BHA: A DPF thematic: the Stratification of Personality

[Gary MacLennan <g.maclennan@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I have a PhD student who is making a non-fiction film on Qld history.  She
is also making in it in the currently fashionable art-doco style made
famous by documentarists such as Ross McIlwee and Michael Moore.  She is
drawing upon Bhaskar's notion of investigating totalities at both the
intensive and the extensive margins.  The intensive for her has to do with
her relationship with her father and uncle both of whom served in the
Police Force at the height of the brutal Right Wing ascendancy here in
Qld.  I have prevailed upon her to front the camera and tell her story.
However fronting the camera also sets in train a series of problems. I
refer here to the fact that fronting the camera and doing the narration
also entails the process of the creation of a character. This in turn
raises the complex question of the relationship between the documentation
that this character ostensibly undertakes and the process of imagination
that has gone into her creation.
To help understand the complex relationship between documentation and
imagination and the process of writing and making a film we have turned to
Raymond Williams' critique of George Orwell's political writing (Williams,
1984). Orwell is of course famous for his observations of working class
life in the Great Depression.  Williams is extremely negative towards
Orwell, accusing him in effect of what is termed in Marxist criticism
'naturalism' that is that he portrays the working class as victims rather
than dialectically capable of being the agent of history (Engels, 1949:
33-5).
However what is interesting is the implied but under-theorised notion of
ontological depth in Williams criticism of Orwell. The latter's
observations were confined to the surface behaviour of the working
class.  He noted their suffering but did not note their underlying capacity
to organise and help themselves and eventually to mount a challenge to the
system that had impoverished them.
If it this notion of ontological depth or stratification, which provides
the key to the resolution of the naturalism versus realism duality, it is
also ontological depth that gives us the clue for resolving the question of
the truth of the persona of the author.  This comes out most clearly in
Williams' emphasis on the character that Orwell had created. For Williams
Orwell's writing until 1937 were notes towards the creation of his must
successful character, "Orwell" (Williams, 1984: 52). It is important to
acknowledge in this instance that Williams is very aware of the intensity
and the pain that this involved for Orwell.  Indeed he stresses that Orwell
could not have succeeded if he had not felt the process so
deeply.  Nevertheless Williams is reading Orwell through his own
determination to break down the rigid positivistic distinction between
imagination and documentary that for Williams belongs to the nineteenth
century  (Williams, 1984: 41).
Williams argues that Orwell created a "structure of feeling".  This is one
of Williams' most celebrated concepts and it also one of his most obscure.
I take it to mean a way of feeling about the world, a feeling that
structures actions and interpretations. Thus Orwell felt in a particular
way about the working class and this came through in his attitude to them
and his writing about them.  It was in the writing, according to Williams,
that he constructed the persona of the 'independent observer'. In terms of
the Bhaskarian model of truth, Orwell's character seemed to have achieved
the first or the normative-fiduciary level.  The persona or character in
The Road to Wigan Pier and other works says in effect, 'This is how it is.
Trust me. You can act on it.'
Williams points out that Orwell neglected to mention the workers who hosted
him and who were coping in the sense that within their socialism they had a
mission and a politics which could situate themselves and their oppressors
(Williams, 1984: 52). This process of selection is presumably determined
by  Orwell's  'structure of feeling'.
For Williams Orwells non-fiction writings constitute a 'remarkable
enlargement of our literature' (Williams, 1984: 52). One  moreover where
         the literary point is the political point. What is created in
the book is an isolated independent observer and the objects of his
observation. Intermediate characters and experience which do not form part
of this world- this structure of feeling- are simply omitted.  What is left
in is documentary enough, but the process of selection and organisation
is a literary act: the character of the observer is as real and yet created
as the real and yet created world he so powerfully describes (Williams,
1984: 52, original emphasis cited in MacLennan, 2000).
 Williams goes on to urge that Orwell's writing should not be divided into
'fiction' and 'documentaries'. My student is sympathetic to what Williams
is striving to achieve here, for the obvious reason that she too is trying
to create a film which is, as it were, a "border citizen" inhabiting the
zone between documentary and fiction. Nevertheless I feel that Williams is
avoiding the problem of the truth of the character created by Orwell and
the truth of what that character says. Putting scare quotes around the word
documentary as in the above quotation does not really help.  I would argue
instead that the best approach is to adapt, yet again the notion of
ontological depth and in particular the stratification of the personality
as broached in DPF.

The independent observer was a creation of Orwell's but he was also part of
Orwell as well.  In other wards 'Orwell' the character was a particular
layer of Orwell the man.  In that sense both exist but what is crucial is
the relationship between the layers. The layers are all authentic but some,
presumably the deeper ones, are generative or more generative than others.
Orwell used his imaginative creation of the persona of the independent
observer to document the suffering of the working-class.  Williams is quite
correct to point out that this process was highly selective in that it left
out the truth of the working class's capacity to resist and arguably to
transcend their location within the master slave dialectic.

regards

Gary

References
Engels, F., Letter to Margaret Harkness of April 1888, in Marx, K. &
Engels, F., Literature and Art, Cumberland Press: Sydney, 1949: 33-5.
Williams, R.,Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review, London:
Verso, 1979.

_________, Orwell, London: Fontana, 1984.



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