Almost entirely free

I'm not really the habit of reading the blurbs on the back of books. So I just now picked up the Country and the City there on my bookshelf--a book I've read at least twice now--and happened to notice this remark from the Times Literary Supplement:

A sustained and thoroughgoing attempt to relate English literature to its social background... It is fair to add that Dr. Williams's work is almost entirely free from the partisan unfairness and unimaginative literalism to be found in some other critics who share his general outlook; and he has given us a right and timely admonition against sentimental falsifications of rural life and of nature.

What can this mean but "Raymond Williams isn't a real Marxist?" I'm searching for the original review--there it might have made much more sense. But on the back of a book like this, one suspects that the line blurs between something like "He isn't your typical Marxist" and "You can pick it up, kiddies, it's safe."

In other words we can see how a typical Kulturkritik rhetoric of originality, when opposed to "partisan unfairness" especially, and then bolstered by "unimaginative literalism," easily turns around into its opposite: Williams is no different than all those others... Indeed, those people he pals around with, those who "share his general outlook," they're the dangerous ones--but who would read such boring trash? They're too sentimental, too naive about country life. Too "back to nature." But fundamentally, they're just so "unfair." To those poor country folk... or to us. In short, you can read this blurb a different way if more context is given (it could be a Marxist defense of Williams, even). But as a blurb, the old "vulgar Marxist" argument is turned into a "right and timely" quote that will sell the book. Of course, then, it is no accident "free" is used in one of its more hygienic senses... And even if we wonder what made the reviewer, and the people who designed the jacket, stick with that "almost," we've already perversely limited what in Williams' approach would be truly tough to swallow...

I bring this up because I wonder whether there is indeed something palatable to Williams from the bourgeois standpoint. While it ultimately might be in the bare content (nature, experience, etc. etc.), I think it has to come from the subtlety of his method, from his isolation of structures of feeling and his very Lukácsian insistence on the need to interrogate what is lived (though he only read Lukács after he wrote The Long Revolution), the real activity of men and women, that would make him take up particular figures wholly opposed to his viewpoint (Arnold, Leavis), and allow him to claim they are vital for our thought in a certain respect (to the extent they shape and express those lived structures).

This was for him a more radical gesture than investigating the unconscious of society--which he considered a basically bourgeois concept (since it had been quickly mythicized and reified: one imagines Williams being more open to more powerful Lacanian reformulations). But, from a certain angle, such subtlety can also make him seem "almost entirely free" from Marxism for such a reviewer. One then has to ask--what sort of environment would take subtlety in such a way? Of course, with the question put this way I open the door to cynicism. But I do imagine there could be other answers. One might, for example, insist upon how hard it is to actually conceive a neutral criticism, despite the long history of the view that criticism is without prejudice.

The Barthesian activity, part 2

Who other than Barthes would have said the following about the novelistic?

…the novelistic is neither the false nor the sentimental; it is merely the circulatory space of subtle, flexible desires; within the very artifice of a “sociality” whose opacity is miraculously reduced, it is the web of amorous relations (“To the Seminar,” an excellent text).

That is, who would have said “‘sociality’ whose opacity is miraculously reduced?” This is a way of conveying that what Lukács calls the “world of convention” (Theory of the Novel) in the novel is porous, indeed “circulatory,” “flexible.” But this is inverted unexpectedly and shown in terms of its thickness, its opacity, which is accordingly “reduced.” Barthes can not only effortlessly accomplish such an inversion: he can make it stick (like the referent, like the “real”) by getting it right, by saying the consistent thing, what accords, what would seemingly succeed or follow. This is what I was getting at in talking about activity and its tendency to frustrate the paradigmatic (to “outplay” it, as Barthes says in The Neutral), by tending to be more dynamic, more syntagmatic: activity is la succession réglée d'un certain nombre d'opérations. To put it bluntly, Barthes’s use of metaphor here (and nearly everywhere else) tends to be more metonymic than we might expect (though it is not reducible to this second, opposing, paradigmatic or metaphorical term). One can wonder, however (and Barthes himself wondered this), just how long this succession can go on.