Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

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Chapter 3 Culturalism
employ ‘magic solutions’ to close the gap in that society between ‘the ethic and the
experience’. He gives examples of how men and women are released from loveless marriages
as a result of the convenient death or the insanity of their partners; legacies turn
up unexpectedly to overcome reverses in fortune; villains are lost in the Empire; poor
men return from the Empire bearing great riches; and those whose aspirations could
not be met by prevailing social arrangements are put on a boat to make their dreams
come true elsewhere. All these (and more) are presented as examples of a shared structure
of feeling, the unconscious and conscious working out in fictional texts of the contradictions
of nineteenth-century society. The purpose of cultural analysis is to read
the structure of feeling through the documentary record, ‘from poems to buildings and
dress-fashions’ (37). As he makes clear,
What we are looking for, always, is the actual life that the whole organization is
there to express. The significance of documentary culture is that, more clearly than
anything else, it expresses that life to us in direct terms, when the living witnesses
are silent (ibid.).
The situation is complicated by the fact that culture always exists on three levels:
We need to distinguish three levels of culture, even in its most general definition.
There is the lived culture of a particular time and place, only fully accessible to
those living in that time and place. There is the recorded culture, of every kind,
from art to the most everyday facts: the culture of a period. There is also, as the
factor connecting lived culture and period cultures, the culture of the selective
tradition (37).
Lived culture is culture as lived and experienced by people in their day-to-day existence
in a particular place and at a particular moment in time; and the only people who have
full access to this culture are those who actually lived its structure of feeling. Once the
historical moment is gone the structure of feeling begins to fragment. Cultural analysis
has access only through the documentary record of the culture. But the documentary
record itself fragments under the processes of ‘the selective tradition’ (ibid.).
Between a lived culture and its reconstitution in cultural analysis, clearly, a great deal
of detail is lost. For example, as Williams points out, nobody can claim to have read
all the novels of the nineteenth century. Instead, what we have is the specialist who can
claim perhaps to have read many hundreds; the interested academic who has read
somewhat fewer; the ‘educated reader’ who has read fewer again. This quite clear process
of selectivity does not prevent the three groups of readers from sharing a sense
of the nature of the nineteenth-century novel. Williams is of course aware that no
nineteenth-century reader would in fact have read all the novels of the nineteenth
century. His point, however, is that the nineteenth-century reader ‘had something
which . . . no later individual can wholly recover: that sense of the life within which the
novels were written, and which we now approach through our selection’ (38). For
Williams, it is crucial to understand the selectivity of cultural traditions. It always