I thought I'd begin the year with a quote of relevance to any scholar of popular culture who wishes to explore the relationship between fictions and the societies in which they are produced and read:
The advantages of fictional materials in the study of social attitudes are twofold: because the novelist must create a world in which to set his characters and actions, the novel enables us to see how the writer places character types [...] in a context of social and philosophical belief. In addition, the novel is a work of fantasy and imagination as well as an imitation of reality; its patterns of action often reveal covert attitudes or judgments which significantly qualify the explicit positions taken by the writer. [...] Ambiguities of this sort are far less apparent in success manuals or political tracts where the element of imagination plays a minor role.
Novels, on the other hand, are problematic as a source of popular attitudes because there is no way of knowing just how representative they are [...].The writer is an individual. How can we infer with any certainty that his views reflect those of a larger social group?
Some students of popular attitudes have dealt with this problem by concentrating their attention on bestsellers. They assume that, because a book is widely read, it must reflect the accepted beliefs of its readers. This is probably a safer assumption in the case of non-fiction than fiction. Novels may be best-sellers because readers find the story or characters interesting irrespective of the attitudes expressed by the author. [...] While best-sellers presumably do not express attitudes completely abhorrent to the majority of their readers, it is not safe to conclude that a novel is popular because it accurately reflects the attitudes of its readers. (Cawelti viii-x)
That cautionary note's worth pondering, I think, given the flood of speculation there's been about the success of Fifty Shades of Grey.
Picking up on the point that "the novel is a work of fantasy and imagination," here's an argument against romance being singled out as the most unrealistic/fantasy-filled type of popular fiction:
To desire is necessarily to exist in a state of fantasy: it is to entertain the possibility of obtaining something one does not have - power, love, adventure. Given that all desire is fantastical by its very nature, it might seem odd that some projections of desire are criticized because they seem inauthentic. Popular romance fiction, for instance, has long been derided as the worst kind of fantasy. There is the sense that publishers such as Silhouette, Harlequin and Mills & Boon provide emotional and erotic titillation for women who are too weak to achieve fulfilment in 'real life'. Only such fools, with no genuine hold on reality, could lend credence to the impossibly beautiful, monolithic, creatures to be found in these novels. There is the suggestion that these works are not so much fantasy as false consciousness. The passion is at once euphemized and overstated; this is pornography for those who cannot bear to own up to sexual appetite. Alternatively, such caricatures of desire may provide an excessive compensation in the sphere of the erotic for a variety of other wants: the imaginary lover can requite not merely sexual loneliness, but also a poorly paid job, or a general feeling of insignificance.
Of course such criticism could also be offered of the characters and scenarios of male-oriented popular fiction, who are usually every bit as predictable and fantastic: the spy who is equally adept at unlocking women's desires and unravelling the plans of evil empires; the silent, unbreakable Western hero; the detective who outwits and outpunches low-life villains. The hard-boiled quality of masculine fictions suggests a claiming of the real, even though we as real readers in the real world may detect the wishfulness of it all. (Stoneley 223)
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Cawelti, John G. Apostles of the Self-Made Man. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1965.
Stoneley, Peter. “‘Never Love a Cowboy’: Romance Fiction and Fantasy Families. Writing and Fantasy. Ed. Ceri Sullivan and Barbara White. London: Longman, 1999. 223-235.
The image of "Hard-boiled detective Race Williams" came from Wikimedia Commons and is in the public domain.
A friend of mine and I were
A friend of mine and I were talking about 50 Shades of Grey and we think that it is successful because it (like the Twilight series) reinforces the patriarchal gender roles we (as a collective) have been culturally primed to think of as “normal” and thus “good” since we were old enough to blink. Like James Bond, the men in those series are Uber-masculine by the given value of patriarchal masculinity, and the women (who are valued for their attractiveness and compliant sweet tempers and love of the Hero) are Uber-feminine vis-à-vis the patriarchal construct of femininity. Fictional worlds that echo and exaggerate cultural paradigms or narratives are often hella popular because almost all of us (as humans) all like to be told that “our” way is the “best” way because of our bone-deep and unconscious ethnocentrism.
almost all of us (as humans)
Yes, I imagine there aren't many people who enjoy being told that they're wrong (unless it's in a D/s context). All the same,
1) when a book sells a lot of copies at least some of those copies may be sold to people who want to find out what all the fuss is about but who subsequently don't like the book.
2) I think readers can differ quite a lot in their understandings of texts. Austen's a good example given the longstanding divisions between Janeites and Austenites. I had to search a bit to find definitions, but in her MA thesis Ursula Marie Gross writes that "The most basic definition of an Austen fan is someone who likes Austen’s work, but the term is further delineated into “Janeite” and “Austenite,” though neither is formally or even frequently defined" (1)
and
Gross gives an example of their differing approaches:
So if Pride and Prejudice is sometimes read as a romance novel and sometimes as a work which casts a scathing eye over the society of its time, there are presumably some grounds for assuming that readers of other works of fiction might also have differing views of their content.
3) Finally, I think that a lot of readers will put up with elements they don't like/don't agree with if they find something else in the text which they do like. For example, when I was growing up I read quite a lot of books which were marketed as adventure stories for boys and which didn't have many female characters. Sometimes they included evil villains who were Spanish and, being half Spanish, I didn't appreciate those stereotypes, but I put up with them anyway because the novels were historical fiction for children and they were exciting stories.
Yes, I agree that people
Yes, I agree that people respond differently to works and on an individual level, but I do always see the influence of culture in and around anything. It's an anthropology quirk. Perhaps I should phrase it metaphorically in that the social body buys the book and the individual body reads it? Not certian how to put it ...
I am a both a Janeite and Austenite, myself. I think her books are romance novels that are simultaneously also extremely well written social critiques of the time period in which they are written. Austenites who think of those things as mutually exclusive drive me a little bonkers.
I do always see the influence
If it's a quirk, it's probably one I have too, which is probably why I felt the quote was a useful reminder to me. There's always a tension between personal autonomy (or free will) and social structures (and cultural beliefs); I think our society prefers to stress the former by suggesting that it's up to the individual to make the choices which will shape her or his life but, like you, I tend to notice the influence of culture (including structural inequalities which shape society).
In my head, I call the
In my head, I call the juxtapostion of infividual with culture the Agency Boogie. That terminology, unlike the more sauve "Glittery HooHa", will never become academic lexicon I'm afraid.
Now you've reminded me of
Now you've reminded me of something which has stuck in my head for years, though I wasn't entirely sure of the context. I'm still not sure whether or not "yo soy yo y mi circunstancia" is a line from the Agency Boogie but I went and looked it up and this is what I found:
IMMA STEAL THAT!
IMMA STEAL THAT!