The Middlebrow

 I think of myself as a middlebrow with low tendencies. Yes, I can read some highbrow things, but all too often I go these things are lifeless. Or they are sucking the life out of their subject - Shakespeare, or James Joyce, or generally art. I think if I can reach another's mind or heart, then all I have written is masturbatory.

However, reading Betwixt or Bewitched? Rethinking the “Middlebrow” with Dino Buzzati by Caterina Domeneghini (Public Books), got me thinking I may not be as middlebrow as I think. See, I do not mind unsettling those who read my stories. In my story "Agnes", the title character has turned the pain of her life into a combativeness against the slings and arrows of quotidian fortune, with which she meant to protect her children from the cruelties of life; only it has alienated her children from her. In "One Dead Blonde", besides pointing out the politics of crime, I went against the idea of the crime story as providing a comfort to the world disrupted by the criminal act. If middlebrow is reassuring of world-as-is, I am not middlebrow. Finally, I want to openly rebel against the Indiana novel as sentimental.

The very title of the collection The Bewitched Bourgeois offers a clue. For Venuti’s choice of the French borrowing bourgeois—“a very difficult word to use in English,” as Raymond Williams once described it—to translate the Italian “borghese” is, itself, a foreignizing move.³ As it invokes the French sociological tradition, where “the petit-bourgeois relation to culture” has been defined by its “capacity to make ‘middle-brow’ whatever it touches,” this borrowed term also gestures toward the ambivalence—and resistance—that the “middlebrow” itself displays toward translation.⁴ “The English word,” as Diana Holmes writes, “with all its derogatory connotations, is … unmatched in any other language hence never quite translatable.”⁵ And yet its hybridity and slipperiness, and the largely shared conditions of its rise across Europe, the United States, and beyond, make the “middlebrow” quite amenable to transnational migration. 

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Still, there’s something about Buzzati’s middlebrow that does not quite fit the Anglophone caricature. His fiction is neither comfortable nor sentimental—it is eerie. Far from sensationalizing or distorting the real world for effect—a “Midcult” trope which Macdonald called “parajournalism” (“a bastard form, … exploiting the factual authority of journalism and the atmospheric license of fiction”)—Buzzati uses the fantastic to illuminate deeper existential and societal anxieties.²⁰ Take, for example, his story “Elephantiasis” (1967). Written partly as a popularizing scientific pamphlet, partly as a news piece, it addresses a familiar obsession, recounting surreal incidents that “had a vast echo in the press, radio, and TV”—the very vehicles of middlebrow culture—as plastic-made cars, infrastructures, and even children’s toys begin to grow uncontrollably in Italy, America, Japan, and Tanzania in a not too remote 2042.

Buzzati’s middlebrow is not simply “betwixt,” as Woolf would call it, but bewitched. Less a diluted compromise between “high” and “low” than a threshold between reality and nightmare, his middlebrow offers a space for enchantment and estrangement. Instead of celebrating traditional bourgeois values such as earnestness or self-improvement, Buzzati’s stories provoke existential bewilderment, as his characters become trapped in looping fables. Giuseppe Gaspari, the “bewitched bourgeois” of the homonymous 1942 story that also gives the title to the collection, epitomizes this condition. Whilst vacationing with his family, Gaspari comes across a group of boys playing war games and, out of nostalgia for a bygone childhood, decides to join them. Yet he participates with such intensity that the game suddenly becomes real, and an arrow strikes him down. “This is not absurd,” Buzzati ominously told Panafieu.²¹

Buzzati’s middlebrow doesn’t aim to reassure so much as to disorient. His stories hinge on a rupture—an uncanny vision, an unexpected visitor, a strange discovery—that suddenly reshuffles the mundane. These moments jolt characters out of their routines, breaking into what he calls the “solid bourgeois world” in “The Scandal on Via Sesostri” (1965). It’s a realm populated by “esteemed professionals” and their “irreproachable wives,” who are momentarily forced to reconsider their prerogatives—to imagine, if only for a second, alternative ways of living. That story chronicles, with the precision of investigative reportage, the unmasking of Enzo Siliri, a dead doctor and Nazi collaborator who had lived under the false identity of respected doctor Tullio Larosi.

 Ideas, still gathering them. Maybe this will give you a few.

sch 9/26