Leisure: The Rise of Mass Culture

In the midst of a seven-day visit to the U.S., France’s Andre Malraux stopped off in Manhattan last week and delivered a remarkable speech in which he eloquently expanded the crucial role of culture in the long fight for the freedom of man. Famed novelist (Man’s Fate), art critic (The Voices of Silence) and now France’s first Minister of Cultural Affairs, Malraux sharply challenged those artists and intellectuals who see in the advent of modern mass culture only an artistic blight.

He began with a sweeping declaration: ”The word civilized is opposed to the word barbarous; the word cultured, first of all, to the word ignorant . . . Knowledge is the study of Rembrandt, Shakespeare or Monteverdi; culture is our emotion on seeing The Night Watch, a performance of Macbeth.

“Today’s radio, records and especially the popular press, films and television—what we call the mass media—are pouring forth the enormous flood of dreams that we now call mass culture, which our intellectual culture seems to oppose. It is true that the mental level of the films based on War and Peace and Anna Karenina is incomparably inferior to that of Tolstoy’s novels; it is true that the mental level of the cinema, and particularly its emotional level, is quite low. But without the film, the millions who have seen Anna Karenina would never have read the novel. Westerns have not replaced Plato or Balzac; they have replaced The Three Musketeers and Treasure Island.

“This new collectivity has produced a new expression for its feelings, and, more important, for its fantasies—an expression served by unprecedented means of circulation. Our civilization produces as many dreams in a week as it does machines in a year, thereby instituting a fantasy-life which the world has never before known, and whose presence in the real lives of hundreds of millions of human beings is quite different from the fictional or legendary presences of the past.” Needed: A New Chivalry. “And if, today, states create Ministries of Cultural Affairs, it is because every civilization is threatened by the proliferation of its fantasy-life if this fantasy-life is not oriented by values. For thousands of years, these values have been religious values. The Renaissance substituted a culture of the mind for a culture of the soul.

But the fantasy-life of the Renaissance was not a mass dream. The American Revolution, the French Revolution fostered great, stirring dreams—confined to history. To rediscover an imaginative form which includes the real and the unreal, emotions and the phantasmagoria, we must look back to our Middle Ages and their noble courts of love. But the fate of Christianity was not decided in the courts of love; it was determined by those who, looking quite objectively at the 10th century mercenaries they saw around them, resolved to bring knighthood into flower from them.

“Now, in the most tumultuous tidal wave of dreams humanity has ever experienced, we vaguely realize that we too must find our own knighthood, our own chivalry. But what values can orient these dreams which seem to ignore all values?” Wave of Fantasy. Those values, said Malraux, can be found only in the world’s masterpieces, each of which embodies “the invincible permanence of what has triumphed over death.” “The wave of fantasy breaking over every city erected by our industrial civilization is coupled with the discovery and appreciation of the past of the entire earth. Never have painters admired so many forms of so many civilizations. Our civilization has kept Michelangelo and revived the Romanesque churches, the archaic Greeks and the temple sculptures of the East, of China and India: the great powers of the soul . . . Confronting the great shapeless dream surging out of the unconscious of crowds, with its imperious demons, its childish angels and cheap heroes, stand the only forces as powerful as they, and which we acknowledge only by their victory over death.”

In fact, said Malraux, “culture is the highest form of rivalry humanity knows. It orients [man’s] fantasy-life, and orients it ‘up.’ by obliging it to compete with the greatest of human dreams. Thus [any great artist] tries to compete with [hi’s predecessors] in the quality of the action they exert upon us.”

The Atlantic Civilization. “Twenty years ago, I was asked what I thought the chief intellectual consequences of the war would be; I answered: ‘The birth of an Atlantic civilization.’ The dialogue between a fantasy-life sweeping over half the world and the resurrection of a global past is not a minor characteristic of this civilization. But in such a dialogue it is well to note one characteristic, too little remarked on, of the United States.

“In the course of history, all empires have been created with premeditation, by an effort often sustained over several generations. Every power has been Roman to a degree. The United States is the first nation to become the most powerful in the world without having sought to be so. Its exceptional energy and organization have never been oriented toward conquest.

“The contrary obtains in the Communist states whose hegemony, should it come to pass, would seem the consequence of an obstinate and deliberate combat. Meanwhile, Marxist propaganda attempts to create imaginative forms that rectify the world according to its own law, and substitutes for the vague aspiration of the masses the rigorous pulpiteering of the party.

“The United States does not oppose the

Marxist concept of culture and fantasy-life with another concept of combat. Like the West, the United States opposes the Marxist concept with freedom of interpretation in regard to the past, with freedom of creation in regard to the present—and also with a singular discovery, which is art’s power of metamorphosis. However terrible an age, its art transmits only its music. The humanity of dead artists, when it transmits a scourge like the Assyrian horror, for all the torturer-kings of its bas-reliefs, fills our memory with the majesty of the Wounded Lioness. And one of the emotions this creature inspires in us is pity. If an art were to be born from the crematory ovens of our age, it would not express the executioners, it would express the martyrs.” Worthy Dreams. “In the battle for the human imagination, a civilization unwilling to impose dreams upon all its members must give each individual his opportunity. In other words, put the greatest number of great works in the service of the greatest number of men. Culture is the free world’s most powerful guardian against the demons of its dreams, its most powerful ally in leading humanity to a dream worthy of man—because it is the heritage of the world’s nobility.

“For culture, for an Atlantic civilization, for the freedom of the mind I offer a toast to the only nation that has waged war but not worshiped it, that has won the greatest power in the world but not sought it, that has wrought the greatest weapon of death but not wished to wield it; and may it inspire men with dreams worthy of its action.”