Raymond Williams through Sri Lankan eyes

Last week I discussed the importance of the concept of culture for Raymond Williams and how he has sought to gloss it in his various writings. In today’s column I wish to focus on another important concept for him - literature. He is both a literary critic and creative writer of distinction who has produced novels and plays that have generated a great deal of discussion. When exploring complex concepts, Williams’ normal method of procedure is to examine their etymological roots and what they tell us and chart how these concepts have evolved historically over time.

In works such as The Long Revolution, Keywords and Marxism and Literature, one discerns the careful way in which he has deployed this method of exploration to his advantage. It is indeed a mode of analysis that we in Sri Lanka can use productively in our own projects in cultural analysis.

As he has pointed out,’ literature is a difficult word, in part because its conventional meaning appears, at first sight, so simple. There is no apparent difficulty in phrases like English literature or contemporary literature, until we find occasion to ask whether all books and writing are literature and if they are not, which kinds are excluded and by what criteria or until, to take a significant example, we come across a distinction between literature and drama on the grounds, apparently, that drama is a form primarily written for spoken performance (though often also to be read.)it is not easy to understand what is at stake in these often confused distinctions until we look at the history of the word.’

Word literature

Let us, therefore, examine the history of the word literature in the way Williams has chosen to delineate it. The word literature entered the English language somewhere in the fourteenth century and its original meaning was a sense of polite learning through reading. The focus here was on literate rather than literary; the idea of literary began to appear in the seventeenth century.

By the 18 century this sense of literary was firmly established. What historians of the concept of literature have to figure out is how the idea of literature as a certain kind of writing took root. As Williams points out this is difficult because it is incomplete. For example, a literary editor or literary supplement still deals, by and large, with all kinds of books. However, one begins to observe a certain specialisation which is highlighted by phrases like creative literature and imaginative literature.

Raymond Williams is of the opinion that the major shift signalled by the modern complex of literature art, aesthetic, creative and imaginative has much to do with social history and cultural history. The movement of literature towards imaginative writing was accelerated by the ideas put into circulation by romanticism. In earlier periods, the word poetry served the functions performed by the term literacy; since the nineteenth century it focused more on creative and imaginative writings.

Concepts

Williams says that in recent times, literature and literary have been increasingly challenged on what can be described as their own ground, by concepts such as writing and communication. They appear to focus on most active and general sense which has been marginalised by extreme specialisation.

Moreover, the term literary seems to have acquired two diminishing senses – belonging to printed books and belonging to past literature rather than to modern writing.

Raymond Williams has been very successful in delineating the complex ways in which the term literature has evolved over time. He says that,‘ What can be seen as happening, in each transition, is a historical development of social language itself; finding new means, new forms and then new definitions of a changing practical consciousness.

Elements

Many of the active values of literature have then to be seen, not as tied to the concept, which came t limit as well as to summarise them, but as elements of a continuing and changing practice which already substantially, and now at the level of theoretical definition, is moving beyond its old forms.’ The kind of historical and social analysis to which Williams subjects his chosen words can prove to be extremely valuable.

Raymond Williams’ approach to literature and literary analysis can be broadly described as historical, cultural and materialistic. His method tends to focus on political and ideological issues related to textual production and textual reception.

When he focuses on the imagination of a novelist, dramatist or poet, as he invariably does, he is quick to explore and highlight the undergirding material circumstances that serve to give shape and form and direction to that imagination.

His intention is to underscore the fact that a literary text is an active site- a site in which certain important facets of society and history and politics attain visibility. Issues of class, the various social forces that aim to usher in disruptive transformations attract his close attention.

He makes literary analysis a way of demonstrating the intensities of societal change as well as the diverse levels of social and collective life at which these changes occur. Williams in his literary analysis is keen to establish the fact that the upheavals in personal lives are at the same time upheavals of social formations. In other words, personal anxieties become reflectors of social anxieties.

What I would like to do now is to explore Raymond Williams’ approach to literature in relation to his views on the art of fiction, drama and poetry. Let us first consider fiction. Here I would like to focus on his important work, The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence.(1969). It is a book that manifests clearly Williams’ predilections as a critic of fiction, more specifically English fiction. As one reads this critical work, it becomes evident that he was offering an alternative vision of the English novel, one that was significantly different from F.R.Leavis’ The Great Tradition which had by then acquired the status of an inescapable reference point in English fiction analysis.

Williams underlined the importance of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy in a way that Leavis had not. He did so by situating their fictional creations in the larger social and historical contexts while paying close attention to the shaping power of material factors.

Fiction

Raymond Williams’ approach to fiction can be usefully understood by focusing on the way in which he situated Thomas hardy in the evolving tradition of English fiction. While Leavis, in his highly influential book The Great Tradition ignored Hardy, Williams paid great attention to him. Hardy has often been portrayed as a regional novelist with all the limitations and restrictions it suggests. A regional novel is one in which the conflicts and tensions that mark the larger society of which it is an invariably a part do not get much traction. It is indeed true that there are certain English novels which can be described as isolationist in the way described above.

However, as Raymond Williams steadfastly and cogently argues, Thomas hardy’s fiction does not belong in that category. They are reflective of some of the predominant crises that convulsed England in the nineteenth century. The approach to Thomas Hardy is indeed indicative of Raymond Williams’ understanding of, and commitment to, fiction as a socially relevant verbal construct.

To understand Williams’ orientation towards fiction we need to pay attention to his concept of the knowable community. This indeed functions as a foundational concept for him; it informs and pervades his analyses contained in the English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence. The concept of the knowable community is social-historical and literary-textual in its address. The concept is vitally connected to his idea of the novel as a social text that shapes experience and promotes understanding of the intersections between personal, social, political, and economic structures of history. It is Williams’ conviction that the novel influences, inflects and even shapes society rather than merely mirroring it. This idea is at the root of his concept of the knowable community. The knowable community encourages us to examine the personal in relation to the social experience and historical transformations.

Raymond Williams first introduced his concept of knowable community to his readers in an essay he wrote on the fiction of George Eliot. His contention was that George Eliot was able to expand the community of the novel to bring within its fold people who actually work in the country. This includes adjustments in idiom and narrative style. As Williams remarked, ‘there is a new kind of break in the texture of the novel between the narrative idiom of the novelist and the recorded language of her characters.’ This knowable community focuses on the need on the novelist’s part to establish a harmonious relationship between analysis and description, commentary and evocation. One sees this very clearly in novels such as Tess by Thomas Hardy; here the mother speaks the dialect while her daughter who was trained by teacher from London speaks the dialect at home and Standard English outside her home.

Intention

Raymond Williams makes the argument that the novels of Thomas Hardy, in many ways, illustrate the power of the knowable community. It is hardy’s intention not to project a rural countryside that is eternal and timeless, but one that is subject to the forces of modernisation and urbanisation; the interconnections between country and city are extremely important to him. We see Hardy as both a proactive participant and acute observer of the world that he inhabits. What this concept of knowable community does is to call attention to the vital interconnections between personal experience, historically guided social formations and patterns of culture that are crucial to the shaping of fictional experience.

Commenting on Williams’ idea of the knowable community, one critic has remarked that, ‘It is then significant and perhaps not surprising that Williams’ argument about knowable communities has been best understood outside the departments of literature. The argument has always been that it is through cultural forms such as the novel that the historical patterns of economy and society show and show through varied and necessarily incomplete communities.’

This kind of approach to cultural analysis has ignited the interest of modern meta-anthropologists. For example, my friend George Marcus has said that, ’Williams has precisely defined text construction as the crucible for integrating the macro into the micro combining accounts of impersonal systems into representations of local life as cultural forms both autonomous and constituted by the larger order.’ and that anthropologists can profit from this approach.

This approach to the novel and the knowable community advocated by Raymond Williams has great relevance for us in Sri Lanka. The idea of a knowable community has always been present in a shadowy form in fictional analysis. What Raymond Williams did was to point out its centrality for literary investigation and underline its unavoidable complexity. Williams commented that,’ most novels are in some sense knowable communities. It is a part of a traditional method –an underlying stance and approach – that the novelist offers to show people and their relationships in essentially knowable and communicable ways.

Much of the confidence if this method depends on a particular kind of social confidence and experience……many factors combined to destroy this confidence, in the process of extraordinary change has been widely recognised..’ As a consequence of these changes the idea that both persons and societies are only partially knowable has gained widespread acceptance. This has the effect of making the task of the novelist that much more challenging.

Raymond Williams makes the helpful observation that, ‘the problem of the knowable community, with its deep implications for the novelist, is then clearly a part of the social history of early nineteenth century England and of the imaginative penetration and recoil which was the creative response. But what is knowable is not only a function of objects – of what is there to be known. It is also a function of subjects, of observers – of what is desired and what needs to be known.

A knowable community, that is to say, is a matter of consciousness as well as of evident fact. Indeed it is to just this problem of knowing a community – of finding a position, a position convincingly experienced, from which community can begin to be known- that one of the major phases in the development of the novel must be related.’ Knowing a community in fiction is connected not only to the social content, but also to linguistic registers as well as technique and form.

Raymond Williams’ approach to the novel and his concept of the knowable community has much to offer Sri Lankan writers and critics. Let us consider a novel such as Gunadasa Amarasekera’s Gandhabba Apadanaya- which, incidentally, remains an under appreciated work. It centres on an intensely personal experience surrounded by a larger social discourses which touches on modernisation, ethnicity, middle -class values and so on. Williams’ concept of the knowable community would allow us to enter into the experience of this novel more intelligently and situate it more productively in the larger social, economic and political context. Such an effort is vital to de-coding its meaning.

Drama

Let us consider next Raymond Williams’ understanding of drama. He wrote important critical works on drama and was himself the author of a number of plays. The two critical works that I wish to focus on are Drama from Ibsen to Eliot (1966) and Modern Tragedy (1966). Both are among his earlier works, and as with all other critical works, contain useful insights and newer pathways of inquiry. The first book is a close reading of the works of distinguished playwrights such as Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Shaw, Synge, Pirandello, Anouilh, Yeats and Eliot. It is also theoretically speaking a sustained critique of naturalism as a dramatic creed. While the influence of Cambridge critics such as I.A.Richards and F.R.Leavis is evident in the intense focus on the words on the page, there is also evidence of a focused desire to go beyond their influence.

Reading Drama from Ibsen to Eliot, it is evident that Williams is keen to highlight three broad strands in his approach to drama. First he sees drama as a form of literary communication and consequently the actual words used by the author deserves careful scrutiny. Second, the idea of drama as performance, as collective art produced on stage, requires close analysis. Third, as with his other investigations, the individual experiences reconfigured in the plays have to be located in the larger social experiences and structures. Raymond Williams made the following comment.

‘I have written of these dramatists and their plays, then, with the conviction that drama is essentially a literary form, but a literary form which requires, for its communication, all the theatrical elements of performance. I have discussed the plays against a background of the theatre for which they were written, and have examined, where they were relevant, the view of the dramatists both on dramatic firm and performance. Much of my criticism is based on the analysis of particular arrangements of words for speech; this is literary analysis, but it id conceived in terms of the medium of communication.’ These twin interests of his are combined with a third, namely, his desire to locate individual experience within the larger context of social experience.

Complex ways

Modern Tragedy (1966) is equally important in understanding the approach to drama advocated by Williams. The book consists of two interconnected parts. In the first, he discussed tragedy in life and tragedy in drama and the complex ways in which they are linked. His discussions on the relationship between tragedy and experience and tragedy and revolution are particularly illumination. The second is devoted to discussions of works by Ibsen, Miller, Strindberg, O’Neill, Williams, Tolstoy, Lawrence, Chekhov, Pirandello, Ionesco, Beckett, Eliot, Pasternak, Camus, Sartre, and Brecht.

We normally use the term tragedy to denote either disasters, calamities in everyday life and to signify a conventionalised form of drama. Williams, in this book, is keen to explore the intersections between the two usages. Williams rejects the idea that a mining disaster or a road accident or burned-out family, however painful, cannot be regarded as tragedy as is the normal practice.

He challenges this conventional thought-way. He says that, ‘the events which are not seen as tragic are deep in the pattern of our own culture; war, famine, work, traffic, politics. To see no ethical content or human agency in such events, or to say that we cannot connect them with general meanings, and especially with permanent and universal meanings, is to admit to a strange and particular bankruptcy, which no rhetoric of tragedy can finally hide.’

What Williams is seeking to do is to establish a closer connection between tragic drama as a literary genre and every understanding of tragedy. The traditional way of approaching tragedy is to state that an event by itself is not tragic and it has to be inflected by literary codes and conventions. It is Williams’ conviction that this is the wrong way to go about examining tragedy. He states emphatically that, ‘what is common in the works we call tragedies is that they dramatise a particular and grievous disorder and its resolution. Tragic meaning is not fixed but is itself an actor in the play. Significant tragic drama is associated not with fixed truths or stable organic communities but with cultures moving toward violent conflict and major transformations. Its usual historical setting is the period preceding substantial breakdown and transformation of an important culture.’

While literary scholars such as George Steiner were arguing for a timeless essence in tragic drama Raymond Williams was making a case for understanding tragic drama in relation to changing social circumstances and cultural discourses. Instead of conceptualising human nature in terms essences and absolutes, he focused on the complex ways in which it is shaped and re-shaped by historical forces. In other words, he shifts the emphasis from universalistic essences to changing social formations. He sees a close connection between tragedy and revolution. He establishes the point that tragedy has to be understood as the cultural manifestation of revolutionary action. Williams clamed that, ’the contrast between the ordinary ideas of tragedy and of revolution seemed then quite stark. Revolution asserted the possibility of man altering his condition; tragedy showed its impossibility, and the consequent spiritual effects. On that opposition, we are still trying to rest.’

Raymond Williams approach to drama, then, should open for us in Sri Lanka a number of productive lines of inquiry. Drama as literary form, drama as performance, drama as social practice are vitally interconnected and that interconnection should guide our thinking about drama. Similarly, going beyond the traditional understandings of drama put in place by Aristotle and classical Sanskrit theorists of drama, we need to expose ourselves to the kind of socially-based thinking on drama urged by Raymond Williams. We would do well to examine his concepts critically.

Let me examine next his approach to poetry. For this purpose, I would like to focus on his very important book the country and the city (1973). Just as much as Modern Tragedy was an argument against the way tragedy was taught by traditional scholars, The Country and the City can be read as a critique of the way country- house poems were read by scholars at Cambridge. In this book, Williams seeks to comprehend poetry not as an exercise in formal and aesthetic ingenuity or a dispassionate record of events and people but rather as a site of contestation of meaning in society. The raw materials for poetry, as he forcefully points out, are the tensions, miseries, expectations, dislocations that ordinary people encounter in their day to day life.

The Country and the City deals with country- house poems and how they can be studied more productively in contradistinction to the methods adopted by Cambridge scholars. He compels these country- house poems to bear witness to history, and is unafraid to convict them of falsification where they fail. The interplay between literary form and historical experience, which has been one of Raymond Williams’ signature preoccupations, finds persuasive articulation in his analyses of these poems. He demonstrates admirably how poetic conventions have deep social roots and why they should not be discussed limitingly as formal strategies of literary textuality. An interesting aspect of this critical work is that while the author is keen to expose the limitations associated with the Cambridge scholars in their approach to country- house poems, he is also keen to demonstrate the inadequacies of Marxist literary scholars.

Stuart Hall, the distinguished British cultural critic, says that The Country and the City inaugurated a new style of literary analysis. ‘First, the formalised and conventional nature of much pastoral literature has forced a more sustained attention to displacements and disjunctures, which earlier work on more naturalistic and realistic forms did not. But the more significant element is the sustained and detailed historical work, and its integration into the thematic of the book, which radically and irretrievably interrupts any residual pull towards practical criticism.’ This sums, in my estimate, the essential progress that Raymond Williams has made in The Country and the City. Williams shows us how we can examine poetic texts as sites of negotiation of meaning related to social experience.

When we read the analyses contained in this book carefully, we realise how the author has endeavored to bring within his critical purview issues of literary textuality, history, poetic conventions, social experience and political implications in a resolute way. The following is a representative passage. ‘Yet the transition marked by the civil war, the commonwealth, the Restoration and the constitutional settlement of 1688 fundamentally altered the social character of England, and it is not surprising that in ideology, in mediation and in new creative work the literature if the country has changed. In the poems of rural retreat there is a marked transition from the ideal of contemplation to the ideal of simple productive virtue, and then to its complications, as we shall see in Thomson. But there is also an interesting tension in what must be seen as the most significant line; that the country-house poems. If we look from Marvell’s Upon Appleton House to Pope’s Epistle to Burlington we can see this change clearly.’

Poetry

It is indeed possible, and even advisable, to make use of the kind of approach to poetry that Raymond Williams has adopted for our own analytical purposes in studying, say, Sinhala poetry. Let us, for example consider the Kotte period which witnessed a great efflorescence of poetry; the Sandesha poetic tradition reached its peak; narrative poetry attained great heights; there was a creatively happy union of the classical and folk styles. All this took place against a background of the amalgamation of the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, the tensions between the Vanavasi and Gramavasi sects and the uncertainties of polity. Ordinarily, when we discuss the poetry produced during this period we tend to focus on the purely literary aspects. There is, to be sure, nothing wring with it; however, the kind of exegetical moves adopted by Williams can inspire us to widen that analytical discourse productively by blending the textual and social imperatives.

In this column I have attempted to clarify Raymond Williams’ approach to literature; I have discussed his distinctive approaches to fiction, drama and poetry. It is my belief that we can learn a great deal by following his interpretive and evaluative writings carefully and trying to apply, wherever relevant, the lessons we can draw from them. What he was after was, broadly speaking, was a form of cultural criticism that was deeply informed by history and acutely sensitive to social transformations. Martin Wickramasinghe and Gunadasa Amarasekera, too, sought to fashion a cultural criticism which would avoid the limitations associated with narrow biographical criticism and sterile formalist criticism that had dominated, and continues to dominate, Sinhala criticism. Raymond Williams’ critical writings, then, can prove to be an eye-opener for us.

(To be continued)