Literary Hierarchy

I am usually more in favor of moving forward in class bloggation than posting upon material that has already been discussed at length but I was reminded today of something I was going to blog about in Hamlet on the Holodeck but never got around to it.

I was interested in Janet Murray's idea of a literary hierarchy. At the start of Chapter 10, Hamlet on the Holodeck? on page 273, Murray returns to the question raised by Aldous Huxley, "Will the stories brought to us by the new representational technologies 'mean anything' in the same way that Shakespeare's plays mean something, or will they be 'told by an idiot'"? She continues to say that we often assume that stories told in one medium "are intrinsically inferior to those told in another." She uses the example of Shakespeare and Jane Austen and how they were once considered to be working in less legitimate formats than those used by predecessors such as Homer. Toda the same thing occurs much in the same way for television and cinema. As Murray says, "The very act of watching television is routinely dismissed as inherently inferior to the act of reading, regardless of content."

How true is that? Though it might be true that visual narratives have more explicit commercial interests than written narratives and thus cater to more "simplistic stories over more authentic engagement with the world," I would agree with Murray in saying that "narrative beauty is independent of medium...The real literary hierarchy is not of medium but of meaning."

Why is it that written narratives are so often privileged above other mediums of storytelling? Why are parents more likely to scoff at the idea of a Film Studies class but not a Literary Analysis class? Why can’t movies like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, one of three movies in the history of cinema to win all five of the most prestigious awards at the Oscars, ever be considered an equal to the book?

I found this question very interesting. I thought that perhaps it is an issue of time and just like Shakespeare and Jane Austen are revered for their literary mastery today, so to will the key figures of more contemporary narrative mediums like Hitchcock, Welles, or Kubrick. Maybe legitimization comes with time? But then again, I find it hard to believe for example that someday Matt Groening, the creator of the Simpson’s, or the executive producers of the Soprano’s will ever be held on the same pedestal as Shakespeare.