Not for nothing did Williams describe the crossing of the English Channel as ‘one of the longest cultural journeys’. A central mediating factor in Williams’s reception of European thinkers is the lag between original and English publications of many key works of Western Marxism, as well as structuralism and psychoanalysis (less so for existentialism). In orienting ourselves to Williams’s Europeanism, then, it will be useful to establish some key publication
40 Mulhern (2009) has also discussed the hitherto unrecognized influence of Marcuse on Williams. 41 See, for example, Dix, H. (2010), Masnatta, C. (2010) and Williams, D. (2003).
30 dates. The selection of texts below is based on Williams’s own published writings; Williams makes reference to all of the listed texts at some point in his career (this fact alone should dispel the notion that he was an ‘insular’ thinker).
Publication in English of key texts by Williams (in bold) and by relevant European thinkers (original publication dates in brackets):
1921 – Williams born
1941 – Fromm’s The Fear of Freedom (U.S.)
1943-51 – Various of Sartre’s plays published in English shortly after French publication 1947 – Sartre’s ‘What is Writing?’ (French and English, the latter in Williams’s journal
Politics and Letters)
1950 – Lukacs’s Studies in European Realism (German: various, thirties)
1950 – Reading and Criticism 1952 – Drama from Ibsen to Eliot 1954 – Preface to Film
1954 – Drama in Performance
1955/56 – Marcuse’s Eros and Civilisation (German and English) 1956 – Marx’s Capital vol. 2 (German: 1885)
1956 – Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (French: 1943)
1957 – Gramsci’s The Modern Prince and Other Writings (Italian: 1950 but written 1929-35)
1958 – Culture and Society
1959 – Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (German: 1844) 1959 – Marx’s Capital vol. 3 (German: 1894)
1959 – Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (French: 1916)
1960 – Border Country 1961 – The Long Revolution
1962 – Lukacs’s The Historical Novel (German: 1937)
1962 – Britain in the Sixties: Communications
1963 – Levi-Strauss’s Structural Anthropology (French: 1958)
1963 – Lukacs’s The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (German: 1958) 1963 – Sartre’s Search for a Method (French 1957)
1964 – Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man published in German and English 1964 – Brecht’s ‘The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre’ (German: 1930)
31 1964 – Brecht’s ‘A Short Organum for the Theatre’ (German: 1948)
1964 – Second Generation 1966 – Modern Tragedy 1967 – May Day Manifesto
1968 – Drama From Ibsen to Brecht
1969 – Levi-Strauss’s The Elementary Structures of Kinship (French: 1949)
1969 – Benjamin’s ‘The Work of art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (German: 1935)
1969 – Althusser’s For Marx (French: 1965) 1970 – Althusser’s Reading Capital (French: 1965)
1970 – The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence
1971 – Gramsci’s Selection from the Prison Notebooks (Italian: 1950 but written 1929-35) 1971 – Lukacs’s History and Class Consciousness (German: 1923)
1971 – Lukacs’s The Theory of the Novel (German: 1920)
1971 – Sartre’s ‘The Burgos Trials’ published in French and English
1971 – Orwell
1972 – Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment published in English (German: 1944)
1972 – Barthes’s Mythologies (French: 1957)
1973 – Adorno’s Negative Dialectics (French: 1966) 1973 – Marx’s Grundrisse (German: 1939)
1973 – The Country and The City 1974 – Television
1975 – Goldmann’s Towards a Sociology of The Novel (French: 1963) 1975 – Timpanaro’s On Materialism (Italian: 1970)
1976 – Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason vol 1 (French: 1960) 1976 – Timpanaro’s The Freudian Slip (Italian: 1974)
1976 – Keywords
1977 – Lacan’s Ecrits (French: 1966)
1977 – Bahro’s The Alternative in Eastern Europe (German: 1976)
1977 – Marxism and Literature
1978 – Lukacs’s ‘Realism in the Balance’ (German: 1938)
1978 – Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama (German: 1928)
32
1979 – Politics and Letters 1979 – The Fight for Manod
1980 – Lukacs’s Essays on Realism (German: 1971 but essays written in the thirties)
1980 – Problems in Materialism and Culture 1981 – Culture
1983 – Towards 2000
1984 – Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (French: 1979)
1985 – Loyalties
1988 – Williams’s death
1988 – The Politics of Modernism 1989 – Resources of Hope
1989 – People of the Black Mountains vol. 1 1990 – People of the Black Mountains vol. 2
1991 – Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason vol. 2 (French: 1985)
As we have seen, Williams could read French and, although he could not read German, his academic situation will have kept him abreast of some European ideas which had yet to make the crossing. Nevertheless, there is good reason to believe that Williams encountered most of these texts first in English translation, and so this chronological view allows us to make some initial observations. As we shall see, there are numerous occasions on which Williams signals his enormous frustration that Britain has been impoverished for so long by the more
egregious translation delays.
Even excluding the extraordinary lateness of some of Marx’s texts in English, the general situation is one of severe cultural lag. In general, the earlier the original publication in German, French or Italian, the worse the delay; evidently, the cultural journey had shortened by the seventies (not least due to the efforts of NLR). Thus Lukacs’s History and Class
Consciousness takes forty-eight years to cross, Bahro’s The Alternative in Eastern Europe
just one. By the time of Williams’s first tranche of publications in the early to mid-fifties (Reading and Criticism to Drama in Performance), he only really had access to Fromm, writing in English in the U.S., to Sartre’s plays, one book by Lukacs, to Freud and some of Marx. By the publication of Culture and Society, we can add one further major Freudo- Marxist text from the Frankfurt School in English (Marcuse’s Eros and Civilisation), Sartre’s
33 Gramsci, The Modern Prince and other Writings. Saussure’s Course appears in 1959, forty- three years late. Fromm, Freud, Marx and Sartre all make appearances in The Long
Revolution (1961); the absence reference to Saussure, Lukacs and Gramsci is forgivable in a
British context of general disinterest - Williams was making broad contact with what was available. Between The Long Revolution and the mid-to-late sixties period of Modern
Tragedy (1966) and Drama from Ibsen to Brecht (1968), more work of Lukacs and Marcuse
is made available, along with Brecht’s theoretical pieces and Sartre’s existentialist-Marxist ‘pivot’ text, Search for a Method. Again, Williams makes use of the material. Williams (1962 & 1963) reviews the extant English texts from Lukacs42 and the Brecht essays inform
Williams’s analysis of his plays in Modern Tragedy; whether Sartre’s Search for a Method did the same for the Sartre/Camus material is less clear.43 European theory is far from absent, then, in Williams’s work as of 1968, but there is nothing comparable to the statement of affinity already to be found in Anderson’s ‘Socialism and Pseudo-Empiricism’ (1966). As Barnett (1976) rightly concluded, the real shift towards Europe comes in the period between the May Day Manifesto (1967) and Marxism and Literature (1977). Between 1969 and 1973, when The Country and the City (in Williams’s own words a kind of Marxist ‘break’ (Williams, 1985a, p. 209)) appeared, major works by Levi-Strauss, Benjamin,
Althusser, a more comprehensive Gramsci, Lukacs, Sartre, Adorno, Horkheimer, Barthes and even Marx (the Grundrisse) appear in English for the first time. Some of these, like
Althusser’s For Marx and Reading Capital, are translated relatively quickly, while others, especially Lukacs’s History and Class Consciousness, Benjamin’s work, Gramsci’s Prison
Notebooks and the earlier Frankfurt School material, were between twenty-five and fifty
years overdue. Over the next four years to 1977 and Marxism and Literature, major works by Goldmann, Timpanaro and Lacan become available, plus Bahro’s The Alternative and
Sartre’s late opus, the Critique of Dialectical Reason (vol. 1), which Williams
enthusiastically reviews in The Guardian. Williams wrote a huge number of reviews of European writers in the sixties and seventies, primarily for The Guardian and New Society. Williams reviewed no fewer than forty-five texts by or about the major European thinkers listed above in his lifetime, at least twenty-five of these in a ten-year ‘Europhile’ window between 1967 and 1977. Williams’s catalogue of reviews has rarely drawn much attention, despite it constituting an enormous body of critical engagement. This thesis draws heavily on
42 For discussion see Chapter One, pp. 50-56. 43 For discussion see Chapter Two, pp. 117-128.
34 Williams’s reviews of European writers, collected among Williams’s papers in the Richard Burton Archives at Swansea University.
Of course, Williams’s engagement with European thought was not confined to reviews. As we have seen, Williams was incorporating the insights of European thinkers into his work from at least TLR, with further engagements in Modern Tragedy and DFIB, but there is a sharp uptick in the late sixties, beginning with an essay on Marcuse for The Cambridge
Review44 (1969) and coinciding with Williams’s lecturing on European theory at
Cambridge.45 I offer here only a summary of Williams’s discussions of European thinkers in his essays and books after 1968; we will return to many of these texts later. Appropriately enough, many of the relevant essays appear in NLR. The first was ‘Literature and Sociology: In Memory of Lucien Goldmann’ (1971), first given as a talk at Cambridge in the same year. Goldmann had died in 1970 and Lukacs, who features heavily in the piece, passed away just months after Williams’s talk. In 1972, another talk of Williams’s, given in Montreal, was transcribed for The Listener; ‘Lucien Goldmann and Marxism’s Alternative Tradition’ (1972) is a crucial text for thinking through Williams’s Europeanism, and plays a structural role in this thesis.46 It was followed a year later by a classic text of the period: ‘Base and
Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory’ (1973), which established the basic parameters of Williams’s Gramscian critique of both orthodox and structural Marxism. Williams would expand his analysis of hegemony in Marxism and Literature alongside discussions (of varying length and detail) of Althusser, Benjamin, Adorno, Brecht, Goldmann, Lukacs, Saussure, Bakhtin and Sartre. Rounding out the ‘cultural materialist’ NLR pieces of the seventies was ‘Problems of Materialism’ (1978), in effect an essay-length review and discursus on Timpanaro. Significant discussions of Lukacs, Brecht, Sartre, Freud and
44 We get a sense of the importance of Marcuse for Williams in the following passage from the 1969 essay: ‘For
historical reasons, we have been separated, in Britain, from a critical and philosophical tradition which, when we re-encounter it in Marcuse or in Lukacs, is at once strange and fascinating: at once broader and more confident, more abstract, and yet more profoundly involved than our own. I felt the size of this gap, and yet the interest and pleasure of a possible bridge across it, in one of Marcuse’s essays from the thirties, reprinted in this volume, on the “The Affirmative Character of Culture”. The particular interest of the essay, for me, is that its analysis corresponded so closely with a central theme of Culture and Society, and that both were historical treatments of very much the same problem, which were yet continents or countries apart in method and in language. It was a marvellous moment of intellectual liberation to read across that gap into a mind which in all but its most central area of concern and value was so wholly other and strange’ (1969, p. 367).
45 In a notebook dated January 23rd 1974 and titled ‘Theories of Culture’, Williams’s lecture notes expound on
ideas of culture in European thought from 18C to the present. The names mentioned give a flavour of the kind of concerted engagement with European thought Williams was making: Volataire, Herder, Montesquieu, Vico, Rousseau, Marx, Engels, the Frankfurt School, Lukacs, Gramsci, Pareto, Mannheim, Weber, Durkheim, Comte, Jung & Althusser.
35 psychoanalysis, Timpanaro, Saussure and Bahro can be found in Politics and Letters (1979) alongside briefer comments on Goldmann, Althusser, the Frankfurt School, Lacan and Bourdieu.
Following the period of his most concerted engagement with European Marxism, Williams wrote several essays assessing the state of literary and cultural theory in Britain and its possible futures.47 These texts, alongside Culture (1981) and a range of essays on modernism
and the avant-garde,48 placed European theory centre-stage in Williams’s transition away
from traditional literary criticism and towards the broader practice of cultural materialism or the ‘sociology of culture’. Williams had laid the foundations of cultural materialism in
Marxism and Literature and the NLR essays of the seventies; in the eighties, particularly in Culture, he offered more programmatic interventions. Within what he considered the terms of
a materialist-idealist synthesis, Williams (1981) argued for a discipline which would combine ‘the anthropological and sociological senses of culture as a distinct “whole way of life”’ and the sense of culture as ‘all the “signifying practices” – from language through the arts and philosophy to journalism, fashion and advertising’ (p. 13) to produce an overarching
sociological enterprise. Williams emphasised that such a project had only been made possible because of the interventions of European Marxist critics, among them Lukacs, Goldmann, Benjamin, Adorno and Marcuse, who had provided ways of studying the relations between ‘forms’ and social relations, and between material conditions, signifying practices and aspects of ideology and consciousness.
Williams examined the disorienting effect which some of these Marxist cultural theories, alongside structural linguistics, post-Althusserian structuralism49 and Russian formalism, were having on British literary studies in an NLR piece, ‘Crisis in English Studies’ (1985a). This was written in response to the ‘MacCabe affair’, in which marxisant cultural critic Colin MacCabe was denied a permanent lectureship at Cambridge by a Faculty Board unprepared to institutionalize European innovation. In a late parallel with the New Left Review furore, Williams sided with the prevailing theoretical winds and fought in MacCabe’s corner. Recounting the recent history of theoretical innovations, Williams distances himself from psychoanalysis and structuralism, and affirms the potential of an as-yet unformed ‘fully historical semiotics’. ‘Cultural materialism’, he contends, ‘is the analysis of all forms of
47 See (1985a), (2007a) & (2007b).
48 These essays are collected in Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (1989).
49 Williams notes, for example, the influence of Eagleton’s Criticism and Ideology (1976) of Pierre Macherey
36 signification, including quite centrally writing, within the actual means and conditions of their production’ (p. 210). Since much Western Marxist cultural theory has been criticism, rather than sociology, Williams argues that ‘most actual Marxist and structuralist tendencies have been … compatible or even congruent in a broad sense with the orthodox paradigm’ (p. 211), that is, the ‘dominant literary paradigm’ (p. 209) which emphasises the uniqueness of literature as a distinct symbolic practice. In Williams’s estimation, much of his own work was carried out within this broad orthodoxy. His late work, however, is included among the three modern positions Williams now takes to be incompatible with ‘Cambridge English’:
traditional Marxist base and superstructure analysis, among which Williams counts The
Country and the City (1973), ‘radical semiotics’ (confusingly, Williams uses this term as a
synonym for deconstruction50), and cultural materialism. Each of these, argues Williams, share an incompatibility with orthodox literary criticism in that they ‘necessarily include the [literary] paradigm itself as a matter for analysis, rather than as a governing definition of the object of knowledge’ (p. 211). They are, in other words, versions of a total theory of cultural production, reserving no special place for literature, or indeed for any other cultural practice. For Williams, of course, cultural materialism is the worthiest alternative to Cambridge orthodoxy. Traditional Marxism and deconstruction are the polarised extremes (one materialist, the other idealist) of total cultural analysis between which Williams will try to steer his sociology of culture.
A key influence on Williams’s mature sociology of culture was Pierre Bourdieu. It appears to have been E. P. Thompson, intriguingly, who put Williams on the French sociologist’s trail. On an undated postcard to Williams, presumably from the mid-seventies, Thompson writes: Just back from a second colloque in Paris: something peculiar is happening there. A group of scholars of the left, younger than me but not very young, are trying to make
(E. P. Thompson, personal communication, undated)
Williams would meet Bourdieu in France in 1976, giving a talk that December; later the same month, Bourdieu wrote to Williams in English:
50 In ‘The Uses of Cultural Theory’ (2007b), Williams describes post-structuralist linguistics more broadly as ‘a
37 I am most pleased with our meeting and hope that this may be the beginning of a
’ [1963]. (P. Bourdieu, personal communication, December 22, 1976).
In the same letter, Bourdieu requests to publish a chapter from William’s Television in his journal Actes de la recherché en sciences sociales. As in Ferrara’s account, we find a sense of transnational, mutual affinity and influence, in particular here around the concept of the sociology of culture, and an aggrieved awareness of national insularity. Bourdieu would later express this in praise of Marxism and Literature: ‘I read your book … with interest and agree profoundly with you … the fact is, I feel so isolated here that the extent of our agreement seems to me somewhat miraculous’ (P. Bourdieu, personal correspondence, December 7, 1977). Williams’s association with Bourdieu in the seventies proved so fruitful that, as the eighties began, Williams wrote (with Nicholas Garnham) ‘Pierre Bourdieu and the Sociology of Culture: An Introduction’ (1980), in which the authors argued that Bourdieu’s work ‘dialectically supercedes [sic]’ (p. 210) three extant and opposing tendencies within cultural studies: culturalism, Althusserian structuralism/formalism and more recently, a resurgent political-economic Marxism emerging in response to Althusserian/Lacanian theoreticism. They viewed Bourdieu as grounding a materialist theory of symbolic power in class relations without dismissing either as merely secondary or affording either undue privilege. Such was Williams’s goal, the task to which he set, at various points, the terms ‘realism’, ‘totality’, ‘hegemony’ and ‘cultural materialism’. It is no exaggeration to say that Williams regarded Bourdieu’s emphases as something like the future of cultural studies, and certainly the direction in which he would be taking his own work. The rather sad coda to Williams’s association with Bourdieu is that in 1987, Bourdieu wrote to Williams to request his collaboration on a transnational journal of European letters that would try to bridge the divisions between Europe’s national intellectual cultures.51 Williams would pass away the following year.
* * *
51 Bourdieu’s prospective journal was to have an innovative format: the first half of each issue would contain
essays from scholars in the country of publication, while the latter half would comprise a common set of essays from across Europe in translation. To my knowledge, the journal never appeared.
38 This thesis is structured as a series of detailed discussions of Williams’s writings on the three European figures who, in my view, had the greatest overall influence on his thought: Lukacs, Sartre and Gramsci. Williams’s engagement with these thinkers was more substantial than with any others (with the exception of Brecht – see p. 40), and speaks to the specific character of his Europeanism. It is far from coincidental that these three thinkers were also those with whom Anderson and Nairn aligned themselves in the mid-sixties. In ‘Lucien Goldmann and Marxism’s Alternative Tradition’ (1972), Williams emphasised the significance of this same triumvirate:
Of the two men who died, Georg Lukacs was clearly the more widely significant figure. His History and Class-Consciousness, a collection of essays written in the early Twenties, is the most important single work of what can be seen – in part against the disavowal of its author – as the alternative tradition of Marxism. In the scale of its contemporary influence it is joined only by the Prison Notebooks, from the late Twenties, of Antonio Gramsci, and by the work of Sartre in the Fifties and
Sixties. As we look at the range of this work, from fundamental philosophical problem to questions of strategy, tactics and political organisation, we can properly call it, over a very wide field, a tradition … the most significant feature of this alternative Marxist tradition is its account of consciousness: a social analysis which seems to me radically different from what most people in Britain understand as Marxist. (1972, p. 375)
Williams does not go as far as Anderson in claiming allegiance to this tradition, but there can be little doubt that he regarded this body of work as the central instance of socialist thought moving beyond both mechanical materialism and ahistorical, liberal idealism: ‘Consciousness is restored as a primary activity: that is the central result of this alternative Marxist tradition. But this consciousness is still social, and it is centred in history’ (p. 375). Within the Marxist