Raymond Williams: Feeling for Structures, Voicing "History"

Abstract

How else could we entitle that word now, except in speechmarks, under the sign of vocative instability, outside any assumed consensus? As perhaps the most over-employed item in the vocabulary of literary-critical and cultural analysis, may well also be the least decisive. We return to history, work toward history, and espouse a historical method, but few of us can say exactly what we mean by history, except in the most gestural way. Those of us who worry about it at all find ourselves necessarily mired in complex theoretical retractions and modifications, bewildering enough to sponsor some fairly radical insecurities. Others, sensing a probable dead-end street, run for the cover of the kind of new historicism that looks to history as to a safe and approved harbor, a place where one may sleep peacefully, lulled by anecdotal stories, after tossing on the stormy seas of deconstructive and theoretical Marxist uncertainty. In Keywords, Raymond Williams had a go at saying not what history is but what it has been taken to mean, and he offered a compromise, if not quite a solution, in the particularities of showing and telling, ostension and invocation: History itself retains its whole range, and still, in different hands, teaches or shows us most kinds of knowable past and almost every kind of imaginable future.' The urgency of history is not, then, in its wholeness or totality but in its immediate applicability to a range of options for reading the past and projecting the future. It instructs and points out; it is part of the present. In the saddest and most untimely sense of the word, Raymond Williams himself is now history, and in the aftermath of his death one feels a temptation to believe in the possibility of saying something final about him, about his place in history, his understanding of history, even, perhaps, about Raymond Williams and history, in the grandest of senses. This is of course an illusion. Even the most minimally sophisticated and merely textual hermeneutics suffices to warn us that the object will shift in accordance with the various kinds of attention that are focused upon it. And Williams's texts are unusually polyphonous both in their genres (novels, criticism, political journalism, etc.) and in the flexibility of their subject positions and discursive attitudes (inside and outside Marxism, Leavisism, the Labour Party, literary theory, and so on). There will be a

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