the book as mass commodity: the audience perspective

The Book as Mass Commodity: The Audience Perspective

Elizabeth Long

An examination of the issue of literary massification and degradation of taste in the light of how locally organized reading groups select and respond to books. Although commodifica- tion does somewhat narrow the universe of choice for these groups it seems less important in shaping their use of books than are the opinions of cultural authorities or the reader's own personal experience. Further, the responses of these readers of "good" books resemble in certain ways what is known of reader responses to mass market books, which also undermine a rigid dichotomy between high culture and mass culture.

T he specter of massification in literature is essentially the fear that book production geared to large audiences will result in standardized and degraded

literary fare serving only the lowest common denominator of literary taste, thus suppressing cultural diversity, critical ideas, and even the free development of literature itself as effectively as any totalitarian state censorship. In fact, commer- cialization of literature has been linked to the expansion of the reading public since the eighteenth century when the middle classes and "their" literature--most nota- bly the novel--achieved undisputed cultural hegemony. The educated and affluent middle and upper classes have not lost their cultural preeminence since then. They now comprise what Robert Escarpit calls the "cultured group," which con- trols most aspects of the literary game, since it is from this group that writers, editors, literary critics, and professors of literature are recruited. 1 These are the "professional valuers" (to use Pierre Bourdieu's term) of literature. 2

It is this relatively elite and self-enclosed group that debates the meaning of mass-oriented publishing. Their authoritative and seemingly disinterested position as arbitors of culture as a whole obscures this fact. Further, when such people, in debating such issues, claim that literature will be degraded by commercializa- tion, their predictions about the debasement of all literary or cultural value can best be understood as a fear that their literary values are endangered. 3 To put it somewhat differently, they are in large part worried about the destruction of the literature they and their social peers esteem, because the circulation of books to wider audiences raises the specter of a change in the cultural hierarchy that might result in the loss of their group's cultural authority. What is at issue, then, is not merely the degradation of taste, but perceived threats to certain social groups' cultural autonomy, or in different terms, hegemony.

Elizabeth Long is associate professor of sociology at Rice University.

10 Book Research Quarterly~Spring 1987

Fears about the loss of cultural authority thus lie at the heart of discussions about cultural massificafion, and the value-laden or ideological nature of these discussions has led to an oversimplified set of assumptions about the relationship between mass and high culturemmore specifically about mass oriented or popular books and serious or "good" books. These assumptions link literary value to reading and its effects on readers in this fashion: Whereas "good books" require a complex intellectual and emotional response and lead to self-enhancement (or critical thinking or moral reflection), "bad books" are escapist pap, uncritically consumed by readers who are lulled into a deadening cultural accommodation.

Appropriately enough, since audiences (whether small audiences who are im- proved by good literature, or big audiences who are corrupted by mass literature) are always implicated in these discussions, ethnographic research among readers has begun to undermine this traditional dichotomy. By offering a grounded view of what readers actually "get" from the books they read, this work offers a more complex description of the relationship between the various strata of American literary culture. To take first the issue of "mass" responses to "mass" literature, Janice Radway's pathbreaking book, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, examines a group of compulsive romance readers in the Mid- west to determine how they connect with, evaluate, and "use" romances. 4 Her work illuminates several aspects of the reading behavior of one audience for mass- produced and formulaic literature. First, she shows that for these homemakers the act of reading itself is a significant statement of independence from the ties of familial duties, an act that asserts their needs as individuals apart from their obligations as nurturers for other family members. (It is also an act of self-improvement: for these women, romances are educational in a way that is difficult for more educated cultural commentators to see.) Second, her findings clearly demonstrate that romances are not all the same for these obsessive readers. De- spite their formulaic nature, which gives them the appearance of a simple repetitive compulsion for those unfamiliar with the genre, romances are not simply interchangeable. In attempting to find a narrative that appeals to them, romance readers are involved in actively evaluating each author and each book.

Radway also shows that the experience such readers desire is based on a complex set of social-psychological needs, in which some resistance to patriarchal relationshipsmexpressed by the "spunky" and articulate heroine, and demon- strated by the tender (as well as spectacularly masculine) hero, who must in the end acknowledge his dependence on and love for the heroine--is as crucial as is the final reestablishment of traditional heterosexual marriage. Her work under- scores, as well, the distance between academic interpretations of the meaning and social functions of these books and those of the romance readers themselves-- although, to be sure, she moves beyond their own interpretations to one of her own, built on relationships and meanings that are not part of their conscious interpretive repertoire.

But, by including their interpretations of the books they read in her own act of cultural interpretation, Radway has significantly widened the grasp of cultural studies, and made it clear that we must move beyond academic readings of mass

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market literature to readings of their effects as experienced by their natural constituencies. This contribution offers a clear path out of the thicket of negative intellectual stereotypes that has trapped so many academics attempting to understand books and audiences that are unfamiliar to them.

My own work uses a similarly ethnographic approach to investigate literary response among people who, on the whole, read "good" or critically-acclaimed books--through a study of reading groups in Houston, Texas. Readers of good books have also been neglected, but for different reasons than those that account for the neglect of audience responses to mass-marketed fiction. First, good reading has never been seen as problematic, so it has been celebrated rather than investi- gated. Second, readers of "good" books are apt to be well-educated, so academics have assumed that their responses would be similar to those of their teachers. The project I have embarked on, however, questions the assumed social function and nature of audience response to good books--for these reactions too, may be more interesting than has heretofore been assumed.

My findings show that most reading group members are very concerned with distancing themselves from both nonreaders and readers of mass market books u for group members, the traditional dichotomy between mass and high culture may still be very important. Yet, the grounds on which they select and interpret or "use" books are also somewhat different from those of the literary establishment. For members of reading groups, stylistics and structure matter much less than do believable characters who can provide them with meaningful moral or psychological insights. This stance towards literature (and the concomitant tendency for such groups to select books that will provide them with such reading experiences) has historically been characterized as "middlebrow," but the "brow" formulation is problematic because it implies that reading is one kind of activity performed more or less adequately with more or less adequate books.

The data yield a much more complex and interesting picture. For instance, vis-d- vis the "highbrow" critics: it is obvious from group discussions that these readers can read the way literary critics do, but that they often do not desire to do so, because it seems an artificial and contrived way of approaching a book, given the place that reading occupies in their lives. Conversely, vis-d-vis "lowbrow" readers: although reading group members do not discuss the kinds of books mass-market readers buy, they often approach the "good" books they do read in very similar ways to what is known, for example, about romance readers. The trickle-down theory of "brow" culture thus obscures a very complicated dialogue between cultural authority and experientially based cultural desires among these middle and upper-middle class readers. It is more fruitful, then, to examine reading as a culturally embedded and potentially variable set of attitudes and practices than to conflate cultural classification with textual evaluation as does the traditional cate- gorization of reading publics.

The work described below, which is part of an ongoing project, will first briefly describe the "social universe" of reading groups, and then discuss how groups select the books they wish to read from the literary fare that surrounds them in the marketplace. In order to negotiate the world of books as mass commodities, many


groups depend on cultural authorities from book reviews to college professors to preselect for them. In doing so, they ally themselves with rather traditional notions of cultural value. However, other groups, who sometimes select more mass-oriented fare, challenge those same authorities, asserting different literary values when they make those choices. Like this essay, they call into question a strict dichotomy between mass-marketed and "good" or serious fiction.

Groups

The more than seventy locally-organized reading groups in Houston and its suburbs range in size from 4 to over 30 people. 5 Forty-two of them are women's groups, of which one is over one hundred years old; twenty-eight are mixed groups (of these sixteen are composed of couples, seven of single people, and five of both couples and singles), and the other three are all-male groups. All the members are middle to upper class. Within those boundaries, groups vary along dimensions of education and occupation, although all members have completed at least some college, and the professions (and among women, teaching in particular) are overrepresented. Although they are overwhelmingly white, groups often include members from ethnic minorities (Chinese and other Asians, like Japanese and Indians, and recent European immigrants are most common). There appear to be no black groups (though one met in the recent past at a bookstore in the black community), and blacks are not integrated into the white groups. While the relatively high social status of reading groups correlates with empirical information on readership in general, this de facto segregation starkly reflects the organization of Houston's social life.

Variations in size as well as demographic composition may account for some variations in structure and longevity. For instance, formal organizational and meeting structure, indicated by slates of officers, program committees, and desig- nated responsibility for book reviews or discussion questions, are associated with size as well as high social status. (The only archival records in Houston come from two elite white book clubs and one black women's reading group that was associated with the Women's Club Movement.) It is also easier for large groups to recruit and integrate younger members. Smaller groups tend not to outlast their original membership. As one member of such a group said, "We feel really close to each other; I guess we'll all just grow old togetheff 6 Recruitment is facilitated, as well, by the social desirability of groups, so socially elite groups tend to have longer as well as better-documented histories.

Groups precipitate out of the quotidian social networks that bind people to- gether informally or institutionally. Women's institutions--such as the PTA, the League of Women Voters, or the AAUW--provide the nuclei for some women's groups. The suburban neighborhood and the local church or synagogue provide a source not only for women's groups, but for groups of couples, and one men's group as well. The other two men's groups--and two that no longer exist-- formed around occupational links (a group of clergy and members of an engineer- ing department at Exxon). Singles reading groups predictably have their source in

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other singles-oriented programs, such as those at a Unitarian and a Presbyterian church, and at a Jewish Community Center. Others met through Mensa. One group of married and single mystery aficionados began as a "class" at a local mystery bookstore.

When asked about their groups, members make it clear that they are not simply friendship groups or organizational spin-offs. In fact, most people stress that their reading groups are not made up of people they routinely socialize with. One or two of the members may be friends--indeed, this is how recruitment takes place--but although the groups may include some connections drawn from ev- eryday social networks, they transcend these connections as well, just as the meetings include but go beyond ordinary conversations. Members of both women's and men's groups are explicit about how much they value the variety of people and views they encounter in their meetings. For instance, one member of an all-male group praised the "diversity" of the readings each book generates in his group, and said that the wealth and political conservatism of some members exposed him to a world-view he never encountered in his daily academic routine.

His response, and that of almost every other reading group member queried, links the specialness of group interaction to the fact that it centers on books. As one woman in the Leisure Learning singles group put it: "Talking about books is a wonderful way to meet people because you get to know their minds, and hearing different people's views about a book makes you see things in the book that you wouldn't see on your own. The lens of other readings, then, gives members a broader and deeper access to the book under discussion; conversely, the lens of the book reveals the inner lives of coparticipants in a particularly meaningful way. While certain individuals or groups may lay greater stress on the importance of one of these "views'--into the book or into other people--all emphasize the importance of focusing on reading.

Couples groups and singles groups also have somewhat different agendas--the first "using" book groups to enjoy a kind of discussion that might seem contrived within a twosome, the second finding book discussions, as one member said, "a lot less alienating than singles bars" as an occasion for meeting people. Groups also crystallize around special orientations and interests: the Mystery group is one long-lived example; a small group has recently begun to discuss books relating to Judaism, and two others, just a few months old, read feminist books.

Although the act of reading and discussing books provides something rather different for different groups of people, the book remains crucial to the various acts of self-definition and solidarity expressed in these diverse groups. Books appear to be important not only in and of themselves, but as signifiers of critical thinking, reflective conversation, and a discourse at once abstract and morally informed.

Variations in patterns of recruitment and organization underline the fact that not all book discussants are alike. For example, the singles groups and special interests groups like the Mystery and Feminist reading groups have a stake in keeping membership open. All of these groups advertise their existence--the Mystery group by flyers at the local store Murder by the Book, and what I call the


Leisure Learning group in a free, bimonthly publication of that name. The four local Great Books groups are also relatively open; although they do not actively advertise, their locations are on file with the Houston Public Library, and they usually meet in public settings; for instance, a library branch. This "public" stance is central to the educative mission of the Great Books program as it was originally conceived at the University of Chicago.

Most groups, however, are not so open. They recruit new members by first discussing a need to expand. Next, a "guest" is invited, a fiction that allows both parties to back out without losing face. After a "visit" or two, the group usually discusses whether to offer membership; discussion will be especially frank if a majority of the members definitely dislike the candidate. Typically, members also bring real guests occasionally. Mothers, mothers-in-law, daughters, and out-of- town friends have been present at women's reading groups I have observed, and members give these visitors the same respectful attention they would extend to another member.

If membership "rules" are largely informal, leadership and meeting structure in most reading groups display the same informality. Groups that are more formal are usually either quite large or historically linked to formal organizational mod- els, like those of the Great Books program or the Women's Club Movement. The Great Books program, for example, not only has a year-long "syllabus" of texts, but requires discussion leaders (rotated from one meeting to the next) to prepare an extensive list of discussion questions, so that meetings have a pedagogical quality. 7 Groups, such as one couples group in Bellaire, that began as Great Books groups tend to maintain this leadership style and didactic tone, even if they dispense with formal affiliation and choose books by themselves. Likewise, traces of the Women's Club Movement, which encouraged reading groups to adopt parliamentary procedures and formal reviews as part of their general program of uplift and "self-culture" for women, still linger on, mainly among socially elite women's groups. Sheer size also encourages formality of structure; some groups are so large, for instance, that they find it necessary to appoint or elect a president to coordinate meetings.

In most groups, however, insofar as selection and discussion of books entail leadership roles, these are rotated, along with responsibility for hosting meetings, so the only rules inhibit the crystallization of hierarchical relationships. Nonethe- less, subtle authority relationships within reading groups result in patterns of informal leadership. Longstanding members--often the founders--may help en- force the traditions and tone of the group. Sometimes particularly well-educated or voracious readers attain the position of "cultural experts" within groups. Occa- sionally, as well, one member has either the energy to take on organizational burdens (such as recording monthly selections or membership lists) or a desire for imposing structure. Such qualities can confer special standing within the group, and with it disproportionate influence. Yet there is a cross-cutting tendency towards egalitarianism, since reading groups are voluntary associations that can continue only as long as their members find them pleasurable, and a satisfying book discussion requires openness and mutuality.

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It is conceivable that the domestic setting of most book clubs signifies to their members that informal friendliness will be the prevailing emotional climate. Most groups do meet in members' homes--which range from modest suburban houses in postwar subdivisions to exclusive River Oaks mansions--and most hosts or hostesses provide refreshments. These range from elaborate lunches in leisured women's groups, to coffee, white wine, and cheese plates or store-bought cookies. Even the Leisure Learning group (which meets in a classical music cafe), the Mystery group (which meets in a bookstore), and the groups that meet in libraries provide something to eat and drink. But, like the interval of pleasant "chat" that extends for up to thirty minutes before the meeting, these refreshments are usually, in the words of one man, "very much in the background. In the foreground is the discussion of the book" If those discussions do not last for approximately an hour, members judge either the book selection or their performance a failure, although they usually reserve condescension or even contempt for other kinds of social gatherings (such as garden clubs or card groups) that have no cultural content.

Book Selection: Availability and the Evaluative Hierarchy

Selection may take place either before or after the book discussion, and is one of the processes that members of reading groups are most curious about when asking about other groups, in part because each method is imperfect. This curiosity may also entail an implicit recognition of the problems inherent in matching critical evaluation of books to members' varied "reading expectations" Groups use several different procedures to select books, and may change their method, as did one women's group which began with a formal selection committee and then adopted the less time-consuming method of consensual choice as members returned to the work force. I have identified four major selection methods which tend to bring groups into different kinds of dialogue with agencies of cultural authority.

The most formal method, in which either a committee or one person develops a program for several months' reading, makes book selection a serious business. Since one's reputation as a literary provider for the group can be at stake, it also appears to engender the most dependence on cultural authorities, whether bookstore owners (who sometimes help plan an entire year's program), college professors, or respected journals and lists of notable or award-winning books. Working with such authorities appears not only to alleviate whatever anxiety may be attendant on the responsibility for picking several months' reading, but also to add luster to the choices which the selectors finally present to the entire group for approval.

The second mode is consensual choice, which is often coupled with rotation of responsibility for suggesting books. In some ways, this is the least formal group process, but it also offers opportunities for the indirect expression of power within the group as, for example, when the group's informal leader(s) support a book enthusiastically or remain noticeably silent at a suggestion. In achieving consensus, groups often move towards relatively more "serious" reading, because it


offers a culturally legitimated way of transcending conflict within the group: all can agree on an "objectively" excellent book. Sometimes, though, finding the collective will of the group involves discussing exigencies of people's lives extrinsic to the books themselves and points up the limits of purely cultural factors in understanding selection. For instance, most groups read short or nondemanding books during the holiday season. Similarly, people do not expect to go far out of their daily rounds to acquire a book, so availability sometimes takes precedence over literary merit.

The concept of availability highlights the importance of the institutional processes of book distribution that prestructure the universe of choice for reasons as extrinsic to literary merit as is the notion of "the holiday read.' '~vailability" refers most often to an almost invisible process whereby choice has been narrowed because of commercial imperatives. For instance, publishers' decisions whether or not to issue a book as a paperback have implications for reading groups because almost every group has an informal "paperback requirement." This particular problem does cause complaint, as does the tendency of chain bookstores to stock mostly mass-oriented, quick-turnover books. In such cases, it becomes clear even to group participants that the territory over which cultural authorities hold sway is bounded not only by people's "life-worlds," but also by the power of the market and its capacity to reduce books to commodities.

The third mode of choice, direct voting on suggestions, takes place in the Leisure Learning group (a singles group that recruits members through a non- academic continuing education organization in Houston, and consequently has a high turnover around a stable core of membership), in one "very efficient" men's group, and in a group called "The Bookies," which operates almost like a small lending library, although members do briefly evaluate the different books they read each month. Here, the process of voting both expresses and encourages a certain populism in book choice as well as in group structure. One member of The Bookies discussed voting as one way they were able to undercut an early tendency to choose what they "ought to read" instead of what they really wanted to read. Since they buy up to ten different books each month, this tendency was quite literally a costly problem. The Leisure Learning group is also very egalitarian in tone.

The fourth method is that of strict individual choice. It allows groups to encounter books that do not necessarily appeal to everyone, and offers one way of achieving a more adventurous series of choices, which is, after all, one reason why people gather in groups to read in the first place. Often individuals themselves choose within a rather narrow literary stratum, because of the group's recruitment policies or cultural "tone." For instance, the League of Women Voters group teased one member twice during one meeting for having chosen Clavell's Shogun some months before. Sometimes, however, individual choice brings distance from cultural authority. Members of the "FM 1960" group, for instance, mentioned mysticism and the black experience as subjects they would have never confronted without their policy of individual choice. And a small suburban group I will call LS's group devoted a session to a science fiction/fantasy by Piers Anthony-- the

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choice of one dedicated fan--even though several members worried that there would be "nothing to discuss" about the book.

Whatever the method, members make use of cultural authority during the process of book selection for two major reasons: to legitimate choices and to predict the outcome of their reading experience. The first needs little explanation; it refers to readers' desire (for whatever motives) to read "good" books and cor- relatively, to the critics' functions as evaluators or gatekeepers. In order to connect to a "good" book, reading group members follow very traditional sources of cultural authority, as is evidenced by the way they rank book reviews (the New York Times Book Review, for instance, has lost prestige now that it features genre books and mass-market paperbacks) and by their deference to the university and its opinions, which they learn about through extension courses, or syllabi and book suggestions brought into the home by college-aged children.

But these cultural authorities, as well as other people who have no claim to expertise, are also valuable because of their descriptive or informational function. Reading group members, like readers of formulaic fiction, do what they can to ensure they will be satisfied by each book, but since they cannot rely on the security of a formula, they must discover by some other means what kind of reading experience to expect. Critical reviews, especially at the time of publication, often devote a surprisingly large amount of attention to description, as if intu- itively understanding the needs of their audience. The informed judgment of a trusted advisor can also suffice. This is one reason for the authority of literary booksellers: they serve as "opinion leaders" who are in touch with the wider world of literary judgment, and who can interpret it to the local audience. 8 For this reason, too, some groups decide that only a book read by one of their members can be seriously considered for selection; a friend's opinion, they know, will take their own taste into account, and can also be probed or questioned. Under the rubric of friendship, however, certain members can gain authority within the group, for particularly serious, well-educated, or voracious readers are often asked to comment on book suggestions, and their opinions carry special weight. Con- versely, some group leaders enjoy authority only by virtue of their leadership role, as in the smaller "Singles" group, where the leader enforces a broader definition of a "good author" than some members are happy with. In this case, the dissidents show their superior taste by muttering from the sidelines, but defer to the leader because she alone has the energy to keep their group alive.

As this last example indicates, groups negotiate very different "reading boundaries," and even the definition of a "discussable" book varies widely. This is true notwithstanding most groups' vision of themselves as very expansive and tolerant. When questioned about their reading, most members say initially, "We'll read anything" But this is simply not so in most cases. Groups usually do not deal with either end of the literary spectrum: most do not read poetry, plays, or difficult modernist novels, and if they do, they will mention it very proudly. At the other end, groups rarely even consider generic books to be part of the relevant literary universe. Queries about genre books like detective books or thrillers or romances, typically elicit responses like "We did read one spy novel and nobody wanted to


do that again. It's nice to have something to stimulate conversation," or "No, not that we might not read them on our own" Under the surface of statements like these, which seem transparent to those who make them, lie a series of implicit assumptions about literary value. These assumptions reveal on the one hand the hegemonic reach of traditional cultural authorities and the acceptance of their definitions of the worthlessness of mass-market literature, yet, on the other hand, also include a source of resistance to such authorities and their hierarchy of value.

Let us start with the assumptions encoded in the concept of the "discussable" book. It seems innocent enough; as one person defined it, "It's a book people can take different opinions on and find evidence in the text to support" The text, then, must be of some substance. Books that do not have substance are "fluff" (con- noting the lightness or airiness of sheer entertainment) or "trash" (cultural dis- posables or junk, or even low-class and morally dubious, as in "poor white trash").

Discussability, then, gears groups into a "hierarchy of taste" that ranks authors, subjects, and genres as well as individual books. At the bottom of the hierarchy are romances and Westerns. No group I know of discusses romances, although a few have held special meetings to discuss why they are such a popular cultural phenomenon, thereby approaching them with the analytic distance academics use to examine mass culture. While some members read romances privately, the consensus is that they are beneath discussion. The same holds true for Westerns. One respondent from a mixed couples group said another member loved West- erns, "but the closest we've gotten to that in the group is Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove" Mass market fare such as "blockbusters" like Princess Daisy, thrillers, and science fiction rank above romances and Westerns; slightly higher yet are mysteries and books by "good" bestseUing authors like Michener or Wouk, which some groups eschew and others enjoy. Contemporary "serious" fiction and nonfiction (such as biographies, history, science, and philosophy) and the classics form the main fare of many reading groups, which, in turn, achieve the reputation of being "serious" if they exclude everything else.

This hierarchy shows that most reading groups accept unquestioningly the systems of classification and evaluation generated by traditional cultural authorities. By the same token, what gives cultural authority to literary professionals like teachers or critics, is their ability to effectively establish and defend the boundaries within which groups like these operate. Their cultural work is to classify or modify generic distinctions and to systematically articulate the bases for aesthetic judgment and canonical inclusion or exdusionmwhether of one novel, a writer, or an entire school or genre. They achieve success if they can convince their peers and other serious readers that their representations of the literary universe are correct.

For most readers, however, the work of literary professionals is invisible, since its results are encoded in the assumptions about literary merit that inform each group's general definition of worthwhile reading, and are only rarely discussed themselves. Hidden in the taken-for-granted, the social process of cultural valua- tion becomes mystified. Its resultsmthe evaluative hierarchy--acquire an aura of inevitability and objective truth. Thus, the hierarchy seemingly stands indepen-

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dent of its constitution by the "professional valuers" who are in fact promulgating literary authority, the more effectively because their individual activity becomes lost from view.

The classics, which stand at the pinnacle of this hierarchy, are a case in point. Enshrined as great, they are both safe and improving. Groups retreat into classics from conflict about selection and use them to establish cultural legitimacy. The leader of the Leisure Learning group, for instance, feels that they should discuss a classic at least once in every two-month "program," though otherwise she does not attempt to constrain selection: here the classic serves as ballast that keeps the group from flying off into cultural limbo. Other groups "do" a classic at least once every six months, and the period before and just after Christmas seems, in its evocation of tradition, to be a natural "classics season~' The classic, like turkeys and wreaths, serves as a reaffirmation of cultural continuity, or as a cultural pick- me-up after the holidays.

Classics also call forth unstinting interpretive effort because they offer a secure investment in self-cultivation. Groups approach them with reverence (UYou'd be proud of the way we discussed it," said one group leader about a classic), often preface discussions with historical and critical introductions, and--because they accept an almost religious definition of great books as intellectually and spiritually enriching--put forth considerable energy to understand and appreciate them. I have observed several groups laboriously answering Cliff Note discussion questions about classics, subjecting themselves to what they thought a "hokey" process in order to "get the most" out of such a book--l ike miners working a particularly rich lode. Classics, then are low-risk reading because they provide guaranteed cultural worth.

Yet by and large, the historical sedimentation of authority that gives classics their aura remains invisible and unquestioned. This is because the social sources of literary judgment have been so lost in time, so buried in reaffirmation across generations, that they are altogether obscured, and the classic has become an icon for our general cultural heritage, which is much more difficult to denigrate than an individual novel.

Usually if reading group members dislike aspects of a classic, they will nonethe- less defend the novel; if they dislike the entire book, they will assume personal inadequacy rather than call its value--and that broader heritage of value--into question. Deference to this heritage, in fact, is what gives reading groups their cultural mandate and distinction. And members- -who in many ways are the good schoolchildren of our culture--have almost always so internalized this deference, as "embodied" cultural capital, that it is easier for them to blame themselves than to cast it off. 9

Almost no matter where they draw the bottom line of their reading, every group appears to be familiar with the hierarchy of value that is crowned by the classics (and difficult modern novels and poetry). Observing groups, however, reveals their concept of "the literary" to be somewhat at variance with that of the academy. This provides the first source of distance from, and possibly resistance to, cultural authority.


For reading group members, literary quality, to begin with, necessitates a mini- mum level of craftsmanship; "literary" presupposes literate. Most academics do not have to cope with questions of literacy except while grading student papers, so discussions of merit rarely touch on this issue. But reading group members must negotiate a world teeming with noncanonical books, in which judgments based on grammatical correctness, for example, are often not only relevant but necessary to defend the stature of good books. As a case in point, reading group members despise romances not only because they are formulaic, but because they are not written correctly. "The sentences weren't complete; the grammar was wrong. It was a terrible book," said one member about a romance given her by a friend. Ungrammatical books offend, in part, because by definition they cannot be improving to the reader.

Literariness is also evidenced by references to other "things literary," such as things academic and things British. One reason that detective fiction outranks science fiction, for example, is that many mysteries (often produced by academics) are peppered with literary epigraphs and word play. And within the one mystery reading group I have found, members most often rank what they call the "British cozy" highest among the subgenres they differentiate, and some only really like British mysteries, because they are so much more "literary" Contiguity with other sources of high culture, then, is another source of literary value for reading groups.

Significantly, Dorothy Sayers, who is both British and literary, most often occupies the "boundary runner" slot among mystery writers. I am using this term to refer to an author whom reading groups classify as a transcendent representative of a literary category or genre. 1~ Authors such as Le Carre or Sayers serve like tokens of a minority group of the social world. They are exceptions, and groups can read them without questioning the evaluative boundaries that they draw around their reading in general. Or, as one reading group member says: "We've never read a murder mystery or a science fiction book--I don't think there's any prejudice. There's no reason we couldn't read something by Ursula LeGuin, for example. We never did sit down and consider what we were going to read:' Generally, these boundary runners are judged to be more "literary" than other representatives of their genre, yet exactly what textual quality makes LeGuin more generally acceptable than other science fiction writers such as, for example, Mary Gentle, Patricia McKillup, or Larry Niven, is much less clear. As in the social world, the literary meritocracy may owe something to pedigree and connections; the Bantam edition author's note in LeGuin's books mentions that she is the daughter of the famous anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber and his wife Theodora, who was a well-known writer, that she was educated at Radcliffe College and Columbia University, and that she had a Fulbright year in Paris. n

So, literary merit, more than for academics, stands first for adherence to certain standards of linguistic competence--standards which themselves are an integral part of high culture, if we follow Basil Bernstein's 12 discussion of class and lan- guage. Second, it is established by association with other loci of "literariness" And, third, it refers to a reading experience that is personally significant and enduring.

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As one reading group member said about Flaubert's Sentimental Education: "Woody Allen said, 'What is there to life?,' and he named some jazz s inge r . . , and then Sentimental Education . . . . I don't have that much leisure time to read . . . . But I just think--it 's a classic. I want to read something that I can remember a year later. I 'm tired of reading stuff that doesn't stick with me. I really like something that's substantial. I 'm certain this is substantial. There's no doubt about it."

There are echoes here of the literary doctrine that great books are those that have endured through the centuries, but the standard is subjectivized--instead of the judgment of the ages, that of the individual's memory. Trash lasts only a week or so, classics for a year at least. Like a hearty meal, they stick.

It is also important to note that this reader defines a classic in experiential terms. A classic is great because it does something for someone: it provides a reading experience that can transcend the ephemerality and flux of daily life and so enrich or move the reader that it finds a permanent niche in her memory. This stands in direct opposition to the intellectualist tendency to produce formal aesthetic analyses. So, even if intellectuals and reading group members categorize the same book as a classic, they may expect something different from the book, and subject it to somewhat different standards of judgment, since the "ordinary reader" is working with an existential or psychological definition of greatness that subsumes it to the criterion of personal enhancement. Thus, even those readers who automatically defer to cultural authority may stand at some distance from it because they are amateurs who must slot their reading into a crowded leisure schedule and who look to books for the transcendent experiential pleasures of deep emotional involvement rather than for the more rationalist pleasures that come with analytic distance.

It is on these same grounds of experiential worth that some reading groups explicitly challenge the elite hierarchy of taste. These groups identify themselves not as "serious readers," but as "readers," and characterize serious readers as cultural snobs. I would like to counterpose these two rather different positions vis-d-vis literary culture by quotes from members of two different groups. The contact person in one group, several of whose members have advanced degrees in literature and some of whom teach English at the college level, characterized their reading like this: "We don't like to read anything too simple, because most of us have a serious background and are serious readers--or were, at the time that we were in school." They read critically acclaimed novels, especially those by women writers, and an international selection of classics, and are proud of being sophisticated and current in their reading. The attitude of these serious readers requires little explanation. 13

The singles' group organized through Leisure Learning, on the other hand, has been characterized by one Great Books group as "the group that reads trash:' The group's leader presents the group to new members by saying, "We'll read anything. We're not snobs. If you can get enough people to vote for your book, we'll read it" They have read science fiction, mysteries, and recently decided to discuss a Louis L'Amour Western. Several members of this group also have advanced degrees, but not in literature, and although two members teach at universities,


others have scientific, professional, or business careers. Less connected to the literary establishment, but legitimated by other educational and occupational cre- dentials, they show remarkable cultural confidence.

Readers like these may not merely be rebelling against snobbery, but contesting the evaluative hierarchy itself. Describing oneself as a reader is a way of claiming that the dichotomy between books and other kinds of culture is a more crucial distinction than that between different kinds of books. 14 Moreover, this stance tends to flatten the generic and categorial pyramid into a continuum of different but equally valuable kinds of reading. Such readers are calling into question the academy's wholesale dismissal of certain kinds of fictional genres or categories as mere "mass" literature. Indeed, this group has begun to invent its own categories, of which the most fully articulated is "women in pain:' And members often subject classics to merciless criticism. Some of their meetings are suffused with an almost illicit sense of taboo-breaking, which heightens the group's pleasure. This tone suggests that rather than being simply populists, they are advocates for a new "map" of literary culture based on a blurring of the traditional mass culture/high culture dichotomy.

The Uses of Literature and Its Implications

Because the readers in reading groups incorporate books into their lives pri- marily as special life-experiences, they often judge them according to the same criteria and values that they apply to their nonliterary lives. 15 While literary critics have, at least until recently, aspired to pure or disinterested aesthetic judgment, reading group members are "interested" readers; they are looking not only for "good reading" but for meaningful and pleasurable experiences from books and literary discussions. Thus "discussability," the very term that gears most reading groups into a traditional evaluative framework, also distances them from it. This can be inferred from usages that differentiate between the two, as does the Belles Lettres membership sheet, which states that, "Books chosen can be current or classic but must contain literary merit and be discussable"

What makes a book enjoyable to discuss shows what people in such groups are looking for from literature: believable settings and plots, and most centrally, characters they can identify with and learn from. Believable settings (and coherent plots) serve mainly to ground the characters more fully in "reality," so how the discussants construe realism can illuminate what kind of background supports "real" characters. The most common criterion of judgment for novelistic settings is pictorial. As one participant said about Flannery O'Connor: "I loved her because she really paints a portrait of the South" Conversely, in a meeting about a Latin American novel, The Girl in the Photograph, a discussant said "I reacted like I was reading about Egypt or somewhere children are being prostituted. I couldn't picture it" Realism, then, depends on what readers--with the aid of the novelist-- can imagine. In this view, the successful novelist has used words to make a world "come alive," which implies a mimetic understanding of literature, and cor- rollatively gives authors great authority in the realm of "objective" knowledge.

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Jean Auel, for example, is now an authority on Neanderthal society for many thousands of readers.

This is very similar to a "reading attitude" Radway found among romance readers--who often assume that the settings and cultural details in romances are unfailingly accurate--and as she points out, it serves the ideology of instruction and self-improvement that justifies the reading habit. 16 It is also ideological in a second sense, since (as seen above) readers sometimes resist novels that transport them to a world they do not want to imagine. Further, there is a deep-rooted refusal to attend to how novelists construct their representations of the world, since readers generally desire immersion rather than analysis. So, the "real" is circumscribed by what people can and desire to imagine, and those limitations relate to the limits of their social situation and the perspective it engenders27 Moreover, most reading group members do not approach the text with critical skepticism, so their encounters with novelistic "constructions" usually do not focus on their scaffolding, but on what it feels like to inhabit them.

Within a novelistic world that has been rendered familiar enough to picture, reading group members look for characters they can relate to. Most discussions center on interpretations or readings of these characters. Even the one mystery reading group, after rating the book under discussion on a ten-point scale, spent the remainder of each session considering which character they liked the most and why. Discussions gain depth when readers respond to fictional characters almost as if they were real people, analyzing their emotional responses to them and moving outwards to aspects of their own lives or those of kin and friends in a conversational mode that resembles free association. Intertextual comparisons of characters or intratextual analysis are much less common.

Identification with characters, then, is the lynchpin of realism as such readers construe it (hi think when you're talking about 'real' you have to get down to talking about characters," as one discussant said.) Since this implies once again subjecting a text to what readers can relate to, this perspective seems limited and closed-minded (as another reader said in the same discussion, "It's real when I see the characters acting in ways that I might a c t . . , or that I can at least see other people doing'). But identification itself proves to be a very complex process. Since it pulls a reader into a dynamic relationship with a character who must be reck- oned with like another person, it can lead to expansive self-understanding, to personal change, and to critical reflection about cultural authorities and the social order itself.

The spark of recognition and insight reading groups members evoke when they discuss identification entails a momentary loss of barriers between self and fictional "other" that can reintegrate aspects of the reader's self in almost therapeutic fashion. One man, for example, refound his younger self in a Flannery O'Connor story: "All of a sudden I remembered myself when I was five years old--well, it wasn't quite the same, but I remembered wanting to die so I could go to Heaven."

Women seem especially prone to merge psychological boundaries in this fashion. TM One woman came to terms with her mother's naivete, and the pain it had caused during her own adolescence, as she followed the mother-daughter rela-


tionships in Ntozake Shange's sassafras, cypress, and indigo. As she said, referring initially to the fictional character: "She had no idea what was going on; she was just relying on her own experience. And that's what I appreciated about it, that here was my mother telling me these things that were real unnecessary, and really didn't apply, but I can't blame her, or say my mother's ignorant, or old-fashioned or anything, 'cause that's the only thing she has to draw on- -her own experience."

Although readers demand consistency and wholeness from fictional characters, they need not wholly identify with them in order to incorporate behaviors or attitudes from them. Once having allowed a character the right to independent existence, they can isolate certain aspects of behavior or personality for self- reflection and personal change. In a dramatic instance of this process, one woman talked about how Thackeray's characters, especially Becky Sharpe, helped form her dream to leave McKinney, Texas, because of the way they talked: "Reading Thackeray is like sitting next to a witty man at a dinner pa r ty . . , that's why I liked it so much when I first read it, because I came from a small North Texas town where one didn't encounter that kind of w i t . . . I'm sure that's my romance with the book. I never got to sit next to a witty man at the parties so I read Thackeray instead" There was much she did not admire about Becky, but her ironic distance and dry humor came to symbolize a way of life that this reader aspired to and eventually created for herself. Thus, the same critical stance that seems circumscribed, because of its requirements that characters be "people" readers can relate to, can also provide the transformative power of deep connection.

Discussants in these groups usually enjoy a plurality of views about characters, because people's responses serve as windows into the personalities of other participants and this contributes to the sharing that makes group discussions satisfying. This means, however, that groups do not usually achieve a collective response to books, or become transformed themselves into long-lasting interpretive or textual communities. 19 Moreover, because groups remain committed to middle-class individualism, both vis-d-vis textual response and in general, they rarely approach systemic issues, and then only indirectly, usually through the lens of their interpretation of fictional characters. Readers can be sure of these interpretations, and their implications, because their ontological conception of characters as real means that they know them on the level of personal experience. And on that level, readers can maintain the certainty of their convictions even in opposition to cultural authorities or the social status quo.

For example, the leader of the mystery reading group contended that the complexity of character development in good mysteries and the moral insights provided by their unfolding relationships ought to lead the critical establishment to revalue the genre as a whole. "They're not just entertainment," she maintained. Usually, however, when groups challenge critical opinion, they do so on the basis of consensual appraisals of character that give the groups a collective authority of their own. On that basis, for example, My Book Group directly contradicted a critical introduction to The Scarlet Letter that called for a balanced appraisal of Hester's and Dimmesdale's human qualities. The group unanimously called Dim- mesdale a wimp and decided that he was such a dried-out stick that he could not

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have really fathered a child. Hester's only character flaw, on the other hand, came from "playing the martyr too much." Similarly, several members of the Leisure Learning group, although granting that Hemingway "wrote really well," said he was not a great writer because he was too "macho" This meant not only that For Whom the Bell Tolls "was really only about men," but that the men themselves were not fully dimensional human beings.

The concept of "macho" tacitly critiques the social as well as the literary hierarchy, and indeed, this same group is willing to take on not only the critics but also social issues like racism--again, stimulated by perceptions about novelistic character. During a meeting about Huck Finn, for instance, they hotly debated Jim's character. Everyone agreed that Jim lacked depth and complexity because of racism, but some maintained he was "realistic" because blacks had been historically oppressed. To make their point, they contextualized the book with much more sophistication than is usual among reading groups, who generally do so only briefly, if at all. The majority, which prevailed, granted that blacks did not have many opportunities for learning, but felt that Twain did not allow Jim to be the "whole character" he could have been, because of Twain's own prejudices. "He's good," one member said, "but he's too simple-minded and stereotypic--too much like a childmand almost too good." Here a character provided the leverage for a discussion that moved beyond the level of personality to take up questions of how prejudice distorts people's vision of each other, and of how to ameliorate racist stereotypes and the social structure that engenders them. 2~

Such "uses" of character illuminate not only how readers integrate books into their lives, but the nature of the selves they are developing through literature, and the nature of the critical reflection literature inspires among them. In living out the importance of ideas, in striving for self-understanding as well as personal and social criticism, these groups, however limited by middle-class biases and perspec- tives, show that it is possible to work through some of those biases in the process of reflection about books. For these readers, literary reflection is fundamentally rooted in reflection about the self. Readers focus on fictional selves and appropriate them for their own self-development. In doing so, they are appropriating literature in ways that would win the approval of most cultural critics--although it should be noted that their "interests" in reading also set them at some distance from academic preoccupations with novelistic stylistics and structure. However, they manage to achieve this kind of self-reflection by engaging with different kinds of literature: not just with the classics and "good" books, but also with books that most critics dismiss as purely mass-oriented commodities. This calls into question the validity of assuming that different kinds of literature automatically result in widely different reading experiences.

Moreover, even when reading "good" books, these readers show some important similarities to romance readers in the way they appropriate literature. Specifi- cally, like romance readers they give authors a remarkable authority in the realm of "facts" Perhaps more significantly, these two kinds of readers are both looking for believable characters that they can "use" for self-reflection or as guides for how to live--and understand--their lives. 21


So, the distinction between "good" books and mass-market books may be less crucial than most intellectuals have assumed. In its place, I would argue for the importance of two other distinctions. First, I think that the dichotomy between readers and nonreaders--a group that reading group members contemplate with pity and even contempt--may indeed mark a cultural abyss. Although recent research in communication shows that mass media audiences, like readers, can "use" what they see in many different and creative ways, I think it is arguable that many television programs provide very little to grapple with, in the sense that reading group members are contending with cultural issues and deep feelings in the books they encounter. Moreover, reading, which has traditionally been associated with education and affluence, brings inclusion in the world of conceptual privilege. It is power, and power of a particularly important kind in a highly information-laden economy such as ours.

Secondly, this work and that of other scholars in the loosely defined field of "cultural studies" points to a disheartening distance between intellectuals and other cultural constituencies--specifically, other readers in this case. If academics are so cut off from their environing culture that they cannot understand how even well-educated readers approach and appropriate books, then their analyses of their culture are apt to be distorted and wrong-headed. Given the position of cultural authority that they enjoy--and the study described here indicates how much weight their opinions carry--their lack of understanding may well have consequences that our culture can ill afford.

Notes

1 would like to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for a Summer Stipend during the summer of 1986, which greatly facilitated the research for this article. I am also indebted to Michele Farrell, Michael Fischer, George Marcus, and Janice Radway for their assistance.

I. Robert Escarpit, The Sociology of Literature. Trans. Ernest Pick. Painesville, Ohio: The Lake Erie College Press, 1965.

2. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984. (Originally published 1979).

3. For further development of this argument, see Elizabeth Long, "The Cultural Meaning of Concentration in Publishing," Book Research Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 4 (Winter 1985-6): 3-27.

4. Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1984.

5. Uncertainty about numbers arises from ongoing outreach. I have used several approaches to locate groups. First, I sent a letter to everyone in the Rice University community at and above the level of lowest rank clerical and skilled manual workers. This left out the predominantly black and hispanic cooking and maintenance workers; to reach them, I posted several copies of the letter in the Building and Grounds building. Since Rice is a prestigious university, and consequently at~acts to its staff many people who value a literate and intellectual atmosphere more than good salaries, I reasoned that this would put me in contact with a high number of "readefly" types. I found over 40 reading groups this way. Second, I sent out a flyer to all local bookstores and libraries, first contacting owners or staff by phone to ensure cooperation. This also yielded a significant number of groups. Third, the Houston Post wrote an article in their Today section about the research; I found several more groups from that publicity. Finally, when I contact people in reading groups, I ask whether people know of other groups. All these approaches have limitations that may lead to the underrepresentation of lower class and less "outgoing" groups. In my continuing research, I am attempting to reach such groups through churches, which are often the major social activity for the less affluent and educated, and which also often sponsor reading or discussion groups--though I have defined Bible reading groups as outside the boundaries of this study, since I am interested in the dissemination and appropriation of secular literature.

6. Conversation at Baylor Interns' and Residents' Wives group, 10 /8 /85 . I will simply reference meeting dates in the text; I keep tapes (and transcripts) or notes of each meeting. In some cases, the reference will be to a

Long 27

conversation with a member, or to what I will refer to as an "inventory'--a structured interview held with one reading group member that contains questions about group history and structure, types of books read, and membership.

7. See James Allan Davis, Great Books and Small Groups. New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1961. Also see his A Study of Participants in the Great Books Program, 1957. White Plains, N.O.R.C., 1960.

8. For the first discussion of this role, and its importance, see Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet, The People's Choice: How the Voter Makes Up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign. New York: Columbia University Press, 1948.

9. This term in Pierre Bourdieu's. It is explicated in a draft article, "Cultural Capital: A Critical Review of Recent American Research," by Michele Lamont and Annette Lareau, which was delivered at the August 1986 meeting of the American Sociological Association.

10. As pointed out by Janice Radway, and people in the audience at the March 1987 conference on "The Book as Mass Commodity," this term resembles others used in the publishing world, such as "crossover" books, which are books that attract readers from audiences for different genres (Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon, for instance, attracts readers of romances, historical fiction, and science fiction) and "breakout" books, which are books that break out of a narrow audience to reach a broader mass readership.

11. "About the Author" on page 278 of the Bantam edition of LeGuin's The Wind's Twelve Quarters. (New York, Bantam: 1975).

12. See Basil Bernstein's Class, Codes, and Control (3 volumes) London, Routledge and Kegan Paul: 1971-75. 13. See Janice Radway's article, "The Book-of-the-Month Club and the General Reader: On the Uses of 'Serious'

Fiction," Critical Inquiry, forthcoming, for a discussion of the relationship of the cultural meanings encoded in the term "serious reader" to the stratification of literary taste.

14. The advertisement for the Leisure Learning group, Bookpeople, in Leisure Learning Unlimited's January- February 1987 Schedule (Vol. 8, No. 3), may support the group's implicit contention that reading itself may be a more crucial cultural distinction among mainstream Americans than what is read. The group is listed in the catalogue's general category of "Serious Stuff" with groups on speed reading, test preparation, writing, mathematics, and current events. Yet under the general rubric of seriousness, the advertisement itself attempts to highlight enjoyment. It reads: "Do you like to read good books (fiction and nonfiction) and enjoy discussing them with others? If so, participate in these fun, informal gatherings. Read Black Elk Speaks by John Neihardt for the first week and bring suggestions for the remaining sessions [each "class" meets four times over a two- month period; many members have been coming for years]. This isn't a group for literary snobs, just an ongoing group (now in its fourth year) that's always looking for new energ)d.'

15. This bears a striking resemblance to Radway's findings in her research on The Book-of-the-Month Club, although the editors sometimes project this attitude onto the imagined audience rather than fully sharing it themselves. In this regard, and in regard to the category of the "serious reader," similarities in our research appear to be pointing to attitudes and distinctions that are widely held among at least one segment of the reading public.

16. See Radway's Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press: 1984), especially chapter three.

17. See Raymond Williams' The Country and The City (London: Chatto and Windus: 1973), for a discussion of the way social situation and what one might call "social perspective" influence both writing and reading.

18. See my "Women, Reading, and Cultural Authority: Some Implications of the Audience Perspective in Cultural Studies," American Quarterly, Fall 1986: 591-612.

19. For the term "interpretive community," see Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?, Cambridge, Harvard University Press: 1980. For "textual" community, see Brian Stock's The Implications of Literacy, Princeton, Princeton University Press: 1983.

20. Some of the material in the above two sections will appear, in different form, in articles for upcoming issues of Critical Inquiry and Cultural Studies.

21. Again, see Radway's Reading the Romance, cited in note 16.

C O M M E N T

Janice Radway

As Elizabeth Long has already said, she and I have been engaged in related, even similar, projects for several years. To begin with--and here I'm merely re-

Janice Radway is associate professor of American Civilization at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature.


iterating--we are both skeptical about the validity of mass culture theory, much of which assumes that mass-produced and mass-marketed products are used in identical fashion by or have the same precise meaning for all of their consumers. As a consequence, we have turned to ethnography as a way to test the set of assumptions that ground most mass culture theory. And, as she has just demon- strated so effectively, the "jeweller's-eye view" of ethnography can render visible variations, fine distinctions, and gradations in the organization, meaning, and consequences of various social practices--including reading, for reading is a social practice.

Thus, her study of Houston reading groups promises to lend texture and complexity to our understanding of the middle-class's relation to cultural production. Her careful attention to demographic variation, gender differences, educational levels, and occupational variation should help us to add a measure of specificity heretofore lacking in our picture of American middle-class reading habits. She should be able to tell us, for instance, how long-standing the effects of schooling are and have been for different fractions of the middle class; she should also be able to say much about how men and women vary in the way they respond to books; whether, for instance, one sex has a more distant relationship to cultural authority represented by the school and the literary reviewer than does the other. Furthermore, she should be able to say a great deal about the distance between the perhaps more personal, subjective use of books occurring in reading groups and the official, structured, and public use made of them in literary classrooms.

The information she will provide us with is invaluable and, indeed, as she has also indicated, it will not be different in kind from the information I was able to unearth in my own study of a group of compulsive romance readers or from the information I have begun to discover in my present project, on the Book-of-the- Month Club. The power of ethnography is a function of its capacity to highlight the complexities, ambiguities, and contradictions that characterize all social practices. And, as Elizabeth Long has also shown, the approach draws additional force from its capacity to generate new categories by focusing so resolutely on the informant's or subject's self-understanding and world-view.

Thus, my own romance study led to several surprising findings. I would like to cite just two here. First of all, I discovered that the women I studied understood each romance to be different. They read them as novels, in effect, and they could demonstrate remarkable recall with respect to the details of plot and character. For this readership the romances worked at different levels of abstraction from those acknowledged by literary critics and reviewers. To this audience, these books are not the identical, formulaic, repetitive pap that they are to literary reviewers, critics, professors, and even to their editors. Secondly, the act of romance reading functioned in a mildly subversive way in women's private lives. They used it as a way to resist and to temporarily contain the demands of their families. Reading challenged the assumption that they ought always be available first to others. Therefore, this finding disputes the simplistic view that romance reading is a conservative, even retrograde practice that rehabilitates a traditional femininity by constructing women's value through the eyes of men.

Long 29

The Book-of-the-Month Club study will, I think, generate similar fine-grained observations. Let me briefly sketch just two here. I have noted that the editors at the Club feel a tension between their literary training, their own high-culture taste, and their perception of the Club's mission as pedagogical in nature on the one hand, and the Club's status as a commercial business designed to generate a profit on the other. Editorial reports are extraordinarily explicit about the conflict and clash between these two sets of deeply felt imperatives and values. Basic cultural conflicts in American society are thus being played out in the Club's New York offices and across the pages of its monthly BOMC News. This clash will perhaps tell us a great deal about the conflicted ways in which middle-class ideology is constructed. Second, the Club's editors struggle endlessly to wrest popularly written and focused books for a generalist's use from specialists: communities, groups, and even professions that have acquired control over the production of knowledge in certain areas and write up that knowledge for their own use and therefore to their standards.

Detailed ethnographic information goes a long way to restoring respect for people traditionally dismissed by members of the academic world and by those involved in literary publishing. It provides an alternative perspective on two groups: those who appreciate mass culture and make it relevant to their own lives and the popularizers who understand that books can and should have many different uses and who therefore believe that books ought to be directed to many different audiences.

But I want to emphasize here as well that there is a potential danger in ethnography's ability to legitimate and rehabilitate popular taste. The danger is that it might persuade us merely to refute the elitist critique of popular taste. Instead, we must recognize that this critique serves important functions in our society, functions that are created by much larger problems. Those larger problems need to be addressed on many different fronts. Ethnography must not be used to deflect our attention from the fact that something important is at stake in the critique of mass culture.

In my opinion, the critique of mass culture can be quickly characterized as a sophisticated version of the "blaming the victim" syndrome. What I mean is this: Although it is certainly the case that people of all classes go to movies, listen to recording releases from major studios, watch television, and buy mass-market paperback books, it is also true, given the huge size of this audience, that for a significant percentage of the people in it, mass culture is its only culture. For them, reading the latest Ludlum, Krantz, or Stephen King novel is not a delicious, relaxing exercise--Uslumming'--but something else entirely. It is their only way of participating in the cultural life of the society. Why? Couldn't they just as well go out and buy Carlos Fuentes's novels, or those of Robert Coover, John Updike, or Peter de Vries? The answer, of course, is that they could, but in most cases they won't. They won't because they have not been endowed, either by birth or by long, high quality education, with the cultural codes, strategies, and knowledge necessary not only to make sense of that work but to appreciate it. And this state of affairs is, broadly speaking, a function of class, race, and gender in our society.


What happens then in the mass culture critique, which is elaborated for the most part by intellectuals, academics, and cultural professionals of one sort or another-- that is, by our cultural elite--is that those who are richly endowed with what Pierre Bourdieu calls "cultural capital" actively blame those who have not been so endowed and who must make do with what is often called a counterfeit culture. They blame them, these victims of cultural exclusion, for degrading the real thing, for devaluing the currency. What is at stake in the struggle over taste, then, is the right to define what will count as legitimate culture. It is thus also a struggle over the right to control whose stories, ideas, and beliefs get taught in our schools as our culture's important symbolic possessions. What I 'm arguing finally is that it is a struggle over cultural authority, a struggle over access to power.

As such, at least from the perspective of those who are its targets, the mass culture critique cannot be merely dismissed nor even simply refuted. It must be understood and challenged as the symptom and sign of division and difference in our society. The issue, it seems to me, is not one of how to contain or cordon off the effects of a degraded culture. Nor is it a question of how to accept such differences as the healthy consequence of a pluralist society which can be addressed and met through the market. Rather, what we see in the mass culture critique is a situation produced by cultural privilege, and what we must ask ourselves is whether we wish to be involved in its perpetuation as an exclusive preserve or in its dismantling through extension and transformation.

the book as mass commodity: the audience perspective

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