(Photo: Life, 1949)
A new "battle of the brows" has been taking place in the pages of the New York Times Sunday Book Review during the past few weeks. On July 29th, Thomas Mallon and Pankaj Mishra entered the ring with two pieces jointly titled "Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow -- Do These Kinds of Cultural Categories Mean Anything Anymore?" For his part, Mallon realizes that the digital democracy we now live in makes those old cultural distinctions more archaic than ever. (He helpfully points out that the term "highbrow" came into popular use in 1902 by a New York Sun Reporter named Will Irvin, based on the then-faddish science of phrenology, which judged a person's intelligence by the height of his or her forehead; naturally the one with the highest brow was the most intelligent, a theory which Mallon notes has "a certain whiff of racialism and eugenics," which alone should make the term highbrow a no-no in today's more enlightened culture.)
But the categories of highbrow, lowbrow, and -- most detested by intellectuals for decades -- middlebrow, no longer exist, as people of diverse cultural backgrounds routinely mix and match YouTube clips, sreaming videos, instragrams, Facebook updates, "reality" TV shows (you'll never see an ostensibly "thoughtful" piece about it without the inevitable quotes around "reality"), pseudo-serious "fact-based" documentaries, the occasional Kindle downloaded -- no pun intended -- with Fifty Shades of Grey, or the latest Malcolm Gladwell opus, "funny" pictures mocking the celebrity du jour, endless quizes testing whether or not you're a great lover, loner, or loafer, (and yes, blogs), along with iPods loaded up with music of every imaginable kind, each haphazard consumer guided purely by their whims, certainly not any hierarchies of taste. Could there possibly be room for War and Peace in the midst of this cacophony of images and noise? (Fear not: Harvey Weinstein is producing a 6-part TV-miniseries of Tolstoy's novel to be aired in 2015. But will our distracted age watch 6 hours of fictional 18th-century French aristocrats at war and play?) Mallon, as befits a novelist and critic of undeniable stature, nevertheless calls for maintaining serious distinctions within the realm of criticism while accepting that we live in a rowdy, often vulgar democracy. But can an aristocracy of critical thought coexist with a leveling political democracy? Nearly two hundred years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville expressed his doubts, seeing the American experiment in democracy the template for the future of the rest of the world. He predicted that democracy will produce many writers of talent, but few if any of genius. Today, even the word genius has a whiff of politically incorrect elitism .
No Awakening from the Nightmare of Modernism
Meanwhile, Pankaj Mishra laments that the high Modernism of the early 20th-century, celebrated by anyone with intellectual pretensions at the time, has resulted in another kind of leveling -- the widespread, relentless, often brutal wiping out of indigenous cultures all around the world; folk songs are replaced by mass-produced pop songs, villages are bulldozed to create sterile highrise apartments, national literatures are gradually supplanted by American TV shows or local imitations of them that are even worse. The modernist dream of intellectual elites has become the default mode of cultural exchange; today, modernism doesn't mean Kafka and Jackson Pollock, but the high-tech entertainments, buildings, and news-presentations whipped up by the graduates of elite universities (with some help from talented if educated singers, actors, and assorted celebrities) for consumption by the working-class and increasingly declasse middle-class, while the elites themselves are too busy making money to worry about acquiring any serious culture at all. (I've heard more than one doctor, lawyer, and successful professional virtually boast to me that they haven't had "time" to read a book for pleasure since they were in college. And how many students today read books for pleasure even while in college?) For Pankaj, our ancestors' dream of modernism has become our nightmare of modernity.
Meanwhile, Pankaj Mishra laments that the high Modernism of the early 20th-century, celebrated by anyone with intellectual pretensions at the time, has resulted in another kind of leveling -- the widespread, relentless, often brutal wiping out of indigenous cultures all around the world; folk songs are replaced by mass-produced pop songs, villages are bulldozed to create sterile highrise apartments, national literatures are gradually supplanted by American TV shows or local imitations of them that are even worse. The modernist dream of intellectual elites has become the default mode of cultural exchange; today, modernism doesn't mean Kafka and Jackson Pollock, but the high-tech entertainments, buildings, and news-presentations whipped up by the graduates of elite universities (with some help from talented if educated singers, actors, and assorted celebrities) for consumption by the working-class and increasingly declasse middle-class, while the elites themselves are too busy making money to worry about acquiring any serious culture at all. (I've heard more than one doctor, lawyer, and successful professional virtually boast to me that they haven't had "time" to read a book for pleasure since they were in college. And how many students today read books for pleasure even while in college?) For Pankaj, our ancestors' dream of modernism has become our nightmare of modernity.
Keeping Up with the Ernest Joneses
Scott cites Thomas Picketty's "surprise" bestseller Capital in the 21st Century -- journalists are always surprised when a "deep-thought" book becomes a bestseller, though it happens regularly every few years; remember Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind? -- as evidence that the shrinking middle-class is helping to shrink whatever's left of middlebrow culture; and more's the pity, says Scott. Yes, the categories of high, low, and middle that became so prevalent after the Second World War were, in part, marketing tools -- it helps to know the audience you're trying to sell to -- as well as "markers" for people quickly rising up the economic, social, and cultural ladders. The car you drove, the books you read (or at least had on your shelf), the plays or musicals you saw, the music you listened to, the stuff you hung on your walls (we're assuming you had walls), all served to show where you were in the great pecking order of postwar American life. The ability to talk about the latest "serious" bestseller -- David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd, let's say -- showed you were a person of education and taste, just as being able to toss off some references to Thomas Picketty's new book at a cocktail party today may gain you brownie points among your new friends. (See -- some things never change.) But Scott is not a Virginia Woolf or Dwight Macdonald aesthetic snob. He's a fine film critic who recognizes that the vanished middlebrow culture also represented genuine efforts by Americans to "better" themselves, to partake of the riches of a culture which has been heretofore reserved only to those with wealth and leisure time. All those Signet paperbacks of the classics weren't just to impress the neighbors -- they were way stations for millions of people to appreciate writers and thinkers whose works were previously available in expensive hardcover editions for the happy few. The thought of a very large happy middle-class happy sent shivers of horror down the refined spines of Woolf and Macdonald.
Scott cites Thomas Picketty's "surprise" bestseller Capital in the 21st Century -- journalists are always surprised when a "deep-thought" book becomes a bestseller, though it happens regularly every few years; remember Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind? -- as evidence that the shrinking middle-class is helping to shrink whatever's left of middlebrow culture; and more's the pity, says Scott. Yes, the categories of high, low, and middle that became so prevalent after the Second World War were, in part, marketing tools -- it helps to know the audience you're trying to sell to -- as well as "markers" for people quickly rising up the economic, social, and cultural ladders. The car you drove, the books you read (or at least had on your shelf), the plays or musicals you saw, the music you listened to, the stuff you hung on your walls (we're assuming you had walls), all served to show where you were in the great pecking order of postwar American life. The ability to talk about the latest "serious" bestseller -- David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd, let's say -- showed you were a person of education and taste, just as being able to toss off some references to Thomas Picketty's new book at a cocktail party today may gain you brownie points among your new friends. (See -- some things never change.) But Scott is not a Virginia Woolf or Dwight Macdonald aesthetic snob. He's a fine film critic who recognizes that the vanished middlebrow culture also represented genuine efforts by Americans to "better" themselves, to partake of the riches of a culture which has been heretofore reserved only to those with wealth and leisure time. All those Signet paperbacks of the classics weren't just to impress the neighbors -- they were way stations for millions of people to appreciate writers and thinkers whose works were previously available in expensive hardcover editions for the happy few. The thought of a very large happy middle-class happy sent shivers of horror down the refined spines of Woolf and Macdonald.
Scott rightly laments the disappearance of the middlebrow film from the Hollywood studios. Such films were hardly Hiroshima, Mon Amour, but a great many of them had strong scripts, plausible characters, superb acting, and visual pleasures more subtle than the CGI effects of the blockbusters churned out nowadays. While the vast middle of films -- as well as books, theater, and TV -- has dropped out of the equation, the high (represented by independent films designed for niche audiences) and low (check out what's playing at your multiplex cinema tonight) have remained, for the most part, the two available options. One could argue that such movies as the "prestige" films produced by the aforementioned Harvey Weinstein like The King's Speech demonstrate that middlebrow is alive and well, but such films, regardless of well they may or may not be, are a very tiny piece of a very large high/low pie. And as Scott suggests, even arguing about whether a film or book is highbrow, middlebrow, or lowbrow, would be inconceivable to young culture consumers today, who blithely mix and morph and post and tweet snippets from everything to everyone, all day long. Conversations about what's highbrow and what's lowbrow are what their parents or grandparents had during college bull sessions -- at least those of their grandparents who went to college. Today, going to college isn't even middlebrow anymore -- it's become a virtual luxury item.
Middlebrowism Reconsidered
Scott is not the only one who regrets the middlebrow boom of the postwar years. Recently Commentary magazine published a piece by Michael J. Lewis, "How This Magazine Wronged Herman Wouk," which essentially apologized to the perhaps-archetypal middlebrow writer of the 1950s to 1970s and reassessed his entire career, this time acknowledging his genuine novelistic gifts and regretting that the magazine had slighted him for not measuring up to the modernist writers then in vogue among the literary intelligentsia. Wouk is still going strong at age 99, and working on a new book. Perhaps those neglected middlebrows have more staying power than anyone suspected. (Ironically, Wouk's last novel, The Lawgiver (2012), with its interweaving of emails, text messages, snippets of screenplay, transcripts of conference calls, and even snail mail, to tell the story of the production of a film about Moses, was even described by some critics as -- wait for it -- "postmodern."
Middlebrowism Reconsidered
Scott is not the only one who regrets the middlebrow boom of the postwar years. Recently Commentary magazine published a piece by Michael J. Lewis, "How This Magazine Wronged Herman Wouk," which essentially apologized to the perhaps-archetypal middlebrow writer of the 1950s to 1970s and reassessed his entire career, this time acknowledging his genuine novelistic gifts and regretting that the magazine had slighted him for not measuring up to the modernist writers then in vogue among the literary intelligentsia. Wouk is still going strong at age 99, and working on a new book. Perhaps those neglected middlebrows have more staying power than anyone suspected. (Ironically, Wouk's last novel, The Lawgiver (2012), with its interweaving of emails, text messages, snippets of screenplay, transcripts of conference calls, and even snail mail, to tell the story of the production of a film about Moses, was even described by some critics as -- wait for it -- "postmodern."
A personal note: I recall from my publishing days a distinction that senior editors made about bad books. They were either "junk" or "trash," and while junk could be good fun, trash was not worth wasting your time reading (except as part of the job, so that it could be sold to those lesser folks who actually enjoyed trash). In the late 1960s, film critic Pauline Kael published her famous 1969 Harper's essay, "Trash, Art, and the Movies," in which she celebrated trash, was suspicious of art (arty movies, at any rate), and rejoiced that movies were a form that was ecstatically "beyond" both trash and art. All of this now sounds so old and quaint. No wonder A. O. Scott is nostalgic. We're drowning in the vast, undifferentiated culture bog, as it becomes increasingly clear that the only kind of status that really impresses anyone these days is not cultural or even social. It's just having money. Lots of it. Nobrow* is the only brow that's left.
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