The flattened American landscape of minor writers

[kelber at mindspring.com]

To mangle a musical (or physical) metaphor that I admittedly little understand, good books "strike a chord" in us.  My understanding of the phrase is that if you, say, pluck a guitar string at a certain resonance, various objects that share that resonance will vibrate.  The more things vibrating, the "better" the music (or the acoustics?  - I told you I don't fully understand the phrase, but it somehow seems apt).  

Nancy Drew books struck a chord in me when I was a kid for the simple reason that she was a role model at a time when there were few role models for girls (Helen Keller???).  That was her main value.  Most of her diehard fans would probably cite this reason.  Her younger fans probably aren't as diehard because they've got lots of role models now. I could even state that The Password To Larkspur Lane represented the pinnacle of the medium.  These books were very important to a lot of women, but, of course, they're basically crap.

I'd say the roster of reasons for becoming a diehard fan of Watchmen are also somewhat limited.  Its strongest fans are probably those who a)read lots of comics and b) read the series when it first came out.  Readers who approach it without a comics background, and younger readers, steeped in graphic novels/anime/anti-heroes will have a harder time becoming die-hard fans.  I don't know what chord(s) Watchmen stirs in its fans, but I hazard a guess that most of the diehards would give pretty similar reasons (brilliant deconstruction of hero mythology?  portrayal of alienation?  fuckin' cool?).

Pynchon fans have a much larger list of reasons of why he strikes a chord in them.  Offhand, some of these chords have to do with sci-fi, politics, literature, music, pop culture, social protest, history, paranoia, technology, mysticism, philosophy and, yes, fuckin' coolness.  He's going to appeal to a readership that resonates at some large subset of these chords.  Someone with only an interest in sci-fi or only an interest in social protest might find him tough going.  The more of these interests he stirs in you, the more you're going to love him.  The subset of readers who share a significant amount of these interests is smaller than the subset of people who are stirred by the more limited set of themes in McEwan or Frantzen (guessing here).  It's not a matter of high culture or low culture, readability or unreadability, status or contract.  If you have a certain range of interests that coincide, in part, with the above list, you're likely to love Pynchon.  

Pynchon strikes more chords in a few people, meaning that his books make "better music" than Nancy Drew or Watchmen, both of which strike fewer chords in more people.

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: Tore Rye Andersen <torerye at hotmail.com>


>Guy Pursey:

> 
>> And, if we take Franzen's attitude to be commonplace, is his
>> "status"/"contract" divide indicative of a public perception a new
>> high/low culture of sorts, despite that fact that authors like Pynchon
>> set out to blur the original distinction?
>
>Interesting question.
>I think that divide is still pretty operative in the public opinion, even though
>authors like Pynchon have done their best to eradicate it. The problem is that
>Pynchon (and Wallace and others like them) are so damn hard to read, that only
>trained readers can see that the divide is being eradicated. I believe that Pynchon
>genuinely loves so-called 'low' culture, and I believe that he would refuse the
>distiction between high and low, but it is an indisputable fact, and something of
>a paradox, that not all readers have the capacity to read Pynchon and understand his
>genuine love for preterite culture. Pynchon's sympathy is no doubt with the preterite,
>but not all preterite can read him.
> 
>In other words, the erasure of the distinction between high culture and low culture is 
>a project undertaken mostly by authors who belong solidly to high culture, or by schooled
>readers like us who may occasionally 'slum' with Tom Clancy or a Harry Potter
>novel. And if that is the case - if the 'common' reader (no disrespect intended)
>never reads those democratic (but nevertheless very difficult) authors, has the 
>divide really been erased? Not in the public opinion, I would argue, and it is
>easy to see the reasons why not.
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