Everyday Canvas

Works of Pop Culture Becoming Classics

Prompt: Jodi Picoult says about Shakespeare: “Here’s what I love about Shakespeare: In his day, he wrote unadulterated popular fiction. And yet—who do we still read, centuries later? What a brilliant reminder that highbrow literature wasn’t always an obscure title—in fact, it used to be the books and plays that we now call commercial fiction.”
Taking a hint from Jodi Picoult, do you believe today’s popular fiction could be tomorrow’s highbrow literature?

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Highbrow is defined as elite, intellectual, and high culture. Pop culture is considered to be lowbrow, infantilizing, and according to some, stupid and flashes-in-the-pan. Then, critics for centuries have shared a sense that the rise of pop culture is new and dangerous because, according to them, pop culture’s cherished work cheapened the tastes of the reading and theater-going public, especially in the case of Shakespeare in the earlier centuries.

Talking of Shakespeare, one of the critics of his time, Samuel Pepys, wrote, “We saw Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life.”

Robert Greene a critic of Shakespeare’s time called Shakespeare ‘shake-scene’ and told his contemporary playwrights to be wary of him and not do what he did. I guess he was unhappy that Shakespeare, a mere actor, had the nerve to write plays and make a career out of it.

Then Leo Tolstoy called Shakespeare’s plays “trivial and positively bad” and his popularity “pernicious.”

All these people were considered to be the high-brows of those earlier times. Yet, nowadays, having a full-fledged knowledge of Shakespeare’s work causes a reader or theatergoer to be considered a well-rounded high-brow.

As to today’s popular fiction becoming a high-brow literature, say two centuries from now, I think, what happened to Shakespeare’s work is very likely to happen to the popular works of our time, also. Case in point, after resisting to read the Outlander series and Harry Potter for a long time, I finally caved in and read them during the past year. Not only were those books enjoyable for me, but inside them were solid passages, scenes, and characterization that, in my opinion, made them good candidates for the classic literature of future millennia.

Chances are each era will come up with its own literature and what it considers literary. As the past has shown and I have found out personally, I am quite sure many popular stories together with the high-brow ones of our time will be forgotten; however, some will stay strong and flourish. From that point of view, I believe, Jodi Picoult has astutely shown a literary vision.