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MAX BYRD
"two great and transforming modern ideas: myth, in its variable forms;
revolution, in its variable forms." Jung's sense of a collective unconscious
only extends and systematizes the sense of community that begins in our
reaction to life among crowds of strangers. Revolution certifies our
recognition that capitalism alone oppresses us.
In the latter part of the book Williams goes far past the conven·
tional list of writers who contribute in one way or another to his
theme -- past the poetry of Eliot and Pound, the country-house novels
of Evelyn Waugh and George Meredith -- to absorb a second range of
literary experiences. Urban detective stories he sees as significant
attempts to reduce the city's intricacies to order, to explore all levels of
social relationship through the "opaque complexity" of crime. Con·
temporary science fiction permits us to experiment in the security of the
future, creating (and destroying) every possible kind of city on every
possible kind of planet. And novelists of the "developing nations" like
Kenya, India, Malaya, if we read them correctly, are now reenacting
phases of European and American urban history in illuminating ways.
It
is in his two concluding chapters that Williams returns openly, as
it seems to me, to the theme of unity and disunity that has all along
shaped the book. For city and country, he holds, although victims of the
same system, are at bottom divided and opposed as images in our minds
because they represent the largest point in scale at which capitalism
requires division of human life : city and country are false divisions of
labor, and false divisions of experience. "What we have finally to say is
that we live in a world in which the dominant mode of production and
social relationships teaches, impresses, offers to make normal and even
rigid, modes of detached, separated, external perception and action:
modes of using and consuming rather than accepting and enjoying people
and things. . ..
It
is not so much the old village or the old backstreet that
is significant.
It
is the perception and affirmation of a world in which
one is not necessarily a stranger and an agent, but can be a member, a
discoverer, in a shared source of life." Perhaps one may be forgiven for
feeling that his eloquence at this point begins at least partly to falter. The
deep anger that the book conveys now appears to tap more a personal
than a moral vein, the language turns toward bureaucratic abstractions.
What he seems so alert to elsewhere, the temptation to make the unity of
our childhood (anyone's childhood) into a political order, for once
eludes him. Autobiography and analysis slip out of balance. He asks what
anyone asks, a sense of membership, of acceptance, of "a shared source
of life." But there will be many readers who will hesitate to expect this
warm and reassuring community from "new forms of decision-making,
