John Carey was born 5 April 1934 and is a British literary critic, and emeritus Merton Proffesor of English Literature at the University of Oxford . He was born in Barnes, London, and educated at Richmond and East Sheen Boys’ Grammar School, winning an Open Scholarship to St Johns College, Oxford. He served in the East Surrey Regiment, 1952-1954, and was commissioned. After posts in a number of Oxford colleges, he became Merton Professor in 1975, retiring in 2001.
He has twice chaired the Booker Prize committee, in 1982 and 2004, and chaired the judging panel for the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005. He is chief book reviewer for the London Sunday Times and appears in radio and TV programmes such as Saturday Review and Newsnight Review.
The sub-title of his book, Intellectuals among the masses is: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939.The book comes in two parts. The first part contains various ‘themes’ and the second offers case studies of several writers.It seems that Carey doesn’t have much time for the literary intelligentsia and comes across that he despises large numbers of them.
The general thesis of the book is that the (largely self-anointed) intellectual classes were deeply shaken by nineteenth-century social developments. Although Carey doesnt mention the French Revolution of 1789 it is possible that the event was deeply disturbing to all those in Europe who held positions of influence, power, and wealth.
What the French Revolution demonstrated was that you weren’t necessarily safe even if you were a King. You could still end up in prison, or with your head chopped off.As the nineteenth century moved on, the ruling classes (from whom intellectuals were exclusively drawn in those days) began to be aware that the masses were rapidly growing in power and influence and also being taught to read! This led to a widespread and deep-seated fear of the masses through the intelligentsia.
As far as literature is concerned, Carey argues that, in the face of this much enlarged reading public, the response of the intellectuals was to create new forms of work which were deliberately exclusive. The whole point (conscious or unconscious) of modernist literature was to exclude the ordinary people. It was to create a class of writers and readers who could feel comfortably superior to the masses, because only they – the new intelligentsia – were clever enough to understand the new literature, and to be aware that there were still people like themselves – people who were so infinitely superior, in every way, to the great unwashed masses who revelled in sordid crime stories and slushy romances.
Ortega y Gasset, for example, in The Dehumanization of Art, argued that it was the essential function of modern art to divide the public into two classes – those who can understand it and those who cannot. The intellectuals could not prevent the masses from learning to read. But they could prevent them reading certain types of literature by making it too difficult; and this they did.
Carey reveals that intellectuals such as Nietzsche and Ortega y Gasset were quite nasty people. ‘I believe,’ said Nietzsche, ‘that the mob, the mass, the herd, will always be despicable.’ The immense popularity of Nietzsche’s ideas, Carey tells us, is indicative of the sheer panic that the threat of the masses induced.F.R. Leavis declared that the mass media arouse ‘the cheapest emotional responses. Films, newspapers, publicity in all forms, commercially-catered fiction – all offer satisfaction at the lowest level.’The fear of the masses also acted as the cover for an equally nasty attitude among the intelligentsia, and that was the fear of women. Popular newspapers were hated and despised because they encouraged women to better themselves. A whole array of intellectuals are revealed by Carey not merely to be snobs and fuzzy thinkers, but possessed of singularly unattractive opinions based on nothing more than prejudice, stupidity and fear for their life style.
Carey shocks the readers when he relates that some of the intelligentsia in the early twentieth century anticipated Hitler in favouring the extermination of the old, the sick, and the suffering. Lawrence was among them. ‘If I had my way,’ he said in a letter of 1908, ‘I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace.’
The literary intelligentsia created a class of literature which was impossible for the average reader to understand. But it probably didnt provide much pleasure for the elite, except that it allowed them to demonstrate, to their own satisfaction at least, that they were infinitely superior in every way to the masses. That is the price you have to pay for being allowed to feel superior; you don’t actually enjoy anything very much.All these attitudes were reflected in the book.
The principal aim of all this, says Carey, was ‘to acquire the control over the mass that language gives.’ After all, if the masses exercised power, they would probably start spreading out wealth more equally. Democratic government, thought Thomas Hardy, would lead to ‘the utter ruin of art and literature.’The masses were feared because it was thought that they would behave like crowds: i.e. they would be ‘extremely suggestible, impulsive, irrational, exaggeratedly emotional, inconstant, irritable and capable only of thinking in images – in short, just like women.’ The process of civilising women was considered by the intellectuals to be one of extreme difficulty.
Every development which favoured the middle or working classes in England was viewed with deep suspicion if not outright hostility. Suburban growth, with improved new housing, was decried for ruining the countryside. Cyril Connolly considered suburbs worse than slums.Carey shows that in the period covered by his book, 1880-1939, English intellectuals (in particular) were an unpleasant, snobbish group. Terrified that they might lose all their privileges, they objected on the one hand to anything which might be called progress, while on the other hand they busily reinforced their own all too fallible self esteem through the creation of ‘superior art’ which the masses could not understand.The trend continues to this day.
After the general introduction of part one, part two of Carey’s book provides several case studies. He deals with George Gissing, H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and Wyndham Lewis, particularly the latter’s connection with Hitler.Gissing, though now forgotten, ‘was the earliest English writer to formulate the intellectuals’ case against mass culture, and he formulated it so thoroughly that nothing essential has been added to it since.’ Gissing, incidentally, was a charming fellow whose sexual appetites required women who were his intellectual and social inferior, and he could only get it up by humiliating and punishing them. He claimed to have beaten both his wives with stair rods.
H.G. Wells views are also unattractive from our perspective. What will we do with the black and the brown races, he wondered, since they are so obviously inferior to us in intelligence and initiative, and there are so many of them. He became obsessed with reducing the world’s population.
Arnold Bennett is included by Carey because the author views him as a hero. ‘His writings represent a systematic dismemberment of the intellectuals’ case against the masses.’ But Bennett was despised by the intelligentsia because he made money from literature. Intellectuals, Bennett believed he should write to appeal to a wider audience, and he did not see why a book which the masses liked should automatically be thought of as trash. Between the popular and the highbrow reader there was, he argued, no essential difference. Neither is there: in fiction both seek emotion; in non-fiction both seek information.
Wyndham Lewis wrote several books in the 1930s, all of which were enthusiastic about the German Fuhrer. Contempt for women was perhaps the key to Lewis’s character. ‘Stay to dinner,’ he asked a friend. ‘I’ve a wife downstairs. A simple woman, but a good cook.’Wyndham Lewis suggested that Whiteness ‘is in a pigmentary sense aristocratic’, and is the proper colour for a gentleman. As far as Hitler himself is concerned, Carey tells us that ‘the tragedy of Mein Kampf is that it was not, in many respects, a deviant work but one firmly rooted in European intellectual orthodoxy.’
Carey ends his survey at 1939, but he reminds us that the old intellectual prejudices have not died out yet. The ever-expanding mass media have ‘driven the intellectuals to evolve an anti-popular cultural mode that can reprocess all existing culture and take it out of the reach of the majority.’ This mode is variously called ‘post-structuralism’, or ‘deconstruction’, or just plain ‘theory’, and it began in the 1960s with the work of Jacques Derrida. It has managed, says Carey, to evolve a language that is impenetrable to most native English-speakers.
Carey has summed up all the modern apparatus of criticism and reviewing very neatly. Every department of Literature in every university and college in the world takes the line that there is a form of ‘serious literary fiction’ which is inherently superior to popular or commercial fiction. But there are no sound arguments or research data which demonstrate this. There is no evidence for seeing the world of fiction as a hierarchy.
Much of Carey's vitriol has been deployed, over the years, against snobbery and intellectual pretension. His championing of conventional values against those of the intellectual and social elite, a recurrent theme of his journalism in the 70s and 80s, found its fullest expression in his book The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992).
When it was published, The Intellectuals and the Masses was criticised for going too far in eliding British intellectuals' snobberies with fascist ideology, as if modernism taken to its logical conclusion would automatically lead to Nazism.. The idea that some people should be regarded as more valuable than others - or that culture should be divided into high and low, or society into upper and lower classes - clearly causes Carey almost physical pain. "I think the distribution of wealth is disgusting," he says. On the one hand, he passionately believes in the moral equality of all, and thinks everyone should have a chance to prove themselves regardless of background. But perhaps, at some level, his onslaught against elitism also reflects an irrational guilt about the fact that he and his successful sisters - one became a headmistress, the other a senior manager at Barclays - were born with greater life-chances than their brother.
Sources
John Carey: The Intellectuals and the Masses
http://www.wikipedia.com/
http://www.grumpyoldbookman.blogspot.com/
www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/jun/.../art.oxforduniversity
www.faber.co.uk/work/intellectuals-and-masses/978057/1169269/
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