The Longest Cultural Journey: Raymond Williams and French Theory

Abstract

I want here to consider the problematic relationship between the thought of Raymond Williams and the tendencies in French literary theory since the nineteen-fifties.' It was Williams himself who remarked that the crossing of the Channel must be one of the longest cultural journeys in existence by comparison with the physical distance.2 In considering Williams's engagement with French thought of, broadly speaking, the structuralist and poststructuralist variety, we shall find an acute sense of that distance: a certain sympathy that is partly an antipathy to the enemies in Britain of that kind of thought, and partly perhaps a solidarity with some of those in Britain who make use of it, combined with a distrust of its potential to renovate the struggle with those problems of form and history in culture to which his own work is so signal a contribution. Increasingly Williams moved back towards the Marxist tradition he had distanced himself from in his path-breaking early works. In so doing, he was moving against the current. Just as many Marxists were beginning, in Lyotard's phrase, to drift away from the orthodoxy with which they had striven to coincide, Williams began more and more to systematize his relationship to the Marxist tradition. Now, when, all over the world, the collapse of Marxism is being proclaimed, as a result of events that took place less than two years after Williams's death, his loss seems more and more tragic and his never-to-be-formulated analysis of the collapse of actually existing socialism in Eastern Europe more actively perceived as a lack.