Literary criticism in the Thirties had a number of branches. Edmund Wilson published “Axel’s Castle” in 1931. It was a book that compared Imagist poetry to the poetry that came before. It was followed in 1941 by “The Wound and the Bow”, which was a Freudian interpretation of the Modernist literature of his time, and in 1943 he published “To the Finland Station”, which was an assessment of Marxist writers. Wilson was less driven by ideology than by the critical project itself, which was to get the hang of what an author was saying, whatever was the subject matter or the relevant theory. William Empson, on the other hand, had a consistent point of view. He published “Seven Types of Ambiguity” in 1930 and “Some Versions of Pastoral” in 1935. In the first book, he carefully took apart the idea of simile and metaphor so as to establish the resources language provided to a writer. In the second book, he reduced literature to its conventionalized genres, so that the Gothic romance was a form of the pastoral, a form that stretched back to Vergil and beyond. Literary language and literary form were what made literature work. Walter Benjamin, for his part, had a Marxist interpretation of literature that was perhaps best realized in his “The Work of Art In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, published in 1936. This last has remained remarkably influential. Both Susan Sontag and Rosalind Krauss took it seriously as the way to understand art. I want to look at what Benjamin proposes in this very short book of his, why I think it is so imperfect, and compare it to other works of aesthetics which seem to me to get the relation between art and modernity more correctly.
Benjamin’s thesis is that what we now take to be art arose as part of a cult. It was an object that had a particular aura associated with it, just as a tree branch or the mona lisa might have. Only later was art liberated from its cultic basios and appreciated separately for its own aesthetic properties, the aura it created in people’s minds. Art was not totally liberated, however, until the age of mechanical reproduction, by which Benjamin means primarily the photograph and the cinema, both of which are capable of making multiple copies of themselves, and so art is finally liberated from any cultic reference, as happens when we still refer to the original of an art work as having its own particular patina or markings whereby we know it is genuine rather than fake because it is somehow distinct. The result of this long term process finally coming to fruition in his time is that art, no longer the prisoner of a cult, can choose some other force to which to pledge its allegiance and that is politics, changes in the superstructure of society finally catching up with the changes in social structure that had been going on in the early part of the Twentieth Century what with the rise of socialism and communism.
There are many reasons to praise this short book. Its machine gun spray of insights contains some important ones, such as when he says that every person can be in a film, which predates every person the subject of his or her selfies, and the idea that everyone has fifteen minutes of fame. He is up on the anthropology of religion where, in his time, “cultus” was an important, foundational, concept for the appreciation of religion and an important basis for the first volume of Thomas Mann.s “Joseph and His Brothers”, which appeared a few years later. There is, most of all, Benjamin’s grand vision: that the technology of film and photography would finally allow the liberation of the human spirit so that it could reshape the social structure of the world.
The problem is that Benjamin does not follow up by showing how the fact of mechanical reproduction actually contributes to an expanded consciousness. He falls down on the job, for example, when he says that the fact that scenes shot at different times can be spliced together interferes with the ability of a distinctive actor to place his mark on a role or for him to benefit from the feedback provided by a live audience. To the contrary. By the time Benjamin was writing, the star system had been in place for a quarter century, which Benjamin disparages because it turns the actor into a mere commodity, which is just the gambit that the Frankfurt School would adapt, that being the worst thing you could say about the capitalist system, rather than that it impoverished the poor, which had previously been the main charge against it. But that is to get the star system wrong. Stars were people who dominated the screen whatever role they were playing and so it made sense to think of a Lillian Gish role or a Mary Pickford role or a Douglas Fairbanks role. The individual film was less important than that it was an occasion for a leading light to strut his or her stuff. And so the role of the actor, if anything, was intensified by the fact that the same or a similar movie was seen over and over again by adoring fans who did intersect with the stars by crowding them at publicity events and seeking their autographs. That was feedback.
Another insight about mechanical reproduction that should have been available to a Marxist such as Benjamin, is that the ability to produce vast numbers of copies means that there are huge audiences for films and so a great deal of money can be invested in the production of any one film. The chariot race in the silent “Ben Hur” provides a spectacle that could not be duplicated even in a Metropolitan Opera production of “Aida”, no matter the number of underwriters. In general, Benjamin does not deal with what are the aesthetic responses to the features of mechanical reproduction and so we do not know how the audience is liberated into a higher form of consciousness by its availability. What we do know is that artists find ways around mechanical reproduction if they care to. Artists have learned, for example, to create a limited set of numbered and signed reproductions and so keep up the market price.
It might seem that the shortcomings in Benjamin’s formulation are the ninety years of film history that have intervened since his book, and so we are profiting from hindsight. But the criticisms of Benjamin that I am making were available from the history of film that had already past by the time he wrote his book. For example, he thinks of the cameraman as the central figure in the creation of a film (and perhaps the editor) when it was well known since the time of D. W. Griffith that it was the director who was in control of the film, supervising both the editor and the cameraman. But Benjamin is so swift and confident in his aphoristic judgments and in his willingness to try to get at the essentials of the matter that a reader is likely to lose sight of the question of whether his insights stand up to scrutiny.
Nonetheless, Benjamin was quite influential in that he set the scene for the Frankfurt School of criticism that arose to prominence during the same time. Horkheimer and Adorno, among others, also argued that the complexity of the production process for film kept it from being a true art in that a single soul had to be the producer of an art work. Collective art works were inevitably inferior. The Frankfurt School also argued that the mentality of the people had been transformed by the mass media so that people could no longer think straight, were the prisoners of a consumer society, which is just the opposite of what Benjamin had hoped for, but not really that far removed in that both proposed reason was a creature of culture rather than something independent of culture in that cavemen also had to reason to figure out how to lead wild herds off cliffs so that they could salvage the meat. You don’t need a field manual or a training film in order to do that. In similar fashion, the medium never becomes the message in that no medium prevents a member of the audience from standing back and making sense of what is there before him to behold. That goes for Nazi rallies and for bourgeois movies as well. As Kant had claimed, you can suppress a person’s freedom, or even kill him, but you can’t take away his free will.
I would answer Benjamin by invoking two theories of aesthetics that are very different from one another and both very different from Benjamin’s theory. Gottfried Lessing was a German playwright and intellectual in Germany at the end of the Eighteenth Century. In “Laocoon”, his study of that statue, he proposes that the moment caught by the statue is the one just before the monster devours the children. That choice is dictated by the fact that a statue can only capture one moment at a time and the richest and most complex one will be just before a cataclysmic event takes place. Painting, I would suggest is very different, because it often portrays the moment after cataclysmic events, as is the case with John Singleton Copley, in his “Watson and the Shark” and Poussin in his “The Crossing of the Red Sea”, both of which record what happened in the moment after, not before, the climactic moment. This point can be given a general significance. How is film different from other forms of culture so that it produces both similar and different effects? As Eisenstein pointed out, the film is similar to the novel, embracing its sweep and its intercutting of plots and subplots and the film also includes the novel’s changes of scenery and its displays of character. The film is different from the novel in that, for a long time at least, it was expected to be experienced all at one sitting and a film director’s techniques in cutting or long shots are not as easily contemplated as the voice the narrator of a novel uses to tell his tale, whether it is the author’s voice or that of a character, and how obtrusive that voice will be. And it is obvious enough that photography to some extent replaced the realistic portrait, even if very few selfies are up to the standards of John Singer Sargent, and so art had to find something else to do, that becoming known as Impressionism and Modernism and all the rest. Photorealism did not have a very long run and it wasn’t all that photographic in that it distorted its pictures even if subtly. So Benjamin is just pointing out how art forms differ rather than how a new one, more liberated from being art, replaces an old one.
Benjamin does try to take up the question of how the different qualities of the forms of art affect their significance, but he is wrong footed on that issue. He says that painting is meant, at least in his time, though not in medieval times, to be seen by small groups of people, while motion pictures can be seen by many. That is to fail to foresee that the internet makes all painting available to everyone or even that museums like the Louvre and the Met host giant crowds (when they are open). This mistake about painting would have been apparent even in his own time, given the rise of photography. Andre Malreaux, the novelist and French Minister of Culture under De Gaulle, published “Museum Without Walls” in 1947. The book suggested that every person could visit every museum in the world because of the availability of photographs of paintings. Benjamin should have been on to that. Painting was not in its dotage because of the rise of film, just looking for new subjects and techniques, which it found in Benjamin’s own time in Modernism and even in the Dataism which Benjamin at least thinks to be a rejection of consumerism because it is a slap in the face of the bourgeoisie, but which he thinks also encourages the lack of contemplation that also goes along with viewing films when, of course, there are no end of articles about what a film or films in general mean and are.
A radical rejection of the historical approach, whether that is provided by Benjamin or Lessing, is provided by Aristotle, who sees art as no different from any other phenomenon in that it is subject to objective description. The elements that Aristotle identifies with theatre are there in all narratives. There is plot, character, thought, music, time, diction and spectacle. Time in drama can be understood as general enough to include the disruption of time as when plots move from one moment to years later or just elide most of the time of a journey and not just as the unity of time that was observed in classical drama. Diction can be taken to mean dialogue itself rather than the enunciation of dialogue. Spectacle can be taken to mean visual settings and so to include a novelist’s description of the rural or city setting for his plot. Those seven elements then pertain to all forms of literature: novels, theatre, films and, without too much of a stretch, even to lyric poetry, which includes the development of a theme through dramatic juxtapositions, each poem also having a “music” of its own, which means a particular verbal rhythm.
Supplementary to those seven elements of literature are the effects created by the means of transmission, whether those are mechanical or not. So streaming services can allow for binging on a number of seasons of a television series, and the experience of seeing all of “West Wing” or “Law and Order” in, let us say, a week’s time, can be impressive because it is so immersive, the viewer catching on to the rhythms of the cutting, the repeated nuances of each character. Also impressive can be the opposite phenomenon, which is breaking up a movie by seeing it in a number of sessions, as is not allowed in the movie theatre but is allowed for by the novel. Then a segment is savored before moving on to the next section of the book. All of these consequences of transmission are secondary to the essential qualities of storytelling referred to by Aristotle, and these have been with us for a very long time. If the paintings on cave walls are consulted, then painting has been with us from very primitive times. If the idea that Homer was based on an oral tradition, as was much of “Genesis”, then literature preceded the beginning of writing. That is not a conservative message in answer to Benjamin’s “revolutionary” one that painting and literature evolve along with human consciousness. It is just that painting and literature are just some of the basic facts of the human condition.