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Cult, or coterie, novels The novel, unlike the poem, is a commercial commodity, and it lends itself less than the materials of literary magazines to that specialized appeal called coterie, intellectual or elitist. It sometimes happens that books directed at highly cultivated audiences--like Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, and Djuna Barnes's Nightwood (1936)--achieve a wider response, sometimes because of their daring in the exploitation of sex or obscenity, more often because of a vitality shared with more demotic fiction. The duplicated typescript or the subsidized periodical, rather than the commercially produced book, is the communication medium for the truly hermetic novel.The novel that achieves commercial publication but whose limited appeal precludes large financial success can frequently become the object of cult adulation. In the period since World War II, especially in the United States, such cults can have large memberships. The cultists are usually students (who, in an era of mass education, form a sizable percentage of the total population of the United States), or fringes of youth sharing the student ethos, and the novels chosen for cult devotion relate to the social or philosophical needs of the readers. The fairy stories of Tolkien, The Lord of the Flies of Golding, the science fiction of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., have, for a greater or lesser time, satisfied a hunger for myth, symbols, and heterodox ideas, to be replaced with surprising speed by other books. The George Orwell cult among the young was followed by a bitter reaction against Orwell's own alleged reactionary tendencies, and such a violent cycle of adoration and detestation is typical of literary cults. Adult cultists tend, like young ones, to be centred in universities, from which they circulate newsletters on Finnegans Wake, Anthony Powell's Music of Time sequence, and the works of Evelyn Waugh. Occasionally new public attention becomes focussed on a neglected author through his being chosen as a cult object. This happened when the novellas of Ronald Firbank, the anonymous comic novel Augustus Carp, Esq., and G.V. Desani's All About Mr. Hatterr got back into print because of the urging of minority devotees. Despite attempts to woo a larger public to read it, Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano obstinately remained a cult book, while the cultists performed their office of keeping the work alive until such time as popular taste should become sufficiently enlightened to appreciate it. |
