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pulp friction
Cult? Been there? Got the t-shirt? Maybe it is nothing more than a buzz word bandied about by cynical publicists and booksellers (ahem) to pitch everything from the offbeat to the upbeat (maybe anything with a beat). But if the idea of publicity seems antithetical to genuine cult, it’s perhaps because of the narrow lens through which we view popular culture.
The etymology of cult reveals the semantic convention of linking its Roman roots in agricultural practice (cultivation) with its Latin ones in religiosity (adoration). The cultivation of a particular set of beliefs isn’t something that trickles down but is cultured from the ground up, as it were. It is no surprise that cult can be traced back to the first pamphlets off the printing press while the advent of the pulp novel, in particular the paperback, heralds a golden age of cult.
The paperback eagerly broke the rules of good literature, deploying the lurid skills of the illustrator and copywriter in assuring market relevance and popularity. The literary hegemony bemoaned the cheap and nasty realism in vain, succeeding in driving some material underground where it only gained greater kudos. True, the cult fiction of the postwar period was a landmark, but our nostalgia for it should not be blinkered to its relationship with visual and consumer culture. Nor should it be a bar to new ideas, or to the publicity that helps cultivate them.