On Impurity: the Dialectics of Cinema and Literature

Abstract

When we consider the birth of film in 1895, we must recognise that it finds its principal significance for literature as threat and opposition. Whether we consider film from the point of view of the documentary record inaugurated by the Lumière brothers or the peep-show attraction with which Edison started, film very quickly reached audiences on a size and scale that literature could never dream of. As perhaps the most visible evidence of a new commercial mass culture, cinema became for many of the official representatives of literary culture the enemy. If one re-reads I. A. Richards’ influential texts of the 1920s, The Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) and Practical Criticism (1929), one finds that the very justification of literary study is often framed in terms of an antidote to a mass culture of which cinema is the most obvious example. This deep-seated opposition is carried through to the present day. The biggest cheer that the late and unlamented Conservative education minister John Patten ever received at a Conservative Party conference was when he bellowed that he would insist that schoolchildren were taught Shakespeare and not soap-opera. Indeed, this opposition is not simply at work in discourses of cultural criticism or political opportunism. There is a literary sub-genre, the ‘Hollywood novel’, of which the two best examples are Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust (1939) and Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One (1948), that finds its fundamental opposition pitting theliterary worker or artist against an uncreative industry which addresses a mass audience.

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