How Green was My Valley

An element of Gramsci that I found particularly instructive in our cultural studies approach is his constant questioning. Gramsci asks: Why is this happening? How can we study this? Why should we study this? Would examining this be arbitrary or would it tap into the life force and really explain something about society? There is urgency in his tone and a force behind these inquiries.

Both Williams and Hoggart take a similar approach in their work by suggesting what has been said and done and what further work needs to be developed. I enjoy Hoggart because his research comes from a real place and a real desire to represent accurately the lives of people. So often I feel when reading some theory or cultural studies research that we stop talking about people and how they interact with institutions or simply on their own. Both Hoggart and Williams suggest that these questions of culture and people have been misrepresented in literary criticism and in literature itself.

I find Hoggart extremely moving perhaps especially because he can speak from a place of longing and frustration with his past. When he recounts his childhood home: “the tiny house was damp and swarming with cockroaches; the earth-closet was a stinking mire in bad weather” (29), one would hardly call this nostalgic. Even his later essay on the “Scholarship Boy” is heartbreakingly personal and it is difficult to fault Hoggart by suggesting his is not a thorough analysis. Hoggart’s aim seems to be that of a documentarian looking back and as he says “capturing the atmosphere” of a place and people that he feels has been crudely characterized. The import of such a project is clear to Hoggart in a post-war era when British class lines are beginning to stretch and disassemble before his eyes. Surely he does not want to see continued stress for his old neighborhood, but neither does he want the games, gestures, phrases, and lifestyles to go without mention so that when we look back on that era all we have are inaccurate flashes presented by Hardy decades prior. Cultural studies never seemed to me to have this great scientific longing to produce statistical research projects but rather to examine life as people live it. This is perhaps why I enjoy Bourdieu’s case descriptions on the petite-bourgeious and Radway’s Reading the Romance because they provide for examination a peopled world that takes a decided interest in representing groups and asking questions.

I might also add that Hoggart certainly wasn’t the only academic or cultural factor interested in such a project. The BBC and Michael Apted’s Up Series premiered in 1964 and sought to examine the lives of children (every 7 years) as they grew up to adulthood in the British class system. The aim was clearly to show how children from childhood to adulthood were groomed for their class. The project ultimately failed in that sense as the children found opportunities beyond class expectations or fell out of rank and became vagrants. Even the subjects of the documentary began to rebel against the filmmaker by age 21 accusing the project of trying to predict their class from very little information.