William Phillips
THE AMERICAN ESTABLISHMENT
It is fortunate that military battles are not like literary ones,
which in our open-minded society are never really won. Imagine having
to fight the Battle of Bunker Hill every few years. Yet this is precisely
what happens on the "cultural front," where the argument over such
questions as mass culture,
kitsch,
the avant-garde, highbrow and middle–
brow,
l
breaks out again and again, as though the rules of the contro–
versy stipulated that nothing could ever be settled. The reason, of course,
is that the clash is not just over differences of opinion or taste; it in–
volves opposing views about the nature of art and culture and society,
and periodically a new generation or a new grouping feels morally bound
to take its stand.
In the past, the issues were usually discussed--or dismissed-in a
polemical and programmatic atmosphere, and the big guns were almost
always on the side of the
rebe~s,
that is, on the side of purity and in–
transigence: indeed one scarcely recalls offhand any important writer
advocating the way of moderation. The most strident declarations were
those of the avant-garde; but even the more temperate statements,
by
such varied figures as Matthew Arnold, or Ortega y Gasset, or the
early Van Wyck Brooks, were actually attacks on complacency, philistin–
ism, and the anarchy of the new middle-class culture.
More recently, however, the tide has turned. For one thing, the
avant-garde
is
everywhere on the run, except, perhaps, in painting,
which in this period seems to have one foot outside the culture--yet,
because of the medium, is pulled into the marketplace. I have in mind,
of course, a serious and sustained avant-garde, not the chic variety
that moves to TV and Hollywood before anyone has time to
be
shocked
1.
I
am
using these and other terms in their generally accepted sense, though
their exact meaning is debatable. Unfortunately, too, some of these terms
sound pompous, but so far we have no others. I might also be accused of
lumping unrelated terms, but the connection between them is basic to my view.
