Politics and Letters

Raymond Williams

Description

The celebrated literary critic Raymond Williams, in his own words
Raymond Williams made a central contribution to the intellectual culture of the Left in the English-speaking world. He was also one of the key figures in the foundation of cultural studies in Britain, which turned critical skills honed on textual analysis to the examination of structures and forms of resistance apparent in everyday life. Politics and Letters is a volume of interviews with Williams, conducted by New Left Review, designed to bring into clear focus the major theoretical and political issues posed by his work. Introduced by writer Geoff Dyer, Politics and Letters ranges across Williams's biographical development, the evolution of his cultural theory and literary criticism, his work on dramatic forms and his fiction, and an exploration of British and international politics.

Sujets

• Critical Theory
• Movements
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Biography
• Cultural studies

Informations

• Publié par: Verso
• Date de parution: 03 mars 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781784780166
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

This paperback edition, with a new introduction, first published by Verso 2015 First published by New Left Books 1979 © Raymond Williams 1979, 1981, 2015 Introduction © Geoff Dyer 2015
All rights reserved The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
www.versobooks.com
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-015-9 (PB) eISBN-13: 978-1-78478-017-3 (US) eISBN-13: 978-1-78478-016-6 (UK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
v3.1
Contents

Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction – Geoff Dyer
Foreword – NLR
Raymond Williams – Dates
References
I. Biography
1. Boyhood
2. Cambridge
3. War
4. Cambridge Again
5. Politics and Letters
6. Adult Education
7. The Fifties
II. Culture
1. Culture and Society
2. The Long Revolution
3. Keywords
III. Drama
1. Drama from Ibsen to Eliot
2. Brecht and Beyond
IV. Literature
1. Reading and Criticism
2. The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence
3. The Welsh Trilogy; The Volunteers
4. The Country and the City
5. Marxism and Literature
V. Politics
1. Britain 1956–78
2. Orwell
3. The Russian Revolution
4. Two Roads to Change
Introduction
‘I come from Pandy …’ The first words spoken by Raymond Williams in this book may not have quite the rolling loquacity of the opening lines of Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March – ‘I am an American, Chicago born …’ – but in their brisk way they bespeak a similar confidence. Bellow’s narrator immediately situates his experience in the heart of America; Williams announced one of his main concerns in the title of his first novel, Border Country . Borders – how they are constructed and recognized, how they impede and are crossed – are central to his thought. In contrast to March’s unequivocal belief – ‘I am an American’ – Williams, whose work concentrated on the English literary and cultural tradition, came to identify himself as ‘a Welsh European’, emphasizing what lay either side of a presumed centre, both locally and within a larger international context.
‘It happened that in a predominantly urban and industrial Britain I was born in a remote village, in a very old settled countryside, on the border between England and Wales.’ This is the account Williams gives of his origins in The Country and the City , 1 the simple facts of the matter beginning to unfurl and expand in the recognizable style of his analytical writing: an authority that draws power from – rather than being hindered by – a suggested hesitancy; the unhurried accumulation of material and argument; a continual elaboration and deepening of meaning. Stylistically this is the opposite of the persuasive oratory of Aneurin Bevan (‘not a style for serious argument’ [ this page ]) that Williams had been hearing ‘since about the age of two’, or of the plain-speaking that he became suspicious of in Orwell: ‘the plain man who bumps into experience in an unmediated way’ ( this page ). While Williams was proudly conscious of the convolutions of his own method and mode – ‘all my usual famous qualifying and complicating, my insistence on depths and ambiguities’ – a former student, Terry Eagleton, remembers his lecturing style as that of ‘somebody who was talking in a human voice’. 2 Eagleton was struck, also, by the way that although Williams’s background might, by Cambridge standards, have been regarded as humble, it was also sufficiently ‘privileged’ to give him ‘a sort of stability, a rootedness and self-assurance, and almost magisterial authority’. 3 It gave him the confidence, while still an undergraduate – albeit an undergraduate who had served in the war – to stand up and insist, after a talk in which L. C. Knights claimed that a corrupt and mechanical civilization could no longer understand neighbourliness, that he knew ‘perfectly well, from Wales, what neighbour meant’ ( this page ).
Confidence counts for little unless it is allied with determination. Combined with an Orwellian sense ‘of the enormous injustice’ 4 of the world, Williams had the resources to develop his early critical and theoretical project – one that stressed the importance of shared experience and common meanings – in comparative isolation. The single-mindedness of the endeavour was matched by its scale. In the process of becoming articulate in the language of a new and expansive kind of cultural history he also, in Raphael Samuel’s words, ‘constructed a conceptual vocabulary of his own’. 5 The vocabulary was more than conceptual; it was also the cerebral expression of a temperament shaped by a particular geography and history. In Border Country Harry Price, in discussion with Morgan Rosser, is ‘waiting for terms he could feel’. 6 You could almost say he is waiting for the author to coin his most famous term, ‘structure of feeling’. Going further back, to Wordsworth in ‘Residence at Cambridge’, Williams’s thought, even at its most theoretical, ‘is linked … with some feeling’. Where Williams came from was inextricably linked with what he came to say.
If Orwell’s sense of the injustice of the world was fed by a disposition to dwell on its misery, then the ‘privileged’ background of the signalman’s son over that of the old Etonian made the idea of defeat almost entirely alien. It also meant, according to his critics, that the political positions of his later years, with Thatcherism in full swing and the miners having suffered a catastrophic defeat, were nostalgic, even sentimental. Either way, the key thing is that his writing always carried an enormous freight of autobiography. He was explicit about this in a piece included in the posthumous collection Resources of Hope : ‘I learned the reality of hegemony, I learned the saturating power of the structures of feeling of a given society, as much from my own mind and my own experience as from observing the lives of others. All through our lives, if we make the effort, we uncover layers of this kind of alien formation in ourselves, and deep in ourselves.’ 7
This double combination – complexity of thought and clarity of expression, with a depth and intensity of personal feeling – made Williams a commanding and inspirational figure for the generation of students who came of age in 1968 and looked to him for political and moral as well as intellectual guidance. In some cases former students shared platforms with him, or went on – like Eagleton – to become colleagues or friends. A representative of the next generation (ten in 1968), I set eyes on him precisely twice.
The first time was when he came to give a lecture at Oxford, where I was an undergraduate, in about 1978 or ’79. Our tutor encouraged us to go, so we went. I had no idea who Williams was or what he was droning on about. Then, in the mid-1980s, I went to see him in conversation with Michael Ignatieff at the ICA. I’m guessing that the occasion was the publication of his novel Loyalties – though if it was, then how come I didn’t get my copy signed? And even if it wasn’t, why didn’t I ask him to sign my copy of Politics and Letters (bought in Collets on the Tottenham Court Road, on 30 March 1983)? I can only assume I was too intimidated because by then the old bloke who’d waffled on at Oxford had entirely reshaped my sense of life and literature and the way they were related. The idea of ‘lived experience’ may have been part of the Leavisite vocabulary but whereas I had read the words in Leavis I experienced them in Williams. Before that, in a way that now seems hard to credit, I had no understanding of the social process I’d lived through even though it was, by then, a well-documented one: the working-class boy who keeps passing exams – exams that take him first to grammar school, then to an Oxbridge college – and discovers only in retrospect that there was more to all this than exams, or even education. It’s entirely appropriate that Culture and Society – a new way of considering authors with whom I was already familiar – played a crucial part in this discovery. All the expected symptoms of the transformative reading experience were in evidence: the feeling of being addressed personally, of one’s life making a sense that should have been apparent all along while being conscious, also, that the revelation was happening at just the right time. This was all the more acute because – and my gratitude on this score is boundless – it occurred independently, after university, not as part of some kind of assigned coursework. At the risk of placing more emphasis on the letters than the politics, I discovered and loved Williams in the way that, and at the same time as, friends were discovering and loving novelists such as Bellow.
And it happened in tandem with my discovery of another writer, John Berger. The Country and the City was published in 1973 and made into a film six years later by Mike Dibb. In