File spoon-archives/marxism2.archive/marxism2_1996/96-07-31.055, message 48


Date: Wed, 17 Jul 1996 22:30:39 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: CHISTOPHER CAUDWELL ON BLAKE (SIGHTING)


"Blake begins by being 18th century, rapidly revolts to
Elizabethan Gothicism, moves on to Godwinism, and eventually can
find no satisfaction until he reaches a sort of
super-Protestantism, a complete individualism of mysticism which
is almost psychotic.  The most genuine revolutionary, his tragedy
is the outcome of an age when, as for Donne, there were no social
forces making for the real release of individualism.  He was
caught in the bourgeois circle.  His interest in Milton and Job
needs no explanation."

from: Caudwell, Christopher.  ROMANCE AND REALISM: A STUDY IN
ENGLISH BOURGEOIS LITERATURE, edited by Samuel Hynes.  Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970,  p. 66.

This must be the single most idiotic paragraph Caudwell wrote in
his entire career.  Caudwell was a brilliant autodidact, but this
passage illustrates what is most disturbing about this book, which
is at the same time an intellectually fertile tour de force and a
galling example of obtuseness to real works of literature.
Caudwell's strength lies in generalities, his talent lies in the
tying in of the various historical phases of capitalism with the
historical development and especially failures of literature, but
there is far too much generalizing and far too little
particularizing.  Caudwell was in a rush to synthesize the entire
universe of knowledge.  Perhaps had he not felt such urgency
(impossible in the mid-1930s), and had he not been killed on his
first day of combat in the Spanish Civil War, he could have
returned to his literary study to make the necessary refinements.


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