More Browbeating

J.W. Hastings and David Fiore both respond to my comments on "middlebrow" comics and comics criticism with potent arguments for why they feel the term is best left behind. Their reasons differ, although both object to any pejorative associations of "middlebrow" with "the masses."

But are such associations still active ninety years after Van Wyck Brooks, sixty-five years after Virginia Woolf, fifty years after Dwight Macdonald? If so, how do they translate to comics? For that matter, how do these terms apply even to the examples J.W. provides of middlebrow comics? While his list looks about right at first glance, it raises the question as to what qualities actually make Herge or Schulz or Lee/Kirby middlebrow. If it's simply that they're good as well as popular, then the list replicates the bankrupt assumptions that the lowbrow cannot be well-made, nor the highbrow well-liked. Or if it's their mere production as comics that precludes them from rising any higher than middlebrow at best, well, that's another proposition best discarded.

This is why Rose Curtin's question, "But how do you tell what brow comics are?", looks more and more apt the longer this discussion continues. We might also ask, in a culture that no longer accepts the axiomatic superiority of high culture to low, how do we tell what brow middlebrow is? What exactly is "middlebrow" supposed to mean in the twenty-first century?

J.W. suggests that middlebrow "means simply neither highbrow nor lowbrow," but for much of its history the term meant something far more specific - and not always the same thing. Woolf's mutable (and too precious and not terribly helpful) usage included patronizing culture-industry fabrications of working class life as well as her more snobbish reaction against middle-class aspirations to grandeur. In the nineteen-fifties, "middlebrow" often meant high culture, repackaged and sold to the masses in a condescending diet of intellectual self-improvement. (The classic example would be Mortimer Adler's Great Books, memorably excoriated by Dwight Macdonald.) To Nabokov, writing on kitsch, it was simply sham art. Focusing on Woolf's essay alone may cast "middlebrow" as an irredeemably elitist concept, but the term's many different applications seem most united by their common disgust at the middlebrow work of art as a lie.

The first step in talking about middlebrow should be separating any condescension to "the masses" from whatever else the term might mean. An example from Dave's piece:

Basically, what I'm saying is--I like "middlebrow" stuff, I just don't like the term "middlebrow", because it drags in associations of "intellectualism" "watered down" for "the masses". Good thought is not only "good" in itself, it's goddamn entertaining to boot. You don't have to "water down" nothin'!

All perfectly true, but, let us be honest – there are plenty of works, in any medium and any genre, that offer pretentious, shallow, or thoroughly diluted ideas, whether for the masses or the cultural elite or an audience of one. Take "middlebrow" out of play and we'll actually have to tell you in detail why American Beauty was overrated tripe, and nobody wants that, do they?

The problem, I think, is that negative association of "the masses" with the shallow intellectualism. Remove it, and the rest doesn't seem so condescending – it seems, in fact, suspciously like an acute critical judgment about a particular work of art, something that can be quite distant from concerns of class and popularity.

Dave also writes:

I don't accept the "brow" system, because it leads to the assignation of the term "middlebrow" to something like Giffen/DeMatteis' throwaway parody Justice League. That's not "middlebrow". That's just mediocre.

Duly noted. Somehow over the course of the comments, my use of "middlebrow" slid from talking about the tastes of the putative critics to the comics themselves, and de Campi's chosen favorites meant that discussion would start with some poor examples. So no, Giffen/DeMatteis Justice League probably isn't middlebrow, but any critical aesthetic that would claim it as a height of the genre – especially so it can enforce an embarrassed value judgment about the genre as a whole - just might be.

J.W.'s piece, with its thesis that any criticism of the middlebrow is inescapably prejudiced against the common folk, is far more troubling because it comes perilously close to the argument that any negative judgment about mass culture, regardless of its criteria, is tantamount to elitism, an attack on the audience as well as the work. This is a formula I suspect neither J.W. nor David would endorse, purveyors of fine critical judgments as they are, but it's where J.W.'s reduction of all modernist critique to anxiety and prejudice tends to lead.

This argument begins with two eminently reasonable premises, that "low" culture is not by definition inferior to "high" and that past criticism was wrong to presume it was. These premises are now so widely accepted that I think it is possible to talk about "high" or "elite" or "low" or "mass" or "middlebrow" culture without replicating Woolf's patronizing tone; the values upon which her hierarchy is predicated are all but rejected today. Indeed, for many there's no longer a hierarchy at all, or the hierarchy has been completely upended, with elitism now the only safe object of scorn - and here the troubles begin anew.

Too many writers extrapolate from these sound premises an unsound conclusion, that any criticism of mass culture amounts to a criticism of the masses and, therefore, to this past elitism. This idea finds its apotheosis not in David's friendly engagement with Brooks or J.W.'s repudiation of Woolf, but in the Panglossian market boosters and "cult stud" academics profiled in Thomas Frank's book One Market Under God, particularly in the chapter "New Consensus for Old: Cultural Studies from Left to Right."

Frank examines the "populist reflex" of the nineties, noting that both academic and business culture claimed the mantle of popularity for their chosen institutions (cultural production, the free market) as a means of forestalling any critique of them; if you can argue that it's even faintly popular or "democratic" (not synonymous concepts), then its critics (or regulators) must be elitists.

In a troubling elision, these faux populists claim that to criticize a popular work is to criticize the intelligence of the people themselves, who are beyond all reproach. The only proper stance towards mass culture, in such a climate, is to invoke the charming but dangerously ahistorical myth J.W. lays out at the end of his piece:

America is pretty much a middlebrow country. This makes sense: Americans, as a type, aspire to be better than while shunning elitism. Most of our best artists aim for a middlebrow audience. And this is a good thing.

Criticize the middlebrow? Yer criticizin' America! Where we shun elitism but never get around to shunning the elites.

I exaggerate; there are two proper stances towards mass culture, and adopters of the second – America as a heterogeneous culture comprised of resisting readers, diverse and contentious and creative audiences, John Fiske Raymond Williams Madonna yada yada – would no doubt dismiss the first as representative of the false consensus-oriented culture of those dreaded 1950s. Ironically, both of these accounts end up at the same point; whether they applaud a fictive homogeneity or an all but meaningless audience resistance, both decline to talk about mass culture in any but the most celebratory terms, and both find the specter of elitism behind anyone who says otherwise.

But changing the values of "popular" and "elite" doesn't mean a term like "middlebrow" loses all its other referents. Not only can the middlebrow still exist in such a climate, it can also run in a new direction, quite opposite old Mortimer Adler - no longer the mass commodification of elite culture but the cultural elites' veneration of mass commodity. Into this breach step the academics and the intellectuals, pseudo- and echt, all too willing to parrot the prevailing economic and cultural discourse by disdaining elitism while still, amazingly, maintaining their elite stratifications.

We can find a perfect example of these pretensions to antipretentiousness in the Ninth Art piece – and I do hope this will be my last mention of an article that has already received more attention than it really warrants - which makes its gestures toward populist inclusion (She digs Giffen/DeMatteis? A woman of the people!) only so that it might more credibly offer its absurd dichotomization between American/superhero and European/independent comics. This is a piece with a clear and utterly arbitrary demarcation of what constitutes "high" and "low," and what values might be placed on each, pitting one against the other, buying into the very hierarchy we're all supposed to be so far above now.

We might also find the same impulse at play in a few recent comics. Not Giffen and DeMatteis, no, but consider Planetary, which seeks through its mini-treatises to bestow upon various genres of popular culture a dignity they either don't need or already possess. Ellis's munificence doesn't conceal his transparent shame at his sources. (As John at Commonplacebook writes, "I see very little fondness for the old material he's working over; it's all reductive and bilious.") And we might wonder about Ultimate Fantastic Four, a comic so embarrassed by its original that it can't even leave Victor Von Doom's name well enough alone.

What is "middlebrow," in the end, if not a pretense to a higher station in some hierarchy of taste than the work - the work, not the audience - actually merits? If that hierarchy should be already out of fashion, that has often been the lot of the middlebrow, and at any rate today's hierarchies extend in both directions. We're as likely to see middlebrow interlocutors of the lowbrow as of the high; just turn on your cable.

"Middlebrow" has its problems, no doubt. I don't like that the term too easily confuses questions of production and audience and class with questions of aesthetics and critical judgment, and David and J.W. are right to point out those dangers. But it may have other important uses in denoting not only the traditional pretenses to content and quality, but also the pretense to populism that now serves the greatest beneficiaries of elitism. In a nation where the defenders of caste privilege posture as its most ardent foes, where our selection of one of two Yalies as our next President may well be decided on the frightening criterion of which one can better pose as a "regular guy," middlebrow and its lies might be an important concept to keep in mind.

Comments

[David Fiore]

"All perfectly true, but, let us be honest – there are plenty of works, in any medium and any genre, that offer pretentious, shallow, or thoroughly diluted ideas, whether for the masses or the cultural elite or an audience of one. Take "middlebrow" out of play and we'll actually have to tell you in detail why American Beauty was overrated tripe, and nobody wants that, do they?"

You convinced me right there Marc! If we can all agree to equate "middlebrow" with determinstic writing/filmmaking/scholarship that trades on the allusive simplification of ideas that are beyond its depth, I will begin using the term with alarming frequency!

Dave

[Abhay]

"We're as likely to see middlebrow interlocutors of the lowbrow as of the high; just turn on your cable."

Nice essay, but I'm not entirely sure I understand what you mean here, or I can't think of a good example. Failure of the imagination, I suppose, but I can see how it goes the one way, but not so much the other way.

[J.W. Hastings]

Marc,

Thanks for the response. I think you're taking what I said too far, though. I'm arguing against a pejorative use of the term "middlebrow", but that doesn't mean that I want it to be used as a term of praise. My list of middlebrow masterpieces would be dwarfed by any list of middlebrow pieces of trash that I could come up with.

But my question remains: if you want to call a work shallow and/or pretentious, why not just call it shallow and/or pretentious? Using "middlebrow" as a stand-in can't help but bring in those elitist associations you hoped to avoid.

J.W.

[Chad]

This makes me wonder what your thoughts are to the whole 'philosophy' behind the Ultimate books in general. (If you've already discussed them at length elsewhere, I apologize.)

[Marc]

Abhay - I was thinking primarily of the legion of cable shows that feature a faux punditocracy C-list celebrities gushing and/or bitching over 80s videos or entertainment news as if they were analyzing the war in Iraq or the Talmud. (Any suggestions that this description might also fit a blog about comic books and Tarantino will be met with an awkward silence.)

J.W. - about halfway through the piece I was no longer responding just to your or Dave's essays, but to the larger cultural argument that I saw them tending towards. Hope I made that clear.

I suppose I prefer "middlebrow" - in certain very specific circumstances - to "pretentious" because it's more complete and concise, capturing not only the pretension but also something of what the work or critic is pretending to, and their ultimate failure to meet their own standards. That does carry the danger of conveying all those other associations as well, but I'm willing to accept the trade-off if the word fits.

For another take that attempts to rehabilitate only the positive connotations of middlebrow, I recommend this Salon article from March 1997.

[Chris Ekman]

If you're shopping for rehabilitations of the middlebrow, there's a fairly recent one by Terry Teachout that's been well-circulated:

http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/archives20031005.shtml#55571

Teachout misses the broad, shared culture of middlebrow and wonders whether it might have been preferable to the atomized, niche culture of today. He admits he feels that way largely out of nostalgia, but still, you can see the appeal.