Handling Wears the Edges Off: How We Turn Great Books Into Parodies Of Themselves in Our Collective Memory
So I have been thinking about the experience I had the first time I ever encountered Young Elvis Presley, as it were, in the wild.
Now, I am an American of a certain age, that age being about one month shy of my 54th birthday. As such, I came to sentience in the not-so-Halcyon days of the 1970s: the era of gas rationing, Hamburger Helper, and slightly racy Calgon commercials. And Elvis impersonators.
So many Elvis impersonators.
I think it’s easy to forget that for much of the 70s, Elvis was still alive and in his Las Vegas era, the denatured crooner whose voice launched a thousand parodies. And those parodies became the sound, the voice of Elvis in the collective memory. I thought it was all pap, and I couldn’t understand why anybody thought this shit had ever been radical.
What I am saying here is that, in the 1970s and early 1980s, there was Ambient Elvis. And it wasn’t good Elvis. It was like, five-steps-removed generation-loss Elvis.
To a teenaged Violent Femmes/Pogues/Iggy Pop fan in the 1980s, this sounded like fucking roots music.
Mind, as they say, blown.
(Fafhrd may have differing opinions)
Anyway, I relate this forty-year-old story of my childish enlightenment not to praise Elvis, in particular, but to unpack a cultural phenomenon. Which is to say, there are a lot of pieces of art out there that sort of float around the Zeitgeist being alluded to and imitated and diluted until the original thematic and emotional impact of the thing is a shadow, a joke, a reference.
You think you know what it’s about. You may have strong opinions about it, possibly even dismissive ones. And then you experience the Actual Thing, and you realize that it is far more complex, nuanced, and provocative than you ever understood.
The Great Gatsby was a book like this, for me. I thought I knew what it was about: a bunch of rich people behaving badly in New York and getting away with murder, replete with glitzy parties and shining roadsters.
And then I read it, and realized that actually, it’s not about the glitzy parties and it’s in no wise an apologia for the careless rich. It’s a book about how our culture makes certain people unaccountable and conscienceless by means of their immense privilege, and how other people aspire to that privilege without necessarily realizing the price. It’s also a book about how people who don’t fit in to society’s expectations knock chips off themselves trying to wedge themselves into “acceptable” roles.
It kind of blew my mind when I read it as an adult, and I reread it fairly regularly.
I had a similar experience with Casablanca. And The Left Hand of Darkness. And Doctor Faustus. And The Fire Next Time. And Van Gogh’s Sunflowers (F454, the only one I’ve seen in person).
I thought I knew what all those things were. I had a pop-cultural awareness of them. I was not prepared for the actual experience of encountering them as raw, unprocessed, unfiltered, unmediated art.
(It doesn’t always work. I still think The Sun Also Rises is catastrophically oversold. But I highly recommend both Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby by Sarah Churchwell and Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway's Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises by Lesley M. M. Blume. Nothing like a scathing literary biography and criticism of a dead white man to while away an afternoon.)
There are, I think, a number of processes at work here.
One is that the reputation of a thing is always, by necessity, less complex and interesting than the thing itself. We kind of pick up the narrative gloss of the whatever-it-is, and don’t really feel and experience and know the Truth of what it’s doing—the contradiction and intricacy and oomph of what it has to demonstrate.
Sometimes, also, we simplify what art is about because we want to use it to prove a point. It’s fashionable, for example, among some of my colleagues to dismiss Tolkien as an apologist for aristocracy and a reactionary/monarchistic cultural force. You can make a decent argument for this, it’s true, if you’re willing to elide the fact that Sam Gamgee is a gardener.
There is this thing I call the Third Artist Problem, which in art often manifests as: the first artist looks at nature or original sources and makes art about that. The second artist looks at the first artist’s work and deconstructs it or reacts against it. The third artist looks at the common elements in the first two artists’ work and says “Well, I guess this is how you make this kind of art.”
In terms of criticism, what this gets you is a chain of takes, essentially, passed down through the generations, iterating, until they are as divorced from the original as the Jesus Restoration Meme.
Another problem is the way art is often taught. As if it were a thing with right answers and wrong answers, with codified beats you can know and control. But story is a force of nature, to quote editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden. And art is story. It tells us something we need to know, bone-deep, revelatory, and unfiltered. You can’t bottle it into discussion questions and if you try, you only dilute it. It becomes homeopathic quantities of catharsis, very safe and small.
And perhaps that’s kind of the point.
A third, though probably not final reason that art in popular culture gets shallowed out is, I think, also the defensiveness of the artists who follow. We’re generally wildly insecure, frankly. We want to look cool and hip and disaffected, and we also are afraid of having our own work measured against the very best of the best.
And we shouldn’t be, because sometimes we’re going to create something amazing and immortal, too. And sometimes we’re not, but I gotta be honest: even Shakespeare wrote some dogs.
But I think of, oh, Dean R. Koontz, who in an introduction to one of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels felt the need to go on at length about how Rex Stout wasn’t all that. Or David Bowie’s early song excoriating Bob Dylan as a pretentious sellout. (Boys, boys. There’s room for you both in the pantheon.)
My friend Sarah Monette (a/k/a Katherine Addison) pointed out to me while I was discussing this essay with her that this desire to be cool is the biggest stumbling block in an artist's path to creating something amazing. She said that Van Gogh was the least cool motherfucker to ever live and you see that in his sunflowers.
And she’s right. Van Gogh ain’t cool. He’s splashing that paint around with will, with definition, with precision… but without emotional restraint. He’s emotionally available through those colors.
This is one reason why I love those reaction videos on YouTube so unreasonably: “Concert flautist encounters ‘Locomotive Breath’ for the first time” or “Vocal instructor analyzes ‘I’m Only Happy When It Rains’”. Because those are always about some professional in a field being absolutely blown away by a piece of art, a human creation, and all the skill and passion and craft that went into building it in the first place.
They’re the opposite of jaded. They’re uncool.
And that’s beautiful.