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. --- from list marxism2-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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