williams - authors.pdf

7/27/2019 williams - authors.pdf

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AtJTHORS~(1977) _

From several angles, within a social perspective, the figure of the authorbecomes problematic. To see individuation as a social process is to set limitsto the isolation but also perhaps to the autonomy of the-individual author.To see form as formative has a similar effect. The familiar question inliterary history, 'what did this author do to this form?' is often reversed,becoming 'what did this form do to this author?' Meanwhile, within thesequestions, there is the difficult general problem of the nature of the active'subject'.The word 'author,' much more than 'writer' or 'poet' or 'dramatist' or'novelist,' carries a specific sense of an answer to these questions. It is truethat it is now most often used as a convenient general terrri, to cover writers6fdifferent kinds. But in its root and in some of its surviving associations itcarries a sense of decisive origination, rather than -simply, as in 'writer' or inmore specific terms, a description of an activity. Its most general early usesincluded a regular reference to God or Christ, as the authors of man'scondition, and its continuing association with 'authority' is significant. Itsliterary use, in medieval and Renaissance thought, was closely connectedwith a sense of 'authors' as 'authorities': the 'classical' writers and their texts.In the modem period there is an observable relation between the idea of anauthor and the idea of 'literary property': notably in the organization ofauthors to protect their work, by copyright and similar means, within abourgeois market.

Two tendencies in Marxist thought bear on these questions. There isthe well-known emphasis on the changing social situation of the writer. Inits most accessible form this points to such changes as that from patronage

* Extract from Marxism and Literature (1977), by Raymond Williams, pp. 192-198,Oxford University Press.


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421AUTHORS

to the~ookselling market: a significant, ,complicated, and continuing history.BUL!his~histo1j of changing conditions can be' seen'as a~second~Drderproble~: ~ow the 'author distributes his work. The more interesting indication takes lthe .active social relationships one or .more .stagesback, showingfirst the. effect of demand onwhat isviablY'produced; under patronage.orwit:hi.1:1.alarticular mmket; and second the more internal. effects - thespecific:piessures' and limits - within actual composition. Theeevidence ofboth kinds of effect is extensive, and can never reasonably be overlooked.But even,where it is fully admitted, the idea of the author, in all but its mostromantic forms, is essentially untouched: The author has 'his' work 'to dd,but he finds difficulties in 'getting it supported or sold, o.r he cannot do iteXactlyas he would have wished;'Jbecause of the~pressures ~nd limits of thesocial relationships on which; asa producer, he depends. This is,. in' thesimplest sense, the political economy of writing: a necessary addition to anyreal history of literatli1:~but stillnO' more than an addition.

The second t~ridericytransforms the whol~ problem. It points to thefig}l1:eof th!= ..mdiVidual author, as tc; the 'related .figure of the individual~ubject, as aCBaracteristic form ofbomgeofs thought. Nominis the authorof himself, in the ab~olut.e sens~,whid.l' these ,pescriptions imply. As aphysicalmqiVidual he~is o'[cqurse. ::;pecific~though" within' a d


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422THEORIES: A READER

which initsown ways, ahd especially in the.!):Ia!ket,.cancbe~ome ill.practicecruel and malign.Anyversion of individual autonomy which fails torecf)gnize~or which radically displaces, the social conditions .inherent in cany practicalindividuality, but which ,has then, -at another level, to reintroduce thesesocial conditions as the decisive. 'practicarhusiness' of the everydaY_oWorld,can lead at best to self-contradiction, at worst to hypocrisy or despair. It canbecomecomplicit with a process which1:ejects, deforms; or actually destroysindividuals in the very name of individualism. Yet the concept has, correspondingly, a certain strength; Within. its explicit limits it is well placed .todefend one sense of individual autonomy against certain forms of theisocialwhichI,-have become themselves' deformed~--In the central tradition ofMarxism the separated ~concepts of 'individual' 'and 'society' are radicallyunified, but reciprocally and ,indeed dialectically:-

.;-- .:;;.-,

It is above a).!.ecessary to,avoid. po~tulating 'society' once more as an,abstraction confrontingthejndividual. The,individual)s a social being. Themanifestation,o{his .life - even wh~n it does nqt appear directly in theform of a social manifestaliton,


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423AUTHORS

definition, for example 'the ideal whole,'are unsatisfactory, and seem indeedto be residual from earlier, non-materialist, forms of thought.) It must besaid, first, that recognition of all the levels of sociality - from the eXternalforms of the political economy of literature, through the inherited forms ofgenres, notations, and conventions, to the constitutive forms of the socialproduction of 'consciousness - is inevitable. But it is at the level of theconstitutive that precision is especially necessary. The most interestingcontribution is Goldmann's analysis (1970, 94-120) of thee 'collectivesubject.' It is a'difficult term, and we must first define its distinction fromthe other uses of 'collective.' Goldmann was careful to distinguish it fromRomantic ideas of-the 'absolute collective' (of which the Jungian 'collectiveuncon'scious'"is a modem example), in relation to which the individual ismerely an 'epiphenomenon. He distinguished it also from what we call the'relative collective' of Durkheim, where collective consciousness is situated'outside, above, or alongside' individual consciousness. What'is actuallybeing defined is not's? much a 'collective' as a 'trans-individual' subject, intwo senses. '".,There is the relatively simple case of cultural creation by two or moreindividuals who are in active relations with' each other, and whose workcannot be reduced to the mere Sunl of their separate individualcontributions. This is so 'common in cultural history, in .5=aseswhere it isclear that something new happens in the very process of conscious" cooperation, that it does not seem to present any serious difficulties. But it isfrom just this realiz~tiop. of a relatively well-known experience that thesecond and more difficult sense ?f a collective subject is developed. Thisgoes beyond


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424TH E 0 R I E S: ARE A D E R

consider it as an activedevelopment.in time, that ,different elements of therange seem to apply more or less closely in different phases.

It is then an open question whether the significant relation, at any onepoint, is with the 'trans-mdividual' fOmi or structure, or with the abstractedindividual. Or, to put it another way, the 'development' of an author can be(subsequently) 'summarized as separate, to be related only when it iscomplete to other complete and separate-'developments.' Alternatively, thisvery process -of development can be grasped- as acomplex of active relations, within which the emergence of .-anindividu?l project, and the tealhistory _of other contemporary projects -and of c the developing forms _andstructures, are continuously and substantially interactive. This latter procedureis the most significant element- in modeTl! Maqist accounts of culturalcreation, as distinct both from the better",known Marxist,version in whichan auth0l: is the 'representative: of a dass or tendency or situation, to )'Thichhe can tlien be substantially reduceci, ancLfrom h()urgeols cultural history inwhich, against a 'backgro_und' of shared facts, ideas, and influenees, everyindividual (or in its more common bourgeois form, every signijicantindividual) creates his quite separate w9rk, to be subsequently comparedwith other separate lives and works. - - . ,_

The character of the problem can be clearly seen in one literary form~the biography. It is a common experience when reading the biography of ~selected individual, in a given time and place;' to ~ee not only Jlls illdividualdevelopment but a more general develophie~t _in which~ w!1Pll !he convelltions of theform, other people and events~forin round him and in thiscrUcial sense are defined by him. This is a relatively satisfactory rea.:dingexperience until we read other biographies of'the same tinle and place, .andrealize the displacements of interest, perspective, and relationwhithwemust now be conscious of, but which, with thaf first biography, we -hadahnost unwittingly taken as natural. The momentary minor figUreIS now tllevery centre of interest; the key events appear'and disappear; the decisiverelationships shift. We are not likely then willingly to go back to'somegeneral account in which all these emphatic'identities are merged to an'impersonal' class or group. But neither can we stay as we are, with a meremiscellaneity or even contradiction of identities. Slowly, and reaching beyondthe very edges of the form, we can gain the real sense of living individuals inevery kind of relationship and in certain significantly common situations,and we come to know that we cannot understand their whole lives simplyby adding each life to the other. At thispoinf we begin to-see the relationsnot only the interpersonal but also the truly social - within which (but notnecessarily subject to which) the distinguishable identities and phases ofidentity developed.


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425AUTHORS

TIlls procedure can be summarized as a reciprocal discovery of thetruly social in the in&\t"idua~and the truly individual in the social. In thesignificant case of authorship it leads to dynamic senses of social formation,of individual development, and of cultural creation, which have to be seenas in radical relationship without any categorical or procedural assumptionof priorities. Taken together, these senses allow a fully constitutive definition of authorship, and its specification is then an open question: that is tosay, a set of specific historical questions, which will give different kinds ofanswer in different actual situations.

This is my only difference, on this point, from Goldmann, who,following Lukacs's distinction of 'actual' and 'possible' consciousness, seesgreat writers as those who integrate a vision at the level of the possible('complete') consciousness of a social formation, while most writers reproduce the contents of ('incomplete') actual consciousness. TIlls can be true,and such a theory has the advantage that integration can be relatively simplydemonstrated at the level of form. But it need not always be true, for itincludes a very classical presupposition. The real relations of the individual,the trans-individual, and the social may include radical tension anddisturbance, even actual and irresolvable contradictions of a conscious kind,as often as they include integration. Abstracted notions of integral formmust not be used to override this.

Moreover we have necessarily to be concemedwith cultural creationas a whole, and not only with the significant cases of the homology offormation and (ideal) form. Indeed any procedure which categoricallyexcludes the specificity of all individuals and the formative relevance of allreal relations, by whatever formula of assigned significance, is in the endreductive. We do not have to look for special cases to prove a theory. Thetheory that matters, in the known and irreducible variations of history, isthat realization of the socially constitutive which allows us to see specificauthorship in its true range: from the genuinely reproductive (in which theformation is the author), through the wholly or partly articulative (in whichthe authors are the formation), to the no less important cases of therelatively distanced articulation or innovation (often related to residual oremergent or pre-emergent formations) in which creativity may be relativelyseparated, or indeed may occur at the farthest end of that living continuumbetween the fully formed class or group and the active individual project. Inthis at once social and historical perspective, the abstract figure of 'theauthor' is then returned to these varying and in princzple variable situations,relationships, and responses.

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