Of course, each case deserves a thorough critical investigation. Once again, aesthetic thought can define the optimal conditions for a communicative experience but cannot judge particular cases.
All I wanted to do here, however, was stress the gradations which, within the same circuit of cultural consumption, allow us to distinguish between works of discovery, works of mediation, commodities, and pseudoartworks—in other words, between avantgarde culture, Masscult, Midcult, and Kitsch.
To further clarify these distinctions, let’s look at four examples from literature. In the first, Marcel Proust describes a woman, Albertine, and the impression she makes on the narrator, Marcel, the first time he sees her. Proust is not trying to whet the appetite of his reader; rather, he is looking for a new way to broach an old situation. The subject is banal (the meeting between a man and a woman and the man’s response to it), but Proust wants to elaborate a new approach to banal events.
To begin with, he refuses to stake everything on a description of Albertine. Instead, he shows her to us little by little, not as an individual but rather as part of an indivisible whole, a group of girls whose features, smiles, and gestures keeps fusing into a continuous stream of images. To reinforce this sense of fluidity, he uses an impressionistic style in which, even when he describes «un ovale blanc» («a pallid oval»), «des yeux noirs» («black eyes»), «des yeux verts» («green eyes»), the somatic information loses all power of sensual evocation to become one note in a chord (and, in fact, he sees the group of girls as an ensemble «confus comme une musique on je n’aurais pas su isoler et reconnaitre au moment de leur passage les phrases. distinguees mais oubliees aussitOt apres» («confused as a piece of music in which I should not have been able to isolate and identify at the moment of their passage the successive phrases, no sooner distinguished than forgotten»).
It is difficult to cite passages from this description precisely because it stretches over a number of pages and cannot be reduced to a nucleus of representations; it slowly brings us to recognize Albertine, but always with the feeling that our attention, as well as that of the author, might have missed its real aim.
The reader fends his way through the images as one would through a jungle; he is not as struck by the «joues bouffies et roses,» («plump and rosy cheeks») and the «teint bruni» («dark complexion») as he is surprised at his inability to distinguish even one desirable face among the girls, who «mettaient entre leurs corps independants et separes, tandis qu’ils avancaient lentement, une liaison invisible, mais harmonieuse comme une mźme ombre chaude, une méme atmosphere. faisant d’eux un tout aussi homogene en ses parties qu’il etait different de la foule au milieu de laquelle se deroulait lentement leur cortege» («established between their independent and separate bodies, as slowly they advanced, a bond invisible but harmonious, like a single warm shadow, a single atmosphere, making of them a whole as homogeneous in its parts as it was different from the crowd through which their procession gradually wound»).
Of course, if we chose to analyze all the expressions one by one, we would find all the elements necessary to make up a fragment of Kitsch, but Proust’s adjectives are never aimed at a precise object, and even less at exciting a precise emotion; nor do they create a vague aura of lyricism, because, though the reader is invited to untangle the web of impressions that the passage offers him, he is also constantly expected to dominate these impressions, to be at once receptive and critical, and never to abandon himself to the personal feelings evoked by the context, since they must remain, above all, the feeling of the context. At a particular moment, Marcel is struck by the brown eyes of one of the girls, by the «rayon noir» («dark ray») that strikes him and troubles him.
But the impression is immediately countered by a reflection: «Si nous pensions que les yeux d’une telle fille ne sont qu’une brillante rondelle de mica, nous ne serions pas avides de connaitre et d’unir a nous sa vie» («If we thought that the eyes of a girl like that were merely two glittering sequins of mica, we should not be athirst to know her and to unite her life to ours»). Just a momentary halt, and then the discourse continues, no longer to refuse the emotion but rather to comment on it, to delve into it. Our reading is never allowed to follow a single thread. The passage refuses to hypnotize us. Its suggestiveness is not meant to fascinate us but rather to spur us into interpretive activity.»
But if, instead of being described by Marcel, the meeting were described by an honest artisan for a public eager to be charmed, troubled, soothed, and hypnotized, we would have something quite different. This is what happens to Sandokan, the Tiger of Malaya, when, in Emilio Salgari’s The Tigers of Monpracem, he first meets Marianna Guillonk, better known as the Pearl of Labuan:
He had barely uttered these words than the Lord was back in the room. He was not alone. Behind him, barely touching the rug, advanced a splendid creature, at whose sight Sandokan was unable to repress an exclamation of surprise and admiration.
She was a girl of sixteen or seventeen, small but slender and elegant, with a superb build, and a waist so slim that a single hand would have sufficed to encircle it. Her complexion was as rosy and fresh as that of a freshly bloomed flower. Her little head was admirable, her eyes were as blue as sea water, her forehead was incomparably pure and, below this, stood out the sharp outline of two gently arched brows that almost touched.
A blond mane fell, in picturesque disorder, like a rain of gold, over the white corset that covered her breasts.
At the sight of that woman, who looked so much like a child, the pirate was shaken by a shiver that went straight to the bottom of his soul.
No need to comment on this passage: all the mechanisms necessary to produce an immediate effect arc there, both in the description of Marianna and in the reaction of Sandokan. On the other hand, this is sheer artisanship with no artistic pretensions; Emilio Salgari never thought he was producing art.’ All he wanted to do was provide his public with a means of escape, with an attractive dream. His prose needn’t be interpreted; it only has to be read. His work is an honest expression of Masscult, too honest to be considered Kitsch. We shall let the pedagogues determine whether the emotions it fosters are good or bad for our youth, or whether its style is appropriate for a respectable high school canon—which generally seems to lean either toward the classics or toward sheer Kitsch.
Let’s now take the case of an author with both taste and culture who, out of choice or vocation, decides to provide his public with a product that is at once dignified but accessible, able to produce an effect and yet above the level of Masscult. His approach to the same situation (a meeting between a man and a woman) will be rather ambivalent: on the one hand, he will want to create a character (the woman) capable of stirring the emotions and the fantasy of his readers; on the other, a sense of propriety will bid him control his words by creating a certain amount of critical distance. This is probably how he would describe the meeting between Sandokan and Marianna:
The second lasted five minutes; then the door opened and in came Marianna. The first impression was of dazed surprise. The Guillonk family stood still, their breath taken away; Sandokan could even feel the veins pulsing in his temples. Under the first shock from hrr beauty, the men were incapable of notieing or analyzing its defects, which were numerous; there were to be many forever incapable of this critical appraisal.
She was tall and well made, on an ample scale. Her skin looked as if it had the flavor of fresh cream, which it resembled; her childlike mouth, that of strawberries. Under a mass of raven hair, curling in gentle waves, her green eyes gleamed motionless as those of statues, and like them a little cruel. She was moving slowly, making her wide white skirt rotate around her, and emanating from her whole person was the invincible calm of a woman sure of her beauty.
This gastronomic description reveals greater stylistic economy and a better sense of rhythm, but despite the unquestionable concinnitas of the passage, absent from the previous one, the communicative procedure is very similar to that used by Salgari. However, the authorial interference in the middle of the passage employs the same styleme used by Proust in the description of Albertine’s eyes.
It likewise calls into question the effect the author has just suggested. But Proust wouldn’t have deigned to write anything so direct and unequivocal, and Salgari would have never been able to moderate his words so cleverly. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa fits perfectly between the two. The quoted excerpt
