Culture and Materialism. Raymond Williams
This is what I mean when I say that art is one of the primary human activities, and that it can succeed in articulating not just the imposed or constitutive social or intellectual system, but at once this and an experience of it, its lived consequence, in ways very close to many other kinds of active response, in new social activity and in what we know as personal life, but of course often more accessibly, just because it is specifically formed and because when it is made it is in its own way complete, even autonomous, and being the kind of work it is can be transmitted and communicated beyond its original situation and circumstances.
Now if this is so, it is easy to see why we must reject those versions of consciousness which relate it directly, or with mere lags and complications, to a determining base. The stress on an active consciousness made by Lukács and Goldmann gives us a real way beyond that. And it might be possible to say that the relation I have tried to describe—between formal consciousness and new creative practice—might be better, more precisely, described in their terms: actual consciousness and possible consciousness. Indeed I hope it may be so, but I see one major difficulty. This relation, though subtle, is still in some ways static. Possible consciousness is the objective limit that can be reached by a class before it turns into another class, or is replaced. But I think this leads, rather evidently, to a kind of macro-history: in many ways adequate but in relation to actual literature, with its continuity of change, often too large in its categories to come very close, except at certain significant points when there is a radical and fundamental moment of replacement of one class by another. As I read Goldmann, I find him very conscious of just this difficulty, but then I am not sure that it is accidental that he is much more convincing on Racine and Pascal, at a point of evident crisis between a feudal and a bourgeois world, than he is on the nineteenth- and indeed twentieth-century novel, where apparently small but no less significant changes within a bourgeois society have to be given what can be called micro-structural analysis. To say, following Lukács, that the novel is the form in which, in a degraded society, an individual tries and fails to surpass an objectively limited society and destiny—the novel, that is to say, of the problematic hero—is at once illuminating and partial; indeed, the evidence presented for it is so extremely selective that we are almost at once on our guard. No English novels are considered at all: the other side of that enclosure of which we are usually, on our side of the channel, so conscious. But while one can offer, willingly, Great Expectations, Born in Exile, Jude the Obscure, and in a more complicated but still relevant way Middlemarch, one is left to face a different phenomenon in, for example, Little Dorrit. And I think this is not only an argument about particular cases. The most exciting experience for me, in reading Lukács and Goldmann, was the stress on forms. I had become convinced in my own work that the most penetrating analysis would always be of forms, specifically literary forms, where changes of viewpoint, changes of known and knowable relationships, changes of possible and actual resolutions, could be directly demonstrated, as forms of literary organization, and then, just because they involved more than individual solutions, could be reasonably related to a real social history, itself considered analytically in terms of basic relationships and failures and limits of relationship. This is what I attempted, for example, in Modern Tragedy, and I then have to say that I have since learned a good deal, theoretically, from the developed sociology of Lukács and Goldmann and others, in just this respect. But much of the necessary analysis of forms seems to me barely to have begun, and this is not only, I think, a matter of time for development.
Perhaps I can put the reason most sharply by saying that form, in Lukács and Goldmann, translates too often as genre or as kind; that we stay, too often, within a received academic and ultimately idealist tradition in which ‘epic’ and ‘drama’, ‘novel’ and ‘tragedy’, have inherent and permanent properties, from which the analysis begins and to which selected examples are related. I am very willing to agree that certain general correlations of this kind, between a form and a world-view, can be shown. But we have then to face the fact, above all in the last hundred years, that tragedy and the novel, for example, exist, inextricably, within the same culture, and are used by identical or very similar social groups. Or the fact that within modern tragedy, and even more within the novel, there are radically significant changes of form in which many of the changes in literature and society—changes in the pace of a life, an experience, rather than of a whole historical epoch—can be quite directly apprehended. Certainly this is recognized in practice. Goldmann has an interesting contrast between the traditional bourgeois novel and the new novel of Sarraute or Robbe-Grillet, which he relates to a more completely reified world. Lukács makes similar distinctions, from Balzac through Mann and Kafka to Solzhenitsyn. But the full theoretical issue, of what is meant by form, is still in my view confused, and perhaps especially by the fact that there is this undiscarded ballast of form in a more abstract, more supra-historical sense. Thus even a Goldmann can say, as if he were an ordinary idealist and academic critic, that Sophocles is the only one of the Greek dramatists who can be called tragic ‘in the now accepted sense of the word’. The prepotence of inherited categories is then striking and saddening.
Past Victories, Present Penalties
But then limitations of this kind are organically related to the strengths of this alternative tradition. The habitual and as it were inevitable relation of structure to doctrine, or the application of formal categories, is a characteristic of the developed philosophical position which in most other respects is a source of real strength. That is why it is so important, now, to go beyond the kind of argument which developed in English in the 1930s, for while particular refutations of this or that reading, this or that method, have an immediate significance, in our whole situation they can hide the fact that behind our local English practicalities is a set of unexamined general ideas, which then suddenly materialize on quite another plane as a sort of social theory: from the critical minority to minority culture and minority education; or from the richness of past literature to a use of the past against the present, as if the past, and never the future, the sense of a future, were the only source of values. The local victory of the thirties was bought at a price we have all since paid: the most active relations between literary and social studies, and the most fundamental and continuing relations between literature and real societies, including present society, have in effect been pushed away from attention, because in theory and in practice any critical examination of them would disturb, often radically, our existing social relations and the division of interests and specialisms which both expresses and protects them.
I want to end by emphasizing two concepts used by Goldmann, which we ought to try to clarify, theoretically, and which we ought to be trying, collaboratively, to test in practice. The first is the idea of the ‘collective subject’: obviously a difficult idea, but one of great potential importance. Literary studies in fact use a related idea again and again. We not only refer, confidently, to ‘the Jacobean dramatists’ ‘the Romantic poets’ and ‘the early Victorian novelists’, but also we often use these descriptions in a quite singular sense, to indicate a way of looking at the world, a literary method, a particular use of language, and so on. In practice we are often concerned with breaking down these generalizations, and that is right: to know the difference between Jonson and Webster, or Blake and Coleridge, or Dickens and Emily Brontë, is in that real sense necessary. Yet beyond this we do come to see certain real communities, when we have taken all the individual differences into account. To see only the differences between Blake and Coleridge, but not also the differences between a Romantic poem and a Jacobean play and an early Victorian novel, is to be quite wilfully limited and indeed quite unpractical. And then to be able to give an account of this precise community, a community of form which is also a specific general way of seeing other people and nature, is to approach the problem of social groups in a quite new way. For it is no longer the reduction of individuals to a group, by some process of averaging; it is a way of seeing a group in and through individual differences: that specificity of individuals, and of their individual creations, which does not deny but is the necessary way of affirming their real social identities, in language, in conventions, in certain characteristic situations, experiences, interpretations, ideas. Indeed the importance for social studies may well be this: that we can find ways of describing significant groups which include, in a fundamental way, those personal realities which will otherwise be relegated to a quite separate area. To have a sociology concerned only with abstract groups,