Читать книгу Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry - Christopher Caudwell - Страница 9

All peoples present, to ethnologists who live among them, distinct individualities, as indeed do animals. Among the Australian aborigines, as Gillen and Spencer have observed men acquire reputations for special types of socially useful dexterity and exercise it to an extent which shows that differentiation already exists. Some division of labour has appeared but it is still mainly genetic. It is not produced by a complex which moulds each generation, and leads to the formation of a class.

Thus, as a rough type of the matrix in which poetry was born, we take the average food-gathering or hunting tribe of to-day where poetry is charm, prayer and history. This undifferentiated group shares social functions and therefore thoughts in common, and is bound by that “primitive passive sympathy” which Kohler has observed in anthropoid apes, and which McDougall considers a specific human instinct. With this group appears a heightened language, the common vehicle of all that seems worthy of preservation in the experience of men.

We must think of this language, not as it looks recorded in arid script, but as it was originally born, and as from age to age it lived its group life, accompanied by the rhythmic beating of drums, by dance and gesture, by the violent emotions of the group festival, a fountain of tradition in which not only the living group participated, but also all the ghosts of dead ancestors which are a tribe’s chief strength From this undifferentiated society the class-types proper to the priest, lawyer, administrator and soldier arise by division of labour, and, in the same way, the heightened language of the primitive corroboree splits into science, history, theology law, economics and other appropriate divisions of cultural capital. In doing so each department evolves a special phraseology and method of literary attack which not only differs from those of other departments but also from those of spoken speech But the departments are not watertight compartments Their development affects each other and also spoken speech, mutually and continuously, because all are rooted in the one developing complex of real social life.

For the sake of convenience we talk of heightened language. But at this stage the adjective should not be allowed to carry any tincture of a value-judgment For any given people at any given stage of evolution the precise heightening adopted can be defined in objective terms of prosody, musical or choreographic accompaniment, or the use of special words not permitted for profane purpose. As yet we have found no reason why an imposed rhythm should improve a language. The reading of almost any manual of prosody will give grounds for supposing that poetry is inferior to unhampered speech as a vehicle of expression, but we claim as yet neither superiority nor inferiority for prosody, only a qualitative difference, and if it be asked why the language should be made different, if it was not intended to make it better, an answer can be given. The function of rhythm may be purely mnemonic. This is evidently the case in rhymed wisdom such as:

Red at night,

The shepherd’s delight

Red in the morning,

The shepherd’s warning,

or

Ne’er cast a clout

Till May is out.

It was at one time supposed that the “faculty of attention” was weak in primitive peoples, and that the rhythmic pattern held their wandering attention. Few modern anthropologists would accept this view. Attention is not a “faculty” but an instinctive component of psychic life, and if anything is more powerful where intelligence is less. A cat stalking a bird, or an Eskimo watching a seal blow-hole, show at least as much attention as a modern scientist watching an experiment. On any matter that interests them—a ritual, dramatic performance or a hunt—primitive peoples show greater capacity for sustained attention than more civilised groups. Rivers has recorded how, during his researches among the Melanesians, he found that an interrogation which left him exhausted and mentally dispersed, found his source of information still fresh and ready to keep up the supply. Yet as between two civilised people, it is almost invariably the interrogated, rather than the interrogator, who tires first.

We call the primitive’s heightened language, which is as it were speech in ceremonial dress, poetry, and we saw how in the course of evolution it became prosaic and branched into history, philosophy, theology, the story and drama. This raises a question whether poetry was ever anything but a reflection of the undifferentiated economy in which it was born and whether poetry in its own right has now any real justification for existence. The fact that it still continues to exist is no complete answer, since evolution is full of vestigial organs, and poetry may be one of these. Poetry has an increasingly small “public”. Alone in literature, it clings tenaciously to heightened language. This might be merely the stigma of degeneration, as if poetry, like a mental deficient, still babbled in a childish tongue outgrown by the rest of the family, which has had to earn its living in an adult world.

We know there is a certain accident in the survival of poetry. Men speak, tell ancient tales, repeat bits of wisdom, and this vanishes Poetry in its heightened language survives, and therefore we think of it as “literature”, making too artificial a separation from the rest of social speech. This in turn may lead us to overlook why poetry has a heightened language, why it survives, why it has a relative changelessness and eternity.

Primitive poetry is not so much the matrix of subsequent “literature”, as one pole of it. Because of its collective and traditional nature, it is the one which survives, and leads us, who see in it the sole literature of a primitive people, to imagine a kind of golden age in which even the oracles speak the language of epics.

What is the nature of this other pole? A modern mind, surveying the primitive scene, and noticing all the vague aspirations, religious phantasies, mythological cosmologies and collective emotions collecting at the pole of rhythmical language, would be disposed to think of the other pole as the scientific pole. This would be the pole of pure statement, of collections of facts uncoloured by emotion: pedigrees, astronomical’ calculations, censuses and all other literary productions which aim at a strong grasp of simple reality.

But science is not likely to seem the opposite of poetry to the primitive mind. He does not know of science as a branch of literature He knows science only as a practice, a technique, a way of building boats and planting trees which can best and most easily be learned through a kind of dumb imitation, because the practice is common to all the members of a tribe. The idea of a statement devoid of prejudice and intended only to be the cold vehicle of sheer reality is quite alien to that mind. Words represent power, almost magical power, and the cold statement seems to divest them of this power and substitute a mirror-image of external reality. But what difference, save of inferiority, is there between the real object and its mirror-image? The image of reality which the primitive seeks in words is of a different kind: it is a magic puppet image, such as one makes of one’s enemies. By operating on it, one operates on reality.

The primitive would defend in this way his lack of interest in the “photographic” scientific statement. It is a late abstraction in the history of thought, a limit to which all sciences work, but only fully achieve in their mathematic content, perhaps not even then, except in so far as it is translated into the logistic of Principia Mathematica.

This colourless statement is alien to a mind shaped by primitive culture, and the primitive does not understand language without a purpose. The purpose of rhythmical language is obvious—to give him that feeling of internal strength, of communication with the gods, that keeps him in good heart. The purpose of non-rhythmical language is equally obvious. There is no question of finding a function for it. The function itself, as in all biological development, created the organ and was shaped by it. The need to extend his personality, to bring it to bear on his neighbours, to bend their volitions into harmony with his, whether in flight, immobility or attack, would have given birth to the gestures and then the grunts which finally became articulate speech. Indeed Sir Richard Paget’s plausible theory of the origin of human speech is based on the assumption that man, with tongue and other movable portions of his vocal organs, attempted to imitate in gesture the images he wished to impose on his fellows’ minds.

The function of non-rhythmical language, then, was to persuade. Born as a personal function, an extension of one individual volition, it can be contrasted with the collective spirit of rhythmical language, which draws in primitive society all its power from its collective appearance. Poetry’s very rhythm makes its group celebration more easy, as for example in an infants’ class, which impress prosody upon the multiplication table it recites, making mathematics poetical.

As with all polar opposites the two interpenetrate, but on the whole the non-rhythmical language, based on everyday speech, is the language of private persuasion, and rhythmical language, the language of collective speech, is the language of public emotion. This is the most important difference in language at the level of primitive culture.