Border Country and whatnot
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts I’ve been reading this Raymond Williams novel, Border Country. I finished it today and thought I’d jot down some thoughts. The novel is set in rural Wales, moving back and forth between the early to mid 1920s and roughly the present day when it was published, in 1960 if memory serves. The protagonist of the book echoes Williams, being the son of a railway worker from a small village in Wales and growing up to go to Cambridge on a scholarship and eventually becoming a Cambridge professor. The protagonist is named Matthew officially and goes by that in is life in England but mostly called Will, another echo with Williams, who was known as Jim in his home town despite being officially named Raymond and going by that after leaving Wales for university.
I like the book a great deal and identify with characters in it, above all Will (though I’m not so fancy as Cambridge, I hasten to smirk). One of the things I like is how the book depicts awkward silences, tongue tiedness, and deliberately avoiding certain conversation topics. There are a couple scenes where Will points out some of these patterns of recurrent mis- and non-communication, and people change the subject, insisting (both truly and cynically) that they don’t understand what he meant. That the attempt to clarify the kind of conversation that goes on (as I sort of a said, a recurring nonconversation) ends being a failed attempt that becomes another nonconversation is funny, poignant, and so real. Related, I like a great deal how the book depicts a kind of periodically experience pressure of wordlessness combined with a need to say something.
I’m reading my own interests and life into the book with the silences and nonverbal communication and how those arise from disconnections tied to the uneven distribution of families across personal and social changes, but I also think these are real themes the novel was intended to address. There’s an occasional sense of being energetically trapped - pacing, or at least frowning out the window - with no sense that any departure is possible, and often without sufficient emotional intelligence to even really understand the situation in its full seriousness.
A lot of my favorite records are about this, by the way - the protagonists songs are stuck, they’re fucked and nothing’s gonna get better so they cope with drinking and drugs and records and friend, that becomes the positive message, as the songs enact something they can’t articulate, that togetherness lets us keep going even when we don’t know to keep going. Those songs are about those instances where you simultaneously realize things have gone really bad and that you are really not equipped for the situation you’re in, and Williams depicted aspects of this really well in a way I don’t remember having read before in a novel. (I mean, I haven’t read tons of novels and never the right ones, so maybe this happens all the time in the right novels.) I was touched by a couple scenes where Will looks at his father or an old close family friend and he wants to say something but can’t and part of what he wants to say is that it bother him that he can’t say it, and as he does this he realizes that his father or the family friend are even more tongue-tied and emotionally unequipped as he is, so there’s a kind of wordless communication about wordlessness and inability to communicate. It’s touching in context, really. Williams also links this to place and displacement - Will having moved to England and become Matthew, returns to Wales and to being Will in a way that’s a bit much for poor Matthew to bear and yet also not enough for people around him, in that they notice that Will’s gone a bit Matthew, which is hard on poor Matthew, knowing he can’t quite close the distance no matter how much he strains his best to Will.
Again, reading my own situation and life into the novel, or unable to set myself aside in reading the novel, but I was struck by the death of a loved one in the end and the funeral and hospital scenes and the sense of going through the motion while making smalltalk. All of that seems resonant with a lot in pandemic life, as does the wordlessness and the swelling of feelings that outstrip words. We experience things in two senses: shit happens, and then we interpret that shit, via the stuff we think. We’re currently in a time where shit keeps happening but there’s a lot of noise clogging up the channels through which we interpret what happens, and we don’t share a consensus on how to do that interpreting - we don’t agree on what’s signal and what’s noise, so to speak - which leads to a kind of suppression of experience, in the sense of lack of collective meaning-making: shit happens but we don’t interpret it together, and don’t always interpret it individually either. Ditto for the disconnects among us, the ways we partially notice and only, at most, partially talk about those disconnects and their sources. All the scenes involving disconnection, being unable to express feelings, feeling distressed at the pent up energy from those unexpressed feelings plus the distress of realizing one’s emotional and communicative incapacity, I identified with all of that. (As I’ve mentioned, I’ve started to think about agitated dance music as being pandemic music, as the wordless jittering anxiety of those tracks maps onto how I feel so much of the time these days, feelings I don’t have words for and to be totally honest the idea of working through that stuff to give it all words sounds like it’d really unpleasant. I’m reminded as well of listening to the Bad Religion song “Sometimes It Feels Like” in my car after breaking down crying in the grocery store parking lot when I discovered I had a negative bank balance because my paycheck had bounced. That song sounded like what I felt like then, and I felt so much less alone. I’ve written about that somewhere but for the life of me I forget where, some blog or other, I dunno.)
So yeah, Border Country’s good. As I recall, Williams later sketched a set of orientations that culture and ideology can have: the dominant, which is simultaneously a set of disagreements and a set of background agreements that are the backdrop for the disagreements, and that which the dominant dominates - he identified two basic types of what is dominated, stuff that’s a relatively safely sidelined alternative, and stuff that’s genuinely oppositional. Each of those in turn can be old - residual, he puts it - or new, as he calls it, emergent. All of these exist dynamically, the old shifting between alternative and oppositional, the old being the vehicle for the genuinely new despite surface trappings and the new being the old repeated under merely surface-level differences, and status as alternative vs oppositional shifting, as well as alternative and oppositional elements being taken up into and renewing parts of the dominant. The novel maps onto some of this: Will crossed multiple borders, both physical and social, and in doing so he moved across different sections of dominant, alternative, and oppositional cultures (as each of those statuses was in flux, moving underneath him, so to speak) and between old and new as well. And of course this continues in the present, as we live in and move across different and relatively isolated pockets of experience in the sense of what happens to us and in the sense of what we make of what happens. Lingering in the background of the novel is also the important collective action involved in the 1926 general strike, its limitations, and the challenges of moving from those kinds of sequences of struggle back into more ordinary life again, with different people often navigating those challenges in incompatible and sometimes mutually incomprehensible ways.
Like I said, I dug it, glad I read it. I don’t know that I have a massively clearer grasp of the late 50s in the UK (part of why I read it is my ongoing interest in the left in the late 50s and early 60s in the UK) but I do get have a little more sense of the cultural atmosphere and kinds of concerns - life in transition, alongside the wrong parts of life not changing, the personal and interpersonal challenges involved in not fully understanding and not being able to communicate about and across those changes and continuities. There’s a sense of need for forward motion while being in the dark to a significant degree - which way is forward, exactly, and what’s the specific pathway? I’m going to read more Williams and will keep posting up thoughts here as long as I have them, though I’m also trying to stick roughly in the period prior to 1963 or so, so I’m going to be reading around in other works more than following Williams or any other single figure for now (my tendency is to want to read a lot of work by an author to see their ideas unfold over their writing life and also just because it’s fun to feel like I know a body of ideas).
I wanted to mention two other things. First, thanks to everyone who donated to offset the costs of my Buttondown subscription. I appreciate it, that’s kind of you. I received $175, which basically covers two years of the subscription, so I’m good to go. Thank you all again. If you didn’t donate, don’t sweat that (honestly! to each according to need, from each according to ability, as the saying does). I’ve got gas money for a good long while now, so to speak - the expenses are covered - and I’m just glad anyone reads this thing and is interested in thinking about any of it with me.
Second, if you’re interested in Marxy stuff, William Clare Roberts recently published a long essay on theories of ideology. It’s here: https://www.boundary2.org/2024/05/william-clare-roberts-ideology-and-self-emancipation-voluntary-servitude-false-consciousness-and-the-career-of-critical-social-theory/ I liked it and I also felt like I wasn’t exactly the intended audience, since I largely agreed with the conclusions before I read it. He ends up endorsing Goran Therborn’s short book The Power of Ideology and the Ideology of Power. (I may have the phrases backwards.) I’m a big fan of the book, and Abby’s written about it at her newsletter as well (and when Abby and I agree that means the point is true. Rules are rules).
As I mentioned above regarding the Williams novel, I’ve got wordlessness and silence on my mind a lot lately. One of the articles I got whiny about writing last spring (fuck, that hurts to say, in a summer that’s not feeling good so far, being beset by a long semester hangover, because the semester was real bad tis time) was on the filtering out of the human realities of suffering and injustice for the powerful, so they don’t have to really face the consequences of their actions. That’s an important part of ideology too, formatting the world and people in it into objects to use and discard. That’s basic to class relations as such and not unique to capitalism, thought it plays out in capitalism-specific ways, as part of how class is organized in unique ways in capitalism.
Sorta related, I’m currently reading Beverley Best’s new book The Automatic Fetish, on the third volume of Marx’s Capital, and a big theme of the book is how localized categories of instrumental use get the world wrong - practical categories make bad social theory, so to speak, even as they facilitate successful navigation within the world. To my mind this is a feature and not a bug, relative to people in positions of institutional power: face the world as it is...? Why bother? I’m too busy playing my part and stomping on people in the process! To put it simplistically, the powerful do as they do through the cultivation of a combination of stupidity and cruelty, in that they either perceive the world inaccurately or discount the dignity of other people or both, and that cultivation’s aided by some of their institutional subordinates and a whole swathe of niche markets where they can buy stuff to help them do as they do. Those subordinates and those niche markets are constantly humming along, generating resources to further comfort the comfortable, and that hum kicks into overdrive when something happens that threatens to crystallize the real character of reality (ie, to make apparent social murder and the implication of the powers that be in it).