Epistemology and the Novel

Abstract

In Illusion and Reality Caudwell examines the role of ‘illusion’ in poetry, following it from its original, positive function in primitive society, through to its role as an example of ‘bourgeois ideology’ in the contemporary world, helping to maintain and reproduce social and cultural inequalities. In tracing the evolution of poetry he has begun to touch on a problem which will preoccupy him for the rest of his brief period of writing: namely, the social determination of ideas and their part in the reproduction of social totalities. His next step is to produce studies of various branches of culture, including a long essay on ‘English Bourgeois Literature’, entitled Romance and Realism. ¹ In all these essays he focuses on the way in which a dominant ideological illusion shapes and distorts all intellectual and cultural life, and the Studies are united by Caudwell’s conviction that it is vital to provide a diagnosis of this ‘destructive illness’ which is killing off contemporary culture:

These ‘Studies in a Dying Culture’ are varied though their subjects may be united by the one theme. This theme is the lie at the heart of contemporary culture, the lie which is killing it.²