Carrol wrote
>``I simply don't believe these lists of great or near-great books that
>supposedly had determining influnce on the poster....
>
I'm left to infer why Carrol does not think that great books actually
affect people. He was of the New Criticism generation, when college
students, asked to distinguish unknown passages from great poets, from
those of lesser poets, could not. He might think that ascribing
influence to the greats is simply a form of unacknowledged elitism
through an identification with the greats. Or perhaps, he just thinks
we're lying in order to play an intellectual parlor game. I don't know.
I just want to point out that the distinction he draws between high art and low art is relatively new. When Bach and Mozart were erecting cathedrals of sound upon the scaffolding of folk tunes, dances, and lullabies, there was still a distinction between the product of their art and that which the slowly evolving traditional forms handed to them, but there was no contradiction. You can still hear the music of the people, as it were, in classical music up to the beginning of the 20th century when Bartok and Enesco could still build upon that scaffold. What changed was the introduction of commercial culture, which displaced the organic social production of art into the realm of commodity creation. Yes, there were still the Irving Berlins and Cole Porters and Bob Dylans, but the commodification of their work and the market demand for diversity, obsolescence, and rapid change could not produce that slow, ample distillate that begins with a tale told by the fire and ends with the Iliad; that begins with a country dance and ends with a Bach gavotte.
This is why popular art is perceived as a vapid anodyne, entertainment becomes synonymous with mindlessness, and one can no longer perceive a connection between the stories one loved as a youth and the classical art one appreciates when older. Our innocent and mature pleasures are divorced. We do not start with Elvis and end with Mahler. Perhaps we can understand Horace's definition of great art as that which is simple enough to draw children from play, and deep enough to draw old men from their corner by the chimney, but we do not see how it applies to our lives. We can no longer distinguish the simple from the mindless.
I began my reading with folk tales and fairy tales, then Jules Verne and Alexandre Dumas, then a long spate of science fiction as an adolescent, and then a conscious and reflective sejourn with those writers who aim for more than just entertainment...which continues to this day. In my childhood, like Chuck, I was surrounded by artists. My mother was a writer and her friends were writers and poets and playwrights. There wasn't anything exalted about it, but certainly conversation was lively and the language was broad and deep and playful and precise in a way that affected me for the rest of my life. But that wasn't it. None of it compared to the stories habitually told by a friend of the family's who was a black garage mechanic with no more than a high-school education, which left me almost dizzy with wonder and which, in this age of divided sensibility, will have died with him.
But the issue is not whether we are influenced by exalted or unexalted art. The issue is whether it is possible to bring the sensibility and attention of an artist to our lives -- rather than to use art as an escape or a pedigree.
Joanna