A. O. Scott’s “The Squeeze on the Middlebrow"

Jose Ortega y Gasset

In a recent Times Arts and Leisure piece, “The Squeeze on the Middle Brow” (NYT, 8/1/14). A.O. Scott takes aim at both Virginia Woolf and Dwight Macdonald who decried middlebrow culture. Macdonald’s Partisan Review essay "Mass Cult and Midcult,” in particular, is a classic primer on the vagaries of a watered down culture. Ortega y Gasset took another view of the same issue in his essay “The Dehumanization of Art," in which he basically saw difficult modernist paintings as a bulwark against the juggernaut of mass culture. Anyone who has ever been in a gallery when a tell it like it is viewer claims that his infant could have pulled off the Jackson Pollock understands the crushing effect the demand for accessibility can have on artistic endeavor. But Scott’s piece sees the conflict between high and middlebrow in light of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the breakaway bestseller which describes the increasing economic disparity between the economic elite and the middle classes. And Scott’s view is almost a wistful one in which a once empowered middle class brought both the high and the low to the middle. Scott writes, “High culture became more accessible, popular culture became more ambitious, until the distinction between them vanished altogether. Some of the mixing looks silly or vulgar in retrospect: stiff Hollywood adaptations or comic book versions of great novels; earnest television broadcast about social problems; magazines that sandwiched serious fiction in between photographs of naked women. But much of it was glorious.” David Lean’s Great Expectations, PBS's Brideshead Revisited; CBS's acclaimed documentary about migrant farmworkers, “Harvest of Shame” and magazines like Playboy, The Evergreen Review and Eros  all are examples of the positive side of middlebrow culture that Scott alludes to. A side issue has always been the dichotomy between political and esthetic avant gardism which became particularly noticeable in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution when Mayakovsky and other vanguard writers, artists and composers began to run afoul of the party line. However, Scott’s jeremiad makes sense in the rarified world of an increasingly powerful elite defined entirely by wealth. The aristocratic patrons like Peggy Guggenheim who once supported innovation have been replaced by a new class whose crushing materialism places little value on anything whose quiddity is not validated by the marketplace--and who fuel the demand for diamond studded skulls by Damien Hirst.

Carpe Diem

Carpe diem, “seize the day,” is the advice of both the sybarite and the stoic. It’s an excuse to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh, as well as an exhortation to enjoy the moment whether or not it gratifies the senses.

   

In reality, only a devout Buddhist monk could truly live in the moment, and his form of living would involve zazen, or sitting meditation. Those who are not so spiritually advanced are doomed to live in a world of either regret about past mistakes or expectations about future rewards. The present falls prey to the allure of that which is past or has yet to be. That which exists always comes up short when compared to what is missing. The sometime lover almost always wins out over the erstwhile companion for life. The fleeting image contains a world of possibility, whereas the known bears the weight of predictability. In short, familiarity breeds contempt.

Carpe diem leaves out so many imaginative possibilities, in particular those having to do with nostalgia and hope. What would The Winter’s Tale be in a world of carpe diem? Impossible dreams and hopes fall by the wayside if the object is to “seize the day.” And then there is the beautiful, sad world of nostalgia. Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement is predicated almost completely on the murderous grip of the past over the present—in this instance because of a false accusation with consequences that ripple through time.

The past is what catalyzes most human behavior. Lovers are more in the grip of the past then they might want to know. Love doesn’t come out of nowhere. The love object must have a frame of reference, and that reference is inevitably some idealized figure in the past, in most cases a parent.

  

How to subscribe to carpe diem and remain a fan of L.P. Hartley’s The Go Between (“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there”), Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, and especially Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, the authoritative work on the magnetism of the past? Was it the past Eurydice was looking back at in the transgression that led her to relinquish her grip on the present? All Eurydice would have had to do was to continue looking straight at what was in front of her. She’s an example of a mythological figure with all too human traits.

   

“One day at a time,” “one day, one lifetime,” and “live in the now” have replaced the dirty jokes on the inside of bathroom stalls. But this devotion to the present is a little like the doctrine of passive resistance. It runs counter to the very impulses and longings that that make for both the horror and beauty of what it means to be human. To be spiritually advanced enough to live in the present requires one to turn the other cheek. In the end, carpe diem could (God forbid!) give way to the austerities of Opus Dei.