JUMP CUT
A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA
Christopher Caudwell
His aesthetics and film
by Ellen Sypher
from Jump Cut, no. 12/13, 1976, pp. 65-66
copyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1976, 2004
Christopher Caudwells career as a Marxist culture theorist was very brief.
Two years after he began serious Marxist writing he was killed fighting in
the Spanish Civil War at the age of thirty. Yet in that brief time his
output was prodigious: a reputable book on physics from a dialectical
materialist perspective (The Crisis in Physics) and four theoretical works
on culture. One of these is dedicated to poetry (Illusion and Reality),
another to the novel (Romance and Realism) and two to general essays in such
fields as history, psychology and religion (presently combined in a single
volume, Studies and Further Studies in a Dying Culture). Caudwells
reputation, based solely on these five works, is considerable. His name has
been a familiar one to Marxists since his death, and he is known of by the
literary establishment. Serious evaluation of his writings is, however, only
a fairly recent phenomenon.(1) This more recent assessment of him from a
Marxist perspective is generally that while immature and deeply flawed, he
is so richly suggestive and often so sound that every serious Marxist
thinker on culture should deal with him.
He was and remains more or less of a maverick. From upper middle class
roots, he left school at fifteen to work in aeronautics. After his
commitment to Marxism he moved to Poplar, a working class section of London,
where he wrote and did menial party work for the British Communist Party,
whose leadership did not even know of him until after his death. He
apparently undertook his serious theoretical work in isolation. His work
bears all the weaknesses of such an individualistic position in that he
uncritically accepts prevailing attitudes. Especially he ignores proletarian
culture, and he depends too much on the then very influential Freud. Yet
notwithstanding these narrow dimensions of his work, some of his perceptions
of literatures basis and workings stand alongside those of the best of
Marxist aestheticians. Caudwells work, undoubtedly because of its mixed
character, has not substantially influenced any writer on aesthetics
although he is undisputedly the major Marxist writer on aesthetics in the
British and U.S. tradition.
Literature and especially poetry is Caudwells first love. Yet in Illusion
and Reality he frequently branches out to mention other cultural forms:
music, dance, drama, and film.(2) The comments on film are theoretical and
frustratingly brief, yet always provocative and never mechanical. By
themselves they cannot stand as a cornerstone for a Marxist theory of film.
Placed, however, in the context of his general views on culture and
particularly literature, his comments form a springboard for other Marxist
film theoreticians.
Unlike more mechanical Marxist writers, Caudwell approaches art neither as
primarily a reflection of historical reality nor as a mere vehicle for
expressing the authors class perspective. Rather, for Caudwell art is
ultimately an instrument in social production. For Caudwell as for Marx, it
is the act of social production which makes humans human, non-animal. Art
thus is guaranteed its place as a necessary feature of human social life.
Science serves this same end of fostering social production and is likewise
necessary. Science, however, operates more in the realm of cognition, while
art operates primarily in the realm of emotion. Poetry seems to operate more
directly on the emotions, while the novel in its more literal representation
of social relations contains somewhat more of the reflective, cognitive, or
as Caudwell calls it, referential element.
Yet in each case, art serves ultimately to direct the participants
subjective life toward social production. Art achieves this end by creating
an illusion of reality which many people can participate in together. It
draws out what is common in peoples socially formed, yet idiosyncratically
experienced thoughts and emotions. Caudwell seems to suggest that the poem
is more effective than the novel in ensuring this collective response. In
any case Caudwell is insistent (see particularly his essay on D.H. Lawrence
in Studies on a Dying Culture) that there is no area of consciousness or the
unconscious, no area of thought or feeling, that is asocial as Freud and
Lawrence believe. Both areas are repositories and transformers of ones
social, historical experience. Thus arts effect in focusing common
responses can be profound. Art can be a powerful instrument in encouraging
social cooperation, social production.
Caudwell recognizes, however, that in a class society all art is class art,
or, the life experiences of people and their interests are class specific.
The shared pool of experience and thus
