Hildegarde

Robert said he had a rough day yesterday, and I had a rough day too, and I’m going to go into that in a second.   Trust me.  I couldn’t help myself if I  wanted to.

But first-Robert says that, classifying literature the way I do, I should call poems or novels “most typical” instead of “best and better.”  But although  I agree that we don’t say that penguins are a “really bad bird,”  we do say “x is the best specimen we have of y”  or “x is the most highly developmed form of y.”

What I’m thinking of for literature is that second one.  Paradise Lost is not a typical anything.  It is the most highly developed form of the epic poem, and it has had an enormous impact on this culture, mostly on people who have never read it and who think that the ideas they have received from it are actually from somewhere else, like the Bible.

Which brings us to the second way in which we study literature, and in the way most people who are not literary scholars find most interesting:  we study it for the ideas it brings, and for the ways in which it impacts the world we live in.

I don’t blame John for wanting to trample Milton underfoot.  Paradise Lost is a book so dense it can make graduate students cry.  And Robert was right in saying, in another place, that nobody ever gets all the allusions in anything, and that Terry Pratchett–in spite of being a “lightweight” writer–requires an unusual range.

But the fact remains that the allusions in both matter, and they matter even if you don’t “get” them, because they go out into the culture and change things.  In the case of Paradise Lost, its expansions on Genesis and Revelation have become the basis for a vast literature of Christain “teaching” that stretches across the range of American folk Protestantism and that color its interpretations and definitions of things like sin (both original and personal), virtue, creation, the Devil, and the “end times.”

And if you don’t think those interpretations and definitions matter, take a look at the referenda on the ballots of numerous states this election season.  Or better yet, because it’s more fun, look at a few of the popular Christian press “scripture novels” available these days.   Their vision of the Devil, of his personality, of his actions in the world, of what they believe we shoud have to fear from him, is out of Milton, not the Bible, even though the vast majority of them don’t even know who  John Milton was.

If we decide to look at the literature that has made the most impact on the culture, we’re going to get a mixed bag technically.  It’s not that literature has to be bad to have an impact (and bad is used here the way  we’d judge a penguin born with only one foot), it’s that it doesn’t matter one way or the other if the literature is bad or good.

It’s hard to figure out why readers want one thing and not another, why one book will have millions of readers and another practically none.  It certainly isn’t level of difficulty in and of itself.   Some very difficult works have been both very popular–anything by Faulkner, for instance, who was one of the best selling writers of his time and an enormous influence on generations of novelists, and not just American ones.

But just being lightweight and stupid won’t make a book sell, either.  Some publishers in the last ten years or so seem to be convinced it will, of course, and writers at some houses are under constant pressure to “clean up” their books–take out the “big words,” make the plots simpler, get rid of anything that smacks of “ideas.”

Then there’s the fact that just because a book is popular doesn’t make it influential.  It’s not just that nobody reads Lloyd C. Douglas any more, and not much of anybody knows his name, but that what ideas he managed to send into the culture haven’t had much resonance.   We still like to watch some of the movies made from the books when they show up on TCM or AMC–The Robe, for instance, or Magnificent Obsession–but to the extent that they promote any ideas at all that we’d recognize, we’re left wth the same sort of squishy-nice Christianity that pervades greeting cards and Miss America pageant interviews.

Contrast that, for a moment, with the monumental impact of two very bad novels:  Gone With The Wind and Atlas Shrugged.  At some later point, we can go into what is technically bad about each of them–Atlas Shrugged is practically the poster child for what is wrong with telling instead of showing–but right now I want to concentrate on the fact that both put ideas into the culture that have been enormously influential and that we are not rid of yet.

Gone With The Wind gave us a picture of the pre-Civil War South that was not only sympathetic to that South, but laudatory of it.  It was even laudatory towards slavery, so much so that all the evils of slavery–families sold away from each other, physical mistreatment of slaves–were presented as the fault of the Yankee overseers who ran the plantations, and not of the plantation owners themselves. 

It’s interesting to contrast this vision of white trash–Northern, uppity, ambitious–with the somewhat more accurate vision in  Faulkner, with the Snopeses and everything they represent.   In Margaret Mitchell’s Georgia,  white Southerners might be stupid, and prone to drink, but they were almost always noble. 

Gone With The Wind was, of course, written and published in the 1930s, and some of its appeal, originally, was simply as an escape from the problems of the Great Depression.  It offered a lot to escape to.  There were plantations and parties, balls in Atlanta, battlefield scenes, escapes in the night.  

But beyond that, the novel offered both the people of the North and the people of the South something they desperately needed:  a vision of the Civil War, and the reasons it had been fought, that did not result in an outright and unyielding condemnation of “the Southern way of life.”  And it did it without the usual Suother protest that the war hadn’t been about slavery, it had been about “states rights.”

Of course, it was about the right of states to maintain slavery, but that’s another issue.

Here’s the thing–it would probably have been impossible for the South to morph itself into the Sunbelt if it hadn’t been for Gone With The Wind.  From the 1860s until that novel was published, the American “take” on the former states of the Confederacy was almost universally bad:  a backward, ignorant, violent region where black people were kept in poverty and misery when they weren’t lynched, a place where no really decent people would want to live.

The interesting thing about Gone With The Wind is that its vision of the South managed to overwhelm not only one generation’s memories of the Great Conflict, but another generation’s present-day experience of racial violence.  The movie was actually rereleased to theaters at the tail end of the Civil Rights movement, after literally years of nightly news broadcasts of burning black churches, black children stoned on their way into elementary school, the National Guard called out to protect the first black student at the University of Mississippi–and the rerelease worked.  It was a smashing success.  One of my teachers took our entire English class to New Haven to see a matinee.

Sometimes, really influential but technically bad books lose importance over time.  Think of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which has become almost unreadable ove time, and is now mostly interesting to history and sociology students studying the abolitionist movement.  Its technical badness may even be working against it.  Its histrionic tone tends to strike modern readers as silly and false.  The book that once made readers outraged at the evils of slavery now makes readers wonder if those evils aren’t being exaggerated.  After all, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, everything seems to be exaggerated.

Gone With The Wind has not become unreadable.  It’s still in print, and it still sells reasonably well.   I’ve owned at least three copies of it over time, and you can buy a hardcover edition if you want something more permanent to put on your bookshelf.   Like a number of other writers of the same era–Agatha Christie, for instance–Mitchell wrote plain, clean, uncomplicated, unpretentious prose, and her very lack of erudition worked for her. 

Besides, Scarlett O’Hara was a stroke of genius.  To the women of the Depression, she was an example of sheer feminine will power overcoming the worst of disasters.   Surely being poor in an occupied South after the Civil War had to be worse that getting through the Great  Depression, and  Scarlett had come out all right.  To the women of the Fifties, fed an ideology of feminine passivity from every expert who managed to write a book, she was a hint that women were stronger and smarter and more capable than anybody was giving them credit for.

For most of America, what life was like in the anteBellum South is what life was like in Gone With The Wind, and no matter how crazy that might drive both historians and other Southern novelists, they haven’t been able to make a dent in the popular mind.  

I said, at the beginning of this blog, and literature sometimes lies.

I’ll try to get to the other lie tomorrow.

For the moment, you’ve been spared the rant I was going to deliver in this post, and you should really be thankful for that.

Students.