6—
Sociology of Literature in Retrospect

By Leo Lowenthal

For more than a half century I have primarily concerned myself with the sociology of literature and the problem of mass culture. With financial support from the Institute of Social Research at the University of Frankfurt, I began in 1926 with studies on German writers in the nineteenth century.^[1] Discernible in these studies is the socially critical spirit that motivated this group of then still young scholars to reject conventional research methods and to seek a new and bolder mode of analyzing material in the social and human sciences—in short, to dare to break through the walls of the academic ivory tower, where specialists pursued their professional interests without any social or moral consciousness. I had the privilege of being one of the first members of this group, which I

joined in 1926 at the invitation of Max Horkheimer and Friedrich Pollock.

The years of my academic training were devoted to the study of sociology and literature. Later, in my first independent work, I attempted to apply what I had learned from Marx, Freud, and the great philosophical tradition of Europe to a new appraisal of European literature since the Renaissance. Like many other intellectuals in my circles of that time, I was convinced of the decadence of Western society. All of us felt Hitler's threatening advance, and the rest of the so-called civilized world we considered to be impaired. We strove, each according to his own knowledge and inclination, to interpret historical and contemporary problems in such a way as to reveal their socially regressive or progressive character. We rejected the concept of a "value-free science" as an unpardonable renunciation of the moral responsibility of those who, amid the general misery of average people, had the good fortune to lead the life of an intellectual. If some of the formulations in what follows appear partisan or even angry, I offer no apologies. On the contrary, I would be pleased by such accusations. There was reason enough for anger—in the scientific enterprise as well as in public life.

Since my school days I have been attracted to literature, and it is certainly no coincidence that I spent several years as a German teacher at a Gymnasium in Frankfurt before joining the Institute. I suspect that from the outset I tended toward literary criticism, for as a high school student and young teacher I had experienced the utterly banal approach to the teaching of literature practiced by most instructors and supported by the officially approved textbooks. More than anything, however, I was irritated by the utterly conventional choice of literary texts. Because I lived through the years after World War I as a politically rebellious, if not out-and-out revolutionary, young man, it seemed to me quite natural to apply the practical experience gained in school and in politics to my theoretical endeavors within the academy.

I soon discovered that I was quite isolated in my attempts to

pursue the sociology of literature. In any case, it was almost impossible to find allies in approaching this task from the perspective of a critical theory of society. To be sure, there were Franz Mehring's articles, which I read with interest and profit; but despite the admirable decency and the uncompromising political radicalism of the author, his writings hardly went beyond the limits of a socialist journalist writing in essentially the same style about literature as about politics and the economy. Georg Lukács hadn't yet published his impressive series of essays on Marxist aesthetics and literary interpretation. Of course, I was deeply touched and influenced by his fine little book The Theory of the Novel (1920), which I learned practically by heart. Besides Levin Schücking's small volume on the sociology of literary taste, the only other major influence I can recall was Georg Brandes's monumental work on the literary currents of the nineteenth century.

Nonetheless, I had the courage, or even the hubris, to plan an ambitious, socially critical series on French, English, Spanish, and German literature, the beginning of which was to consist of the above-mentioned studies. My attention was especially focused on the writers and literary schools that the German literary establishment either punished by total silence ("Young Germany" and Friedrich Spielhagen, for example), raised up into the clouds of idealistic babble (Goethe and the Romantics), or relegated to quasi-folkloric anthropology (C. F. Meyer and Gottfried Keller).

In these studies, I limited myself to the narrative forms of literature; for reasons I hold to be sociologically and artistically valid, I believe that novels and stories represent the most significant aspect of German literature in the nineteenth century. While I am in no way ashamed of these documents of my youth, I am conscious of their weaknesses. If I were to write them over again, I would certainly be less sure of some of the direct connections I drew between literature and writers on the one hand, and between literature and the social infrastructure on the other. In later publications I attempted to analyze with greater circumspection the mediation

between substructure and superstructure, between social currents and ideologies; but my views on the social world and the necessity to combine social theory and literary analysis have not changed in any essential way. In the last decades the sociology of literature has become progressively more fashionable. The writings of my contemporaries have often amazed me because some—frequently in unnecessarily complicated and esoteric language—are so concerned with "mediation" that the connections between social being and social consciousness become almost obscured.

I

The first issue of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforchung —the only one we managed to publish in Germany before the Hitler-night descended—gives an indication of what Critical Theory means: namely, a perspective, based on a shared critical fundamental attitude, that applies to all cultural phenomena without ever claiming to be a system. It includes critical analysis of philosophy, economics, psychology, music, and literature.

Critical Theory—a term, by the way, that we began to use only in the late thirties—should not, then, be understood as anything more than this collective "common denominator." As the only survivor of the founding years in the twenties, I feel almost ill at ease. . . . Why should I survive and not the others, who in 1926 invited me to join an intellectual alliance they had created in an institutionalized form two years earlier? We did not speak of "Critical Theory" at that time, and the thought of a "school" was certainly far from us. We were and remained "Nay-sayers," in the tradition of Hegel's particular form of negation; each one of us tried to express what was wrong in his particular field and, therefore, in our society. We were consciously on the periphery of established power. Even now, as you will see, this position on the periphery, this marginality, remains for me in my work, and perhaps even in

my own perception of life, the most important category. What I have tried to do in the last fifty years is guided by my unbroken commitment to the European literary heritage and simultaneously to the critique of the production of commodities and words for a manipulated and manipulable mass market. I shall now try to sketch my critical approach.

II

First, the most important thing to stress is that art and consumer goods must be held strictly apart. I cannot accept any of the current radical attempts, either in Germany or in the United States, to do away with this distinction. To be sure, the consumption of high art can also turn into mass culture and play its part in manipulating society. I need only remind you of Wagner's role during the Hitler years, about which Adorno has written extensively. More peculiar examples are found in the history of theater direction, for example, when bourgeois common sense trivializes the socially inherent tragedy of marriage and love. Here I am thinking of an eighteenth-century English production of Othello in which the Moor does not kill Desdemona in the final scene but rather realizes his own mistake and asks her forgiveness so that they can be eternally happy on earth; or, for another example, when in a turn-of-the-century staging of Ibsen's Doll's House in Munich, Nora, at the end of the play, closes the door not from the outside but from within and returns to her boring husband—for, after all, a woman's place is in the home. These are certainly examples that reflect the social climate. In contrast, certain materials, originally produced as articles of consumption, can sometimes—if seldom—pass into the realm of folk art, or rather of folkloric mythology. But those are borderline cases. And I must not neglect to point out certain differences between the American and the European scene. In the United States the sociology of literature is more or less limited to content analysis and the

study of the effects of mass culture, with particular emphasis on commercial and political propaganda. The model used in these studies is behavioristic, that is, unhistorical; sociology of literature in the sense of an analysis of art remains suspect. I sense today in Europe an inclination to perceive a work of art merely as a manifestation of ideology, which strips it of its specific integrity, that is, its historically conditioned, but also rationally creative and cognitive, role. To put it in a more provocative form: Marxist literary criticism is not merely totally adequate, it is indispensable in the analysis of mass culture. It must, however, be applied with utter caution to art itself and must, as a critique of social illusions, limit itself to the residues that are unequivocally ideological in nature.

To put it in even stronger terms: art teaches, and mass culture is learned; therefore, a sociological analysis of art must be cautious, supplementary, and selective, whereas a sociological analysis of mass culture must be all-inclusive, for its products are nothing more than the phenomena and symptoms of the process of the individual's self-resignation in a wholly administered society.

III

I would like to speak first of the sociology of literature as art. Adorno once said, "Works of art . . . have their greatness only insofar as they let speak what ideology conceals. They transcend, whether they want to or not, false consciousness." Literature is not ideology. We are not engaged in research on ideology; rather, we have to focus our attention on the special truth, the specifically cognitive aspect, that the literary work imparts. This does not mean "new criticism"; on the contrary, it implies studying the social history of art and its reception, as suggested in Marx's comments on Greek tragedy and the novels of Balzac. At this point I would like to identify the great themes of literature as I perceive them from a sociologically critical perspective. To begin with the

most general: literature is the only dependable source for human consciousness and self-consciousness, for the individual's relationship to the world as experience. The process of socialization—that is, the social ambience of the private, the intimate, and the individual—is raised to consciousness by the artist, not only for his time but also for our time, and thereby functions as a constant corrective to our false consciousness. Awareness of this aspect of art has come to be an important issue on the intellectual agenda only in the past fifty years, when the Western world entered into a severe crisis with the rise of totalitarianism. The sociology of art is indeed one of Minerva's owls. The sociology of literature, rightly understood, should interpret what seems furthest removed from society as the most valid key to understanding society, especially its defects. Psychoanalysis, by the way, in revealing the social dimension of the most intimate aspects of body and psyche, is a good model for what I am attempting to express. Of particular importance to me is the role of a critical sociology of literature in the analysis of the social ambience of the intimate and the private, the revealing of the sociological determination of such phenomena as love, friendship, the human being's relationship to nature, self-image, and the like. This approach does not mean reductionism, however. Literature is no mere site to be plundered. I reject all attempts to regard literature as a tool for learning facts about such institutions as the economy, the state, and the legal system. Social scientists and social historians should be forbidden from regarding literature as a source for raw materials. Literature teaches us to understand the success or failure of the socialization of individuals in concrete historical moments and situations. The novels of Stendhal, for instance—in particular, Lucien Leuwen —would be a perfect source for studying the transitions of forms of experience from a feudal to an aristocratic to a bourgeois type of individual.

If what I have said thus far seems too formalistic, let me assure you that a critical perspective is absolutely necessary. When I speak of the history of the individual's socialization, I also speak of the

history of his sufferings, and of his passions. The literature I am familiar with, that of Western Europe since 1600, is the history of human passion in our everpresent crisis, the long-endured story of tension, promises, betrayal, and death. The literature of bourgeois society makes the permanent crisis of the individual apparent. A criterion of literature as art demands assessing whether and to what extent the crisis is manifested as being permanent. And thus we enter the precarious realm of the fringe, or marginality.

The most extreme form of the marginal existence, that is, the conscious or unconscious critique of society, is expressed in the emphatic utterances of those characters who know humanity's death sentence to be already sealed before we enter the so-called fullness of social life. Stendhal has one figure, with whom he identifies, say somewhere in The Charterhouse of Parma : "I can see nothing other than a death sentence which characterizes a real human being. . . . Everything else can be bought." And a half century later, Walter Pater assures us in his The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry :

Well, we are all condamnés , as Victor Hugo says: we are all under a sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve—les hommes sont tous condamnés à mort avec des sursis indéfinis: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among "the children of this world," in art and song.^[2]

This means, in the language of a neo-Romantic, that art alone communicates what is truly good in human life and experience; it is a promise of happiness that remains unfulfilled.

Here I come to the most significant aspect of marginality, namely, the sociology of the artist himself. He has a skewed view of

the world. By looking at the world obliquely, he sees it correctly, for it is indeed distorted. The artists is no Cartesian but rather a dialectician focusing on the idiosyncratic, on that which does not fit into the system. In short, he is concerned with human costs and thus becomes an ally of Critical Theory, of the critical perspective that is itself a part of critical praxis.

The marginal in the work of art is represented by groups, situations, and protagonists.

First, from the perspective of Critical Theory, the literary artist becomes our ally as the spokesman for the collective of outcasts , of the poor, the beggars, the criminals, the insane, in short, of all those who bear the burden of society. Here, however, the true dialectic of art is immediately apparent, making it meaningless to interpret it, in the sense of Adorno's remark cited above, as mere ideology. In the writer's representation—which comes nearer to reality than unmediated reality itself—the collectivity of those excluded from profits and privileges is shown to be the true first nature of humankind. In the collectivity of misery, the possibility of true humanity is revealed not as distortion, but as an immanent indictment. It is a dialectical irony that those who least correspond to a trivial bourgeois-ideological concept of the individual bear the mark of liberated, autonomous humaneness.

Here I may perhaps refer to my analysis of the works of Cervantes as an example of social groups on the periphery:

There are two, not mutually exclusive, ways of looking at the marginal figures of Cervantes; they are the refuse of a society that has cast them aside, and they are, by virtue of their own right, moralists. . . .

All these marginal creatures, the beggars, the crooks, the gypsies, the insane, constitute "overheads" of society, to which they are either unwilling to belong or from which they are forcibly excluded. But while they are accused, indicted, and confined, they themselves in turn are accusers. Their very existence denounces a world they never made and

which wants no part of them. The artist, in giving these people a voice, may seek to inspire uneasiness on the part of those who have profited by the prevailing order. The author's voice is the voice of the losers. The other aspect in which the marginal figures may be viewed leads us back to the concept of the utopian. The marginal figures not only serve the negative function of indicting the social order; they also positively demonstrate the true idea of man. They all serve to show the possibilities of Utopia, where everyone has the freedom to be his own deviant case—with the result that the very phenomenon of deviation disappears. The outcast society of robbers and thieves who are plying their trade on the fringes of Seville, and the society of gypsies encamped on the outskirts of Madrid, are grotesque utopian prototypes: everybody works according to his own talents, and everything is shared by everybody. . . .

The meaning of Cervantes' critical idealism is even clearer in The Little Gypsy . . . . The tribal chief says: "We observe inviolably the law of friendship; no one solicits the object of another man's affection; we live free from the bitter curse of jealousy. . . ." Thus at the threshold of the new society Cervantes describes the law by which it operates and confronts it with its professed measure: the autonomous and morally responsible individual. And this responsible and independent man is to be found only at the margin of society, which at once produces and expels him.^[3]

The most extreme case in which a critical perspective attempts to highlight the cognitive character of peripheral groups portrayed by literature is that of woman. Even since the Renaissance, the literary artist has made female protagonists the true revolutionary critics of a defective society. Ibsen once said, "Modern society is not

a human society; it is merely a society of males." However, this disenfranchisement of woman has not only negative but also positive consequences.

Ibsen's men never practice what they preach, and the only principle by which they live—the materialism of personal gain—they never admit. The women, too, are materialistic, but their materialism is clearly of a different nature, and it is, above all, openly articulated. It is a conscious dramatic irony that morality is preached by the egotists, whereas egotism is preached by the moralists.

Second, situation-marginality and group-marginality are very closely related. Significant examples are found in Shakespeare's plays, especially in The Tempest, King Lear , and Timon of Athens , where the characters are driven out into the wilderness of unsocialized nature. Here nature is not perceived as raw material to be abused and exploited by a class society's lust for power—an exploitation that parallels that of the marginal groups of society of which I just spoke. When in these plays nature emphatically appears in the form of the untamed elements, it heralds at the same time a reconciliation of nature and man. Outraged nature forms an alliance with outraged man in order to indict an evil society. In The Tempest this is made very clear, as unmastered nature leads the human being's second nature, his reified and socialized mask, back to his true nature. The marginal situation of absolute poverty (not to be confused with Robinson Crusoe's situation), which initially besets Prospero, Lear, and Timon, eventually turns into a blessing and thus represents the anticipation of utopia. Implicitly or explicitly (and this I can only boldly assert without proof), utopia—the reconciliation of human nature and nature—remains the fundamental theme of authentic literature.

Third, where the protagonist himself appears as a peripheral figure, the synthesis between marginal groups and marginal situations has been reached, or at least anticipated, all the way from Rabelais's Pantagruel to, if you will, Günter Grass's The Tin Drum ,

and into the present—here, the identity of the average person in class society and that of the protagonist are totally incompatible. Don Quixote is symbolic of a critique of bourgeois society, of its manipulated conformism from its late feudal forms around 1600 up to the present day. He is the ahistorical symbol of a genuine historical materialism. In every situation he is insane—that is, he is sane; in every encounter he is irrational—that is, he is rational. He is the only one who is really happy, nearly fulfilled—precisely because he sees society from an oblique critical perspective and "straightens it out" by his fantastic deeds. By converting his critical idealism into practice, he represents the fulfillment of the potential of every individual. Although he is destroyed and finally dies, he still stands for the premonition of what life could be. His fantasies anticipate what remains invisible in this damaged world. To quote Hegel:

We find in Don Quixote a noble nature in whose adventure chivalry goes mad, the substance of such adventures being placed at the center of a stable and well-defined state of things whose external character is copied with exactness from nature. . . . In all the madness of his mind and his enterprise he is a completely consistent soul, or rather his madness lies in this, that he is and remains securely rooted in himself and his enterprise.^[4]

In short, in him, through him, the identity of theory and practice is realized.

Before I turn briefly to the topic of mass culture, I would like, as a transition, to refer once more to Stendhal, who to my mind is the master analyst of the experience of socialization, and who, if in a now dated way, anticipates a social climate in which genuine experience becomes completely overpowered by conformism. And this is indeed the essential characteristic of mass culture. When, in Lu -

cien Leuwen , Lucien can endure the decadent restoration society as little as the juste-milieu of the new bourgeois world, he toys—as does the hero of Wilhelm Meister's Travels —with the idea of emigrating to America. This quotation speaks for itself:

All Lucien's sensations had been so dreary since he came to Nancy that for want of anything better to do, he let this republican epistle absorb his attention. "The best thing to do would be for them all to sail to America. . . . And would I sail with them? I am not quite such an imbecile! . . . I should be bored in America among men who are, it is true, perfectly just and reasonable, but coarse, and who think of nothing but dollars."^[5]

Bordeom is indeed the key word; it is the form of experience in which nineteenth-century artists express the perspective of Critical Theory in relation to the emerging manifestations of modern life.

IV

When I think about my own works on the analysis of mass culture, it is easy for me to appreciate the term "boredom," because this term offers access to the most significant factor: the crippling of imagination that obstructs artistic experience and gives free rein to the forces of manipulation. The extent to which the "administration," or suppression, of the imagination is part of the business of mass culture can be made clear in a few examples. In the United States, as well as in Germany, book clubs are a big business. One enterprise, called "Time Books," offers a "Time Reading Program." For a modest sum, three or four books are delivered each month and, with them, participation in a "planned approach" to

reading, which guarantees that "though your time may be limited, you will be reading widely and profitably . . . many books that are truly timeless in style and significance." The reliability of selection is beyond doubt: "This plan draws its strength from the fact that the editors spent thousands of hours finding the answers to questions that you, too, must have asked yourself many times. . . . It is part of their job to single out the few books that tower over all others." Significance, quality, and relevance of the publications are assured: "In each case, the editors will write special introductions to underline what is unique in the book, what impact it has had or will have, what place it has earned in literature and contemporary thought." In addition, a kind of religious sanction is bestowed upon the wrappings: "The books will be bound in durable, flexible covers similar to those used for binding fine Bibles and Missals."

Another example: the Literary Guild, one of the most successful American book clubs, recently offered inexpensive special editions of Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary , and Dumas's Camille . The advertisement reads about as follows: "These three classical novels, which are now published together in an attractively bound set, tell the story of a trio of tragic and unforgettable ladies who risked their lives for love and thereby lost everything. Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, a woman who gives up her aristocratic society for the cause of an insuperable passion; Dumas's Camille, a lady who makes the highest sacrifice for the man she loves; and Flaubert's Madame Bovary, a tender dreamer whose romantic longing leads to an act of violence." These descriptions illustrate how art is degraded into commodities of mass culture. After all, the triumphs and tragedies in love experienced by Faust's Gretchen or Anna Karenina are not eternally valid statements about the nature of woman; they are, rather, to be seen as specific perceptions about women in certain circumstances. It would not be such an outrageous act of manipulated mass culture if, instead of tossing such books cheaply onto the mass market, the experts were to proclaim that these ladies are all neurotics and

would certainly be better off today after psychoanalytic treatment! In short, the organization and "administration" of the imagination is taken over by agencies of social control, and here reductionism, including that of the behavioral sciences, is a justifiable method, indeed the only appropriate method.

Mass culture reinforces and signals the instructions in the late-capitalist world that promote a false collective. In this sense, I have always regarded my studies as political. Two examples in particular come to mind, which appear to me symptomatic of the shattered bourgeois self-consciousness and the insurmountable impotence that characterized the mood of wide strata of the middle classes. One of the examples is related to literary reception, the other to genre, both of which are closely related.

One of my studies had as its subject the reception of Dostoevsky in Germany at the turn of the century, as documented in a voluminous corpus of books, as well as in articles, journals, and newspapers. It soon became clear to me that the massive reception of Dostoevsky's works was not necessarily a function of their aesthetic quality but rather of deeper social-psychological needs. With the probable exception of Goethe, Dostoevsky was the most written-about literary figure at that time. The analysis of the material revealed that the reception of Dostoevsky's works illuminated significant idiosyncrasies of German society in a time of total crisis: infatuation with the so-called irrationalism of the artist; the alleged mystery in the life of the individual; the wallowing in the "dark regions of the soul," the glorification of criminal behavior—in short, indispensable elements that were later incorporated in the psychological transfiguration of violence by National Socialism.

That studies on reception can have social-political significance was confirmed years later when I took a closer look at the reviews of the writer I had predicted—years before the event—would be a Nazi-sympathizer: Knut Hamsun. A history of the reception of Hamsun's works can reflect the development of political conscious-

ness all the way from liberalism to the slogans of the authoritarian state. Indeed, bourgeois literary criticism was not nearly as surprising as the Social Democratic responses. The observations on Hamsun that appeared in Neue Zeit , the leading theoretical journal of German Social Democracy, reveal as early as the nineties a clear political stance: Hamsun's novels are to be rejected; they do not portray living human beings but rather vague attitudes that have nothing to do with tendencies directed toward positive change.

The volumes of Neue Zeit from the early years of World War I and the immediate postwar years, however, contain glowing descriptions of the same writer who twenty years before had been so unambiguously rejected. What was previously judged as "empty atmosphere" and "mere nervous stimulus" was now perceived as "gripping depictions of life and soul in which the most vivid reality with all its lights and shadows is transposed into the allegory of innermost life." The author who impressed the earlier critics as an "amorous exclamation point in a melancholy easy chair" had now grown to such "solitary greatness" that one might not compare him with others without doing him an injustice; what had in his novels previously been seen as "ephemeral as the atmosphere" suddenly became "a parable of the eternal." After World War I, this hymn of praise was joined by the liberal spokesmen of the bourgeoisie, as well as those of the proletariat that Hamsun so despised. Conventional bourgeois criticism and Neue Zeit criticism both belong to the same constellation: that of political resignation and a susceptibility to ideological seduction within broad social strata in Central Europe.

My studies on genre examined the biographical fashion. I attempted to analyze, in two different societies, popular biographies as an illuminating criterion for significant transformations in political and social structure. The first study was carried out in Germany before 1933. It is difficult today to imagine the flood of popular biographies that inundated Europe and Germany at that time. Already by 1918, the popular biography was the classic example of

German bourgeois escapist literature. Biography is both the continuation and the inversion of the novel. In the bourgeois novel, documentation functions as raw material. In the popular biography, on the contrary, the various kinds of documentation—that huge pageant of fixed data, events, names, letters, and so on—come to take the place of social relationships, which have become the individual's fetters; the individual is, so to speak, nothing more than a typographic element, a column heading that winds its way through the book's plot, a mere excuse to attractively arrange a certain body of material. The heroes of the popular biography have no individual destinies; they are nothing but functions of the historic. Latent relativism, although rarely the manifest credo of this literature, is always present. Conscious cynicism of the masters is completely absent, but what remains is the need to cloak the helplessness of the losers. The aestheticism of the nineties, the fin de siècle , could be called the very epitome of activity when compared to the fatigue and weakness emanating from the writers of popular biographies. In these testimonies to the immortality of mortality, in this maze of superlatives and uniquenesses through which reason can never hope to guide us, the writers are every bit as lost as their readers.

Popular biographies in the United States operated in a different social context. I attempted to show in my work on the triumph of mass idols in several American high-circulation magazines the structural change in the treatment of popular biographies in the period of transition from liberal capitalism to manipulated collectivism. I called it the transition from the idols of production to the idols of consumption. Whereas around the turn of the century the so-called heroes were the representatives of production, at the end of the thirties and the beginning of the forties these "heroes" were increasingly replaced by athletes and entertainers, especially those of the cinema, who appeared to be "newsworthy" because of their private affairs rather than their productive functions. The identification offered to the reader was no longer with entrepreneurial

success but rather with the imitation of consumption. Ultimately, the German and the American phenomena share certain identical characteristics, although in different political contexts. As I put it then:

The distance between what an average individual may do and the forces and powers that determine his/her life and death has become so unbridgeable that identification with normalcy, even with philistine boredom, becomes a readily grasped empire of refuge and escape. It is some comfort for the average person who has been robbed of the Horatio Alger–dream and who despairs of penetrating the thicket of grand strategy in politics and business, to see his heroes as a bunch of guys who like or dislike highballs, cigarets, tomato juice, golf and social gatherings . . . just like he himself. He knows how to converse in this sphere of consumption and here he can make no mistakes. By narrowing his focus of attention he can experience the gratification of being confirmed in his own pleasures and discomforts by participating in the pleasure and discomforts of the great. The large confusing issues in the political and the economic realm and the antagonisms and controversies in the social sphere are all submerged in the experience of being at one with the lofty and powerful in the sphere of consumption.^[6]

V

With the power of a seemingly prophetic insight, Shakespeare, in act 3, scene 2, of Hamlet , suggests the threat to the autonomy of the individual through social manipulation, although he certainly

could not have guessed that finally, nearly four hundred years later, the Guildensterns would defeat the Hamlets.

Hamlet: Will you play upon this pipe?

Guildenstern: My lord, I cannot.

Hamlet: I pray you.

Guildenstern: Believe me, I cannot.

Hamlet: I do beseech you.

Guildenstern: I know no touch of it, my lord.

Hamlet: 'Tis as easy as lying; govern these ventages with your finger and thumb, give it breath with your mouth, and it will discourse most eloquent music. Look you, these are the stops.

Guildenstern: But these cannot I command to any utterance of harmony; I have not the skill.

Hamlet: Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me. You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood! do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me.

Guildenstern represents, if you will, mass culture, which mediates social domination, which tries to force the individual to obedience and plays with him as on a passive, but well-prepared, instrument.

What finally happened is clearly expressed in the words of the American poet, Randall Jarrell, who has the following to say in his book Poetry and the Age:

The poet lives in a world whose newspapers and magazines and books and motion pictures and radio stations and television stations have destroyed, in a great many people, even

the capacity for understanding real poetry, real art of any kind. . . . the average article in our magazines gives any subject whatsoever the same coat of easy, automatic, "human" interest.^[7]

Jarrell contrasts Goethe, who stated, "The author whom a lexicon can keep up with is worth nothing," with Somerset Maugham, who once said, "The finest compliment he ever received was a letter in which one of his readers said: 'I read your novel without having to look up a single word in the dictionary.'" And Jarrell closes with the observation that "popular writing has left nothing to the imagination for so long now that imagination too has begun to atrophy." In short, the wasting away, the end of imagination, is the end of freedom.

I cannot say anything definitive about the possibility of genuine artistic experience in the present day. Although the acquaintance with great art is certainly growing, an acquaintance without genuine experience, rooted in critical openness, only serves to support the system. Acquaintance and experience are mutually exclusive. I am very concerned about the dwindling possibility of the aesthetic experience as experience of freedom in today's world. I can say no more. What I have tried to convey here was perhaps not so much a summary of my work in the sociology of literature as a chapter of a perhaps too presumptuous intellectual autobiography, an autobiography, however, that—and I will not be falsely modest—does not lose sight of the marginality of the field. As an intellectual, one certainly can, and possibly ought to, live on the margins. And for me, sociology of literature has served me in that respect quite adroitly.