Raymond Williams through Sri Lankan eyes

[Part 1]

Let me start out by stating categorically that Raymond Williams (!921-1988) was one of the greatest cultural critics of the twentieth century. He exerted a profound influence on the thought-ways of his time and continues to do so. Over the years he was able to fashion a prodigious and versatile repertoire through his commentaries on literature, culture, communication and social change. He was a literary critics, cultural analyst, social theorist, novelist, dramatist, political commentator, media analyst and social activist.

It is as a supremely insightful cultural analyst that his reputation continues to grow on both sides of the Atlantic as well as in many other parts of the world. The way he worked towards a socialist theory of culture, sought to combine academic investigations with personal witness and turn his explorations into multi-disciplinary quests infuses his cultural criticism with a remarkable investigative power and scholarly resonance.

E.P.Thompson, the author of the celebrated work The Making of the English Working Class, a contemporary of Williams and an equally powerful cultural critic said that, ‘even a brief passage of his (Williams’) writings has something about it which demands attention – a sense of stubborn, unfashionable integrity…….his work, over the past ten years, carries an authority which commands respect of his opponents; and the positions which he has occupied must be negotiated by critics and by historians, by educational theorists, by sociologists and by political theorists.’ Raymond Williams was a brilliant and consequential intellectual. He was equally effective in this scholarly work as well as in his writings for the general public. Edward Said, speaking of the importance of a public intellectual asserted that, ‘a public intellectual is someone who represents ‘an individual vocation, an energy, a stubborn force engaging a committed and recognisable voice in language and society.’ Raymond Williams admirably fits this description of Said. He was indeed a committed and powerful presence in diverse fields of inquiry of importance for the public at large. Similarly, Stuart Hall, the eminent British scholar of cultural studies made the following observation.

Thinker

‘When I try to answer the question what Raymond Williams was…my answer is that he was a thinker. When you talked with him, his thinking was almost palpable; a deceptively slow delivery allowed a tremendously impressive body of mental capital to go into action. Above all, he grasped what a few of his associates realised; that we are far from understanding the process of social change. He proposed a new general approach that he termed cultural materialism.’ and the distinguished literary critic and theorist, and one time pupil of Williams, Terry Eagleton proclaimed that, ‘almost single-handedly, he transformed socialist cultural studies in Britain from relative crudity of the 1930s Marxism to an impressively rich, subtle and powerful body of theory.’

Raymond Williams, then, is an extremely important cultural critic and intellectual whose work, we in Sri Lanka, can pursue with great profit. In the next few columns I plan to examine his work in relation to his privileged investigative areas of literature, culture and communication; he excelled in all these three intersecting areas of academic inquiry and was able to open up productive lines of inquiry. My focus of analysis is the way his work can be usefully connected to our own interests and investments in the areas of literature and culture and communication.

There are two main reasons why I selected Raymond Williams for detailed analysis through Sri Lankan eyes. First, as I stated earlier, he is one of the greatest and most influential cultural intellectuals of the twentieth century. Second, I was a student of him at Cambridge. I took his course on nineteenth century realistic fiction and I participated in the discussions on society and change that he was involved in the ‘open university at King’s College, Cambridge. I got to know him well; this was the time that he was developing some of his ideas on communication and mass media, and my interests in communication were ignited by these encounters with Raymond Williams.

Biography

Let us turn very briefly to some basic facts regarding Raymond Williams’ biography. An understanding of his biography is deeply relevant to a proper comprehension of his important body of work. It’s not only works of fiction like Border Country that bear the traces of his lived life but also his scholarly and critical works; they are too driven by the pressures of personal experience.

he leading vectors of his scholarly work are animated by the realities of his life in the margins. Despite the warnings of certain modern literary theorists to the effect that biography has no place in literary and cultural analysis, it is abundantly clear that an understanding of his life and times illuminates his work in productive ways.

Raymond Williams was born in 1921, in Pandy a small village. It was typically Welsh but at the same time exposed to diverse English influences. He came from a working-class background; his father was a railway signalman. Reflecting on his childhood, he made the following comment. ’I come from Pandy, which is a predominantly farming village with a characteristic welsh rural structure; the farms are small family units.

My father began work when he was a boy as a farm laborer. But through this valley had come the railway, and at fifteen he got a job as a boy porter on the railway, in which he remained until he went into the army during the First World War.

When he came back he became an assistant signalman and then a signalman. So I grew up within a very particular situation – a distinctly rural social pattern of small farms, interlocked with another kind of social structure to which the railway workers belonged.

They were unionized wage workers, with a perception of a much wider social system beyond the village to which they were linked. Yet at the same time they were tied to the immediate locality, with its particular family farms.’

In 1939, at the age of 18, Williams won a scholarship to Cambridge University’ there he was deeply involved in political activity as a committed member of the communist party and Cambridge University Socialist Club. In 1941 he was summoned to the army and fought as a tank commander in several ferocious battles of Word War II. He returned to Cambridge in 1946 in order to complete his studies that had been suspended due to the intervention of the war.

His chosen field was English and he obtained a first class; he wrote an insightful dissertation on the work of the celebrated Norwegian playwright Ibsen. Looking back on his period at Cambridge as a undergraduate, he made the following observation. He spent his next fifteen year or so as a tutor in adult education at Oxford. This experience was extremely important for him as it served to inflect his thinking on literary analysis and literary pedagogy.

Departure

As one commentator remarked, this move and the consequent departure from the standard university curriculum of English studies, provided some of the space for the fashioning of his two seminal scholarly books which were instrumental in subverting the ruling paradigms of literary analysis at the time. The two books are Culture and Society 1780-1950, and The Long Revolution.(I will discuss these works at length in mu later columns). These two works served to establish his reputation as a foremost thinker of the left and pave the way for the currently fashionable Cultural Studies.

In 1961 Raymond Williams received an offer from the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge; he was offered a position as Lecturer. By this time, he was disillusioned with the way adult education programs were developing in England and he decided to accept the offer. The rest of his working life he spent at Cambridge teaching and researching. Thirteen years later he became professor of drama at Cambridge. What is interesting to note that it is from Cambridge – the citadel of elite education – that Williams sought to challenge elitist notions about English studies as well as culture and education. He produced a corpus of work in the areas of literature and cultural analysis that have stood the text of time. At Cambridge he emerged as a powerful oppositional intellectual who was able to give voice to the marginalized. As he remarked in an interview, that if one looks at the implied relationships of nearly all the books that he has written, it is evident that he has been arguing with what he took to be official English culture.

This desire to challenge the official English culture dives his exegetical work into important and uncharted territories.

This is one of the central threads that rums through the nearly twenty five of his academic books. It allows him to occupy space in the periphery and challenge the center in powerful, but constructive ways; this becomes evident when we pause to examine his critical and exegetical works. His early writings which include essays he wrote for journals such as ‘Politics and Letters’ and ‘The Critic’ as well as his important monograph Reading and Criticism, bear witness to this desire.

These writings call attention to the tension he experienced and articulated between literary analysis and Marxist analysis. It was his intention to draw on the vigor of Marxist analysis for quickening literary studies without yielding to dogma and narrowness. This tension continued until the end of his life. He grappled intensely with the task of making Marxism into a vital and creative force in cultural studies, eschewing the simplicities and crude generalities.

Books on dramas

The three books on drama and cinema – Drama from Ibsen to Eliot (1952), Drama in Performance (1954) and the co-written book, Preface to Film (1954) reveal Williams interests in drama and cinema as powerful modes of social communication. What we see in these books is the predilection of Williams for social progress and commitment and to make consequential interventions into current cultural conversations.

As he stated in the introduction to Drama from Ibsen to Eliot, his aim was to ‘give ‘not so much a history of the drama of these hundred years (1850-1950) as a critical account and revaluation of it.’

This revaluation entailed the pursuit of his privileged themes that I discussed earlier .and his book preface to film enables us to understand the growth of his master concept of the structure of feeling, which is so central to his work; I shall discuss this concept later.

In 1958, Raymond Williams published his path-breaking book on culture and social change titled Culture and Society 1780-1950 and this was followed by in 1961 by The Long Revolution. Both these books enjoyed wide popularity among academics as well as educated lay readers. The first book addresses the issue of culture and social change by tracing the evolution of the idea of culture from 1780 to 1950.Here he is deploying the term culture not in its narrow sense as referencing art but rather in its wider sense as social experience. The book is organized around the idea that the notion of culture, and the word itself the way it is used now, came into English thinking in the period that is generally referred to as that of the industrial revolution. What Raymond Williams has sought to do in this book is to examine how and why this happened and follow the idea to modern times. In order to investigate into this important phenomenon, the author selects five key words and explores their growth. The five words are industry – democracy – class – art- culture.

Structure

As Raymond Williams says, ‘the importance of these words, in out modern structure of meaning, is obvious. The change in their use, at this critical period, bear witness to a general change in our characteristic ways of thinking about our common life; about our social, political, economic, institutions; about the purposes which these institutions are designed to embody; and about the relations to these institutions and purposes of our activities in learning, education and the arts.’ In an interview, commenting on this book, Williams remarked, ‘it allowed me to refute the increasing contemporary use of the concept of culture against democracy, socialism, the working class or popular education, in terms of the tradition itself. The line of inquiry opened up by this book is one that should appeal to critics of Sri Lankan literature and culture The potentialities are many and challenging. I hope to discuss this point in a later column.

The Long Revolution continues the exploration initiated in the earlier book focusing on the gradual transformations which have marked the political, economic and cultural life, he places great emphasis in the creative mind in relation to social and cultural thinking.

After examining the theory of culture, he engages in a highly productive historical study of such institutions as education and the press, and seeks to trace the evolution of a common language and uncovers the connections between ideas, literary forms and social history; this is Raymond Williams at his best displaying is remarkable ability at contextualizing human phenomena and drawing out their profound social implications.

In the Introduction to the Long Revolution, Raymond Williams makes the following revealing comment. ‘This book has been planned and written as a continuation of the work begun in my Culture and Society, 1780-1950. I described that book as an account and interpretation of our responses in thought and feeling to changes in English society since the late eighteenth century, and this, of course, was its main function, a critical history of ideas and values in this period of decisive change.

Yet the method of this book, and in particular its concluding chapter, led to a further intention; from analyzing and interpreting the ideas and values I moved to an attempt to reinterpret and extend them, in terms of a still changing society and my own experience in it.’ The term ‘my own experience’ is indeed important; it is a critical idea that informs all his work.

In writing these two books, Raymond Williams was fighting a battle on two fronts. On the one hand he challenged the assumptions and modes of operation of mainstream literary scholars; on the other hand, he critiques the orthodoxies and dogmatisms associated with simple mined Marxist analyses.

E.P, Thompson understood well the intentions and the nature of the struggles Williams was waging, when he remarked that, ‘with a compromised tradition at his back, and with a broken vocabulary in his hands, he did the only thing that was left to him; he took over the vocabulary of his opponents, followed them into the heart of their own arguments, and fought them to a standstill in their own terms.’

The next book that I wish to comment on is Keywords published in 1976. This is, in many ways, an outgrowth of Culture and Society, 1780-1950 that I referred to earlier. In Keywords, the author focuses on a set of words that are central to modern social and cultural analysis and re-description. Originally conceived as an appendix to Culture and Society, Keywords was enlarged to include 155 critical words.

He says that this book is not a dictionary or glossary .of a particular subject. It should not be regarded as a series of footnotes to dictionary histories or definitions of a number of words. It is rather a record of an investigation into a vocabulary; a shared body of words and meanings in our most general discussions in English, of the practices and institutions which we group as culture and society.

Keywords to my mind, is a very important book – one whose significance has not always been appreciated adequately. It opens a window into the complex intersections between language, meaning, history and social structure in interesting ways. Christopher Norris, a distinguished British literary scholar has made the following claim for the book which I feel is exactly on the mark. ‘so the importance of Keywords….is that it provides what pot-structuralism couldn’t and what certainly currently fashionable post-analytic and neo-pragmatist approaches to interpretation can’t provide, that is, some way of explaining, not always with full clarity but often very suggestively, how it is that language both bears structures of consciousness and structures of feeling and at the same time articulates the changes that take place historically between them, and this leaves room for the subject, that is, the conscious, intending, purposive speaker or writer.’ This, to be sure, is a most challenging task undertaken by Williams.

English study

I stated earlier that Raymond Williams was intent on challenging the hegemony of officially-sanctioned approaches to English study. This intention is clearly manifest in the three books Modern Tragedy (1966), The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (1970) and The Country and the City (1973).In these works, it is evident that as he offers his critiques of English studies, he is also putting in play a critical engagement with Marxism, and the two efforts go hand in hand.

For example, in his book Modern Tragedy he makes the point that what is looking for is not a universal meaning of tragedy, which is the standard practice among literary scholars, but to identify the structure of tragedy in our own culture. This approach stands in sharp contrast to the orientations suggested by literary critics such as George Steiner which promoted the idea of a unitary tragic essence as the measure of all forms of tragedy.

The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence can be read, in many ways, as a critique of F.R.Leavis famous book The Great Tradition and a subversion of it. Williams accords great importance to dickens and Thomas hardy whom Leavis had virtually ignored and offers fresh interpretations of the novelistic form in relation to changing social structures.

For Williams the significance of the novel lies in the importance of representation as a social and political act – the way writing is not merely communicative but constitutive and how writing is always situated. These lines of approach have much to offer to those of us interested in Sri Lankan literature.

Interaction

The Country and the City is, in many ways, one of the most authoritative works of Williams. This indeed committed academic writing at its best where the subjective and the objective intermingle in an invigorating fashion. The book deals with the interaction between country and city in English poetry and points out the importance of rising above the easy opposition between the two. More specifically, the book addresses the question of reading country house poems productively from newer angles of vision.

As one reads the book, the author convincingly makes the point that it is important to restore produced literature to their conditions of production and that literary conventions have social roles; they should not be understood as merely formal devices of writing.

This book also underscores the fact that anyone who seeks to adopt a materialist approach to history, as indeed Raymond Williams does, needs to understand nature in far more complex ways in its interaction with social and economic imperatives.

Marxism and Literature (1977) is another book that merits close analysis. Although it is presented as an introductory text, it is highly sophisticated theoretically and signals a new direction in his analyses.

While emphasizing the need to transcend the dogma and overly simplistic generalisations associated with some forms of Marxist analysis, he also points out the need to develop a socially-centered literary aesthetics. In other words, Marxism and Literature seeks to challenge the orthodoxies and dogmatisms associated with both Marxist cultural analysis and traditional literary criticism.

This book, demonstrates persuasively the fact that Williams was deeply indebted to Marxism even as he was straining to distance himself from it. Commenting on Marxism and literature, Terry Eagleton said that, it is the combination of political sympathy with a powerfully distancing perspective which allows this deeply felt study at once to comment in its subject, and effectively to reinvent it.’

Another book by Raymond Williams that I find particularly thought-provoking is Television: Technology and Cultural Form. This book relates in interesting ways to my interests in communication. At a time when Marshall McLuhan was disseminating his euphoria over new mass media and information technologies and how they were transforming the world, Raymond Williams adopted a more balanced approach locating technology in the larger social configurations. In this book, he makes the point that effects of communication technologies have to be understood in relation to the interplays between technology and society, technology and culture and technology and psychology.

What he aims to clarify in this book, through a survey of the development of television and broadcasting institutions in England and America, is the nature of television as a technology and the productive ways in which it could be studied. The book, although just one hundred and fifty pages in length, contains many useful insights into technology and social change and the nature and significance of visual culture in modern society.

In addition to his scholarly and critical books, Raymond Williams was the author of a number of novels and plays. For example his novels Border Country (1960), Second Generation (1964), The Fight for Manod (1979) have generated a great deal of interest among discerning readers. Similarly his plays too, which are compelling in their own ways, have ignited informed interest.

These works of creative literature capture facets of his Welsh experience as well as some of the social experiences that he has dealt with discursively in some of his scholarly works.

He also wrote regularly to newspapers and journals addressing lay readers on matters pertaining to literature, culture, communication and social change. These short essays and articles have now been collected in book form.

What I have sought to do in this opening column is to indicate certain dominant interests of Raymond Williams by focusing on a number of his representative works.

They reflect his deep commitment to social progress, his acuity of perception and willingness to think afresh issues that were once thought to have been settled. All these works that I have cited have a great relevance to us in Sri Lanka.

What I plan to do in my next few columns is to explain why Raymond Williams matters to us, why his patterns of thinking should stimulate our own. Williams, to be sure, did not write about Asia.

His writings are largely confined to Great Britain and Europe. In a way, this can be characterised as a limitation of Williams. However, a careful reading of his work, I am persuaded, will enable us to think afresh some of our own perplexing issues in the world of arts and letters.

(To be continued)