The only way a text can survive is through its interaction with a reader – “no matter how far away that reader may be from the writer in time and space,” Atwood wrote. Now we are getting closer to answering the question: What lasts, what writing survives? And what books should I keep? “It may yield a low-level self-satisfaction, but how can this compare with our joy at great, generous writing.” “To create or endorse the Scholastic is a craven desire,” he wrote in 2000. The playwright David Mamet suggested the purpose of literature is to delight. This is a far better measure of a novel or story’s worth than whether it is highbrow or lowbrow.

In a wonderful 2002 essay, Negotiating with the Dead, Margaret Atwood suggested there is only one question to be asked about any work - is it alive, or is it dead? To talk about literature, therefore, we must ask what is literature? A common response is that it’s a force for change, or morally instructive, but these vague motherhood statements would exclude Rabelais, Henry Miller or the Marquis de Sade. Yet for a long time Don Quixote was regarded as light literature and not worthy of serious study. The final and the greatest expression of human thought, the bitterest irony that a human is capable of expressing …Īnd yet Don Quixote is neither highbrow nor middlebrow if anything it is a satire on literary pretensions, on those genres - the epic and romance of chivalry - that preceded it. In fact, Dostoevsky declared Cervantes book: In a 2002 poll by the Norwegian Nobel Institute, 100 international authors, including Nobel prize-winners, chose Don Quixote (1605) as the most important book of all time, ahead of novels by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. It survives for its historical value alone. Quintus Servinton (1830), the first novel published in Australia, was written by a convict in 1830, but no one would ever describe it as literature. What is valorised today might not be read in 50 years. If we can’t trust our literary academics and critics, to whom, then, should we entrust the judgement of literary quality? Would I ever read Graham Greene again? Probably not, I decide – all that Catholic angst – but I keep two novels by Raymond Chandler. “Literature is bunk,” Chandler replied, “written by fancy boys, clever-clever darlings, stream-of-consciousness ladies and gents and editorial novelists.” It was the duty of learned men to uphold literary standards against the rising tide of middle-class tastes.Įven Dickens was considered by many of his contemporaries to be too middlebrow to be a serious writer, and Edmund Wilson wrote of Raymond Chandler that he “remained a long way below Graham Greene”. Real literature was to be found in religious tracts, epic poetry and mannered letters written by the nobility. In the 18th century, novel-reading was regarded as frivolous and morally suspicious. The distinctions between highbrow and middlebrow fiction are as old as literature itself. It implies an aesthetic pecking order, and is more often than not used in a derogatory way. To which the authors in question last week published their responses, in part taking umbrage at the description of their work as middlebrow because, in Hayes’ words: The academic Beth Driscoll entered the debate, with a recent, wide-ranging article on the middlebrow, with particular focus on three recent Australian novels, by Susan Johnson, Stephanie Bishop and Antonia Hayes. The cult of the middlebrow seems now to have established itself. My colleague Ivor Indyk in the Sydney Review of Books added in September that it was in the giving of literary prizes that:

What lasts, I ask myself, what writing survives? The Guardian critic Jonathan Jones bemoaned in August that a middlebrow cult of the popular was holding literature to ransom. But with fiction, particularly Australian fiction, it is harder to decide. With non-fiction it is easy: keep any reference books that might prove useful in later life, such as the Oxford Guide to Philosophy or Primates of the World. Clearing out my office in preparation for a faculty move, I am faced with the dilemma of what books to retain and what to discard.

Lowbrow vs highbrow