Читать книгу Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry - Christopher Caudwell - Страница 11

WE have reached the birth of religions. This collective phantasy of poetry which passes into the individual life of each because it is secreted in the web of society, again emerges (as that web is differentiated out by division of labour) in the form of an elaborate outgrowth, a world of religion separate from the material world of terrestrial life.

Poetry is the nascent self-consciousness of man, not as an individual but as sharer with others of a whole world of common emotion. This emotion, because it is common, has for each individual an objective, and therefore pseudo-external existence. This social objectivity is confused by primitive man with material objectivity, so that the phantastic world, because it is presented to the individual “from outside” by outside manipulation, is confused with the material world against which he bumps himeslf. Other men confirm by their actions the objectivity of a material world; similarly they seem to confirm a like reality for the phantastic world whose sanctions they recognise.

Man’s emotions are fluid and confusing. They are projected into the outside world in animism, orondism and mana at his primitive stage of culture, not because he is one with his environment, but because he has consciously separated himself from it in order to seek his desires in it by hunting or crop-gathering. Because the environment is already something consciously distinct from himself, he is concerned with locating “things” out there or in himself Because these collective emotions, unlike a pain or a wound but like a sunset or a thunder-storm, are manifestly experienced by all, they gain the sanction of objectivity and therefore of material reality and are located “out there”, in the object which arouses them. Man enters into nature: nature becomes “animated”—endowed with man’s subjective soul.

What in fact is this emotional complex of tribal poetry? Is it material reality or completely ideal illusion? It is neither. It is a social reality. It expresses the social relation of man’s instincts to the ungathered fruit. These instincts have generated these emotions just because they have not blindly followed the necessities of the germ plasm, but have been moulded by the objective necessities of collective action to a common economic end. The phantasy of poetry is a social image

Therefore the phantastic world of poetic ritual, myth or drama expresses a social truth, a truth about the instincts of man as they fare, not in biological or individual experience, but in associated experience. Such truths are necessarily phrased therefore in the language of the emotions. A pinola roll is pierced with holes. Those holes are real concrete entries. But they are not the music. The music is what happens when it is played. The poem is what happens when it is read.

Hence tribal poetry, and that part of religion from which it is at first indistinguishable, is man’s confused knowledge of society and of his relation to it.

And magic? Man, conscious of his personal emotions, locates the irregularity in the object which stimulates them, because such conscious affects as terror and desire are due to the common experience of a tribe, are impressions common to all individuals of the tribe in relation to certain things. The emotion then seems located in these things and, because of its immediate vividness, seems the soul, the essential reality of these things. Force, the kin-aesthetic sensation of muscular effort, even up to a late date dominated the thought of science, and yet expresses this primitive animistic way of regarding nature.

Man’s emotions are also in him. They therefore seem under his control. They therefore seem to be the means whereby he can dominate reality—through the emotional essence of things. He, the individual, can dominate reality by his will. By evoking—through charms, ceremonies and sympathetic magic—the emotions proper to the achieved act, he believes the act accomplished. It seems to him that he can control outer reality by returning into himself. So indeed he can, but only if this thought is scientific thought and, acting as a guide to action, returns out again to grapple with reality.

Because society stands as environment to individual man, and as associated men to the environment, magic and religion overlap, and blend more closely in a primitive economy, where society is only slightly developed and is therefore a thin blanket between the individual and outer reality.

Magic gives birth to science, for magic commands outer reality to conform to certain laws, and reality refuses, so that knowledge of the stubborn nature of reality is impressed on the magician. He does not try to walk upon the water with spells, or if he does, the spells fail. Rainmakers are not found in the desert, but in regions where rain sometimes comes. No magician makes spells for a winter harvest. Thus certain stubbornnesses in reality for which stronger spells are needed are gradually recognised; and so it becomes accepted that certain laws can only be overridden by mighty forces—by gods, by Fate, and eventually Fate dissolves into that very decree that these forces may not be overborne by anyone. Even Jove is subject to Fate. Fate is law. Magic has turned into its opposite, scientific determinism

In proportion as man, by the development of economics, discovers more and more of the nature of reality, magic sets itself bolder and more elaborate tasks, and more and more is corrected by experience. It proposes to man phantastic possibilities, which man realises. But he does not realise them by magic. Without the absurd ambitions of the shaman and the impossible hopes of the alchemist, the modern chemistry which fulfils them would not be. Always the magician is defeated by “fate”, by the inexorable determinism of things, and it is precisely when he has become conscious of that determinism, and magic has turned into science, that he is able to do in reality the things magic only feigned. Illusion thus plays into the hands of reality. Magic, promising freedom by a blind pressure of the affects, is realised when the emotional content vanishes, when the magician’s eyes are opened, and he becomes conscious of the passionless causality of reality.

Magic can only exist, as a confused perception of outer reality, because man is himself confused about his relations with it. He has not distinguished himself from his environment—subjective affects are confused with objective qualities How does he clear up this confusion? Not by mere contemplation, refusing to handle the pitch lest he become soiled. He separates himself consciously from his environment by struggling with it and actively interpenetrating it, in the course of the development of economic life. When man has grasped the nature of outer reality by his constant struggle with it in economic production, then he understands clearly the distinction between environment and self, because he understands their unity. He learns that man, as a machine, is subject also to necessity, and that the universe, as a process, is the theatre of free development.