What do Edgar Allan Poe, Philip K. Dick, and Jerry Lewis have in common? These hilobrow pioneers were scorned, or ignored—while at their height of their powers—by middlebrow American intellectuals and critics. But they were hailed as geniuses by French intellectuals and critics. The French dig hilobrow. Q.E.D.

Poe was a weirdo: morbid, hysterical, politically incorrect. He hated the commonsensical, progressive-minded bourgeoisie—particularly the middlebrow literary types headquartered in Boston—and they returned the sentiment. No wonder that Baudelaire, a pioneer of literary modernism, and Poe’s great champion in France, saw him as a kindred spirit. Mallarmé and Valéry followed Baudelaire’s lead, and “edgarpoe” became a Symbolist saint.

His adoption by French intellectuals and critics has long puzzled those Americans who think of Poe as a writer of occult horror and detective stories, which—no matter how well-written—are by definition lowbrow. This is not the place to set the record straight, however; it’s more important to point out that we latter-day hilobrows find the very same things attractive about Poe that the French did then. Valéry would write about Poe’s influence on Baudelaire: “Poe was opening up a way, teaching a very strict and alluring doctrine, in which a kind of mathematics and a kind of mysticism become one.” Yes! Another great hilobrow, Alfred Jarry, would give this doctrine a name: ‘pataphysics. More on this topic another time.

Thanks in part to the admirable efforts of Jonathan Lethem, Philip K. Dick has been adopted, in recent years, by middlebrows. Here’s Adam Gopnik, the ultimate middlebrow, writing in The New Yorker in 2007:

The trouble is that, much as one would like to place Dick above or alongside Pynchon and Vonnegut—or, for that matter, Chesterton or Tolkien—as a poet of the fantastic parable he was a pretty bad writer. Though his imagination is at least the equal of theirs, he had, as he ruefully knew, a hack’s habits, too, and he never really got over them. … That’s probably why Dick’s reputation as a serious writer, like Poe’s, has always been higher in France, where the sentences aren’t read as they were written.

Another middlebrow stratagem is revealed here: Because middlebrows like all edges smoothed, all surfaces shined, they tell themselves that the prickly, eccentric, sometimes even bad prose of a Poe or a Dick can only be praised by someone reading it in a beautiful translation. No, that’s not why Dick’s reputation was higher in France! It’s because the French not only admired Dick’s ideas, their sensibilities hadn’t (yet) been blunted by Hollywood’s high production values. Much like eccentric French slow-foodists who actually enjoy finding wormholes in their apples, French intellectuals and critics are able to enjoy the hack qualities of Dick’s prose without fetishizing or ignoring them. As PKD fan Jean Baudrillard says of the first-order simulacrum (to use Baudrillard’s own phildickian example: the clumsy robot, as opposed to the slickly produced, and therefore uncanny and terrifying android), it’s charming.

Middlebrows still can’t decide whether France’s embrace of Jerry Lewis is funny or aggravating. It gets under their skin; hence all the anxious jokes about it. Here’s Cecil Adams:

[Lewis biographer Shawn] Levy conjectures that French audiences took to Lewis in part because he exemplified the French notion of the auteur—the individual, typically the director, who imposes his artistic vision on the production, which Lewis definitely did. But it’s probably equally true that the French, despite or maybe because of their devotion to art (you know, pushing the envelope and all that), were also suckers for low comedy. One recalls the legendary French stage performer Le Petomane, aka the Fartiste.

Adams would have us believe that Lewis fans must either be snobby highbrows (e.g., the auteurist, whom middlebrows love to mock) or lowbrow “suckers” who love fart gags. This is a typical middlebrow stratagem: When confronted with a cultural production that makes you uncomfortable, something that challenges your complacently transgressive hipster worldview, brand it as wacky—auteurists are wacky; so is Le Pétomane—and then you can dismiss it with an untroubled conscience. Readers, don’t be bamboozled. The French hailed Lewis not for one reason or the other, but both.

PS: Our friend Chris Fujiwara is writing a book on Lewis; read this excerpt.

‘Pataphysical, charming in its eccentricity and imperfection, simultaneously visionary and fart-ilarious: This is hilobrow.