Raymond Williams

About a year or two ago, a newspaper books section asked me to contribute to a feature that were assembling, in which various non-fiction authors would pen a short tribute to some writer who had influenced their work. The feature ended up getting killed, but the other day I stumbled across the entry I wrote for it -- about the British cultural critic Raymond Wiliams -- and I was inspired to post it here, updated slightly to account for the ways in which Williams, and particularly his masterpiece, The Country And The City, have only grown more relevant to what I do. As some of you know, I spent most of my late teens and early twenties in the thrall of post-modern cultural theory. I was a Semiotics major -- literally, that's what it says on my diploma. And while I learned an immense amount from that period of my life, I had to, well, unlearn some of that period as well, particularly what I learned in the subject of prose style. (I wrote more than a few papers that sounded as though they had been translated, poorly, from the original French.) But Williams is one of the critics that I devoured during that period whose work seems entirely relevant to me as a writer today -- in both content and form.

You could say that Williams was, first and foremost, a scholar of change and transition, most powerfully in The Country And The City, a survey of the British literary mind as it grappled with the shift from agrarian capitalism to the industrial metropolis. Read Williams on novels or poems you've read multiple times before -- on Bleak House, or Emma, or "The Prelude" -- and invariably he supplies a flash of insight into some essential novelty of the work, the small but central point where it dislodged itself from tradition in order to capture the changing society around it. "As we stand and look back at a Dickens novel," Williams wrote, "the general movement -- the characteristic movement -- is a hurrying seemingly random passing of men and women, each heard in some fixed phrase, seen in some fixed expression: a way of seeing men and women that belongs to the street." This is one of those rare observations that seems, if you're a Dickens reader, immediately and intuitively true when you first hear it, and then goes on to change the way you read Dickens for the rest of your life.

Williams' ideas and slogans -- "the knowable community," "structures of feeling" -- would influence a generation of cultural critics, but the fluidity and precision of his prose was, for a time, largely replaced by the twisted syntax of the post-structuralist wave. Few critics since have managed to traverse so many levels of experience in a single text: from the broad movements of economic and technological change to the biographical histories of individual authors, all the way back to Williams' own personal migration from rural Welsh society to Cambridge don. This integrative movement across scales of experience has been a recurring theme in all of my books, particularly in the new one, The Ghost Map, which takes place squarely in the middle of the revolution -- social and conceptual -- that Williams chronicled in The Country And The City.

In writing this last book, when I found myself reaching for words to represent that movement from scale to scale -- representing complexity in words that are themselves not unduly complex -- it was Williams' patient, probing voice that I found myself seeking out. There are critics who celebrate change and complexity by letting their own voice grow correspondingly chaotic. Williams took another approach to the turbulence of modern life: he made it meaningful.

Comments

[Chris M.]

Word, my brother.

When I was in college I had the feeling that the postmodernists/poststructuralists were on to something, that they had a technique to see under the surface of things, and to reveal what was really going on. But they almost never did. Most of it was half-baked BS pulled outta their butts. I think a lot of people are enchanted by Marx, as if he is a prophet, similarly.

Eventually I figured out that if a reasonably intelligent person can't figure out what they hell a person is talking about, it's probably nonsense. That even applies to giants like Hegel. The classic insult, "It's not even wrong," comes to mind. But you can understand Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton.

Eventually I just majored in econ, and got plenty of seeing under the surface.

[Chuck]

This is a nice tip of the cap to one of the more important cultural critics of the last two or three dcades. I'm particularly influenced by Williams' concept of "planned flow" as it applied to broadcast television. Of course with cable TV and TiVo, that concept needs revision (as many TV and media scholars have done).

I've also found his concept of "mobile privatization" rather useful for thinking about television and suburban sprawl (this is rather broad but it's a Saturday afternoon).

[Alan Wallach]

Thank you for your insistence upon Raymond Williams' importance as a critical thinker, especially since so many neo and paleo cons (e.g., Maurice Cowling, Christopher Hitchens)have done so much to blacken his reputation. Williams' Keywords remains extraordinarily useful.