Politics and Letters

Interviews with New Left Review

Raymond Williams

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781784780159
• eBook ISBN:
  9781784780166
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory

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.

IV
Literature

1. Reading and Criticism

When you wrote Reading and Criticism, were there any substantive divergences between you and the Scrutiny tradition? Looking at the book today the two seem very close, but perhaps there were unexpressed differences?

I was conscious of one difference which may not appear obvious now, but was important then. The normal Scrutiny practice in the criticism of fiction was to judge the quality of a novel or of a novelist by analysing a sample of prose which was assumed to be a representative pattern of the writer’s work as a whole. This method was developed essentially for the analysis of the single short poem. I didn’t think it would work with the novel. Already in preparing for the Tripos I searched for a long time to find paired examples of prose by George Eliot and Lawrence that would demonstrate the point. The cases I chose showed that one pair would make George Eliot a better writer than Lawrence, and the other pair would make Lawrence a better writer than George Eliot. At the time I felt this to be a challenge to the critical orthodoxy. Later, of course, I would have said that the very selection of a passage for close analysis usually presupposed an unexamined judgment of the work from which it was taken, derived from other sources.

Your comparison of the passages from Eliot and Lawrence in Reading and Criticism remains very effective. The practical conclusion you drew from it was the need to analyse, not arbitrarily isolated passages, but complete works. You went on to attempt this with an account of Conrad’s novella The Heart of Darkness. How do you feel about that chapter today?

I think that it was moving in the right direction, although it was again taking a relatively short work. Yet what the chapter shows is the limits of that kind of critical analysis – what it can and cannot do. For ironically Conrad’s text poses quite crucial issues – about imperialism, for example – which concerned me greatly later on, but which I did not discuss at all then, and which in a way could hardly be discussed within a procedure so completely focussed on use of language or thematic organization.

That raises the question of your general theoretical position at the time. Reading and Criticism contains some aggressive restatements of wider Leavisian intellectual tenets. For example, you scout very boldly and deliberately the idea that literary judgments are in any sense subject to, let alone could benefit from, wider theoretical perspectives. You write: ‘ “What are the standards?” This question could be treated theoretically, but a preoccupation with theories of literary judgment and value seems quite frequently to be of little relevance to the actual judgment of literature, however useful it may be to other branches of knowledge. Often, indeed, one has seen a theoretical interest of this kind distract attention from literature.’ Then you go on to say: ‘To the questions, “What are literary values?” and “What are literary standards?” one could only reply “They are literature itself”.’¹ Isn’t that the classic Leavisite argument, at its most circular?

Yes, this was more or less a statement of the orthodox position. However, I wasn’t thinking so much of the theory of literature as of the theory of literary judgment. Actually, although I wouldn’t put it that way now, I still hold much the same opinion of what is called critical theory, which is a very different matter from literary theory or cultural theory. There is a good deal of apparently theoretical discourse about the process of making judgments which as an isolated activity repeats the limitations of the isolated critical practice itself.

At the end of the book, you say that literature is ‘valuable primarily as a record of detailed individual experience which has been coherently stated and valued’.² That seems a very surprising formulation for you to have penned, even at the time?

That’s right – obviously I wouldn’t use those terms now, although I would retain the elements of ‘detail’ and ‘experience’. It is ‘individual’ that destroys the emphasis. The intention of the word was to reject the idea of society as a literary abstraction. In fact, as I later argued, a social system can only work itself out in quite specifically detailed lives and relations; if that is not said, literature is displaced towards forms of discourse which are more appropriate for studying the structure of the system as such. But what I did not see is the deeply ideological presumption of the use of the term individual, in the other direction. I wanted to assert that a social system is also a human society, but the forms of my definition perpetuated the false contrast between the individual and the social.

One final problem posed by Reading and Criticism brings us right up to the present. For a new reader today, the most striking single theme of the book is in some ways your general plea for criticism and the terms in which you make it. For you write: ‘Criticism is widely resented, and the hostility which it provokes is so frequently intense that it is clear there are very large emotional forces involved. It is a little difficult to understand why this should be so.’³ You attack the treatment of criticism as a mere ‘nagging, fault-finding activity’,⁴ designed to take away one’s pleasure, and declare that criticism is actually the legitimate process of evaluation and comparison of standards in mature reading. Thirty years later, you take up the very same terms in your entry on criticism in Keywords and in your discussion in Marxism and Literature, and you now appear to endorse the very equation between criticism and fault-finding which you once denounced. In Keywords you write expressly: ‘The continuing sense of criticism as fault-finding is the most useful linguistic influence against the confidence of the habit [of judgment].’⁵ Did you intend this to be a complete and calculated reversal of your previous position?

Of course, it was very conscious. The change, however, has to be related not just to the development of my work, but also to the evolution of the cultural context. The fact is, and it is a point of general importance, that the early stages of practical critical activity were linked to a corresponding advocacy of certain kinds of contemporary writing. The force of the new criticism in the twenties was directly related to the new poetry and prose of Eliot or Joyce. The literature of the past was of course often invoked by these critics, but they had a sense of connection with literary practice in the present too. When we took up their watchwords immediately after the war, we felt there was a cultural battle to be waged. There were certain figures or styles of writing we wanted to attack; for example Priestley, who precisely responded with the lofty tone of the creative writer – ‘Who are these young Cambridge people nagging away?’ That was what we meant by resentment against criticism at the time. On the other hand we were much less clear about alternative positive directions for contemporary literature. That uncertainty was later succeeded by a general indifference in the fifties, when very little critical practice was in any way alive to even qualified advocacy of any tendency in current writing. The two became quite separate. Leavis was a key influence in this change, rejecting everything after the war but a few surviving writers of the earlier period. The implicit standard by which contemporary work was now judged was simply work of the past. The result was the emergence of the familiar socio-cultural doctrine of past civilization and present chaos, combined with the assertion of the priority of literary criticism over any kind of literary practice. By the early sixties, it was widely assumed that pointing out flaws in contemporary writing was a much more important activity than attempting any such writing itself. At that point, it could more justly be said that fault-finding was being elevated into a central discipline of English studies – something qualitatively different from the original character of practical criticism.

Today, when I see young Marxist anti-realists making very severe points against people of their own generation in television or fiction, rejecting all the premises of the Leavisite critical tradition and proceeding from quite different philosophical bases, but responding to the work of their contemporaries in a remarkably similar spirit of hostility, I cannot help feeling that this culture is rotten with criticism. That is why I now think it is important to restore the sense that unless critical practice is related to some advocacy of literary practice, it is going to be much nearer to what is described in a philistine way as merely nagging and fault-finding, and is inevitably going to provoke the crude reaction that if you think you can write a better novel or make a better television programme – do it, we’ll look at yours too. Of course it’s true that this response is often philistine bad faith, when it comes from people who are busily preventing anyone from doing that kind of work. The recent television festival at Edinburgh was an occasion where these two attitudes were prominently displayed. On the one hand, you got the most complacent kind of ‘creative’ people telling the young critics: ‘Of course, you are just critics, we are the people who make the programmes.’ That sort of reply takes me back to my 1947 position – against it I would write the same defence of criticism again. On the other hand, when I talk with many of the critics who are dismissed for not understanding ‘us creative people’ about the direction of their criticism and its relation to contemporary work, it is impossible not to notice its disconnection from any alternative practice, which should be a condition of its health.

Moreover, you cannot see the institutionalization of criticism as a prolonged educational practice in examination papers or university essays without getting a very strong sense of what it does to a generation that is trained to an assumption of critical privilege. The incident which crystallized my conviction of this was when I read a whole set of examination answers on Johnson’s epitaph to Levet, which describes Levet as ‘officious’, in the second verse, as well as ‘innocent’ and ‘sincere’. ‘Officious’ was often positive in the 18th century, meaning conscientious, whereas now of course it would mean bossy or interfering. One could forgive anyone for not knowing that. But one would expect some openness in the undergraduates who found this problematic word in a list of virtues, some willingness to admit ‘There’s something puzzling here even if I can’t explain it.’ What struck me as extraordinary was the confidence with which the answers either fell back on the technical mystification that came out of practical criticism – that this was an interesting ambiguity: nice and officious at once; or simply declared that Johnson was muddled and confused, unable to make up his mind. That un-selfcritical habit takes hold incredibly easily, and does no good to man or beast. A style develops – the more institutionalized, the more confident it becomes – which is profoundly unproductive. In fact, it is now a crucial ingredient in a certain kind of anti-political cynicism. Critics like this are so attuned to faults that when there is an industrial dispute, they would rather be analysing the militants’ language, which will always include some errors or clichés, than giving a damn what the dispute is about. It’s at that point that the sense of criticism as merely fault-finding has to be articulated, in however qualified a way. That is why I consciously revised my judgment in Keywords – to protect people who need some protection.

Every socialist should have the strongest sympathy with that. Your reply is actually a reminder of one important feature of Reading and Criticism which isn’t easily inferred from a simple comparison of texts, but which should be part of any retrospective judgment of the book: which is that you were trying to transform the social relations of Leavisian-Richardian criticism. Richards’s audience was factually a social elite; Leavis’s audience was programmatically an intellectual elite; whereas your direct audience was in principle working-class, largely taught by committed socialists who saw their educational practice in that light. So in a way the book did actually stand outside the development you have been talking about – the professionalization of the discipline.

That is objectively true. But I don’t think I was so conscious of the difference as that. Then, of course, as I’ve explained, since Adult Education was a mixed movement, there was a sense in which it was only an expansion of an elite. But the presence of working-class students was the other part of the mixture, and taking the practice of criticism to them inevitably led to its modification: the altered social relations necessarily produced an altered social tone.

¹ RC, pp. 25–26.

² RC, p. 107.

³ RC, p. 3.

⁴ RC, p. 2.

⁵ K, p. 76.

2. The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence

We would like to ask you a general question about the role of literary criticism in your own biographical development. There is a very long lapse of time between the publication of Reading and Criticism and The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence. In effect, you were teaching literature for fifteen years in Adult Education and then for another seven or eight years at Cambridge before you published a book directly in English Studies again. That is a striking gap. What was the relationship of literary criticism to the rest of your work in that period? Were you intending to produce a full-scale work in the field or not?

No, I wasn’t particularly interested. When I was teaching in Adult Education, I used to devote up to two-thirds of the course each year to work that I had either never read before, or knew only superficially. So I spent a lot of time simply reading more widely. I didn’t want much to write about it. I was more preoccupied with Culture and Society and The Long Revolution. From somewhere in the early 1950s I ceased to see work in criticism as the sort of book I wanted to produce. I didn’t keep up, for example, with what they call ‘the literature’. When I came back to Cambridge, I was quite out of touch; I wasn’t a professional literary scholar. I had to read all the publications on the major authors which had appeared since I was a student, to bring myself up to date. Even on authors I had been constantly thinking about, like Dickens, I hadn’t read those sorts of book, let alone the articles.

When I got back into the academic atmosphere, it was assumed as a matter of course that criticism is what you would be doing. ‘What are you working on?’ people would say. I would answer vaguely, ‘I don’t know, on Godwin or Herrick or something.’ In actual fact, however, the return to Cambridge produced two works which include literary criticism but also other kinds of attention and argument. They were Modern Tragedy, which I wrote because I was appalled at the ideology of tragedy in the university, and The Country and the City, which had its origin in discussions of country-house poems at the same time. The impulse for these books came in a sense from re-entering this literary critical atmosphere. But then neither of them was called a literary critical book. In the end, I only published the book on the English novel, which was originally a series of lectures, because the spin-off from them in other people’s work was occurring at such a rate that I thought I’d better make my own position clear. It wasn’t a planned work, and it was done very quickly. I just found my old notes and transcripts and wrote them up into a short book.

Many readers must have felt that the book has a particular clarity and urgency of diction, perhaps because it was first spoken. Is the final text very close to the original form?

Yes. I became very involved in the course I was giving on the novel, after I came back to Cambridge: it met with a lot of response and over the years several post-graduates started developing their own work from it – Terry Eagleton, Pat Parrinder and others. Many of the ideas occurred while I was actually speaking. I remember for example the moment when I linked the analytic composition of Middlemarch to George Eliot’s loss of her earlier social perspective – a connection which hadn’t occurred to me till then. Terry Eagleton, who was sitting in the front row, sat bolt upright because he was so inside the argument – we talked all the time – that he could see immediately the shift of judgment that had just come out of the logic of the argument. When I went through the recordings, I maintained the way the lectures had been given. I deliberately kept the book at about that level. I wondered whether I shouldn’t, but then I thought that if I were to produce what would be called by my colleagues a proper book on the English novel from Dickens to Lawrence it would be an enormous job that would take years, and the end-result would be something entirely different. If it had been a work conceived in current academic styles it couldn’t even have been written. For myself, I felt that a period was over and it was now time just to have it on the record.

One feature of The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence that cannot fail to strike anyone familiar with Leavis’s work is its apparently sustained, virtually symmetrical inversion of the authors, evaluations and emphases to be found in The Great Tradition. In each case the books begin with Jane Austen, who doesn’t get a chapter to herself but figures as the starting-point of a tradition; but whereas Leavis writes Dickens out of his tradition, you instate Dickens very firmly as the first author you discuss at length in yours. Moving on to George Eliot, Leavis puts all his emphasis on Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda – the later work, which you precisely deprecate at the expense of Adam Bede and the earlier work. Then when he jumps straightaway to James, omitting Hardy, you go straight to Hardy and delete James. Even with Lawrence, where Leavis holds Women in Love to be the peak achievement, you single it out for censure – praising by contrast Sons and Lovers and Lady Chatterley, which he neglects. It looks as if at nearly every point you are joining issue with him and seeking to overturn the map he drew. How deliberate was that on your part?

At certain points very deliberate: the different judgment of the relationship between Jane Austen and George Eliot, or Jane Austen and Emily Brontë; the assessment of Dickens (which by this time he had amended anyway); the transition from George Eliot to Hardy rather than James. I couldn’t fail to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction – Geoff Dyer
• Foreword – NLR
• Raymond Williams – Dates
• References
• I: Biography
• II: Culture
• III: Drama
• IV: Literature
• V: Politics