Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [121]
“Pop won’t admit it,” said Maggie, “but he’s going to lose his shirt. He was low bidder on a job of building a concrete flume across Arroyo Diablo. That’s on the desert, about a hundred miles east of here.”
“Pop’s been low bidder on every job he’s built,” Dugan said. “That’s how contractors get work...”
“The bolts at the corners of the timber collars that locked the forms together sheared in two,” Maggie said.
“That’s important,” Dugan declared. “A bolt that size wouldn’t shear under a pressure of less than 1000 pounds. The timbers would have split first.” [to which Maggie, in love’s eternal duet:] “Only these bolts didn’t get sheared in a materials-testing lab. The real collar bolts were removed and the sheared ones hammered back in place top and bottom.”
After seven thousand words of this, one has learned a good deal about the contracting business and about the tensile qualities of timber bolts but not much about Maggie and Dugan. This is reasonable (if not sensible), since the lovers are only stooges for the timber bolts. Another idyll, “No Room for Love,” turns on the echt-American theme, should a boy marry his girl or his car, and produces yards of dialogue like:
“What do you do when the head bolts are frozen?”
“You tap them easy with a hammer. You don’t want to crack the head. Then you put a long-handled wrench...”
“You got rust on your cylinder block. Face it.”
“For Pete’s sake, listen, will you? Krucek’s got a used ’41 block in there, never been rebored.”
“You got a ’39 car. It’ll mean new pistons, and you got a pitted camshaft.”
Fairness compels me to note that this dialogue is not between the lovers, and also that the car loses out: “For once in his life, Charlie was more interested in a girl than a motor.”
The Triumph of the Fact in modern fiction is, of course, by no means limited either to America or to mass culture. It is one of the things that distinguish the nineteenth-century novel, and is obviously connected with the industrial revolution and the rising prestige of science. Balzac and Zola aspired to nothing less than to re-create, in all their minute factual details, the different occupational and class worlds of their times; the former succeeded better than the latter precisely because he relied on inventive passion rather than scientific method—as Joyce succeeded in Ulysses, for the same reason. Flaubert was an especially interesting case, from this point of view, split as he was between naturalism and symbolism, science and art-for-art’s-sake. In Madame Bovary the conflicting drives are harmonized into a masterpiece, but the synthesis breaks down in Salammbô and Bouvard and Pécuchet. Flaubert could escape the prosaic nineteenth century by turning to ancient Carthage, but the naturalistic technique, which he could not escape, produces a dead, cold, and—in the scenes of battle and torture—even repulsive effect. Bouvard and Pécuchet, which is meant to satirize the bourgeois mania for accumulation and for technical knowledge, becomes itself a monstrous example of the thing he is attacking, because of the author’s own obsession with technique (style) and accumulation (naturalistic detail).
The same strain runs through our own literature. It appears in Poe’s fascination with solving cryptograms and perpetrating hoaxes, his invention of the detective story—the only literary genre whose point is the discovery, by scientific method, of a Fact (whodunit?)—and especially in his preoccupation with technique. His celebrated account, in “The Philosophy of Composition,” of how he wrote The Raven reads like a cookbook:
Holding in view that a poem should be short enough to be read in one session as well as have that degree of excitement which I deem not above the popular, while not below the critical taste, I reached at once what I conceived the proper length for my intended poem—a length of about 100 lines. It is, in fact, 108...Regarding, then, Beauty as my province [he has given a page of reasons] my next question referred to the tone of its highest manifestation