Читать книгу Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry - Christopher Caudwell - Страница 8

How are we to judge whether a given society is more highly developed than another? Is it a question of biological evolution? Fisher has pointed out that there can be only one definition of “fitness” justified by biological considerations, and that is increase of numbers at the expense of the environment, including other species. In man this increase must depend on the level of economic production—the more advanced this is, the more will dominate his environment.

But there is only one species of man—Homo sapiens—and his level of economic production is unequal at different points and develops in self-contained systems of various sizes. This inter-specific difference in mankind is just what separates humanity from other species, and makes biological standards no longer the most important in the very department in which we are interested—that of culture. The non-biological change of man, superimposed upon his relatively constant biological makeup during historic times, is the subject of literary history. This development is non-biological just because it is economic. It is the story of man’s struggle with Nature, in which his increasing mastery of her and himself is due, not to any improvement in his inborn qualities but to improvements in systems of production, including tools, the technique of using them, language, social systems, houses, and other transmissible external structures and relations. This inheritance is the vast concrete accumulation of “human qualities” which are not transmitted somatically but socially. Mother wit is needed for their use, but it is a plastic force which inflates these developing and transmitted forms Looked at in this way, culture cannot be separated from economic production or poetry from social organisation. They stand together in sharp opposition to the ordinary biological properties of species.

Poetry is to be regarded then, not as anything racial, national, genetic or specific in its essence, but as something economic. We expect cultural and therefore poetical development to increase with the complexity of the division of labour on which it is based As yet no aesthetic standards have been introduced. Complexity is not an aesthetic criterion. It is a quality associated only with division and organisation of labour.

Among primitives—peoples with whom economic production has not passed its early stage of food-gathering or hunting and fishing—there is less differentiation in function than among more historically-developed peoples. The only differences of importance are sexes, age-grades and marriage classes or totemic groups. Each member of the tribe can perform the social, magical and economic offices proper to his sex, age or totem, providing of course that he is not ceremonially impure or outcast. Hence it is not surprising that their formal language and their art are equally undifferentiated, and that poetry, or heightened language, is the common medium of collective wisdom.

As to the exact process of differentiation, there is difference of opinion among anthropologists. Even the Australian aborigines possess a culture obviously resulting from a considerable period of historical development. Indeed the diffusionists see in it traces of indirect Egyptian influence. Frazer visualises the process as one by which the clever primitive appropriates to himself magical offices, and by this means becomes a priest or god-king. This view is confused, for individual cleverness could not create permanent classes, unless they played some part in the mechanism of social production. This in fact the god-king did, being an important class in agricultural organisation, but Frazer does not mention this.

Extrapolating into the past, Durkheim sees the primitive tribe as a homogeneous unit with a group consciousness, and Levy-Bruhl regards this group consciousness as “prelogical”. Durkheim imagines such a primitive tribe to be almost entirely undifferentiated, so that one can consider the members as without character or individuality except the common impress of the tribe’s collective representations, which are coercive and overcome the individual’s free thoughts.

This is an abstract conception, since no such homogeneous tribe can be found to-day. Abstractions of this kind are limits to which society never fully attains. If this school had a clearer idea of the connection between economic function and genetic make-up in creating characters or “types”, they would not confuse, as do so many other anthropologists, differentiation with individuation. Individual differences are genetic, the result of a particular pack of genes. Biologically speaking, they are “variations”. But social differentiation means that an individual plays a particular role in social production This differentiation may be the very antithesis of individuation, for by it the individual may be pressed into a mould—whether that of miner, bank clerk, lawyer or parson—which is bound to suppress some part of his native individuality He becomes a type instead of an individual An inherited character is forced into an acquired mould The greater the differentiation, the more specialised will be the mould and the more painful the adjustment. Psychologically, as Jung has shown, the process takes place by the exaltation of one psychic function—that most marked genetically, and therefore most likely to prove economically remunerative. The hypertrophy of this function and its accommodation to the purposes of the chosen professional type result in the wilting of the other psychic functions, which eventually become largely unconscious, and in the unconscious exercise an opposing force to the conscious personality. Hence the typical “modern” unease and neuroses Twentieth-century civilisation, the creation of a gospel of unadulterated economic individualism, has thus finally become anti-individualistic. It opposes the full development of genetic possibilities by forcing the individual to mould a favoured function along the lines of a type whose services possess exchange-value; so that for a refreshing contrast we turn (like T. E. Lawrence) to a nomad civilisation such as that of the Bedouins. Here genetic individuality, the character of a man, is most respected and most highly developed; and yet it is just here that economic differentiation is at a minimum.

Does this mean that biological individuality is opposed to economic differentiation, and that civilisation fetters the “free” instincts—as the followers of Freud, Adler, Jung and D. H. Lawrence by implication claim? No, it is precisely economic differentiation, by the possibility of specialisation that it affords, which gives opportunity for the most elaborate development of the peculiarities or “variations” constituting the “difference” of a biological individual. But this opportunity presupposes a free choice by any individual of the complete range of economic functions. There is no such free choice in modern civilisation, because of its class structure. Not only is an individual heavily weighted in the direction of following an occupation approximately equivalent in income and cost of training to that of his parents, but also a marked bent for a slightly remunerative occupation (such as poetry) will be sacrificed to a slight bent for a markedly remunerative occupation (such as company promoting), while the career of being unemployed, the involuntary function of so many millions to-day, muffles all useful variations

It is not civilisation as such which by its differentiation stifles genetic individuality; on the contrary, its complexity gives added scope for its development and increases the sum of “standard deviation”. One incident of civilisation—the development of classes in society and the increasing restriction of choice if function for the individual—holds back the very development of individuality which the existing productive forces could allow in a more fluid system of social relations. Capitalism, by making all talents and gifts a commodity subject to the inexorable and iron laws of the “free” market, now restrains that free development of the individual which its vast productive forces could easily permit, if released. This gives rise to the complaints of the instincts tortured by civilisation which are investigated by Freud, Jung and Adler.

It is not surprising that a civilisation in which this rigidity has become pathological and individuality has almost vanished—as in the declining Egyptian and Roman Empires—collapses before “barbanans” at a lower stage of economic production in which, however, individuality has a freer rein. This class rigidity is itself the reflection of a complete disintegration of the economic foundations of a culture, in which the productive forces, like men’s imprisoned characters, are wasting themselves in a sterile quarrel with the iron fetters of obsolete social relations.

Durkheim’s conception of a tribe whose consciousness is solid crystal and undifferentiated, corresponding to its undifferentiated economy, in its absoluteness misses the significance of genetic individuality as the basis of economic differentiation, just as the conception of the instincts of civilised man fighting the constraints of society ignores the importance of economic differentiation as a fruitful outlet for individuality. Biologists will notice here a significant parallel to the famous dispute on their own science over “acquired” and “innate” characters.

Durkheim distinguishes the collective representations of the tribe which constitute its collective mind, from individual representations which constitute the individual mind, because of the coercive character of the former This error is only the fundamental error of contemporary philosophy which, by its false conception of the nature of freedom, continually generates the same stale antithesis. The consciousness made possible by the development of society is not by its nature coercive; on the contrary this consciousness, expressed in science and art, is the means whereby man attains freedom. Social consciousness, like social labour, of which it is the product and auxiliary, is the instrument of man’s freedom. And it is not the instincts un-adapted by society which are of their essence free; on the contrary the unmodified instincts deliver man into the slavery of blind necessity and unconscious compulsion.

Yet social consciousness is sometimes telt by men as coercive—why is this? Because it is a consciousness which no longer represents social truth; because it is no longer generated freely in the whole process of social co-operation. Such a consciousness is the product of a class antagonism; it is the consciousness of a class which by the development of the division of labour and absolute property-right has become isolated from economic production, and is therefore maimed and obsolete. This consciousness now becomes the bulwark of privilege instead of the spontaneous expression of social fact, and must therefore be coercively enforced on the rest of society. Durkheim does not see that this coercive type of group consciousness is least common with a primitive people, and most common with a sophisticated civilisation.

We cannot help noticing already the connection of early poetry—poetry which is also tribal wisdom and rude chronology—with a state of society in which economic differentiation due to division of labour hardly exists. In primitive society man’s genetic individuality realises itself simply like a physical trait—a wide forehead or a splay foot. Remembering that there seems in all ages something simple and direct about poetry, that good poetry can be written by the comparatively immature, that it has a more personal and emotional core than other, forms of literary art, we may already guess that poetry expresses in a special manner the genetic instinctive part of the individual, as opposed, say, to the novel, which expresses the individual as an adapted type, as a social character, as the man realised in society. Such an art form as the novel could therefore only arise in a society where economic differentiation gives such scope for the realisation of individual differences that it is useful and valuable to tackle man, the individual, from this angle. There is no essential difference; it is a difference of aspect. But it is an important difference, and one to which we will return again and again. In this sense poetry is the child of Nature, just as the developed novel is the child of the sophistication of modern culture.

We must repeat the warning against mechanically separating genetic individuality from social differentiation. One is a means of realising the other. In tragedy, in dramatic verse, and in the epic they unite, because these flourish at a time of rapidly-changing society, a society in which older class-distinctions are cracking and man’s genetic individuality, his passions, his instincts, his blind desires, are the means by which new economic functions, new differentiations, new standard types, are being idealised and realised. Odysseus, Oedipus and Hamlet are such figures of a social poetry, and the problems these epics and tragedies resolve are the problems peculiar to such a period of change.

All such problems are problems concerning the nature of freedom, and hence tragedy poses with overwhelming poignancy the question of necessity, although in each culture the necessity wears a different aspect, for in each culture necessity presses on men through different channels. The necessity that drives on Oedipus is wholly different from that which torments Hamlet, and this difference expresses the difference between Athenian and Elizabethan cultures The same necessity, but posed in a metaphysical way and with its solution postponed to another world, is the constant theme of religion—the problem it has set itself immediately it begins to talk of good and evil. A religion expresses by its definition of “sin” the stage of development of the society which generated it.