STATE OF CRITICISM
69
sharing the human experience of culture with the people who consume
it, and who also have anecdotica and oedipal complexes and tax
problems-is regularly purveyed. Often, indeed, pop criticism is high
level gossip. But, again, not only is that a useful beginning, it is also
quite vital in the explicating of the pop-cult product.
It
is
the splitting
up of rock combinations that produces new sounds. One of the reasons
that criticism of popular culture looks at this underside of culture is
that pop culture is differentiated from high culture in one very
significant way: almost all who consume it are also capable, at some
level, of creating it. Everyone sings, everyone enacts scenarios, or tells
his girl she's behaving like Diane Keaton.
Everyone plays sports and games. Everyone is his own disc jockey.
This does make for a sort of intimacy between creator and consumer
that furthers the cultural cause. Composing quartets, on the other
hand, is like learning another language; to write on American
political-literary history means reading certain books; you can't, or you
couldn't, do ballet unless you could balance on your toes. But where
the consumer can do, there the consumer will venture into criticism.
Now, that interdependence of creator and consumer makes of
popular culture a perpetual
now,
or perhaps even a constant tomor–
row. I think there is an understanding in pop-cult, shared by both its
creators and its critics, that what they are dealing in is, essentially,
ephemera. It is not that it is here today and gone tomorrow, but that it
hasn't got a very long shelf life: unless, of course, the critic
revives
it by
his attention.
To my mind, this is a very good state of affairs in criticism. I
believe that criticism fails when it is written to be enshrined between
covers, to last. As Edmund Wilson was fond of pointing out, the critic's
task most often was to
react.
And when that reaction was relevant to
what was going on
at the time
it was bound to be read and
to
provoke
interest. The magazines he wrote for appeared frequently, they kept
one in touch. That was important, and it points up a superiority in
popular criticism: that there is little or no gap in time between event
and judgment. The public insists on knowing what movie is on and
whether it's any good. The situation we allow in book criticism, where
a year can elapse from appearance to elaborate critique in a quarterly,
contributes to the demise of books as subjects of conversation. But that
is not the case with pop-cult, and I think we have something to learn
from that.
I have referred before
to
what could be called the nowness of
popular culture. When we criticize in this field, that absence of history,
