Frye and Hoggart on Film and TV by Brian Graham 1

Hamilton Arts & Letters Generally, Northrop Frye and Richard Hoggart do not occupy the position of openness to mass culture associated with postmodernism or a major critic such as Lesley Fiedler. But, moving away from cultural elitism towards cultural openness, they occupy a place well beyond the Leavises or Adorno and Horkheimer, or Dwight McDonald for that matter.         In their writings, Hoggart and Frye distinguish between popular culture and mass culture, and both register a clear preference for popular culture. Hoggart is famous for defending popular culture while critiquing mass culture. His The Uses of Literacy laments the mass culture sold to working class people in the late fifties in the United Kingdom, demanding more for working class communities like the one he grew up in in Leeds. If much discourse about the levels of culture conflates popular culture and mass culture, Hoggart, like Frye, distinguishes between the two. In The Way We Live Now, Hoggart states: ‘Mass culture is machine tooled, popular culture can be spontaneous; mass culture is processed, popular culture is live; mass culture is evasive, popular culture is honest; mass culture is conventional, popular culture is challenging; mass culture is falsely resolving, popular culture is exploratory; mass culture is stereotyped, popular culture is straight’ (Hoggart 1996, 102). Similarly, Frye is ready to speak (quite damningly) of mass culture in the same breath as propaganda and advertising (Frye 2003, 33).1 In contrast to this, popular culture, in his view, is ‘good’ in toto. Popular literature is:  [  >>>>>  FORWARD ]    1 Frye posits a brand of realism for the combination of advertising, propaganda and aesthetically-limited mass culture: ‘stupid realism’ (Frye 2003, 33).  For Frye, ‘revolutionary or prophetic realism […] tears apart the façade of society and shows us the forces working behind that façade’ (Ibid.). ‘Stupid realism,’ in contrast to this, is ‘a kind of sentimental idealism, an attempt to present a conventionally attractive or impressive appearance as an actual or attainable reality’ (Ibid.).We find stupid realism ‘in the vacuous pretty-girl faces of advertising, in the clean-limbed athletes of propaganda magazines, in the haughty narcissism of shop-window mannequins, in the heroically transcended woes of soap-opera heroines, in eulogistic accounts of the lives of celebrities, usually those in entertainment, in the creation by Madison Avenue of a wise and kindly father-figure out of some political stooge, and so on’ (Ibid.). The anti-arts have an aural aspect too. Rhetoric is to the ear what stupid realism is to the eye, ‘the surrounding of an advertised object with emotional and imaginative intensity, the earnest, persuasive voice of the radio commercial, the torrent of prefabricated phrases and clichés in political oratory’ (Frye 2003, 36). Frye’s conception of ‘stupid realism’ is very close to Kundera’s notion of ‘kitsch’. ‘There is kitsch attitude’, writes Kundera. ‘Kitsch behaviour. The kitsch-man’s (Kitschmensch) need for kitsch: it is the need to gaze into the mirror of the beautifying lie and be moved to tears of gratification at one’s own reflection’ (Kundera 1995, 135).   Share [Distillate © HA&L + Brian Graham {from the Greek bios} -- the course of a life.] [This article is sponsored by the Hamilton Public Library, acknowledged with thanks by the Editors and Samizdat Press.]