72
PARTISAN REVIEW
I can remember myself reading Edgar Rice Burroughs or Frank L.
Packard or Achmed Abdullah or Zane Grey and I can quote passages
from Achmed Abdullah, rather flamboyant ones. I was delighted
with the extreme language and it was the way I think I learned about
words. I can remember almost the page where I came across a certain
word that I didn't know the meaning of and I've noticed that in
writers like, say, Joyce, Eliot, and Pynchon, the effects of that kind of
reading get somehow implanted and embedded in their imagina–
tions and consciousnesses.
PETER BROOKS: It seems to me that one of the things Richard Gilman
was objecting to when he spoke of the professionals of popular
culture, who have their own journal and so on, is precisely that by
making it into a profession they isolate it and they draw the frontier
very sharply between high and low culture-and that is what we
don't want to do.
It
seems to me that there ought to be a constant
skirmish on that frontier. We should be delving into what's known
as popular, seeing what is retained by memory, and going back to
certain writers who were popular in their time and may be revived.
The phenomenon of revival (and the fashion for revival in our time)
is something very curious which ought to be studied in itself. I think
it's also well not to forget that all the great nineteenth century
novelists, with a few exceptions, the main one being Flaubert, who is
in another tradition, thought of themselves as popular. Even Henry
James and Joseph Conrad wanted to be popular-wanted to be
read-and were bitterly disappointed. They couldn't understand
why they weren't popular.
RICHARD GILMAN: That's exactly it. I did not mean by popular
necessarily well-liked. Dickens was popular, which is why I said I
don't like the term popular culture because it is confusing and
ambiguous, which is why I'd rather use entertainment.
PETER BROOKS: I think the term entertainment has these problems, too,
of drawing a fine line, absolute frontiers where absolute frontiers are
not to be drawn.
KEITH BOTSFORD: I think the fate of all objects of popular culture is to
become part of high culture. They are simply absorbed.
ELIZABETH FOX-GENOVESE: One way of thinking about ephemerality is
to consider uniformity: the individual product is consumed rapidly,
there is a heavy turnover in popular novels, television programs, etc.
But if you look closely at problems of plot or character in these
things, the repetition among them is extraordinary.
DAVID THORBURN: To my mind, the distinction Richard Gilman has
