68
PARTISAN REVIEW
know who wrote the music and lyrics.
It
is one of the functions of
criticism of popular culture
to
provide that information, to create the
links between several songs created by the same person.
Popular arts, however, being cultural underdogs, more than a
little frowned upon by the stern guardians of high culture, do strive
upwards, often to their detriment. And we can begin
to
distinguish that
shift toward high culture and away from folk culture when we begin to
recognize authors, creators, composers. A dress by Saint Laurent is not
just something you wear, it is a
Saint Laurent.
Newspaper columnists
are no longer anonymous. Thus cinema grinds its way upward into
high culture: in no small part because of the critical acceptance it has
recei ved. By acceptance, I mean space.
For the vast attention popular culture gets
is
by its very nature
criticism. Now, rather meanly I think, very few journals of high intent
pay attention to sport-unless a writer like Ring Lardner or Norman
Mailer writes a piece on it. However, unlike most books, which would
probably survive without critical attention, the products of popular
culture would not. And that is a sort of paradox: if popular, why do
they need attention? But the reason sports writers are cosseted by the
purveyors of popular culture in that form, is that they are
needed:
without the several million column-inches spawned by a Muhammad
Ali, there'd be few fights to watch.
To my mind, that mutual interdependence between creation and
criticism is, at any level of culture, rather more a good thing than a bad.
A utopian vision would have book writers, what literary critics are to
sports writers, breathlessly considering the injury to Mr. Bellow caused
by divorce actions, his witting average, the emergence of a new stance,
and that would not only sell books, it might even get people
to
read
them.
But, as you know, the interdependence of criticism and creation
that goes on in the popular arts is of a very special kind-a kind that we
no longer, to my great regret, practice in high culture. Criticism reveals
to the public the living human beings who make up the culture.
Readers of
Rolling Stone
know that a large part of popular "criticism"
is really thinly disguised biographical material. Pop criticism talks
about where Dylan 's head is
at.
Had there been articles on where Dylan
Thomas's head was at, poetry might not be the special province of
English departments . And it is curious that whenever literati gather
nothing is of such interest to them as the anecdotica of their profession:
who is doing what, who's fallen out with whom, who got how much
for what-all this sort of information-which at least has the virtue of
