The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [43]
An enthusiastic front-page review in the weekend arts section of The New York Times (A SUPERHERO IN A PRISM, ANTIHEROES IN DEEP FOCUS) spoke glowingly of three new graphic novels that “display the ambition behind an evolving format,” and was accompanied by extensive illustrations.8 Wertham had considered the popularity of the comic book a sign of the loss of interest in reading. He quoted a publisher who, asked about the spread of the comic style to regular publications, answered, “We are retooling for illiteracy,” then said flatly, “Comic books are death on reading.”9 He was speaking of children’s reading habits. But in a more visual age, and with extraordinary graphics, the comic book has come of age.
As for the term well-made play, who uses it today as a term of praise? Yet in the nineteenth century, the well-made play was an extraordinarily successful mode of tight construction, developed by the French dramatists Eugène Scribe and Victorien Sardou, influencing even those who professed to scorn it. In Scribe’s typical formula, a plot complication—like letters or documents coming suddenly to light or to hand—brings about a reversal of fortune, sometimes revealing a major character to be a fraud or impostor, which in turn leads to a denouement in which there is at least a semblance of return to order. Dismissed by George Bernard Shaw as “sardoodleism” or “sardoodledom,” a contrived plot structure with stereotyped characters, the well-made play (pièce bien faite) nonetheless had its effect upon Shaw’s plays, as well as those of Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, and other dramatists. (Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest is a deliberate send-up of the genre that profits both from following and from exploding its by then familiar conventions.) Many of these responses to the well-made play are enrolled in the canons of literature, but the genre, though dutifully taught in courses on the history of the drama, has pretty much disappeared from view. By contrast, this genre’s near historical neighbor, melodrama, has enjoyed a recent revival, spurred by film studies but extending back into studies of the Victorian stage and emerging side by side with the sensation novel as an area of intense interest for scholars, audiences, and readers. Sweeney Todd, The Woman in White, Lady Audley’s Secret—none of these was literature when first written, published, or performed. All are now regularly taught in college and university courses, and feature centrally in well-regarded scholarly books.
While melodramatic retains its negative force as an adjective, courses in Hollywood melodrama, American melodrama, melodrama and modernity, melodrama and race, etc., attract both students and teachers. (One indicative text would be Uncle Tom’s Cabin, an instant best seller when it was published in 1852, having first appeared in serial form in an abolitionist magazine.)
Recent years have witnessed the migration of things that once weren’t considered literature into the privileged fold, ranging from essays (Montaigne, Bacon, Addison and Steele, Barthes, Sontag) to what was once called intellectual prose (philosophy, politics, economics, via—for example—Francis Bacon again, or John Milton, or Edmund Burke) to the graphic novel (scion of the humble comic book). This period has seen the emigration of things that once were literature into the discard pile, which has been the fate of not only the well-made play, but also of the