Views Beyond the Border Country

Raymond Williams and Cultural Politics

Dennis Dworkin, Leslie Roman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138158429
• eBook ISBN: 9781136637926
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

This collection examines the influence of Raymond Williams on the work of radical intellectuals. It especially looks at the limitation of Williams' political vision and commitment.

Part I

Culture Is Ordinary

1

Autobiography and the “Structure of Feeling” in Border Country

Laura Di Michele

Border Country (1960) is Williams’s first autobiographical novel, which presents us his fictional self—Matthew Price—as a character moving between two very different worlds and pressed by the difficulty of that complicated situation to analyze the very significance of his own life.¹ It draws upon his boyhood and adolescence in Wales and upon his remembrances of the General Strike of 1926 as it is recalled time and again in the novel through the voices and recollections of his father, Harry Price, and his friend, Morgan Rosser.

The novel is deeply imbued with the author’s feelings of longing for the ideal Welsh community life of Glynmawr and with the protagonist’s anger at having left it to go to study at Cambridge University. Border Country is an autobiographical novel for many reasons. It is inspired by Williams’s life in the time of his childhood; and it is a kind of continuation of the writer’s ideas on “culture and society” as they had already taken shape in his Preface to Film (1954)—where Williams uses the expression “structure of feeling” for the first time in the sense of a general or shared culture²—and in Culture and Society (1958), wherein Williams discovers, so to say, a “culture and society” tradition which is explored by him through a cultural analysis that attends “to the experience that is otherwise recorded: in institutions, manners, customs, family memories.”³ The novel can be also perceived as an anticipation and, in fact, an extended critical reflection, in narrative form, of what Williams was to theorize in his fascinating book on The Long Revolution (1961).

It is in this more general and complex sense that Border Country may be envisaged as a work which mirrors Williams’s whole way of life, and, at the same time, comments upon it. From this point of view, Border Country is a novel of self-exploration; a representation of the working-class movement observed from a Marxist angle; a revaluation of the “organic” rural community in the tradition of Hardy and the Welsh novels; it is a form of communication which transgresses generic boundaries, containing within itself different ways of writing, autobiography, cultural analysis and theory, and political assessment. It reveals how a structure of feeling is construed in the interconnections between the characters and the various situations they are in; it also shows how the “structure of feeling” can be used by the narrator to explain a specific sensibility and mentality, to reconstruct the culture of a period.

We know that Raymond Williams wrote Border Country seven times⁴ before he could find a satisfactory narrative form wherein the complex internal processes, divisions, and conflicts which articulate the events and characterize the people who inhabit the small Welsh community of Glynmawr could connect deeply with wider issues and social pressure originating well beyond the borders of that locality and regionality, and yet penetrating far inward into it.

Metaphorically and structurally, this idea of an intense, dynamic relationship is conveyed quite early in the novel, in that episode where Matthew Price—the main character, and surely an emanation of Williams—is described while looking intently at the rail-map on the wall of the compartment of the train that is taking him to Glynmawr from London, back into Wales; back into Wales, from England. Significantly, as the rhythm of the train rattle changes, so does the speed and rhythm of the sentences; and the flow of writing slows down coming nearly to a halt, as if to capture the reader’s attention and fix it on that specific moment, which then opens up a very wide range of interpretations.

Abruptly the rhythm changed, as the wheels crossed the bridge. Matthew got up, and took his case from the rack. As he steadied the case, he looked at the rail-map, with its familiar network of arteries, held in the shape of Wales, and to the east the lines running out and elongating into England.⁵

The railway lines on the map trace the course of different routes that from Wales penetrate into England, crossing the frontiers between the two countries and, in fact, symbolically erasing any kind of border. One consequence of this description is that the train and the railway operate to alert the reader’s attention. The railway—with the little country station, and the signalmen and the stationmaster—already retains a highly significant function in this initial part of the narrative, and it displays a symbolic quality similar to that it will disclose later in the novel when we reach the General Strike section.⁶ Now, at this early stage, and in spite of the fact that the station is located in the periphery of the town, near the asylum “on the outskirts, where the Victorians thought they belonged,”⁷ it occupies a very central, crucial place: it is a kind of magical crucible, where Matthew regains a lost sense of his belonging there and understands the reason why he does not feel any longer a stranger in Glynmawr.

His coming back to Wales becomes much more than “a break from the contained indifference that was still his dominant feeling of London.”⁸ There, in London, “you don’t speak to people,” because “there is plenty of time for that sort of thing on the appointed occasions—in an office, in a seminar, at a party.”⁹ Here, in Glynmawr and Gwenton alike, you speak to everybody; you know everybody; as a matter of fact, the whole community is in direct relationship and in face-to-face contact with you.

Perhaps, the complex meaning of Matthew’s meeting with Morgan Rosser at the country station of Gwenton resides in the fact that the situation is presented through the two contrasting characters of Matthew and Morgan: Matthew seems to stand for the impersonal city attitude to human relationships, while Morgan illustrates the rural community attitude to personal relations. The scene is beautifully described and succeeds completely in communicating the intense feeling of the skepticism and disbelief which inspire the look, the gestures and the whole behavior on Matthew’s part; by contrast, we discover Morgan’s confident approach and natural gestures, and his penetrating stare at Matthew in search of direct confrontation. Not recognizing him, Matthew answers Morgan’s questions curtly and goes on walking head down in the rain. Morgan does not give in and follows him with his car, while Matthew is thoroughly absorbed in his own private thoughts:

He was set, now, on the walk. He wanted to come back like this; slowly, with obvious difficulty, making up his own mind.
“You’ll get wet, you know, Will!” the voice said suddenly. Matthew stopped, and swung around, arrested by the name. Always, when he had lived here, he had been Will, though his registered name was Matthew, and he had used this invariably since he had gone away.¹⁰

From that moment, Matthew begins his voyage back home; from that instant onward, gestures, voices, sounds, colors, movements, landscapes, and friends do cohere in helping Matthew/Will to find out his own way through the difficult journey into Wales. The dialogue between Matthew and Morgan is not easy at first and Matthew feels uncomfortable, while Morgan knowingly tries to help him, though he cannot resist the temptation of being ironically reproachful.

“I’m sorry,” Matthew said. “I should have recognized your voice. Only sometimes we only recognize when we’re expecting it.”
“You thought we’d leave you to walk then?” Morgan said, looking across at him.
“I expect to walk. Nobody knew the time of my train.”
“We got timetables. Get in, Will. Don’t stand in the wet.”¹¹

Gently, but firmly, Matthew is reminded of where he is and that there exists a reality he had almost forgotten. After the first exchange of words, Morgan explains what happened soon after the news of Matthew’s father being seriously ill spread among the neighbors:

“Your mam rung me,” he said, settling again in his seat. “She said Mrs. Hybart rung you a quarter past five, you said you’d get the first train.”¹²

In speech, too, Morgan draws on the oral and local tradition of Glynmawr; effectively, he shows how the spontaneous chain of solidarity among the members of that community got started and how natural the reaction of the neighborhood to the serious illness of Harry Price is. Matthew still tries to react and defends himself: “‘Well, thank you, anyway. I didn’t expect it.’”;¹³ but he has to capitulate quite soon and remember that he is in Wales now.

Morgan did not answer, but with a hard movement sent the car forward. Matthew jerked back, then steadied himself. It is like that, this country; it takes you over as soon as you set foot in it. Yet I was sent for to come at once.¹⁴

Matthew recognizes, so to say, Morgan Rosser and the values of friendship, neighborhood, and, ultimately, of Welshness he incarnates as against those traits of Englishness (indifference, impersonality, and alienation) Matthew noticed at the beginning of the novel.

The meeting at the railway station, then, may be seen as the starting-point of the process of the growth of Matthew’s consciousness, very similar to the painful awakening of the working class’s consciousness which was shaped during the General Strike of 1926. It is in that year—both in the novel and outside of it—that a wider process of the growth of the working-class consciousness of the rural community of Glynmawr and other communities all over Wales developed amid the many contradictory and complex events. On the occasion of the strike, the country station of Gwenton (like many other Welsh country stations) became the nerve-center of the then rising working-class movement and one of the most important ways of communication, together with the telephone, the telegraph, and the radio.¹⁵

Raymond Williams’s reflections on the General Strike will better explain the main function of the railway station as far as the formation of the working-class consciousness is concerned. Williams’s words refer to the situation of the General Strike as it occurred in the Welsh mining valleys and as he knew it from his father; but these words are also perfectly suitable to illustrate the situation in Border Country:

Consider first that specific situation. These men at that country station were industrial workers, trade unionists, in a small group within a primarily rural and agricultural economy. All of them, like my father, still had close connections with that agricultural life. One of them ran a smallholding in addition to his job on the railway. Most of them had relatives in farm work. All of them had gardens and pigs or bees or ponies which were an important part of their work and income. At the same time, by the very fact of the railway, with the trains passing through, from the cities, from the factories, from the ports, from the collieries, and by the fact of the telephone and the telegraph, which was especially important for the signalmen, who through it had a community with other signalmen over a wide social network, talking beyond their work with men they might never actually meet but whom they knew very well through voice and opinion and story, they were part of a modern industrial working class.¹⁶

From this perspective, then, the railway station in Border Country plays a crucial role in highlighting the social significance of the General Strike, both at a personal and local level and at a national level, and also in facing the complex problems of consciousness and solidarity arising and spreading among the men at the country station of Gwenton. Again, Williams’s words will clarify the meanings of the close and difficult relationship between the railway station and the strike. They interlocked very tightly indeed: “There, in that country station, there were real connections—of neighbourhood, of kinship, of trade—with the mining valley.”¹⁷ Again, Williams is referring to the real situation, when his father, the other two signalmen, and the stationmaster working in the old Great Western Railway Box of Pandy in 1926 took a very active part in the strike. They—like the characters in Border Country—suffered from many disappointments and recovered from betrayals, learning with mixed feelings and great difficulty of the social solidarity of the working class. That solidarity seemed to clash with another, larger idea of solidarity: that of a national cohesion and loyalty to their “country” to which they had all been trained and which could, and in fact did, exercise a powerful influence in smoothing away conflicts and obstacles, thus defeating the working-class movement.¹⁸

This mixture of hope and despair, of illusion and defeat is what characterizes the description of the attitudes and feelings of the people who inhabit the rural community of Glynmawr in Border Country at the time of the General Strike; as a matter of fact, the novel centers around the General Strike and the difficult relation between the Welsh working classes and the Trade Union Congress (TUC) in London. The events of 1926 are represented through the recollections of Matthew’s memory, and they are commented upon in the dialogues between Matthew and his father, between Matthew and Morgan Rosser.¹⁹

It is in the intensely “liminal conjuncture of social, cultural, ideological and generational conflicts”²⁰ that the protagonist of Border Country is put to a severe test and succeeds not only—as K. Ryan maintains—“at last emerging, charged with a deeper understanding of his whole personal and social situation and with the renewed political energy and committed will to transform it”;²¹ Matthew is also a figure whose ability, from both a narrative and ideological point of view, consist in coordinating—that is, in connecting and serving as a condensed expression for—the series of ideological and cultural issues that have been important in the cultural life of Glynmawr and in Britain since the late 1920s.

From this perspective, Border Country represents a special type of industrial novel which discusses the ways through which Matthew climbs over the fence which separates him from Will (the Welsh part of his identity). In the process, Matthew/Will painfully achieves the full consciousness of himself and his self-identity, of his efforts to conciliate his Welsh roots and his sense of guilt at having gone off to England, away from Wales and its moral values and ways of life.

It is this deep split in Matthew’s character that the novel tries to explain and overcome through the minute exploration of Matthew’s dissatisfaction with himself and his work as a university lecturer in London, and through the sustained analysis of the difficulties he has both with his father’s moral integrity and with Morgan’s equivocal compromises.²² In Williams’s mind, Matthew/Will [Williams] is a kind of guinea-pig which is being experimented with throughout the novel in the attempt to produce—with the help of a partially autobiographical recollection of the author and the complex construction of the structure of feeling of that specific period in history—a new way of seeing and, also, a new way of writing.

From many points of view, it appears that the story of Matthew Price is the story of Raymond Williams: both were railway signalmen’s sons from a Welsh village; both were professors at the university; both were deeply bound to their country, Wales. Both of them never lose touch in fact with their roots, with their Welsh origin, while at the same time living in England, beyond the border.

In a way, in reading his fiction and his criticism, his interviews, one gets the impression that Williams did always live on the border, in a sort of metaphorical “border country” of his own which allowed him to look deep inside, with great advantage, both at England and at Wales. He could look, as it were, from there and from here simultaneously at his two worlds, which never appeared to him as mere landscapes or places; they were in fact landscapes “with figures,” living worlds and authentic communities, where peopl...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Series Editor's Introduction
• Introduction: The Cultural Politics of Location
• Part I Culture Is Ordinary
• Part II Education from Below?
• Part III Culture's Others: Culture or Cultural Imperialism?
• Notes
• Notes on Contributors
• Index