Dancing Cheek to Cheek With Lionel Trilling
The other day I went into a furniture store full of imaginary rooms, groupings of furniture: “French Provincial” sofa with bright yellow crushed velvet, reduced to just $899.99; a “Mediterranean” ensemble; an “American Colonial” one, of rock maple and gingham. On a coffee table was a small figurine representing hands folded in prayer; on the walls a picture in pastels of a gentle-seeming tiger cub, called “Born Free”; another of an embracing couple, reminiscent of a Collier’s illustration, entitled “Lovers.” At the entrance to another group of furniture, on waisthigh pedestals, were two busts called “Joan of Arc.” In a corner stood a lamp, some six feet high. A fat, elaborate, carved base, painted gold, supported a plastic statue of a nude (encased in glass), who appeared to be bathing in the spray of a fountain through an artful contrivance of purple and white lights. It cost $399.99.
I didn’t like this furniture.
As it happened, I had just read a book that told me how to feel in this situation. Herbert J. Gans’s new sociological study, POPULAR CULTURE AND HIGH CULTURE: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste (Basic Books, $10.00). It is one of Gans’s central arguments that American culture includes several levels of taste-Gans calls them “taste cultures” and that any one of them is as good as any other, because each serves the needs and wants of a particular public. According to Gans, I should have maintained a respectful distance from the furniture, but I disliked it; worse, I disapproved of it,
I have any number of such practical quarrels with Herbert Gans’s provocative book, but there is much to value in it. It springs from an attractive sentiment. Gans is animated by a healthy democratic distrust of those who assume there is a culturethat-counts and a culture-thatdoesn’t for those people, that is, who feel that High Culture must take an adversary position against Popular Culture.
The best-directed energy in the book goes toward an examination of the long history of hostility among intellectuals against what is known more pejoratively as “mass culture.” Gans calls this body of thought “the critique of mass culture.” On the one hand is the conservative view: mass culture is a powerful sea eroding the delicate beaches of genuine art. (We hear this less and less, perhaps because contemporary producers of “high culture” are better rewarded than has historically been the case.) On the other hand lies the liberal argument, the stronger one. l ike most liberal arguments, it builds one’s self-esteem by allowing one to feel selfless. It holds that mass culture injures those who are presumed to enjoy it: it brutalizes, demeans, deadens the sensibilities of its victims.
As Gans points out, one of the fallacies that inhabits the “critique of mass culture” is a romanticized version of the past—a view that imagines a thriving and wholesome folk culture replaced by a vulgar “mass culture,” a view that forgets such bygone pastimes as bearbaitings and lynchings. Cans says: “The argument that popular culture leads to a societal decline of taste levels is based on a skewed comparison, with the best features of the past compared to the worst of the present.”
There are other fallacies. One of the most important has to do with the tendency of critics of “mass culture” to impose upon it critical devices that were designed to fit quite different situations. It is a mistake, for example, to assume that television occupies the same position in the life of the heavy viewer that novels occupy in the life of the steady reader. They’re different media, and they satisfy different needs. Gans may put this point a bit too assertively, but it’s worth making:
. . . people pay much less attention to the media and are much less swayed by its content than the critics, who are highly sensitive to verbal and other symbolic materials, believe. They [i.e., the viewers] use the media for diversion and would not think of applying its content to their own lives.
This isn’t (I think) to say that television doesn’t have its splendid moments, but they are its moments, to be judged on their own terms.
Gans is on solid ground in arguing that television, and other media, have been given far too much credit for autocracy over their supposed subjects than is the actual case. He writes that, though the evidence is scanty, “a sizeable difference exists between the media effects postulated by the critic of mass culture and those discovered by empirical research. As a result, it would appear that the critics are making unwarranted inferences about the extent, intensity, and harmfulness of media effects. . . .”
The stickiest issue in the “critique of mass culture” has to do with the origins of taste: in a word, does popular culture reflect its audience’s taste, or shape it? Here “empirical” data is truly wanting, as Gans acknowledges:
. . . whether the media in fact express the values of their taste publics is an empirical question which still remains to be answered.
It is a rather large qualification of his argument, and I wish Gans were able to keep alive throughout his discussion a sense of this ambiguity, a sense of the tension between the producer and the consumer of “mass culture.” (I am back in the furniture store, staring at the ornate lamp, thinking that its creator was not full of altruism, and that its purchaser will not have bought a life-enhancing object.)
Much of the interest of Popular Culture and High Culture—to step back for a moment from the substantive argument—lies in watching the sociological mind, determined to he scientifically rigorous, confront a subject of deep subtlety. Gans is at pains to make it clear when he goes beyond the bounds of data into the realm of subjectivity, and he almost apologetically says that he must now and then rely on “value judgments.”
But it may be that a subject of the intricacy that Gans has taken on can only be confronted through “value judgments.” What I admire in this book is not the data it musters, hut the conviction from which it grows: that many aesthetic judgments simply serve as a costume for class antagonism. To put something down as “mass culture” is too often to express a relatively dignified abhorrence for people presumed to be of the mass. Categories of culture plainly exist. Excellence and junk both exist, and they exist in patterns. There is more junk on television than in the works of George Eliot. But categorical thinking about culture can be as risky and destructive as categorical thinking about other subjects.
A true confession: I have judged people’s intelligence, character, and moral worth on the basis of perfume, books they have or haven’t read, accents, diction, grammar, furniture. paintings on the wall, and the way they wear their hats. There is a lot of sin but not much shame in that confession, because we have all done the same thing, and all felt ourselves being judged. We live that way. It’s often fun. It’s often accurate. It turns our rung on the class ladder into a cozy spot, it also is often brutal, to others and to ourselves, cutting us off from one another, and in rare moments of democratic self-escape we realize that, and occasionally act on it.
The democratic impulse plainly lives in Herbert Gans, but in this book it takes what seems to me a curious form. The center of the book is given over to a mapping job of various levels of taste, the terrain that Russell Lynes has labeled Highbrow, Middlebrow, and Lowbrow.
Gans divides his cultural map into five areas: “high,” “uppermiddle,” “lower-middle,” “low,” and “quasi-folk low culture.” I have misgivings about this enterprise, but not because the categories don’t make a certain sense. Readers of this magazine know where The Atlantic fits on the scale, and where to put Argosy. The only puzzling category perhaps is “quasi-folk low culture,” in which Gans includes such items as comic books and subway graffiti. One could object to the excessive elaboration of this scheme, but then again it could be argued that if you are going to name five, why not ten or twenty levels?-after all, we’re a nation with a complicated if ambiguous and hard-totalk-about class structure. But does it do any good to talk in these terms? Gans says it does: he is a person with both a philosophy and a plan. The philosophy is called “cultural pluralism,” the belief, to repeat, that every cultural level is as worthy as every other, because it serves different needs.
The plan takes a bit of explanation. Gans allows that high culture might be thought “better” than low if one were comparing cultures without regard to their publics. But not everyone can be expected to respond to high culture, (or to upper-middle, or lowermiddle, etc.). The equitable thing to do in this situation, according to Gans, is not to force-feed high culture, but to pay more attention to cultural appetites that exist, to supplement the diet at every level by supporting its own media and creators. Gans calls this “subcultural programming.”
You might ask who is going to perform this supplementing, this programming. The passive voice takes over in this part of the book. Content analysis studies are to be performed, creators are to be aided. But the unsurprising source of the putative funds is the federal government. I am less troubled by the practical questions implied by such a program than by the spiritual and intellectual difficulties. It is a design for the building of walls. It inhibits honest criticism, and encourages patronization. It neglects a dire cultural need found at every level of the society: the need for communication among classes.
Cans sees his program as a utopian scenario that has scant chance of being enacted. I see it as a nonutopian one, whose practical prospects may well be brighter than he claims. We’ve become at last a nation that spends federal money on culture over $80 million a year currently on the arts and pressure for heterogeneous use of the money can’t help but increase. The foundations find popular culture an agreeable subject for inquiry. To take one example: on a recent weekend, several distinguished intellectuals were brought to the Ford foundation headquarters in New York under the auspices of the Aspen Institute and a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to watch reruns of such shows as Marcus Welby, M.D., to talk about television and how it might be improved. To take another example, there is Herbert Gans’s book, written with the support of the Bullitt foundation. The importance of this book, in fact, is not that it will be widely read, or that it breaks new intellectual ground, but that it will be read by a small but select audience of people—cultural bureaucrats. foundation and media executives who have money to spend on culture.
In September the Rockefeller Foundation sponsored an event that bears directly on the issues raised in Cans’s book-another piece of evidence of Official Interest in the subject. The editors of Commentary were invited to assemble a symposium; the topic was “Culture and the Present Moment.” An edited transcript appeared in the December Commentary, and it was rich discussion.
The participants were Norman Podhoretz, Lionel Trilling, Hilton Kramer, Michael Novak, Cynthia Ozick, Jack Richardson, and Ldward Crossman. The list itself reminds us of the intricacies of class cultural relations. Who, for example, on the guest list needs to be identified for an educated audience? Podhoretz and Trilling are of course national landmarks, though each of a different sort; Hilton Kramer has a wide following because of his association with the New York Times; after that, phrases suggest themselves such as the novelist Cynthia Ozick, the philosopher author and former foundation executive Michael Novak, the well known playwright and critic Jack Richardson, the frequent contributor to Commentary Edward Grossman. Herbert Cans should have been there. He could have invented some new’ cultures: the Nearly High, the UpperMiddle Nearly High, etc. Niceties of deference occur throughout the panel’s deliberations; Podhoretz and Trilling rule the roost.
Norman Podhoretz began the discussion by recalling the cultural atmosphere of thirty-five years ago, at the time of the publication of Clement Creenberg’s influential essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” which expressed the then dominant view that mass culture was the enemy of worth, that contemporary high culture, the avant-garde, had to fight it to the death. Podhoretz remarked, “Today I doubt that anyone knows with assurance or could say with confidence what high culture is.”
The remark may sound a bit disingenuous. i doubt that Norman Podhoretz suffers grave anxieties about what high culture is, or that he ever errs by more than an inch in placing himself in relationship to it. But Podhoretz’s comment in context signified a shift in feeling that has occurred among intellectuals about their relationship to that which is still nominally beneath them. If an idea dominated the symposium, it was this: criticism has fresh work to do—pulling down vanity at the top, and turning its unprejudicial interest toward areas that were formerly written off as wasteland.
The conversations at this event were too various to summarize adequately. But a moment sticks in my mind. Lionel Trilling is speaking, pointing out that low culture has been unfairly treated in the past. He says:
... I had an interesting experience this summer at the Aspen Institute. At a party given to mark the end of a conference one of the guests sat down at a piano and out of an enormous memory began playing popular songs, untold numbers of them. Some young people began to sing to his playing. They too seemed to know every song that had been written and after a while I was drawn to join them and I discovered that I knew dozens, scores, hundreds of songs from the time of my childhood, from the time of my mother’s childhood— that I knew and adored them. It suddenly came to me that I was filled with the most enchanting music from popular culture, and I thought what a splendid thing it was to be in possession of these songs, which certainly do not in any way make against my notion of what high culture is. Indeed, in an important and striking way they are continuous with it.
Well. Yes. I think something happened there, in Aspen, after the conference, at the piano. 1 could listen to Lionel Trilling talk more about it. Would like to know what the official business of the conference was—perhaps last summer’s session on “The Educated Person”? Would like to know what some of the songs were—“East Side, West Side”? “Miss Otis Regrets”? “Dancing Cheek to Cheek”? “Love is Just Around the Corner”? My guess is that if Mr. Trilling were to say a few sentences more, if he were to look a bit further inward, he would say that what he had experienced was not just love of those songs, but love of his ability to love them. And that the continuity he speaks of is not quite a continuity between high culture and popular culture, but a sudden apprehension of the continuity between himself and the larger society.
You might go so far as to say that such “interesting experiences” are what American life is all about - that is, you feel most alive in this society when you are aware of the great commonality of experience that unites classes and “subcultures.” And the measure of the quality of your participation in a democratic society is not the cultural level you are on, but the extent to which you can imagine life at other levels.
So. To get to the bottom line. Popular culture will be studied. Funding will occur. (Even if the Depression is at hand. Writers this time around won’t work on guidebooks, but cable TV.) Content analysis will be performed. The passive voice will be heard. Young professors will spend delicious moments with notebooks in front of the television. Useful work.
I don’t have any specific notion of how it should be carried out, but I think the result shouldn’t have much to do with “subcultural programming.” And grant-givers and grantees ought to invent some terminology, fasten on to some images, that reminds them of an uncomplicated truth that the need for cultural salvation is spread with a lovely democratic evenness throughout the society.