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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 the more accessible, indeed the more normal, history. This is what I mean when I say that art is one of the primary human activities, and that it can succeed in articulating not just the imposed or constitutive social or intellectual system, but at once this and an experience of it, its lived consequence, in ways very close to many other kinds of active response, in new social activity and in what we know as personal life, but of course often more accessibly, just because it is specifically formed and because when it is made it is in its own way complete, even autonomous, and being the kind of work it is can be transmitted and communicated beyond its original situation and circumstances.

Now if this is so, it is easy to see why we must reject those versions of consciousness which relate it directly, or with mere lags and complications, to a determining base. The stress on an active consciousness made by Lukács and Goldmann gives us a real way beyond that. And it might be possible to say that the relation I have tried to describe—between formal consciousness and new creative practice—might be better, more precisely, described in their terms: actual consciousness and possible consciousness. Indeed I hope it may be so, but I see one major difficulty. This relation, though subtle, is still in some ways static. Possible consciousness is the objective limit that can be reached by a class before it turns into another class, or is replaced. But I think this leads, rather evidently, to a kind of macro-history: in many ways adequate but in relation to actual literature, with its continuity of change, often too large in its categories to come very close, except at certain significant points when there is a radical and fundamental moment of replacement of one class by another. As I read Goldmann, I find him very conscious of just this difficulty, but then I am not sure that it is accidental that he is much more convincing on Racine and Pascal, at a point of evident crisis between a feudal and a bourgeois world, than he is on the nineteenth- and indeed twentieth-century novel, where apparently small but no less significant changes within a bourgeois society have to be given what can be called micro-structural analysis. To say, following Lukács, that the novel is the form in which, in a degraded society, an individual tries and fails to surpass an objectively limited society and destiny—the novel, that is to say, of the problematic hero—is at once illuminating and partial; indeed, the evidence presented for it is so extremely selective that we are almost at once on our guard. No English novels are considered at all: the other side of that enclosure of which we are usually, on our side of the channel, so conscious. But while one can offer, willingly, Great Expectations, Born in Exile, Jude the Obscure, and in a more complicated but still relevant way Middlemarch, one is left to face a different phenomenon in, for example, Little Dorrit. And I think this is not only an argument about particular cases. The most exciting experience for me, in reading Lukács and Goldmann, was the stress on forms. I had become convinced in my own work that the most penetrating analysis would always be of forms, specifically literary forms, where changes of viewpoint, changes of known and knowable relationships, changes of possible and actual resolutions, could be directly demonstrated, as forms of literary organization, and then, just because they involved more than individual solutions, could be reasonably related to a real social history, itself considered analytically in terms of basic relationships and failures and limits of relationship. This is what I attempted, for example, in Modern Tragedy, and I then have to say that I have since learned a good deal, theoretically, from the developed sociology of Lukács and Goldmann and others, in just this respect. But much of the necessary analysis of forms seems to me barely to have begun, and this is not only, I think, a matter of time for development.

Perhaps I can put the reason most sharply by saying that form, in Lukács and Goldmann, translates too often as genre or as kind; that we stay, too often, within a received academic and ultimately idealist tradition in which ‘epic’ and ‘drama’, ‘novel’ and ‘tragedy’, have inherent and permanent properties, from which the analysis begins and to which selected examples are related. I am very willing to agree that certain general correlations of this kind, between a form and a world-view, can be shown. But we have then to face the fact, above all in the last hundred years, that tragedy and the novel, for example, exist, inextricably, within the same culture, and are used by identical or very similar social groups. Or the fact that within modern tragedy, and even more within the novel, there are radically significant changes of form in which many of the changes in literature and society—changes in the pace of a life, an experience, rather than of a whole historical epoch—can be quite directly apprehended. Certainly this is recognized in practice. Goldmann has an interesting contrast between the traditional bourgeois novel and the new novel of Sarraute or Robbe-Grillet, which he relates to a more completely reified world. Lukács makes similar distinctions, from Balzac through Mann and Kafka to Solzhenitsyn. But the full theoretical issue, of what is meant by form, is still in my view confused, and perhaps especially by the fact that there is this undiscarded ballast of form in a more abstract, more supra-historical sense. Thus even a Goldmann can say, as if he were an ordinary idealist and academic critic, that Sophocles is the only one of the Greek dramatists who can be called tragic ‘in the now accepted sense of the word’. The prepotence of inherited categories is then striking and saddening.