Thought for a Thursday: Is It Really "Entertainment" That Needs Defending?

Great authors are not to blame for your lack of education., June 17, 1999 By A Customer:For God's sake--- why do so many people write these idiotic reviews, these reviews that are nothing so much as confessions of stupidity? Why do people believe that the primary aim of all art, even that of fictive prose, is absolute simplistic clarity? These are the same chuckleheads who fail to understand impressionism and cubism; they are the people who fail to recognize that distortions of photographic reality (or the use of abstract, metaphor-laden prose with poetic, rather than simple reportorial, qualities) are attempts to reveal a hidden truth or an occult sensation, something intangible lurking beneath the surface of the hubbub that constitutes our everyday lives. "Guernica" strives to convey the absolute chaos and horror of war, something of the mental distortion endured by those unlucky enough to fight; "The Scream" tries to convey the sense of terror that resides the very nature of being, a sense only perceived by the introspective and the sensitive; and "The Crying of Lot 49" dissects the effects of sixties culture, and its cultural precedents, on the bare skeleton of America. It uses metaphor to make sense of the welter of confused action that is American life (read: it does not strive to obfuscate it). None of these masterworks fail simply because they refuse to be obvious. There is a place for the realism of Michelangelo and the journalistic minimalism of Hemingway, but artistic expression should not, is not, and cannot be confined to those styles that lend themselves to easiest comprehension. Some art reaches for wispier, more difficult ideas, and demands that we, the readers and viewers, make the effort required to understand.Reading is like weightlifting. It is a skill. It requires repetition and practice. One must read incessantly and carefully to become a good practitioner of the art.One should not skip anything, not so much as a single ambiguous phrase, not so much as a single word that falls outside one's vernacular. One should strive to ascertain the primary meaning of every word of a given text and as many secondary meanings as possible as well. And one must never expect that educated and erudite and soulful being, that being that John Milton called a "master spirit"--- the writer--- to dumb his prose down for easy consumption by dim-witted orangutans. Thomas Pynchon is not to blame for the fact that you know nothing of history, culture, literature, and so forth. Yet people blame him, and Shakespeare and Dante and Baudrillard and everyone else, rather than themselves and their TV-addled ignorance. For shame! There is more at stake here than the dignity of great writers themselves; there is more at stake here than the possibility that Thomas Pynchon might have to endure reading one of these asinine reviews and wind up asking himself, "Am I just throwing pearls before swine?" No, the matter is graver than that: potential readers are also victims. They read some numbskull's pronunciamento that Pynchon's book is a "great idea" with--- I can barely repeat it--- "flawed prose" (all the while writing in a terrible prose style himself, this astute reader, employing that stilted language of imbecility that everyone can easily understand), and think to themselves, "Humph. I guess it's not so good." And then these misled readers will buy John Grisham instead, whose work the fans of facile clarity and structural simplicity have awarded numerous five-star reviews. Literacy in America is limping toward death. The confederacy of dunces is on the verge of conquering the last bastions of a proud intellectual tradition. Wake up, America. Man cannot live on "Gilligan's Island" and "The Firm" alone--- unless he wishes to celebrate the millennium by returning to the trees.