Apart from the taste, the Big Mac is still a masterpiece of the entertainment industry, even more than the food. And 'in fact ample evidence from many socio-cultural as the vast majority of its voracious consumers fell on it to meet the healthy instinct of hunger: on the contrary, its function and deepest secret is just the opposite of stimulating' appetite rather than appease it, like any self-respecting drug.
But how does it work? Being a product intended to programmatically indistinct masses of consumers, without national marker, its basis consists of elements and widely known in the world: beef, wheat bread, vegetables used in every continent. This is to create an atmosphere of familiarity and expected flavors: the trick is to add the "appetizer" of the flavor enhancers obtained with a mixture of salt, fat and spices that determine the final result. And the consequence is that you get up from the table momentarily pacified, but in fact induced to return as soon as possible to retry the same sweet reward.
After all, is not that the literature of mass functions in a way too different. Here, too, appear from the beginning some similar characteristics: a difference of writing "high", where the text stands as a programmatically unique end of a given set of existential questions (when Proust deals with the relationship with the past, Dostoevsky or that of guilt, or Mann the relationship between disease and aesthetic creation, they do intend to "finish" the reflection on those themes, not to open it) in the case of Trivialliteratur the purpose of the writer is rather to provide the reader with a set of "answers" around a theme, rather than continuing to call for "questions" because the writing-publishing-reading cycle is continuously fed and potentially inexhaustible.
Continuing the metaphor, in other words, the writer of mass does not arise entirely the problem of satisfying the reader, but instead of "loyalty" to its product, led to a desire recursively the same flavors.
And the formula is very similar to those developed by magicians California dumpling. In the case of mass literature (ie aimed at a non-specialist reader and potentially undifferentiated) some of the appetizer are well known and discovered: the use of serial characters, the use of topical situations familiar to the reader, coupling to chronicles events in recent times that have affected his imagination, to build on the fears, desires, or simply on the latest trends.
Others, like the secret ingredients of the sandwich, covered and are more blurred: one for all the leverage exerted on some ideological constraints in the presumed common people, as the Vulgate ecologist, fear of absolute pervasiveness of organized crime, the inevitable degeneration of all power into tyranny.
Whichever way you think, are now more than two centuries that this clash between fast food and haute cuisine goes no holds barred, and has not said who the ideas in the end. Personally I would pull for Proust, but to be honest, even a nice juicy ... paninazzo