constitutes the economic structure of society, the real basis on which a juridical and political superstructure arises, and to which definite forms of social consciousness correspond. The mode of production of the material means of existence conditions the whole process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, it is their social existence that determines their consciousness.6
For Caudwell this meant that poetry had to be understood in terms of class as well as individual motives. In his paraphrase, he extracts a simple, experiential notion of class:
For a class, in the Marxian sense, is simply a group of men whose life-experiences are substantially similar, that is, with less internal differences on the average than they have external differences from the life-experiences of men in other classes. This difference of course has an economic basis, a material cause arising from the inevitable conditions of economic production. Therefore the artist will necessarily integrate the new experience and voice the consciousness of that group whose experience in general resembles his own – his own class. (IR, p. 226)
Caudwell saw that literature has a function in sharing consciousness and transmitting class values. In terms of conventional literary studies, this is obviously revolutionary: not only does he move away from the habit of literature courses which focus on the individual works and treat them as independent, he also presents literature as having a practical function. Again, ‘the point is to change it.’
Caudwell takes a similar position in regard to language, rejecting the philosophical position that language exists simply to assert facts. He says that language does not only present information: ‘The business of language, as an extension of life, is to decide what facts are worth asserting or denying …’ (IR, p. 218). As a product of social activity, of people doing things, language necessarily acquires an emotional content:
It is precisely because language expresses feeling, is a judging as well as a picturing of parts of reality, that it is valuable. Language expresses not merely what reality is (what reality is stares man in the face) it expresses also what can be done with reality – its inner hidden laws, and what man wants to do with it – his own unconscious necessities. Language is a tool to express what reality is in relation to man – not abstract man but concrete human beings. (IR, p. 219)
Language, too, is part of changing the world. Intellectual production is rooted in practice, and its purpose and development are tied to activity in the material world.
FROM ‘VERSE AND MATHEMATICS’ TO ILLUSION AND REALITY
In relation to his writing, Caudwell’s commitment to Marxism was already present when he was working on the predecessor of Illusion and Reality, ‘Verse and Mathematics’, an extensive study (unfinished and unpublished) of the balance of emotion and rationality in different intellectual fields, psychology and imagination. The study provided a basis for Illusion and Reality but was transformed analytically and politically by his developing Marxist orientation. (The residue of ‘Verse and Mathematics’ is seen most obviously in the analysis of the formal characteristics of poetry and of the relation between science and art, sections which are less integrated into Caudwell’s developing sense of literature as action, are less original and are less relevant to our contemporary concerns and therefore have not been included in this volume.) A more immediate stimulus for the directional shift from ‘Verse and Mathematics’ to Illusion and Reality was an article by C. Day Lewis in Left Review of July 1935, ‘Revolutionaries and Poetry’. Day Lewis argues that writing poetry is not just satisfaction of personal desire but has a social role: ‘For centuries before this poetry represented the clearest insight into reality possible to mankind, and the poet was honoured as the spokesman of his social group and he expressed what they were feeling both as a group and as individuals.7
This accounts for poetry’s value as historical evidence, ‘even if it had not been underlined by Marx and Lenin … It discloses for us emotionally, as science does intellectually, the hidden links in nature’ (IR, pp. 51–2). Although he makes clear that poetry is not propaganda, it still has a social effect; in its personal quality, poetry lodges in the reader’s emotions:
Poetry was a necessary activity of primitive life. We still find the most vivid, poetical use of language amongst peasants. Now these emotions, based on the fear of cold and hunger, are as keen to-day as they were ten thousand years ago: they have grown a little more complex through the increased complexity of economic conditions: but their sources are the same. Poetry was one of the chief instruments through which primitive man, by expressing his emotions, gained strength to fight against the economic conditions which gave rise to those emotions. It is bound up therefore with our emotional life, and there seems no reason to suppose that it is less necessary to us than it was to our early ancestors. (IR, p. 56)
Day Lewis’s article was short, only six pages, but it provided the perspective that Caudwell needed to anchor his own argument: poetry gives people the emotional strength to deal with, and change, their reality. And, of course, as the reality changes, so will the poetry needed to deal with it.
With what he learned from Marx and the focus supplied by C. Day Lewis, Caudwell developed his theory of function, that literature was not merely a reflection of the world in which it was created; it was also an imaginary transformation of that world – an ‘illusion’ that gave an emotional impulse to making change. The theory was revolutionary and thoroughly Marxist. But even though as he believed poetry, through most of human history, had been an important tool in focusing social attitudes, by the mid-1930s the audience for poetry had become too small and certainly too specialised for it to be an effective agent of change. There is no reason to dispute that conclusion, but poetic composition was not the only form of creating the ‘illusion’ that could help change the world. Cinema was recognised by Lenin and by Mussolini as exceptionally important social tools of the modern age; Caudwell neglected it. His justification could have been that, as the sub-title indicates, Illusion and Reality is about the sources of poetry. Fortunately, the principles he advanced for poetry apply at a general level to most of the arts, and, except for specific poetic techniques, are as helpful for understanding cinema as for poetry.
PROBLEMS OF RAPID DEVELOPMENT
Caudwell was a phenomenally fast writer. Much of this can be attributed to his work as a journalist where he managed several writing jobs at once. He edited and wrote under various pseudonyms articles in British Malaya, the journal of the Association for British Malaya. Working with his brother in their firm Airways Publications, he edited or wrote for the magazines Airways and Aircraft Engineering, and for Who’s Who in Aviation, at the same time as writing his books on aeronautics. We know he managed his first crime novel in a fortnight and while he was working on ‘Verse and Mathematics’, he wrote to a friend, ‘The ideas have been pouring out at the rate of 4–5000 words a day!8 But his thinking had been developing over a long time. He wrote to his brother, ‘I have had bits of it in my mind for a long time. It incorporates all the biological, psychological, etc. etc., theories I have been forming in the course of my reading during the last few years.’ Although the ideas were in gestation over a number of years, the writing was accomplished in little over a year. The speed of composition was extraordinary – he told his brother he was averaging 4,000 words a day, not counting his bread-and-butter writing. It is unlikely that much revision could take place under such conditions, which helps to explain why the expression is sometimes unclear and he is occasionally repetitive.
Caudwell also uses a lot of specialist expression drawn from his reading in different fields which he doesn’t explain (this is more frequent in the chapters of Illusion and Reality not selected for this volume). Some terms are unclear simply because they are long outmoded (Caudwell died in 1937; much of his reading would of course have been written a good while earlier). But it is possible that his employment of a battery
