Raymond Williams through Sri Lankan eyes

It is evident that the country and the city raises several important questions related to literature, social change, politics and history. In an interview Raymond Williams remarked that, ‘the country and the city had a very precise starting point; the much discussed problem of how to read the English country-house poems. Its aim was a transvaluation of the literary critical questions that were put to them.

Now the irony was that those literary questions carried with them unusually explicit socio-political assumptions. That is why country-house poetry was so attractive to me as a point of entry. This was a very antagonistic book that was conceived like modern tragedy – as a pointed response to a particular orthodoxy.’ These remarks by Williams give us a clear idea of his intentions and plan of action in composing this book.

Complexity

The country and the city manifests an increasing awareness of the complexity of literary textuality on the part of Williams. In his earlier works such as Reading and Criticism, Culture and Society, the English novel, he saw literature as a record of, a response to, an expression of life and human experience. However, in the country and the city, Raymond Williams promotes the idea that literary texts are sites of production of cultural meaning.

This is somewhat different from the earlier notion of a literary text being a record of experience. As Williams himself admitted this book did not emphasize the idea of literary texts as records; his intention was to enforce the point that literary texts were important representations of history.

Social reality

This is, of course, not to suggest that Raymond Williams has given us a completely satisfactory answer to the question how does the perceived discrepant between social reality and its reconfiguration as literary works influence the artistic assessments of texts. As one interviewer rightly asked Williams, ‘how great a discrepancy can there be between the vision of a certain rural or urban reality in a poem or novel, and the actual historical facts, for the literary artifacts still to be of real aesthetic value/ if the distance is very wide, as in the case of Marvell’s poem, wherein does this value reside?’This is indeed a question well worth pondering.

I have dwelt at length on the criticism of poetry contained in The country and the city. That is primarily because I personally found them to be the most stimulating. However, it is important to recognise that there are very perceptive comments on fiction as well in this book. For example his observations on Charles Dickens and his vision of London and how it inflects his narrative discourse merits close analysis.

For example, commenting on Dickens, Williams offers the following analysis. ‘Dickens ultimate vision of London is then not to be illustrated by topography or local instance. It lies in the form of his novels; in their kind of narrative, in their method of characterisation, in their genius for typification; it does not matter which way we put it; the experience of the city is the fictional method; or the fictional method is the experience of the city. What matters is that the vision – no single vision either, but a continual dramatisation – is the form of writing.’

The country and the city clearly demonstrates the need to engage in deep and sustained readings of literary texts. What Williams is stressing is that country -house poems should not be red as simple records if experience or representations of a literary convention; they should be located in their respective social and historical contexts and examined as sites of production of cultural meaning.

This is what Raymond Williams has undertaken in The country and the city. Many literary critics have commented favorably on his project. For example, Edward Said says the following regarding The country and the city.

‘The extent to which these ideas are actually invested in geographical distinctions between real places is the subject of Raymond Williams’ richest book, The country and the city.

His arguments concerning the interplays between rural and urban places in England admits of the most extraordinary transformations – from the pastoral populism of Langland, through Ben Jonson’s country-house poems and the novels of Dickens; London, right up to visions of the metropolis in the twentieth-century literature. Mainly, of course, the book is about how English culture has dealt with land, its possession, imagination and organisation.’

From our point of view, one of the most important features of The country and the city is the way in which literary conventions and historical relations interact.

As he said in response to an interviewers question,’ It (my project) was to try to show simultaneously the literary convention and the historical relations to which they were a response – to see together the means of production and the conditions of the means of production.

For the conditions of the means of production are quite crucial t any understanding of the means of production themselves.’

To be continued