How art arises in human history: Christopher Caudwell

Reading notes: Marxist Literary and Cultural Theory by David Anshen (2017)

Chapter Two: Major Marxists' Approaches to Literature and Culture

CONCEPTUAL APPROACHES TO CATEGORISING MARXIST LITERARY THEORY

Anshen here discusses some of the categories Eagleton and Milne introduce in their anthology Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader (1996).

My interest in fantastika immediately found an echo in Anshen's discussion of UK critic Christopher Caudwell.

....Music, dance, song and collective ritual entice humans into collective labour and harvesting, in Caudwell's view. Even more interesting, particularly from the vantage point of later thinkers like Roland Barthes (whose theories of myth have already been touched upon) and other critics of ideology, is the way Caudwell's depiction of the early collective development of society validates and praises the function of illusion.

Most Marxists see illusion and imaginary fantasies as precisely the realm of ideology that needs to be critiqued and fought against in order to liberate humanity from deception by the ruling classes. However, the fight against illusion is not what Caudwell chooses to emphasise when describing the development of society from an animal-like biological existence to collective activity. Borrowing from schools of anthropology that stress the functional adaptive mechanisms of the collective expression of emotion in ritual and festivals, Caudwell praises, even glorifies, ceremonies of magic and collective emotional release. He writes: 

The poem adapts the heart to a new purpose […] it does so by projecting man into a world of phantasy which is superior to his present reality precisely because it is a world of superior reality—a world of more important reality not yet realized [….] Without the ceremony phantastically portraying the granaries bursting with grain, the pleasures and delights of harvest, men would not face the hard labour necessary to bring it into being. Sweetened with a harvest song, the work goes well. (Solomon 323)

Caudwell stresses the 'directed' nature of the illusion. Poetry transforms early humans into joyous labourers who work in common cause to sustain and create agricultural surpluses. Caudwell may be correct to stress the positive features of illusion at the heart of early human society as a necessary function of binding individuals together, but to a modern Marxist reader such praise of 'phantasies' might leave a bitter taste in the mouth. The idea of 'illusions' portraying a better world than reality and spurring humans to shape their labour practices based upon 'phantasies' seems to convey an idyllic, pre-lapsarian existence that may be mythical itself. Also to modern audiences, this argument might not be convincing since we may have only seen illusions hold back human development.

No doubt the song makes work sweeter; the consoling features of music in the face of unjust labour conditions can be traced from the African American spirituals during slavery in America (and these songs also held secret messages of rebellion and escape) to the songs of plantation labour and the work songs of convict labour. Indeed, in the United States such music developed into popular musical genres like blues, jazz, folk, country music and the antecedents to rock and roll. However, none of these musical forms seem to have fully ameliorated unjust conditions.

Indeed, Caudwell's language almost suggests a kind of romantic idealisation of rural labour common to some capitalist, Stalinist and Maoist ideologies. One almost wonders if Caudwell's passionate entry into the British Communist Party in the 1930s, at a time when the official line was that the Russian peasants were joyously embracing what later was revealed as horrible forced collectivisation of the peasantry, shapes Caudwell's enthusiasm.

This may be unfair, however, because Caudwell offers a plausible explanation for the function and role of collective oral traditions in the rise of human society that does not necessarily reference what were contemporary events in the Soviet Union. He also strangely (given his hostility to Freud and Freudianism) sees art as a kind of projection of fantasies and illusions to compensate for lack in the real world, which smacks of Freud's theory of the fantasy and art deriving from wish-fulfillment. Caudwell is deeply hostile to Freud (and Solomon makes a case that he has not read Freud broadly or well), and again reminds the reader of Roland Barthes and Louis Althusser's definition of ideology as the imaginary resolution of real contradictions. The difference is that for Caudwell, the illusion promotes a positive change in reality, at least potentially. It builds social bonds that then operate practically upon the world. This practical function ascribed to art can be viewed as ahistorical and it may be unfair to compare it with ideological features late in the history of capitalism, yet the formulations are strikingly similar. This can perhaps be understood as common mechanisms functioning differently within different historical stages of development.

Interestingly, the ways in which illusions are mistaken for reality and structure the labour process seem historically accurate. We must keep in mind that art, as a semi-autonomous realm, distinct from religion per se, is a product of modernity. However, Caudwell's idealisation of early human labour seems somewhat one-sided and overly romantic, at least from a modern perspective. Overall, however, despite how Caudwell's analysis gets evaluated, he makes a fruitful effort at a logical, historical, and collective understanding of how art arises in human history....

Jay

3 November 2021