Lowbrow, Highbrow, and the Categorization of Art Selina Lai
Along the same line of adopting popular motifs which enjoyed tremendous public appeal, Pop artist Andy Warhol set out to attain fame and fortune by producing his paintings on sex, violence, money, and food en masse. While some denounce his work for its complete lack of meaning and artistry, others consider it groundbreaking and original in his ideas and artistic techniques. No matter to which end the criticism goes, it is clear that Warhol's work has caught worldwide attention to a type of art that is appreciated not only by the bourgeoisie, but also by everyday people. Swirski furthers his argument that mass fictions continue to enjoy wide popularity among the reading public because, contrary to being repetitive as often accused by the intelligentsia, they are far from homogeneous. Drawing examples from the hardboiled genre, he asserts that such authors as Dashiell Hammett, John O'Hara, Ernest Hemingway, James E. Cain, Raymond Chandler, Chester Himes, Philip Kerr, and Walter Mosley all exhibit numerous differences in style and substance. Likewise, one could argue that the so-called highbrow literature could be defined as sharing great resemblances among themselves. "A good example," Swirski writes,
is Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, a successful and much anthologized war novel that also happens to be highly derivative of other successful war novels. In plot and structure, for instance, it closely imitates Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front and Barbusse's Under Fire, two trend-setting First World War bestsellers [...] In this respect The Naked and the Dead is no less formulaic than all those John Wayne war flicks, with a Martinez, a Minetta, a Goldstein, and a 'Polack' Czienwicz in every unit. The same goes for the narrative technique, where Mailer's flashback vignettes openly mimic Dos Passos's U.S.A. The latter's 'Camera Eye,' for example, is resurrected as 'Time Machine,' and the only marginally more innovative 'Chorus' draws heavily on Dos Passos's experiments with montage." [7]
All this is to say that highbrow art and its lowbrow kin are not that different from each other. With the right "formula," Petrarch and Sting could be said to have produced the same type of oeuvre called sonnet, despite significant transformation in form and language over the years. Anyone listening to Sting's 1987 album "...Nothing Like the Sun," a title taken from the first line of Shakespeare's Sonnet 130, might find similarities between Shakespeare's classic and today's modern jazz and rock.
If the term nobrow is what Swirski phrases as "an intentional stance whereby authors simultaneously target both extremes of the literary spectrum," then the jazz poetry of Langston Hughes' certainly falls into this middle-ground category.[8] Writing largely to channel social messages to an audience from all walks of life, he adopted the speech and dialect of the common people and, using such techniques such as changes in spelling, dialect, punctuation, structure, and the alteration and addition of words, revitalized the language in ways which gave his poetry a radically modernized prose.
As the "Father of Black Modernism," Hughes restored identity to black people by applying folk references and black music to his writings, which produced a complex and authentic version of modernism for his time. Despite the harsh criticism he received on his avant-garde language, which was considered by many as lowlife and vulgar, Hughes eventually gained a firm place in the literary canon. Like George Washington Harris and Mark Twain, who featured the humor of the old Southwest, Hughes rebelled against the middle-class disdain of the lower social counterparts by writing poetry for unpretentious people. He humanized poetry and helped transfer the appreciation of literature from the higher to the lower strata of society.
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).