‘Not all books are sold to be read. Some . . . are sold to be consulted’. Coming at the bottom of page 1,301 of Donald Sassoon’s The Culture of the Europeans, this sentence has an arresting effect. Given its length—well over 600,000 words—size, weight, typeface and paper quality (almost but not quite India paper), this looks and feels like a book to be consulted in small doses, and it has some distinctly encyclopaedic qualities (along with a good index and very useful bibliography). But it neither claims nor achieves encyclopaedic coverage; it is explicitly thesis-driven, though the theses sometimes take a back seat when the author’s descriptions begin to take on detail and extension. A dazzling achievement of summary and synthesis, it is also eminently readable.
Sassoon’s opening gesture positions us on the London underground on a weekday morning in December 2000. People are reading newspapers, magazines and books, doing a crossword, perhaps casting an eye over the poems that appear posted up among the advertisements; others are listening to music through tiny earphones. ‘The tube’, comments Sassoon, ‘is heaving with the consumption of culture’. The world of 1800, by contrast, was one of stark cultural deprivation: few could read or write, and most experienced music only in church or on special occasions. How did we get from there to here? The book charts two centuries of the ‘extraordinary expansion of cultural consumption’ throughout the populations of the European states, in broadly chronological fashion. Sassoon’s theses may be summarized as follows: culture is a business which succeeds by the profitable reproduction of genres and motifs across both time and space. After 1800, its expansion was led primarily by the printed word, above all by the novel, and accompanied by the sounds of a parallel musical efflorescence most profound in the German-speaking countries and Italy, which reigned over the opera. In the first three decades of the nineteenth century, ‘a book-reading public of some consistency begins to appear, and along with it a large number of printers and publishers, a network of lending libraries, and a proper book market’. So too do concert performances and musical instruments; from the early nineteenth century on, every middle-class family owns or feels it should aspire to own a piano. The years from 1830 to 1880 mark the ‘triumph of bourgeois culture’, as the consolidation of the market facilitates further diversification of genres, and a consequent expansion of the market.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, however, cultural markets for books and music are matched and perhaps overtaken by the mass-consumption made possible by the advent of new technologies in sound and image, the record (1889) and the motion picture (1895). The speed was astonishing—Paris had 10 cinemas in 1906; in 1908 there were 87. In the usa the spread of movie-culture was still more dramatic: from a ‘few dozen’ in 1906 to 10,000 in 1910. From that point on, according to Sassoon, culture has been and is becoming more and more American, thanks to the financial power of the us media corporations and the uniquely representative market-research resource embodied in its highly diverse, immigrant-based population. Film and recorded music are more fully embedded in capitalist business practices than any previous media: they are bigger, work faster and make more money than ever before. The process is driven by a recursive cycle whereby European models are recast for a us mass-market and then, with their added surplus value ensured by a tradition of protectionism, exported back to a willing European market. Though consideration of genres other than film and music, such as fine art, might make the relationship look less one-way, from the interwar period on, to talk about Europe is also to talk about America.
Between 1920 and 1950, this American advance took place in the context of expanding state control over broadcasting networks: first radio, then television. But since about 1980, these have been increasingly displaced or outflanked by global media dominance and by the sheer proliferation of apparent choices. Sassoon does not lament the seeming disappearance of the great Modernist dream of radically effective high-cultural experimentation. Eschewing the rhetoric of the ‘single-minded moralists’ in favour of the impassive analysis of the historian, he seems happy enough with a future governed by YouTube, the iPod and blog: ‘there will be more fragmentation and more diversity’ in this world of democratized information and empowered consumers, but ‘there is no more reason to lament such diversification than to lament the so-called cultural imperialism of the very recent past.’ A world without culture, he ends by saying, would be ‘even more savage than that facing us now’.
In seeking to confirm these findings, Sassoon presents a vast array of facts—some of them quite recondite—in a tour de force of the statistical sublime. We learn, for instance, that in the 1870s only twelve novels were serialized in the Transylvanian press, eighteen in the 1880s, and thirty in the 1890s, and that the majority were French. Yet although his account is packed with statistics in both narrative and tabular form, Sassoon is properly sceptical of the evidence they provide: how many novels Dumas really wrote is open to question, as is the matter of what proportion of them were readable and actually read in, for example, Greece; bestseller lists in Italy in the 1930s might well have been rigged; figures from Communist countries are always to be suspected; and as recently as 1997 vastly discrepant figures for sales of the same book can be found in published sources in the neoliberal homelands, a.k.a. Britain. These are among the hurdles Sassoon has to negotiate in putting together his arguments, and he does an admirable job in signalling the problems of evidence without giving up on the whole idea of making sense of the many such figures he has.
There are three related questions I find myself asking of this book: what is Europe, what is culture, and what is a market? I raise them not in the spirit of opposition but in hopes of setting out the project’s strengths and limitations. First, Europe. It would be petty to complain that Albania, Finland and other small states do not get the coverage here that is afforded to Britain, France, Italy and Germany, when Sassoon’s undoubted contribution is that they appear at all. Nor do they figure in the role of the merely factoid: the data are always part of an analysis, for example of the comparability and translatability of various cultural forms as they move from larger to smaller national markets. Some might, however, feel that the increasing American cultural dominance over Europe from the 1920s on is not as simple or as uncontested a process as is here proposed, given the importance of national broadcasting companies in the rise of tv and radio.
Second, what counts as culture for Sassoon is a difficult issue: an apter title might be something like ‘Some Components of the Market History of European Culture’ (to echo an important essay of 40 years ago). For in Sassoon’s account, ‘the story of culture . . . is the story of production for a market’. Less obviously commodified elements of culture such as science, philosophy and social theory are omitted, as is the impact of, for example, the Napoleonic Wars. Implicitly (for this is not discussed head-on), political history matters relatively little here. We are told, for instance, that German and Italian fascists were either unconcerned about or unable to stem the tide of American films being shown in their cinemas—they could not ‘risk depriving their public of its main form of entertainment’. Or perhaps they were anxious to hang on to a mass media forum for the distribution of newsreel footage which they could and did control? In such a narrative, movements of broader cultural importance largely disappear from view—one mention of Yeats’s folkloric inclinations, for instance, hardly stands in for an account of Irish literary nationalism. Avowedly avant-garde figures like Pound and Godard (both unmentioned)—those who take pride in not selling their goods—also fare badly; though of course, the fact that some smaller-circulating writers sell fewer books than others does not make them culturally insignificant.