PARTISAN REVIEW
with one bold stroke. The sense of modern reality was present only
in the novel. Respect for the drama was a mere left-over from Puritan
classicism, a flirtation with the poverty of a form that had been
spiritually outgrown.
The novel was the representative literary form of the previous
century,
if
only because it was the psychological genre par excellence.
For, just as in the Middle Ages theology was master over all other
intellectual disciplines, now psychology was becoming the central
science and the epitome of all wisdom. Every significant achievement
in literature and the humane sciences opened new access to the human
psyche, every important work of philosophy or history constituted
a new contribution to the analysis and interpretation of man. The
French, English, and Russian novel, the new social sciences, modern
psychology, and psychoanalysis, all strove toward an understanding
of the man who had risen out of the turmoil of the industrial revolu–
ti0n and, in modern bourgeois society, fallen out with himself. The
basic trait of the picture they revealed was inner conflict, the disinte–
gration of the personality. The findings of historical research are per–
haps best summed up in the words of Ortega y Gasset: "Man has no
nature, he has only a history." And in literature, a hero's disunity
and alienation actually became the touchstone of his significance. The
psychology that failed to see the strange, the dangerous, the abysmal
in man, that did not state at the outset: "You are not what you
seem," came to be regarde.d as hopelessly idyllic and simplistic. To be
sure, at the time of the First World War when the film art was
coming into being, certain signs (such as the works of Franz Kafka,
which departed from a purely psychological vision of man) pointed
to a change in this attitude. Nevertheless the film was, and is increas–
ingly, judged by the standards of psychological analysis, a type of
expression for which it is not equipped, and from this inadequate
standpoint it .appears superficial and meaningless. A conception which
can only subject the problems of metaphysics and ethics, the symbols
of religion and mythology to psychological interpretation, and which,
instead of creating such ideas, religions, myths, can only produce a
psychology of man's struggle with them, cannot do justice to the
drama or to the film, and will inevitably appraise the film in particu–
lar as intrinsically unintellectual and unprofound. The profundity
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