I just read The Gift of Death, Jacques Derrida’s late-career foray into deconstructionist theology. Of course, to come out and say that you’ve been reading the famously abstruse French philosopher is a major throwdown. (“Look at my brain!”) It’s also a little embarrassing. What sort of poseur lets it be known that he reads Derrida? In my case, the pretension is compounded by my motivation. I picked up the book because my brother the English professor had just mentioned his own Derrida reading, and I was feeling inadequate. He didn’t mention Derrida on the phone or in person, either, but in the comments section of my snooty comics blog, which is where I have most of my conversations with him these days. And yes, that’s embarrassing, too.
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The binary represented by the Oprah/Franzen fight—literature as mass-media self-help for all vs. literature as self-definition for the few—not only appears in various forms (Miramax Films vs. new wave, novelist Nick Hornby vs. critic Michiko Kakutani) in Bring on the Books for Everybody but structures it. Like his grad students, Collins is good at making fun of both sides of the conflict, but he’s at his best when he does so by reshuffling and complicating its terms. His final, bravura move is to argue that respected contemporary works like Ian McEwan’s Saturday, Diane Johnson’s Le Divorce, and David Lodge’s Author, Author: A Novel belong to a genre he calls lit-lit. According to Collins, lit-lit novels name-drop dead authors obsessively and are built around an epiphany in which one or another character recognizes the transformative power of literature. The Crown Prince of Modernism and Oprah alike turn to fiction not for truth, beauty, or knowledge, but simply to cultivate their own sense of ineffable wonderfulness for appreciating the appreciation of literature.
I don’t scorn Bring on the Books for Everybody. On the contrary, Collins’s analysis of the way literary culture has changed and expanded taught me a lot—I’m even planning to see The Hours on the basis of his thoughtful recommendation. And he’s certainly right that highbrow culture’s long-standing contempt for the proles was and remains a sin. But his wishy-washiness doesn’t expiate that sin. On the contrary, it’s a continuation of the same contempt by other means. If academics like Collins were really down with the rest of us, they’d start throwing some punches.
