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The Art of Collaboration in Popular Culture
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10445 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1993 |
4,704 Words |
| Author
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M. Thomas Inge
M. Thomas Inge is Robert Emory Blackwell Professor of the
Humanities at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia. He
is editor of Truman Capote: Conversations and Comics as
Culture, both published by the University Press of Mississippi. |
Individualism has often been noted by cultural historians as one of the salient features of the American character. From before Frederick Jackson Turner's celebration of individualism as a product of the frontier experience in his influential address of 1893 down to the lone figures of the film screen such as John Wayne, Dirty Harry, and the Batman of 1992, Americans have praised the solitary individuals willing to strike out on their own, take the law into their own hands, rise above the common crowd, and chart a unique path for themselves. True creativity and innovation are the products of those gifted individuals who break the pattern of tradition and the commonplace to lead us into new directions of enlightenment and achievement--or so goes this line of thought. Thus collaboration, group creation, or mass production are likely to result in the ordinary, unexceptional, and unimaginative. Who wants an assembly-line product when you can have a handmade one? Why settle for Taster's Choice when you can grind your own coffee beans at home?
In the areas of art and literature, these ideas have connected with the concept of the creator as prophet and conduit of divine inspiration and led to the veneration of the alienated and misunderstood artist who refuses to barter his talent for the vulgar taste of the ordinary populace and the demeaning demands of the capitalistic marketplace. Herman Melville has often been cited as a case in point.
Traditionally Melville has been seen as a writer "damned by dollars" and the economic necessity of earning a living, who because of his individual genius and talent was unable to adapt to the prevailing patterns of popular fiction in his day, and who was rejected by his reader because he refused in Moby Dick, Pierre, and other works to compromise by writing down to his mass audience. He has been the darling of the highbrow literary establishment because he demonstrates the fate of the artist unwilling to sacrifice his integrity for popularity. However forthcoming research demonstrates that Melville was actually drawing directly on existing popular narrative forms, intended to address himself to a wide readership, and was himself very much a part of mainstream antebellum popular culture. Melville collaborated with his cultural and economic world, in other words, out of intention as well as necessity.
The truth is that most of the culture of this century, probably since the industrial revolution has largely been the product of the art of collaboration rather than the art of the individual. Ever since movable type was developed, another individual has stood between the writer and the reader the
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