Raymond Williams, 3. Literature (Marxism and Literature)

'literature' as a concept is relatively difficult to define, as it appears to be a specific description and highly valued. It is often defined as 'full, central, immediate human experience', with an associated reference to minute particulars. In contrast,'society' is often seen as essentially general and abstract, with the summaries and averages of human living being the direct substance. Other concepts such as politics, sociology, or ideology are often seen as mere haraened outer spheres of common living experience.

The concept of 'literature' can be shown in two ways: theoretically and historically. One popular version of the concept has been developed in ways that appear to protect it, and in practice do often protect it against any such arguments. An essential abstraction of the 'personal' and the 'immediate' is carried so far that, within this highly developed form of thought, the whole process of abstraction has been dissolved. Arguments from theory or history are simply evidence of the incurable abstraction and generality of those who are putting them forward. This is a powerful and often forbidding system of abstraction, in which the concept of 'literature' becomes actively ideological.

Theory can do something against it by acknowledging that whatever else 'it' may be, literature may be the process and the formal composition within the social and formal properties of a language. The effective suppression of this process and its circumstances, achieved by shifting the concept to an undifferentiated equivalence with 'immediate living experience', is an extraordinary ideological feat. The very process that is specific, that of actual composition, has effectively disappeared or has been displaced to an internal and self-proving procedure in which writing of this IQ.n is believed to be 'immediate living experience' itself.

The modern term 'literature' did not emerge earlier than the fifteenth century and was not fully developed until the nineteenth century. The word itself came into English use in the fifteenth century, following French and Latin precedents. Literature as a new category was a specialization of the arts formerly categorized as rhetoric and grammar, a specialist in the material on text of the development of science, especially the book. It was eventually a more general category of poetry or earlier poesy, which had been general terms for imaginative composition but became predominantly specialized in relation to the development of literature.

Literature has evolved over time, with a focus on social class and the development of a generalized social concept. In its first extended sense, literature was defined as "no" learning and thus constituted an articulate social distinction. New political concepts of the "nation" and new valuations of the "vernacular" interacted with a persistent emphasis on "literature" as reading in the "classical" languages.

In the eighteenth century, literature was primarily a generalized social concept, expressing a minority level of educational achievement. It was considered a potential and experientially valuable form of literature, including philosophy, history, essays, and poems. The question of whether new eighteenth-century novels were "literature" was first approached by reference to the standards of "polite" or "humane" learning.

The definition of literature has persisted, losing its earliest sense of reading ability and reading experience, and becoming an apparently objective category of printed works of a certain quality. The concerns of a "literary editor" or a "literary supplement" would still be defined in this way. However, three complicating tendencies can be distinguished: defining a "high literary quality," an increasing specialization of "oflint" or "imaginative" works, and a development of the concept of "tradition" within national terms, resulting in the more effective definition of "a national literature."

The shift from "learning" to "taste" or "sensibility" was the final stage of a "shift frorii a para-national scholarly profession," with its original social base in the church and universities, and with the classical languages as its share of culture. Criticismsm, a critical and bourgeois categorization, developed from commentaries on literature within the "learned" criterion to the conscious exercise of "taste," "sensibility," and "discrimination."

The reliance on "sensibility" as a special form of an attempted emphasis on whole responses to problems was a significant part of the general tendency in the concept of hteratu:(e)tow an emphasis on die use or (~Q!!~PiC.JJQl!~l.G$>:Q~MJB~Ji!£!,JJ;_,) of v.rorks eiilian on their production. While the habits of use or characteristics were standard criteria of a relatively integrated class, they had their characteristic strengths and weaknesses.

The concept of literature and criticism has evolved over time, with the specialization of literature to 'creative' or 'imaginative' works becoming more complex. This process was driven by a new social order, capitalism, which challenged the pressures and limits of the traditional social order. The central Romantic assertions depended on these concepts, which had a significantly absolute range, from politics and nature to work and art.

Literature acquired a new resonance but was not yet a specialized resonance. It developed several concepts together, such as 'art' being shifted from its sense of a general human skill to a special province defined by 'imagination' and'sensibility', and 'aesthetic' shifting from its sense of general perception to a specialized category of the 'artistic' and the 'beautiful'.

Taste and'sensibility' had begun as categories of a social condition, and a new specialization assigned comparable but more elevated qualities to 'the works themselves', the 'aesthetic objects'. However, there was still one substantial uncertainty: whether the elevated qualities were to be assigned to the 'imaginative' dimension (access to a truth 'higher' or 'deeper' than'scientific' or 'objective' or 'everyday' reality) or to the 'aesthetic' dimension (beauties' of language or style).

The category that appeared objective as 'all printed books' and given a social-class foundation as 'polite learning' and the domain of 'taste' and'sensibility', now became a necessarily selective and self-defining area. Not all 'fiction' was 'imaginative' or not all 'literature' was 'Literature'.

Criticism gained a quite new and effectively primary importance, as it was now the only way of validating this specialized and selective category. It was at once a discrimination of the authentic 'great' or'major' works, with a consequent grading of'minor' works and an effective exclusion of 'bad' or 'negligible' works, and a practical realization and communication of the'major' values.

This development depended on an elaboration of the concept of 'tradition'. The idea of a 'national literature' had been growing strongly since the Renaissance, drawing on all the positive forces of cultural nationalism and its real achievements. Each of these rich and strong achievements had been actual; the 'national literature' and the'major language' were now indeed 'there'.

Within the specialization of 'literature', each was re-defined so that it could be brought to identity with the selective and self-defining 'literary values'. The 'national literature' soon ceased to be a history and became a tradition, resulting in local disputes about who and what should be included or excluded in the definition of this 'tradition'.

The categorization of literature has been a significant challenge for Marxism, with the author arguing that it has made little headway against it. Marx himself did not attempt to challenge this categorization, as his intelligent and informed discussions of actual literature are often cited defensively as evidence of his humane flexibility in these matters. The radical challenge of the emphasis on 'practical consciousness' was never carried through to the categories of 'literature' and 'the aesthetic', and there was always hesitation about the practical application of propositions held to be central and decisive almost everywhere else.

When such application was eventually made, it was of three main kinds: an attempted assimilation of 'literature' to 'ideology', an effective and important inclusion of 'popular literature'-the 'literature of the people'-as a necessary but neglected part of the 'literary tradition', and a sustained but uneven attempt to relate 'literature' to the social and economic history within which 'it' had been produced. Each of these last two attempts has been significant, as they have extended or revalued the category of 'literature' but never radically questioned or opposed.

For half a century now, there have been other and more significant tendencies, such as Lukacs' profound revaluation of 'the aesthetic', the Frankfurt School's sustained re-examination of 'artistic production', Goldmann's radical revaluation of the 'creative subject', and Marxist variants of formalism undertook radical redefinition of the processes of writing, with new uses of the concepts of'signs' and 'texts' and a significantly related refusal of 'literature' as a category.

The crucial theoretical break is the recognition of 'literature' as a specializing social and historical category. This does not diminish its importance, as it is a key concept of a major phase of a culture and decisive evidence of a particular form of the social development of language. However, in our own century, there has been a profound transformation of these relationships, directly connected with changes in the basic means of production. These changes are most evident in the new technologies of language, which have moved practice beyond the relatively uniform and specializing technology of print.

The specialized concept of 'literature', developed in precise forms of correspondence with a particular social class, organization of learning, and the appropriate particular technology of print, should now be invoked in retrospective, nostalgic, or reactionary moods as a form of opposition to what is correctly seen as a new phase of civilization. What can then be seen as happening in each transition is a historical development of social language itself: finding new means, forms, and definitions of a changing practical consciousness. Many of the active values of 'literature' have then to be seen, not as tied to the concept, which came to limit and summarize them, but as elements of a continuing and changing practice moving beyond its old forms.