[MontyPython]
Oh, there you go, bringing class into it again!
[/MontyPython]

Even sillier was a Michael Kinsley column urging the Washington Post to start its own series on raising class consciouness to keep up with the nutters at the NYTimes, the Wall Street Journal, and the LATimes.

What do you mean by "unAmerican"?

I think OJ means that obsessing about class in unAmerican. Despite what many lefties think, this country has never had "classes" in the sense that the Old World did.

and, therefore, literature that obsessed about it--Theodore Dreiser and company--was unAmerican by definition.

There difference between the US and the Old World is that the class system here is fluid; wealth is more attainable and thus more tormenting to a striver lacking the intellectual muscle to attain it. Getting carpet bombed with advertising exacerbates the effect. For those without skill or luck in a consumer society, it's like being an ascetic living next door to a brothel.

It's a good article if you can see past the bias.

Best Comment on this article from Best of the Web:

If you want to read contemporary fiction about class conflict in America, all you have to do is pick up the New York Times.

20th century?

I can't think of any 19th century American novelists who were not obsessed by class: Melville, Hawthorne, Eggleston, Cooper.

All unAmerican, I guess.

None of them even knew what class was.

None of them even knew what class was.

wasn't the concept of "class" more or less a concept marx introduced in the late 19th century ?

Oh, I think they all knew what class was, as did Howells, Simms, Cable.

I suppose the distinction you are making is that 20th century American novelists who wrote about class disapproved of arbitrary privilege, whereas 19th century novelists who wrote about class (including all the ones I listed and many others) thought it perfectly natural for their class to be unfairly favored.

I'm hard put to think of any American novel of the 19th century that was not based on class. While a number of 20th century novelists, including the two finest stylists, Coover and Beattie, show no interest in class at all.

If you recognize that aristocracy is natural and that class is unimportant then you aren't, as Mr. McGrath defines the unAmericanism of the literary class, preoccuppied with class. The nobility of Indian characters in Cooper and Melville is quintessentially American where the hand-wringing helplessness of blacks in an Ellison or Wright is not.

I'd say the helplessness of blacks -- and lack of not merely nobility but even mere humanity -- in a Page novel is quintessentially American, since they were slaves.

It passes belief that anyone can imagine that a nation with slaves was classless.

I don't recognize that aristocracy is natural. Common, yes. But it's the most artificial of all human constructs, after religion.

(cjm is simply bizarre. When I read a late 19th century class novel like 'The Grandissimes' I don't suspect Marx behind it.)

Slavery isn't about class.

Sure it is, but there were other classes being written about as well. Cooper made his reputation with his maritime novels, which were classist and did not include noble or any other kind of savages.

I am still chuckling about cjm's idea that, one must suppose, Henry James was some kind of Marxist.

It may not be true that all comedy is conservative, but it is true that many conservatives are comedic. They just don't realize it.

James was European.