Talking About Issues

"Why doesn't 'culture' include 'poetry'?," asks Jonathan Mayhew, while explaining his own practice of sending academic articles on poetry to journals of cultural study, where "they will be seen by people who wouldn't normally read an article on 'poetry.'"

Noting that cultural studies focuses mostly on novels, and that "people who are (otherwise) quite well-read often confess their near total ignorance of poetry," Jonathan further asks:

When did the novel get to be so important?. . .Is it [simply] a matter of the fact that more people read novels? Or is it because novels talk about the "issues" people want to talk about, and therefore can integrated seamlessly into a certain vision of cultural studies?

Jonathan's answers to his own question are surely part of the explanation of why, where "cultural study" is concerned, the novel has gotten "to be so important," but I would add that another reason this brand of inquiry goes on "in near total ignorance of poetry" is that encountering a poem requires an initial acknowledgment of and response to the constructedness of literary works, the formal and ultimately wholly artificial quality that makes them literary to begin with and that renders poetry less than congenial to the bull-in-a-chinashop approach to "content" favored by cultural studies. In other words, poetry requires some literary sensibility on the part of the reader, and that is the one thing that has been bred out of literary "scholars" in the cultural studies camp. That is why they so readily "confess" their ignorance of (that is, contempt for) a kind of writing so "merely literary."

I would love to see fiction develop in a direction that also makes it less nutritious fodder for the "issues" people (or continue to develop in that direction--I think much of postwar experimental fiction has indeed moved fiction closer to poetry already.) A kind of fiction that foregrounds language, form, the vicissitudes of "structure," and the very processes of meaning-making and "expression" and that de-emphasizes "character" and "theme" and, indeed, "issues" would be just the thing for separating those who value literature precisely because it is merely literary (that is, verbal art) from those who glom onto it because it seems a convenient means to more conventionally "serious" ends (that is, the study of almost everything except literature itself). I'd like to see fiction become less "important," less "seamless" in its utility to cultural studies and more utterly, blessedly frivolous.

Comments

[Steven Augustine]

I never cease to think of it as miraculous: moments, days, weeks or even centuries of four dimensional reality are simulated in a human imagination, encoded with little squiggles on paper (or some other material) and gazed upon months, days, years or possibly centuries later by another human in whose imagination the 4-D simulation then comes instantly alive...with a somehow ambiguous precision; demonstrably a product of the sender's imagination but experienced in a way unique to the receiver. We take this bizarre magic for granted; we think those are cars, trees, demons, planets, cigarettes and people on that sheet of paper....but they're just funny little squiggles of ink. Is microchip technology *really* much more impressive than that? It's a hell of a lot easier to explain the creation and enjoyment of a blockbuster film than it is to explain how the sentence "Molly's thumb was bleeding," works. How can we ever find such voodoo ordinary? And why does it require justification?