Kudos to Gary MacLennan for a kickass analysis, and to Louis for
pulling it out of one of his several hats at my stated yearning.
Following the display of Hanson's "doctrine vs strategy" problem
comes a section echoing some odd reading of mine: "Studies in a Dying
Culture" by Christopher St John Sprigg (writing as Christopher Caudwell),
a privileged International Brigader who died behind a machine gun in 1937.
First MacLennan: .......................................
> The problem is that Hanson herself is simply too stupid to understand
> anything of this. She is, though, genuine Joan of Arc material. But this
> is Australia in the 20th century and instead of the fascinating Maid of
> Orleans plagued and driven by the angelic voices in her head, we have the
> fish and chip owner with the ugly whining tones - the genuine petty
> bourgeois from the bush with a mission to save her nation. Nevertheless
> she is also charismatic. I personally find that difficult to believe, but
> the truth is there. Hanson is enormously attractive to poorly educated and
> culturally deprived males in the 35-55 age bracket (what I refer to as the
> Viagra zone) and there are it seems enormous numbers of them. .........
In his first chapter, an attack on Shaw and the polished hyperrationalism
of his main characters, Caudwell asserts that social dynamism derives from
human evocations quite the opposite of Shaw's Olympian logic, and says:
This source of all happiness and woe is the disparity between
man's being and man's consciousness, which drives on society and
makes life vital. Now all this tension, everything below the dead
intellectual sphere, is blotted out in Shaw. The Life Love, which
is his crude theological substitute for this real active being,
is itself intellectually conceived. Thus his characters are inhuman;
all their conflicts occur on the rational plane, and none of their
conflicts are ever resolved -- for how can logic ever resolve its
eternal antinomies, which can only be synthesized in action?
This tension creates "heroes" like Caesar and Joan of Arc, who,
in response to the unformulated guidance of experience, call into
existence tremendous latent forces of whose nature they can know
nothing, yet history itself seems to obey them. Such heroes are
inconceivable to Shaw. He is bound to suppose that all they brought
about they consciously willed. Hence these heroes appear to him as
the neat little features of a bourgeois history book, quite inhuman,
and regarding their lives as calmly as if they were examination
papers on the "currents of social change." These plays are not
dramas. This is not art, it is mere debate and just as unresolved,
just as lacking in tragic finality, temporal progress or artistic
unity as is all debate.
For this reason, too, Shaw is a kind of intellectual aristocrat,
and no one who is not capable of declaring his motives rationally
and with the utmost acuity on instant demand appears in his plays,
except as a ludicrous or second-rate figure. The actors are nothing;
the thinkers are everything. ..............................
Thus and for seven chapters more does Sprigg/Caudwell attack and expose
what he conceives of as the seminal flaw of the dying bourgeois culture
of the '30s: the notion of liberty as a condition born only of solitude,
an idea central to the classical liberalism that slew the feudal period.
E P Thompson was fascinated by this writer, calling him "an anatomist of
ideology" who was "obsessed with the characteristic illusions of the
bourgeois epoch..."; Spain was his proper epitaph as well as his grave.
valis
