Finn Harver at Conversational Reading is suggesting that images are trumping words. I don’t think this is quite true, although it’s close (and the idea is certainly well-thought out). The problem, as I see it, isn’t that images trump words–it’s that our images have gotten cruder. There was a great article on the art of the tease in advertising in The Toronto Star a while back that I think gets at the heart of the problem. The article notes, rightly so, that no longer is any cultural competency required to decode advertising’s in-jokes. It is the decline of cultural competency, and not the ascendance of images, that I think is killing writing.
Harver comes pretty close to suggesting this during the critique of highpowered blogs from The Guardian and The Washington Post. Harver says, essentially, that these blogs are inauthentic because “while these latch onto the cool of the blogosphere, they do not partake of its democratic nature. Therefore, you, dear reader, are supposed to visit these sites, but they will not visit you.” These blogs reference cultural competency, just like the “‘blogish’ big-money sites” Harver mentions in the next paragraph. The issue of authenticity aside (it’s a tricky one), sites like these are now doing what the images in regular print advertising used to–making the viewer feel like an insider–and frankly, I see nothing wrong with it. What concerns me is that regular print advertising these days doesn’t require insider status (no matter how manufactured). Back in the day, advertising relied on four principles:
First, the reader was considered an intelligent peer, not an easy-to-titillate sucker. Second, a product benefit had to be offered once the reader’s attention was gained through pulchritudinous means. Next, racy images should combine humour and respect – Springs’ ads objectified men and women, although both retained their dignity. The final principle was the most important: The Tease was the most effective method of leveraging sex in an ad. An inch of stocking top worked far better than a topless woman.
Springs had to fight with illustrators to show less, not more. “What I wanted was a subtle picture of a girl with her skirt agitated by the wind,” writes Springs in a 1948 letter reprinted in Advertising in America. “You send me a picture of a girl with her skirts blown over her head like she was standing over an air jet at Coney Island! It’s about as subtle as the Can Can.”
Obviously, these days are long gone in advertising. The double entendre has given way to the single entendre (think of Victoria’s Secret ads, for example–not much is secret in them, that’s for sure). And so the viewer has to work less to “get it.”
Why do ads matter for literature? Well, we’re all used to “getting it” with a minimum amount of effort (or none at all). So when we turn our attention to something that requires extreme cultural competency, literature, it can be a frustrating experience not to be an insider immediately.
I had the extreme good fortune to be a Fellow (essentially a teaching assistant) for this summer’s Kenyon Review Young Writers program. For one of our workshops, we read Pynchon’s short story “Entropy” (originally published in The Kenyon Review and available in our Best of the Kenyon Review collection). In the story, one of the characters, Callisto, is convinced the world is ending because the thermometer stays at 37 degrees “despite the changeful weather.” Callisto believes that the world is broken–and I figured it had to be the thermometer. Not only did this “aha” moment make the story more satisfying for me to read, it made the story resolve itself into sense.
When I suggested this reading to my students, I saw the “aha” on their faces, too. We had decoded something, a rewarding experience in and of itself. We were now members of the “in” group–just like in the ads Elliott White Springs used to write. But decoding requires effort and background information about the world (in this case, asking onself the question “Is it more likely that the world is broken or that the thermometer is broken?” and perhaps also “How trustworthy do I find Callisto?”). It requires the kind of cultural competency Springs used to use:
In a memo on some rough drafts for his first advertising campaign, Elliott Springs wrote, “I want it to appear as if we were just imitating our competitors, and really trying to sell sheets with cheesecake. A lot of dumb bunnies will then write in and bawl us out for being vulgar and stupid. Then some people will take a second look and catch the burlesque, and be very proud that they’re so smart.” Springs had identified a version of cultural competencies, and the pleasure of being in the know, almost 70 years ago.
But most images these days (see American Apparel, for example, although I wouldn’t suggest it if you’re at work) don’t require this kind of work, and so when it is required of us elsewhere, it seems foreign. Literature–especially classic literature–often requires extreme cultural competency: The Bible at the bare minimum, and often also The Illiad, The Odyssey, The Divine Comedy, and Paradise Lost, among others, which is why they’re required reading for most English majors. The canon isn’t “decided upon” by our professors, it’s decided on by authors–what is referenced most often becomes required reading simply because it’s necessary to decode other works.
The literary canon is like arithmatic–you’ve got to master the basics before you can move on to calculus (or Joyce). But as the need for cultural competency is disappearing elsewhere, the competency required for literature can seem overwhelming in comparison. It’s not the image that’s killing reading–it’s the amount of thought the image requires. Too often that amount is zero.