literary criticism

The Haydn Example

THE IMPORTANCE OF CONTEXT

(painting: “Haydn In London” by John Hoppner)

THE OTHER DAY while driving someplace I listened to a classical music station. A serious-voiced commentator discussed a Joseph Haydn symphony which premiered in London in 1794. The radio host read from newspaper reviews of the concert, published the day after, which raved about the work, its drama and explosiveness. Then followed a recording of the symphony itself.

The piece was underwhelming. Unexceptional, even dull. Definitely no “Carmina Burana”!

What does that tell us?

Beyond the possibility that the problem was me: Two things.

1.) An art changes. A musical work considered thrilling 230 years ago won’t be looked at the same way today, after many innovations in the classical genre, and especially outside it. Which is the point: peak achievement for one set of critics could appear obsolete at a later date, or another time and place.

2.) The problem may be the critics. Those who wrote the gushy reviews the next day. They represented a sliver of their society. The standard audience size in London at the time for renowned symphonies was 800 persons of refined taste and breeding. Aristocrats and aristocrat wannabes. The critics’ opinions reflected them, not the general population.

Context is everything.

Does a similar situation afflict the U.S. literary world in 2025? The audience may not comprise, at its highest levels, quite as narrow a segment of society as Haydn fans, then or today. But literary writing sure doesn’t speak to a broad swath of society either.

Should it? The stance of the New Pop Lit project says, Yes, it should. Which leaves a canyon-sized hole in the art for writers with imagination and smarts to jump through.

–Karl Wenclas

The Prisoners of Dwight MacDonald

A RANT

(photo of chateau d’if prison c/o travelfrance)

We’re imprisoned by our own attitudes.

We’re held back by the preconceptions, prejudices, and stereotypes with which we address the world. They become invisible jail bars around our minds. We construct a fortress around our accepted ideas– stone walls that an army couldn’t break through.

One sees this in every aspect of life– including in the literary realm. Writers and critics cling to rules laid down sixty-four years ago by a handful of intellectual pundits, most notably Dwight MacDonald in his 1960 Partisan Review essay, “Masscult and Midcult.”(An earlier essay by Clement Greenberg in the same publication, edited by Dwight MacDonald, set the tone.)

UNBREAKABLE RULES:

No Kitsch! Whatever kitsch is. Anything which might entertain the public.

Beware the Public! No masscult, midcult, on the edges or in-between.

Allowed: Completely inscrutable, alienating, pretentious and goofy examples of upper-class overeducated posturing known as the avant-garde.

Whither the fate of the prisoners of Dwight MacDonald?

They sit cautiously in their antiseptic modernist-designed offices and rooms. No art adorns the walls– only a single beige baize stripe (the walls themselves are gray) in the style of Barnett Newman, and a distorted portrait of a sparrow, meant to symbolize one of their captured-behind-glass idols, Proust.

The prisoners wait for: something. Not commutation of their sentences. They love their sentences– both kinds. They sit carefully at cold metal tables writing sentences on laptops, well-written one-direction sentences– always very well written, carefully screened: they rigidly police this– more and more sentences, always more of them, long ones, jammed impressively together in ever-longer paragraphs on more and more pages– Infinite Graphomania– and the sentences are acceptable if they’re intellectual, not passionate or emotional; not too much plot or excitement; no outbursts or melodrama– that would be kitsch– the sentences are permissible, approved, allowable, laudable just as long as they don’t engage the stray incautious reader in any way.

-Karl Wenclas

(These thoughts to appear someday in a planned book on the technocracy.)

7 Questions Every Literary Historian Should Be Able to Answer

SEVEN LITERARY QUESTIONS

1.) Who was the most influential post-World War II American novelist?

2.) Which famed literary publication was founded with Random House money as a corporate ad vehicle during a major newspaper strike?

3.) Which canonical author’s cousin headed a Cold War CIA-front arts organization designed to steer literature into safe directions?

4.) Which innovative writer was once left by American soldiers in a cage on an airport tarmac in the hot sun, for hours?

5.) Which American populist novelist, forerunner of the Beats, went from being an acclaimed author to writing screenplays for low-budget monster movies?

6.) Which literary critic, after writing a scathing article in the Atlantic about the pretentiousness of American literary fiction, received a torrent of vitriol and denunciations from book reviewers, novelists, and corporate publishing power brokers? (The person currently lives in South Korea.)

7.) Which over-the-top pulp novel was praised by both Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud for exploring realms of the unconscious?

(Please give your answers below.)

What If the Literary Establishment Were a Car Company?

A SPECULATIVE ESSAY

IS IT ABSURD to compare literary products– novels and books of stories and poems– with automobiles?

Yes and no. After all, one is considered “art” and the other merely engineering and design. Plus there’s the unwanted question of aligning literature with Capitalism– even though the literary realm is dominated by giant conglomerates– centered on the same Big Money island as them– with the literary intelligentsia as embedded in the publishing system as anyone, and long has been.

Besides, a few of us believe literature, done right, carries many of the same attributes as a well-made vehicle. Speed, power, beauty, and sound internal structure, to name a few of them.

WHAT IF?

What would the name of said literary car company be, do you think? I have one picked out:

STODGY MOTORS

Fits the vibe. General Motors circa 1970, but worse– stuck in an outdated mindset with an arrogant belief that only they know the right way to do things.

But for the Stodgy board members, everything is great!

“We have all these great models,” they tell themselves. “Why is no one buying them?”

Yes, after all they have their long-time favorite top-of-the-line model, the Proust, first introduced in 1913– same year as Ford’s Model T. (Shown: a more recent model.)

(photo c/o youtube)

Or, the much-lauded Woolf model. Not very quick– top speed of 45 mph– and uncomfortable seats, but will eventually get you where you’re going. Who could not want it? “The engineering is actually remarkable,” a Stodgy salesperson assures us. “Well put together, if you examine it closely. I mean, the parts fit. They really do.”

(photo c/o autoevolution)

Or the more recently designed Beckett. Another award-winner.

(photo c/o car.info)

But what about cutting edge design, consumers ask? The Stodgy Company has that covered, with a more experimental model they call the Kafka. Pushing the boundaries of, well, something.

(photo c/o ugly car)

“How can you not love it? All of it?” the Stodgy representatives ask.

They do. They’ve staked their reputations on their tastes and choices, and will not go back on them. It’d be unheard of. After all, who knows better than them?

“It’s a golden age for Stodgy, you see,” they affirm. “It really is.”

-reportage from Karl Wenclas for Fast Pop

About Modernist Literature

A RANT

WHAT TRUE MODERN LITERATURE SHOULD LOOK LIKE

FUNNY: Modernist writers Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson and their famous protege, Ernest Hemingway, saw the key to moving literary art forward in removing Victorian-era verbiage. They stressed “economy of language.” They saw modernism in the same terms as modernist painters, architects and designers: via simplicity and clarity. Eliminating the unnecessary to get to the core emotion beneath. Hemingway’s own prose, beginning with his earliest in our time vignettes, embodies this philosophy.

I ASK, then, how did we arrive at the piled-on unreadable verbiage of High Literary Modernism? A combination of Henry James sentence fetish, detail disease, and word clot? Run-on Joyce Faulkner Woolf paragraphs of stream-of-consciousness nonsense within endless Proustian narratives, through which the reader haplessly hopefully wades, as if digging through a garbage dump, until said reader, stupefyingly bored after hundreds or thousands of pages, at last cries out, “Enough!”

WHO PRAISED these High Modernist con artists? Who made them an essential inextricable part of the literary Canon– the art’s Pantheon– while more accessible and frankly more intelligent authors were expunged? High Modernists are held up to gullible students as role models, but in reality they’re giant OBSTACLES preventing the art from moving forward.

OUR STANCE at New Pop Lit is that Ernest Hemingway was not an end point of modernist writing, but a beginning, marking a path to take– one of outward-looking, in-the-real-world expectation and experience. A clear-eyed, clear-headed plunge into the world of now, connecting DIRECTLY and immediately with readers in electric communication– a current of art running through readers like a surge of energy.

THAT’S the path to follow. New art which wakes up the stunned sleepy public to announce, “Literature is BACK!” Then spreading across the planet.

Anyway, that’s the plan.

-Karl Wenclas

Four Fears of Literary Critics

WHAT’S WRONG WITH AMERICAN LITERATURE PART IV

FIRST FEAR: MIDDLEBROW

Many years ago, ridiculously-overrated English novelist Virginia Woolf wrote a defensive letter over a criticism of her work on a radio show(!) in which she scorned her critics as “middlebrow.” Her husband had her letter published in a collection of her writings after her death. Since then, established literary critics on both sides of the Atlantic have lived in fear of being thought of, or thought to be encouraging, or in any way associated with, “the middlebrow.” An excuse, really, for disconnecting themselves from the general public in order to remain in an artistic bubble.

In practice this has meant not aiming for the center, for a wide audience– and that writers like Ernest Hemingway who attained a wide audience despite their literary skill and intelligence have been downgraded as a result. The outcome for literature as an art form has been disastrous.

The fear is most pronounced among those critics who come from conformist middle-class backgrounds. Which means: all of them.

SECOND FEAR: SENTIMENT

To avoid sentiment and melodrama, authors have eliminated strong passion and emotion from their works. Subtle effects only. In practice: works which are restricted. Constipated. To instead be operatic in scope, expression, and theme? Nope. Can’t have it.

BUT the novels of Charles Dickens thrive on sentiment. Or what does one do with “the best worst movie ever,” 1967’s Valley of the Dolls? The flick has a bad screenplay, bad writing, bad direction, bad acting– its fans know this yet compulsively view it again and again. Why? Because of its over-the-top emotion, which strikes deep chords, despite all else, in we human beings.

No: Avoid sentiment. Play it safe. The result: More disaster.

THIRD FEAR: POP

Pop elements are also forbidden. Any of them. Anything too colorful, dramatic, or entertaining is not wanted. The approved literary reader is not supposed to be entertained. Speed and excitement? No. Action? NOT! “Lit-ya-chur” is serious business, made for committed slogs through densely written tomes while wearing determined frowns.

FOURTH FEAR: POLITICS

Finally, there’s the biggest fear: politics. Unless the politics is strictly in-line with an approved narrative issued by proper mandarins from on high. In practice this has meant an avoidance of ideas. No thrilling verbal exchanges expressing intellectual conflict. “One can’t use characters as mouthpieces for ideas,” I was told more than once by prominent literary personages. Uh, why not? “Fiction must never be polemical” founding Paris Review Editor George Plimpton himself told me in person more than twenty years ago, when we sat at a table at CBGB’s after a literary debate, drinking beer. (Which, brahmin New Englander that he was, he pronounced “be-ah.”) Did ol’ George have an agenda? Perhaps.

The extreme example of polemics and politics in fiction are the novels of Ayn Rand– anything can be pushed too far. But you know what? It worked. Readers for decades have thrilled to her one-sided diatribes and over-the-top plots. Their mistake wasn’t in enjoying the books, but in believing too-well what the characters said.

My own thinking: when you inject ideas, present more than one viewpoint.

As I do in a re-released 2012 ebook novel I’m currently hawking called The Tower. Available here.

(I need more clueless bad reviews of it. Or a few objective ones. Only 99 cents on Kindle. Weigh in!)

XXX

WHY is any of this important? It matters because the fundamental purpose of the New Pop Lit project is to provide a better “UX,” as techies say. A more exciting User Xperience. Literature that’s reader-centric. The only way forward. We’ll examine this further, at this site and elsewhere. Much more to come– in ideas, imagination, and ART.

-K. Wenclas