Christopher Caudwell

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Christopher Caudwell (actually: Christopher St. John Sprigg ; born October 20, 1907 in Putney near London ; † February 12, 1937 at Jarama , Spain ) was an English author and Marxist theorist.

Life

Born in 1907 in Putney near London, he broke off his school career at the age of sixteen at the Benedictine school in Ealing and initially worked for three years as a reporter at the “Yorkshire Observer”. After working as a journalist for a provincial newspaper, Caudwell joined an aviation publisher in London, initially as an editor, but soon became its director. In addition to his work as an aerospace engineer and editor of specialist books and the magazine “Aircraft Engineer”, he wrote seven detective novels, short stories and poems. In May 1935 the novel "This my hand" appeared under the pseudonym "Caudwell".

Since the summer of 1935 Caudwell (in Cornwall) studied the writings of Marx , Engels and Lenin in great detail . In the same year, in London, he began to work on his work "Illusion and Reality - A Study of the Sources of Poetry" and joined the Communist Party.

After a trip to Paris and contact with the left “Popular Front Movement” in France, he returned to London, revised “Civil Illusion and Reality” and began working on “The Crisis in the Physics”. Caudwell was a disciplined writer who meticulously divided his working day; he also agitated for the communist party.

After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War , he went to Spain and joined the British Battalion of the International Brigades on December 11, 1936 . On February 12, 1937, Christopher Caudwell died in the Battle of the Jarama .

reception

Christopher Caudwell was an outsider all his life who did not play an essential role in the English literature business or in the party hierarchy of the Communist Party. After his death, he was increasingly forgotten. It was not until the 1950s that the Communist Party began to discuss its positions.

In England and Germany, occupation with his writings is still rather marginal; in the USA, however, René Wellek and Peter Demetz described him as the "only serious heir to Mehring and Plechanow ". They "considered his attempt to unite" Marxism and anthropology "into a new theory of the origins of poetry as absolutely successful." The most thorough study of Caudwell to date was published by Samuel Hynes.

The German composer Helmut Lachenmann wrote his piece Salut for Caudwell in 1977 , in which two guitarists a. a. recite a text by Caudwell.

Bourgeois illusion and reality

The work “Bourgeois Illusion and Reality” attempts to interpret the genesis of poetry, its justification from the economic conditions of the respective societies and its historical development from the perspective of a materialistic aesthetic.

theses

  • The life of primitive tribes brings forth poetry as a collective cultic act. A world is imagined through poetry; a real object, a goal, e.g. B. the harvest, becomes a fantastic object:
“The non-existent real object appears as a fantastic object in the world of ideas. Through the vehemence of the dance, the noise of the music and the hypnotic rhythm of the verses, the human being is transported from the present reality, in which there is still no harvest, into a fantasy world in which these things exist fantastically. "
This imagination, so Caudwell, provides the members of the tribe with the energy to take action to shape their reality.
  • Poetry (resulting religion) and magic (as well as the resulting science) arise from the economic necessity of shaping the environment and are at the same time an expression of common social experiences.
  • With the increasing division of labor and the emergence of classes, a world of "working" and one of "enjoying" separates; Art and religion are decoupled from the original social context and thus alienated .
  • Poetry becomes a world of wishful thinking that loses its relation to the real change in social conditions.
  • With the emergence of the bourgeoisie , art became an expression of this class . Caudwell attributes a revolutionary impetus to the bourgeoisie: "This class gradually came to power, but the condition of its existence consists in the constant revolution of the means of production , consequently of the relations of production and at the same time of all social relations."
  • The capitalism , the growing confrontation between art and life; at the same time, through the compulsion of the circumstances, the artistic means of expression of poetry unfold. Caudwell provides a rough historical overview of the characteristics of bourgeois poetry in relation to their historical conditions from 1550–1930.
  • In Chapter X, “The Dream Work of Poetry”, Caudwell draws connections between dream and poetry. Like dreams, poetry takes an emotional stance on the world, but always reflects the social conditions in which it was created:
“Poetry colors the world of reality with affective tones. The affective tints are not 'pretty' because it is the real world of necessity and great poetry does not cover the nakedness of external necessity just to surround it with the brilliance of the interesting. "
In contrast to dreams, poetry is creative work because of its social significance.
“The great mass of people no longer read poetry, no longer perceive it as a necessity, no longer understand it, because poetry has turned away from concrete life with the development of its technology; this development is only the counterpart of a similar process in society as a whole. "
It ends with the vision of a communist poetry that consciously and collectively turns back to the shaping of reality:
"Communist poetry will be complete because man becomes just as conscious of his own necessity as it is of external reality. (...) Art is one of the prerequisites for man's self-realization and at the same time one of his realities."

literature

  • Christopher Caudwell: Illusion and Reality. A Study of the Basics of Poetry. Verlag der Kunst, Dresden 1965 ( Fundus series 12/13)
  • Christopher Caudwell: Bürgerliche Illusion und Reality (orig .: Illusion an Reality - A Study of the Sources of Poetry ), from the English by Horst Bretschneider, ed. and with an afterword by Peter Hamm, Ullstein Verlag, Frankfurt am Main / Berlin / Vienna 1975, ISBN 3-548-03144-7 (this edition first Munich: Hanser 1971).
  • Christopher Caudwell: Studies in a dying culture (orig .: Studies in a Dying Culture, The Bodly Head, London 1938 ) from the English by Elga Abramowitz, VEB Verlag der Kunst, Dresden 1973 (GDR) ( Fundus series 32)
  • Christopher Caudwell: The Perfect Alibi (orig .: The Perfect Alibi, Withy Grove Press Limited, London and Manchester 1934), from the English by Gisela Petersen, Verlag Volk und Welt, Berlin 1975 (GDR)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Cf. Christopher Caudwell: Bürgerliche Illusion und Reality , Frankfurt a. M. u. a. 1975 (see literature), afterword by Peter Hamm, p. 305.
  2. ↑ a b c Cf. Christopher Caudwell, afterword by Peter Hamm, p. 306.
  3. ↑ See Christopher Caudwell, afterword by Peter Hamm, p. 307.
  4. ↑ a b c d Cf. Christopher Caudwell, afterword by Peter Hamm, p. 308.
  5. ↑ Bourgeois Illusion and Reality, p. 25.
  6. ↑ Bourgeois Illusion and Reality, pp. 40–42.
  7. ↑ Bourgeois Illusion and Reality, p. 57
  8. ↑ Bourgeois Illusion and Reality, pp. 118–123.
  9. ↑ Bourgeois Illusion and Reality, pp. 201–274.
  10. ↑ Bourgeois Illusion and Reality, p. 221.
  11. ↑ Bourgeois Illusion and Reality, p. 222.
  12. ↑ Bourgeois Illusion and Reality, pp. 275–304.
  13. ↑ Bourgeois Illusion and Reality, p. 298.
  14. ↑ Bourgeois Illusion and Reality, p. 303.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Caudwell, Christopher
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sprigg, Christopher St. John (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English author and Marxist theorist
DATE OF BIRTH October 20, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Putney near London
DATE OF DEATH February 12, 1937
Place of death at Jarama , Spain