The result is a commodity that will please without exciting, and that will provoke a certain kind of critical participation without entirely polarizing the attention of the reader onto the structure of the message. Obviously, the passage is not the entire book, but it is an eloquent sample of it. The success of this work is perfectly explained by these structural characteristics, and yet its success would not be enough to define it as either a product of Midcult or of Kitsch. This work is a commodity that also has the advantage of having been able to tackle a series of sociopolitical issues, which, despite their notoriety, had never reached such a wide readership in such a clear form.
The Leopard is an excellent commodity but not quite a product of Kitsch. No crosscontamination is ever quite so successful as Kitsch, and the thirst for prestige is much more obvious. The following passage is a perfect example of this last category, the basest.
Ray Bradbury, famous among the midintelligentsia for being the only sciencefiction author to have produced literary works (which in a sense is true, since instead of writing honest scifi stories he is always trying to give them the appearance of art by using an explicitly «lyrical» style), once wrote a novella for Playboy. As everybody knows, Playboy is a magazine that has made its fortune by publishing glossy photos of nude women in more or less enticing postures. Its emphasis is on the excellence of the product it offers, not on its artistic value—an all too common alibi of pornographic publications. To this extent, Playboy is not a Kitsch product. Unfortunately, however, Playboy has cultural aspirations.
Its aim is to be the New Yorker of libertines and goodtimers, and to this end it invites the collaboration of famous authors who, in the name of tolerance and humor, seldom disdain the improbable combination with the rest of the magazine. Ironically, although Playboy seeks this collaboration in order to raise its status and to allay the uneasy conscience of some of its readers by providing them with a cultural alibi («but it has very good articles»), this is precisely what turns it, as well as the hapless tale of the hapless contributor, into Kitsch. Of course, this is not exactly what happened to Ray Bradbury, since he was already Kitsch to begin with.
Bradbury’s novella likewise tells of a meeting between two people. Not between a man and a woman, however, since that situation is obviously much too banal for an author who’s so keen on producing «art.» So in his story In a Season of Calm Weather, Bradbury tells us of the meeting, and the ensuing passion, between a man and a work of art. Bradbury’s hero is an American who decides to spend his summer near Vallauris, on the French Riviera, in order to be close to his idol: Picasso. His devoted wife accompanies him. Why Picasso? Because Picasso means art, modernity, and prestige. Because Picasso is very widely known, and because his work, totally fetishized, no longer needs to be interpreted. Picasso is the perfect choice.
One evening, toward sunset, our hero is dreamily strolling along a deserted shore, when, at some distance, he notices a small man busy drawing figures on the sand with a stick. Needless to say, it is Picasso. But our hero does not realize it until, having walked closer, he can see the figures drawn on the sand. Spellbound, he watches the little man draw He doesn’t say a word, doesn’t even dare breathe lest the vision vanish. It does, eventually, when, having finished his drawing, Picasso walks away. The lover wants to keep the work, but the tide is rising.
Since a summary cannot possibly do justice to the style of the story, this is what our hero sees as he watches the little old man draw on the sand:
For there on the flat shore were pictures of Grecian lions and Mediterranean goats and maidens with flesh of sand like powdered gold and satyrs piping on handcarved horns and children dancing, strewing flowers along and along the beach with lambs gamboling after and musicians skipping to their harps and lyres, and unicorns racing youths toward distant meadows, woodlands, ruined temples and volcanos. Along the shore in a neverbroken line, the hand, the wooden stylus of this man bent down in fever and raining perspiration, scribbled, ribboned, looped around over and up, across, in, out, stitched, whispered, stayed, then hurried on as if this traveling bacchanal must flourish to its end before the sun was put out by the sea. Twenty, thirty yards or more the nymphs and driads and summer founts sprung up in unraveled hieroglyph. And the sand, in the dying light, was the color of molten copper on which was now slashed a message that any man in any time might read and savor down the years. Everything whirled and poised in its own wind and gravity. Now wine was being crushed from under the grapeblooded feet of dancing vintners’ daughters, now steaming seas gave birth to coinsheathed monsters while flowered kites strewed scent on blowing clouds . . . now ..
now . . . now . .
The artist stopped.
Here again, there’s no need for comment. The reader is clearly told what he must see and what he must appreciate—and how—in Picasso’s work. Better yet, the passage gives him a quintessence, a summary, a concentrate of Picasso’s entire oeuvre, or rather, of the more facile and decorative period of his oeuvre—which, of course, only serves to make us (or those of us who hadn’t yet done so) realize that even Picasso may not have been totally impervious to Kitsch. On the one hand, Bradbury interprets Picasso by means of the purest of codes (for the most part reduced to the cult of the arabesque and a series of facile connections between stereotyped figures and trite emotions); on the other, he constructs his passage by clumsily stitching together a number of stylemes borrowed from the decadents (in it, one can hear faint echoes of Pater, Wilde, the earliest epiphanic Joyce—the bird girl!—and so on) simply in order to accumulate effects. And yet, the main intention behind this message is selfreflexive: the reader is supposed to react to its style, to be awed by an author «who can write so well.»
To the Midcult reader, the overall impression will be one of «intense lyrical tension.» In other words, the story is not only eminently comestible but also quite beautiful; more than that, it succeeds in conveying a sense of Beauty. The difference between this kind of beauty and that of the nudes that surround it, in Playboy, is minimal but significant: whereas the nudes bluntly refer to a reality that not only exists but may also have a telephone number, Bradbury’s story tries to cloak its true nature behind the worn veil of «art.» Its very hypocrisy is enough to characterize Bradbury’s piece as Kitsch.
Conclusion
Thus, we have looked at all the possibilities and found a definition for Kitsch within the context of aesthetics.
Yet let’s assume that a reader, excited by Bradbury’s novella, would make it his duty to discover Picasso and, confronted for the first time with one of the master’s works, would experience something so personal as to quite obliterate the initial literary stimulus, something that would draw him into the world of the painting and compel him to understand the way in which it was formed. Wouldn’t this be enough to make us wary of all the theoretical definitions concerning good and bad taste?
The ways of God are infinite, as some would say, forgetting that even illnesses can bring us close to God. But the duty of a doctor is to diagnose and cure them.
We should suspect, a priori, every investigation of mass media that tries to reach a definitive conclusion. Within the anthropological situation of mass culture anything can happen, things can be turned upside down in no time; reception can change the physiognomy of transmission, and vice versa. At times, Kitsch is on the side of the message. at times on the side of the receiver’s intention, and, more often than not, on that of the sender who tries to palm his product off for something it is not.
Kitsch is Addinsell’s Warsaw Concerto, with its accumulation of pathetic effects and imitative suggestions («Hear that? Those are planes dropping bombs»), and its heavyhanded use of Chopin; just as Kitsch is the appreciation of this particular musical passage as described in Malaparte’s La pelle (The skin). The notes of this fragment arc heard during a reunion of British soldiers attended by the author, who at first thinks they are part of a Chopin concerto. He is set straight by one of the officers who, with great satisfaction, informs him that «Addinsel is our Chopin.»
In this sense, all the music known as «rhythmicsymphonic,» because of the way in which it tries to amalgamate dance music with the daring of jazz and the dignity of classical symphonies, produces effects similar to those of Addinsel’s piece. But when
