precise deformation; indeed, against capitalism itself. And yet this was not idealism—as assertion of the primacy of other values. On the contrary, just as the deformation could be understood, at its roots, only by historical analysis of a particular kind of economy, so the attempt to overcome and surpass it lay not in isolated witness or in separated activity but in practical work to find, to assert and to establish more human social ends in more human political and economic means.
At the most practical level it was easy for me to agree. But then the whole point of thinking in terms of a totality is the realization that we are part of it; that our own consciousness, our work, our methods, are then critically at stake. And in the particular field of literary analysis there was this obvious difficulty: that most of the work we had to look at was the product of just this epoch of reified consciousness, so that what looked like the theoretical breakthrough might become, quite quickly, the methodological trap. I cannot yet say this finally about Lukács, since I still don’t have access to all his work; but in some of it, at least, the major insights of History and Class-Consciousness, which he has now partly disavowed, do not get translated into critical practice, and certain cruder operations—essentially still those of base and superstructure—keep reappearing. I still read Goldmann collaboratively and critically asking the same question, for I am sure the practice of totality is still for any of us, at any time, profoundly and even obviously difficult.
Yet advances have been made, and I want to acknowledge them. In particular Goldmann’s concepts of structure, and his distinctions of kinds of consciousness—based on but developed from Lukács—seem to me very important. And they are important above all for the relation between literary and social studies. At a simpler level, many points of contact between literature and sociology can be worked on: studies of the reading public, for example, where literary analysis of the works being read and sociological analysis of the real formations of the public have hardly yet at all been combined. Or the actual history of writers, as changing historical groups, in any full critical relation to the substance of their works. Or the social history of literary forms, in their full particularity and variety but also in the complex of their relation with other formations. I attempted each of these kinds of analysis in a preliminary way in The Long Revolution, but I felt then and have felt ever since a crucial absence of collaborators, and especially of people who did not say or have to say, as we approached the most difficult central problems, that there, unfortunately, was the limit of their field.
Goldmann, of course, did not accept these limits. He spoke now as sociologist, now as critic, now as cultural historian; but also, in his own intellectual tradition, a philosophy and a sociology were there from the beginning; the patient literary studies began from that fact. Thus, when he spoke of structures, he was consciously applying a term and a method which did not so much cross as underlie the apparently separate disciplines. It is a term and a method of consciousness, and so the relation between literature and sociology is not a relation between, on the one hand, various individual works and on the other hand various empirical facts. The real relation is within a totality of consciousness: a relation that is assumed and then revealed rather than apprehended and then expounded. Much that has to be proved, in our own tradition—and especially the very existence of significant primary relations between literature and society—can there be surpassed, in general philosophical and sociological terms, before the particular analyses begin. Looking at our work it could be said that we lacked a centre, in any developed philosophy or sociology. Looking at his work—and for all his differences he was representative of the whole other tradition—it could be said that he had a received centre, at the level of reasoning, before the full contact with substance began.
Structures of Feeling
I think the subsequent argument, if it can be developed, has this necessary tension and even contradiction of method. I will give a central example. I found in my own work that I had to develop the idea of a structure of feeling. This was to indicate certain common characteristics in a group of writers but also of others, in a particular historical situation. I will come back to its precise application later. But then I found Goldmann beginning, very interestingly, from a concept of structure which contained, in itself, a relation between social and literary facts. This relation, he insisted, was not a matter of content, but of mental structures: ‘the categories which simultaneously organize the empirical consciousness of a particular social group and the imaginative world created by the writer’. By definition, these structures are not individually but collectively created. Again, in an almost untranslatable term, this was a genetic structuralism necessarily concerned not only with the analysis of structures but with their historical formation and process: the ways in which they change as well as the ways in which they are constituted. The foundation of this approach is the belief that all human activity is an attempt to make a significant response to a particular objective situation. Who makes this response? According to Goldmann, neither the individual nor any abstract group, but individuals in real and collective social relations. The significant response is a particular view of the world: an organizing view. And it is just this element of organization that is, in literature, the significant social fact. A correspondence of content between a writer and his world is less significant than this correspondence of organization, of structure. A relation of content may be mere reflection, but a relation of structure, often occurring where there is no apparent relation of content, can show us the organizing principle by which a particular view of the world, and from that the coherence of the social group which maintains it, really operates in consciousness.
To make this more critical, Goldmann, following Lukács, distinguishes between actual consciousness and possible consciousness: the actual, with its rich but incoherent multiplicity; the possible, with its maximum degree of adequacy and coherence. A social group is ordinarily limited to its actual consciousness, and this will include many kinds of misunderstanding and illusion: elements of false consciousness which are often, of course, used and reflected in ordinary literature. But there is also a maximum of possible consciousness: that view of the world raised to its highest and most coherent level, limited only by the fact that to go further would mean that the group would have to surpass itself, to change into or be replaced by a new social group.
Most sociology of literature, Goldmann then argues, is concerned with the relatively apparent relations between ordinary literature and actual consciousness: relations which show themselves at the level of content, or in conventional elaboration of its common illusions. The new sociology of literature—that of genetic structuralism—will be concerned with the more fundamental relations of possible consciousness, for it is at the centre of his case that the greatest literary works are precisely those which realize a world-view at its most coherent and most adequate, its highest possible level. We should not then mainly study peripheral relations: correspondences of content and background; overt social relations between writers and readers. We should study, in the greatest literature, the organizing categories, the essential structures, which give such works their unity, their specific aesthetic character, their strictly literary quality; and which at the same time reveal to us the maximum possible consciousness of the social group—in real terms, the social class—which finally created them, in and through their individual authors.
Now this is, I believe, a powerful argument, and I make my observations on it within that sense. The idea of a world-view, a particular and organized way of seeing the world, is of course familiar to us in our own studies. Indeed I myself had to spend many years getting away from it, in the ordinary form in which I found it presented. The Elizabethan world-picture, I came to believe, was a thing fascinating in itself, but then it was often more of a hindrance than a help in seeing the full substance of Elizabethan drama. Again, I learned the Greek world-picture and was then baffled by Greek drama; the Victorian world-picture and found the English nineteenth-century novel amazing. I think Goldmann’s distinction might help us here. He would say that what we were being given was actual consciousness, in a summary form, whereas what we found in the literature was the often very different possible consciousness. I have no doubt this is sometimes true, but it is as often the case that we need to reconsider the idea of consciousness itself. What is ordinarily extracted
