Well, of course you’re reading my compelling exposition because of its lapel-grabbing title, but did you notice that my title is in quotes?  Oh, yes indeedy.  That’s because I got the title from Motoko Rich’s article in the New York Times of May 20, and I didn’t want to plagiarize, or rather I should say that I didn’t want to get caught plagiarizing.

So, according to the previously cited Motoko Rich (op. cit.), we have learned that Charlaine Harris of Magnolia, Arkansas, has recently made a bundle with her series of “Sookie Stackhouse vampire mystery romance novels” (New York Times, May 20, 2009, op. cit.) and the HBO tie-ins related thereunto.  Ms. Harris has indeed reached the No. 1 spot on the Times’ best-seller list for hardcover fiction, and, if one photograph tells me anything, I dare say that Ms. Harris can identify with her readers, and they with her.  And by the way, you just read an elliptical chiasmus.  This is Chronicles, buster.

Now as a veteran Times reader, and indeed a veteran reader, period, I was a little challenged as to why the Times best-seller list wasn’t enough in itself.  That Americans read trash is hardly news, and if it is, that news belongs in the business pages.  So why the additional attention, then?  There was the condescending treatment of small-town America, of course, but I knew there had to be something else besides a quote like “Every trip to Wal-Mart is an inspiration” (op. cit.).  Then there was something decisive, though it was hedged: “With their message of accepting diversity, Ms. Harris said she wrote the Sookie novels in part as ‘a metaphor for gays in America.’  But, she added: ‘I am not a crusader.  If you need a good adventure or a vacation from your problems, then I am your woman’” (ibid.).  The politics was perhaps not as obvious as it seemed, for if there is one thing to want to escape from, that would be the tom-tom beat of the inverted homosexual strategy of certified victimization.

I am not in the market for any vampire mystery romance novels, for like many another, I read Bram Stoker’s 1897 version many moons ago, and do not see any competition on the horizon for the perverse erotics and bizarre vision of the outrageous original.  I remember that, when I was young, an adult assured me that Dracula was the greatest of novels.  OK, so maybe it wasn’t that—but it remains a hell of a book, a real roller coaster.  You might suppose that there could have been some sense of context in the Times account, but as George W.S. Trow has insisted, we live in the context of no context.

Yet if I hadn’t known much about vampire mystery romance novels, then neither had I known that there were other “genres” that signified, if anything, less.  I don’t know or I didn’t know, or I didn’t care, or I just didn’t give a flying rodent rump—I’m trying to get in touch with my feelings here—what “a classic historical lesbian romance novel” was or is or might be until I “read” about it on the web and began to realize that I would have to expand my grammatical take on the possibility, or rather the impossibility.  I was thinking future perfect, like this: By this time next week I still will not have read a classic historical lesbian romance novel, as far as I know.  But wait a minute, maybe I was just having difficulty with my right-brain processing and connecting it with male-dominated white history, because my regard for the epigrams and lyrics of Théophile Gautier is one of rapt admiration and the image of Mademoiselle de Maupin might fit in there somewhere, if only I could adjust my imagination to fit the requirements of illiteracy and ignorance that are imposed by the New World Order, er, Oprah—whatever.

Because let’s face it, when Aristotle was lecturing and the usual groupies were scribbling the Poetics, neither novels nor romances existed to be analyzed, so the generic criticism we needed and need was not intoned and transcribed.  But the Greek romances were just around the corner, though Longinus, who was more in touch with his feelings, paid them no heed.  Epic and dramatic poetry were greater than prose, by definition—they were even sublime.  Not much earlier, Horace lived just before the composition of great prose fiction, but he gave it no mind, though, later on, T.S. Eliot and F. Scott Fitzgerald did.  Future perfectly, I will by the end of this screed have indicated little or nothing about the Alexandrian Library and Callimachus and Apollonius of Rhodes, though I would dearly have loved to because, in those days, they really had criticism—but never mind, let it go.  We will get to what “literary critic” means today in just a moment, and, at that time and not before, I will be willing to answer all the questions that dance in your respective (as opposed to respectful and respectable) noggins.

But as I am no longer disposed to the future perfect but rather toward conditions contrary to fact, I believe that means the subjunctive is in order, so here we go.  Had I reviewed with you the sums that ancient elites devoted to the purchase, classification, analysis, storage, preservation, and retrieval of papyri and parchments, what an education that would have been indeed!  And were we to have contemplated the paradoxical losses imposed by the gain of alphabetic literacy, the benefits would have been immense!

That feels ever so much better, so now we can resume the indicative.  There was a bubble for library acquisitions a long time ago, and after the collapse of the ancient world, there wasn’t much of a market for anything, though in the monasteries respect was given to various manuscripts.  So we can say that the commodification of culture is an old story, and that strangely enough, the medium of culture itself has become a commodity—that is to say, the book.  And a book is a commodity in two opposite ways.  It can be the object of a bidding war because it is unique, as in the only copy, or a rare autographed first edition.  Or it can be a commodity because there are a million copies sold, which means that it has little market value, but that it has generated a lot of cash or plastic digits.  It is the latter case that we mean when we talk about the commodification of culture, unless we are Matthew Arnold or Theodor Adorno.

But as I have tried to imply however gingerly, culture has always been a commodity, in the sense that you could hardly expect Homer or Demodocus to recite epic poetry for you (much less improvise the sublime through divine inspiration) unless the feast had been funded and the wine was flowing freely (excuse the excessive touch of alliteration there).  To change the image, we can imagine Pope Julius II nagging about the ceiling with his house painter, Michelangelo, thus giving us the first So Popera.  Flash forward to the embarrassing novel and the wretched movie, and there or here we are, from So Popera to Soap Opera.  The story is a great one, however vulgarized, for it is the ultimate image of the artist’s need for a commission—he must render culture, not create it.  This elementary point has been occluded by centuries of romantic and modern arrogance, and postmodern nihilism.  A professor once told me that, in the familiar story, the Pope was a tyrant, destroying the artist’s free vision by stipulating his subject!  He couldn’t have been more wrong and was really making a statement about his own delusions, as academics tend to do.  Artists always work best within definition, limits, and prescription, and often enough, the artist sensibly provides these himself.  Otherwise, the culture, the patron, or the marketplace performs the necessary function.  To confirm the point, Michelangelo carried a chamber pot with him as he ascended the scaffolding, because he worked by natural light for long summer days in a supine position—he didn’t want to be interrupted by any need to descend.  He was an artist when to be that also meant to be a man, a craftsman, and a worker.  Those days are pretty much gone.

Another story is that of Dr. Samuel Johnson and Lord Chesterfield, a story that has been distorted.  Johnson rejected quite rightly the interference and impertinence of Chesterfield, in a neoclassical sense.  The episode has no romantic footing at all, for Johnson rejoiced to concur with the common reader and never rejected common sense.  The swelling of the romantic ego is in another key altogether, one related to politics in uncomfortable and even bizarre ways.

Before Marcel Duchamp trivialized art, Richard Wagner in effect tried, by finessing the wacko he had cultivated, to be his own patron and to create Kultur, not art.  Yes, he was a craftsman and a worker at times when he was not shopping for silk underwear, but he was also a gnostic visionary and ranter who assumed that one kind of inspiration was a licence for another, or even for playing God.  His number-one idolator after himself and family was the Kibitzer of Bayreuth, Adolf Hitler, a failed artist and architectural fantasist, who assumed that exciting musically boosted visions could be reified by acts of will, with results that we know.  After the destruction of Europe and millions of deaths, we can see at the inception of madness, not political paranoia so much as confusion about creativity.  And this point suggests that the commodification of culture is no trifling matter.  For in our time of postmodern chaos, it is not the marketplace that is problematical so much as the narcissism of the consumer.

The word consumer is one that needs a little scrutiny.  A consumer would be the opposite of a producer.  A consumer could not, as such, hope to engage with culture—that is say, to reflect dialectically.  So a consumer could not read, say, Jane Austen—she could only misread Jane Austen as a scribbler of romances, as a source of low-energy erotic fantasy.  No “regulated hatred” or irony for her!  Wallowing in Gadarene luxuriance, the consumer is oinking off to the races, as she smears the pages with what’s left of her Whitman sampler.  I see the exemplary reader of our day, shod in flip-flops, billowed in a muumuu, settling down with a Georgette Heyer or a Sidney Sheldon and half a gallon of rocky road, a frozen carrot cake, and a jug of Smearnoff, consuming her little heart away—literally.  The tears come to those little pig-eyes—difficult to see or to see out of, as they are encircled with deposits of adipose tissue—as the endorphins kick in.  She’s got that loving feeling, and it is going to last until—until Oprah comes on!

The big Soap Oprah is on the new flat-screen in full digital, high-definition efflorescence, and that book will have to be set aside for a while, because after all, Oprah is the one who told us what a “shlumpadinka” is, the one who led us to Dr. Phil, the one who has been beyond frank about the problems with Stedman, and the one who also periodically addresses issues of self-esteem and obesity as may be appropriate, but even more, she is the one who replaced all those dead white males such as Aristotle, Horace, Longinus, Sir Philip Sidney, Ben Jonson, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot, and whomever.  No amount of wealth has deterred Oprah from being recognized not merely as a sage and sybil and a sacrificial victim but also and above all as, according to Wikipedia, a “literary critic.”  Oprah is prescriptive, Oprah has made selections, and Oprah speaks from authority.  Though Aristotle was descriptive, though he made no selections as such, and though his authority was inherently validated, Oprah is nonetheless the Aristotle de nos jours because she has shown us how to read and appreciate literature.

Consumers want to watch Oprah because she has feelings, and even though she is a superior being, she has the same feelings that consumers have, and now that men have been taken down a peg and then some, she has the same feelings that men have, and that women have, and that people of all colors and orientations have.  We may doubt that we have or anyone has feelings unless these sensations have been ritually validated by Oprah, who feels for us, who reflects back to us our own natures, and who therefore must regress from weight loss (as represented by the wagon of 67 pounds of fat that she pulled on television in 1988) to resume the tragic burden of weight gain, as in her confession in the January 2009 issue of her magazine, O.  She acknowledged that she had racked up the numbers to “the dreaded 2-0-0” and that she was “mad” and “embarrassed.”  Those were her feelings about the matter, for a brutally quantitative scan of the old scale didn’t register emotion.

The Big O has feelings, we have feelings, and books have feelings, and you can be sure to find a match for your needs in Oprah’s selections.  Some of these selections are predictable and a waste of time, and some are actually good recommendations, but the specifics are beside the point.  Let’s go back to the market and its subdivisions, as we see it is displayed commercially in Borders or Barnes & Noble or on Amazon.  The commodification of culture is arranged in manipulative categories: “women’s interest,” “feminist,” “gay and lesbian,” “black literature,” and so on.  Oprah’s selections have the merit of sometimes transcending such false categories, but even so, there is the baleful effect of the commodification of culture, which is the destructive and deceptive implication that culture can be bought like lipstick for a pig.

Culture is not an object that can be charged on the old credit card, so that you can show it off on your coffee table, as though you are au courant and engaged with the vital issues of our day.  Culture is not a cheap signal but rather a struggle without end.  It is not the book you read yesterday, but the one you haven’t even heard of yet and which will challenge you when you get to it.  Culture is neither an invaluable painting nor a cheap poster of that image, but rather the picture the artist hasn’t got to yet, or even imagined.  Culture is always beyond, and artists know it.  We are interested in their work in ways that artists are not, and vice versa.  Oprah talks about writers to millions, but artists don’t talk about their work—or to Oprah.  They get the job done and move on.