Raymond Williams through Sri Lankan eyes

[Part 11]

In the past so many columns I have been discussing Raymond Williams’ scholarly and critical works and how they might relate to our interests in Sri Lanka. It is important to remind ourselves that he is also a supremely gifted creative writer; he has written novels and plays that invite serious study. As a matter of fact, he was interested in creative literature before he displayed his indubitable skills as a cultural critic.

As he said in one of his interviews that he had started to write function before he began his work on criticism. In this column I wish to focus on his fiction, especially the trilogy of novels, generally referred to as the Welsh trilogy. Williams is the author of novels such as Border Country (1960), Second Generation (1964), The Volunteers (1978), The Fight for Manod (1979) and Loyalties (1985).

Criticism

Many literary critics who have ventured to comment on Raymond Williams’ fiction have made the observation that they constitute a thinly disguised version of his cultural criticism. To my mind, there is some substance to this charge; but at the same time it misses out on an important segment of Williams’ agenda. He, of course, repudiated the notion that his fiction is a thinly disguised version of his cultural criticism.

He retorted, ‘the act that I also write social criticism has led to a simple formula in which my novels are seen as by-products, but the two kinds of writing have always been important to me, and in fact the novel-writing came first and will, I think, go on longer.’ It needs to be noted, however, that Raymond Williams is an insightful critic as well as a talented novelist, and his criticisms and novels mutually illuminate each other in important ways.

Let us begin by considering his first novel, Border Country, published in 1960 (This is still my favourite). This generated a great deal of interest among discerning readers. He revised in seven times over a thirteen-year period. Clearly, much thought and effort had gone into its composition. And it is among his novels the closest that comes to his personal experience. This novel centres round the character of Matthew Price who can be justifiably regarded as a fictionalised self of the author. It examines, for the most part, his childhood experiences in rural Wales. Harry Price, his father and Morgan Rosser, his friend are two other important characters that serve to define the personality of the protagonist

Working class

The story of the novel revolves round the character of Matthew Price. He is a university lecturer in economics living in London. He goes back to visit his father who is ill in South Wales. The story is set in the fictional village of Scybmwar in Black Mountains. This is a coal mining area. His father worked as a railway signalman and belonged to the working class. The novel is full of flashbacks that recreate the social situation in the 1920s and 1930s.It also refers to the General Strike that had such a profound impact on the lives of workers. Matthew Price leaves South Wales to go the Cambridge University for higher studies and after that to London to work as a lecturer in the university. The novel manifests a deep bond of intimacy that the protagonist has with the Welsh village community and his regret for having to leave it.

The contrasts between the past and the present, individuality and community, belonging and alienation, tradition and modernity, are central to the narrative discourse of Border Country. In this novel, we find Matthew, now an adult separated bro his native welsh environment. As we wait to get on a train that will take him to Glynmawar, Mathew ponders.

‘It was no longer a crowd that he saw, but the hurrying, actual people. He went slowly down the steps, watching the people who passed him. It was as if, for the first time, he was able to know them as himself, and this was like a change in the weight of his body, a deep flowing back of energy. He was feeling the recovery of a childhood which at the moment of recovery was a child’s experience and no more, but a living connection between memory and substance.’

Contrast

The contrast between his early life and his present life could not be more stark. Here, we are reminded of modern Sinhala novels which deal with this same theme. In London, Matthew feels that it is not customary for people to speak to each other because ‘there is plenty of time for that sort of thing on the appointed occasions – in an office, in a seminar, at a party.’

But back in Wales, in Glynmawr, everybody speaks to everybody. This juxtaposition of discrepant attitudes and values runs through the novel. As I stated earlier, Border Country is an autobiographical novel that deals with the life of Matthew Price. At another level, it is the life story of Harry Price, his father narrated against the backdrop of working class life and family obligations. The author is perspicacious in his representation if working class life. Harry Price is working as a railway signalman along with two others, Morgan Rosser and Jack Meredith.

They receive instructions from the union that beginning in Tuesday there is going to be a work stoppage and that they should participate in it. Morgan, who is a committed socialist says, ‘We’re the power, we the working class are defying the bosses’ government, going to build our own social system.’ Harry Price is not sure whether this optimism is placed and warns against enlisting Meredith. And sure enough, Meredith refuses to strike. Raymond Williams, by focusing in the divergent attitudes if these three workers, is seeking to focus on the contradictions and challenges experienced by the working class. And, understandably, Matthew Price’s attitude to them is complex.

The character of Matthew’s father, Harry, is one of the most vividly drawn in the novel. He gains in depth and definition through the useful contrast offered between his friend Morgan Rosser and his son Matthew. He is, in many ways, the evaluative center of the novel. He is dedicated to his community and family and tries to be as consistent as he can. In an important scene in the novel, Morgan tries to persuade Matthew to assist him running a new factory and asks harry about the idea.

His reply was, ‘you set yourself a job, you finish it; agreed the job may be wrong, you might have done better. But get the habit when it’s difficult of stopping and going off somewhere else, hen its not the job’s useless, that may not matter, but you yourself. Nobody sets himself what he doesn’t want. What you set yourself you anted, or seemed to want it. and now it isn’t the chance you’d be missing, I don’t care so much abut that. ’This statement points to the firm, but limited vision if harry, and that is how his son sees it.

Protagonist

The second novel in Raymond Williams trilogy, which is also referred to as the Welsh trilogy, is second generation. In the first novel we see how the protagonist Matthew is drawn towards his childhood and Welsh roots. The second generation deals with a different kind of experience although a thread of continuity persists between the two. Peter Owen has been living in the city fir a long tome and is virtually an urbanite. He flees temporarily to his native village which offers a sharp contrast to his normal context of living. However, owing to family pressure he is compelled to return to the city. As we saw earlier the narrative of border country unfolds in a Welsh border village – the kind of border village in which Williams grew up.

Second generation is set in an industrial city. The novel deals with two Welsh working class brothers who come to work in the factory; they are very different from each other. One of the brothers, Gwyn Owen, is the head of a family that is superficially content but masks sexual repression and political superficiality. The other brother, Harold, lives next door; he is presented as a deeply committed and political active shop steward. Harold’s wife, Kate, has a licit relationship with a university professor

In second generation, the author depicts the various seductive forces of consumer society that working class intellectuals are subject to. As one commentator observed, ‘indeed, none of the characters can resist the call of a new life that hails them from lecture hall, newspaper, and television screen. The incessant wrangling and bargaining that pervades every aspect of their present, from the marriage bed to the work place, dissatisfies all of them.

Between their hope for a new life and their disgust with the current one falls the repeated hope, voiced by almost every character, for a more settled existence.’ However, it is important to point out that the term settled does not convey the same meaning it once did for the denizens of the border country.

Second generation depicts the lives and predicaments of a group of politically committed operating in a society that has other things on its mind. The city becomes space of contested meaning. The desire for change in the spheres of politics, culture, economics and sexuality is patent. Yet at the same time there are countervailing forces at work. What Raymond Williams his laboring to represent is the problems of a society that is desirous of change but does not have the wherewithal to do so. It is evident that the convention spaces such as parliamentary elections, trade union activities are inadequate to respond meaningfully to the new challenges. However, none of the characters in the novel is able to forge a new path of change. The aspirations for change have wilted. At the end of the narrative, Peter Owen is seriously considering giving up his university career for the life of a factory worker.

Interest

The fight for Manod is the third novel in the trilogy, and its displays the same focused interest in working class life that characterised the other two novels. There is a great measure of hope in the novel. The Welsh village of Manod becomes the physical setting of the novel, and it is also, in many ways, its emotional center. Traditionally, this village has been marked by subsistence farming.

In the 1960s it became the focus of a development project envisaged by the state. Robert Lane, a senior member of the civil service explains the government project. Clearly, there is a note of doubt in his statement. ‘just another new world indefinitely postponed.’ Matthew price, by now, has earned a reputation as an economic historian and he is invited to assess the project – ‘to come to this fresh, to make it human again, to help us see it as again as it is.’

It is lane’s firm belief that Mathew Price’s intervention and guidance is necessary if the project is to succeed. As the novel progresses, we become aware of a number of projects of Monad that are in contention. For example, for a property speculator named john dance, this project seems to hold out the promise of great real estate profit. Trevor and Modlen Jenkins are a young married couple, and they see it as a generator of employment. Peter Owen has been discharged from his factory work as a consequence of uncovering malpractices in the motor industry. He sees this project as evidence of crass greed of the multinationals. And Mathew Price sees the project as opening new possibilities for investigating social relations, interactions and patterns of behaviour.

. Matthew, alone among the diverse characters, is committed to renewing the social potentialities of the community as a means of attaining progress. What comes through strongly in the narrative discourse is his deep and abiding faith in the community and the place that gives rise to it. It is not so much a political project that engages his interest as the possibilities of a regional mode of social living. In Second Generation, we saw how the author was in a agonised quest for a new life. However, in The Fight for Manod, we see Williams returning to the attractions of the border country, to the resources of a community and its treasured land.

Pastoral country

He sees a land that occupies, ‘a border in the earth and in history; to north and west the great expanses of pastoral country; to south and east, where the iron and coal had been worked, the crowded valleys, the new industries, now in their turn becoming old. There had been a contrast, once, clearly seen on this Border, between an old way of life and a new, as between a father living in his old and known ways and a son living differently; in a new conception and with a new cast of mind. But what was visible now was that both were old. the pressure for renewal, inside them, had to make its way through a land and through lives that had been deeply shaped, deeply committed, by a present that was always moving, inexorably, into the past. and those moments of the present that could connect to the future were then hard to grasp, hard to hold to, hard to bring together to a rhythm, to the necessary shape of a quite different life. What could now be herd, momentarily, as this actual movement, had conditions of time, of growth quite different from the conditions of ant single life, or of any father and son.’

Raymond Williams’ the Welsh trilogy, then, is a narrative well worth pursuing. T deals with the complexities of working class life. His attitude to the working class is one grounded in reality, one that recognises the manifold contradictions that are discernible in the lives of workers. As a novelist, Williams combines the intricacies of psychological entanglements with the multi-faceted meaning-structures of social formation. Indeed, it is the skillful way in which he is able to put in play these two different agendas that gives his novel their depth and resonance.

In addition, one mist also pay close attention to Williams’ narrative style and representational techniques. He is not a novelist given to rhetorical exuberance and verbal flourishes. In his fiction, he analyses with a quiet dignity the complexities of social living in Britain. There is a certain subtlety in his narrative style. Very often his syntax, verbal rhythms capture effectively the physical movements of characters as well as thought-patterns of different strata of society.

Rhythm

Let me give one example. In border country, we are offered a description of Matthew returning to his native village of Glynmawr from London. What we see here is that as there is a change in the rhythm of the train rattle one observes a corresponding change in the flow of the syntax.

The flow of words comes to a standstill so that the reader can fix his attention undisturbed on that specific moment. ‘abruptly, the rhythm changed, as the wheels crossed the bridge. Matthew got up, and took his case from the rack. As he steadied the case, He looked at the rail-map, with its familiar network of arteries, held in the shape of Wales, and to the east the lines running out and elongating into England..

This is a second example. In border country we observe a certain distance between Matthew and his home community. What is interesting to observe is that that distance is reflected in the linguistic separation. ‘He heard the separate language in his mind, the words of his ordinary thinking. He was trained to detachment; the language itself consistently abstracting and generalizing, supported him in this. And the detachment was real in another way. He felt, in the house, both a child and a stranger. He could not speak as either; could not really speak as himself at all, but only in the terms that this pattern offered.

In discussing Raymond Williams’ approach to the art of diction, I referred in my earlier columns to the concept of knowable community that he had proposed. This concept finds clear expression in the welsh trilogy. The knowable community is concerned with perceptions of self and other, social forces that impinge in human relations, way of understanding one’s place in a given social context. It is also vitally connected to human consciousness.

Community

The three novels that we discussed briefly – Border Country, Second Generation and The Fight for Manod – display the importance of the knowable community. One of the aims of the author has been clearly to highlight this knowable community.

Raymond Williams’ critical studies are reasonably well known in Sri Lanka. However, his novels seemed to have attracted far less attention. There is nothing surprising in this in that this is pretty much the situation in most countries including Britain. However, it seems to me that Williams’ novels deserve our attention more than they have received so far. We as Sri Lankan writers and readers can benefit from them. They enable us to think through carefully the nature and significance of fictional experience. Let us, for example, consider Martin Wickremasinghe’s trilogy with Raymond Williams’ trilogy; clearly, there are certain similarities and differences. In his three novels, Wickremasinghe has sought to chart the rise of the middle class and its progress in Sri Lanka pointing out certain potential perils as well.

To be continued