Popular Literature E-Book

• Herausgeber: ibidem
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 441

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

This volume offers a selection of critical essays on texts that can be broadly categorized as popular literature. The essays are inclined to question the idea of ‘the Canon’ and re-consider the divide between the canonical and the popular. As such, besides engaging in a serious critical reading of typical popular literary texts like "The Jungle Book" and "The Hound of the Baskervilles", the book also considers populist tendencies in literary classics like "Jane Eyre" and "Frankenstein". It will be of interest to young scholars and readers of popular literature, science fiction, detective fiction, genre studies, and culture studies. The volume’s contributors are: Anisha Ghosh, Arnab Dasgupta, Goutam Karmakar, Jaya Sarkar, Jaydip Sarkar, Madhuparna Mitra Guha, Mandika Sinha, Mitarik Barma, Pinaki Roy, Puja Chakraborty, Rajadipta Roy, Rupayan Mukherjee, Shirsendu Mandal, Shubham Dey.

Leseprobe

ibidem Press, Stuttgart

To Naughty, Titli, Tintin and RaiThe Irreducibles

Preface and Acknowledgements

As we introduce the present volume, the Pandemic has frowned once more. The National newspapers accompany our morning coffee with information of newer breaths becoming air; news channels tirelessly report on the mortality records that are being continuously unmade and remade with each passing hour. It is perhaps impossible to escape a growing sense of nihilism which is slowly adapting to this catastrophe of humanity. An intimidated consciousness, increasingly made aware of the fragility of existence, has often pondered if one can afford to write when the elementary premise of survival has been jeopardised. As we wrecked our brains off and laboured with our mediocrity to produce the book you have in hand, we increasingly realised that we, as the intelligentsia, still live within the ivory towers of indifference. While Rome burnt and is burning still, we lived and are still living warm within our world of reading and writing, contentedly fiddling our thoughts.

Our only apology can be that as scholars and learners of Literature, reading and writing is the only possible mode of response available to us. Armed with no other techne but a nominal ability to read and write, we can only pursue the same, even in the time of exception or emergency. Also, wisdom has so long enlightened us about the need to read, about the possible vitality which reading promotes on the face of adversity. The Bible had helped a shipwrecked and an islanded Crusoe to regain hope; the photograph of an unknown boy seated amidst the ruins of Blitz and reading has become the image of sustenance. For all of us who were quarantined and isolated, either due to the disease in us or due to the dis-ease in us of catching the disease, reading could serve as the only possible mode of dialoguing with the world, of responding to the ailment of the age. We chose to read and deliberately read literatures which are often identified as ‘Popular’—an adjective that corresponds to forbidden categories like ‘collective’, ‘mass’, ‘multitude’ which, in these times that are being consistently eclipsed and overshadowed by the fear of contagion, have been heavily controlled, governed, censored and partitioned. Marooned in our secluded islands of solitude, we could not conceive of a better escape from our inferno of isolation. We read and wrote on Popular Literature because it allowed us, even if feebly, to engage with the intimation of the forbidden fruit called mass.

While the Pandemic has possibly been an immediate motive for us, one can also contemplate this volume as a response to the prevalent trends of academic thought that are often guided by, almost unconsciously, hierarchical considerations. In our academic circuits, we often come across high-brow Arnoldian academicians who cherish a firm faith that the term ‘Popular Literature’ is a fanciful oxymoron. For them, Popular and Literature are an irreconcilable twain which can never meet. One of ourselves had once encountered a superannuated Professor who had expressed his discontent at the incorporation of ‘trivial texts’ like Half Girlfriend and Sonar Kella (The Golden Fortress) in the recently modified syllabus of English major in Indian academia. Such texts, he observed gravely, lacked ‘serious substance’. He had, in that same conversation, also lamented the fact that Shakespeare was now taught by ‘anyone and everyone’ which, in his erudite opinion, was a heinous act of sacrilege. After all, not everyone could do justice to the genius of the visionary Bard! The listener was tempted but refrained, keeping in mind the reverence that the senior deserved, from asking “But then…he was a Popular playwright on the Elizabethan stage, wasn’t he? Then how could he be substantial?”

The present volume has tried to look beyond such reductive tendencies of reading which fail to find substance in Popular Literary works. The chapters have tried to trace serious contentions in Popular literary texts and have tried to interpret canonical literary texts as Popular Literature. In doing so, the book has tried to problematise the idea of Popular Literature and has proposed that, contrary to reigning presuppositions, Popular Literature is not an easily determinable category which can be unproblematically identified with the frivolous. Above all, it has tried to contemplate the possibilities of reading beyond hierarchical presumptions. The volume can claim its success only if it manages to prompt young readers to read, reflect and think non-hierarchically and without presumptuous biases.

The Book would not have been possible without our contributors who have generously provided us their labours. We are grateful to all of them, particularly to Madhuparna Mitra Guha who has managed to provide us her piece within a very short notice. We take this opportunity to thank ibidem press for expressing their interest in the work and extending their whole hearted support to ensure the deliverance of the book.

Finally, we are grateful to our family for providing us the necessary support and comfort by ensuring that no mundane concerns of everyday intervened into our Minerva towers of contemplation.

Rupayan Mukherjee

Jaydip Sarkar

7th April, 2021

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements

Introduction

Section I Juvenile Literature

The Proper and the Pure: Biopolitics, Law and Sujectivity in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book

Making the Chessboard Smooth: Popular as “Nonsense” in Through the Looking Glass

Narrative Function and Identity in Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist

Section II Science Fiction

Hail the Monster and Fie the Man: The Construction of Monstrosity in Frankenstein

Rethinking Sciences, Situations and Bamboo-groves in Ray’s Science Fictions: Guessing Who Speaks What

Utopia as Dystopia: Subjectivity at the Limits of Subjection in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451

Section III Crime and Detective Fiction

Reclaiming the Elementaries of Context: Ponderings on Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles

“Our mysterious neighbour, Mr. Poirot”: Locating the ‘Other’ Detective in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

“What Shall I see in my dreams tonight?”: Reading the Repressed in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White

Section IV Romance

Trauma as Calamity or Capital?: The Aporia of Representation and the Ethics of Reading in Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl

Phantasmagoria of the Hegemonic Cultural Structure: Interrogating the Indian Urban Facade in Chetan Bhagat’s Half Girlfriend

Relocating the Classic as Popular: Reading Jane Eyre as a Romance

Post Script

Why my Children Love Cinderella and I Don’t: Negotiations with a Classic-Popular Fairy Tale

About the Contributors

Introduction

Rupayan Mukherjee

Artists are the antennae of the race, but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust their great artists.Ezra Pound

You are the majority—in number and intelligence, therefore you are the power—which is justice.Charles Baudelaire

In the world’s largest democracy, where the contagion of post-truth is increasingly saturating the political climate, the word ‘Popular’ has started to evoke an unpleasant stench. The stench is swiftly identifiable, almost equable, with a headless mass that gather wisdom from WhatsApp universities, uncritically ruminate the ideologies that are propagated by the system and are deeply convinced by the predictable tendencies of Populist politics. As diverse governments introduce innovative policies which are directed only at their target vote-banks (determined on the principle of majority), as celebrities (mostly ‘stars’ from mainstream entertainment industry) participate in musical chairs to contest in impending elections and deliver popular dialogues in their electoral campaigns to acquire political credibility among the gathered swarming flock, as gross numbers are written, sung and played at political meetings to please the accumulated public, the stench grows an olf more. All the perfumes of Arabia fail to sweeten the stench that intensifies with each report of mob-lynching and khaap-panchayat where the overwhelming mass subjects the singular, who is often an already disenfranchised subject, to the brutalities of collective violence. Ironically though, the same stenching people who populate the signifier ‘Popular’ ought to be “solemnly resolved to constitute India into a Sovereign Socialist Secular Democratic Republic” and must possess a rudimentary political consciousness and wisdom to preserve and perpetuate the Spirit of the Nation. The irony around the people and popular, like gravity, is so founded and encompassing that it is barely noticed. Only a contemplative Hamlet or an unkempt but unconforming Berenger1 who has not yet turned into a rhinoceros is able to notice that Something is rotten in the State (pun intended) of the World’s largest democracy.

These Hamlets and Berengers are critical of the evolving populist tendencies of governance which relies on the strategic use of the “empty signifier” (Chatterjee 2020, 91) called ‘people’ to manufacture a climate of political antagonism between “…the people and their enemy”. (Ibid., 100) The polarised categories of ‘the people’ and its ‘enemy’ are often floating in nature and is often conceptualised on “…existing solidarities such as ethnic, linguistic or religious identity” as well as “…new solidarities…such as distinctions between the wealthy few and the exploited many, or domiciles and immigrants, or a party long entrenched in power and those excluded.” (Ibid.) Populist politics is thus relational in nature, for its validation and sustenance, it has to imagine and invent an Other.

This Other-oriented essence of the Popular is not exclusive to the domain of the political. It is also equally relevant and fundamental to an evaluation of Popular Literature. Defining and determining Popular Literature is impossible without considering its arch-other category called Literature. Ken Gelder’s thoughtful observations on Popular Fiction elucidate that although Popular Fiction and Literature are “…mutually antagonistic, but they need each other for their self-definition.” (Gelder 2004, 13) This relational need of the Other to act as a Foil, and thereby determine, fashion and validate the self, suggests the formulation of an identity in difference.

Gelder identifies a host of contexts, characteristics and aspects on whose premises the identity in difference of Popular Fiction is established: artistic intention, craftsmanship and readership being fundamental among them. In other words, he argues that the field of Popular Fiction characteristically departs from Literature in their intention “to reach a large number of readers” (Ibid., 20), in their preference for simplicity and an ingenuous and unproblematic repulsion towards “tangled plots” and “intense formal artistry” (Ibid., 19), and in promoting and catering to a readership that is unthinking and does not read “seriously” (Ibid., 23) but “uncritically” (Ibid., 38), solely for leisure and entertainment.

Jacques Derrida’s ponderings on the idea of Literature exposit the nuances that are often inextricably associated with the discourse of literature and the literary. Derrida, unlike Gelder, does not necessarily consort to an essentialist understanding of Literature as “the kind of writing…produced by…Jane Austen, George Elliot, Henry James, James Joyce, William Faulkner…” (Ibid. 11) which “…deploys a set of logics and practices that are different in kind to those deployed in the field of popular fiction”. (Ibid. 12) For Derrida, literature is not an exclusive category that is hierarchically distinguished from its other—Popular fiction. Instead, Derrida understands literature as a “strange institution” (Derrida 1992 (b), 36) marked by a characteristic paradox. Derrida explains this paradox as follows:

““What is literature?”; literature as historical institution with its conventions, rules, etc., but also this institution of fiction which gives in principle the power to say everything, to break free of the rules, to displace them…The institution of Literature in the West, in its relatively modern form, is linked to an authorization to say everything…” (Ibid., 37)

In what follows, Derrida argues that the “institution of literature in the West in its relatively modern form…” shares a correspondence with the “modern idea of democracy”. (Ibid.) However, that is not our concern for the time being. Instead, we are interested in Derrida’s forked understanding of “The space of literature” as “…not only that of an instituted fiction but also a fictive institution which in principle allows one to say everything.” (Ibid., 36) Literature, as Derrida argues, is suggestive of an ambiguity and holds together contrary tendencies. On the one hand, literature for Derrida is overarchingly accommodative/ absorptive as it “allows one to say everything, in every way” (Ibid.) and thus “is an institution which tends to overflow the institution.” (Ibid.) Simultaneously, Derrida observes, answering the epistemological question “What is literature” seems ‘unserious’ without “an analysis of my time at school…and of the family in which I was born, of its relation or non-relation with books, etc.” (Ibid.) Hence, Literature seems to be suggestive of a characteristic paradox. It is, on the one hand, essentially (almost irreducibly) free and non-hierarchical that absorbs all that is written. Simultaneously, its essence is determined and construed by the intricate considerations of the cultural-ideological.

Derrida also observes that “…there is no text which is literary in itself.” (Ibid., 44). Instead, the essence of the literary, which Derrida calls “literarity”, “is the correlative of an intentional relation to the text, an intentional relation which integrates in itself, as a component or an intentional layer, the more or less implicit consciousness of rules which are conventional or institutional—social, in any case.” (Ibid.) For Derrida, literarity is often influenced by the poetics of reading which is fundamental to the intentional relation that the reader has with the text. Intention, in its phenomenological connotation, holds the reader as much responsible as the author in determining the nature and essence of the literary. Terry Eagleton observes that “All literary works…are ‘rewritten’, if only unconsciously, by the societies which read them; indeed there is no reading of a work which is not also a ‘re-writing’”. (Eagleton 1996 (a), 11) Of course, Derrida is quick to mention that he does not interpret or understand literarity as “…merely projective or subjective—in the sense of empirical subjectivity or caprice of each reader”. (Derrida 1992(b), 44) Instead, Derrida claims, “The essence of literature, if we hold to this word essence, is produced as a set of objective rules in an original history of the “acts” of inscription and reading”. (Ibid., 45) For Derrida, “the literary character of the text is inscribed on the side of the intentional object, in its noematic structure…and not only on the subjective side of the noetic act.” (Ibid., 44) The obtuse expressions ‘noetic’ and ‘noematic’ have phenomenological references and J Hillis Miller observes that “Noetic means “apprehended by the intellect alone”, while noematic refers to “…features in what is to be known that makes them knowable, subject to noesis”. (Miller 2002, 62) The noematic in a literary text, as Derrida opines, is constituted by ““in” the text features which call for the literary reading and recall the convention, institution, or history of literature”. (Derrida 1992(b), 44) Reading, for Derrida, is very much in concordance with this noematic structure and the positionality of the reader is a subjectivity that ‘includes’ and recognises “the noematic structure” (Ibid.). The reader is thus “linked to an inter-subjective and transcendental community” (Ibid.) and reading as an act is an always-already institutionalised and ideologised enterprise.

Interrogating the Canon

Terry Eagleton introspects into the indisputable pertinence of ideology in determining the literary worth (or what we might, contrary to Eagleton’s claim, dare to call literary essence) of a text and in categorising Literature as a discipline. Rather clairvoyantly, Eagleton asserts that “Literature, in the meaning of the word we have inherited, is an ideology”. (Eagleton 1996, 19) Eagleton’s socialist commitment haunts his genealogical interrogations on the origin of the institute called Literature and he finds in the promotion of the ideology of literature an organised endeavor to sugar-coat typical middle-class sensibilities. He further argues that the canonisation of ‘English Literature’ in England had happened in the early twentieth century, in the aftermath of World War I and with the inauguration of English Departments in the ancient Universities like Oxford and Cambridge. Reflecting on the influential role that the Cambridge based journal Scrutiny played in determining the trajectory of English Literature and developing the canon, Eagleton observes:

“Scrutiny redrew the map of English literature in ways from which criticism has not yet recovered. The main thoroughfares on this map ran through Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jonson, the Jacobeans and Metaphysicals, Bunyan, Pope, Samuel Johnson, Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Austen, George Eliot, Hopkins, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence. This was ‘English literature’: Spencer, Dryden, Restoration drama, Defoe, Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Shelley, Byron, Tennyson, Browning, most of the Victorian novelists, Joyce, Woolf and most writers after D.H. Lawrence constituted a network of ‘B’ roads interspersed with a good few cul-de-sacs. Dickens was first out and then in; ‘English’ included two and a half women, counting Emily Brontë as a marginal case; almost all of its authors were conservatives.” (Ibid., 28)

The map of English Literature, redrawn by Scrutiny and elucidated by Eagleton, holds a position of undisputed authority for any individual who inhabits the imagined community of English Studies. While Eagleton argues that the Leavisite current, substantially preached by the Scrutiny, “…has entered the bloodstream of English studies in England…has become a form of spontaneous critical wisdom as deep-seated as our conviction that the earth moves round the sun” (Ibid., 27), one can arguably erase the geo-political limit of ‘England’ stated in the aphorism. Indeed, barring a few exceptional departures, the worldwide canon of English literature has considerably conformed to the ‘map’ stated above. The academic programme of English major at various Universities across the world, even after the recent interventions of Culture Studies and New Literatures, can be unproblematically accommodated within the standardised map of English Literature. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the African novelist and intellectual, living geographically far away from Eagleton’s England, remarks that the charm of the “Leavisite selected ‘Great Tradition of English Literature’” (wa Thiong’o 1987, 90) had cast its spell in Universities which were territorially located in Africa. “The syllabus of the English Department…” as wa Thiong’o remonstrates “…meant a study of the history of English Literature from Shakespeare, Spenser and Milton to James Joyce and T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards and the inevitable F.R. Leavis.” (Ibid.) wa Thiong’o observes, that the formation, sustenance and the reception of the English literary canon in Africa had (and still has) a deep rooted association with imperialism whereby “…the content of the syllabi, the approach to and presentation of the literature, the persons and the machinery for the determining the choice of the texts and their interpretation, were an integral part of imperialism in its classical colonial phase, and they are today an integral part of the same imperialism…in its neo-colonial phase.” (wa Thiong’o 1981, 5)

In her magnum opus The Masks of Conquests, Gauri Viswanathan observes that the institutionalisation, and thus the canonisation, of English in the colonies had happened “long before it was institutionalized in the home country”. (Viswanathan 2015, 27) Viswanathan is critical of Eagleton’s “token acknowledgement” (Ibid.) of the correspondence between the institutionalisation of English as a discipline and the birth of the Empire. Echoing Wa Thiongo, Viswanathan claims that the canonisation of English literature is so intimately associated with the politico-historical event of Imperialism that it is problematic to place the two within a cause-effect design. One is often at a loss to determine if the institutionalisation of English is a cause or an effect of imperialism. Viswanathan opines that English literature acquired “surrogate functions” (Ibid., 33) in the backdrop of imperialism, all of which cannot be listed in the limited scope of an Introduction. To state in a nutshell, it is Viswanathan’s contention that the initiation of English in the academic circuit of colonised India and the formulation of the English canon played a significant role in the consolidation of the Empire. The mimic man, “a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect” (Macaulay 1835, 8), was the imperfect, but desired, outcome of the Anglo-cultural pedagogic model and the perfect embodiment and exemplar of a colonised subject who was dominated with consent. The holistic description of the private life of the Bengali babu by Deborah Baker is incomplete without a mention of the “Family libraries of…calf-bound copies of Tennyson, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, illustrated folios of Shakespeare, and the entire run of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels…” (Baker 2018, 52)

What thus stands out is the intimate relationship of the literary canon with power and its typically political disposition. The political essence that is revealed is considerably dependent on the position of the revelator, i.e., the nature of the introspective gaze which considers the canon. For a feminist intellectual like Virginia Woolf, the canon is a patriarchal construct which systematically denies recognition to deserving women writers like Shakespeare’s imagined sister Judith. Differently, for the avant-garde Bengali novelist and intellectual Nabarun Bhattacharya, the canon is the repository of petty bourgeoisie sensibilities promoting a spirit of conformism, which must be unmade by imagined poets and intellectuals like Purandar Bhaat who write profane and unrefined verses in a crude language that is largely obscene and often sexist. What is thus revealed is the transitive nature of the canon, a face that is revised and re-invented with every intervention of interpretation. Charles Altieri observes that “…what I claim to be canonical (or to be criterion for determining canons) does depend on norms that I establish, or at least, on institutional norms that I certify”. (Altieri 1983, 40) Terry Eagleton is of the opinion that the parameter of value, on which the constricted category of the canon rests, is “…a transitive term: it means whatever is valued by certain people in specific situations, according to particular criteria and in the light of given purposes”. (Eagleton 1996, 10) One can extend Eagleton’s argument further to suggest that it is not just the value of the canon but also the nature of the canon which is transitive. Or else, it is also possible to interpret Eagleton’s ‘value’ as not necessarily a valorised ‘worth’ but an implied significance that is unfolded through critical evaluation and interpretation and whose nature and essence is dependent on the position and perspective of the critical gaze. Frank Kermode argues that the canonisation of the literary text is considerably dependent on the continuity of attention and interpretation that the text motivates. (Kermode 1979, 78) The evaluation of the text, which can either be an appraisal or a critique (Frank Kermode claims that the literary canon is actually defined “by attacks upon it” (Ibid., 81)), significantly determines its canonicity.

Hence, one can argue that canons are hauntological in nature. In their pervasiveness and consistent recognition (a recognition that happens even in denial) they resemble the historic. The critique of the canon through denial only foregrounds its relevance, just as the wistful urge to live unhistorically only implies the inescapability of history and historicised existence. The canon breathes when it is accepted, it thrives when it is denied. Reverence and denial are distinct means which eventually accomplishes the same end, the validation of the canon. Like the Eliotian tradition, the canon is diffusedly related to the artist through an inescapable trope of measurability, “in which two things are measured by each other” (Eliot 1932, 15).

The problematic relationship of modern Bengali poetry with the aesthetic model typified as Rabindrik can aptly illustrate the paradoxical position of the canon with relation to art. Rabindrik, a prevalent and overused word in the Bengali language, connotes a “distinctive style” (Chatterjee 2001, 304) of, chiefly aesthetic, expression that is often identified with the 1913 Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. It is a matter of little contention that Tagore occupies a formidable presence in the Bengali cultural field and is a “canon in himself” (Ibid.). In an interview, the celebrated Hindi and Urdu poet Gulzar, rather unambiguously, and to an extent reductively, observes that in the cultural life of Bengal “…that one man (Tagore) is the culture of the entire community…the children begin their learning from him…there is perhaps no other instance where a single man becomes the culture of the entire community.” (Live, 5:48-6:23) Apparently, there are generalising strains in Gulzar’s comments. Yet, like most other generalisations, the assertion is partially true. The various modernist literary movements in Bengal, which aspired to make it new, believed that an unconditional rejection (annihilation in some cases) of Rabindrik sensibilities and consciousness was a fundamental requirement for the arrival of modernity in literature. These heterogeneous movements, with each departing from the other in their outlook, historicity and praxis, can be branded together on the basis of their anti-Rabindri-kata/cism. The poets of Kallol, Krittibaash and Hungry generation unanimously agreed that modernity and rabindrikata were mutually antagonistic and for the first to arrive it was essential to reject the second.

However, the rejection of Rabindrikata and Tagore never meant an absolute autonomy from their sublime shadow. On the contrary, as the renowned modern Bengali poet Buddhadeva Bose notes in an interview, the post-Tagore modernists like Bishnu Dey, Sudhindranath Datta and Bose himself “showed a serious involvement in Tagore. This involvement took many forms: parody, imitation, submission, rejection, revolt.” (Bose 1966, 43) Bose’s comment emphasises the eternal truth that revolt or rejection is an-other way of involvement and establishes an-other relationship that is founded on the premises of non-relation. In his Memoir Awrdhek Jiban (Half-a-Life) Sunil Ganguly remarks that the readers of Bengali literature have often failed to comprehend the actual essence of Rabindra-birodh, i.e., the intentional antagonisation of Rabindranath, among the modern Bengali poets and litterateurs. For him, the true essence of Rabindra-birodh was not to discard or unrecognise the bard’s creative authority. It was more an attack on the systemic tendency of Purists who believed that nothing ‘literary’ has been produced in the post-Tagore era of Bengali literature. (Awrdhek Jiban 204) Elsewhere, Ganguly remarks that the “people’s obsession with Rabindranath, that mindset they carried where he was the only ‘poet’ who existed…” (Ganguly 2010) significantly motivated him to adopt an Anti-Rabindranath stance.

What we hence have is the classic case of the canon evolving as a referential point, which must be considered or alluded to even when the contemporaneous seeks to depart from it. The Canon is, to quote Charles Altieri, “…a permanent theater helping us shape and judge personal and social values” (Altieri 1983, 40) Altieri argues that Canons serve “as dialectical resources” (Ibid., 47) whereby it both serves as a model and a challenge for the aspiring artist. He asserts that “Canons make us want to struggle…” (Ibid., 48) and in its dichotomous relevance as both a model and a Foil, canons are inescapably relevant to the artists and their art.

Reflections on the canon also point to its contingent and non-singular and non-exclusive nature. It is often problematic to determine a pure canon in a literary-cultural field for there is often not one but many canons. To complicate the possibilities of an inference further, multiple canons often exist simultaneously. Graham Holderness explores this curious but rather recurrent condition of ‘many canons in simultaneity’ (emphasis mine) in form of a personal reminiscence. Holderness claims that although his “first encounter” (Holderness 2014, 74) with the canon of English Literature had happened in the 1960s when he was a student of English, he had been introduced to “…another canon, a more popular one…” (Ibid., 75) before his formal studies in English began. This “another canon” was a Christmas gift to him from his parents and it was “…a set of ten books called the ‘Presentation Library’” (Ibid.). Holderness remonstrates that “the ten books represented a mixture of different canons”. (Ibid.)

Holderness’s reminiscences clearly exemplify the pluralistic disposition of the category called Canon. Furthermore, it also considers the canon outside the institutional limits of academia. In asserting the existence of “another canon, a more popular one”, Holderness problematises the binarised distinction between the Canon and the Popular. Instead, his assertion implies that it is perhaps necessary to revise our (fore)understanding of the Canon as a sacrosanct category that is hierarchically superior to its baser Other (i.e., Popular) and far removed from the profanities that is usually associated and identified with the latter. Does Popular as a category hold its claim to the canon? If so, what are the founding parameters and classificatory principles on which such an alternative canon can be constructed and maintained? Is such a canon non-striated in nature or is it governed by more intricate considerations of readership? Can such an alternative canon support the possibilities of free reading or does it eventually commodify the literary? Such questions are perhaps not irrelevant to ponder upon.

In his Presidential address of the Modern Humanities Research Association, later titled as “The Popular Canon”, Jean Francois Botrel observes that “Nothing seems further from potentially canonical literature than our subject (Popular Literature)” (Botrel 2002, xxx). Botrel is critical of the canonised categories of “‘popular’, ‘infra’ or ‘para literature’, ‘minor literature’” and finds in such “disqualifying epithets” (Ibid., xxix), the unnecessary intervention of the intelligentsia (Botrel calls them “the guardians and supporters of the canon”). For Botrel, such categories barely refer to the literature of the people. Rather, in absence of a genuine intent to “…provide a basis for the de facto development of a popular canon” (Ibid. xxxi) the “literature of the voice” (Ibid.) is often unacknowledged and hence remains perpetually uncanonised. Botrel’s thought-provoking essay ends with his assertion that “The popular canon seems…to be the canon that is established notwithstanding the apparent submission to legitimate learning tastes…it is not an explicit, decreed canon, but an implicit, de facto one, having no official status, but tacitly and stubbornly opposed to the Canon of the Other…” (Ibid. xxxviii)

Identifying Popular Literature

Contrary to Botrel’s assertion, what is often conceived as Popular Literature is an “explicit, decreed canon” which, if otherwise difficult to define, is easy to identify. One possible and immediate strategy of identifying Popular literature is clearly tautological; it is that which is popular among the readers. Hence, depending on its popularity among the readers, a literary work can be accorded or denied the status of Popular. Having said so, it is perhaps wrong to arrive at the easy inference that all Bestsellers are exemplars of Popular Literature and they comprehensively constitute the ‘Popular’ Canon. Ken Gelder is sharp to remind us that “…a bestseller can mean sales of anything from around 20,000 copies to several million…and some works of Literature, whether it happens over an extended period of time or immediately after publication, can indeed do well in the marketplace.” (Gelder 2004, 11) If Readership remains the only criteria for defining and identifying Popular Literature, the long-standing rift between Classics and Bestsellers is likely to dissolve and the great debate around the two will possibly sound absurd. That there is a prevalent presumption that the two are mutually exclusive categories (which they are and occasionally they are not, we will in due course take up this contention) clearly signify that Classics, even when they (arguably) acquire their credibility as Classic by being popular among readership across the limits of space, time and culture, cannot be unproblematically equated with Bestsellers. Salability can barely be the primary criteria for identifying and defining Popular Literature. The plays by Shakespeare, the novels of Dickens or the poems of the Romantics are read worldwide and are arguably popular among a trans-temporal and trans-cultural readership who often, paradoxically, read them as Literary classics. Political pamphlets like The Communist Manifesto or autobiographies like My Experiments with Truth only problematise the idea of defining Popular Literature in terms of readership.

Gelder further contends that the law of the genre is a significant criterion for the classification and identification of Popular Literature. He argues that “…with popular fiction, generic identities are always visible” and that “Popular fiction announces those identities loudly and unambiguously; you know and immediately need to know that this is romance, or a work of crime fiction (and/or spy fiction), or fantasy, or horror, or a western, or an historical popular novel or an adventure novel.” (Ibid., 42) There seems to be a considerable substance in Gelder’s claim, for Literary works which conform to these generic types are often recognised (or dismissed? the choice, dear reader, is yours) as Popular Literature. The constituent imperatives and parameters of a genre and its thematic tropes are often formulaically repeated in works which are canonised as Popular Literature. Satyajit Ray, the eminent Indian filmmaker, once observed that Popular Indian cinema has become a manufactured product of Bombay (Bollywood) which “…has devised a perfect formula to entice and amuse the illiterate multitude that forms the bulk of our film audiences”. (Ray 2011, 8) This ‘formula of amusement’, as Ray observes elsewhere, tries desperately to feed the public appetite for entertainment, “…the craving for spectacle, for romance, for a funny turn or two, for singing and dancing…” (Ray 1994, 73) In his classic tongue in cheek humor, Ray elaborates the formula thus:

“…colour (Eastman preferred); songs (six or seven?) in voices one knows and trusts; dance—solo and ensemble—the more frenzied the better; bad girl, good girl, bad guy, good guy, romance (but no kisses); tears, guffaws, fights, chases, melodrama; characters who exist in a social vacuum; dwellings which do not exist outside the studio floor; locations in Kulu, Manali, Ooty, Kashmir, London, Paris, Hong Kong, Tokyo…who needs to be told? See any three Hindi films, and two will have all the ingredients listed above…” (Ibid., 90-91)

For Ray, the enlisted integral components of Indian (Hindi) cinema are not just empirically identifiable characteristics whose recurrence is only incidental or accidental. Instead, owing to their recurrence through repetitions, these components have acquired the hermeneutic status of being the ‘rules of the game’ (emphasis is mine). They are formulas for not just procuring success at the box office but also for making the materialisation of the craft possible. For Ray, it is never quite possible to create a Hindi cinema without succumbing to the formula.

Ray’s understanding of the formula as a hermeneutic category holds true for not just Popular Cinema but also Popular Literature. Gelder observes that for writers of Popular fiction, the autonomy of creativity is largely compromised for a methodological pursuance of labour. For him, an epistemological and theoretical distinction exists between the categories of author and writer in the sense that while the former “subsumes and transcends the thing he creates” (Gelder 2004, 14), the latter is identified by his/ her “industry”, i.e., “production and sheer hard work” (Ibid., 15). One need not necessarily agree with Gelder’s contention that the author is the creator of Literature while the writer is the producer of Popular fiction (Gelder’s proposed distinction between Literature and Popular fiction is in anyway problematic) but there is substantial validity in his understanding of the writer/ author of Popular Literature as a craftsman labouring within the discursive design of a prevalent mode of production with little aspiration to problematise, question or critique the design. The conformism of the writer is not merely an ideological conformism, it is also a self-subjection to the normative praxis of aesthetic production. Virginia Woolf’s critique of the writer who “…seems constrained, not by his own free will but by some powerful and unscrupulous tyrant who has him in thrall, to provide a plot, to provide comedy, tragedy, love interest…” (Woolf 1984, 160) is a precise and fitting, if only a little anachronistic, definition of the Popular writer. Woolf’s subsequent praise of James Joyce and the ‘spiritualists’ (who in her opinion are the embodiments of modernity) are serious symptoms of her own ideological position. Yet, what stands out again is the relevant presumption that the writer of Popular Literature possesses a customised and compromised creative spirit that is continuously tamed by some unperceived and incomprehensible tyrant.

The tyrant is possibly the Market and we will consider the effectiveness of the same as the distinctive criteria on the basis of which Popular Literature can be identified, categorised or defined. However, before that, we must consider the problems that underlie our proposition that Popular Literature can be exclusively identified on the basis of their genre-dependency. While it is true that a Popular work prefers not to mingle genres and usually bears distinct marks of genre-specificity, the tyranny of genres is not exclusive to Popular Literature. Jacques Derrida finds in the pronouncement of the word genre the establishment of “a limit” which is immediately followed by “norms and interdictions…” (Derrida 1992(a), 224) For Derrida, the principle behind this limit is an unavoidable trait “…which one could rely in order to decide that a given textual event, a given “work”, corresponds to a given class”. (Ibid. 228-229) Derrida further asserts that “…there is no genreless text, there is always a genre and genres…” (Ibid., 230). In similar lights, Tzvetan Todorov and Richard Berrong observe that any avant-garde and unprecedented/ novel work of art “…as soon as it is recognised in its exceptional status, becomes in its turn, thanks to successful sales and critical attention, a rule.” (Todorov and Berrong 1976, 160) Such a rule inspires other artists who, driven by the motive of “critical attention” (Ibid.) more than successful sales (or both), seek to replicate the rule. Todorov and Berrong’s rhetorical question “Have not Joyce’s exceptional puns become the rule for a certain kind of modern literature?” (Ibid.) elucidates that genre-dependency is not an exclusive tendency of writers of Popular Literature. Instead, it is also observable in practitioners of elite literature (if such a distinction still exists in our mind) who often aspire to replicate an unconventional generic model with the urge of being recognised as avant-garde artists (in this case the modernists). In other words, they consciously imitate a genre with the motive of recognition. Such conscious imitations have two-fold implications: not only do they qualify the imitators as the practitioner of a genre, they also end up canonising an unconventional exception as the generic rule. Todorov and Berrong provides us the classic example of Prose poem which “seemed like an exception in the time of Aloysius Betrand and Baudelaire” (Ibid.) but, owing to its repeated practice, has now acquired the status of norm.

Hence, considering genre-dependency as a distinct trait of Popular Literature, although reasonable, can be problematic. Elite literature is also genre-dependent in its own way, all it takes is to reinterpret and reconsider our own understanding of the term genre. The recent trends in genre studies propose to evaluate genre as a contingent category which is regularly revised and modulated. Todorov and Berrong opine that genres are born from other genres and “a new genre is always the transformation of one or several old genres: by inversion, by displacement, by combination” (Ibid., 161). Furthermore, the codified characteristics which constitute the nature of the genre have a problematic origin. They are sole results of perspective (which Todorov and Berrong calls “point of view” (Ibid.)) or ideology.

The motif of ideology is often considered to be an effective basis for determining Popular Literature. Popular texts are regarded as a vital medium for the propagation of ideologies and as effective safeguards of existing ideological structures like Patriarchy, class and Nation State. The morals of compulsory heterosexuality, class-caste consciousness, nationalism, technocracy etc. are often believed to be systematically disseminated by diverse popular texts which are carriers of dominant ideological tendencies. Hence, Romance fictions are considered to be “…primary sites for the ideological construction of individuals as gendered subjects…” (Ebert 19); Popular plot-centred novels are regarded as a potent means of dissemination of bourgeoisie sensibilities; children’s literature is frequently comprehended as an effective literary mode to procure ‘good conduct’ (emphasis mine) and morality in children and thereby ensure the production of docile conforming subjects who, in future, are conditioned to obey rather than refute the socio-political status quo.

While such conceptual readings of the various segments of Popular Literature is not unreasonable, similar allegations of ideological conformism are often raised against high literature. For Marxist intellectuals, the dispassionate retreat of the early twentieth century artist into the ivory tower of art for art’s sake has been a clear symptom of ideological conformism. A classic case at hand is Karl Radek’s critique of the avant-garde novelist James Joyce and what is often believed to be his literary masterpiece, Ulysses. The novel is often regarded as an authentic testimony of the Irish, or to be more specific, Dublin, everyday and Joyce himself had once remarked that he had attempted “to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.” (Joyce qtd. in Adams 2003, 84) However, contrary to Joyce’s claim, the Marxist critic Karl Radek finds in the novelist’s depiction an ideologically determined choice whereby “he (Joyce) has selected a piece of life and depicted that” (Radek 1934). This life, as Radek argues, is founded on Joyce’s own position and ideological inclination and hence is limited to “…a cupboardful of medieval books, a brothel and a pothouse.” The bourgeoisie does not figure as agents of revolution in the novel because for its creator i.e., Joyce, “…the national revolutionary movement of the Irish petty bourgeoisie does not exist…” (Ibid.) Radek’s reading of Joyce’s Ulysses implies that the re-presented unhappening ordinary world of Dublin, lulled by the monotony of a predicated and ritualised everyday existence, is a clear reflection of Joyce’s ideological position of self-withdrawal from Irish politics and the Irish nationalist movement and his complacence with status-quo. Likewise, the leftist intellectual and playwright Augusto Boal finds in classical Aristotelian tragedy a “…very powerful purgative system, the objective of which is to eliminate all that is not commonly accepted, including the revolution, before it takes place” (Boal 2008, 41). Tragedy, as Boal interprets it, is an effective literary medium through which the ideology of the ruling class is propagated and ideologically conditioned subjects, who are inclined to conform to and not contradict the existing order, are produced. Hence, it is perhaps incorrect and, as Gelder observes, perhaps ideological (Gelder 2004, 35) to unproblematically consider only Popular literature as ideologically charged. Rather, the ideological is an inseparable component of the aesthetic.

Popular Literature is also often identified and defined as market-oriented. Indeed, this is perhaps the most rudimentary definition that one can imagine of Popular Literature. A practitioner of Popular Literature is expected to serve the market and write for a pre-conceived readership who have an ordinary and predictable literary taste. Such an understanding of Popular literature is miserably flawed for it tends to assume the market as a static and constant category. Hence, the fact that there are markets enfolded within the umbrella-signifier ‘Market’ is a reality which is often ignored and overlooked. Adorno and Anson’s reconsideration of culture-industry proposes to understand the transformation of culture into commodity in the historic period when “…these cultural forms first began to earn a living for their creators as commodities in the marketplace…” (Adorno and Anson 1975, 13) Adorno observes that the “culture industry has its ontology…from the commercial English novels of the late 17th and early 18th centuries” (Ibid.,14). The commodification of culture is thus historically simultaneous with the birth of the author as an ‘autonomous’ (emphasis is mine) category, free from the constraints and conditions of patronage. It is simultaneously necessary to clarify that the single quoted autonomy is not equable to absolute liberty. Rather, it suggests “…the laws of the marketplace” (Watt 1957, 53) to which the author was, is and will be constantly subjected, often through the meticulous procedures of print culture that are associated with publication. The market is a pre-consideration for any author, it is only that their target readership is different. Ezra Pound, announcing the long-desired publication of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in the book form, famously observed that “Members of the “Fly-Fishers” and “Royal Automobile Clubs”, and of the “Isthmian” may not read him” (Pound 1970, 82). Nevertheless, Pound was optimistic that “…intelligent readers gathering few by few will read it, and it will remain a permanent part of English literature…” (Ibid. 83). Pound never implied that Joyce’s masterpiece was outside the ambit of market and readership. Rather, he realised that it was meant for a different category of readers and would in due course develop its own market.

Popular and the Ethics of Reading

Can we then suggest a better set of parameters on the basis of which we can identify what we presume, if not understand, as Popular Literature? What then can be the undisputed distinguishing mark on the basis of which a text can be identified as a piece of Popular Literature? Is it at all possible to unproblematically define Popular Literature? Considering the nuances which we have discussed at length, the chances of an affirmative response seem less likely.

Yet, response is an important aspect to be considered. Texts demand response, it is the ethical act of the reader to respond to a text through the praxis or act of reading. Reading is the vital act that orients the afterlife of the text, through reading the text is re-born in continuum. Reading as a cultural act often determines the essence of the textual. However, with a few happy exceptions, the act of reading mostly occurs within institutionalised models of interpretation which pre-exist and pre-date the reader. These models are problematic categories not only because they appropriate the reader within patterned reading tendencies but also because they are often the litmus which distinguish between good reading-bad reading, authentic reading-misreading, valid reading-invalid reading. The reader is disallowed the possibility of approaching the literary non-hermeneutically and un-historically. For such an ideologically conditioned reader, the canon and its ramifications are so overpoweringly real that s/he barely stands the possibility of evading the same. It is virtually impossible for the third-world reader to read Robinson Crusoe as a popular novel (Watt 1957, 92) and to appreciate William Shakespeare as a playwright of the masses. The former is introduced to the young reader as an exemplary Classic of world literature, the latter is the visionary bard who is the unchallenged face of culture, serving forever the cause of humanity. Ian Watt or Stephen Greenblatt or Robert Weimann cannot erase the lingering traces of symbolic capital which, due to the history of British imperialism and the subsequent formation and evolution of the culturally colonised Anglo-cultural bourgeois as the dominant class, such literatures and litterateurs embody in the reading circles of postcolonial Nation like India. The liberal humanist reading practices which chant the names of Shakespeare, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Eliot like pious hymns constantly inspire the reader to develop a discrete and fine literary taste and read by the canon.

One can unproblematically define the Literature of the Popular if one is in possession of such a conditioned reading sensibility. Popular Literature is all that the canonical reading tendencies designate as Popular. It is that which is believed to be readable unthinkingly. It is that which can be read at leisure, it is that which does not deserve the serious and sombre appreciative mode of reading which must be accorded to the canon. In other words, it is all that can be read un-methodically and informally. Until recently, they were excluded by the academic canon in India and even today, they lack the symbolic capital that is intrinsic to a Paradise Lost or a Great Expectations. Gelder’s critical take on the idea of reading Popular Literature explicates that there is often a pre-dominant socio-cultural presumption that Popular Literature is a non-readable genre which can be consumed but not read. That is to say, Reading as a sophisticated engagement with the literary, by a critical individual or class, is not possible in the context or case of Popular Literature. (Gelder 2004, 35-36) Hence, Popular Literature is all that which does not deserve the critical gaze of the canonical reader.

J. Hillis Miller has argued that for the mattering of Literature at both an institutional and intimate level, it is not enough to read by the canon. Instead, good reading is equally essential. Miller claims that good reading “…means noncanonical reading, that is, a willingness to recognize the unexpected, perhaps even the shocking or scandalous, present even in canonical works, perhaps especially in canonical works…” (Miller 2002, 189). Miller further claims (and this serves our design) that good reading “is more likely to lead to disconfirmation…of a theory than to offer a firm support to it” (Ibid., 190). Although Miller is principally concerned with an alternative model of reading the canon, his idea of disconfirmation can be significant when considered in the context of reading (if that is possible) Popular Literature.

In all possibilities, a good reading of Popular Literature begins with the assertion that it is indeed possible to read Popular Literature. It is not a rejection of the same as unreadable in the classical highbrow reader-esque manner. Neither is it a systemic exuberant flattery of the genre. Rather, it is the honest intent to engage critically with these texts which the canon has dismissed as non-literature. It is the willingness to accept a blatant disconfirmation of the theoretical presumption that Popular literature is unworthy, unserious, unimportant, trivial, lay.

The present volume is an attempt to (good)read texts which belong to the undefinable genre of Popular Literature. Keeping in tune with the nuances that the present chapter has explored in its attempt to identify and define the genre of Popular Literature, the determined texts are equally problematic. One can validly contend that Frankenstein or Fahrenheit 451 are classics. However, as we have already discussed, Classics and Popular Bestsellers are not exclusive categories and there are ample texts which co-habit both these domains. In fact, their status in the latter compartment often allows them an entry into the former. Further, relevant questions can be raised about the sectional divisions. For instance, one can rightly ask if Frankenstein unproblematically belongs to the genre of science fiction and how correct is it to ignore the strains of the Gothic in the novel. We can evade such pressing questions with the disclaimer that the subsections have been created to real-ise the conceived ‘design of the book’ (emphasis is mine)—which is always an irreducibly subjective and non-formulaic affair. Yet, we have other justifications to offer. We have not intended to be precise and immaculate in designing the subsections for our main motive in the book is not to establish genres but to problematise them. Our readings are typically inclined to explore other possible readings that are possible outside the generically patterned models of reading. Hence, the generic categorisation has been strategic, so as to ensure the possibilities of uncategorised reading of the texts. Of course, the categorisation has not been arbitrary and texts with nominal, if not absolute, signs of a generic tendency have been clustered together. That is to say, we have not considered Frankenstein as a Romance because that would be ludicrous. Simultaneously, we have also strategically turned deaf to the dominant strains of Gothic in the novel. This is precisely because we have not attempted to determine genre authenticity. The generic identity has only served as a scaffolding which can host other possible readings that extend beyond the limits of the genre and at times end up problematising the notion of a distinct generic identity of the text.

Our book is not free from the allegations of epistemic violence that holds true for any designed work which appears to be (at times claim to be, not this time though) complete and exhaustive but is never really so. Design is always already political and we do not contend that we have been accommodative enough to have been able to design the perfect and complete design. Self-criticism makes us ponder if we have not unproblematically accepted a derived categorical notion of Popular Literature which is typically Anglo-oriented and is utterly disconnected from the more organic non-English speaking mass. Where is the ‘People’ in our understanding of the Popular? Are the literatures written about in the pages that follow ‘literature of the people’? (emphasis is mine) Are they not popular only among the sophisticated metropolitan readership heavily conditioned by the Anglocentric mode of education? Have we, like many other predecessors, conceptualised a design of Popular Literature that has, yet again, systematically excluded the literature of the People?

Perhaps we have lost miserably to the Politics of position.

Notes:

In Eugene Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros, inhabitants of an unnamed provincial French town start metamorphosing into Rhinoceroses. The dramatic action ends with Berenger resolving to cling to his individuality while the rest of the residents in the town have happily capitulated into Rhinoceroses. The play is often considered as a response to the rise of Fascism and a latent but vital critique of mob mentality which often prefer to obey than question, conform rather than confront.

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