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 as a world-view is, in practice, a summary of doctrines: more organized, more coherent, than most people of the time would have been able to make them. And then I am not sure that I can in practice always distinguish this from the kind of evidence Goldmann himself adduces as possible consciousness, when he is engaged in an analysis. Moreover I think either version is often some distance away from the real structures and processes of literature. I developed my own idea of structures of feeling in response to just this sense of a distance. There were real social and natural relationships, and there were relatively organized, relatively coherent formations of these relationships, in contemporary institutions and beliefs. But what seemed to me to happen, in some of the greatest literature, was a simultaneous realization of and response to these underlying and formative structures. Indeed, that constituted, for me, the specific literary phenomenon: the dramatization of a process, the making of a fiction, in which the constituting elements, of real social life and beliefs, were simultaneously actualized and in an important way differently experienced, the difference residing in the imaginative act, the imaginative method, the specific and genuinely unprecedented imaginative organization.
We can feel the effect, in all this, of major individual talents, and indeed I believe that there are discoverable specific reasons, of a social kind, in the immediate histories of writers, why this imaginative alternative was sought. But I am also sure that these creative acts compose, within a historical period, a specific community: a community visible in the structure of feeling and demonstrable, above all, in fundamental choices of form. I have tried to show this in actual cases, in the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century European drama, and in the development and crisis of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century English novel. And what seems to me especially important in these changing structures of feeling is that they often precede those more recognizable changes of formal idea and belief which make up the ordinary history of consciousness, and that while they correspond very closely to a real social history, of men living in actual and changing social relations, they again often precede the more recognizable changes of formal institution and relationship, which are