uninstructed are in a very different position from his. Why, what, and whom are they teaching? Helen Gardner, a devout supporter of the Common Reader view, has spent her life teaching literature to the expensively educated. In a recent book1 she compares her students to camels, who pause at the Oxford oasis to fill their humps with reading before striking out across the desert of modern life. But she also believes that some people are better readers than others, and I suppose she would number her Oxford students among them; they are already uncommon readers, and unless the teacher secretly believes that reading cannot be taught, will presumably be even more uncommon by the time they leave the university. To believe otherwise would surely destroy the spirit of all but the most cynical and self-serving of teachers. Yet Dame Helen warmly applauds Dr. Johnson and Virginia Woolf, who took The Common Reader as a title for her collected literary essays, for appealing from the judgment of professionals to the common sense of “those who read widely for enjoyment.”
The Common Reader is of course not a person but a constituency, and everybody not seeking to grind an ax must know that by now it is a pretty rotten borough. Whether or not there is a causal connection, the dissolution of the Common Reader has proceeded pari passu with the establishment and growth of the profession of which Dame Helen is such an ornament. A large-scale history of the Common Reader is certainly a professional desideratum (though it might find but few common readers). Erich Auerbach sketched a part of that history when he investigated the expression la cour et la ville: “The absence of function, common to the aristocracy that had been stripped of its feudal character and to the wealthy bourgeoisie which had begun to turn away from gainful occupations toward otium cum dignitate, fused these two groups into a single class, namely la cour et la ville.” But as this class expanded, it recruited on a large scale from la ville, and in the course of the eighteenth century, “the ‘public’ came … to be dominated by la ville, the bourgeoisie.” This public came into existence as a direct consequence of the development of the vernaculars and of printing. Auerbach says that it “determined the character of literature and the literary language throughout Europe.”2 It was an “elite minority,” clearly differentiated from the uneducated on the one hand and the specialists on the other. In fact, it was Johnson’s Common Reader.
Johnson took an interest in this phenomenon, and of course understood that it had undergone a historical development. He remarked, for instance, that in Milton’s time reading was not a general amusement: “Neither traders nor often gentlemen thought themselves disgraced by ignorance. The women had not then aspired to literature, nor was every house supplied with a closet of knowledge.” Of his own time, however, he says that “general literature … pervades the nation through all its ranks.” There is here a touch of hyperbole, but it is clear enough that Johnson characterizes the Common Reader sociologically; he speaks of him (or it) as a class. Reading was one of the things that was done, in his time, by people of some income and some leisure. Occasionally he even suggested that they read because they could think of nothing else to do: “People in general do not willingly read, if they can have anything else to amuse them.”3
That last sentence might adorn the wall of any modern publisher’s office, but the point is that leisure and income are now for the most part otherwise employed than in reading. We still speak of “the general reader,” but not very hopefully, and it is acknowledged that the kinds of people who constituted the class of the Common Reader have now thought of other things to do; the class is as nearly obsolete as “polite literature,” which is what it once chose to read. Its rapid decline dates from the last quarter of the nineteenth century; one symptom of it was the sudden demise of the three-decker novel that had helped to fill the leisure time of large numbers of bourgeois families. The effect on literary production is very noticeable in the same period. Crudely speaking, there was a new public to satisfy, but its requirements were not always consistent with the aspirations of authors who thought of themselves as artists. Hence the new importance of such editors as Edward Garnett, middlemen between artist and public. Garnett wielded extraordinary power over a host of writers, including Conrad, Galsworthy, and Lawrence, and they submitted to it because the gap between art and the public had to be closed if they were to survive.4 The literary agent was another new trade, another sign that the concurrence of specialist and Common Reader now called for professional intervention. The ample provision of ephemeral writing for the masses made it more and more obvious that serious writing must be content with its own small audience; the avant-garde took pride in the fact, but eventually its products were to be saved by the creation of an artificial class of readers who taught, or were taught, in colleges. The division widened as cinema, radio, and television took over the task of filling people’s leisure time; and all the duties of the old Common Reader have now virtually devolved upon professional students of literature. The competition for mass markets (for common readers in a looser sense) is something that does not concern these professionals, who generally have nothing whatever to do with the promotion or censure of the most widely read books. Pale descendants of the Common Reader, they have none but the most transient contacts with common readers.
The nature and extent of such contacts are worth more study than they get. We must expect a good deal of variation from one country to another; the only study I know of confines itself almost exclusively to West Germany, where the position is different from those in the United States or in the United Kingdom. Yet there are resemblances also, and we have something to learn from the work of Peter Uwe Hohendahl,5 who assumes a split between “elite” and “mass” culture and sees that it must affect criticism. Broadly speaking, the elite is still under the influence of notions of aesthetic autonomy that had their origins in the thought of the late eighteenth century; the masses assume that naive realism is the proper aim of writing. This division indicates the end of what Hohendahl refers to as “the public sphere,” a Frankfurt term that in this connection means something very close to Johnson’s Common Reader. Hohendahl happens to believe that the remedy for this split is the socialization of private property; but we need not follow him in that direction to benefit from his empirical observations.
In Germany there is still a clear difference between the reviewing of books, Tageskritik, and the study of literature in the universities, Literaturwissenschaft, such that it is unusual to find the same persons doing both. The effect of Tageskritik on readers seems to be very limited; at a date in the late 1960s, it appeared that of the one hundred seventy thousand people who read reviews in the journals or class newspapers (a number estimated to be about a quarter of the total professing some interest in literature), very few took any serious notice of book reviews. The aesthetic assumptions of the reviewers do not coincide with those of the readers; indeed, “the literature that is actually read is not the literature that is discussed” by reviewers.6 Best sellers are rarely reviewed at all, except in provincial newspapers. Rather, the publishers work directly on the public, arranging “media events” and general support from newspapers whose owners find the promoted book ideologically congenial. Such books are, in their way, instruments for the capitalist oppression of consumers; and by paying no attention to them and concentrating on work that meets their own irrelevant standards of “merit, the reviewers are abetting the exploitation. All they do is serve as cultural extras to the papers they write in; and they use a narcissistic jargon mostly incomprehensible to their readers.
It was for these reasons that the New Left eventually turned its fire on the practitioners of Tageskritik. They served the ruling system; aesthetic autonomy has no real meaning in an age of mechanical reproduction. What the critics ought to have concerned themselves with was political praxis; they ought to stop reviewing randomly chosen books and concentrate upon the mechanisms by which books are produced and sold. As it turned out, both Tageskritik and Literaturwissenschaft survived these assaults. There is, to be sure, more consideration of “trivial literature”; the authority of professors is somewhat reduced; but the end of bourgeois criticism still seems a long way off. In a famous essay7 Walter Benjamin spoke of an art appropriate to an era of mass production, an art lacking aura—that uniqueness, authenticity, historicity, which mass reproduction necessarily destroys. But aura is what most of us literary critics are interested in. To the New Left, and indeed to Benjamin (who had marvelous antennae for aura), our interest makes us more or less unconscious kin to fascism.
As I remarked, Hohendahl’s material is not quite the same as ours, and any critique we ventured would also differ from his. We rarely think of criticism as an “institution”—rarely consider it as part of the entire social nexus. But it is hardly to our credit that we fail to do this, and the absence of any effective critique of criticism goes some way to explaining why our criticism is in such a peculiar state. One significant difference from the German situation might be mentioned at once. In the United States and perhaps even more in the United Kingdom, Tageskritik is very often, perhaps one could say normally, the work of the same hands that produce Literaturwissenschaft. The writers use a different tone, but are essentially academics; either they are talking to an audience that consists, approximately, of their former students (the new Common Reader), or they indulge themselves as wits or punsters. The dyer’s hand is visible, though there may be attempts to conceal it; and it can hardly be denied that their aesthetic expectations, the general set of their interests, are very different from those of their audience, even in the posh Sunday papers, which have a circulation of a million or more. That circulation is maintained by means quite other than those employed by the academic reviewers, and it is easy enough to see that, to the New Left, the reviewers must seem to be passive instruments of a vicious system, contributors to “systematically distorted communication.”
The historian of the Common Reader would need also to be the historian of reviewing. He would find in the great nineteenth-century quarterlies, and in The Atlantic Monthly of Brownell’s day, long and lucid reviews of important books. The Common Reader still existed; such reviews were bourgeois family reading. To find anything comparable now he would have to look to such journals as The New York Review of Books and The London Review of Books, but even there he will find dons writing for dons and their pupils—a very different audience, very differently recruited. The reasons for the change I have already adumbrated: first, the relatively uneducated have found amusements they prefer to reading; second, the universities have taken over both the production and the criticism of literature, except—and it is of course a large exception—for the books that are read by millions.
A few freaks aside (the latest being The White Hotel), how do English-speaking critics respond to best sellers? On the whole, when they look at them at all, they do so with a holiday air, as if they were doing something that wasn’t really their business. Edmund Wilson was, among many other things, the greatest Tageskritik of his time. In a piece called “‘You Can’t Do This To Me!’ Shrilled Celia,” he took a look at Lloyd C. Douglas’s wartime best seller, The Robe. (“I lately decided that it was time for me to take cognizance of it,” he says, meaning by “lately” not, I think, “recently” so much as “belatedly,” for he explains that the book has sold about a million and a half copies in hard cover in rather less than two years.) Having provided samples of the prose, he goes on to say how very old-fashioned the book is, just like Ben Hur and Quo Vadis. The puzzle for Wilson is that this “almost unrivalled fabric of old clichés” should hold the attention of seven million Americans, when it is “difficult to imagine that any literate person could ever get through more than two pages of it for pleasure.” Yet the work has “a certain purity”; and the fact that all those readers should prefer this long and tedious novel to “livelier and easier productions which have been specially flavored to please them” testifies to the longing of the ordinary reader for “moral light.” Wilson concludes that “the ordinary reader, even in our ghastly time,” is in decent moral shape; but that anybody who supposes Mencken had improved American taste had better think again.8
I doubt if the attitude of reviewers to popular books has altered much since that article was written, almost fifty years ago; Wilson cannot conceive of himself concurring with ordinary readers. When they read, they do different things, and for different reasons. Like shepherds in a pastoral, the Common Reader is granted a certain moral purity, but no refinement. Or, like the shepherds’ flocks, they look up, and Douglas feeds them. Nowadays we might rather say that his successors exploit them. The latest notice I have seen of a current best seller in a highbrow journal—The London Review of Books9—is by John Sutherland (author of a good book on the publishing of best sellers). His subject is Jeffrey Archer’s The Prodigal Daughter, topping the list as I write. Sutherland tells the story, which is about Florentyna, a prodigious child who grew up to be vice-president and then president of the United States. He then criticizes the style, just as Wilson did: “The result is the kind of novel one imagines a Time Magazine team turning out.” Why, then, do people like it so much? Well, there is “an insatiable appetite for fables of success”; and such fables do best in America, which is why Archer, an Englishman “with a shrewd eye to the market,” made his book a “tatty rewrite of the American dream.” Like Wilson, Sutherland censures the derivative nature of the best seller’s prose, and associates the success of the book with what he takes to be well-understood characteristics of the American way of life. The space between the reviewer and the novel, and the people who like the novel, is accepted as unbridgeable; and there is no attempt to explain why this should be so, or what the consequences are of its being so. Sutherland has, exceptionally, made a point of studying the best seller; that is, when he is wearing his Literaturwissenschaft (subsection, sociology of literature) hat. As a reviewer, in the London Review, he assumes that he is talking to the new Common Reader, who shares his assumptions and wouldn’t be seen dead with a copy of The Prodigal Daughter, but might be amused to read a bit about it, simply as a curiosity having nothing to do with literature but only (as Leavis said unfairly but brilliantly of the Sitwells) with the history of publicity.
Meanwhile the academics go on producing their editions of the classics, or, more usually nowadays, developing theories of everything; of both classes of work, it may safely be said that the ordinary reader cannot afford to buy them, and could not read them if he did. Even in Germany, the most successful new critical school—that which deals in “reader response”—has very little to say about that reader as a social being, a person who opens a book and reads it. In England and America, a few Marxists—and they pretty rarefied—apart, the matter of the relation between professional critic and audience is hardly ever referred to, except in the sort of vacuous observation about the Common Reader I have mentioned. As to why ordinary readers should be so different from us—why they used to be moral and dull, and are now possessed of an insatiable appetite for success and are still dull—nobody ventures an opinion.
Yet such power as there may be to influence our literary culture must be in the hands of these critics, who teach in the colleges and moonlight in the reviews. How do they, and how ought they, use that power? I have assumed that the modern Common Reader passes through a university. The number of people now teaching literature is probably greater than the total of critics who formerly existed throughout history, and they must have some effect on the millions of readers who frequent their classes. Does good come of this? Richard Poirier says he sees “no reason in the world” why common readers should care to read the classics or serious contemporary fiction and poetry; “I don’t think it makes them better people, better citizens, better anything.” By some criteria, he must be right. Indeed, it is immodest to propose that by making people read these things we are improving them, ethically or civically. All we dare claim is that we are making them better readers. We might or might not go on to claim that bad reading (of the Bible, for example) has often had disastrous consequences; or that a society containing subtle readers is at least a more interesting, perhaps a richer, society than one that does not; or that good readers are likely to be more resistant to the exploitative forces of “the ruling system.” But we should not say we are improving them, except as readers.
And that is surely enough for anybody to attempt: the reconstruction of the Common Reader on a new, historically appropriate plan. We need to remember Johnson’s remark, that reading is not willingly undertaken if there is something else to do; that the acquisition of the knowledge and technique to do it well is arduous. People will sweat for them only if assured of the authenticity of the authority that asks them to do so. Such authenticity is largely institutional, but we have to manage without any central authority ourselves. If there were one, with power to bind and loose, to make and uphold canons, even to issue an index librorum prohibitorum, the job would be easier. It would be easier, too, if we did not devote quite so much of our energy to showing how clever we are, either in the manipulation of texts or in the rarefied exercise of theory and methodology. If, in short, we had a full and daunting sense of our responsibilities toward the Common Reader, conceived not as some fictive outsider whose word, it pleases us to say, is our law, but as the students in our class, who, as we are now continually lamenting, know nothing and have never acquired our own need to be on speaking terms with the past. As Philip Rieff likes to point out, the world of rock and pop pretends to have no past, and they live partly in that world. Some make the mistake—understandably, but it is a mistake—of treating the past as synonymous with authoritarian oppression. I am sure Rieff is right in speaking of them as “disinherited.”10 He believes that the only remedy is the restitution of authority, the promulgation of “interdicts” and the inculcation of “the knowledge that is in repetition.” It is true that “unified cultures” tend to be authoritarian, so the culture of the new Common Reader, however subtle and various, would need authority. There is something to be learned, perhaps, from the success of F. R. Leavis as a teacher: these books prescribed, those proscribed; a bold doctrine of minority culture, and the creation of an image of it that made the young want to join it. As Donald Davie, who underwent that influence, has recently remarked,11 it was at least as encouraging to be told what you should not read as what you should. There was a canon; and where there is a canon there is authority.
Philip Rieff believes that by authoritarian prescription we can make our students “sovereign selves.”12 I imagine he would allow in that remark a certain ethical component. There, I hesitantly disagree; hesitantly, because I don’t know what Rieff could bring off, but know the sensible limit of my own ambitions. I agree with Poirier; I daresay he would accept my view that reading, as we ought to teach it, can make not a good person, but a subtle, questioning one, always with the possibility of corruption yet richer and more enriching. How did we ever come to suppose that we were equipped to make people good? To be realistic, we cannot do that, any more than we can fill the humps of the young with supplies of reading for later use. There are soft drinks available everywhere; nobody needs that warm stale water. To be realistic again, we have little to do with the oppressed, with the hapless victims of television and advertising, insofar as they constitute an inaccessible mass. We have to do with the new Common Reader, who has to be our creation, who will want to join us, as people who speak with the past and know something of reading as an art to be mastered. We are carrying something on, but have the responsibility of making the generation that will agree that carrying it on in its turn is worth the effort. In the end, that is the only feasible task of reviewers as well as academics. And every narcissistic, venal, or impudent review, every clever academic stunt, is a dereliction of this duty of continuance and creation. That, I think, is where we may speak of the morality of the business: in terms of our duty to the only real Common Reader, and the strong temptations to neglect it.