Raymond Williams through Sri Lankan eyes

There are the positive and negative aspects to this inclination. It can be plausibly argued that in his writings on novels, plays and poems he is more concerned with their value as signifying practices that capture the dynamics of a historical moment rather than focus on the intrinsic merits of these works by calling attention to aesthetic standards, formal breakthroughs, innovations in style; as Stanely Aronowitz accurately points out, ‘he reads poetry and novels in a way that is profoundly at variance with any accepted critical methodology……his object is whether the novel or poem provides knowledge of what he calls the structure of feeling of a specific historical moment, and even more concretely of a given class, not whether it is a source of pleasure.’

There are two sides to this issue. On the one hand, Raymond Williams’ attempt to examine literary works as social texts has the merit of acting as a counterweight to the excesses of New Criticism which strained to shut out historical and social forces from the evaluation of literary texts. On the other hand, too great an emphasis on socialitiy can have the adverse effect of diminishing the artistic significance of literary works. When we seek to draw on the critical writings of Raymond Williams we need to balance these contending forces in our exegetical efforts. In his more successful studies such as The Country and the City, we see how fiction and poetry can become the raw materials on the basis of which we can reconstruct the complex and manifold ways in which historical change are interpretively represented.

Williams’ approach to literature and society has much to offer us as we seek to enrich our own literary creations and literary culture in Sri Lanka; at the same time, we also need to be mindful of his limitations.

Fifth, Williams’ attitude to modern cultural theory deserves careful exploration. Although he found the writings of structuralists, Lukacs, Gramsci, Bakhtin etc. intermittently interesting, he never engaged deeply what is now referred to as modern Cultural Theory – the works of Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Bourdieu etc. Once gain, there is the good side and the bad side to this desire of his. On the one hand, the recent obsession with theory has resulted in the diminution of disciplines such as literary studies and cultural studies, because theory rather than being a means to an end becomes the end itself with unhappy consequences. On the other hand, to keep modern theory at arms length is to deprive ourselves the contact with some of the more invigorating currents if contemporary thought.

One consequence of not engaging deeply with contemporary cultural theory is that Williams has been unable to theorise adequately the constitutive role of language in cultural meaning. Clearly, he recognises the importance of language as a social practice, but it seems to me that he does not go far enough in exploring its constitutive nature in the way that Derrida or Lacan or Foucaut did.

This is related to his understanding of the concepts of subject and consciousness. Post-structuralists and post-modernists believe that the subject is a product of language. Drawing on the formulation of such innovative thinkers as Martin Heidegger they advanced this view. While William recognised the importance of language as a vital social practice, he did not go as far as the post-structuralists were willing to go. Similarly, post-structuralists and post-modernists privileged language at the expense of human consciousness. Once again Raymond Williams did not subscribe to this mode of thinking.

To be continued