This article was downloaded by: [Monash University Library]

On: 11 April 2015, At: 19:37

Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House,
37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Third Text
Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ctte20

Popular art and the cultural tradition

C.L.R. James
Published online: 19 Jun 2008.

To cite this article: C.L.R. James (1990) Popular art and the cultural tradition , Third Text, 4:10, 3-10, DOI:
10.1080/09528829008576248
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528829008576248

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the Content) contained in the
publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations
or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any
opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the
views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be
independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses,
actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever
caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic
reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any
form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://
www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Downloaded by [Monash University Library] at 19:37 11 April 2015

Popular Art
and the Cultural Tradition*
C.L.R. James

* Translation of a talk
delivered at a
discussion on mass
culture held under the
auspices of The
Congress of Cultural
Freedom, March 9,
1954, at the offices of
the French review,
Preuves, Paris.

We are publishing this

article with the kind
permission of CLR James
Estate.

I propose to show that artistic creation in the great tradition of Aeschylus and
Shakespeare finds its continuation today in films by D.W. Griffith, Charlie
Chaplin and Eisenstein.
I shall also make some remarks about the function of literary criticism in
relation to these films.
Film critics often write as if Griffith invented techniques as Edison invented
the electric light. But the film techniques which Griffith created are the result
of the extended interests, awareness, needs and sensibilities of modern men.
Our world of the twentieth century is panoramic.
Contemporary society gives man a sense, on a scale hitherto unknown, of
connections, of cause and effect, of the conditions from which an event arises,
of other events occurring simultaneously. His world is one of constantly
increasing multiplicity of relations between himself, immense mechanical
constructions and social organizations of world-wide scope. It is representation
of this that demanded the techniques of flashback, cross-cutting and a camera
of extreme mobility.
Along with this panoramic view we are aware today of the depths and
complexities of the individual personality, as opened up by Freud and others.
This finds its most plastic representation in the close-up.
Modern content demanded a modern technique, not vice versa. What is the
content that this technique serves? Ours is an age of war. D.W. Griffith's Birth
of a Nation portrays the American Civil War, the first great modern war. Ours
is an age of revolution. The Birth of a Nation is the first great epic of a modern
nation in revolutionary crisis. And reactionary as is his attitude to the Negro,
in his famous scenes of the organization of the white-shirted Ku Klux Klan,

Griffith gives us a portrayal, to this day unsurpassed, of the rise of the Fascistic
movements which are so characteristic a feature of our age. In this film he
unfolds the history of our epoch. The date is 1915.
The two masterpieces of Griffith bear the stamp of an artist in the grand
manner.
In periods of historical transition man seeks to integrate in the present his
conceptions of his past and his expectations of the future.

Downloaded by [Monash University Library] at 19:37 11 April 2015

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.1
1 T.S. Eliot, 'Burnt
Norton' from The Four
Quartets.

It is a common characteristic of the great artists at the height of their powers.

Aeschylus in the Oresteia, Dante in the Divine Comedy, Shakespeare in King
Lear, Victor Hugo in Lgende des Sicles, Melville in Moby Dick. But no age has
been so conscious of the permeation of the historical past in the actual present
as our own, and no modern artist has attempted such a colossal integration
of the historical past as Griffith in Intolerance. In this film he shows us the fall
of Babylon, the story of Christ, the religious crisis in Europe in the 16th century,
the struggle between capital and labour, and the story of a family of
unemployed in a big city.
The means he uses show the same insight into the needs of our century.
Today, in mid-century, as we look back and forwards, we can see that our
age is dominated by a sense of the immense accumulation of institutions and
organised social forces which move with an apparently irresistible automatism.
Yet at the same time it is an age more than ever conscious of the inviolability
of the single human personality. The sub-title of Intolerance is Love Through
the Ages. In reality Griffith gives a portrait of the individual in desperate struggle
against the constantly increasing power of social forces.
Griffith writes the epic of the ordinary man. The lyric poet of the ordinary
man is Charlie Chaplin, from his beginnings up to City Lights. (For me after
that, there is still genius but genius in decline.) The Tramp is himself the modern
individual, inviolable in the midst of the cruelties and pretenses of modern
society. But how does he convey this inviolability? Modern aesthetics, in its
search for the secret of form, has neglected perhaps the most remarkable
manifestation of it that our society has created. Chaplin is, above all, an actor.
And certainly within the memory of man living, no one has seen a performer
more fully equipped, both in his individual virtuosity and his sense of himself
in relation to the whole. It is by the perfection of his form that Charlie, the
Tramp, becomes a heroic individual, representing all humanity.
The existentialists have never surpassed Chaplin in their emphasis on the
fact that the essential existence of man is in the violent struggles that take place
in him over the most elementary details of his everyday existence. But they,
like the Freudians, are overwhelmed by these problems. The Tramp always
emerges from them, not necessarily victorious, but always undefeated.
Why?
I believe that it is because Chaplin played for a mass popular audience.
Chaplin and Griffith, like Aeschylus and Shakespeare, had to please the mass
audience.
We have therefore to examine this audience.
The mass popular audience of Griffith and the early Chaplin lived in an
atmosphere of social freedom and absence of traditional restraints characteristic
of the growth of the United States. It enjoyed the most advanced technology

Downloaded by [Monash University Library] at 19:37 11 April 2015

C.L.R. James in United States, 1940 (Photo: Penumbra)

in the world and the greatest possibilities for formal education and social
mobility. The beginning of the century in the United States saw the growth
of the cheap popular newspaper and the inclusion of the great masses of the
people in the hitherto restricted stream of general intellectual communication.
It was precisely in this period that there sprang into sudden existence the
popular arts which, characteristic of American civilization, have been welcomed
by the common people all over the world, the comic strip (culminating in the
work of Walt Disney) and jazz music. It was this public for which the early
film was produced.
These new popular arts seemed very far removed from the work of the great
artists in Europe. Yet I believe there is a bond and one whose significance will
grow with time. Proust, Picasso, Joyce, Stravinsky, T.S. Eliot (and also Bergson
and Freud) are united in this, that they seem to have had as their common
purpose the complete destruction of the values of 19th century civilization.

Downloaded by [Monash University Library] at 19:37 11 April 2015

2 This is not true of his

other better known
works.

An examination of the popular art of the early 20th century of the American
mass will show that they were no less hostile to the values of the 19th century,
and particularly to romanticism. The two masterpieces of Griffith2 and the
films of Chaplin are only one proof of this. But while in the European art of
the 20th century the impression is of doom, an undefeated buoyancy pervades
the American popular art, despite its frequent crudenesses and brutality. It
is this buoyancy which finds its most characteristic expression in the work of
Chaplin.
The mass popular audience, however, must not be considered as being
separate from the nation. If the mass was decisive, yet the audience for which
Griffith and Chaplin produced was a national audience. It was the depression
in 1929 which opened the split in the national consciousness in the United
States. And with that began a period of decline for the film.
No less characteristic of modern society than the mass audience in the large
industrial cities is the great industrial corporation. I believe it to be of immense
significance for the study of aesthetics that the artistic productions of Griffith
and Chaplin were created by typical modem corporations, with their hierarchial
organization, their thousands of mass employees, their financial manipulations
and the extent and variety of their relations with their public. In other words
the artists, the medium and the audience, were an organic part of the social
structure of their day. (Contrast this with the isolation of a Valry or a Joyce)
The third of the great masters is Eisenstein, but what I have to say about
him will be better said later. I prefer immediately to take up the other point
that I stated at the beginning, that a modern aesthetic an aesthetic of the
20th century must base itself upon modern popular art and above all, the
modern film. In the light of what we have observed about Griffith and Chaplin,
let us look at Shakespeare. Shakespeare was a script writer for a dramatic
company, and the modern screen writer has more interest in his script than
Shakespeare seems to have had in his. Whenever I read that school of critics
who persistently treat Shakespeare as if he were engaged in writing cosmic
profundities for philosophic minds, I say to myself: if indeed it were so, it is
very strange that he did not take more care to see that these were printed.
Full of philosophical profundities as he might be, the artistic company
through which and for which Shakespeare worked was a commercial company,
(like Griffith's and Chaplin's) characteristic of the new forms of industry of
the time. He and the actors had their money invested in it. They had to please
a mass popular audience. If they didn't please it, like Griffith and Chaplin,
they would go bankrupt.
To continue this line of investigation we therefore have to examine this
audience carefully. It was one of the greatest audiences that an artist ever had.
First, it was a national audience composed of all classes. At the time of
Shakespeare's death the national consciousness had not been split by the Civil
War. But the great body of the audience consisted of artisans, apprentices and
students, the mass popular audience of the London of that day. From these
Londoners, within a generation after Shakespeare's death, came some of the
cadres of Cromwell's army. From them came the cadre of that great political
party, the Levellers. From that stratum came some of the men who founded
the United States. This class of men was permeated with the great new idea
of free individualism, and all of Shakespeare's great tragic characters are
essentially individualists who are in conflict with the corporate society of
medieval Europe. Even the puritans who bitterly opposed the theatre were
themselves an extreme form of this individualism. Every thinker was prepared

Downloaded by [Monash University Library] at 19:37 11 April 2015

to stand on the corner of the street and expound his individual interpretation
of the scriptures.
Hamlet is an individualist, a man of free enterprise. But I have to separate
myself from the vulgarities of Stalinist criticism. Hamlet is not a rising capitalist.
His activity, the freedom of his enterprise, is intellectual. For him thought is
a form of action. To think freely, to examine, to speculate, that was a new
force in society in 1600. And Hamlet is torn between the need for action as
a member of a corporate society and his need to examine, to speculate on
everything in sight, and above all, on his own individual personality.
The individuality of Hamlet is the individuality of the intellectual. In every
succeeding generation the intellectual has been caught between these two
compulsions, to act within the precise and limiting conditions of society or
to preserve his intellectual being by wandering through continually expanding
seas of thought alone. That is why the play has achieved increasing significance
through the ages, particularly for the cultivated, the intellectuals.
Now the relation between Shakespeare and Griffith and Chaplin is this. The
modern novelists and the modern poets are at the tail-end of that tradition
which had its magnificent beginning in Hamlet. But Griffith and Chaplin and
Eisenstein have broken out of it. I am not asking "futile comparisons between
the relative aesthetic values of Shakespeare and Chaplin. What I am drawing
attention to is that Shakespeare in giving artistic embodiment to the intellectual
tradition in Hamlet was seeking to please his mass popular audience. And
Griffith and Chaplin have broken out of that tradition, now in decay, because
they sought to please their mass popular audience. They deal with an individual
too, but the individual they deal with is not an intellectual. He is the common
man, everyman, the lowest possible denominator. The Tramp could not be
lower in the social scale. Griffith would not even give names to any of his
fictional characters in Intolerance.
With Aeschylus I can be even more brief.
The organisation for which he worked was a state organisation, whose
structure was characteristic of the social political organisation of the Greek
city-state.
His audience was truly national. It was also truly popular, the overwhelming
majority being that extraordinary social phenomenon, the political democracy
of 5th Century Athens. This mass audience, directly or indirectly, decided who
were the victors in the dramatic competition. I am sure that I have seen
somewhere that Aristotle or Plato, or both, disapproved of this literary criticism
by the populace. But this audience gave Aeschylus the prize thirteen times
and I don't see how Aristotle and Plato and their friends could have done any
better.
For this popular audience (and it seems that it was extremely partisan and
very noisy) Aeschylus wrote the Oresteia which is admittedly the greatest drama
of ancient times and for me personally the greatest play that has ever been
written.
Here we have to note only that Orestes is not Hamlet nor is he the ordinary
man of Chaplin and Griffith, overwhelmed by institutions. Prince though
Orestes is, his crisis was the crisis of the normal Greek citizen caught between
the old tribal society and the new order of democratic government by law.
We can now see the umbilical cord that enables us to bring together such
diverse names: revered artists of the cultural tradition, like Aeschylus and
Shakespeare, and modern popular favourites like Griffith and Chaplin. In their
ways they give three stages in the development of the relationship of the

Downloaded by [Monash University Library] at 19:37 11 April 2015

individual man to his social environment which is the true history of humanity.
I am not confusing aesthetics with history. Aesthetics is the study of artistic
form. And the form of the film both illustrates and is illustrated by the history
of the dramatic classics. In the art of the Greek city state, where individual
and universal have achieved some balanced relation, it is the chorus upon which
the whole dramatic action depends. In the drama of the modern free
individualist, it is the soliloquy. It is because the individual is dominant in
life that he can take the liberty of explaining to the audience not only his open
but his secret motives, the motives of everyone in sight and anything which
is needed to advance the drama. It is in our world, the world of vast institutions
and the helpless individual, that Griffith's close-up tells us the facts about the
individual that the individual does not know himself.
But these relationships are even more subtle. We have lost the chorus which
was the audience on the stage. But the modern director moves his camera
always with a view to whether he wishes the audience to be directly involved
in the middle of the action or for some artistic reason to be removed from it.
Never before has the audience been so directly a constituent of the process
of artistic creation. The recent film production of Julius Caesar is for me as
arresting, as startling, as revealing a commentary on our own age and on
Shakespeare as I have seen in a lifetime of reading and study of the plays.
To oppose to these considerations comparisons between the relative values
of the work of Shakespeare or of Griffith is entirely irrelevant, not to say
stultifying.
It is now that I want to say a few words about Eisenstein. If Griffith and
Chaplin refused to deal with the heroic individual of free enterprise (either
in action or in thought) but dealt with the individual as symbolic of the mass,
Eisenstein goes further. He makes the mass itself his hero. All criticism must
begin from the individual impulse. And for my part, from the very first time
I saw Battleship Potemkin many, many years ago, the scene on the steps of
Odessa has not been the greatest scene in the film. I was fascinated by the
spectacle of the thousands upon thousands of people bursting from all parts
of the screen on their way towards the body of the dead sailor. And the years
have only confirmed this first impression. And I believe that it is this discovery
of a new category in dramatic creation that accounts for the formal perfection
and simplicity of the structure of Potemkin. But Eisenstein was never to repeat
it. Like Aeschylus he worked for a state organisation. But unlike Aeschylus
the final verdict on his work was not the verdict of the mass popular audience
but of the central committee or its representatives.
Here it is convenient to point out the infinite complexity of some of the
problems which for the most part I am merely stating here. I will take only
one. It seems to me that Eisenstein had to satisfy a committee. The Russian
working class, the basis of the mass audience in Russia, was separated from
the rest of the nation in its own consciousness and in the consciousness of
the Russian artist of that time. I have made clear my belief that (judging
empirically from history) this conscious separation of the classes seems to be
an obstacle in the way of the greatest creation. I am concerned with it here
for its effect on form. The more I see of Potemkin, the more it brings to mind,
of all people, Racine. It is true that the 20th century sees infinitely more in
Racine than did the 18th and the 19th. Perhaps we are beginning to understand
what his audience saw. Be that as it may. In Potemkin as in Phdre I see the
result of an artist who knows precisely the clearly defined audience for whom
he is working, and I note the same in The Mother of Pudovkin.

Downloaded by [Monash University Library] at 19:37 11 April 2015

Formal perfection is not necessarily the most inclusive mode of expressing

what is there to be expressed. Potemkin was a very early creation of Eisenstein.
But this artist teeming with ideas was denied a natural development. And as
I read the fascinating account of his theories in Marie Seton's recent biography,
I am more than ever convinced that the tragedy of the whole brilliant Russian
school was that they were not able to test their theories by the suffrage of the
popular mass.
I am now in a position to make some remarks on criticism today. Modern
criticism has to reckon with the fact that modern man, the ordinary everyday
citizen, feels that he requires to know his past in order to understand his
present. This knowledge he can learn only in art, and above all, in literature.
So that criticism today has a popular function to perform. It will cease being
merely culture or perish. The great creative works of Aeschylus and
Shakespeare, which I have taken here as examples, were not produced as
culture. And it is noticeable that the greatest of all literary critics, Aristotle,
did not know drama as culture but as a popular art.
What is one distinguishing characteristic of Aristotle's criticism, especially
today since the development of psychoanalysis? It is the theory of catharsis.
Through the pity and terror which the audience feels, these passions are purged
from them. The importance of this theory to me is that Aristotle had in mind
and could not have had in mind anything else but the great body of the political
democracy of Athens. In other words, he had in mind the Athenian form of
the modern film audience. I believe that to be the source of the enduring value
of his Poetics. I go further, I believe that we of the 20th century will get closer
to an understanding of the Poetics of Aristotle by a study of it in relation to
the modern film and its audience. By it also we will understand more clearly
than previous generations where we have left the Poetics behind. Plato., in his
hostility to the poets, was obviously motivated also by the mass character of
the Greek audience. In this study modern literary criticism can find its true
function.
Since Aristotle and Plato and the decline of the Greek city-state, criticism
of necessity no longer has the mass popular audience as the center of its
conceptions. It is the modern film which has restored this possibility.
I am not speaking of social consciousness. No philosopher was more
conscious of society than Hegel. His philosophy was completely permeated
with a conception of humanity developing through different social stages to
complete self-realisation. His aesthetics is the culmination of his system, but
it is the culmination of his system because he believed this complete selfrealisation was impossible in the objective world. That is why he placed its
realisation in intellectual activity, specifically art and religion. The Romanticism
of disoriented men of genius like Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Wordsworth,
Keats, Shelley, and the whole French Romantic movement was only the
actuality of what was arrived at by a man so entirely different from them as
Hegel. Aristotle might have that problem in his politics and longingly
contemplate refuge in a community of kindred souls. He did not have it in
aesthetics.
That problem is still with us.
I want to take as an example English criticism of Shakespeare. Coleridge
lifted Shakespeare criticism to great heights by the romantic interest in
individuals, both in the characters of the plays and the uniqueness of the gifts
of the great artists. But once he and his colleagues, Lamb and Hazlitt had done

Downloaded by [Monash University Library] at 19:37 11 April 2015

10

3 What would happen to

them there is another
matter.

that, there was nothing left to be done in that field but a mere repetition
according to personal insight, idiosyncracy and the capacity to generate
enthusiasm of the critic. English criticism of Shakespeare has not recovered
from it to this day. The great advances that have been made have been in the
field of scholarship. A reviewer has recently said in the Times Literary Supplement
of Shakespeare criticism that it is a jungle. Of integration there has been none.
Integration there will have to be. Nothing on earth can prevent the
coalescence of the cultural tradition with the popular audience. The question
is: How? It can be done according to the directives of that great literary critic,
the late Zhdanov, or of that other great literary critic, Mao-Tse-Tung. Possible
deficiencies in criticism are more than atoned for by the power of the totalitarian
press, and if that is not sufficiently convincing, the secret police. But the
democracies have no reason to be complacent. In America the divorce is
complete. American criticism lives almost entirely in little magazines read only
by students and professors. A great government corporation, like the British
Broadcasting Corporation, frankly divides its cultural programme into two
parts, the Third programme for the cultivated and popularisation for the mass.
As far as France is concerned, I have constantly in my mind the conclusion
of Jean Paul Sartre's otherwise very illuminating book What is Literature? Here
he puts forward the doctrine that for literature to be saved, writers must write
for the masses on behalf of the proletarian class struggle in order to advance
mankind on the road to socialism. That is the way to produce party resolutions,
not great literature. But it is significant evidence that serious criticism on its
present basis either retires into the clique or the coterie, or in its desperate
effort to reach the masses of its own free will arrives at conceptions leading
to totalitarianism.
I do not propose to give any advice to creative artists. I believe, however,
that if Aeschylus, Shakespeare or the author of Tartuffe and Don Juan (I am
not sure of Racine) came back today, they would take one glance around and
immediately buy a plane ticket for Hollywood, in order to make contact with
the popular audience of the world.3 But to critics and to all interested in the
cultural tradition, what I have to say amounts to this. Today the tradition can
only be renewed in the place where the tradition was created, in an art intended
for the popular mass audience.
I have confined myself to the classic films. It is not that there are no modern
films worthy of critical notice, for example, the Italian school which sprang
up after the nation purged itself of totalitarianism. There are good modern
films. There are bad ones. But whether they are good or bad, the medium deals
with that range and variety of modern sensibilities from which it originated.
If the film however has declined, as it undoubtedly has, the reasons, I think,
are not artistic but social. At the root is the depression which deprived the
artist of that national audience which it seems is inseparable from great
creativity. And the other reasons spring from the first. Griffith could treat,
for example, the subject of capital and labour with the utmost freedom. But
today, in the United States, for instance, or for that matter anywhere, so tense
is the relation between the different classes, and so highly organised their
representative institutions, that immense areas of social experiences have no
opportunity to be presented on the screen. In this respect Aeschylus and
Shakespeare had infinitely greater freedom than any modern film director.
The poet or novelist is free. The film director is not. He needs it far more than
they. His creative imagination is stunted from the very beginning. The solution
of that is not an aesthetic question. It is a question of politics.