Page 151 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

POSTMODERNISM

Metaphysical poetry. Truly popular pre-modern cultures have been
essentially non-literate folk cultures, and the record we have of them
is often both imprecise and patchy. That they were significantly
differentiated from contemporaneous élite cultures nonetheless seems
almost certain to have been the case.
We can be rather more definite about élite culture. In pre-modern
Europe, such cultures were overwhelmingly defined, constructed and
regulated either by the church or by the court. If the former had a
popular dimension, the latter by and large did not. And even then,
popular Catholicism was very often distinctly heretical and normally
distinctly heterogeneous: it was never a part of the seamless web of
some ideal Christian social organism.
The new more fully modern cultures of the 18th and 19th centuries—
or at least what was distinctively modern about them—were
quintessentially “bourgeois” in form: democratic, realistic, and prosaic.
The exemplary instance here is that of the rise of the realist novel. 39
Formally democratic though the realist novel may have been, it was
not, however, in any sense a truly popular literary form: in the 18th
century, the “price of a novel…would feed a family for a week or
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two”. Throughout the 18th century, and across Europe, print runs
were generally still well below 2,000; by way of contrast, Orwell’s
41
1984 sold 360,000 copies in the United States and 50,000 in Britain
during its first year of publication. 42
It is only in the late 19th century, in fact, that we are able to observe
the more or less simultaneous emergence of both a new modernist
high culture and a new mass popular culture. The new modernism
was characterized above all by its aesthetic self-consciousness, by a
formalist experimentalism that recurred in painting and drama, poetry
and music, the novel and sculpture; the new mass culture by the rapid
development of a whole range of technically novel cultural forms
each of which was in principle almost universally available (yellow
journalism, penny dreadful and later paperback fiction, radio, cinema,
and so on). Whenever we date the beginnings of modernism, whether
from 1890, as does one standard academic text, or from December
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44
1910, as rather more interestingly did Virginia Woolf, there can be
no doubt that high modernism and mass culture are indeed
contemporaneous. However we may characterize the cultural avant-
garde, whether as integral to high modernism, as do Bradbury and
45
McFarlane, or as internally opposed to it, as does Peter Burger, 46

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