With this in mind I am going to briefly trace one trajectory of media from the written word to film. Crucially, externalizing ideas by writing them onto a page, transformed ideas into things. Indeed, Ong points out that classical Greek philosophy espoused by Socrates, who ironically condemned the written word as alien, was only possible in a literate society. The European tradition of the novel, whose birth is generally dated at the turn of the seventeenth century, owes its popular success to both the invention of the movable type printing press and the increasing level of social mobility. Additionally, the novel as a proper genre appeared in the middle of the European Age of Exploration as well as the formation of bourgeois society, both of which led to the heteroglossia, the multiplicity of types of speech, Bakhtin finds so characteristic of the novel.
Epic distance is the authority of the past, which is complete, sacred, and absolute.
It is closed off from the audience's world, whereas the novel draws on the real world experience of its audience. The novel is open and polyvocal, easily incorporating traditional genres, subordinating them to its own structure. In this way it avoids a singular, authoritative voice who must be either accepted or rejected as a whole. Benjamin, however, is much less enthusiastic about this crisis than Bakhtin. The ascendancy of the novel results in isolation both for the writer and her audience, and in this isolation, the experience of sharing a story is lost.