Jane Austen once described the ideal subject matter of a novel as “3 or 4 families in a country village.” You don’t have to have read Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility to see how that recipe could work; and you don’t have to be a novelist to appreciate, for storytelling, the value of focusing on a narrow slice of reality and burrowing deeply into its inner workings, its inhabitants’ rich interrelations, the apparent ordinariness of day-to-day lives slowly revealing universal themes and insights. Austen’s advice is a reminder of the inherent pull of characters deeply drawn, scenes lovingly portrayed, plots patiently unfolded.
Contemporary fiction, on the other hand, sometimes seems to be all about references to pop culture. Readers are pulled into a story not by character, scene, or plot but by winks and nudges, knowing allusions to the signs and symbols of our globally networked entertainment culture. That’s a recipe for superficiality, cynicism, and homogeneity, right?
Ready Player One is obviously about more than just references to pop culture. But it is heavily laden with allusions to popular movies, songs, music videos, television shows, comic books, cartoons, novels, and videogames. Sometimes it seems like Wade’s quest to find Anorak’s Easter egg is not so much an attempt to solve a puzzle James Halliday has created as it is to replicate with exacting precision Halliday’s own experience of living in a commercial, consumerist, entertainment-obsessed culture.
And yet maybe that’s part of the point of this novel, one of the messages its readers will leave with, knowingly or not.
On the one hand, experiencing popular culture – seeing the movies everyone else is seeing, listening to the music everyone else is listening to, watching the television shows everyone else is watching – is an important way that young people in particular connect to others, feel part of a world larger than their own, and negotiate their identities, values, and goals. On the other hand, an all-consuming devotion to popular culture can be a road to emptiness.
What do you think? What role does popular culture play in your life? What would James Halliday, or Wade Watts, or Ernest Cline say on this issue?