Dumbing down the Books

[Bêthberry]

One difficulty with this criterion of popularity is that it assumes there is a progressive trajectory where the greats just keep remaining popular or increasing in popularity and the chaff falls by the wayside.

This is not what really happens, for there are many kinds of historical changes in values, taste, idioms, access, reading time, etc. All kinds of writers are eclipsed by certain generations and then 'rediscovered' by later generations.

T. S. Eliot, for instance, championed John Donne, who had fallen into disrepute, so much so that another poet of the seventeenth century, John Milton, became less popular.

William Blake was largely ignored for much of the nineteenth and even twentieth centuries. It wasn't until Northrup Frye's book Fearful Symmetry--one of those wretched academic tomes--hit the stands that there developed widespread popular appetite for Blake's work.

Jane Austen was relegated to the back ranks of lady author until Lionel Trilling championed her.

If anything, the history of reader reception demonstrates that popularity is as much a social construct as is academic reputation. The 'discovery' of women writers, working class novels, colonial writers, black writers of the last thirty years shows that often our assumptions and expectations when we read preclude many other writers.

We all have our own personal preferences. What we can do is talk about them, in the hopes of understanding them better or of widening our perspective. But we cannot always assume that the past is a predictor of future value.