________________________________
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 arts potential reach is limited.
This brings up the question of which art is good art. For Caudwell art
which encourages cooperation in the revolutionary class in any era is the
periods progressive art. Only art that can help people move forward in
human social evolution is the art that can free people. For as Caudwell
reminds us through Hegel,
Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.
In his essay Liberty Caudwell examines the idea that freedom is the
consciousness of ones potential efficacy in the context of the larger
forces that make up historical process. Art from the revolutionary class is
the only art which can squarely face this process.
Other art, rooted in the perspective of the dying class, cannot reflect
necessity accurately because such a recognition would invalidate that
classs position. Thus this reactionary art cannot be liberating art, art
which fulfills its raison d'etre as promoter of cooperation in the further
evolution of human society. This art rather promotes a false consciousness.
Caudwell observes that artists of the late capitalist period (capitalism is
the only class society Caudwell examines) who retain the view of the now
dying class, the bourgeoisie, do suffer intensely because of their false
consciousness. At once they rebel against the alienating and dehumanizing
effects of capitalism (art is humanistic by nature), yet seek only
individualistic retreats from society. This is because the dominant
characteristic of bourgeois consciousness is individualism. Throughout his
works Caudwell refers to individualism as the bourgeois illusion that the
subject, the human, can separate himself or herself from the object, or
social process.
The question posed above has not, however, yet been answered: Where is the
good art of the present? For Caudwell this is a sticky question, one that
he does not answer to the satisfaction of many Marxists today. For while he
recognizes that only proletarian art now can be liberating art, and while he
theoretically accords art an important role in social change, he hardly
discusses progressive tendencies in existing art that the proletariat is
involved in. Rather he seems to despair of its capability as good
effective art until the revolution has already been won. Caudwell examines
only artists who retain strong ideological ties with the bourgeoisiethe
proclaimed major artists in the British tradition.
It seems as if his writings were primarily addressed to these bourgeois
artists in the hope of getting them to change sidesnot to proletarian
artists seeking a tradition. This is presumably because he feels bourgeois
artists have a sensitivity and technique lacking in proletarian artists (or
artists who address the proletariat) of today. Caudwell categorizes most
contemporary art as high or low brow art, where bourgeois or high brow
art is refined and artistic, and low brow art is escapist and trashy, art
only for the proletariat. For Caudwell low brow art is less significant
as art than bourgeois art. To him, such popular art is only an expression of
the poverty of the proletarian intellectual and emotional life that helps to
perpetuate that poverty. High brow art, on the other hand, is more
sensitive to thought and feeling, and more technically innovative, and so
offers something worth saving for socialism.
It is in the passage describing the characteristics of low brow art that
Caudwell makes one of his few references to film and particularly to popular
films. Caudwell observes that mass production art helps
...enforce a dead level of mediocrity.. arts role is now that of
adapting the multitude to the dead mechanical existence of capitalist
production, in which work sucks them of their vital energies without
awakening their instincts [or potentialities], where leisure becomes a time
to deaden the mind with the easy phantasy of films, simple wish-fulfillment
writing, or music that is mere emotional message ... Immense technical
resources and steady debasement and stereotyping of the human psyche are
characteristics alike of factory production and factory art in this stage of
capitalism ... The modern thriller, love story, cowboy romance, cheap film,
jazz music or yellow Sunday paper form the real proletarian literature of
todaythat is, literature which is the characteristic accompaniment of the
misery and instinctual poverty produced in the majority of people by modern
capitalist production. It is literature which proletarianizes the writer. It
is at once an expression of real misery and a protest against that real
misery. This art, universal, constant, fabulous, full of the easy
gratifications of instincts starved by modern capitalism, peopled by
passionate lovers and heroic cowboys and amazing detectives, is the religion
of today, as characteristic an expression of proletarian exploitation as
Catholicism is of feudal exploitation. It is the opium of the people; it
pictures an inverted world because the world of society is inverted.
High-brow bourgeois art grows on the bourgeois classs freedom. Low-brow
proletarian art grows on the proletariats unfreedom, and helps, by its
massage of the starved revolting instincts, to maintain that unfreedom in
being. Because it is mere massage, because it helps to maintain man [sic] in
unfreedom and not to express his [sic] spontaneous creation, because of
that, it is bad art. Yet it is an art which is far more really
characteristic, which plays a far more important and all-pervasive role in
bourgeois society than, for example, the art of James Joyce. (pp. 197-98)
This mass art Caudwell describes characteristically reproduces alienation
and false consciousness by providing only escape, only a vent for starved
desiresnot a vision for the solution of problems. Presumably Caudwell would
include with the easy phantasy of the opiate film (the detective, cowboy,
and sentimental films of the forties and fifties) the more recent cult of
violence films. Just as earlier films play on peoples need for ingenuity,
heroism and passion, so the modern violence films play on peoples desperate
need for power in a system where war, genocide, crime, police brutality,
unemployment, and a higher rate of exploitation have become commonplace.
What kind of films, then, would Caudwell assess as being good art? Seemingly
he would gravitate toward high brow bourgeois films rather than low brow
ones. Of course he would not find high brow films wholly acceptable, even
as he finds the vision embodied in high brow literature deeply flawed by
bourgeois illusion. In the passage quoted above, it is true, Caudwell seems
to contradict his general theory of art outlined earlier as he speaks of
high brow bourgeois films growing on the freedom of the bourgeoisie.
This suggests perhaps that the artists who address this class are still
capable of producing films which reflect reality accurately, thereby
fostering the freedom of the bourgeoisie. To achieve consistency with his
general theory, however, we must interpret freedom here as the bourgeois
illusion of freedom, a consciousness fostered by their wealth and power that
individual retreat is possible. Thus we would have to extrapolate that
Caudwell does not see high brow art films of today as liberating films.
While Caudwell would certainly have studied Bergman even as he studied
Joycefor technique and sensitive, unsentimental, and critical depiction of
human interactionhe would undoubtedly find Bergmans films limited and
ultimately bourgeois. Even as Caudwell criticizes writers such as Joyce and
Eliot for their individualist and idealist perspective, so he would
undoubtedly find films like CRIES AND WHISPERS and SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE a
reaffirmation of the bourgeois vision of the limitation and temporality in
contact and commitment among humans. In the case of Bergman, however much
contact is urged, whether it be responding to the cries and whispers or
continuing human relationships throughout life, the cause of alienation
which limits contact is not located in historical and materialist social
forces. Annas isolation from heterosexual relationships and possibly even
her religiosity, rather than her proletarian history, are the only reasons
offered for her emotional responsiveness. Likewise, the difficulties in
communication between husband and wife in SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE are
presented as aspects of male and female patterns of behavior rather than as
a consequence of a petty bourgeois alienation that would encourage the
development of such patterns. Caudwell would undoubtedly find in filmmakers
such as Bergman another example of the bourgeois artist who recognizes the
ossification and alienation of the society yet who is not able to recognize
the transforming and cleansing power lying dormant in the proletariat. Such
artists develop an attitude of despair or moralism but do not advocate class
struggle.
But is Caudwells preference for high brow over low brow, more highly
commercialized films politically acceptable? Aren't there trashy, escapist
films in the high brow camp? What about the technical excellence of some
low brow films? What about Charlie Chaplin, or Hitchcock? Where would
Caudwell rank them? Presumably they are low brow and commercial, but
clearly these films do not enforce a dead level of mediocrity. Caudwells
categories of high and low brow for art which is not overtly
revolutionary are clearly of dubious utility and would probably better be
scrapped. Caudwell is too easy on the degeneracy of the bourgeoisie and too
elitist in his idea of what appeals to proletarian tastes.
As mentioned above, Caudwell does not spend much time discussing existing
genuine, liberating proletarian art. He hints briefly that the Russian
filmmakers are beginning to show us both the extent of our alienation and a
way out of it. Presumably he is referring to people like Eisenstein. Were he
living, Caudwell would undoubtedly have much to praise in directors such as
Humberto Solas and Pontecorvo, who show us proletarian revolutionary
struggle as historically necessary and positive.
The summary and extrapolation above of Caudwells views on class art and
class filmhis scrapping of mass art, his failure to discuss revolutionary
proletarian artistsis characteristic of a strong trend particularly in
European Marxism. It is also probably a consequence of Caudwells living at
a time when socialist revolution and flourishing socialist art to inspire
the rest of us was not the world-wide phenomenon it now is. Caudwells
narrow focus on high brow culture does not hold interest for us except as
an historical phenomenon and as an example of a perspective we shouldn't
adopt. Nor is Caudwell useful in providing observations on how to make
revolutionary films (as is Eisenstein for example). Caudwells more original
and positive contributions to a Marxist theory of film lie elsewhere: in his
theoretical comments on some basic generic features of film.
Caudwell already perceived in his time that, like drama, film as starring
vehicle would remain with capitalism. He could not, of course, imagine the
extent to which this hero/heroine worship would be carried. Yet Caudwell
makes an important distinction between drama and film in this respect. This
distinction does not lead him quite into Lenins estimation that cinema is
the most important of all arts for socialism, but it at least leads him to
estimate that film would be the more appropriate of the two forms for a
collective society. Dance, drama, and film, Caudwell maintains, are all
related forms in that they are mixed in their effect. Like the novel, they
are symbolic forms. That is, they tend to refer us immediately out toward
the world of external social relations. Yet, like music and poetry, they
also contain a non-symbolic dimension, encouraging us to remain more within
the medium. That is, they focus us toward our inner, emotional world, where
social relations appear in a refracted, masked state. Just as the sounds
of music or the carefully selected words of poetry do not direct us
immediately toward a moving social reality beyond the music or the words, so
the human dancer or actor keeps us riveted on himself or herself. A tension
thus emerges in these forms between the non-symbolic and symbolic
dimensions. The person mimicking, the vehicle of the non-symbolic dimension,
conflicts with the director, the one who forces attention on the thing
mimicked, the symbolic dimension.
Such a tension, Caudwell affirms, can be successfully overcome only in film
where the mechanical flexibility of the camera makes the cast wax
in a good producers [sic, directors] hands. (p. 255)
The egoism of the actors and actresses, their tendency to emphasize the
non-symbolic side, or said another way, their individualistic attitudes, can
be more easily contained by the directors moving the camera from static
close up to other characters, to larger events. Such flexibility, such
ability to restrain individualism means that film is therefore a more
appropriate form for a collective society. In fact, Caudwell feels films
potentiality as a form can only be fully explored when freed from reflecting
the fragmentation and individualism of our society, epitomized in the star
system. This does not mean that individuality of character will cease in a
collective society, as Caudwell is careful to note. Rather, individuality
can be given more elaborate and deeper meaning because it will be a
collective meaning, (p. 296) as directors more effectively create a sense
of human interdependency through the flexibility of the camera than can the
dramatist. Caudwell is not saying here that drama will disappear with
socialism, for under socialism the individual actor or actress will develop
a less individualistic consciousness. But film, for Caudwell, seems the
higher socialist art form because it can achieve this sense of individuality
through collectivity in a richly powerful and more flexible form. (p. 296)
There seems to be, however, another reason why Caudwell finds film a highly
appropriate art form for socialism. Caudwell observes that dance, drama, and
film fall into the category of temporal arts, those arts which reflect
various individual actors and actresses crisscrossing in time. (p. 254)
All these forms developed their present character under capitalism, which
intensified the division of labor to create highly differentiated people.
The novel, Caudwell asserts elsewhere, likewise reflects various
individuated humans interacting in time. While socialism certainly works to
remove the alienating division of labor of a class society, it nevertheless
seeks to encourage individual development. These art forms, shorn of their
individualist aspects, would thus have a strong support under socialism.
Yet perhaps there is an even more special suitability of film for socialism
than Caudwell suggests above. It may not be insignificant that film and the
novel are the forms born in capitalist social relations. Insofar as
socialism builds upon certain aspects of these relations, perhaps there are
qualities in these two forms alone which make them especially suitable for
socialism. When contrasting the novel with the poem, Caudwell intimates at
least one aspect of the novel that would make it a crucial form for
socialism. Perhaps his observation could be applied to film too. Caudwell
observes that capitalism produces the notion of life as process, as
dialectic (p. 205) and that the novel embodies this consciousness in its
form in contrast to the poem.
Caudwell here seems to be fumbling toward the kind of more extensive and
more powerful explanation formulated by Lukács some years earlier in History
and Class Consciousness, Lukács observes that capitalism is the first fully
social society, the first mode of production to break down every
artificial barrier of religion, caste, or race to draw all areas of life and
all peoples into its all-penetrating nature.(3) This, of course, flows from
its expansive, commodity-dominated character. Such a fully social society
means that people are for the first time in history able to see that they,
and not some supernatural force, make history and themselves. Thus emerges
the notion of life as dialectical process between human and environment, the
notion of evolution. Thus emerges a qualitatively new kind of incursion of
the time element into human consciousness and art. Socialism, of course,
transforms the alienating effects of this social society created by private
ownership, eventually creating in communism a society where all humans will
be fully conscious of their role in making history and themselves, and not
thwarted by the exigencies of class.
If Caudwell were to adopt this fuller description and explanation for
capitalist and communist consciousness, he would have to show how the novel
and film actually reflect this consciousness in their forms. Do these forms
alone communicate a sense of life as dialectical process? How is this
different from the sense of time passing created by dance and drama, forms
born long before capitalism? These questions need answering to establish
film as a dominant, crucial form under socialism.
As do all critics of Caudwell, I can only reiterate regret over his untimely
death. Ideas such as those analyzed above are incomplete and too abstract.
Yet these ideas are nevertheless highly provocative. Particularly important
is Caudwells concept of films greater potentiality than drama as a
collective form in terms of films ability to combat egoism and present the
individual more flexibly in a collective context. In addition, his
observation on films projection of individuated lives interacting and
changing in time suggests films eminent suitability for a socialist society
which encourages diversity among individuals. More especially, one wonders
if, like the novel, the other form born in capitalism, film reflects a
consciousness of life as dialectical processa consciousness which Lukaçs
explains emerges only with capitalism to become dominant under socialism. If
so, both these forms, transformed of course, will become major art forms in
socialist society. Caudwells suggestions concerning the relation between
genre and social relations and the questions they raise should surely be
stimulating of further work.
Notes
1. Following scattered introductory essays and dissertations on him over the
years (the best of these is Stanley Edgar Hymans essay appearing in the
hardbound edition of The Armed Vision), in 1967 David Margolies published
the only book thus far on Caudwell, The Functions of Literature, in which he
compares Caudwells views of literatures function with those of George
Plekhanov. Two recent dissertations continue raising the level of scrutiny
of Caudwell. Francis Mulherns dissertation (a portion of which appears as
Caudwells Literary Theory in New Left Review, 35, May-June 1974, 39-57)
examines from a Marxist perspective some of Caudwells theoretical
weaknesses. My own dissertation (Christopher Caudwell: The Genesis and
Function of Literary Form, University of Connecticut 1976) studies
Caudwells views on literary form as they contribute to a Marxist approach
to the meaning of genre.
2. Christopher Caudwell, Illusion and Reality (New York: International,
1937). Page numbers in text refer to this book.
3. See George Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge: M.I.T.,
1968). pp. 55-59.
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