Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry. Christopher Caudwell
Читать онлайн книгу.
is not a class struggle which ends with the clear victory of the revolutionary class, but rather with the “mutual ruin of the contending classes”. The struggle between the oligarchs and the democrats, between Athens and Sparta, tears Greece to fragments. It is a struggle between town and country, between slave latifundia and slave-town. Because it remains within the categories of slave-owning, it is incapable of a final solution. No decisive stroke is possible such as the freeing of the tied serfs which provides the basis of the bourgeois revolution. Neither class can completely undermine the foundations of the other, for both are based on slavery, and slavery of a similar character.
Culture is still sufficiently undifferentiated for one man to survey the whole, and Plato and Aristotle stand out as philosophers surveying the whole field of culture, including that of literary art. Both were fortunate in that they were born before the class struggle was reaching its final sterile issue in Greece. There had recently been an alliance between the classes against the common enemy, Persia, and the alliance was still dynamic and creative. Plato, spokesman of the oligarchic class, reacts creatively upon Aristotle, who voices the aims and aspirations of the newer class, more tough-minded, more practical, more in touch with reality. It was no accident that Aristotle of Stagira had been so closely allied with Philip and Alexander, for if at last his class were to score a more solid triumph, and to emerge somewhere as conquerors, it was only by bursting the confines of the city and ruling beyond the bounds of Greece in the Hellenistic empires of Alexander’s heirs.
Aristotle clearly sees the primitive distinction between private and public speech, between non-rhythmical and rhythmical language, between individual persuasion and collective emotion. Indeed to a Greek of that time the distinction appeared so self-evident and practical that it needed no explanation. On the one hand was the great instrument of Rhetoric whereby an individual swayed his fellow men; on the other hand the world of Poetics wherein men were collectively moved to emotion. Aristotle writes about both like a man writing a text-book on a useful and important human activity.
Aristotle’s view of Rhetoric is simply this—the art of Persuasion. But he makes it clear that he has chiefly in mind the obvious and impressive public occasions where the art of persuation is needed—in the law courts and the political assemblies. This conception of Rhetoric as individual speech used for formal “public” occasions, must be distinguished from the publicity of poetry. It is the publicity of State occasions where State is distinguished from society. Both are one in primitive life, but the class development of Athens has already separated the city from men. The occasions when men use the State machinery and State occasions to persuade others are by Aristotle considered as separate from the occasions when one man speaks to others to persuade them about the normal incidents of daily life. The development of classes has made the city a “tamer of men”, something already towering above society as a structure separate and imposed on it, a view which was to reach its zenith with the Hegelian conception of the absolute State. But it is already implicit in Socrates’s refusal to flee the city’s judgment of death. In this refusal, Socrates forecasts that the class struggle was doomed to destroy Greece, because the city could not generate a class or even one man able to look beyond the city.
Aristotle’s treatment of Poetics requires a more detailed consideration. He deals with a primitive poetry already in process of differentiation in odes, dramas, epics and love poetry, and already distinct from rhetoric; and he therefore looks for a characteristic common to poetic creations which will distinguish them as a species from the non-poetic. An obvious characteristic of poetry to the Greeks was that it told some sort of story. It made some statement about the ways of gods or men or the emotions of the poet which, even though it was not true, seemed true. The epic is a false history, and the drama a feigned action. Even in love poetry the poet may justly say “I die for love of Chloe” when no Chloe exists. The essence of poetry therefore seemed to the Greeks to be illusion, a conscious illusion.
To Plato this feature of the poet’s art appeared so deplorable that he would not admit poets to his Republic, or at least only if their productions were strictly censored. Such reactionary or Fascist philosophies as Plato’s are always accompanied by a denial of culture, particularly contemporary culture, and Plato’s contemporary culture was pre-eminently poetic. He therefore hates poetry as a philosopher even though he is charmed by it as a man. In a revolutionary period culture expresses the aspirations of the revolution or the doubts of the dispossessed. The philosophers of the dispossessed regard both the aspirations and the doubts as “dangerous”, or “corrupt”, and want a culture which shores up their rottenness. Such a culture idealises the past in which they were strong. This ideal past does not bear much likeness to the real past, for it is one carefully arranged so that, unlike the real past, it will not again generate the present. For Plato this past is idealised in his Republic, ruled by aristocrats and practising a primitive communism which is the way Plato hopes to undermine the trade by which the rival class has come to power.
The Greeks reasoned that poetry was designed to create an illusion. Evidently then the poet made something which created the illusion, even if the something was fabulous. He made stories actually visible on the stage or, as in the Homeric cycle, a history more real than the transactions of the market-place, the reallest thing in the collective life of the Hellenes. This creation the Greeks took to be the special mark of the poet. The very name etymologically was derived from “making”, just as was the Anglo-Saxon word for poet—maker:”
To build from matter is sublimely great,
But only gods and poets can create.
However, the Greeks did not suppose that a poet could create something out of nothing by words, which are only symbols of reality. They considered the poet created an artificial imitation of reality, a mimesis. For Plato the poet is essentially a man who mimics the creations of life in order to deceive his hearers with a shadow-world. In this the poet is like the Demiurge, who mocks human dwellers in the cavern of life with shadows of reality.
This theory of mimesis gives Aristotle the specific mark to differentiate between the class of rhetoric and the class of poetry. Though it is, to our modern minds, imperfect as a distinction, owing to the differentiation which has taken place in literature since then, it aws an adequate distinction in Aristotle’s day.
We separate poetry from the novel and drama; he did not. But the categories of literature are not eternal, any more than the classifications of systematic biology; both must change, as the objects of systematisation evolve and alter in the number and characteristics of their species. Culture changes faster than species, and cultural criticism must be correspondingly flexible. Aristotle’s theory of mimesis, as our analysis will show, so far from being superficial, is fundamental for an understanding of the function and method of art.
Aristotle, with his extraverted mind turned firmly on the object, was more interested in the created thing, e.g. the play—than in the man who was influenced by it or who produced it. Thus his angle of attack is aesthetically correct; he does not approach literature like a psychologist Or a psycho-analyst.
Plato, with the more intuitive, introverted mind; is interested in the poet and in his hearer rather than the composition itself. His conception of the productive and receptive states of the poetic mind is primitive, corresponding to the more reactionary cultured snigger which is characteristically Platonic. The barbarity rather than the culture makes Plato to some extent a spokesman of the primitive view of the poet’s role, at a time when poetry is passing, as a result of the invention of writing, from a collective to a private phase.
Plato, belonging to the older world of Athens, is not aware of the change. He does not see that the development of Hellenic economy makes the poem an object of exchange between cities and people, like Athenian vases. The poem is no longer, as in old Athenian tragedy, rooted in a collective festival where actors and audience are simultaneously plunged into an associated world of art. Neitzsche’s passage from the Dionysian to the Apollonian in art has already taken place as a result of the passage of Athens from the primitive to the sophisticated, i.e. the differentiated. Poems are now separate from the body of society, to be enjoyed by individuals or groups separate from society. And the invention of writing, made necessary by the development of economy to a stage where records and messages were