Against The American Grain: Essays Of The Effects Of Mass Culture (A Da Capo paperback)

Interesting take on the melding of high culture with folk culture to produce a despicable hybrid, midcult. The reviews on authors Twain and Joyce are even handed and revealing.

A classic of cultural criticism. The essays reverberate 50 years after they were first published. Once you read these
essays you will understand what became of literacy in America.

I recall this tome from my youth to today's readers primarily for the first essay in the book, "Masscult & Midcult," which first appeared in Partisan Review in 1960. MacDonald, who was on the staff of the New Yorker magazine for many years, sees Masscult as "a parody of High Culture." He identifies "the enormous output of such new media as the radio, television and the movies" as "almost entirely Masscult." (p. 3) The idea is that the product which is fed to the masses is not art at all but instead a kind of ersatz denaturing of art similar to bleached white flour. "Masscult offers its customers neither an emotional catharsis nor an aesthetic experience.... The production line grinds out a uniform product whose humble aim is not even entertainment...but merely distraction. It may be stimulating or narcotic, but it must be easy to assimilate." (pp. 4-5)

Curiously MacDonald was right in the same way that Marshall McLuhan was right in his Understanding Media (1964) in which he famously wrote that "the medium is the message" and in a later work, "the medium is the massage." Masscult massages the couch potato, deadens the critical faculties of the mass mind and renders the average person fit for compliance with the needs of the corporation and the power structure. MacDonald and McLuhan predicted the world of today some 45 years ago. They foresaw the rise of the tabloids, the consolidation of the "news" into a product for the masses as a means of controlling them through a whitewash of political unreality in which attention is focused on the lives of celebrities and their antics along with lurid crime stories and fictions about what our government is doing here and abroad--all designed to serve the interests of the ruling class.

What to do with the unwashed masses has always been a problem for the powerful. In ancient Egypt they were enslaved and made to build pyramids. It is not easy to rebel or even to think when you are physically exhausted. In today's society the masses are overstuffed with Big Macs and super sized with Big Gulps and reruns of "Friends" and reshowings of Masscult movies like Rocky and Meg Ryan comedies or the latest MOW from Lifetime television.

But where MacDonald was wrong is in his highbrow discrimination about what is art and what isn't. True Norman Rockwell, whom he dismisses as kitsch in the same way we dismiss Thomas Kinkade, is not art--or at least not yet. But perhaps Norman Rockwell will be art someday. Shakespeare was not art to Christopher Marlowe or Francis Bacon. Shakespeare played to the mass mind of the time with tales of kings and queens and heroic princes. He provided titillations in his bawdy humor and in his comedies. Yet there can be no question of the artistic quality of his work.

The point is that it is nearly impossible for critics to objectively critique and evaluate their own culture, the culture in which they are currently immersed. We have no real objectivity. It is like history can only be written by historians after the fact of the events. To write a history of current events is to write from a position of extreme prejudice because we have no perspective upon which to judge those events partly because we do not know where those events will lead.

The same is true of artistic endeavors. MacDonald dismisses not just Norman Rockwell but the musical South Pacific, rock and roll, and the works of James Michener as "ephemera." Clearly there is room for disagreement, but even today we cannot be sure which products of our culture will be remembered and appreciated by future generations and considered art. Rock and roll may become like classical music in that it is no longer popular but is still played and improvised upon, listened to and appreciated by millions. Someday rap may be considered something more than ghetto noise.

I guess what delighted me as a young man about MacDonald was his ability to satirize the culture. Here is an insightful passage: "Life is a typical homogenized magazine, appearing on the mahogany library tables of the rich, the glass cocktail tables of the middle class, and the oilcloth kitchen tables of the poor. Its contents are as thoroughly homogenized as its circulation. The same issue will present a serious exposition of atomic energy followed by a disquisition on Rita Hayworth's love life; photos of starving children picking garbage in Calcutta and of sleek models wearing adhesive brassieres; an editorial hailing Bertrand Russell's eightieth birthday (A GREAT MIND IS STILL ANNOYING AND ADORNING OUR AGE) across from a full-page photo of a matron arguing with a baseball umpire (MOM GETS THUMB); nine color pages of Renoir paintings followed by a picture of a roller-skating horse..." (p. 12)

Midcult fares a little better with MacDonald. He identifies writers like John Steinbeck, Pearl Buck, Irwin Shaw, Herman Wouk and John Hersey as its typical purveyors. He includes "the Revised Standard Version of the Bible" as Midcult, adding that it destroyed "our greatest monument of English prose, the King James Version." (p. 38) Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea and Thornton Wilder's Our Town are singled out for special Midcult recognition and analysis. The irony of course is that it is Dwight MacDonald himself who is nearly forgotten while Hemingway and Wilder live on. But were MacDonald alive today he would no doubt note that ours is still a mass and midbrow culture, and so that is to be expected.

The book also contains essays on Mark Twain, James Joyce, James Agee, on "The Decline and Fall of English," "Howtoism," and what MacDonald calls "The Triumph of the Fact."

Recommended reading for aspiring critics and students of culture.

"Against the American Grain" is a collection of essays and critical reviews that Macdonald wrote between 1952 and 1962. The pieces cover a wide variety of topics, ranging from appraisals of the works of Twain, Joyce, and Hemingway, through the rewriting of the Bible, to the decline and fall of the English language. One theme, however, is paramount throughout: the influence of Mass Culture on High Culture. Although Macdonald sees this conflict stretching back for two centuries, it greatly intensified during the 1950s. (One can only imagine how he would perceive the situation today.) No longer were art and thought the exclusive province of an educated minority. As the masses became more and more educated, prosperous, and politically aware, they also became increasingly involved with the cultural scene. That, unfortunately, resulted in a vulgarization of the traditional (high) culture.
The Mass Culture ("Masscult" is his term) is not really culture at all. It is a parody of High Culture, a commodity created especially for the marketplace. It is not simply unsuccessful or bad art. Rather, it is non-art, even anti-art. Masscult offers its customers "neither an emotional catharsis nor an aesthetic experience." It asks nothing of its audience and it gives nothing to them. Its goal is not even entertainment, but merely distraction.
Macdonald draws his distinctions between High Culture and Masscult along subtle, yet easily understood lines. The works of James Joyce, for instance, were High Culture; the works of James Michener, Masscult. Chaplin and Welles were proprietors of High Culture; Wyler and DeMille were Lords of Kitsch. Picasso, as opposed to Norman Rockwell. Early-Hemingway versus Late-Hemingway. Rogers and Hart versus Rogers and Hammerstein. Stravinski versus Elvis. Masscult is impersonal and ignorant of standards, "totally subjected to the spectator." High culture is "an expression of feelings, ideals, tastes, visions that are idiosyncratic and the audience similarly responds to them as individuals." High culture is the expression of a singular, unique vision; the creation of an artist.
Since this conflict between High Culture and Masscult had been in existence for over two hundred years, why did it become a pressing issue during the Fifties? Macdonald sees this time as a period of increasing sophistication. "The West has been won, the immigrants melted down, the factories and railroads built to such effect that...the problem has [become one of] consumption rather than production." The work week had shrunk, real wages had risen, college enrollment had skyrocketed, and the country was enjoying an unprecedented standard of living. Money, leisure, and knowledge-"the prerequisites for culture"-were more abundant and widespread than ever before. Consequently, the average person (Ortega y Gasset's "mass man") had the ability and the inclination to partake of culture. Unfortunately, the traditional High Culture, the avant-garde, was beyond both the ken and the taste of the mass man. He turned instead to something that was more palatable and easily digestible, something that he could appreciate, and even understand, with a minimum of exertion: Masscult. This rise of the mass man coincided with the rise of television (the altar of Masscult), the spread of the inexpensive, quality paperback book, and the long-playing record, all of which slaved to bring Masscult to a vast audience thirsting for kitsch.
Macdonald believes the solution to the problem of the spread of Masscult is an attempt to define two cultures, one for the masses and one for the classes. (By "classes" he means not a social or economic elite, but an intellectual one.) He believes that there already exists a dichotomy between two cultures and it is in our interest to keep them separate. There cannot be a broadly democratic culture on a high level, not because the elite forcibly exclude the masses, but rather the great majority of people have never cared enough about such things to make them an important part of their lives. That is as it should be. "Let the masses have their Masscult [and] let the few who care about good writing, painting, music, architecture, philosophy, etc., have their High Culture." A truly elegant, if arrogant, solution.

There's not much I can add to David Montgomery's review -- an excellent one -- about the intellectual assumptions and findings of this book. Macdonald is an elitist, and if that bothers you, then you might as well pass on this collection. What I think David Montgomery failed to mention, however, is Macdonald's superlative style. He's the most entertaining of the 'New York Intellectuals' -- more fun than Irving Howe, less stuffy than Philip Rahv, less egotistical than Mary McCarthy. (A good indication of Macdonald's openness to the opinions of others is his printing of George Plimpton's dissent on Hemingway.) I suppose the tension between High Culture and Masscult, which so occupies Macdonald in these pages, is still apparent today, although I think he might argue that Masscult has completely overrun High Culture; but what makes these essays appealing now, forty years after some of them appeared, is the felicity of Macdonald's style and the fecundity of his wit. A collection of Macdonald's best essays, put together by a sympathetic editor, might help restore his fading reputation.