Abstract
The New Yorker Books section of December 12, 1959, largely comprises a long treatment of Richard Ellmann’s monumental biography of James Joyce by Dwight Macdonald (who would, the subsequent year, publish the well-known anti-middlebrow polemic “Masscult and Midcult”). Shortly after the essay on Joyce, comes a tiny anonymous review of James Michener’s smash hit Hawaii, which damns Michener’s novel with the wittily faint praise of which the New Yorker was master: “Mr. Michener makes a definite effort to lend personality to a few of the many people who find a voice in his work”; “[t]he writing is competent.” The review concludes with a note meant to buttress the reviewer’s implication that Hawaii is beneath serious notice, kitsch, middlebrow: the novel is a “Book-of-the-Month Club selection.”1 By contrast, Macdonald’s article lionizes Joyce as “A Hero of Our Time,” championing his rugged individualism in columns that are, in a serendipitous metaphor for Cold War anxiety over the eclipse of the individual by mass culture, seemingly squeezed thin on both sides by advertisements for the products of large corporations, a cartoon where a firm rings up an employee during his free time to check that he is still thinking about his job, and books on the threat of “the new Super-science.”2
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Notes
“HAwAii, by James A. Michener,” rev. of Hawaii, by James A. Michener, New Yorker, Dec. 12, 1959, p. 223. On middlebrow culture and the Book-of-the-Month Club, see Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992)
Janice A. Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
Franco Moretti, Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to Garc ia Márquez, trans. Quintin Hoare (London: Verso, 1996), pp. 4, 1, 4. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as ME.
See Alan Nadel, “God’s Law and the Wide Screen: The Ten Commandments as Cold War ‘Epic,’” Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 90–116.
G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford: larendon Press, 1975), II: 1053
Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), p. 87. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as TN.
Immanuel Kant, AAAA Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 57.
John Hersey, Hiroshima (London: Penguin, 1946), p. 107.
Pound, The Cantos (New York: New Directions, 1996), p. 816
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, trans. Sophie Wilkins, 2 vols. (New York: Vintage, 1996), I.181
W. B. Yeats, Collected Poems (Ware: Wordworth Editions, 2000), p. 296
T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950 (New York, Harcourt Brace, 1967), p. 38.
Drury, Advise and Consent (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959), p. 161. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as AC.
See Ruark, Poor No More (New York: Fawcett, 1959)
Ruark, Poor No More (London: Corgi, 1971).
Caldwell, Dear and Glorious Physician (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959), pp. 319, 282. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as DGP.
Uris, Exodus (New York: Bantam Books, 1986), pp. 80–1. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as E.
Michener, Hawaii (New York: Random House, 1959), p. 1. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as H.
See, for example, Michener, “‘Aloha’ for the Fiftieth State,” New York Times Apr. 19, 1959, p. SM14
Michener, “Hawaii: The Case for our Fiftieth State,” Reader’s Digest, Dec. 1958, pp. 158–70.
For an alternative view that sees Hawaii as very much in line with Michener’s journalism, see Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 223–64.
For the well-known formulation of disavowal as a psychic process characterized by the phrase “I know well, but all the same,” see Octave Mannoni, “I Know Well, but All the Same…,” trans. G. M. Goshgarian, in Molly Anne Rothenberg, Dennis A. Foster, and Slavoj Zižek (eds.), Perversion and the Social Relation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 68–92.
Macdonald, preface to Against the American Grain (New York: Random House, 1962), p. ix.
Heinz Kohut, The Restoration of the Self (New York: International Universities Press, 1977), p. 286; see also pp. 285–90.
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© 2015 Tom Perrin
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Perrin, T. (2015). The Second-Greatest Stories Ever Told: Middlebrow Epics of 1959 and the Aesthetics of Disavowal. In: The Aesthetics of Middlebrow Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137523952_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137523952_5
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