Sherry Chandler

Not North/South, Suburbs/Country but Class?

We get another view of the cultural divide in this “literant” from Shelley Ettinger, guest-editing at Meredith Sue Willis’s Books for Readers:

A few years ago when THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW hired a new editor, Sam Tanenhaus, to much acclaim, I knew things were going to go from bad to worse. The guy’s resumé had highlights like service at the NATIONAL REVIEW, the ultra-reactionary magazine founded by William F. Buckley. And sure enough, he hasn’t disappointed. In fact, last week he made it explicit; in an interview, he spoke of his vision of the NYBTR as a “conservative” literary voice.

You can see it partly in their choice of reviewers, who regularly include right-wing commentators chosen to skewer progressive books, but mostly in their choice of which books they review. The particular trend that I find most interesting is which fiction writers from other countries, in particular the Third World, they champion. With few exceptions, it’s those whose work tells stories that highlight government corruption, inter-group violence, patriarchal excess and so on, without putting these stories in the context of the European colonialism and U.S./European neocolonialism that, as Walter Rodney so memorably phrased it, “underdeveloped” Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Or it’s anticommunist fiction that tells tales of the supposed horrors of People’s China or the USSR or revolutionary Cuba. The irony here, of course, is that it is gospel in the U.S. that good literature cannot be political, when in fact the books that the NYBTR and other such organs champion are for the most part extremely political; it’s just that their politics jibe with those of the U.S. bourgeois class. No surprise there. As Marx long ago pointed out, the culture of any country is determined by its ruling class. In this country, they do their darnedest to mask this, and probably many commentators and critics don’t even realize how thoroughly imbued with bourgeois ideology their work is, but there is a thoroughgoing chokehold in force here perhaps more than anywhere else.

Possibly related posts:

Girl from the North Country

And the winners are — Carter, Vonnegut, and The Widow of the South

The Solid South

In the Country of Men

Country Boys Revisited

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