I just love Raymond Williams. Here's his description of Lucian Goldmann confronting literary scholars at Cambridge, and then his short history of the problems of practical criticism--with Leavis as (and I think he's right about this) the villain:
...I would give it about fifteen minutes, as Goldmann began to describe his own methodology, for that crushing quotation to be brought out from Lawrence:‘We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudo-scientific classifying and analysing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.’ So no methodology here, thank you; only sincere and vital emotion. But who decides the sincerity and vitality? If you need to ask that you couldn’t begin to understand the answer. People decide it, in themselves and in an active and collaborative critical process.
But which people, in what social relationships, with each other and with others? That, at whatever risk of damnation, is the necessary question of the sociologist. Practical criticism is vulnerable at several points: in its hardening into an apparently objective method which is based, even defiantly, on subjective principles; in its isolation of texts from contexts; in its contemplative aspects, which have often made it hostile to new literary work. But all these weaknesses are most apparent, we say, when it is badly done: well or badly being again an internal criterion. In fact, however, all these weaknesses, or potential weaknesses, follow from the specific social situation of its practitioners. The real answer to that question—which people, in what social relationships?—was, as we all know, precise and even principled: the informed critical minority. What began as the most general kind of claim, a visibly human process centred on the apparently absolute qualities of sincerity and vitality, ended, under real pressures, as a self-defining group. But then, because the critical activity was real, very different social relations—a sense of isolation from the main currents of a civilisation in which sincerity and vitality were being limited or destroyed, an implacable opposition to all the agents of this limitation or destruction—emerged and forced a generalization of the original position.-"Literature and Sociology,"
Culture and Materialism, 17-18 (and
here at the New Left Review).
It is on the basis of this history that he proceeds to, very clearly, put the problem to the sociologist: in Britain--but I wonder whether this has some similar significance here in America now--one has to confront the fact that "
it is from this," this practical criticism, "
paradoxically, that much of the English work in literary sociology has come" (18). In other words, literary sociology must also transform the academic society (which is not the same, for Williams, as the discipline or institution) in order to be able to do its work. This does not mean revolution--which the theorists here in the 80's tried to bring about--but first and foremost a change in vocabulary that will allow method and theory to enter into critical practice (as I tried to bring out of Williams in the
last post). First and foremost, there is the change in what actually gets described: not the actual but the possible. Using Goldmann, he outlines this view:
Most sociology of literature, Goldmann then argues, is concerned with the relatively apparent relations between ordinary literature and actual consciousness: relations which show themselves at the level of content, or in conventional elaboration of its common illusions. The new sociology of literature—that of genetic structuralism—will be concerned with the more fundamental relations of possible consciousness, for it is at the centre of his case that the greatest literary works are precisely those which realize a world-view at its most coherent and most adequate, its highest possible level. We should not then mainly study peripheral relations: correspondences of content and background; overt social relations between writers and readers. We should study, in the greatest literature, the organizing categories, the essential structures, which give such works their unity, their specific aesthetic character, their strictly literary quality; and which at the same time reveal to us the maximum possible consciousness of the social group—in real terms, the social class—which finally created them, in and through their individual authors.-"
Literature and Sociology," 23-24.
Ultimately, however (and a bit against Goldmann), Williams says that we cannot even think of what gets realized and revealed to the sociologist as a
consciousness: first and foremost, "
we need to reconsider the idea of consciousness itself" (24). Rather, what is more important is the ability of the structure, the organizing categories, to then actualize themselves. Where are the points in this structure that are more capable of producing the work than others? This is why he introduces his notion of "structures of feeling:" by making the structure one of feeling (which, as I always stress, should almost be taken in the tactile sense of "feeling:" what we are talking about here is bodily, material), what one does is then think more
in terms of the structure and sees its productive possibilities not at all in terms of the actual. One thinks the ideality of the structure in a more differentiated way (one thinks its productive capacity more purely) by attributing to it this odd (and not necessarily conscious) aspect of "feeling." One adds to it a certain width, a breadth, not unlike Bourdieu.
The prime obstacle in general education is a feeling of helplessness before the unintelligible. Every problem is new to the mind which first meets it and is baffling until he can recognize in it something which he has met and dealt with already. The all important difference between the mind which can clear itself by thought and the mind which remains bewildered and can proceed only by burying the difficulty in a formula--retained, at best, by mere rote memory--is in this power to recognize the new problem as, in part, an old conquest. Language, with its inexhaustible duplications (which here are duplicities), ceaselessly presents to us the old as thought it were new, familiar ideas in novel disguises, understood distinctions as fresh opportunities for confusion, already assimilated combinations as unforeseeable conjunctions. The teacher meets with all this whenever he reads anything which stretches his intelligence; the pupil meets with it all the time, and if he is being well taught he should be expecting it and enjoying the sense of increasing power that his progressive mastery of it can afford. For this growth in power is, fundamentally, the vitalizing incentive with which education builds.
