Critical exhaustion in the “old world”. A postcard from Raymond Williams.
“France, you know, is a bad bourgeois novel.” I could see how far he was right: the modes of dramatisation, of fictionalisation, which are active as social and cultural conventions, as ways not only of seeing but of organising reality, are as he said: a bourgeois novel: its human types still fixed but losing some of their conviction; its human actions it struggles for property and possession, for careers and careering relationships, still as limited as ever, but still bitterly holding the field, in an interactive public reality and public consciousness. ‘Well, yes.’ I said politely, ‘England’s a bad bourgeois novel too. And New York is a bad metropolitan novel. But there’s one difficulty, at least I find it a difficulty. You can’t send them back to the library. You’re stuck with them. You have to read them over and over.
‘But critically’, he said, with an engaging alertness. ‘Still reading them’. I said.
From his essay Drama in a Dramatised society.
