Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

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Chapter 3 Culturalism
them in their own way. So that even there they are less affected than the extent of
their purchases would seem to indicate (231).
Again, this reminds us that Hoggart’s target is (mostly) the producers of the commodities
from which popular culture is made and not those who make these commodities
(or not) into popular culture. Although he offers many examples of ‘proof’ of
cultural decline, popular fiction is arguably his key example of deterioration. He compares
a piece of contemporary writing (in fact it is an imitation written by himself) with
an extract from East Lynne and an extract from Adam Bede. He concludes that in comparison
the contemporary extract is thin and insipid: a ‘trickle of tinned milk and water
which staves off the pangs of a positive hunger and denies the satisfactions of a solidly
filling meal’ (237). Leaving aside the fact that the contemporary extract is an imitation
(as are all his contemporary examples), Hoggart argues that its inferiority is due to the
fact that it lacks the ‘moral tone’ (236) of the other two extracts. This may be true, but
what is also significant is the way in which the other two extracts are full of ‘moral tone’
in a quite definite sense: they attempt to tell the reader what to think; they are, as he
admits, ‘oratory’ (235). The contemporary extract is similarly thin in a quite definite
sense: it does not tell the reader what to think. Therefore, although there may be various
grounds on which we might wish to rank the three extracts, with Adam Bede at the
top and the contemporary extract at the bottom, ‘moral tone’ (meaning fiction should
tell people what to think) seems to lead us nowhere but back to the rather bogus certainties
of Leavisism. Moreover, we can easily reverse the judgement: the contemporary
extract is to be valued for its elliptic and interrogative qualities; it invites us to think by
not thinking for us; this is not to be dismissed as an absence of thought (or ‘moral tone’
for that matter), but as an absence full of potential presence, which the reader is invited
to actively produce.
One supposedly striking portent of the journey into the candy-floss world is the
habitual visitor to the new milk bars, ‘the juke box boy’ (247) – his term for the Teddy
boy. Milk bars are themselves symptomatic: they ‘indicate at once, in the nastiness of
their modernistic knick-knacks, their glaring showiness, an aesthetic breakdown so
complete’ (ibid.). Patrons are mostly ‘boys between fifteen and twenty, with drape
suits, picture ties, and an American slouch’ (248). Their main reason for being there
is to ‘put copper after copper into the mechanical record player’ (ibid.). Records are
played loud: the music ‘is allowed to blare out so that the noise would be sufficient to
fill a good sized ballroom’ (ibid.). Listening to the music, ‘The young men waggle one
shoulder or stare, as desperately as Humphrey Bogart, across the tubular chairs’ (ibid.).
Compared even with the pub around the corner, this is all a peculiarly thin and
pallid form of dissipation, a sort of spiritual dry-rot amid the odour of boiled milk.
Many of the customers – their clothes, their hair styles, their facial expressions
all indicate – are living to a large extent in a myth world compounded of a few
simple elements which they take to be those of American life (ibid.).
According to Hoggart,