isn’t a disinterested critic in this case: itnhelps lend weight to his thesis in “ComenBack to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey,”nwhich basically says that white peoplenfeel a homosexual longing for black people,nwhich is why The LeatherstockingnTales, Moby Dick, ^ndHucMeberry Finnnare really admired.) He doesn’t say thatnthe “accepted” classics that happen to benboring should be canceled from thensyllabi due to poor Nielsen ratings, butnwith his trivial treatment of them, hendamns them to dusty library shelves.nOne writer who doesn’t appear in thenpages of What Was Literature ? is GeorgenOrwell, the man who, in 1945, took anterm from Chesterton and used it as thenspringboard for an essay: “Good BadnBooks.” Orwell doesn’t define that typenof book as one that causes its readers to gonberserk; instead, he writes that it is “thenkind of book that has no literary pretensionsnbut which remains readablenwhen more serious productions havenperished.” Orwell points out that suchnbooks are simply more enjoyable, oftentimes,nthan what is conventionally considerednliterature, and that “They bringnout the fact that intellectual refinementncan be a disadvantage to a story-teller, asnit would be to a music-hall comedian.”nThe most telling passage, vis-a-vis WhatnWas Literature?, one that causes all ofnFiedler’s postures to look like nothingnmore than music-hall histrionics, is thenfollowing: “Perhaps the supreme examplenof the ‘good bad’ book is UnclenTom’s Cabin. It is an unintentionallynludicrous book, full of preposterousnmelodramatic incidents; it is also deeplynmoving and essentially true; it is hard tonsay which quality outweighs the other.”nOrwell is being coy: obviously the formernoutweighs the latter.nL