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                                         December  2, 2012

Dwight Macdonald, describes what he calls
"The Middlebrow Counter-Revolution":
                                                  "Masscult and Midcult",
  "In the 'twenties and 'thirties the              p. 131
  avant-garde intellectuals had it pretty
  much their way.  In 1940, the                         DWIGHT_MAC
  counter-revolution was launched with
  Archibald MacLeish's essay, 'The
  Irresponsibles,' and Van Wyck Brooks's
  [sic] Hunter College talk, 'On Literature
  Today,' followed a year later by his
  'Primary literature and Coterie
  Literature.'  The Brooks-MacLeish thesis
  was that the avant-garde had lost contact
  with the normal life of humanity and had        Ha, what a funny
  become frozen in an attitude of destructive     idea, eh?
  superiority: the moral consequences were
  perversity and snobbishness, the cultural
  consequences were negativism, eccentricity
  and solipsism. [See footnote] The thesis
  was launched at the right moment.  By 1940
  the avant-garde had run out of gas [...]
  while the country had become engaged in a
  world struggle for survival that made any
  radically dissident, skeptical attitude a
  luxury.

The footnote referred to above:

  "Brooks and MacLeish assumed it
  was good for writers to identify
  themselves with their society,
  which in turn assumed the
  society was good.  If it wasn't,
  then the avant-garde was            Well, actually, no. It might
  justified in isolating itself."     be regarded as their job to
                                      engage with society in order
  "Empirically, this would            to improve it.
  seem to be the case-- at
  least most of the                      Also, it doesn't follow that the
  memorable art in every                 isolated life would necessarily
  field produced between                 be an improvement over the dread
  about 1890 and 1930 was                imperfections of Society.
  done by artists like
  Joyce, Elliot, Picasso,
  Stravinsky, and others    One hates to quibble-- well,
  who had rejected          all right, maybe I don't hate
  bourgeois society."       it-- but 1887 was the first     I will not argue
                            publication of Sherlock         (for the moment)
                            Holmes, and by 1890 his         about quality, but
                            popularity immense.             the criteria at hand
                                                            is whether something
  Macdonald refers the reader                               was "memorable"
  to his Partisan Review
  article of November-December
  1941, "Kultubolsewismus--
  the Brooks-MacLeish Thesis",
  reprinted in _Memoirs of a       Please excuse the cheapshot--
  Revolutionist_ (1957).           something about reading
                                   Macdonald has me in the mood--
  
                                   But someone who thinks he qualifies
                                   as a "revolutionist" who spends
                                   all his time sneering at popular
                                   literature is kind of pathetic.

                                       COMMON_RESPECT
                                                       But then, maybe the
                                                       point is he *used* to
                                                       be political before
                                                       he sold out to _The
                                                       New Yorker_ (which we
                                                       will not classify as
                                                       "midcult").


                                                      DWIGHT_MAC



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