Raymond Williams through Sri Lankan eyes

[Part 6]

In the past few weeks I have been discussing the concepts of culture, literature, communication as formulated and elaborated on by Raymond Williams. In today’s column I wish to explore his approach to the novel. This is indeed a topic that should have a great relevance to the interests and preoccupations of Sri Lankan writers and readers who find the novel a potent form of literary communication.

In discussing Williams’ understanding of the novel, how we should assess it, I will be basing my analysis on two of his books - The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence and George Orwell. To be sure, these books are modest in length, but not in ambition. They raise a multitude of issues that we could pursue with profit.

Raymond Williams’ approach to the novel, how it should be analysed, is perfectly in consonance with his approaches to drama, to poetry and to culture in general. That is to say, his focus of interest is on cultural formations, the role of social factors and the determinative influence of history. The same kind of approach that was evident in Drama from Ibsen to Eliot and The Country and the City finds meaningful expression in his two books dealing with fiction.

This book examines the novels of Charles Dickens, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad and D.H. Lawrence in that order. What Williams has done is to locate these novels in the larger social discourse at the time. At the beginning of the book he makes the following statement.

‘The changes in society had been very long in the making; the industrial revolution, the struggle for democracy, the growth of cities and towns. But these also, in the 1840s, reached a point of consciousness which was in its turn decisive. The twelve years from Dickens; first novel to his radically innovation Dombey and Son were also years of crisis of Chartism. He first industrial civilisation in the history of the world had come to a critical and defining stage. By the end of the 1840sthe English were the first predominantly urban people n the long history of human societies.

The institutions of an urban culture, from music-halls and popular Sunday newspapers to public parks, museums and libraries, were all decisively established in these years….it is then not surprising that in just this decade a particular kind of literature - already known and widely read, but still not very highly regarded- should come to take on new life, a generation of writers, in very different ways, found the common form that mattered, in response to new and varied but still common experience.’

A central concept that guides the English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence is that of the knowable community. He proposed this in opposition to the heavy focus on individual experience, sexual or moral, that marked the criticism at the time. It was his judgment that this was the central issue that activated English novelists during this period. These novels seek to focus on the inevitable loss of community that took place owing to a variety of factors- the attempt to find a sense of community, the displeasure with urban values became central topics of fictional analysis. In exploring the concept of knowable community, Raymond Williams highlights the work of Thomas Hardy in fascinating ways.

It is interesting to note that Hardy had been ignored by such influential critics as Leavis in his definitive work The Great Tradition. Williams sees Hardy as occupying ‘that border country so many of us have been living in; between custom and education, between work and ideas, between love of place and an experience of change.’ One reason for the cogency of Williams’ analysis of hardy - and I believe that his comments on Hardy are among the most insightful- is that Williams’ sees in Hardy’s work some of the very predicaments and dilemmas that he had to confront.

The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence is in many ways an answer to Leavis’ The Great Tradition. Williams’ clearly emphasizes where and how he differs from Leavis. It can be argued with a large measure of justification that Williams; book is almost a symmetrical inversion of Leavis’ work. Both books begin with the novels of Jane Austen. Although she does not get a chapter to herself in either book, she becomes a kind of useful point of departure.

There are, to be sure, significant differences. While Leavis had written Dickens out of his great tradition, Williams places him securely in the evolving tradition of British fiction. They both place great emphasis on Geroge Eliot as a supremely important novelist. However, while Leavis focuses on later works such as Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, Williams seems to value Adam Bede and the earlier works more.

From their Leavis moves on to Henry James and skips Thomas Hardy; on the other hand, Raymond Williams proceeds to an analysis of Hardy and downplays James. Both writers consider Lawrence to be a significant novelist; Leavis sees Women in Love as his most successful novel, while Williams accords that position to Sons and Lovers; .Hence, it can be plausibly argued that what Williams is seeking to do is to erase the map of English fiction that Leavis has drawn and create a new one for us. It is almost as if Williams is driven by a polemical impulse.

As I stated earlier, Raymond Williams is keen to demonstrate the importance of Thomas Hardy in the evolution of English fiction. The way he situated his characters in a changing social landscape and sought to make unseen and unanticipated connections among characters and social forces is extremely illuminating. Those of us interested in the imaginative ways in which one can analyse a novel would benefit greatly from Williams approach to Hardy.

Commenting on Hardy’s fiction he makes the following remark.’ Actually, the very complicated feelings and ideas in hardy’s novels, including the complicated feelings and ideas about country life and people, belong very much, I think, in a continuing world. He writes more consistently and more deeply than any of our novelists about something that is still very close to us wherever we may be living; something that can be put, in abstraction, as the problem of the relation between customary and educated life; between customary and educated feeling and thought.’

Observation

Raymond Williams goes on to make the observation that although the Hardy country is Wessex, primarily Dorset, the real Hardy country is that border country - the topography that many of us inhabit. This border country is situated in between custom and education, work and ideas, love of place and experience of change. Williams underlines the contemporary relevance of this mode of feeling by pointing out how it has a special importance to a particular generation who has entered the university from ordinary families and have to find out for themselves the true meaning of that experience.

What this does is to instigate us to discover in the new a number of unanticipated crises, struggles between desire and possibility. When we consider the Sinhala novel, for example the trilogy by Martin Wickramasinghe or the chain of nine novels by Gunadasa Amarsekera we see the relevance and significance of Williams’ observations on Hardy.

Raymond Williams is very clear on the importance of Hardy’s novels as illuminative social texts. ‘In this characteristic world, rooted and mobile, familiar yet newly conscious and self-conscious, the figure if hardy stands like a landmark. It is not from an old rural world or from a remote region that hardy now speaks to us; but from the heart of a still active experience, of familiar and the changing, which we can know as an idea but which is important finally in what seem the personal pressures - the making and failing of relationships, the crises of physical and mental personality - which Hardy as a novelist at once describes and enacts.’

Similarly, Williams underlines the importance of Charles Dickens as a novelist. Many critics have dismissed him as an entertainer (there is, of course, nothing wrong inn being entertaining). F.R. Leavis initially did not include Dickens in his preferred great tradition. However, Williams sees things in a different light. Commenting on dickens novels, Williams makes the following astute observation.’ And this is another aspect of Dickens; originality. He is able to dramatise those social institutions and consequences which are not accessible to ordinary physical observation. He takes them and presents them as if they were persons or natural phenomena. Sometimes are the black cloud or as the fog through which people are groping and looking for each other. Sometimes as the circumlocution office, or bleeding hear yard, where a way of life takes in a physical shape.’ Raymond Williams, it seems to me, is drawing our attention to a very significant facet of Dickens’ fiction.

Complexity

Williams’ demonstrates the complexity of Dickens’ art - an aspect often ignored my many literary critics - by analyzing closely the words on the page and making useful comments on them. For example, let us consider this passage from Dickens Little Dorrit. ‘The debilitated old house in the city, wrapped in its mantle of soot, and leaning heavily on the crutches that had partaken of its decay and worn out with it, never knew a healthy or a cheerful interval, let what would betide. You should alike find rain, hail, frost and thaw lingering in the dismal enclosure, when they had vanished from other places. and as to snow, you should see it for weeks, long after it had changed from yellow to black, slowly weeping away its grimy life. The place had no other adherents ….’

This passage is interesting for the way in which it captures the interplay between objects and people, the way the houses and the life being lived in them become indistinguishable. As Williams asserts, ‘This method is very remarkable. It has its basis, of course, in certain properties of language; perceptions of relations between persons and things.’ This observation, I wish to argue, is important in that focuses on the evocative language and rhetoric of Dickens that carry symbolic and allegorical valences.

The art of Dickens is marked by a powerful desire to see complexly and show cogently. What we see here is the way the city emerges as a social fact and a human landscape. What passages such as these dramatise is what Williams terms the structure of feeling. This is the kind of insightful reading that we should pursue in our own investigations into, and evaluations of, novels written in Sri Lanka.

Social system

One of the points that Raymond Williams makes is that Charles Dickens has the ability to totalise the represented social system as a whole in a manner that few other writers are capable of, and he accomplishes this through sensitive and dexterous deployment of metaphor and symbol. This is, of course, not to suggest that Dickens did not have his weaknesses and blind spots.

For example, it his contention that if Dickens had a more comprehensive and many-sided vision of the society in England, with its diverse and manifold sites if resistance to the power of capitalism, he would have been able to fashion a more aesthetically compelling embodiment of the constellation of values he labored to represent. For example, in commenting on Dickens novel Hard Times, Williams said that ‘it is exactly what I felt was wrong with hard times. You have the classic contradiction inside the txt - the novel begins with a description of a town where all the people are exactly like each other, and then inevitably, because of the kind of novelist Dickens is, it goes on to show people who are totally unlike each other, moving in different directions and against each other. But the initial statement of their work is never revised.’

Raymond Williams’ approach to the novels of Hardy and Dickens, among others, should embolden us to examine our own novelistic creations in Sri Lanka as complex social texts traversed by contradictory cultural and historical forces. So far, I have focused on Williams book The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence. Similarly, his book ‘ Orwell’ deserves careful consideration. It is a short book, 128 pages in length; however, it displays the characteristic analytic strengths of Williams when it comes to the assessment of fiction. In Orwell, Williams deals with all aspects of his chosen object of analysis - his politics, his investments in writing, his social vision and his fiction.

Commenting on Orwell’s novels and non-fiction writings, Williams says that it is easy to assert that Down and out in Paris and London is better than A Clergyman’s Daughter; however, he believes that it ought not to be reduced to the acceptable generalisation that he is a better observer than a novelist. He suggests that the real problem lies deeper - in the conception of the novel endorsed by the writer.

Unique

Raymond William claims that, ‘what is unique about the novel in Orwell’s work is that he creates an entire social and physical milieu within which the social criticism and the personal break are defined elements. In his later novels, the essential form is shaped by what became separated elements; the personal break, and social criticism through it, in the novels of the thirties; the social criticism, with the personal break inside it, in Nineteen Eighty-Four.’ Here we see Williams going beyond standard formalistic analysis ad enforcing a vital conjunction between form and social experience in the novel.

It is Williams’ belief that in A Clergyman’s Daughter, one observes a close alliance between direct observation and fiction. However, in his subsequent novels, he seems to have endorsed the division between documentary and fiction. Then he goes on to make the very valuable observation that a possible reshaping of the novel was avoided, or proved to be too hard; this is, of course, not due to the fact tha he was not a real novelist - he clearly was; this is rather due to the fact that ‘a problem of consciousness….emerged as a problem of form.’ Raymond Williams’ commentaries contained in these two books, then, contain many useful insights for us in Sri Lanka who are interested in fictional analysis.

As I read his critical works on fiction, two central concepts strike me as being extremely important and pivotal to his analyses. The first is that of the knowable community, which I have alluded to in my earlier columns on Williams. The second is that of realism which figures so prominently in his literary commentaries . Both these concepts, I contend, have a deep relevance for, say, assessing Sinhala fiction.

Let us first consider the concept of the knowable community. This is the master concept that guides the analyses in the English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence. This is a concept that has both social-historical and literary-textual implications. Williams categorically states that those novels which can attain an effective range of social experience and adequately cogent on immediate relations contain a knowable community. He takes Thomas Hardy as a powerful example. Very often hardy is unfairly characterised as a regional novelist; Williams challenges this widespread viewpoint.

A regional novel is one which is unable or unwilling to incorporate and dramatise the conflicts of the larger society of which it is a part. There may be novels which conform to this pattern but not Hardy. His works of fiction manifest major crises of nineteenth century England. As Williams says, ‘he could reach a very wide range social experience through a series of relations which were wholly knowable to him in manifest ways, and which he could render concrete in his fiction.’.This is indeed a cardinal feature of the knowable community that William is striving to promote as an analytical construct.

Raymond Williams characterises a knowable community not as a face to face community but an extended one. It is his belief that the experience of face to face small communities is fragmentary and ruptured, and that a community is knowable through expanded communication. He argues that most novels in some sense can be regarded as knowable communities. It signifies the way novelists seek to dramatise people and their many relationships in knowable and communicable ways.

In other words, the knowable community is a discursive product.

It can be regarded as a discursive product in view of the fact that a novel shapes experience, establishes connections between individuals and wider economic, social, political, cultural forces within history. Literary critics are in the habit of claiming that novels do more than reflect society - they define it. It is through this knowable community, according to Raymond Williams, that this definition takes place.

As I stated earlier, according to Raymond Williams, small and face to face communities do not highlight the power of knowable communities. In his view, the countryside so carefully depicted in this is the whole stance.ane Austen’s novels do not form a knowable community. He observes that, ‘it is outstandingly face to face; its crises, physically and spiritually, are in just these terms; a look, a gesture, a stare, a confrontation; and behind these, all the time, the novelist is watching, observing, physically recording and reflecting.

This is the whole stance; the grammar of her morality. Yet while the community is wholly known, within the essential terms of the novel, it is an actual community very precisely selective.’ It is important to note that this enclosed world of Jane Austen is selectively constituted by class. Peasants who live adjacent to the members of this community do not gain entrance to it. Moreover, while the peasants are shut out, the social and economic forces that shape society hardly find fictional expression.

As a consequence of the fact that the economic, social, and political forces that inflect society are insufficiently represented, Jane Austen fails to fashion a knowable community. On the other hand, a novelist like Charles Dickens is more successful, as argued by Williams, in creating a knowable community because he recognizes the existence of these forces that Jane Austen ignores.

Content

The knowable community, as formulated by Raymond Williams, touches on not only the content of the novel but also the self-positioning of the commentator. This is indeed a point that we can easily ignore or lose sight of. Williams has made clear that a knowable community is defined and given shape not only by the objects which can be knowable but also by the subject-position of the observers or commentators - their ambitions, desires, what they like to know. In other words, the knowable community contains within the dynamics of its formation an objective as well as subjective dimension. The interplay of these two aspects, it seems to me, should constantly be kept within our critical sights.

It is my conviction that this concept of the knowable community can prove to be of great analytical value in examining the strengths of a novel such as Martin Wickremasinghe’s Gamperaliya. For the first time in Sinhala fiction, we see in Gamperaliya the full weight and signifying power of this knowable community made manifest. In this novel, we observe how the countryside is subject to a process of transformation, an unsettling but inevitable modernisation, and the author is anxious to suggest the various economic, social and cultural forces that are facilitating this social transformation. After all, we need to remind ourselves, of the fact that the title of the novel clearly directs our attention precisely to this change. The external and internal factors that enabled this social change are depicted through the interplay of character; the linguistic registers and the rhetoric employed by the author serve to underscore the significance of the change he is calling attention to. To phrase it differently, Martin Wickremasinghe has succeeded in fashioning the kind of knowable community that Raymond Williams has encircled.

Fraudulent

The importance of the knowable community can be usefully established through a novel like Gunadasa Amarasekera’s Rupantharanaya. It deals with a shallow, fraudulent, and hypocritical character that is a victim of self-delusive grandeur; his meager talents, however, are hardly adequate for achieving his misguided ambitions. Amarasekera represents the predicament of this pitiable man in terms of the knowable community - that is to say, by locating him in the larger social, economic and cultural discourses that engulf him.

He fails to understand the true significance of them but the reader does. The satirical edge of the novel manifests itself here with great effect. A reading of Gunadasa Amarasekera’s novel in terms of the concept of the knowable community enables us to appreciate its deeper layers of social meaning.

The second concept of Raymond Williams that I wish to focus on is realism; it is closely related, in his mind, with the concept of the knowable community. Realism is a common enough term in literary analysis. However, we have to be careful not to interpret it in unduly narrow terms. The desire to represent real problems encountered by real people in the real world should not be glossed as a simplistic mirroring of society; realism is larger than that.

On the other hand, we have to be on our guard against falling into the trap of believing that realism is the aesthetic face of bourgeois ideology. To my mind, this is an unduly restrictive and reductionistic reading of realism promoted by some post-structuralist critics. It is my belief that Williams got it right; he saw the strengths and limitations of realism and the challenges it presents to us, in a sober manner.

It is very important for us to understand the nature of the concept of realism promoted by Williams. He repudiated the dominant theory of realism which held that realism reflects the world and is committed to the direct representation of society. He finds this approach inadequate because it does not pay attention to the significant role of language in shaping and communicating reality. The chosen medium of a novelist is language and realism, he argued, correctly in my judgment that is mediated through language in novels. Although Williams agreed with much of what George Lukacs had to say about realism, he found that Lukacs did not engage sufficiently with the complexities of language as a means of communication.

Structuralists

On the other hand, he also rejected the views of structuralists and others who favored reading language and literature as a passive product of society. As one commentator pointed out, ‘Williams’ realism thus exists as an attempt to rescue realism from those who would valourise it at the expense of other modes of literary representation, as well as from those who would dismiss it as naïve reflectionism. Williams maintained that realism is mediated by language and its own compositional processes and conventions, but that it nevertheless engages reality. Indeed for Williams, it is this realist basis to language and literature that produced a shared reality.’ This is indeed a very perceptive observation and one that should guide our thinking.

It is important to bear in mind the fact that, as I stated earlier, realism, as Williams sees it, is closely linked to the idea of the knowable community. As he has demonstrated ably in his book The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence, that the classical realist novels produced in the nineteenth century displayed a remarkable ability to give expression to a broad gamut of social, economic and class relations, thus paving the way for the construction of a cogent knowable community. This is, of course, not to suggest that he unduly valorised nineteenth century fiction. As opposed to Lukacs, who privileged nineteenth century fiction over twentieth century works, Raymond Williams engaged seriously with modern works as well. His point was that we as novelists and literary critics should confront the realities of modern societies with the idea of the knowable community as a compass to guide us.

While Williams agreed with critics like Roland Barthes who maintained that realism is a form of writing, a convention-led form of expression with its own codes and axioms, he also sought to go beyond them by emphasizing that literature is not only perception but also communication and that it cannot be reduced to a vision of an individual. Williams stated that, ‘but art is more than perception; it is a particular kind of active response, and a part of all human communication. Reality, in our terms, is that which human beings make common, by work or language. Thus, in the very acts of perception and communication, this practical interaction of what is personally seen, interprets and organise an what can be socially recognised, known and formed is richly and subtly manifested.’

There is, then, a close and intimate relationship between realism and the knowable community as Raymond Williams formulates these concepts. Both of these concepts can be pressed into service profitably by us in our evaluations of novels written in Sinhala, Tamil and English. Sri Lankan literary commentators are constantly looking for interesting and productive pathways of inquiry into literary texts.

The writings of Raymond Williams can prove to be of inestimable value in this regard. Interestingly, the interpretation of realism offered by Gunadasa Amarasekera in Nosevuna Kadapatha, parallels some of these ideas, although he deploys a different critical lexicon. What I have sought to do in this column, then, is to examine Raymond Williams’ critical approaches to the novel and to see what lessons, we as Sri Lankan readers and writers, can learn from them. Williams, like most other literary critics and theorists, had his share of faults, deficiencies and prejudices. I shall discuss these in a later column as they relate to, and highlight some of our own preoccupations in Sri Lanka.

(To be continued)