Do you know who Dr. Frank Raymond Leavis is? He has had more cultural impact through his writing than perhaps any British Humanities scholar of the 20th Century. He was the leading light in a movement that lent credence to the idea that novels were of artistic value. Seems silly doesn’t it? Obviously novels are important, The Bronte’s, Dickens all that. Surely someone must have read them before and thought these things are quite good? Well they may have done, but it was Leavis who was the first person to give them academic weight. He propagated the belief that popular literature was as important if not more so than the classical texts so prevalent in the education systems of the time, because they were reflective of the culture that produced them. He is the reason you probably didn’t spend days slaving over Latin grammar in secondary school. So why am I battling on about a long dead Cambridge lecturer? Well it’s to do with the methods we use to appreciate popular culture. Leavis wanted great things for popular literature, and to bring the idea of something being great forward he believed in canonical thinking. What I mean by that is he believed there were a few great examples of work in each given field and that they should be held up above the rest. Through the journals New Bearings in English Poetry, Fiction and the Reading Public, and Scrutiny, he, his wife queenie, and his students developed a way of critical thinking that espoused these ideas. His teaching was a heady mix of authoritarian bluster and literary certainty that drew young thinkers towards him as natural rebels with an air of leadership do.
We think canonically all the time. We all have our five favourite matches, wrestlers, tag teams, territories, and so on. That is how far Leavis’ influence has taken us. I have, though, begun to notice a trend that is Leavisite in the extreme. The idea that there can only be a set canon of work that has to be held up as great, and more importantly that everything else is not worthy of critical thought. That we have a list of expectations that have to be met, that those certain things have to happen in certain places and certain times for them to be great. There are many examples of current wrestlers that get a bad reputation with fans because of historical anomalies, or certain perceptions about them. I will give you two examples; John Cena and Randy Orton. They don’t get into the canon of greatness that the most certain of wrestling fans admire. They didn’t spend time in Japan, they didn’t pay their dues in the traditional way, and despite obvious success and growing professional acclaim. Now neither of these wrestlers are my personal cup of tea. However I do believe their work is of serious academic consideration. (If a HE institute wants to give me 13 grand to write a dissertation on them, please feel free to get in contact with the site). Those two wrestlers who have been the highest profile workers of the biggest company in the world for the last 20 years and are very much worthy of our time, they show what the populous want to see, for better or for worse, and are worth deep study purely to see where we are as a wider pro wrestling society of fans and for future generations of workers.
We as avid fans tend to dismiss the commercial as fluff; not necessary to our enjoyment as wrestling fans and should be stamped out accordingly. Only the great and the good should be held forth as the best examples of work, which is understandable, and fuels things like the YES Movement, but it is not the way the world works. We need the commercial to support the non commercial. Ours is an art form that works on trickle down economics; when the WWE is hot for whatever reason, the rest of wrestling is hot. It has been that way ever since the WWE went national. We should be thanking Cena and Orton for their years of service, whether we like watching it or not because they have been leading the way for others to follow.
Which is of course the great conceit of Frank Leavis; he led by dismissive example. “These works are good, these works are not worth reading.“. This was fine in the early days of his and his follower’s criticism, because it set up a tone of seriousness for a new subject. However in the long term, it would have detrimental effects on the way literature was perceived worldwide and not only books. I have read Leaviste film reviews, Leaviste music reviews, Leasviste everything , where the principle guiding value was absolute authority. Leasvistes pervaded everything in the late 20th century. Some of them run your favourite television channels. Anyone who went through Cambridge in the early Post war era could not fail to be affected by him. However you can only think canonically if you dismiss everything else. I implore you to watch everything, and if you enjoy it tell someone about it, they may like it too. Just do not dismiss what other people enjoy just because it doesn’t match your criteria. Leavis made a career out of it, but as Clive James wrote in his book “May Week was in June” he had no anger left when it came to criticizing wider social ills like Stalin. If you can’t get angry about Stalin, then you have gone on too long. So don’t get angry about Cena, there are much worse things in the world.
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