Not only does The Old Man proceed unsteadily along the edge of a false universality, but it also frequently relies on what MacDonald calls «constant editorializing» (in other words, it advertises itself). At a certain point in the book, Hemingway has the old man say: «I’m a strange old man,» to which MacDonald ruthlessly retorts, «Prove it, old man, don’t say it!» It is not difficult to see why this tale appeals to the average reader: it still has the exterior trappings of the early Hemingway (raw, distant), but here they are diluted and reiterated till they are fully digested. The hypersensitivity of Manuel Garcia, who is by now used to bad luck, is suggested, represented in his feeling, through the closed door, the hostile presence of the elusive impresario.
The bad luck of the old man is instead explained to the reader, whose sympathy is nudged by the author’s waving in front of his eyes, until they well with tears, that tattered sail that looks like «the flag of permanent defeat» (close kin to the enchanted silence and the subdued glimmer that hover over Brunhilde’s chamber in the first quoted passage). On the other hand, no average reader would respond to the persuasive power of that sail if its metaphor did not bring back to his mind the memory of other similar metaphors, from other poetic contexts, that have by now become part of the literary canon.
Once the mnemonic short circuit is provoked, and the impression of poeticity registered and felt, the game is over. The reader is aware of having consumed some art and of having recognized Truth in the face of Beauty. At this point, Hemingway is an author that can be appreciated by everybody, and as such worthy of being awarded the Nobel Prize (which, as MacDonald reminds us, had already been awarded to Pearl Buck).
There are representations of the human condition in which this condition is so universalized, not to say generalized, that what we learn about it can be applied to all sorts of experiences and none at all. The fact that this sort of information is often cloaked in the garb of an Aesthetic Experience only confirms its substantial falsehood.
One remembers Broch and Egenter’s references to falsehood, and to life reduced to falsehood. In these cases, Midcult becomes synonymous with Kitsch, in the fullest sense of the term. It assumes the function of pure consolation and becomes the stimulus for thoughtless (acritical) evasions: in short, a marketable illusion. On the other hand, if we accept MacDonald’s analysis, we must also be wary of the nuances the problem assumes thanks to his keen intuitions. For instance, not all the characteristics of Midcult always occur together. The passage he quotes is a perfect example of Midcult because:
(1) it borrows the avantgarde’s procedures and bends them out of shape to create a message that can be understood by all;
(2) it borrows these procedures after they have already been amply used, and abused, after they are already quite worn out;
(3) it constructs the message as a source of effects,
(4) sells it as art, and
(5) satisfies its consumer by convincing him that he has just experienced culture.
Do all these five conditions always occur in every Midcult product, or is this example a particularly insidious one? Do we still have Midcult if one of these conditions is absent? In his other examples, MacDonald himself seems to waver between different meanings, each of which involves one or more of the five conditions.
An example of Midcult is the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, «put out several years ago under the aegis of the Yale Divinity School, that destroys our greatest monument of English prose, the King James Version, in order to make the text ‘clear and meaningful to people today,’ which is like taking apart Westminster Abbey to make Disneyland out of the fragments.» In this particular instance, it is fairly clear that MacDonald is much more interested in the aesthetic product than in the improvement of the masses, in their need or their fight to understand texts such as the Holy Scriptures (a need which, once recognized, perfectly justifies the publication of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible by the Yale Divinity School). In this particular case, Midcult is identified with popularization (point 1), which is then seen as intrinsically bad.
Another example of Midcult is the BookoftheMonth Club, because it diffuses works such as The Good Earth and therefore passes off as art what is in fact only commercial matter (points 4 and 5). Our Town, by Thornton Wilder, is also an example of Midcult, since it borrows the Brechtian technique of estrangement in order to hypnotize and console the audience, not to invite it to participate in a critical process (point 3). But among these examples of Midcult, MacDonald also includes certain products that have reduced old Bauhaus designs into objects of daily use (point 2)—a fact that really shouldn’t irritate the critic since, after all, the designers of Bauhaus meant their designs to be diffused at all levels of society.
To this, one could object that, in fact, in their author’s intentions, the purpose of these designs was to decorate a completely new social and urban setting, and that therefore to use them as mere objects of consumption, in a totally alien context, deprives them of most of their meaning. But this argument is not enough to dispel our suspicion that what really irritates MacDonald is the idea of popularization. In fact, for him, the dialectic between the avantgarde and Midcult is fairly rigid and unidirectional (the passage from High to Mid involves progressive entropy), nor does he ever question the values of «high» art.
In other words, he never seems to doubt that the activities of the avantgarde had profound historical motives, and he does not allow for the possibility that some of these motives may have emerged out of the uneasy relationship between the avantgarde and Midcult. For MacDonald «avantgarde» is synonymous with «high» art, the only domain of value; any attempt to mediate its results must be bad, for the very simple reason that the average man, the citizen of modern industrial civilization who requires such mediation, is beyond help.
As a result, in MacDonald’s view, the formative methods of the avantgarde become dubious the moment they are understood by a majority, a fact which makes one suspect that MacDonald judges the value of a work not just in terms of its nondiffusion but also in terms of its nondiffusibility. In that case, his critique of Midcult may be nothing more than a dangerous initiation into the game of «in» and «out,» whereby the moment something that was initially meant for the happy few is appreciated and desired by many, it loses its value as well as its validity.»
But this would mean that criticism is replaced by snobbery and that sociology and the awareness of the demands of the masses have an extraordinary, if negative, ascendancy over the taste and the judgment of the critic: he will never love what the average man loves, but he will always hate what he loves. In either case it is the average public that dictates the law, and the aristocratic critic becomes the victim of his own game.
To let snobbery infiltrate an aesthetic sociology of the consumption of forms is quite dangerous. Formal procedures sooner or later become worn out, but who can decide what are the best criteria for judging consumption? The difference between critical sensibility and snobbery is minimal: a critique of mass culture can be the ultimate and most refined product of mass culture, whereas the «aristocrat,» who merely does what others don’t yet do, in fact depends entirely on what they do to know what not to do.
Abandoned to individual moods, particular palates, and value judgments. the critique of taste becomes a sterile game. likely to produce a few pleasant emotions but unable to tell us much about the cultural phenomena of an entire society. Good and bad taste thus become flimsy categories that may be of absolutely no use in defining the complex functionality of a message within a given group or society. Mass society is so rich in determinations and possibilities, that it acquires an immensely elaborate network of mediations and reactions between a culture of discovery, a culture of mere consumption, and a culture of popularization and mediation, none of which can be easily reduced to a simple definition of Beauty or Kitsch.
All these supercilious condemnations of mass taste, in the name of an ideal community of readers involved solely in discovering the secret beauties of the cryptic messages produced by high art, neglect the average consumer (present in just about all of us) who at the end of the day may resort to a book or a movie in the hope that it may evoke a few basic reactions (laughter, fear, pleasure, sorrow, anger) and, through these, reestablish some balance in his or her physical and intellectual life. A wellbalanced cultural context does not require the eradication of this sort of message; it only needs
