In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Community Raymond Williams’ s entry for “Community”in Keywords (75-6) is straight­ forward enough, though it is characteristically succinct, comprehensive, and subtle. He gives a brief history of the etymology of the word and of the different meanings the word has had since it entered the English language in the fourteenth century. He also sets “community” against French and German words, commune and Gemeinde. He refers to Tonnies’influential contrast (1887) between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft-. community, on the one hand, and more impersonal organization or corporation, on the other. Though Williams distinguishes five senses of“community,”the essence ofhis definition is expressed in the following phrases: “a sense ofcommon identity and characteristics,” “the body of direct relationships” as opposed to “the organized establishment ofrealm or state.”A community is “relatively small,” with a “sense of immediacy or locality.”Williams stresses the affective aspect of the word and its performative power: “Community can be the warmly persuasive word to describe an existing set of relationships, or the warmly persuasive word to describe an alternative set of relationships (76).” What Williams meant by “community” is developed more circumstan­ tially in The Country and the City, especially in chapters 10,16, and 18 ofthat book: “Enclosures, Commons and Communities,” “Knowable Communi­ ties,” and “Wessex and the Border.” The last two are on George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, respectively. Williams does not wholly admire George Eliot, nor Jane Austen, whereas Hardy gets his more or less complete approval. What is the difference? “Jane Austen,” says Williams, “had been prying and analytic, but into a limited group of people in their relations with each other” (168). Eliot, according to Williams, was, like Jane Austen before her, more or less limited in her comprehension to members of the gentry. The latter formed her “knowable community.”She did not really understand the common people, rural farmers, laborers, servants, and tradesmen. They and their community were “unknowable” to her. In Williams’ s view, Eliot projected her own inner life into lower class people in her novels and was consistently condescending to them. “George Eliot,” says Williams, “gives her own consciousness, often disguised as a personal dialect, to the char­ acters with whom she does really feel; but the strain of the impersonation is usually evident—in Adam, Daniel, Maggie, or Felix Holt” (169). The lat­ ter judgment, by the way, seems questionable. Hetty Sorrel, for example, in Adam Bede, seems to me a plausible characterization of someone to a considerable degree unlike George Eliot herself. Like Williams, I come from Retro Keywords | 11 J. Hilus Miller taught for many years at the Johns Hopkins University and then at Yale University, before going to the University of California at Irvine in 1986, where is he now uci Distinguished Research Professor. He is the author of many books and essays on nineteenth and twentieth-century English, European, and American literature, and on literary theory. His most recent books are Others (Princeton, 2001), Speech Acts in Literature (Stanford, 2002), On Literature (Routledge, 2002), and Zero Plus One (Universität de Valencia: Biblioteca Javier Coy d’ estudis nord-americans, 2003). A J. Hillis Miller Reader has recently appeared from Edinburgh University Press and Stanford University Press. A book on speech acts in the novels and stories of Henry James is forthcoming from Fordham University Press. a rural background, though at the distance of an extra generation, so, like Williams, I too can speak from direct experience about this. Can it be that there is a trace of misogyny in Williams’ s putdown of Austen and Eliot, in favor of male novelists like Hardy and Lawrence? “Prying and analytic”is a really nasty epithet, and what worse can one say of a supposedly objective realist novelist than that all her protagonists are versions of herself? Williams’s judgment of Hardy is quite different. Hardy, he says, truly understood the rural personages and communities he represents in his novels. He understood them because he had experienced rural life first hand as a child. He also had a sharp eye for what rural life is really like. Hardy’ s “essential position and attribute” are his “intensity and precision of observa­ tion” (205). Hardy’ s...

pdf

Share