Review
J.P. Ward: Writers of Wales: Raymond Williams.
J.P. Ward: Writers of Wales: Raymond Williams. University of Wales Press, on behalf of the Welsh Arts Council, £2.50.
Some twenty works in a period of twenty-five years, many of them of seminal importance: the productivity of Raymond Williams not only threatens to eclipse that of anyone of his leading British literary-critical colleagues, but to eclipse the whole of their output taken together. It is a measure of Williams' significance that there is no name for the enterprise which has formed his life's work. Literary critic, perhaps: but in any strict sense he was this only in his very early work. Political theorist, social philosopher, cultural analyst: these categories capture something of his substance, but in the same gesture carve up what has been an astonishingly unified project into so many discrete areas. Williams has always believed that borders are meant for crossing, whether geographical or intellectual; and his work has thus proved something of an anomaly to the guardians of our academic culture, those customs officers and frontier guards of the mind who would jealously check one's official credentials as one moves from region to region.
'Sociology', as J.P. Ward recognises in this fluent and valuable study, is always a handy label for consigning a thinker to the outer darkness. If the custodians of the literary establishment can stick Williams into this particular box, the challenge he represents is gratifyingly averted. He can be relegated to the vague, abstract universe of structures, trends and forces, inferior to those whose métier is poetic particularity. Unfortunately, this will not quite do either: for Williams is capable of demonstrating the most detailed attention to the intricacies of dramatic form and the texture of a prose passage, and he is, after all, an important novelist in his own right. Perhaps, if Williams had worked in a country other than England, it would have been enough to say that he is, in the classical European sense of the term, an intellectual. But this term will not work in England, where the academies are stuffed with many brilliant specialists and very few intellectuals.
To deal effectively with such a richly complex writer in the span of a mere eighty pages is a daunting task, but Ward has pulled if off with admirable success. He deals deftly and lucidly with most of the major texts, is particularly perceptive about Williams' fiction, and communicates a sense of the drift and originality of the whole oeuvre. A keynote of his study is Williams' tone level, evenhanded, authoritative and while he is right to discern this, he perhaps does not exhaust its importance. Williams' tone is, in the best sense of the term, reasonable- not at all in some aridly rationalistic sense, but in the sense of a deeply humanistic thinker who trusts, despite a bleak political realism, to the critical, analytic capacities of human beings, capacities which for Williams are quite indissociable from our lived experience. But it is a contradiction for all left-wing intellectuals that the very need to recognise the complexity of the systems which they oppose, if political action is to be effective, risks confiscating some of the energy and anger which such opposition demands. This has been a problem in Williams' work, as it is for many others; and this is why one sometimes has the sense of a strange division within him, between the patient, equable motions of a powerful intellect and some altogether more angry, recalcitrant and unappeased passion. Middle-class liberals like Frank Kermode, who greeted Culture and Society as 'magnificent', were by the time of Modern Tragedy speaking of Williams' work as 'sullen'. It is not, of course, sullen; but the Establishment were right to discern in his later writing a deeper tone which they were quite unable to accommodate.
J.P. Ward ends his monograph by reflecting that Williams' renewed commitment to Wales over the past years may have something to do with a turn towards more local, communitarian politics. The 'turn to Wales' has been a quite central personal and political feature of his development, but I am not sure that Ward has quite identified its source. For whatever personal renewal Williams must undoubtedly reap from this reaffirmed identity, his political vision has never been more acute, grimly realist and properly intransigent than it is at present; and Wales, as The Fight for Manod shows, is a part of that reality rather than a spiritual respite from it.
TERRY EAGLETON
Page(s) 87-89
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