MAIN STREET
The first of his major novels of the 1920s, Sinclair Lewis's Main Street satirizes the manners of the American Middle West. Here is the story of Carol Kennicott, who, to be accepted, must adapt to the ways of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. This groundbreaking novel attacks conformism, commercialism, moneygrubbing, and the decline in what Lewis saw as the American ideals of freedom and respect for individuality.
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- Borges famously wrote a preface to a Spanish-language edition of "The martian chronicles". Excerpt:
"Ray Bradbury has preferred (unknowingly, perhaps, and by secret inspiration of his genius) an elegiac tone. Martians, who at the beginning of the book are horrible, deserve his pity when annihilation reaches them. Men vanquish and the author is not proud of their victory. He announces with sadness and disappointment the future expansion of mankind over the red planet - that his prophecy reveals as a desert of vague blue sand, with ruins of chess-like cities and yellow sunsets and ancient ships to wander on the sand.
Other authors stamp a coming date and we don't believe them, because we know it is a literary convention; Bradbury writes 2004 and we feel the gravitation, the fatigue, the vast and vague accumulation of the past - the 'dark backward and abysm of Time' from the Shakespeare verse. Already the Renaissance had noted, by mouth of Giordano Bruno and of Bacon, that the real Ancient Ones are us, and not the men from Genesis or Homer.
What has this man from Illinois done, I ask myself when closing the pages of his book, that episodes from the conquest of another planet fill me with horror and loneliness?
How can these fantasies touch me, and in such an intimate way? All literature (I dare reply) is symbolic; there are a few fundamental experiences and it is indifferent that a writer, to transmit them, recurs to the fantastic or the real, to Macbeth or to Rascolnikov, to the Belgium invasion in August 1914 or to an invasion of Mars. Who cares about the novel, or novelry of science fiction? In this book of ghostly appearance, Bradbury has placed his long empty Sundays, his American tedium, his loneliness, like Sinclair Lewis did on Main Street."
- I'm reading Sapiens right now. I wouldn't say "mind blown" as I was at least a little familiar with a lot of it before, but the way that Harari writes really makes you think about things differently.
Here are a couple of other books that have been pretty influential for me:
Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government
"Main Street" by Sinclair Lewis
- Miscellaneous comments on the article, from the perspective of a Greek-American who's lived some years in Denmark. Admittedly a bit disjointed and anecdotal, but then so was the article...
1. The biggest "contentedness" aspect imo is not only people's economic position, but extraordinarily high confidence in it. To compare with neighboring Germany, Germans are economically not much worse off, and their poverty rate is only moderately higher. But middle-class and especially lower-middle-class Germans feel much less secure about their status. In Eurostat surveys, something like 10-15% of Danes report worrying that they or a family member might fall into poverty, but it's ~40% in Germany (and higher in other parts of Europe).
2. I haven't found this part to be at all true: Newspaper editor Anne Knudsen had an interesting theory relating to why the Danes continue to respond positively to happiness surveys: “In Denmark it is shameful to be unhappy,” she told me.
It's possible this isn't what she means, but in my experience Danes are much more likely to be open about things like being treated for depression than Americans are; it's still seen as shameful in the US to a much greater extent. The social system also supports it, e.g. students or employees sometimes take off time due to mental-health issues or stress, and are usually pretty open about it.
3. I don't find the "Jante Law" particularly useful as an interpretative device for understanding Scandinavian society, at least in the big cities (I've never lived in Herning or Randers or such, so can't speak to them). The novel it comes from is mainly a satire of small-town mentality of the era it was written (the 1930s, when most of Scandinavia's population lived in such towns). Some parts are distinctively Scandinavian, but in my opinion most are not. For comparison, read Sinclair Lewis's 1920 novel Main Street, a satire of American small-town mentality, and you'll find a very similar mentality being parodied. And you still find it in the U.S. quite a bit; there's a deep suspicion in smaller town and rural areas of people who are perceived as thinking that they're "better" than their roots.
- He actually touches on this as well:
> There is a very small body of exact knowledge, which it requires no outstanding ability or training to deal with. The rest is in the journalist's own discretion. Once he departs from the region where it is definitely recorded at the County Clerk's office that John Smith has gone into bankruptcy, all fixed standards disappear. The story of why John Smith failed, his human frailties, the analysis of the economic conditions on which he was shipwrecked, all of this can be told in a hundred different ways. There is no discipline in applied psychology, as there is a discipline in medicine, engineering, or even law, which has authority to direct the journalist's mind when he passes from the news to the vague realm of truth. There are no canons to direct his own mind, and no canons that coerce the reader's judgment or the publisher's. His version of the truth is only his version. How can he demonstrate the truth as he sees it? He cannot demonstrate it, any more than Mr. Sinclair Lewis can demonstrate that he has told the whole truth about Main Street. And the more he understands his own weaknesses, the more ready he is to admit that where there is no objective test, his own opinion is in some vital measure constructed out of his own stereotypes, according to his own code, and by the urgency of his own interest. He knows that he is seeing the world through subjective lenses. He cannot deny that he too is, as Shelley remarked, a dome of many-colored glass which stains the white radiance of eternity.
I recommend giving the book a read at some point if you have the chance (there's also a free audio book up on YouTube). It's a very thought provoking journey through how public opinion gets formed, and the myriad of different elements at play shaping them.
- I kind of feel Fitzgerald gets a lot more press than his contemporaries like Dresier, John O' Hara and Sinclair Lewis. How does Gatsby hold up against 'Sister Carrie' or 'An American Trajedy' or 'Main Street' or 'Babbitt'?
- They don't even seem that strange as an American. It's just (a parody of) typical conservative Protestant small-town mentality. Much of Scandinavia at the time was made up of religious, Protestant small towns, with most of the population engaged in farming or fishing (and the novel in question was set in such a town). People in small-town and rural America don't like big-city, degree-and-money-having people who "think they're better", either. Sinclair Lewis's 1920 novel Main Street, about small-town American attitudes, has some loose parallels.
I think the same is true even today in the US. Some of the people who're lionized in Palo Alto or NYC would be shunned in much of the "heartland", if they flaunted their wealth or education and came across as thinking they were a "super-achiever". You're allowed to be rich, but you're expected to act somewhat humble and "down-to-earth" about it and not see yourself as better than other kinds of people (especially farmers, who have their own mythos). Warren Buffet, a lifelong midwesterner, is an example of being rich but still sort of pulling that off.
