Читать книгу Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry - Christopher Caudwell - Страница 14

Poetry, then, cannot be separated from the society whose specifically human activity secretes it. Human activity is based on the instinctive. But those forms of human activity which are most changeful and least dependent on instinct are highest and most human. These activities, because they are based on the inheritance from generation to generation of developing forms and systems which are real and material and yet are not environmental in the biological sense, mould in a different way each new generation, which is not however mere clay, for its own inner activity drives on the movement of the external system. This contradiction between individual or natural man, and associated or civilised man, is what makes poetry necessary, and gives it its meaning and its truth. Poetry is a productive or economic activity of man. To separate it from this foundation makes its development impossible to understand.

How far do men’s own estimates of the function of poetry at various times agree with our analysis? It has been generally realised by poets such as Milton, Keats, Shelley or Wordsworth that the poet as “sheer”, “prophet” or “teacher” had a social function of importance. This was not expressed precisely but in a metaphorical way, a poetic way, in which the resounding magnitude of the claims concealed a certain vagueness and poverty of social insight. Indeed the conditions of bourgeois economy—under which poetry tends, like everything else hitherto thought sacred, to become a commodity, and the poet, hitherto thought inspired, tends to become a producer for the anonymous free market—these conditions make it almost impossible for any critic who remains within the categories of bourgeois thought to penetrate the idealistic veils with which poetry in the modern era has concealed her commercialised shame.

Yet it is impossible to appeal to primitive self-appraisement, for literary criticism cannot exist among the unself-conscious primitives—the undifferentiated state of their society makes it unnecessary. The criticism is direct and dumb and efficacious—the valuation of the poet is expressed by the place he is voluntarily accorded in tribal society, the valuation of the poems by their repetition and survival.

In Athens of the fifth century B.C. a society had emerged which, although it was still sufficiently near to primitive society to be conscious of the social function of poetry, was also sufficiently differentiated to be able to separate poetry off as a distinct “sphere” of culture. Poet as producer is not yet a trade, because Athens is not a capitalistic town engaged chiefly in commodity production. It is a port, a centre of exchange. The vending of poems is therefore a trade—the trade of rhapsodist or paid reciter.

It is a society in ferment, in revolution. The developing commerce of the Aegean is producing a class of merchants and slave-owners who are displacing the old land-owning aristocracy. In Athens already the qualifications for rule have ceased to be based on land, and are now based on money income; and this brings it in sharp opposition to Sparta. From a market town and residence of nobles which was a mere appendage of the estates of Attica, Athens has become a town in its own right, a centre of merchants and artisans. This is regarded by the Hellens as a change from an “oligarchy” to a “democracy”. As in later transitions of the same kind, it has taken place through a transitional period of strong, centralised government or “tyranny” like the Tudor monarchy. The “democracy” of course is extremely qualified—it is a democracy of men of property. The proletariat has no franchise.

Unlike a somewhat similar stage in medieval economy—the transition from feudalism to capitalism—this is not a class struggle which ends with the clear victory of the revolutionary class, but rather with the “mutual ruin of the contending classes”. The struggle between the oligarchs and the democrats, between Athens and Sparta, tears Greece to fragments. It is a struggle between town and country, between slave latifundia and slave-town. Because it remains within the categories of slave-owning, it is incapable of a final solution. No decisive stroke is possible such as the freeing of the tied serfs which provides the basis of the bourgeois revolution. Neither class can completely undermine the foundations of the other, for both are based on slavery, and slavery of a similar character.

Culture is still sufficiently undifferentiated for one man to survey the whole, and Plato and Aristotle stand out as philosophers surveying the whole field of culture, including that of literary art. Both were fortunate in that they were born before the class struggle was reaching its final sterile issue in Greece. There had recently been an alliance between the classes against the common enemy, Persia, and the alliance was still dynamic and creative. Plato, spokesman of the oligarchic class, reacts creatively upon Aristotle, who voices the aims and aspirations of the newer class, more tough-minded, more practical, more in touch with reality. It was no accident that Aristotle of Stagira had been so closely allied with Philip and Alexander, for if at last his class were to score a more solid triumph, and to emerge somewhere as conquerors, it was only by bursting the confines of the city and ruling beyond the bounds of Greece in the Hellenistic empires of Alexander’s heirs.

Aristotle clearly sees the primitive distinction between private and public speech, between non-rhythmical and rhythmical language, between individual persuasion and collective emotion. Indeed to a Greek of that time the distinction appeared so self-evident and practical that it needed no explanation. On the one hand was the great instrument of Rhetoric whereby an individual swayed his fellow men; on the other hand the world of Poetics wherein men were collectively moved to emotion. Aristotle writes about both like a man writing a text-book on a useful and important human activity.

Aristotle’s view of Rhetoric is simply this—the art of Persuasion. But he makes it clear that he has chiefly in mind the obvious and impressive public occasions where the art of persuation is needed—in the law courts and the political assemblies. This conception of Rhetoric as individual speech used for formal “public” occasions, must be distinguished from the publicity of poetry. It is the publicity of State occasions where State is distinguished from society. Both are one in primitive life, but the class development of Athens has already separated the city from men. The occasions when men use the State machinery and State occasions to persuade others are by Aristotle considered as separate from the occasions when one man speaks to others to persuade them about the normal incidents of daily life. The development of classes has made the city a “tamer of men”, something already towering above society as a structure separate and imposed on it, a view which was to reach its zenith with the Hegelian conception of the absolute State. But it is already implicit in Socrates’s refusal to flee the city’s judgment of death. In this refusal, Socrates forecasts that the class struggle was doomed to destroy Greece, because the city could not generate a class or even one man able to look beyond the city.

Aristotle’s treatment of Poetics requires a more detailed consideration. He deals with a primitive poetry already in process of differentiation in odes, dramas, epics and love poetry, and already distinct from rhetoric; and he therefore looks for a characteristic common to poetic creations which will distinguish them as a species from the non-poetic. An obvious characteristic of poetry to the Greeks was that it told some sort of story. It made some statement about the ways of gods or men or the emotions of the poet which, even though it was not true, seemed true. The epic is a false history, and the drama a feigned action. Even in love poetry the poet may justly say “I die for love of Chloe” when no Chloe exists. The essence of poetry therefore seemed to the Greeks to be illusion, a conscious illusion.

To Plato this feature of the poet’s art appeared so deplorable that he would not admit poets to his Republic, or at least only if their productions were strictly censored. Such reactionary or Fascist philosophies as Plato’s are always accompanied by a denial of culture, particularly contemporary culture, and Plato’s contemporary culture was pre-eminently poetic. He therefore hates poetry as a philosopher even though he is charmed by it as a man. In a revolutionary period culture expresses the aspirations of the revolution or the doubts of the dispossessed. The philosophers of the dispossessed regard both the aspirations and the doubts as “dangerous”, or “corrupt”, and want a culture which shores up their rottenness. Such a culture idealises the past in which they were strong. This ideal past does not bear much likeness to the real past, for it is one carefully arranged so that, unlike the real past, it will not again generate the present. For Plato this past is idealised in his Republic, ruled by aristocrats and practising a primitive communism which is the way Plato hopes to undermine the trade by which the rival class has come to power.

The Greeks reasoned that poetry was designed to create an illusion. Evidently then the poet made something which created the illusion, even if the something was fabulous. He made stories actually visible on the stage or, as in the Homeric cycle, a history more real than the transactions of the market-place, the reallest thing in the collective life of the Hellenes. This creation the Greeks took to be the special mark of the poet. The very name etymologically was derived from “making”, just as was the Anglo-Saxon word for poet—maker:”

To build from matter is sublimely great,

But only gods and poets can create.

However, the Greeks did not suppose that a poet could create something out of nothing by words, which are only symbols of reality. They considered the poet created an artificial imitation of reality, a mimesis. For Plato the poet is essentially a man who mimics the creations of life in order to deceive his hearers with a shadow-world. In this the poet is like the Demiurge, who mocks human dwellers in the cavern of life with shadows of reality.

This theory of mimesis gives Aristotle the specific mark to differentiate between the class of rhetoric and the class of poetry. Though it is, to our modern minds, imperfect as a distinction, owing to the differentiation which has taken place in literature since then, it aws an adequate distinction in Aristotle’s day.

We separate poetry from the novel and drama; he did not. But the categories of literature are not eternal, any more than the classifications of systematic biology; both must change, as the objects of systematisation evolve and alter in the number and characteristics of their species. Culture changes faster than species, and cultural criticism must be correspondingly flexible. Aristotle’s theory of mimesis, as our analysis will show, so far from being superficial, is fundamental for an understanding of the function and method of art.

Aristotle, with his extraverted mind turned firmly on the object, was more interested in the created thing, e.g. the play—than in the man who was influenced by it or who produced it. Thus his angle of attack is aesthetically correct; he does not approach literature like a psychologist Or a psycho-analyst.

Plato, with the more intuitive, introverted mind; is interested in the poet and in his hearer rather than the composition itself. His conception of the productive and receptive states of the poetic mind is primitive, corresponding to the more reactionary cultured snigger which is characteristically Platonic. The barbarity rather than the culture makes Plato to some extent a spokesman of the primitive view of the poet’s role, at a time when poetry is passing, as a result of the invention of writing, from a collective to a private phase.

Plato, belonging to the older world of Athens, is not aware of the change. He does not see that the development of Hellenic economy makes the poem an object of exchange between cities and people, like Athenian vases. The poem is no longer, as in old Athenian tragedy, rooted in a collective festival where actors and audience are simultaneously plunged into an associated world of art. Neitzsche’s passage from the Dionysian to the Apollonian in art has already taken place as a result of the passage of Athens from the primitive to the sophisticated, i.e. the differentiated. Poems are now separate from the body of society, to be enjoyed by individuals or groups separate from society. And the invention of writing, made necessary by the development of economy to a stage where records and messages were essential because records were no longer the collective memory of the tribe and men no longer lived in common, led’ to written poems, not simply because writing was invented, but because the needs that demanded writing also demanded that poetry be detached from the collective festival and be enjoyed by men alone. With Euripides even drama becomes a closet art. Plato, however, was Only conscious of this in a general way, as expressed in his condemnation of books and the art of writing. Plato’s criticisms are like D. H. Lawrence’s, they reach back to the past, to the time of an undifferentiated society and collective emotion. They are correct but useless because the critic is unaware that what he condemns is’a product of a class differentiation rooted in economy. He does not therefore reach forward to a solution of present difficulties, but backwards to a time before those difficulties arose. But one cannot put back the clock of history.

Plato is the most charming, humane and civilised of Fascist philosophers, corresponding to a time before the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War had made reaction murderously bitter. In this respect he is an Athenian Hegel. No reactionary philosopher of to-day could attain Plato’s urbanity or charm. This is Plato’s conception of the poet:

Socrates is speaking to Ion, a rhapsodist

It is a divine influence which moves you, like that which resides in the stone called Magnet by Euripides, and Heraclea by the people. For not only does this stone possess the power of attracting iron rings, but it can communicate to them the power of attracting other rings; so that you may see sometimes a long chain of rings and other iron substances, attached and suspended one to the other by this influence. And as the power of the stone circulates through all the links of the series, and attaches each to each, so the Muse, communicating through those whom she has first inspired, to all others capable of that first enthusiasm, creates a chain and a succession. For the authors of those great poems which we admire, do not attain to excellence through the rules of any art, but they utter their beautiful melodies of verse in a sate of inspiration, and, as it were, possessed by a spirit not their own. Thus the composers of lyrical poetry create those admired songs of theirs in a state of divine insanity, like the Corybantes, who lose all control of their reason in the enthusiasm of the sacred dance; and, during this supernatural possession, are excited to the rhythm and harmony which they communicate to men Like the Bacchantes who, when possessed by the god, draw honey and milk from the rivers, in which, when they come to their senses, they find nothing but simple water. For the souls of the poets, as poets tell us, have this peculiar ministration in the world. They tell us that these souls, flying like bees from flower to flower, and wandering over the gardens and the meadows and the honey-flowing fountains of the Muses, return to us laden with the sweetness of melody; and, arrayed as they are in the plumes of rapid imagination, they speak truth, For a poet is indeed a thing ethereally light, winged and sacred, nor can he compose anything worth calling poetry until he becomes inspired, and, as it were, mad, or whilst any reason remains in him. For whilst a man retains any portion of the thing called reason, he is utterly incompetent to produce poetry or to vaticinate. Every rhapsodist or poet, whether dithyrambic, encomastic, choral, epic, or iambic, is excellent in proportion to the extent of his participation in the divine influence, and the degree in which the Muse itself has descended upon him. In other respects, poets may be sufficiently ignorant and incapable. For they do not compose according to any art which they have acquired, but from the impulse of the divinity within them; for did they know any rules of criticism according to which they could compose beautiful verses upon any one subject, they would be able to exert the same faculty in respect to all or any other The god seems purposely to have deprived all poets, prophets, and soothsayers of every particle of reason and understanding, the better to adapt them to their employment as his ministers and interpreters; and that we, their auditors, may acknowledge that those who write so beautifully, are possessed, and address us inspired by the god:¹

Here Plato shows poetry to be something different in kind from conscious rhetoric, the art of persuation, which, according to Greek views, could be reduced to rule and learned. But poetry can never be learned, for according to Plato it is not a conscious function, with rules of criticism, but an inpouring of the god, and he is sufficiently near to primitive culture to place the poet beside the prophet and the soothsayer. Moreover, according to Plato’s view this inspiration is not only essential for the poet, but for his reader. The rhapsodist who declaims him, and the auditor who is affected by him, must also be inspired by the god. In other words, not only the writing but also the appreciation’ of poetry is an unconscious (or irrational) function. To Plato all deception is a form of enchantment. Poets are wizards wielding quasi-religious powers. Plato’s symbol of 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.