Jonathan Meades The anti celebrity as public intellectual (original) (raw)

Jonathan Meades is a prolific novelist, critic, visual artist, and broadcaster whose career now spans a half century. A true polymath, his oeuvre comprises journalism, fiction, memoir, and more than 50 films on subjects including architecture, local and national identities, language, and gastronomy-all delivered in a highly distinctive mix of caustic wit, capacious vocabulary, and arresting style. Meades is regularly featured and lauded in the culture sections of Britain's serious media, his writing is often shortlisted for awards, and his work is routinely compared to world-famous figures from across the arts. Yet, Meades' position as a public intellectual is an ambivalent one. While he certainly enjoys a high level of renown in certain sections of public culture, he is often missing from lists of top public intellectuals and there is a near total absence of academic attention to his work (The single significant item being a 2016 book review in an academic journal-one in which the author states that he had to convince the journal's editors to include due to the subject matter-that begins by observing that Meades' career "has never really attracted academic attention" going on to state that "This is a shame" [Doeser 2016]). As such, this paper is an attempt to begin to think about Meades' curious position as a public intellectual, whose work is variously important, admired, and largely ignored. Drawing both on scholarship about public intellectuals (Collini 2006) and microcelebrity (Marwick 2013), it raises questions about why Meades has not been embraced more widely, and therefore considers the conditions in which the public intellectual is produced and reproduced, and what kinds of figure emerge as this type of celebrity. Clearly, moreover, Meades position within his own national culture is problematic. As one journalist suggests, "In France, you can't help feeling, Meades's range of misanthropic brilliance, his love of the scatological (one reviewer described him as a "dandy filth hound") and the sublime, would have seen him embraced as a cultural hero. In Britain he tends tobe kept at arm’s length on BBC4 and on the “experimental” fiction pile” (Adams 2017). Therefore, this paper also considers what it means to be a public intellectual especially within the context of a peculiar English national tradition that has been constructed as spurning intellectuals as public figures and which prefers empiricism to idiosyncratic theorisation and criticism.