Lowbrow, Highbrow, and the Categorization of Art Selina Lai
Likewise, despite the hitherto highbrow reception of Shakespeare, he was very much a popular writer at the Globe whose plays were widely enjoyed by people from the working class to the royals in the English court. Lawrence Levin in Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (1988) argues that Shakespeare is popular culture in nineteenth-century America because of his inherent popularity throughout the nation. He puts forward that Shakespearean parodies constituted a prominent form of entertainment. Hamlet's lines, for instance, "intricately combined with those of a popular song." [9] Shakespeare's prominence in the public domain happened at a time when the nation emphasized the importance of literary and public education. While oral tradition has been playing such an intimate role in the lives of the American people since the birth of the nation, it is no surprise that performing the oratory Shakespearean plays in even small Mississippi River towns could be "conceived of as potentially lucrative." [10] Levin contends that Shakespeare was taken "not merely along side popular entertainment as an elite supplement to it" but "as an integral part of it," which makes it clear "how difficult it is to draw arbitrary lines between popular and folk culture."[11] The turn of the century saw a decline of Shakespeare's popularity which came in part from the highbrow sector, who began to question the public's real understanding of the "sacred author." All the same, while Mark Twain was considered by the public as a "professional humorist," Matthew Arnold writes in 1888 that the American "addiction to the funny man" illustrated the lack of "the discipline of awe and respect" necessary to the creation of "distinction" in American culture. [12]
In this light, Swirski rightly remarks, with reference to Russell Lyne's The Taste-Makers (1954), that the so-called canonization is after all "not so much a matter of intrinsic value" but "of sometimes very arbitrary decisions about what is highbrow and what is lowbrow." He alludes to the critical claim pop writer Ring Lardner received at his time who nonetheless became today's classic in the American literary cannon.
Lardner was, of course, a satirist and humorist working with the vernacular mastered during his years as an itinerant sportswriter, a fact that ought to earn him a place in the populist tradition of Dickens or Twain. Is it the lowbrow stigma of having had baseball as his first subject matter that cost him the laurels lavished on writers who, for example, had made their careers on bull fighting or marlin fishing? But then, why should Bernard Malamud attain the first rank in American letters, given that he inaugurated his career with a novel about baseball (The Natural)?[13]
While defenders of highbrow literature consider popular works highly formulaic, Swirski holds that we need cognitive interpretation to process narratives and make emotive and moral judgments. Foreknowledge of the plot, therefore, does not bar a rewarding re-read. Whereas popular literature "expresses and reflects the aesthetic and social values of its readers," Swirski argues, reading is a "matter of choice and not necessarily cultural and ideological brain-washing."[14] For ten years the author championed a groundbreaking approach to literary interpretation which relies profoundly on the mathematic game theory. He proposes reading as a "cooperative two-person non-zero-sum game" which involves ambiguity, vagueness, and even radical misinterpretation. Writers too communicate their (reflexive) intentions to the readers under the "convergence of reciprocal expectations [...] coordination, not classification, you might say, is the name of the game." [15]
War With the Newts, Playback, and The Chain of Chance are chosen as much for chronological continuity as for being exemplary of literary trends that cross national, political, and linguistic borders. They underscore a number of literary and cultural undercurrents that prevailed in the early decades of the twentieth century, and continued to the millennium. Although these three nobrow objets d'art wore different cloaks of respectability and acceptance in their own times, what brings them together in the hands of the Czech, the American, and the Pole is the writers' refusal to compromise to either literary end.
A nobrow fusion of high aesthetics and popular entertainment, War With the Newts is a socio-political makeup of cross-national socialism, expansionism, communism, and militarism. Swirski contemplates the rules Capek maneuvers with in his social satire, and ingeniously pays heeds to Chandler's reversal of such rules in his detective artertainment, wherein readers become "literary detectives" playing a different game outside the traditional hardboiled formula. All the same, deliberately positioning himself beyond the highbrow/lowbrow rhetoric, Lem in The Chain of Chance goes as far as to subvert "not only the structural but the moral imperative of detective literature" where one experiences the sheer absence of justice in this gumshoe oeuvre."[16]
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).