JEAN-JACQUES LECERCLE Structures of Feeling, Literature and Cultural Change In the field of English studies, considering the relationships between literature and cultural change will inevitably involve re-visiting the work of Raymond Williams. It is my contention that Williams’s main contribution to our conceptual toolbox, the concept of structure of feeling, is essential for any account of these relationships. The best definition of the concept is to be found in the chapter of Marxism and Literature that is devoted to it: We are talking about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; especially effective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating continuity. We are then defining these elements as a ‘structure’: as a set, with specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension. Yet we are also defining a social experience which is still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating, but which in analysis [...] has its emergent, connecting and dominant characteristics, indeed its specific hierarchies. 1 The passage is typical of Williams’s often irritating style, with its convolutions and tropes (note the trope of antimetabole: a structure of feeling deals with feeling as thought and thought as felt). Yet the importance of the concept is clear, as it seeks to provide a solution, in both senses of the term (the solution of a problem and a chemical solution, or dissolution) to the twin contrasts of the rational vs. the emotional and the collective vs. the individual. For a structure of feeling focuses on the affects that come with thought (thought as felt) and yet, being a structure, it is articulated, always already an object of thought (feeling as thought). And a structure of feeling, being what forms and informs lived experience, is materialised in individual consciousness and yet, being a structure, it is always already social, a ‘social experience,’ with its articulation and hierarchies, at the very moment when it is ‘taken to be private.’ This provides a solution to the old Marxist difficulty in making sense of the individual and the idiosyncratic (i.e. conscious and lived experience), as the concept combines what could be a development of Marx’s sixth thesis on Feuerbach (“In its reality, [the essence of man] is the ensemble 1 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 132. JEAN-JACQUES LECERCLE 40 of social relations”) 2 But perhaps the most interesting aspect of the concept is its temporal slant, already noticeable in the passage I have quoted: “practical consciousness of a present kind,“ “a social experience which is still in process,“ “which has its emergent [...] characteristics.” This is where the concept is going to be useful if we are trying to approach cultural change. with the personal and subjective interpretation of such relations in the individual consciousness (and since we are still within the ambit of Marxism, in this potential contradiction, the social aspect is dominant, as consciousness, being practical consciousness, is always already social). As is well known, the concept accompanied Williams all through the evolution of his thought. It already appears in his second book, The Long Revolution, where it is defined as “the culture of a period,“ and more specifically of a generation. 3 On the face of it, this temporal distribution of dominant, residual and emergent is a commentary of the classic Marxist analysis of social formations as combining elements of various modes of production, which, qua modes of production, are ordered in a temporal sequence. Thus, contemporary Britain will be under the domination of the capitalist mode of production, but it will still contain survivals of the feudal mode of production, and anticipations of what might be called the communist mode. And this is not only true at the level of social stratification, production and exchange, but also at the level of representations, of elements of consciousness, of knowledge and belief - this is what Williams, who famously sought to dissolve the canonical distinction of economic base and ideological superstructure, is primarily concerned with. What dominates is the current dominant ideology; the residual dwells in various traditions; and the emergent in the utopian impulse, but not exclusively, as cultural emergence is a continuous process in a society in a constant state of change: “By ‘emergent’ I mean that new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationship are continually being created.” At this stage, the concept is still too broad and too vague (there is only one structure of feeling per generation, and the definition of this “generation” is rather vague). But in Marxism and Literature, the definition is stricter, especially in its temporal aspects, as the chapter devoted to the concept is preceded by a chapter entitled “Dominant, residual and emergent.” 4 2 Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, in Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1965), 646. Structures of feeling, therefore, are a mixture of the sedimented, the conjunctural and the emergent: the whole problematic of cultural change is implicit in this unholy mixture. 3 R. Williams, The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), 64-5. 4 Williams, Marxism and Literature, 123. Structures of Feeling, Literature and Cultural Change 41 However, in structures of feeling, even as the social dominates the individual, the emergent dominates the sedimented. The object of the concept, therefore, is, explicitly so, to conceptualize cultural change, that is a change in “institutions, formations, and beliefs.” 5 Such change has three characteristics. First, as we saw, it is social before it is personal, a form of social experience: it goes beyond the small individual changes in beliefs and representations, it involves the whole of a culture, by way of its structures of feeling. The other two characteristics concern the temporality of the change. For cultural change is what Williams calls a “change of presence” 6 - an obvious feature while the change is being lived, but a feature that is retained even after, as the still somehow present trace of an experience that has been lived, a chemical precipitation of past experience. It would seem, therefore, that cultural change looks backward, in other words that it is sedimented, loaded with tradition and survivals. But because it is a process, a movement, it has of necessity an emergent aspect, which is the dominant aspect, and therefore looks forward to the future, even if it does not do so explicitly, in articulated representations and beliefs: “Although they are emergent or pre-emergent [such changes] do not have to await definition, classification, or rationalization before they exert palpable pressures and set effective limits on experience and on action.” 7 What we have here is an image of the operation of cultural change, with its triple temporality, in which the emergent aspect is dominant, and the present, or the conjunctural, is the receptacle of the contradiction between the sedimented and the emergent. But what is not yet clear is the cause or motor of cultural change, or rather its immediate and precise cause, as the general causation - we are still in the ambit of classical Marxism - will be found in the determination in the last instance of the superstructure by the base. And like most Western Marxists, Althusser for instance, although in his own inimitable way, Williams is trying to give a more precise meaning to that canonical phrase, “determination in the last instance”. And Williams immediately adds that “such changes are changes in structures of feeling” - the object of the concept is indeed to make the underlying logic of cultural change accessible. This is where the detour through literature will be of prime importance, as the contribution of literature to changes in structures of feeling may provide an answer to the question of causation. To put it in a nutshell, the centrality of literature to cultural change provides a mediation between the general determination of the superstructure by the base and the social experience, which, being lived and felt, will percolate down to the individual 5 Williams, Marxism and Literature, 131. 6 Williams, Marxism and Literature, 132. 7 Williams, Marxism and Literature, 132. JEAN-JACQUES LECERCLE 42 agent, as the structure of feeling, a constraint on experience and action, but an enabling constraint, will be both a reflection of the general change and an agent in it (in other words, there is a relative autonomy of cultural change, as there is a relative autonomy of the ideological superstructure in relation to the social and economic base). But it still remains to be seen why literature has a specific potential to fulfil this mediating role in cultural change. For Williams, works of literature are central to structures of feeling. His great book, The Country and the City, 8 This is due to a simple but overwhelming fact - that works of literature are works of language. The central image, as well as the main motor, of cultural change (in its relative autonomy) is change in language. This is where Williams’ main intellectual opponent is structuralism, which was dominant, at least in linguistics, when he was writing, and which, with considerable hindsight, he consistently opposed from a historicist point of view. Structural linguistics, as we know, is good on the description of the system of Saussurean langue, of which it gives a synchronic account, and rather weak on linguistic change, as, under the name of diachrony, it can only think the change produced within the system, but not the linguistic change due to external factors, such as society and history. Williams, quite rightly to my mind, maintains, against the principle of immanence of mainstream structural linguistics, that language is of the world and in the world, and cannot be understood in isolation from it. So for Williams, the study of language must take the form of a historical semantics, as developed in the “vocabulary of culture and society” that Keywords is: “The emphasis on history as a way of understanding contemporary problems of meaning and structures of meaning, is a basic choice from a position of historical materialism rather than from the now more powerful positions of objective idealism or non-historical (synchronic) structuralism.” which in a way is a history of English literature centering on these two motifs, is deeply informed by the concept of the structure of feeling: the history of literature is a history of structures of feeling. Literary works are central expressions of such structures, they inscribe them - and as such enable the lived experience to survive beyond its original conjuncture - and they actively contribute to them, in so far as they are not merely reflections of cultural change (static elements of the structure of feeling) but actors in it (as emergent expressions of the changes in lived experience). 9 This emphasis on history, combined with an emphasis on language as activity, or practice, is what, according to Williams, should inform the Marxist position on language. 10 8 R. Williams, The Country and the City (London: Paladin, 1973). In what is the sketch of a programme for a historical materialist approach to language, we accordingly 9 R. Williams, Keywords (London: Fontana, 1976), 20-21. 10 Williams, Marxism and Literature, 21. Structures of Feeling, Literature and Cultural Change 43 note the phrase “structures of meaning”: what the system of language grammaticalizes (in other words sediments) as structures of meaning, literature captures as structures of feeling. Cultural change as change in structures of feeling, therefore, is best captured in changes in language, which inscribe them: The process [of cultural change] can be directly observed in the history of a language. In spite of substantial and at some levels decisive continuities of grammar and vocabulary, no generation speaks quite the same language as its predecessors. The difference can be defined in terms of additions, deletions, and modifications, but these do not exhaust it. What really changes is something quite general, over a wide range, and the description that often fits the change best is the literary term ‘style’. 11 The witness of linguistic change, and the instrument of capture of new structures of feeling, is literary style. Literature, therefore, plays a crucial part in the expression of structures of feeling and of cultural change. We may wonder why that is. Again, the reason is simple: because literature is the art of language (which means that it is the most complex and rewarding set of language games). And it is a constitutive characteristic of human language that it can state what is not the case, in other words fiction. And it does this, in hypothetical sentences, because it can state what is no longer, or not yet, the case. In other words, human language, and human language alone, can express the three times of experience, past, present and future. And literature is the set of language games that not only turns this into fiction (“Once upon a time...” is the motto of fiction), but is also capable (this is the essence of style) to capture the three times of the language in which it is written: the sedimented tradition of past generations (i.e. the structures of feeling the writer inherits), the current experience of language as it is lived and felt by the present generation, and the emergent features that announce the coming changes in language because literary texts are intuitively aware (“in an embryonic phase before [they] can become fully articulate,“ as Williams phrases it) 12 It will be objected that “style” is not necessarily, or not only a literary term: the English use of the term “stylistics” corresponds to the study of various registers and collective styles as well as the individual style of the great writer. But, apart from the fact that the subject of stylistics, from Leo Spitzer onwards, has developed through the study of literary texts, literary style has one particular characteristic: it captures the moment when the “social experiences in solution,” of the shifts in general cumtural experience and feeling. 13 11 Williams, Marxism and Literature, 131. as Williams calls his emergent structures of feeling, passes from relative unconsciousness to a form of as yet unarticu- 12 Williams, Marxism and Literature, 131. 13 Williams, Marxism and Literature, 133. JEAN-JACQUES LECERCLE 44 lated but already felt consciousness. This is why literary style is the best witness of cultural change: because it captures the moment of emergence of a new structure of feeling: we understand why Deleuze, in order to define style, consistently used Proust’s famous statement that the writer writes his own language as if it were foreign. 14 Let me sum up my argument in a number of theses. Thesis 1: structures of feeling mediate between a number of classic dichotomies: (i) between the emotional and the rational (between feeling and thought); (ii) between the individual and the social (between lived experience and articulated structure); (iii) between the base and the superstructure (cultural change is determined in the last instance by changes in the base, but as superstructural change, it enjoys relative autonomy - there is a history of structures of feeling). Thesis 2. Structures of feeling are dynamic processes, and their specific mode of temporality is central to them. A structure of feeling involves sedimented, conjunctural and emergent elements in a continuous process of change. Thesis 3. Therefore, structures of feeling are the best embodiment and expression of cultural change. Thesis 4. The triple temporality of structures of feeling is based on the triple temporality of language, as human language is able to state what is currently the case, what is no longer the case and what is not yet the case. Thesis 5. Literature is the set of language games that best express and exploit the triple temporality of language by constructing fiction out of it (by stating what is not the case) and by capturing the three times of language as bearer of lived experience (the traditional, or sedimented, elements of language; the current state of the language; and the emergent elements that announce the changes in language, as one generation succeeds another). Thesis 6. This capture (both expression and exploitation) is achieved by literary style, which is the moment when the not yet articulated structure of feeling becomes aware of itself, as the new generation learns to inhabit its own language. Since this is somewhat abstract, let us turn to a case study. As we saw, a structure of feeling, according to Williams, is the conception of the world of a generation. And no generation ever suffered a more sudden and brutal change in its conception of the world than the generation that fought the First World War. The word ‘brutal’ is used advisedly: it alludes to George Mosse’s analysis of the brutalisation of European societies by the war, which resulted 14 G. Deleuze, L’abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze (Paris: Editions de Montparnasse, 1997), “S, c’est style.” Structures of Feeling, Literature and Cultural Change 45 in the rise of fascist and national socialist movements. 15 And this brutal form of cultural change took the form in a shift of structures of feeling as defined by Williams. The definitive book on the subject is Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory. 16 The first moment of the analysis describes the collision between the brutality of the events of the war and the language available to express them: What it describes is a shift in structure of feeling which has two striking characteristics: it is a change in language, and it involves a change in literary style. For the Great War was, as the title of one of his chapters suggests, a “literary war” (the chapter is, of course, entitled “Oh what a literary war! ”). The collision was one between the events and the language used for over a century to celebrate the idea of progress. Logically, there is no reason why the English language could not perfectly well render the actuality of trench warfare: it is rich in terms like blood, terror, agony, madness, shit, cruelty, murder, sell-out, pain and hoax, as well as phrases like legs blown off, intestines gushing out over his hands, screaming all night, bleeding to death from the rectum, and the like. Logically, one supposes, there’s no reason why a language devised by man should be inadequate to describe any of man’s works. The difficulty was in admitting that the war had been made by men and was being continued ad infinitum by them. The problem was less one of “language” than of gentility and optimism: it was less a problem of “linguistics” than of rhetoric. 17 The rest of the chapter gives countless examples of such linguistic inadequacy - of the inability to describe the new experience except in the clichés of sedimented language. And the explanation Fussell suggests is not only that the new experience was unsayable in the old language, but that nobody (meaning the recipients of the soldiers’ letters) was “very interested in the bad news they had to report.” 18 Literature is directly involved in performing this shift. Fussell notes that the language available - the language in which and through which the shift in structure of feeling was effected - was a literary language because of the social function that literature fulfilled in the historical conjuncture: So there was emotional as well as linguistic resistance to the expression of the radically new - in other words a shift in structure of feeling was necessary to give word to the new lived experience: the emotional acceptance of the new experience was first available to those who directly underwent it and then transmitted to the whole of the Englishspeaking community through the change in attitude to language, which shifted the limits of the sayable. 15 George Mosse, Fallen Soldiers. Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 16 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). 17 Fussell, 169-70. 18 Fussell, 170. JEAN-JACQUES LECERCLE 46 By 1914, it was possible for soldiers to be not merely literate but vigorously literary, for the Great War occurred at a special historical moment when two “liberal” forces were powerfully coinciding in England. On the one hand the belief in the educating powers of classical and English literature was still extremely strong. On the other, the appeal of popular education and “self-improvement” was at its peak, and such education was still largely conceived in humanistic terms.[...] The intersection of these two forces, the one “aristocratic,” the other “democratic,” established an atmosphere of public respect for literature unique in modern times. 19 So the structure of feeling of that generation, a situation “unique in modern times,” was formed and informed by literature. And this is where the shift, induced by the inadequacy of the available language and the clash between the old language and the new historical experience, occurred: in literature, and, in the case of England, primarily in poetry. I am suggesting that the importance of the war poets - an importance now universally acknowledged - is due to the fact that their work registers this shift in structure of feeling. To put it briefly these poets register a middle stage between on the one hand the Georgian bucolic of the “And is there honey still for tea? ” type 20 and the imperialist heroic of the “Play up! play up! and play the game! ” type 21 The following is probably Rupert Brooke’s best known poem, The Soldier: and, on the other hand, the new poetry of The Waste Land or the imagists. If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust that England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, A body of England’s, breathing English air, Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. And think, this heart, all evil shed away, A pulse in the eternal mind, no less Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, In hearts at peace, under an English heaven. 22 This is still essentially the diction of Georgian poetry, an elegy which takes the form of a pastoral. It will be remembered that Brooke died at the very beginning of the war and did not experience trench warfare: although the 19 Fussell, 157. 20 Rupert Brooke writing on the old vicarage at Grantchester, The Poetical Works (London: Faber, 1946), 72. 21 H. Newbolt, Vitai Lampada, in Poetry of the First World War, ed. Maurice Hussey (London: Longmans, 1967), 15. 22 Brooke, 23. Structures of Feeling, Literature and Cultural Change 47 language is simple (a simplicity that explains the success of the sonnet), it is still the old language of poetry, the language that the new experience shattered. And this is, in an equally successful and famous poem, where the new language appears: What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns. Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle Can patter out their hasty orisons. No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells, Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, -- The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells; And bugles calling them from sad shires. What candles may be held to speed them all? Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes. The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall; Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds, And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds. 23 What is striking in this poem is that the change in language, expressing the authenticity of the novel experience, is only partial: it is only felt in the first stanza of the sonnet, especially in the violence of the last words of the first line, “die as cattle,“ which certainly does not belong to the ancient diction (it is one of those phrases existing in the English language which Fussell lists, which were not available for the literary expression of the experience). Here we can see the new language emerging from the old, and with it the new structure of feeling. But this expression of anger (the anger is not restricted to the guns) becomes more subdued in the second stanza, where the sustained metaphor of the graveless corpse deprived of ceremonial burial becomes more traditionally elegiac. The genre and form take over to produce one of the great poems of the English language, but one that remains within the ambit of the poetic tradition. The new experience, the new structure of feeling, are present in the poem, and are immediately retranslated in the terms and the emotions of the old language and the old structure of feeling. This is not the case for all of Owen’s war poems: one will remember the first lines of Dulce Et Decorum Est: “Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, / Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge [.]” 24 23 Wilfred Owen, Anthem for Doomed Youth, Collected Poems (London: Chatto & Windus, 1963), 44. Here the language of everyday life, which is also the language of the new experience, pervades the poem, suggesting in the deliberately crudest terms the traipsing 24 Owen, 55. JEAN-JACQUES LECERCLE 48 line of soldiers who are not yet blinded by gas, as in Sir John Sargent’s famous picture, Gassed. 25 But rather than this well-known poem, I shall quote, as an example of the new language and the new structure of feeling that it expresses, the first two stanzas of Isaac Rosenberg’s poem, Dead Man’s Dump: The plunging limbers over the shattered track Racketed with their rusty freight, Stuck out like many crowns of thorns, And the rusty stakes like sceptres old To stay the flood of brutish men Upon our brothers dear. The wheels lurched over sprawled dead But pained them not, though their bones crunched. Their shut mouths made no moan. They lie there huddled, friend and foeman, Man born of man and born of woman, And shells go crying over them From night till night and now. 26 This is how Rosenberg describes the occasion of the poem: “I’ve written some lines suggested by going out wiring, or rather carrying out wire up to the line on limbers and running over dead bodies lying about.” 27 So the speaker is on an artillery limber and those “rusty stakes” (l. 4) are barbed wire - and the limber is actually driven over dead bodies, the bones of which crunch as it passes. And the chute of the poem reiterates the theme, as the limber narrowly misses “one not long dead”: So we crashed round the bend, We heard his weak scream, We heard his very last sound, And our wheels grazed his dead face. 28 In this text, we catch the essence of the new structure of feeling, a form of authenticity, of truth to a radically changed historical experience, giving the lie to both the irenic Georgian pastoral and to the emphatic rhetoric of colonial heroism (hence Owen’s “old lie,“ dulce et decorum est pro patria mori): not only is the poem true to an actual scene, brutally and vividly evoked, but it is an emotional response, sublimated into a work of art, to an experience that is unbearable, impossible, the sheer horror of an encounter with what Jacques Lacan calls the Real. And we understand the necessity of the new, more realistic, more brutal everyday language, to express the new structure of feeling. 25 See Sue Malvern, Modern Art, Britain and the Great War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 97. 26 I. Rosenberg, Selected Poems and Letters (London: Enitharmon Press, 2001), 101. 27 Rosenberg, 164. 28 Rosenberg, 103. Structures of Feeling, Literature and Cultural Change 49 Rosenberg called his poems “actual transcripts from the battlefield,” 29 the transcription of a lived experience that precludes a too conventional language and a too traditional literary form. As we read the poem, we become aware of the breaking down of the poetic form, as the old language is inadequate to express a radically new situation. And this goes far beyond the deliberate use of a cruder vocabulary: the poem as a whole belongs to no recognizable genre (it is not a sonnet, unlike the first two poems I quoted), there is no regularity of metre (the first line is an iambic pentameter, the second a tetrameter, the third is made up of a spondee and three iambs, etc.), and at certain points in the poem, even the syntax breaks down. In the philosophical language of Alain Badiou, one might say that the function of the new structure of feeling and its new language is to enable the poet to express an “event.” 30 I think, in concluding, that the example of the appearance of the new structure of feeling expressed by the war poets enables us to understand the contribution of literature to cultural change. Literature is a prime agent of cultural change because it is the set of language games that best expresses what Jacques Rancière calls le partage du sensible, the distribution of the sensible, the a priori framework of sensibility in a given historical conjuncture, which determines places in the social whole but also frames what is sayable in the conjuncture. 31 Hence the political function of literature: it is not only the reflection, but also the agent of cultural change. 29 Rosenberg, 166. 30 Alain Badiou, L’Etre et l’événement (Paris: Seuil, 1988). 31 Jacques Rancière, Le partage du sensible (Paris: La fabrique, 2000). JEAN-JACQUES LECERCLE 50 Works Cited Badiou, Alain. L’Etre et l’événement. Paris: Seuil, 1988. Brooke, Rupert. The Poetical Works. London: Faber and Faber, 1946. Deleuze, Gilles. L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze. Paris: Editions du Montparnasse, 1997. Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. Hussey, Maurice, ed. Poetry of the First World War. London: Longmans, 1967. Malvern, Sue. Modern Art, Britain and the Great War. New Haven/ London: Yale University Press, 2004. Marx, Karl & Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1965. Mosse, George. Fallen Soldiers. Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Owen, Wilfred. Collected Poems. London: Chatto & Windus, 1963. Rancière, Jacques. Le partage du sensible. Paris: La fabrique, 2000. Rosenberg, Isaac. Selected Poems and Letters. London: Enitharmon Press, 2001. Williams, Raymond. The Long Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965. ---. The Country and the City. London: Paladin, 1973. ---. Keywords. London: Fontana. 1976. ---. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.