Raymond Williams (1) (1921–1988)

The Marxist cultural historian Raymond Williams, who died in 1988, is widely regarded as a hostile critic of George Orwell, but this 1971 monograph (published as part of the Fontana Modern Masters series - the ones with the groovy Op Art covers) struck me as fair-minded, often insightful and intellectually stimulating even when I disagreed with it.

Williams argues that the question of identity is central to an understanding of Orwell. When Orwell left the Imperial Police in 1928 and headed show more for the lower depths he attempted to reject his identity as a member of the English ruling class and create a new one and a new set of social relations. He then proceeded to inhabit a bewildering succession of identities: tramp, plongeur, Spanish Civil War combatant, revolutionary socialist, middle class English intellectual.

In his excellent book Gilded Youth: Privilege, Rebellion and the British British Public School James Brooke-Smith notes the ambivalent nature of the left-wing English public school rebels of the 1930s. Many became communists yet all retained the manners and style of their upbringing and an attitude towards their old schools which oscillated between hatred and an intense nostalgic attachment bordering on love. Orwell both fits into and stands outside of this pattern. He transferred his intellectual allegiance to the working class but never seemed entirely comfortable around them; many working class people who met him remarked on his formality, social awkwardness and apparent aloofness. At the end of his life he was simultaneously criticising the Labour government for failing to abolish public schools and thinking of sending his adopted son to his alma mater - Eton College (‘five years in a lukewarm bath of snobbery’, as he once put it). He does, however, stand apart from his contemporaries by the courageous integrity he repeatedly demonstrated; his willingness to put himself in unpleasant and life-threatening situations. He certainly did more to deracinate himself than most and the fact that he was unable to completely transcend his early conditioning seems ultimately less remarkable than the extraordinary effort he made.

Orwell’s rejection of the class ethos he had been educated to was a reaction to his experience of imperialism and Williams notes that, pretty much uniquely among his contemporaries, he viewed injustice and inequality within England in the larger context of the British Empire. His socialism was ideologically light and stressed values such as liberty and decency. It might have benefited from a bit more ideology. He wrote a great deal about class and believed that the differences between the social classes in England were gradually diminishing. He tended to concentrate, however, on largely transitory phenomena such as clothes or accents. What was lacking was any real sense of class as a social and economic system. Williams rightly rejects Orwell’s famous remark that ‘England is a family with the wrong members in control’ as overly sentimental.

He makes a convincing argument for the inherent unity of Orwell’s fiction and non-fiction. There was a lot of autobiography in his fiction and a good deal of imaginative creativity in his non-fiction (this point was elaborated on with much supporting evidence by Bernard Crick in his biography of Orwell). Essays like Shooting An Elephant and books like The Road to Wigan Pier are not historical documents but carefully crafted literary works in which Orwell shaped and edited his experience to make a polemical point. When travelling around the North of England in 1936 for Wigan Pier, for example, he was assisted by a grassroots political network of working class socialists, trade unionists and organised unemployed workers, but most of this is absent from the book, Orwell choosing instead to create the narrative of a lone observer discovering the facts by himself. The Labour Movement largely disappears from the story and the depression hit working class communities are portrayed, albeit with immense sympathy, as essentially passive victims.

For Williams Orwell’s attempt to reinvent himself and create new affiliations collapses with the despairing vision of 1984 which he evidently regards as a repudiation of socialism. This seems to me a fundamental misreading. 1984 was clearly intended as a warning, not a prophecy, and it isn’t about socialism at all; it’s about totalitarianism. Orwell drew on both fascism and communism to create his nightmare society and also on totalitarian tendencies in the capitalist democracies. There is plenty of evidence that he remained a radical socialist to the end. His main criticism of the post-war Labour government was that it was not socialist enough.

Williams is on much firmer ground when he proposes that the essence of Orwell lies in his paradoxical nature. Orwell was, in many ways, a mass of contradictions: an English patriot and a revolutionary socialist; a rebel with a strong fatalist streak; a radical who was temperamentally conservative. These are not phases in his development but overlapping tendencies found throughout his work. In most good Orwell essays there is something to annoy almost everyone. His sheer contrariness and multifaceted individuality continue to make him wonderfully readable.

I first read Orwell in my late teens and have been reading and re-reading him ever since. I still admire his work as much as I ever did but my understanding of it has certainly shifted over the years. These days I tend to see past the plain speaking ‘honest George’ persona telling it like it is (as Williams comments Eric Arthur Blair’s greatest fictional creation was George Orwell) and appreciate much more Orwell’s artistry as a writer, the complexity behind the deceptively simple prose style and the sheer slipperiness of his thought. The more you get to know him the more fascinatingly mysterious and elusive he becomes. show less

First published in 1960, but set for the most part in the 1920s and 30s, this book was recently reissued by the National Library of Wales as part of an initiative to make more widely available the literary output of Wales written in English. Will (or Matthew) is a university lecturer in London, where he is researching population movements of South Wales, where he grew up. He is called back to his home village in the Welsh Borders to visit his father, Harry, who has suffered a heart attack show more and the book tells their early story together and the sequence of events that led to Will moving away. Theirs was a relationship where little had been said but much felt and this new crisis raises difficult feelings for Will and makes him look again at his past and his relationship with his parents, family friends from his childhood and with his own wife and children.

The book evokes the old Welsh village life in the Welsh Borders extremely well. But the border country of the title is more than just the geographical border - it is also about the borders between past and present, staying and leaving, silence and speech, life and death. Sparingly written, moving and thoughtful. show less

Television: Technology and Cultural Form by Raymond Williams


Williams starts by reflecting on the sentiment, generalized throughout society, that television has altered our world. He critiques technological determinism, which argues that technology influences culture and society rather than vice versa. He also critiques the idea he calls symptomatic technology, where technology comes to be as a reflection of the values of the society.

His problem with all these critiques is that they all show more assume the R&D to be neutral. There are no intentions behind the development of tech in these arguments.

He argues that powerful decision-makers in society can have more resources invested in technical solutions to their needs, but the social history of communications technology is different. The newspaper was a response to the dramatic shifts the social system and various crises within it. Early newspapers consisted of power centers conveying messages to their agents, plus news on the expanding system of trade. But as the industrial revolution progressed and the world began urbanizing, the church and school could no longer adequately explain the world. There was much background and news that had to be conveyed, and the newspaper filled that role. Similarly, photography was a way of maintaining ties in an era of migrations to cities and other places of work.

When broadcasting came in, newer technologies were already fulfilling the new society’s needs. Newspapers conveyed political and economic information, telegraphy allowed long-distance business communication, and the movie theater fulfilled curiosity and entertainment needs. Because all these technologies had different uses, and broadcasting was a conglomerate of them, it’s difficult to pin it down with a simple explanation. Only in hindsight, with the void in simple explanation, will people argue that TV and broadcasting were developed to be a form of social integration and control.

The social context that broadcasting emerged from was that of mobile privatization. Two seemingly contradictory tendencies happened in the early twentieth century. On the one hand, the world was becoming larger. The industrial revolution created a society requiring mobility, which also fostered a sense of curiosity about the world. Self-sufficient homes were not self-sufficient anymore, and required funding and supplies from outside sources. Outside conditions constantly threatened the private family, which was needed for social reproduction. So, mobile privatization served both needs.

I don’t buy his rejection of “symptomatic technology” and see his work has revitalizing “technology is neutral” arguments, even if Williams wouldn’t say just that. show less

A gold-mine for quotes from authors you should have read but never will (Gissing, Carlyle, Ruskin etc etc...), Williams sums up the argument of this book in two paragraphs of his conclusion: the Romantics started talking about 'Culture' because they were looking for a way to discuss the changes of industrialism. The late romantics and fin de siecle types became either total idealists with an anti-democratic concept of culture, or socialists with a hyper-democratic concept of it; both of show more these attitudes lead to paradox. Modernists continue these trends, but have to deal not only with industrialism, but also with mass media, actually existing democracy and 'actually existing' socialism. Everyone keeps trying to provide a foundation for the support of/ attack on 'culture,' and nobody has yet succeeded. End.
But along the way there are all sorts of little gems which make it well worth reading, and he's very even-keeled. He can analyze Orwell, Anglo-Marxism and Coleridge with equal sympathy and skill.
Williams' prose is a great lesson in how to write - inasmuch as it's clear and coherent - and how not to write - inasmuch as his best points are buried in the middle of paragraphs analyzing long quotes from dead authors.
Finally, this is a book about the English tradition. You may notice that when you pick up the book and see that all the chapters are about English men. Of course, if you judge books by their titles, you'll be misled. But that's your fault. If you're looking for a post-colonialist analysis of British imperio-hegemony or whatever, find something else. Don't blame this book for not being what it never intended to be, anymore than you'd blame a book about the Punjabi political situation in the 1950's for not analyzing Mill's book on Bentham and Coleridge. show less