Social life, like literature, is conventional in that the participants in life, like the audiences for literature, are able to grasp what is going on because what is presented is as familiar and routine and signaled as to the kind of story it will be.
Popular culture is conventional. That means, strictly speaking, that popular culture fals into generic categories and the reason proposed for that is so as to simplify the story and presentation so that viewers and audiences can easily relate to the type of story being offered, easy to digest, and not at all troubling, because the audience is prepared to know what it will be shown, following a usual story line, just because the audience will appreciate the familiar and just wanting tyo see it reenacted just as it has been done before just for the pleasure of going through that arc one more time, these basic stories ringing a bell and attesting to something deep and enduring about the way fantasy or, on the other hand, reality, is the way things work. So people like romcoms whether well done, as in Norah Ephron movies, or trite, as in Hallmark Christmas movies, those trite because the conflicts are manufactured or nonexistent but pleasant to withhold just because you know that the couple will find a way to find one another. It’s the pattern rather than any of the minor surprises that make the film appealing. The same is true with other genres, which means, after all, “generic”. People watch disaster movies for the same reason and what were called “women’s movies”, because Bette Davis or Joan Crawford would put up a brave front despite adversity, Even the later Bette Davis in “All About Eve” was about a star having to cope with being overcome by a younger woman. Women age and encounter other difficulties, like madness or death and for some reason men don’t get how the women suffer. Add also westerns like “Bad Day at Black Rock” where Spenser Tracy arrives at a small town like a frontier sheriff to correct wrongs and manages to do that and the strangeness of “High Noon” is that the sheriff doesn’t want to be a hero and so is violating and so intensifying the conventional story just as Hitchcock starts Psycho” with a successful heist story and then halfway through changes to another story and expecting the audience to adjust. War movies since “The Big Parade” are about recruitment and training and the inevitable battle followed by the recovery after the war is over and happens in Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket”, Kubrick’s “2001” follows from George Pal’s “Destination Moon” but has so many fresh story twists and fresh visuals that space movies since then have imitated his techniques, down to showing a spacecraft slowly emerging into the visual scene, with Lucas in “Starwars” improving the Kubrick shots which are impressive by also comparing magnitudes of smaller vehicles becoming embedded into larger ones, the romance of spacecraft prior to the sense of the power of spacecraft. And so on, with other genres, such as film noir, or Lucy and Ethal finding ways to to do something exciting when all the two restless women are drinking coffee while Ricky is off performing in show business.
Novels are supposed to be more series, individual rather than generic, each with a story of their own which a reader can appreciate by turning to its particular settings, characters and stories so as to sort out what the novel is about. But that is not the case. They are also generic and appreciated for having followed a familiar script. A friend told me that it was boring to read Jane Austen because tey were always about a couple consummating a courtship with a marriage, but that is to the point. The novels repeat the romantic device but manage in her seven novels, to look into any number of issues in the state of England as well as the varieties of love and so are always fresh, the grandmother of the sitcom, Dickens novels are all about the life of a young man growing up into adulthood, whether in “David Copperfield” or “Oliver Twist” or Pip in “Great Expectations”, a departure in his late work in “A Mutual Friend”, where an inheritance allows a poor and uneducated man to try a new life all over again and let us see what he will do with his new life.
Remember that the novel was originally a popular art not much emoved from Defoe’s dispatches to newspapers about strange ts not so far away and his novels concerned with the sensationalism of pirates and prostitutes It was only at the end of the nineteenth century that novels were recognized as a great art form feather than just a popular one where Ann Karenina and Madame Bovary had to face deep distress because of violating the iron fist of double standards. Opera, after all, was also a popular art, and “Il Travatore” repeats the same trajectory of the fate of women who love too much. It should be added that the most elevated standard of art is that of Shakespeare who was also engaged in a popular art in that he shifted from the elegant standard of art, which was poetry, to an appeal to those of limited education, which was the theatre, and allowed audiences to enjoy the conventional spectacle of a high person brought low, as in the great tragedies, while the histories saw subsequent events as they are in news reports still: something always coming off left field.
Indeed, it can be argued that all new genres emerge out of popular and therefore conventional genres before their adaptation as art. Even Pindar’s Odes were tributes to popular Olympic heroes rather than creating poetry for its own sake and epics like “Beowulf”, however artistically crafted, is at heart a scary story about monsters, something to entertain children and their parents. Do not confuse art as elitist with the most elemental and obvious bases for stories, which is to excite and to feel sorry for people and to escape their everyday lives. It is only the Modernists who see art as necessarily elitist,.open only to the sophisticated. Mozart went from symphonies to the theatre . Who started elevated? Maybe the Seventeenth Century French tragedians, but not the parts of “Genesis” reworked by the Babylonian editor from a set of moral exemplary tales transformed into a narrative about the wandering of the Jews in search of a reclamation of their homeland.
This view that forms of high art percolate up from popular art is a contradiction or at least an emendation of the classic statement by Northrop Frye in “Anatomy of Criticism” that all of the various forms of art, such as play, epic, and poem have existed since time immemorial because they use up the possibility of constructing literature. His exception is the novel, which quizzically arose in the eighteenth century, perhaps, some people think, because of the arrival of empiricism, in that novels establish and illuminate facts, though if that were the case, then the Greeks were in an age of empiricism, which they were. But my sociological evolution of the forms of literature suggests new forms are ever unfolding, just as acrylics provided the possibilities of Abstract Impressionism, and photography made composition and shading more important than the poses of sitting portraiture and the lushness of the outdoor landscape. In that case, artistic evolution has to do with its materials while art arising from popular culture arises from degrees of accessibility for the audience, from easily grasped to a puzzle to be solved, Picasso’s “Woman in the Mirror” only gradually to be seen as a woman, just as movies shift from being a stunt to an art form, whether that is placed in the silent era or in the Forties and maybe later on when in the era of John Ford directors were seen as artists rather than in :”Mack and Mabel”, so the play suggests, is not concerned with art at all;.
If literature is understood as essentially conventional, so that in “Genesis”, people have to confront God every time they engage in an adventure, whether Cain or Noah or Abraham, God no longer an agent by the time of the elemental story in “The Book of Ruth”, then how is there to provide an experience of literature that is not conventional? Here are some ways to do so, producing art that is memorable aside from being conventional. the experimental novel in style and language and novels that are striking for providing a distinctive character or setting or plot. A novel can become compelling rather than conventional by being experimental in its literary style. So Hemingway writes in his fresh, boiled down, plain speaking style, that makes him attractive even if his novels fare rather benign or rhapsodically heroic. And I would say the same about F. Scott Fitzgerald who merely laments the end of the Twenties decade rather than showing something important but does that in a charming style. Another way of avoiding the conventional or find interesting what is only conventional in the sense of boring is to put standard mystery stories in strange places so that you care about a murder because it happens in a Caribbean island. English novels are set in Cornwall and York because it gives the reader some exotic places. Novels can become attractive as well in spite of their conventionality by introducing intriguing people into the story so that the two distinctive women in Collins’ “The Woman in White”, take up the stage, and even manage to live together with their male art tutor when they have escaped from the Gothic like mention that brought him to there in the first place. We remember Hedda Gabler more than her story of self revelation, and we know any number of movie stars for having filled up the screen rather than for their vehicles. So there are lots of things to do with literature..
Conventional, as a word that applies to novels and other forms of literature, has multiple meanings. It means usual, as when we note that the protagonist in a sitcom will pair off as unlikely a pair as they might seem. Conventional also means ordinary, in that someone in the room in an Agatha Christie mystery will be found to have done it. And conventional means that the story line is rule driven, as when the criminal will have made a mistake in the commission of a crime and so will be found out. But none of these meanings mean that the conventions and the conventionality are self enforcing or coercive. In some crime stories the perpetrator can get away from murder. Raskolnikov is done in, within his own world, by his own guilt, he possibly having escaped and so there is suspense as to what the outcome will be.
The same application of convention applies to real life as well as to literature. Poor people are more likely to commit violent rather than white collar crimes because they don’t have access to embezzlement or bank fraud. It is ordinary for people like one another to court one another. Birds of a feather flock together. And law is a set of rules whereby contracts can be conducted and enforced. But there is nothing about such practices that are coercive in themselves. Being strange looks strange and people have to decide whether trans people are to be castigated rather than simply noted as strange. Going out of the ordinary can make a person in retrospect seem heroic or laughable, a soldier brave or a sad sack. Some felons get pardons and some don’t. So there is no automatic or inevitable response to a violation of convention even though Durkheim thought that was to be the case, a violation of convention always rewarded with derision, censure or exile. Cain was exiled and not killed when that could have happened. Convention does not limit free will though Durkheimianism would seem to suggest that punishment is inevitable. That Durkheimian mistake infiltrates so much of sociology that it is perhaps the wiser and the more accurate view to treat real social conventions as more like what they are, as literary conventions, because the literary version does not go too far, to overreach and think justice is self compensating. There afre patterns that may be reinforced by their usualness, because people do not think of fresh options, as finding a legal way to make a living when there are opportunities to steal because that is what the local crowd does, crime an opportunity structure, but crime can pay rather than always get caught even if only in one’s own self-regard. Literature is more real, more accurate, more self limiting and punctilious, than social scientists who, after all, have to try to say laws of social life in declarative sentences rather than in describing what people are imagined to do and leave others, the critics, to sort out whether the literature makes sense and corresponds more or less to the realities of life or only to its conventions.