Already in Woolf, the middlebrow concept comprises two seemingly unrelated ideas: the implication of falseness—of counterfeit culture—and of educational intent. When she asks why the middlebrows enjoy the social success that they do, Woolf answers that they seem to spread good things around. She imagines asking her lowbrow “friends” (one wonders whether they exist) why they tolerate middlebrow company, and stuffs into their mouths this reply: “It is very kind of the middlebrows to try to teach [us] culture.” In associating middlebrow with education, Woolf finally displays a little of the psychological acuity that marks every sentence of her novels. For teaching always does feel somewhat false, somewhat incomplete. In the classroom, I take things I love and adapt them. I abridge them. I simplify. I commit the heresy of paraphrase. I make comparisons and explanatory analogies at which specialists would wince. I make reading lists, which always leave somebody important out—whether I cut Thoreau to make room for Harriet Jacobs (a stunningly vivid and economical writer) or the other way around. I find the right level of oversimplification for my audience, I go directly to it, and then, by degrees, I retreat from it, inviting students to follow me into greater complexity. I never stop worrying that I have replaced my subject with a slightly stupider changeling. It just goes with the territory.
Kitsch, Silly and Corrupting
After Woolf, writers on the subject of middlebrow tended to emphasize one of these two qualities—its falsity or its pedagogical usefulness. On the side of falsity, we have art critic Clement Greenberg, who in his influential essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939) separates true art from “kitsch” by centering the artists’ narrowness of purpose, their intentness on a particular idea. Greenberg’s avant-gardists pursue “an absolute in which all relativities and contradictions would be either resolved or beside the point.” Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1989), 5. First published 1961. (One might indeed call this “riding their mind at a gallop in pursuit of an idea.”) For him, this means an ever stricter formalism, an art that breaks itself down into narrower and narrower analysis of its own building blocks, as though in search of the fundamental aesthetic particle. Meanwhile, for the “urban masses,” whose removal from their grandparents’ peasant settings has alienated them from folk culture, a new category of “ersatz culture” arises to fill that need, which Greenberg calls “kitsch.” Kitsch he considers not only silly, but spiritually corrupting; he associates it with totalitarian regimes.