Mediocre man has trudged through two centuries of European and American culture and shows no sign of finishing his ghostly walk. The compelling tragi-comic appeal of this ‘lost’ Western archetype has been unrecognised until now. Drawing on sociology, cultural theory and fiction from three centuries, this book considers why this character endures.
Why is mediocre man so funny and determined to resurface in many guises and artforms? Do these fictions employ a warm comedy of recognition or darker comedy of distancing? Why is fiction repeatedly offering an escape from the mundane, through a revelling in its depiction?
How does mediocre man earn his place alongside the Don Juans, villains or hunted men of our collective consciousness? This book searches the dialectical symbolism of mr average and his bohemian foil. Suburban signifiers from Reginald Perrin, mediocre salesmen and the office neurotics of post-war fiction are drawn upon. The classic fool typology of ‘light entertainment’ mediocres and the Freudian displacement of the mediocre writer are also defined.
Weber and Adorno’s theories on power are used to explore the symbolic schema of this quotidian quest myth. Mediocre man and his bohemian nemesis are folk devils of post-industrial societies, the spawn of ideologies that need an isolated, outsider position for the artist and a purported mediocrity playing his draining, opposing role.
When the deepest essence of man, his creative act, has been transformed into a possession, bohemian man, in modern mythology, comes to represent the false promise of liberation through artistic activity. It is to the radical separation of mental and manual labour that our archetype owes its existence. Knitted into our collective imaginative fabric in this way, is it any wonder we forever re-enact mediocre man’s revenge?