Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry. Christopher Caudwell

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СКАЧАТЬ the magnetised rings well expresses the collective character of primitive poetry. In contrast to Aristotle, Plato the idealist is concerned with the enjoyment rather than the function of poetry.

      Aristotle, however, is uninterested in the poet’s mind, and does not concern himself with whether or not the creation and appreciation of poetry is a conscious function. He judges it by results, by poems. He systematises them, analyses them, and reduces them to rule. He finds that mimesis is the distinguishing features of Poetics, and he investigates the rules for producing a convincing and successful mimesis.

      Unlike Plato, he goes further. As befits a philosopher who studied the constitutions of existing states, he asks: what is the social function of tragedy?

      His answer is well known. Its effect is cathartic—purging. The answer is somewhat enigmatic, once one attempts to go behind it. It is tempting to give to the expression a modern interpretation. It has been suggested, for example, that this is merely the basic therapy of Freudism—therapy by abreaction—in a Greek dress. This is on the one hand an over-refinement of Aristotle, and on the other hand a misunderstanding of what therapy by abreaction actually is. Poetic creations, like other phantasies, may be the vehicle of neurotic conflicts or complexes. But a phantasy is the cloak whereby the “censor” hides the unconscious complex. So far from this process being cathartic, it is the opposite according to Freud’s own principles. To cure the basic complex by abreaction the phantasy must be stripped of its disguise and the infantile and archaic kernel laid bare.

      Thus the poetic construct, according to Freud’s own empirical discoveries, cannot represent an abreactive therapy even for the poet. But Aristotle visualises tragedy as cathartic for the spectators. Even if the poetic phantasy did have an abreactive effect on the poet, it is impossible that every spectator should have, not only the same complex as the poet, but the same associations, which analysis shows are generally highly personal.

      Hence followers of Freud who suggest that Aristotle’s catharsis is the equivalent of Freud’s therapy by abreaction, not only misunderstand Aristotle, but also are imperfectly acquainted with the empirical discoveries on which psychoanalysis rests.

      It is best, in fact, not to go behind Aristotle’s simple conception, until we ourselves are clear as to the function of poetry, and can compare Aristotle’s ideas with our own How Aristotle arrived at his definition is fairly clear. On the one hand he saw tragedy arousing unpleasant emotions in the spectator—fear and anxiety and grief. On the other hand these same spectators went away feeling the better for it, so much so that they returned for more. The emotions, though unpleasant, had done them good. In the same way unpleasant medicaments do people good, and perhaps Aristotle went further, and visualised the tragedy concentrating and driving out of the mind the unpleasant emotions, just as a purge concentrates and drives out of the body the unpleasant humours. This highly practical attitude towards tragedy is not only, as it seems to me, healthy, and good literary criticism, but essentially Greek. If the tragedy did not make the Athenians feel better, in spite of its tragedy, it was bad. The tragic poet who made them weep bitterly at the fate of their fellow Hellenes in Persia was fined. A similar imposition suggests itself for our own purely sentimental war literature.

      This, then, was the intelligent Greek view of literature as the differentiation, carried so far in our own culture, had just begun. On the one hand Rhetoric, the art of persuation, exercised consciously and appreciated consciously, an art which was simply ordinary conversation hypostatised by the hypostasis of the city-state. On the other hand Poetics, a mimesis whose success in imitating reality can be judged by the poignancy of the emotions roused, just as if the auditors were really concerned in it. Both Plato and Aristotle agree here. But in Plato’s view no rules can be laid down for achieving that poignancy, for both creation and appreciation come from outside the conscious mind. Plato, moreover, sees no social justification for poetry. “The emotions aroused”, retorts Aristotle, “serve a social end, that of catharsis.”

      Such a definition of poetry is insufficient in literature to-day, not because the Greeks were wrong but because literature, like society, has changed. If he were systematising literature to-day, Aristotle would see that the criterion of mimesis was insufficient to distinguish the existing species of literature, not because of any weakness in the original definition, but simply because in the course of social evolution new forms of literature had arisen. Mimesis is characteristic also of the modern novel and prose play. What we nowadays agree to call poetry is something apart from both play and novel, for which fresh specific differences must be sought. Our next task is to find them.

      But Aristotle’s definition reminds us that we cannot, in studying the sources of poetry, ignore the study of other forms of literature, because there is a time when all literature is poetry. A materialistic approach to culture avoids any such error. We have already seen that there is a time when all religion as well as all literature is poetry. Yet as moderns, as men living in the age of capitalism, our concern must be principally with bourgeois’ poetry. Our next section therefore will be devoted to a general historical study of the development of modern poetry.

      ¹ Marx, On Hege’s Philosophy of Law.

      ¹ Ion, translated by Shelley.

      III THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN POETRY

      1

      WHEN we use the world “modern” in a general sense, we use it to describe a whole complex of culture which developed in Europe and spread beyond it from the fifteenth century to the present day. There is something “modern” in Shakespeare, Galileo, Michael Angelo, Pope, Goethe and Voltaire which we can distinguish from Homer, Thales, Chaucer and Beowulf, and compare with Valery, Cezanne, James Joyce, Bergson and Einstein. This complex rests on an economic foundation. The complex itself is changeful—no epoch of human history has been so variegated and dynamic as that from the Elizabethan age to ours. But then, the economic foundations too have changed, from feudal to “industrial”. This culture complex is the superstructure of the bourgeois revolution in production—a revolution whose nature was first analysed completely by Marx in Das Kapital Modern poetry is capitalist poetry.

      It is impossible to understand modern poetry unless we understand it historically—in motion. We can only bring back dead formulae from a study of poetry as static “works of art”, as something frozen and ossified. This is particularly true where poetry is the organic product of a whole society violently in motion.

      Yet to study the poetry of bourgeois culture as a whole during that time is a formidable task. Many nations and many languages have been caught up into the bourgeois movement, and yet it is the characteristic of poetry that it demands for its appreciation a, more intimate knowledge of the language in which it was written than any other form of literature.

      But as it happens, England pioneered the bourgeois revolution in economy. Italy preceded it—but its development was stifled early. America outstripped it—but only at a late date. In England alone the greater part of the bourgeois revolution unfolded itself, and from there spread to the rest of the globe.

      In France during the period 1789-1871 the bourgeois revolution moved through many stages with greater speed, greater precision and more relentless logic than here, but its very speed made the ideological superstructure more confused. For a study of bourgeois literary art in general, France during that short period is more valuable; but for the study of poetry in particular; England—where the revolution unfolded itself so much snore evenly and in so much more detail—is a better field.

      Owing to its earlier and fuller development, the decay of English bourgeois economy arrived later than in other countries. Therefore during the period of Imperialism the poetic symptoms come to light at first in other countries than England—in France, Germany and Russia СКАЧАТЬ