Lowbrow, Highbrow, and the Categorization of Art Selina Lai
Popular Equals Generic Equals Bad?
A good case in point concerning the strong skepticism serious writers carry with them toward popular works is a heated debate of literature a few years ago between Tom Wolfe and his "Three Stooges": John Updike, John Irving, and Norman Mailer. In his 1988 article "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast" in Harper's, Wolfe remarks that modern literature can only be saved with the use of journalistic techniques. Such a claim immediately provoked a heated reaction among other American writers. As soon as his novel A Man in Full was published in 1998, Updike denounced Wolfe's work as "entertainment, not literature, even literature in a modest aspirant form." [3] Similar disdain came from Mailer, who compared reading Wolfe's "adroit commercial counterfeit" to making love to a 300-pound woman: "once she gets on top it's all over. Fall in love or be asphyxiated." [4] Irving went so far as to announce on a television broadcast that Wolfe "is NOT a writer" and that he only "writes sort of journalistic hyperbole." [5]
Interestingly, if Wolfe cannot write, why would his novel stand on the New York Times best-seller list for ten weeks? Is his work considered "lowbrow" only because it is popular? If this is so, then does popular mean something bad, implying that the reading public is a mere horde of ignorant audience who know nothing about literature? On the other hand, what is wrong with introducing journalistic devices and realism in literature? Is it not what earned John Dos Passos a reputation, and later a firm place in the American belles lettres, with the use of the "Camera Eye" in his U.S.A. Trilogy?
In the midst of this highbrow-lowbrow tug of war, Swirski pens a sharp rebuttal against the four main criticisms of popular literature. These are that popular literature mass produces for profit making, borrows from "serious" fiction and depletes the latter's pool of talent, poses emotional and cognitive harm to readers and readership, and lowers the cultural level of the reading public, who becomes an audience turning to propaganda.
While the majority of people tend to identify popular art with commercialism, Swirski contends that it happens in high art too due to the lack of government subsidies and wealthy patrons. William Faulkner for instance, is among one of the more prominent, serious writers who at some point of their careers turned to popular writing for commercial purposes. Having been writing books for about five years, which sold poorly, Faulkner vowed "to make a bundle by writing a potboiler." The end product was Sanctuary (1931), which as Faulkner exclaims, is "the most horrific tale I could imagine and wrote it in about three weeks." [5] Full of sadism, impotence, corncob rape, murder, brothels, lynching, and psychological taboos, this book had indeed become one of Faulker's best-selling novels.
Selina Lai teaches in the American Studies Programme at the University of Hong Kong. She holds degrees from the University of Heidelberg, Germany (M.A., American Studies) and the University of Hong Kong (B.A., English and Comparative Literature). She is particularly interested in twentieth-century American literature, and has published in Magill's Survey of American Literature (ed. Tracy Irons-Georges), the International Fiction Review, the Fourth International Hawaii Conference on Arts and Humanities Proceedings, and the forthcoming Encyclopedia of the Culture Wars (ed. Roger Chapman).