The Educated Reader and the Thriller

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 389, 6 December 1946, Page 20

The Educated Reader and the Thriller

A GOOD many of our readers will probably recall having noticed, and having had their interest stimulated by two cable items from Australia several weeks ago-one a brief report of an attack on the thriller type of novel by W. J. Scott, of Wellington, at the international conference of the New Education Fellowship, and the other a reply to his criticism by the "Sydney Morning Herald." We have now secured from Mr. Scott the relevant portion of his address, given in Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide during the conference (which was held in the six Australian state capitals in September and October). It will be noticed that he dealt with some of his critics in the course of his remarks, In general, the speaker was discussing the surrender of the educated to the mass-producer of popular entertainment, and the recent tendency of such people to defend their taste, particularly their taste for the thriller.

HESE are the critical assumptions which I expect you all as educated people to accept: 1. The proper business of literature is and has always been to interpret man to man, to show human nature in action, to illuminate any and every aspect of experience by the power of the creative imagination, and by so doing to nourish the imagination and increase the understanding of the reader. The literature which does this is the only kind that can give him lasting satisfaction, the only kind to which he can return again and againi. 2, This is the literature-sugh of it as is within the range of the boy’s and the girl’s understanding-that the teacher 5

has to-.teach; it is, therefore, the literature that he must himself read and enjoy at his adult level. The teacher has the personal responsibility of maintaining his own taste and enjoyment at the highest pitch possible to him as an adult, and the professional responsibility of developing in those he teaches the best taste and a gern poatbie to them. 4 3. In the branch iF iL avtbatine literature that we call fiction it is the story of men and women in action with its moving and accurate record of their character which is important. The quality of this story determines the quality of the whole book. It does not matter what additional information about this or that a novel may give us; if its

picture of human nature in action is distorted or defective, the quality cannot be good. Now, the question at issue between those who attack and those who defend the thriller, including the brand known as the detective novel, is: What is the literary quality of the thriller as a type of literature? What is the quality of this thriller and of that as books. None of my critics made any serious attempt at a literary defence of the thriller. To say, as the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald and the editor of the Times Literary Supplement before him have said, that leading statesmen and scholars read thrillers unashamedly is not a literary defence, but merely an appeal to authority. It may indicate only that their taste has de-

teriorated. And to say, as the columnist in the Melbourne Herald did, that the fact that Waverley was the bestseller of 1814 and Tarzan of the Apes the best-seller of 1914 merely proves that taste changes and evades the relevant question: What is the quality of the taste? "If I were forced to read either of these best-sellers now," stated the writ of this article, "I should choose Tarzan? for can anyone under 50 assert that best-seller Scott isn’t often tedious today." Note the evasion of the question of whether the taste for Waverley is or is not a better thing than the fagte for Tarzan of the Apes. The Case of Lord Peter Wimsey I have said that the proper business of literature is to interpret man to man, to show human nature in action, and so on. This is something that the de-tective-riovel whether for educated or for uneducated readers is prevented by the conditions of its existence from: doing. For the emphasis in this type of story must be on the kind of plot which keeps the reader guessing, springs dramatic surprises, and ties up the loose ends with a neatness unknown in ordinary life, To this main purpose all (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) else must be subordinated — motives, character, inner conflicts, the clash of codes and ideas, the emotional quality and significance of experience. . . . If a writer becomes more interested in those than in the mathematical formulae of his plot, he then engages in the proper business of literature and ceases to write thrillers. The deficiencies of the genre are well illustrated in the work of Dorothy®Sayers. In her detective novels her main concern was the working out of a carefully constructed plot, in which Lord Peter Wimsey had to identify and capture the criminal. The result was that she could not attend to the proper business of literature, and her characters, especially the incredible Lord Peter, are crude and conventional. When she wished to write about the real experiences of human beings, she found herself obliged to abandon a form of expression so barren as the detective story. (It is not relevant to my purpose to discuss the quality of what she has written in place of it). Occasionally the preoccupation of authors with moral problems-Chester-ton and Graham Greene are examples -does manage to infuse into the frame- work of the detective story and the thriller some of the genuine substance of literature, but the occasions are rare, and the books still do not rank very high. Defence and Attack When we examine the attempts that have been made by educated readers to defend the thriller habit, we come upon some remarkably specious arguments. They are indeed so naively specious that they in themselves provide evidence of the surrender of the educated of which I. have spoken. Let me now examine some of the pleas for the defence. 1. "Turn your back on popular literature (including the ‘thriller) and you turn your back on life." The obvious truth is that most popular literature is fantasy and has no relation to life, In’ one way..this statement of the Herald columns has meaning-that, if we want to know what sort of mental lives many people lead, we should read the books of fantasy they are accustomed to read. But, of course, the educated people who read thrillers and other kinds of popular literature don’t read them for this purpose, but for their own pleasure and excitement. "A healthy mental digestive process," declared the same writer, "can assimilate all these things from street ballads to ‘Whodunits.’ It is dyspepsia which

rejects them." Like many other analogies, this one won’t bear very close examination. A varied diet is not quite the same in books as in food; assimilation by a reader of the ‘Whodunits’ always involves the excitement of identification with fantastic characters, an acceptance of a view of life that most educated people in their cooler moments will readily admit to be false and unreal, and a perhaps more than temporary blinding themselves to the facts of experience. 2. "Good westerns and _ detective stories are intellectual exercises, too, like sonnets, and far more entertaining."’ Such reading, it is true, does provide intellectual exercise of a kind, but in it the mind is being exercised on artificial and simple problems without personal or social significance. But in another way, the exercise means the relaxing. of an educated reader’s usual standards of value, and the acceptance, as I have already said, of a distorted view of life and character. _ 3. "I think that a clever mystery tale trains the mind.’ Of the Archbishop who made this statement, it may fairly be asked: Trains the mind for what? Theology and philosophy? Tolstoy, Milton, Fielding and Eliot? Or more mystery tales? The logical, and clearly the only possible answer is the last. 4. "The intellectual believes in relaxing now and then (to read thrillers). Thereby he strengthens his taste and widens his sympathies." The author of this assertion, made in a Wellington newspaper, is a well-known New Zealand writer. Like the Archbishop, he may fairly be asked to answer the questions: Strengthen his taste for what? Widens his sympathies for whom? It is difficult to see how a taste for good literature can be strengthened by making a willing and habitual response to poorer literature. A reader who samples the thriller, finds it inferior, returns to his» normal higher level may perhaps have his taste for the better books strengthened by the experience, but if he forms the habit of reading thrillers in his moments of relaxation, the only possible result is a strengthening of his taste for thrillers. "Shocking Deterioration" So far as the other part of the assertion is concerned, it is in the highest degree absurd to argue that relaxing to read thrillers can lead to a widening of sympathy for other people, and can make the reader a more understanding and sensitive person. The effect will, of course, be the reverse; for the organised day-dream that the thriller provides must dull and vulgarise feeling; it cannot very well sharpen and discipline it. If it is argued that the reading of this literature of distraction eases the inner tensions of the intellectual and makes him a more comfortable person to live with, there are, I think, two relevent replies to make. First, the fact that he requires such a poor form of literature to give him his compensation release is further proof of his surrender to the mass producer of inferior literature; second, no evidence can be produced to show that the thriller has more power to perform this function than Tom Jones, War and Peace, Put Out More Flags, Howard’s End, or-any other of the many novels that seriously attempt the proper business of literature. To ad‘vance this extraordinarily specious argument is to give further evidence of the educated person’s surrender; it reveals a shocking deterioration not only of taste but of the reason as well,