101
PARTISAN REVIEW
by it. But even a genuine avant-garde would be in -d<plger of becoming
immediately fashionable, because what we have today
is
not so much
an outright opposition to anything serious or extreme as a zeal to make
it palatable_ Hence a kind of cultural mediation, which at one time
would have been scorned, has now become intellectually respectable, and
though this mediation occasionally creeps into literary criticism in
the guise of sanity and modulation, more often the task of adapting to
the cultural order is assumed by the literary journalists, who add to
the general confusion by making everything serious amusing and taking
everything amusing seriously_ The now fan10us example of such journal–
istic enterprise is Russell Lynes's essay, "Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middle–
brow," in which the distinctions are conver ted into a social game, but
the
effect is to boost the status of the middlebrow, as the lowbrow naturally
does not count, while the highbrow is taken down for being both too
snooty and too academic. Despite the breeziness of the piece, Lynes
does hit upon one of the central points in the entire controversy, for
by separating the highbrow from high art--or from the avant-garde-–
he rationalizes the process whereby creative or critical work of high
quality can be taken over without accepting the values that made them
possible. This separation is most essential to any theory of the "middle
way" in culture; and the art it generates-art that imitates the forms
of high art while rejecting its values---comes under the heading of
kitsch.
The task of
tra~sforming
live issues into academic ones was left
mostly to the sociological critics and the sociologists who have lately
appropriated these literary questions, presumably to study them in a
more factual and analytic manner. Again the result has been to blur
the question of values. In the beginning, the sociological critics-who
combined an interest in literature, philosophy and psychology-set out
to examine the origins and effects of "mass culture" and
"kitsch,"
to
look over the enemy, as it were, because these phenomena were a threat
to what they believed to
be
true art and culture. But soon the study
became an end in itself and the "critics" embarked on what can only
be described as an endless tabulation of the "content" of movies, tele–
vision, comics, etc. One thing leads to another and before long they
began to make aesthetic distinctions within this vast commercial output
originally thought to be outside the bounds of art.
A few sociologists without special literary training also entered the
field, though their concern was of a different nature_ They came to cul–
ture mainly through an interest in the structure of American democracy.
But in their enthusiasm over the genuine cultural benefits of an egali-
