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Literary Review
Resources of hope
ON my recent visit to Wales, I was determined to visit Clodick Church in Raymond Williams' beloved Black Mountains where he was buried on January 26, 1988. From Monmouth to Y Fenny and then to Hay on Wye, passing through Abergavenny and reaching Pandy, his home village, I made the journey not only because I wanted to see the mountains he had walked so often, but feel the place and the air that had sustained this socialist. And as I stood beside his grave, I thought of the years he had spent at Cambridge, some happy, others agitated, but overall so productive, that his place now in the world of cultural thought cannot be overlooked.
In most of the university departments around the world, meetings are usually, in the words of Frank Kermode, "scenes of ignoble strife", almost endlessly prolonged. Given the motivations of a powerful sense of real work to be done towards tangible improvement in the working conditions and academic sphere, it sometimes becomes a torture to preside over tedious and vainglorious brawling which is aimed at either killing all initiative or for self-aggrandizement of some nature. Much that you may try to be conciliatory and patient or have the calm good-humored determination of Raymond Williams to talk past the point of conflict to some further intersection of human encounter at which comradeship would be possible, it all amounts to your efforts being regarded thanklessly as either connived or insincere, a kind of generalised animus or nastiness at a "flyblown level". The university would not be the place it unfortunately turns out to be if it did not have people to peddle lies about their critics, show malice toward people better than they are, hatred and rage about those who disagree with or disobey the silent canons of unfair play.
On that sunny morning what came to my mind was this culture that Raymond Williams stood against all his life. Though running the department was important to him, he was always deeply involved in the understanding of society and culture, a project intended to vindicate "culture as ordinary". He tried to grasp the whole process of the working of a society, of the forms of its writings or the changes in response to history.
"As long as Raymond Williams and Edward Thompson were still there, still speaking and writing in the splendid rhythms and time-honoured litanies of the labour movement, of common hopes and purposes, of the visible and monstrous injustices and indifference, the cruelty and wrong so apparent in all that mere power and ruling class did, then we could keep up a good heart." This is how Fred Inglis eulogises these two Marxist scholars in his book on Raymond Williams whose passing away has left a significant inadequacy in the already dismayingly quiet political radicalism around the world. As long as they were there, there was idealism, political energy and hope, which could have done a lot to boost the "scrappy and impoverished" organisations in the face of a radiant and arrogant conservatism which was markedly Thatcherite.
Williams had stood for the ideas of internationalism and socialism, those "excellently civic virtues" so heartlessly trampled upon by the rising European and American politics overrun by the anonymity of metropolitan-style consumerism and violence and the draconian structural adjustment programmes devised by the IMF. Williams died at a time when it had almost become difficult to formulate one's own political and ethical vision, especially after the defeat of the trade union movement in Britain and the rise of conservative politics. He had tried to defend ideas, ideals, structure, family and society in the face of environmental abuse, ecological disasters and the exploitation of the masses. And his belief in "domestic settlement and a quiet, unglamorous local courtesy" along with all that he wrote with a left-wing dissent, were all responsible for the wide esteem and love that his countrymen and intellectuals bestowed on him till the end.
Williams's work transformed contemporary understanding of society and culture. As a socialist thinker, Williams was fully engaged with the project aimed at vindicating "culture as ordinary" so as to stand out against "minority culture", a Levisite position that he had once supported and then totally went against. It is now important for any student of sociology or cultural studies to see how Williams grasped the "whole process of the stories of a society, of the forms of its writing as they change in response to history". In this he had a deep sense of sustained purpose of writing about truth and lies in the way people describe rural and city life, of writing on the role of the TV, of the acute problem of ecology and nuclear disasters. His intellectual effort worked on human experience and its oddities so as to face facts of life and not hesitate to counter "the toadies and cowards, the vicious snobs and the traitors who throng the roads leading to all places of learning".
Raymond Williams, Fred Inglis, Routledge, p.333, £ 25.
SHELLEY WALIA
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