Conservatism and Popular Art

     Popular art, which belongs to the common people either as oral literature and folklore or as mass commodified culture such as movies and television shows, might seem likely, to one who has not studied such work, to suggest progressive themes, voicing social protest and proposing reforms that would benefit the greatest number. This is hardly the case. Indeed, popular art is most often quite conservative, siding with the status quo or with reactionary alternatives.
     Indeed, literature can sometimes encourage critical thinking about one’s preconceptions and can introduce or spread new ideas. To some the artist is thought even to occupy a privileged viewpoint, from which literary works may enrich their consumers’ knowledge of any subject, be it psychology, politics, indeed even theology. Yet surely the only field in which writers excel others is in the use of words. Further, when poems or stories do foreground their themes, by which I mean what they suggest is true about lived reality, they seek to reinforce the views readers already hold more often than they introduce new ones.
     Unsurprisingly the works that reinforce preexisting prejudices are in general not only more common but more popular (which comes to much the same thing) than those which challenge them. Traditional oral literature and modern works directed at a mass audience teach for the most part what is already accepted in a given culture while those which emphasize new ideas, ambiguity, and mystery, those which violate conventional thought, are characteristic of elite art consumed by only a few. This distinction by no means implies a value judgement. Beautiful poems and stories occur at either extreme of the spectrum and at any point along it, and the same may be said of failures.
     While it may be impractical as to provide adequate definitive support for such a grand generalization, evidence is ample. In the first place in traditional societies, in which all art is “popular,” which is to say, consumed by all people alike, the role of song and story is primarily and explicitly dogmatic. Rituals, folk-tales, indeed all genres, tend to transmit the assumptions of the past to each generation. The young are systematically taught how a man should behave, or a woman, or a child, what priests are capable of, what the animals have to tell people, and the secret meaning of the stars. Each young person learns the culture’s cosmology and ethics, not systematically but anecdotally, as it were, through the accumulation of lyrics and stories, forming in the end a coherent pattern.
     It is only in belated societies like our own that the artist is seen as a rebellious outsider, and people look to works of art for new ideas rather than those which have been accepted and validated over a long period of use.
     What is true of oral literature is largely duplicated by recent mass culture. Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart were quite right to label Donald Duck a tool of imperialism. [1] Plots of the family situation comedies of the nineteen-fifties, shows such as Make Room for Daddy, Ozzie and Harriet, and Leave it to Beaver, are regularly based on minor conflicts or misunderstandings that test the strength of connubial love, parental authority, or other accepted norms, only to be resolved after twenty-two minutes of action with an emphatic reinforcement of social convention. In very much the same way, police and detective stories always concluded with retributive justice that reassures the viewer that all is basically right, the police do what they should, malefactors are punished, and, though a few bodies of the upright may fall in sacrifice along the way, the most important good people prosper in the end.
     With widespread literacy and the rise of middle-class leisure and lending libraries, Victorian fiction provides a useful field of data. Among those who enjoyed genuine popularity as well as critical acclaim during this period were Scott, Dickens, and Trollope. Each was prolific enough to record a detailed image of the society of his day. (It matters little that Scott wrote about earlier periods. The politics in his novels is always far more reflective of his own present time.) Each is profoundly conservative. While they were able to perceive social injustices in their own times, and to urge some measure of relief, none was able to imagine a systematic response to the evils of early capitalism.
     Sir Walter Scott was clear and consistent about his support for the status quo and his opposition to the reform movements of his day. He endorsed what E. P. Thompson called the myth of paternalism, trusting in the landed gentry to be the most wise and secure governing class. These would, due to their upbringing, recognize their obligations under the principle of noblesse oblige. Though more often in financial straits than comfortable affluence, he as a baronet was an active participant in local government as well as serving as Clerk of Session and Sheriff-Depute of Selkirkshire. To him the country gentleman is, as a part of the order of nature, "the natural protector and referee of the farmer and the peasant." [1] He considered that the Scots suffered less privation because of their benevolent landlords looked after them than laborers in the south where “accursed poor-rates” in fact oppressed those they aimed to assist. He blamed poverty and want not on an exploitative economic system, just then shifting from a feudal land-based aristocracy to an urban capitalist one, but rather to the loss of old ideals in a welter of “reforming mania.” [2]
     When his Toryism conflicted with his Scots nationalism, he chose conservatism over regional pride. In Old Mortality, for instance, the struggle of the Covenanters is represented as in part justified by the high-handed actions of rogue dragoons and by the claims of religious conscience, but he satirizes mercilessly the more militant leaders such as the fanatic preacher Habbakuk Mucklewraith and the violent John Balfour. Henry Morton is depicted as the reasonable moderate whose good will and common sense is far preferable to the extremists’ ideology and zeal. In fact, Morton has no quarrel with the better representatives of the crown. Conflict appears to be generated not by the order of society, but by its abuse, caused by bad actors in both parties.
     Scott’s most explicit comments on current events are perhaps in the anonymous pieces titled The Visionary (1819) in which he calls for a sort of reactionary popular front in which all patriots belong, all Britishers, in fact, but the wicked radicals. “All must unite now . . .in support of our existing laws and constitution, or all will be swallowed up in a ruthless despotism – a despotism that would soon crush all useful spirit.” He calls for all people of good will to “put a bridle on the jaws of the Leviathan multitude.” Rob Radical appears in a dream to destroy a noble house which, admittedly imperfect, was, like the system, yet grand and well worth preserving. To Scott radicals are “the wildest of untamed animals,” their representative a “half naked ruffian,” “rather brutal than human.” Though the poor are kindly offered makework by their benevolent betters, they remain ungrateful and unsatisfied until they have entirely ruined economic production through agrarian reform. The result is that “we have stirred up the cauldron so efficiently, that the dregs are now uppermost,” and the ignorant masses end by crowning an emperor.” Raising the specter of Napoleon seals Scott’s case.
     Dickens, the only one of the three who could be said to have endured at least some of the trials of the underclass, is generous with charitable feeling, to the deserving poor, at least. In fiction the convention of retributive justice guarantees that all will come out right in the end. Yet he portrays a revolution as a terrifying mob in Tale of Two Cities and the opportunities that magically open up for long-suffering lads such as Pip in Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, and David Copperfield come by way of private charity: from Magwitch, Mr. Brownlow and Rose Maylie, and Betsey Trotwood. While well aware of the horrors of the life of the poor in Victorian England, he was never receptive toward any of the numerous schemes to uplift them other than the benevolence attentions of the comfortable. The novel that most directly engages the working class movement is Hard Times in which all Dickens’ sympathy for the exploited workers, exemplified by the upright but tragically doomed Stephen Blackpool [3], does not lead to his sympathy for their cause. Blackpool’s antagonist in fact is the mendacious union organizer Slackbridge.
     Though never in danger of the factory work in which Dickens found himself at the age of twelve, Trollope, descended from landed gentry with a title of baronet descending to his cousins, felt himself in straitened circumstances until elevated by his popular success as an author. Yet never a hint enters his novels, many of them directly concerned with politics, that society would be well-served by fundamental changes. His model for social intervention in his own private practice of charity was Urania House, a “Home for Homeless Women” funded by heiress Angela Burdett Coutts. Though the institution, in which Dickens took a direct management role, was certainly more humane than the alternatives offered by the church and the state to assist “fallen women,” it today seems fatally paternalistic, with its emphasis on sewing and laundering, system of points and demerits, and the ultimate goal of the women’s emigration and marriage abroad. Urania House sought to ameliorate the harshest conditions for the most virtuous but never otherwise challenged society’s assumptions.
     When he stood for Parliament, it was as a Liberal, but in a district in which corruption so governed the outcome that he had no hope of winning, but only of proving his opponents’ criminality. Perhaps the clearest expression of Trollope’s political views is to be found in his account of this political foray in his Autobiography.in which, while conceding what he calls “terrible inequalities,” he still fears any “sudden disruption of society in quest of some Utopian blessedness.” He is obliged to take shelter behind the unassailable walls of religion, which one might here call the very last refuge of a scoundrel, saying that, while certain “enthusiastic but unbalanced minds” have been so bold as to imagine equality, they prove only by their efforts “how powerless they are in opposing the ordinances of the Creator.” Trollope’s conscientious Conservative, “being surely convinced that such inequalities are of divine origin, tells himself that it is his duty to preserve them.” After all “We do not understand the operations of Almighty wisdom” and are thus unable to understand “why so many, should have so little to make life enjoyable, so much to make it painful, while a few others, not through their own merit, have had gifts poured out to them from a full hand.” [4] Radical social reform was to him tantamount to blasphemy, and this conviction justifies his resistance to change while admitting the evils of pocket boroughs and all the other defenses of the old ruling class.
     It is precisely this sort of certainty that defines an ideal allowing popular writers to note the extent of people’s falling short. Often such a model rests more securely in the imagined past than a hypothetical future. Further, a work is more like to reach a mass audience if it may be rapidly understood with unambiguous meaning; such themes typically rely on fully formed codes of conduct. Because of the privileging of innovation, not to say idiosyncrasy, since the Romantics, it is necessary again to stress that popularity does not imply lesser value. The business of literature has always been equally to affirm preconceptions and to challenge them, often simultaneously.
     Such affinity of art with ambiguity reminds the critic that the rule associating popularity with conservative views is by no means absolute. Exceptions abound, in particular those cases in which what is accepted by a subculture is rejected by a majority. Thus bebop, rap music and the poetry of Allen Ginsberg may be both transgressive and “popular” with a well-defined audience. The ambivalence so frequently highlighted by art may at times make judgements less than straightforward. What effect do the words of the deceased Achilles in the Odyssey have on the valor of the hero in the Iliad when alive? Does Falstaff’s dismissive “there’s honour for you” make the honor of Hotspur and Henry IV (and the V) meaningless? Though popular art may be in intention conservative its reception and use may point in the opposite direction.
     The fact remains, however, that, though the more sophisticated of our own era make a hero of the rebel and the outsider, every society prescribes, indeed, enforces norms of behavior. The works which appeal to the greatest number will be quite naturally those representing a common denominator of belief, by definition then “conservative” in the fundamental sense of seeking to preserve and transmit standards. The system would be static, however, were it not that inscribed within every conclusion is a nagging doubt and within every daring proposal a warning against change.



1. See How to Read Donald Duck. Compare Shaan Amin’s “The Dark Side of the Comics that Redefined Hinduism” s in The Atlantic for Dec. 30, 2017. Amin details the racist and classist Hindu nationalism taught by popular Indian comic books.

2. Life of Napoleon.

3. Andrew Lincoln, Walter Scott and Modernity, 68.

4. See in particular the chapter titled “Men and Brothers.”

5. Chapter XVI “Beverley.”

Aesthetic Principles of the Middle English Romance

     I would like to approach my topic through what might seem a rather peculiar route — a few remarks on the aesthetic problems posed by the popularity of American television. Though the juxtaposition may seem provocative, it should not sound willfully arbitrary as others have associated the romances with detective thrillers and the like and have labeled them not only "popular," but "hackwork," "subliterary," and even simply "inferior." While the statement of literary value judgments is rarely logically compelling, it is often very revealing, and it is the basis for such denigrating adjectives and for the unstated but no less clearly expressed contrary views that led a mass audience to enjoy romances six hundred years ago and comedies and cop shows today that I take as my subject.
     Many among us who love art and make some claim for familiarity with its beauties and its techniques are nonetheless insecure or indifferent before the question of popular genres. The romantic myth that during the golden age taste was miraculously universal (in Greece, say, or Artaud's Bali, or in any of a number of versions of the American Indian currently retailed in these states), but that the situation has today irreclaimably altered dismisses without accounting for the phenomenon of American television. The very tribal elders who only yesterday tossed proverbs and folk-tales about the evening cook-fire while anthropologists gathered in the darkening gloom may themselves today absorb reruns from the narrative factories that program the minds of Americans for nearly a third of their waking lives, and yet the respectful anthropologists have, for the most part, moved on. Through what means does television speak to the hearts of all with grace and persuasion sufficient to displace any rival? Only the film scholars are so "bold as to identify the most popular with the most artful in contemporary entertainments, while students of the popular arts as such often prefer sociological inference to critical discourse. What, precisely, are the qualities of truly popular art that make it at once appealing to its audience and unappetizing to the learned? I believe that the same qualities underlie both reactions and that they are equally evident in the season's new network shows and in the Middle English romances. As my interest here is generalizing and largely theoretical I shall speak of the romances as a unitary body of work, though much of what I have to say will be less true of the exceptional works which have been more admired and accepted. My attempt is not so much to justify the romances or to assert their special excellence as to illuminate the genre as a whole, and with it the idea of the "popular."
     A survey of the last hundred years of scholarship treating the romances indicates that much of the early interest was in grouping them by theme and in tracing sources and influences. This approach was accompanied by a somewhat condescending attitude toward the poems. They were clearly derivative, such that even those with no known French originals were provided with hypothetical ones; they were highly repetitive on the level of incident as well as of verbal formula; they seemed "flat" with very little character development or description but with a good deal of action; and they normally had happy endings which celebrated the known and erased the contradictions and conflicts which the texts had briefly raised. A tone of apology for these characteristics is apparent in some work done yet today. Rather than disputing the reality of these "negative" traits or praising those few texts which do not exhibit them to so great an extent as others, I mean to focus on them and to suggest an explanation for them other than the incompetence of the authors.
     The quality of repetitiveness may be quantitatively determined. It is surely first of all the hackneyed (that is, familiar) sound of the tale of Sir Thopas that causes Herry Bailly to call it "dogerel." Convention may be a ground against which change is measured, but what function can repetition have. The question has been illuminated by the investigation of the nature of oral literature over the last forty years, but much of the discussion of oral formulae has centered on their technical mnemonic advantages or their diagnostic value in testing the text for its degree of orality. Little detailed attention has been paid to the thematic implications of such repetition, though some possibilities are apparent. Its first function is clearly to mark off the text as a literary one and, further, as a representative of an established genre (like "once upon a time"). Secondly, the content of the repeated phrases must to some extent constitute an inventory of the values of the culture which produced it.
     Just as the stereotyped presentation of sacrifice in Homer intensifies rather than reducing its emphasis as a highly significant ritual of Greek life, so Middle English passages on "Christian" war or ostentatious display of wealth and the modern television cliches of sexual stereotypes and dialogue consisting of verbally aggressive wisecracks define and buttress attitudes which are highly culturally specific. The insistent and coherent construction of a world-view through tireless repetition of motif may seem admirable in Indonesian myth but disagreeable in the products of our own society.
     Repetition on the level of narrative episode, so alien to a Flaubertian or New Critical fetishization of the individual word, is indeed characteristic of much of the literature of myth which is culturally normative and which possesses a vitality and reality exclusive of any individual retelling. The binary oppositions resolved in myth according to Levi-Strauss structure the segments of the romance narrative in which episodes may be added or subtracted or may float from story to story. That this is the very stuff of folk-tale a glance into Stith Thompson will verify. So the very "looseness" of narrative is an essential and enabling condition for the construction of a localized "world of discourse," in which the elements may appear in virtually any order though they remain the same internally.
     So, too, the lack of characterization, motivation, and specificity of description indicates the universality of the story's theme rather than the poverty of the author's imagination. Sinbad the poor and Sinbad the wealthy are the same, as the story makes abundantly clear. The archetypal family of old-fashioned situation comedy replicates the nameless father, mother, and children of fairy tales. Things happen without cause in order to show that they happen to Everyman, not to a particular person.
The insistence on a world of exceedingly solid yet floating conventions is evident in the rigidity with which editors require them not only of television shows, but also of romance novels, pornography, detective stories, and science fiction. The redundancy thus generated is neither incidental nor inappropriate. Rather it is a necessary technique in this powerful and yet despised mode of storytelling. Perhaps the most powerful convention of the lot is that the vicissitudes of romance characters must end with a happy resolution. This is altogether identical with the television conventions and expresses a positive acceptance of the social order of the day and a sort of sympathetic apotropaic magic to ward off problems. Here, too, the lack of specificity is instrumental. Fate controls destiny beyond the influence of any individual's powers, but the artist gains acceptance for his work by turning ultimately to wish-fulfillment. Denied the opportunity to master one's own life, one is nonetheless led to give assent to life in general. While given no organizing understanding, the reader is given a final answer that simulates one. This is probably the strongest single motive for popular art. Far from being a cry of protest from the people, it is a symbolic yea-saying that allows the members of the community to resolve the insoluble and in that way to endure the intolerable.
     Having spoken at such length in generalizations, I would like now to review briefly a single specific example, the romance of Qctavian. The story begins with the problem of the barrenness of the royal marriage, a problem surely as profound and suggestive as any, both literally and symbolically. The difficulty is overcome through magical intercession, accompanied by no change in the principal characters. The question of adultery is then raised through the pure and gratuitous malice of the mother-in-law, a circumstance which, like today's mother-in-law jokes, raises without exploring the tensions of aging and sexual rivalry, marriage customs and descent systems which animate so many romance plots. The felicitous resolution of this situation must await the denouement, but it provides the transition to a new problematic opposition, that of city versus wilderness which opens the prospect out from the fertility and happiness of the royal marriage to those of the kingdom as a whole. These two closely related areas are then developed in ever new guises in a pattern as symmetrical as a mandala or a fugue. The search for stable and nurturing family is worked out in the odysseys of the two sons among savage or inappropriate parents, while the search for a supportive social order is represented by the opposition of home and exile of which the Christian against heathen conflict is a variation. (See the following schematic outline.) Every time the cause of deliverance adds nothing new to our knowledge of the characters, nothing to their own perspicuity or insight. The whole reassuring paradigm of affirmation would be undermined by ambiguity or tragedy or social criticism.


Schematic Outline of the Plot of Octavian

fecundity vs. barrenness
↓
birth of twins

fidelity vs. adultery
↓
her condemnation


the city vs. the wilderness
↓
robber beasts

ape vs. knight
↓
Clement

lion vs. griffin
↓
maternal lion

nobility vs. bourgeoisie
↓
giant’s defeat

home vs. exile
↓
residence in Jerusalem

Christian vs. heathen
↓
denouement

Christian vs. heathen
↓
denouement



     Lest it sound as though I, too, would class Octavian and the other romances as "subliterary," let me place this sort of story in the context of the nature of literature as a whole. Many attempts to define literature have foundered in the difficulties of accurately portraying the aesthetic text as essentially or exclusively critical, innovative, and convention-breaking on the one hand or, on the other, as conventional, traditional, and normative. The fact is that every use of language partakes of both; every utterance is at once conformist and novel. The distinguishing mark of the aesthetic text is that the relation between it and the norms is of central significance. The mixture of rule-breaking and rule-keeping is not identical in every case, of course. The anti-conventional is prominent in post romantic art while the conventional governs oral literature as well as neoclassical theory.
     Each type of literature has masterworks and failures and each expresses a vision. To properly read the medieval romance I think it is imperative to see this classification as one inherently free from value judgments. Only then can fitting distinctions be made. The potential greatness of the conventional narrative is apparent in folk-tale, Hellenistic and medieval romance, ballads and silent comedies. One has a glimpse of its distilled charm in those iconic calendars distributed in many countries featuring an idealized couple, say neo-Aztec in Mexico City or pseudo-Vedic in Delhi, blissful and attractive, free from contradiction. At once encouraging self-acceptance and sales, their many American counterparts include not only Norman Rockwell and Victorian poetry books retailed through Sears, Roebuck but all those purely popular genres which gain their authentic hold on the imagination of people by verging into myth.