Page 268 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS AT THE CENTRE 257

own subordination by supplying crucial connections and articulations between the
coercive institutions of civil society and the common-sense intuitions and
assumptions of everyday life. In the chronic instability of mature capitalist
societies it can seem to offer a ‘safe space’, a reassuring refuge from the
bewildering proliferation of institutions that seek to police the deepening crisis.
This is the terrain of the popular media, which should be seen, therefore, neither
as entirely institutional (a ‘cultural ISA’ or ‘culture industry’), since reading,
watching television, going to the cinema—unlike going to work or school—are
‘private’ activities, nor as altogether private, since they are forms of cultural
commodity production, with specific ideological conditions and effects.
If naturalization, the representation of dominant ideologies as a self-evident, if
contradictory, common sense, is the site and raw material of the popular media,
how can this be seen with the necessary specificity in a particular form of
popular literature? First, we have already suggested that in spite—or because—
of its exclusion from the literary-linguistic practices of formal education, popular
fiction has itself an important educative function. The formal coherence and
intelligibility of a popular narrative hangs upon an active assent to certain key
propositions, sometimes implicit, more often standing out of the surrounding
narrative with the gnomic assurance of common sense itself:

Money, titles, possessions—what did they matter in reality? What mattered
was if a man and a woman could come together in love and know that the
emotions they felt for each other were part of the Divine pattern of
creation. 90

But, as this implies, popular fiction is also a form, and and its effectiveness
depends less upon such direct ‘interpellations’ (which accomplish little in
themselves) than upon the negotiations and resolutions of narrative functions,
which in turn derive their meaning from their power to articulate connotations of
an already familiar common sense. An adequately full analysis of even a single
text would need to be more extended than we can attempt here. In any case, it is
decidedly not our purpose to offer yet another ‘method’ for analysing texts. But
unless the formal distinctiveness of popular fiction is recognized as a specific
practice of writing and reading the texts will continue to dissolve into the
ideologies that constitute them.
The hero of Barbara Cartland’s Blue Heather returns to his ancestral home in
the Highlands to find it already occupied by strangers: a young woman and her
nephew and niece. He seeks the advice of his cousin, an eccentric duke who has
recently achieved his lifelong ambition of breeding a strain of blue heather. The
young woman claims the hero’s home and his family title as the rightful
inheritance of her nephew. While the claim is being investigated, the heather
disappears. The ensuing search throws the hero and the young woman together,
and their realization that they love one another, which coincides with the
recovery of the heather and the satisfactory resolution of the inheritance, enables