shaped cultural production and the functional role of the arts is indeed revolutionary, but it was clear in his last chapter of Illusion and Reality that he had already recognised that the rise of fascism made demands of a different order. The problem now was immediate and demanded a more direct style. In Studies he refocuses, assuming a more militant posture and making better use of his journalistic skills. The essays deal with what is wrong with bourgeois culture in the present. They have a better pace than Illusion and Reality and their statement is sharper and clearer. Caudwell is also more attuned here to other people’s ways of looking at things; he realises his task is not just to construct an argument that can be persuasive but actually to persuade, to persuade people who may well see the world in quite a different way. His theories as a critic have at this point led him to a different practice. The energy of the essays in Studies comes across well; this is vigorous argument that makes them attractive to read. It should not be surprising that in the current crisis-riven period they remain relevant.
PART I
Studies in a Dying Culture
INTRODUCTION
Studies in a Dying Culture was published by The Bodley Head in 1938 and was reprinted five times in the decade after the war. It was Caudwell’s most accessible theoretical work and probably the most popular at the time. Whereas Illusion and Reality can seem rather formidable, with a bibliography that Caudwell jokingly said was designed to terrify reviewers, Studies contains more clearly focused essays which are fairly short and must seem more manageable. The topics had a more obvious relevance than the ‘study of the sources of poetry’ which the subtitle of Illusion and Reality suggested.
The essays of Studies were radical, explicitly so, and the subjects were examined against a political background. The rise of fascism and the growing resistance from the Popular Front – the People’s Front as it was in Britain – made the issues sharper. Writers as citizens and as writers had to take sides; Writers’ International allied itself to ‘the class that will build socialism’. Caudwell’s joining the International Brigades to fight fascism confirmed his citizen commitment; Studies is a clear demonstration of his commitment as a writer.
The effect of writing from commitment meant that the balance of explanation and argument shifted; the essays were propagandistic in their advocacy. They are more tendentious than his writing that is not shaped to a political purpose, but what they lose in nuance they gain in rhetorical vigour. They have a tremendous energy, which sometimes overruns their logic. In evaluating Freud’s contribution to human understanding, for example, Caudwell’s conclusions have a good balance but he commits occasional excesses in passing which he then modifies, for example, ‘Freudism, attempting to cure civilisation of its instinctive distortions, points the way to Nazism.’ Freud, he says explicitly, rejects fascism but promotes a bourgeois misunderstanding of the nature of society which can point to fascism.
Similarly, Caudwell says of D. H. Lawrence, ‘it is Lawrence’s final tragedy that his solution was ultimately Fascist and not Communist’ because he is advocating a return to the primitive (he is not taking up fascist politics). The point for Caudwell is that Lawrence’s reaction to the decline of human relations is backward-looking: he refuses to understand that society is what makes humans human, whereas a blind retreat into the body in fact negates the very thing that transforms the beast into the human. This essay is Caudwell’s most eloquent plea to recognise the fundamental role society plays for humanity.
The final essay of the book, ‘Liberty’, is one of Caudwell’s most thoroughly developed arguments. Again, he is insistent about the fundamental role of society, without which liberty is meaningless. Politically, it is one of the most important pieces of his writing, not because of party advocacy, but because it examines views about freedom that are important in making political choices, are commonly held throughout bourgeois culture and are fundamentally wrong.
These three essays are, I think, the most relevant of the collection and best stand the course of time. They are presented in the order in which they appear in the original volume. The essays I have not included were on George Bernard Shaw, T. E. Lawrence, H. G. Wells, Pacifism and Violence, and Love.
The appearance of * * * in the essays indicates text that has been left out of this edition.
1
D. H. Lawrence: A Study of the Bourgeois Artist
What is the function of the artist? Any artist such as Lawrence, who aims to be ‘more than’ an artist, necessarily raises this question. It is supposed to be the teaching of Marxism that art for art’s sake is an illusion and that art must be propaganda. This is, however, making the usual bourgeois simplification of a complex matter.
Art is a social function. This is not a Marxist demand, but arises from the very way in which art forms are defined. Only those things are recognised as art forms which have a conscious social function. The phantasies of a dreamer are not art. They only become art when they are given music, forms or words, when they are clothed in socially recognised symbols, and of course in the process there is a modification. The phantasies are modified by the social dress; the language as a whole acquires new associations and context. No chance sounds constitute music, but sounds selected from a socially recognised scale and played on socially developed instruments.
It is not for Marxism therefore to demand that art play a social function or to attack the conception of ‘art for art’s sake’ for art only is art, and recognisable as such, in so far as it plays a social function. What is of importance to art, Marxism and society is the question: What social function is art playing? This in turn depends on the type of society in which it is secreted.
In bourgeois society social relations are denied in the form of relations between men, and take the form of a relation between man and a thing, a property relation, which, because it is a dominating relation, is believed to make man free. But this is an illusion. The property relation is only a disguise for relations which now become unconscious and therefore anarchic but are still between man and man and in particular between exploiter and exploited.
The artist in bourgeois culture is asked to do the same thing. He is asked to regard the art work as a finished commodity and the process of art as a relation between himself and the work, which then disappears into the market. There is a further relation between the art work and the buyer, but with this he can hardly be immediately concerned. The whole pressure of bourgeois society is to make him regard the art work as hypostatised and his relation to it as primarily that of a producer for the market.
This will have two results:
(i) The mere fact that he has to earn his living by the sale of the concrete hypostatised entity as a property right – copyright, picture, statue – may drive him to estimate his work as an artist by the market chances which produce a high total return for these property rights. This leads to the commercialisation or vulgarisation of art.
(ii) But art is not in any case a relation to a thing, it is a relation between men, between artist and audience, and the art work is only like a machine which they must both grasp as part of the process. The commercialisation of art may revolt the sincere artist, but the tragedy is that he revolts against it still within the limitations of bourgeois culture. He attempts to forget the market completely and concentrate on his relation to the art work, which now becomes still further hypostatised as an entity-in-itself. Because the art work is now completely an end-in-itself, and even the market is forgotten, the art process becomes an extremely individualistic relation. The social values inherent in the art form, such as syntax, tradition, rules, technique, form, accepted tonal scale, now seem to have little value, for the art work more and more exists for the individual
