Puzzling over value 8C: John Carey and 'The intellectuals and the Masses'.

I wasted far too much time reading this. The idea that Pound, Joyce and Eliot, wrote the way they did with the sole purpose of excluding a mass readership to preserve their own sense of superiority is so wayward that only a rigorously argued case, with some kind of convincing primary evidence, would redeem what at first sight appears a ridiculous conspiracy theory.

In the Preface to his book “The Intellectuals and the Masses’  John Carey begins:

This book is about the response of the English literary intelligentsia to the new Phenomena of mass culture. It argues that Modernist literature and art can be seen as a hostile reaction to the unprecedentedly large reading public created by late nineteenth-century educational reforms. The purpose of Modernist writing, it suggests, was to exclude these newly educated (or ‘semi-educated’) readers, and so to preserve the intellectual’s seclusion from the ‘mass’.

The book is remarkably unconvincing, because there is no ‘argument’.  

There are two undeniable facts, which most people might accept.

1) British culture in the period 1890-1939 was riven by social divisions and class snobbery. Many people, including writers, expressed opinions about the ‘masses’ which today seem vile.

2)  Modernist Literature, whatever that means and who ever it might include, required different reading practices than the writing of Marie Corelli and Henry Newbolt.

Were the two casually related?  Carey states they were, but he never attempts to prove the link. All he does is heap up examples of the first. 

While Carey rightly points out the masses were an abstraction:

 ‘The ‘mass’ is, of course, a fiction. Its function as a linguistic device, is to eliminate the human status of the majority of people-or at any rate, to deprive them of those distinctive features that make users of the term, in their own esteem, superior.’ [And 'its function as a linguistic device is....' is typical of the level of thinking throughout the text. One of its functions? Its function in certain contexts?)

He never stops to consider that words like ‘Intelligensia’, ‘Intellectual’ and ‘modernist’ are equal fictions.  Or that their use in his book function as a linguistic device to eliminate any distinctions between writers or cases.  And his refusal to define his own terms, or consider his own assumptions, means he can conscript any writer who said anything nasty to his argument and quote them.

Q) Was D.H.Lawrence, who gets a lot of press in part one, 

A) A Modernist, 

B) Difficult, 

C) An intellectual, 

D) One of the Intelligentsia

Because Carey offers no definitions of any of those terms there are no answers possible to that question.

It is interesting that a Professor of Literature at Oxford could write such a badly argued book. A grade ten student writing an essay that began with the first paragraph quoted above would be required to prove the argument using evidence.

It doesn't get me anywhere in the excellence vs elitism problem either. 

Puzzling over value #7 The Modernists: Excellence or Elitism?

This is going to take some untangling so to start the thread:

Excellence or Elitism

In his most excellent “The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes” a book that should be mandatory reading for anyone who wants to teach literature,  Jonathon Rose, coming to the end of his narrative, quotes John Carey. In “The Intellectuals and the Masses” Carey “argues that the fundamental motive behind the modernist movement was a corrosive hostility towards the common reader.” (Rose p.392)  and Rose sets this in the context of ‘the centuries-old tensions between the educated classes and the self-educated’. (p393)

Anyone who has read Pound’s criticism, will know his arrogant dismissal of the Mob, but as Rose proves, the “mob” Pound was reviling was becoming far better educated. In 1870 education was made compulsory in Britain, by the beginning of the 20^th century the schools had introduced a new generation of working class readers to the classics of English literature  and they were buying the shilling editions of the everyman library by the millions.  

“If most American magazines were printing free verse,[Eliot was complaining of this in 1917)  America could hardly be the philistine wasteland portrayed by Sinclair Lewis and H.L. Menken. In fact the reading public on both sides of the Atlantic was becoming more affluent and more educated. That growing audience could support an ever-expanding corps of writers, artists, critics and academics: they could earn a living by rejecting the mass audience and writing for coteries of sophisticated readers.  The modernists were among the first authors to carve out that market niche, and to secure it they had to become ever more innovative, complex and difficult-partly to frustrate imitators, partly to appeal to the exclusivity of readers. That is why mass education, even mass higher education, never produces a ‘common culture’, however noble that dream may be. Whenever the masses are educated up to a given level of culture, elite audiences and intellectuals will have already pressed on to the next and more challenging level". (p.436)

There is an undeniable process built into the structure of any society. Rose again: ‘If knowledge is power, then power wealth and prestige depend on preserving inequalities of knowledge. Anthropologist Mary Douglas notes that the drive to maintain differential of information is present in all societies: “Ethnography suggests that, left to themselves, regardless of how evenly access to the physical means of production may be distributed, and regardless of free educational opportunities, consumers will tend to create exclusive inner circles controlling access to a certain kind of information.” (qtd 395).

However, Rose, following Carey, seems to  imply that the modernists did this deliberately.

‘The inaccessibility of modernism in effect rendered the common reader illiterate once again, and preserved a body of culture as the exclusive property of a coterie.‘ (p.394)

I haven't read Carey, but  I’m not sure either of them is right. 

More to follow.