Towards a Materialist Poetics II: Poetry and ‘Inner Reality’

Abstract

Caudwell’s aim in Illusion and Reality is to construct a theory of modern poetry and its social function, yet his book opens with an account of the origins of poetry and its early development in ‘primitive’ society. This is no accident, of course, since he clearly expects that the key to the meaning of poetry will be found in its genesis. In adopting this approach, Caudwell’s work shows marked similarities with that of one of his influences, the anthropologist Malinowski, since the latter argues that, in order to understand the ‘essential’ nature of cultural practices or institutions one has to trace them back to their ‘simplest forms’ in ‘primitive’ society.¹ Similarly, the early Marx is inspired by the notion of a ‘human essence’, whose outlines are discernible in the original, ‘unalienated’ world of ‘primitive communism’. As Maynard Solomon has noted:

An often overlooked aspect of Marxism is that it is devoted in some measure to a search for origins — of society, of institutions, of the motive sources of history and its superstructural epiphenomena. It is in this sense that Marxism is linked to a number of other systems of post-Enlightenment thought. With the anthropological demonstration of the natural and human origins of religion, the way was opened to an exploration of the basic sources of every aspect of reality. The origin of species, of language, of arts, of religion, of man, of mythology, of moral ideas, of the family — these were the subjects that some of the best minds of the time turned to, seeking out the roots of human life, behaviour and institutions.²