Page 67 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

MARXISM

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struggle with Nature”. Perhaps the book’s most striking feature is
its attempt at a general historical sociology of literature, defining
different kinds of poetry as the “expression” of one or another stage
in the development of the mode of production. Cultural modernity
was thus “the superstructure of the bourgeois revolution in production”,
and modern poetry notoriously “capitalist poetry”. 28
Like Plekhanov, Caudwell thought of culture as having an essentially
adaptive function: “The poem adapts the heart to a new purpose,
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without changing the eternal desires of men’s hearts”. In Caudwell’s
view, these eternal desires are fixed by the human “genotype”, that is,
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“the more or less common set of instincts in each man”. And for
Caudwell, as for Plekhanov, a socio-functional explanation for the
existence of art leads easily to a valorization of realist cultural forms.
Art, he wrote, “remoulds external reality nearer to the likeness of the
genotype’s instincts… Art becomes more socially and biologically
valuable and greater art the more that remoulding is comprehensive
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and true to the nature of reality”. During the “epoch of imperialism”,
which in Caudwell’s view had then only recently come to an end,
such bourgeois modernisms as surrealism had attempted “entirely to
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separate the world of art from that of society”. The result had been
“the pathos of art…torn by insoluble conflicts and perplexed by all
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kinds of unreal phantasies”. Hence, the concluding address to the
bourgeois artist, made unselfconsciously in the name of “the conscious
proletariat”: “You must choose between class art which is unconscious
of its causality and is therefore to that extent false and unfree, and
proletarian art which is becoming conscious of its causality and will
therefore emerge as the truly free art of communism”. 34
Doubtless, there is much in Caudwell that is idiosyncratic, indeed
original: his psychologism for instance. But both the general structure
of communist Marxism and the more specifically Romantic, as distinct
from utilitarian, conception of the rôle of the militant artist-intellectual
recur throughout the British communist cultural criticism of the 1930s.
Alick West, for example, could move readily from the quasi-sociological
proposition that the “source of value in the work of literature is…social
energy and activity” to the quasi-Romantic prescription that “the
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criticism of our lives, by the test of whether we are helping to forward
the most creative movement in our society, is the only effective
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foundation of the criticism of literature”. A similarly sociological
moment informs Ralph Fox’s understanding of art as a “means by

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