In Praise of Richard Hoggart

I have a young Bulgarian journalist friend who has a multilingual blog The Bridge of Friendship about cross-border issues. He’s based in his home town of Russe on the Danube – a selection of the earlier posts can be read here.

We chat frequently and he has taken recently to posing what he calls “challenges” – when he presents, in a few phrases, a new issue which he needs to explore. This wrenches me out of my usual channels and has me musing about things which normally pass me by.

And this was particularly true of the latest one he threw at me – about the sociology of literature or was it literary theory – or indeed critical theory?  Is there a difference? And does it matter?    

As I’m not a fan of novels, this was a tough one. But then I remembered the reason for my dislike of English novels and their boring portrayal of the various dilemmas of middle-class characters….it’s the narrowness of the social context which turns me off – in contrast with the dynamism I find in Scottish and Irish writing – let alone French and German cultural icons. 

Take the Germans first – I was still in my early 20s when I first came across artists such as Georg Grosz and Kathe Kollwitz and writers such as Bert Brecht and Heinrich Boell – all profoundly influenced by the experience of war and exploitation, the first three angrily whereas Boell’s  stories were more resigned. Michel Houllebecq’s novels react against consumer capitalism where JG Ballard’s tales show the threatening dystopia.

In picking out such artists I simply show my own preference not just for critical narrative but for stories to be set against a social context. Other people are different – they don’t like to be reminded of such realities – preferring more magical tales….Where does that get us? 

In 2014, Michael Schmidt produced a 1,200 page book called “The Novel; a biography” which discussed the plots of hundreds of writers – grouping them into strange categories such as 

THE HUMAN COMEDY: Victor Hugo, Stendhal, Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Émile Zola 

IMPERFECTION:  George Eliot, Louisa May Alcott, George Gissing, Samuel Butler

BRAVERIES: Robert Louis Stevenson, Bruce Chatwin, William Morris, Charles Kingsley, Henry Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling

SMOKE AND MIRRORS: Lewis Carroll, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, Athur Conan Doyle, J. M. Barrie, Max Beerbohm, Kenneth Grahame

PESSIMISTS: Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane

LIVING THROUGH IDEAS: Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy 

A book I read with some interest a few years back was Grand Hotel Abyss – the lives of the Frankfurt school; by Stuart Jefferies (2015). For me, Erich Fromm was the most interesting of the group but he soon parted company with them. Jefferies’ Intro to his book is useful as it reminds us that - 

The School came into being in part to try to understand failure, in particular the failure of the German Revolution in 1919. As it evolved during the 1930s, it married neo-Marxist social analysis to Freudian psychoanalytical theories to try to understand why German workers, instead of freeing themselves from capitalism by means of socialist revolution, were seduced by modern consumer capitalist society and, fatefully, Nazism.

The School was forced to leave Germany in 1933 – for the USA and, while in Los Angeles exile in the 1940s, Adorno helped develop the California F-scale, a personality test designed to discover those likely to fall prey to fascist or authoritarian delusions. Breivik would have been the perfect example of the authoritarian personality Adorno wrote about, one who was ‘obsessed with the apparent decline of traditional standards, unable to cope with change, trapped in a hatred of all those not deemed part of the in-group and prepared to take action to “defend” tradition against degeneracy’. 

But Herbert Marcuse was the only one of the group to take a revolutionary path – remaining in the States and supporting the students during the 1968 unrest. 

What I find most curious is that the ultimate legacy of the Frankfurt School was not actually in the field of literature but - in popular culture. This is what fascinated the group in 1950s America – and spawned the discipline of Cultural Studies - started in the UK by Richard Hoggart in 1964 but whose biggest star was Stuart Hall. The Frankfurt school may have shown an initial interest in people like George Lukacs and Lucien Goldmann who were trying to develop a sociology of the novel but soon veered into polling work on the authoritarian personality…. 

I came to adulthood in the late 1950s – just as the New Left was getting off the ground. I remember the impact Hoggart’s “The Uses of Literacy” (1957) made with its picture of the resilience of working-class culture and the threat posed by the banality of “popular culture” – as well as the excitement as I held in 1960/61 the first few issues of “New Left Review” in my hands after its creation from “New Reasoner” and “Universities and Left Review”. 

The wider global context is nicely caught in the diagrams in this short paper 

But Cultural Studies has probably done more harm than good – it was certainly the means through which the issue of identity came to the fore and destroyed the left. Richard Hoggart is, for me, an immensely important – if rather neglected – figure in the story. Raymond Williams is the man who attracts the adulation these days from the trendies – perhaps because he is so high-falutin’ and boring!

So what do I take from this canter down Memory Lane? What lessons about culture? About the left? About the UK? Well, my prejudices are still intact – I find it curious that anyone can take writers such Goldmann, Lukacs and Williams seriously…. 

On the other hand, I realise that I have neglected Richard Hoggart for too long. He was a superbly sensitive writer whose various autobiographies (he lived to the grand old age of 95!) are beautifully written – you can get a sense from some excerpts from A Measured Life – the times and places of an orphaned intellectual; R Hoggart (1994; 2019) 

And I’m delighted to see that he’s still celebrated today – see this recent article in the Los Angeles Review of Books

Further Reading

Understanding Richard Hoggart – a pedagogy of hope M Bailey, B Clarke, J Walton (2011)

Richard Hoggart and Cultural Studies ed S Owen (2008)

a review of the above book

Rereading Richard Hoggart ed Sue Owen (2008) some excerpts of a more personal tribute

“Promises to keep – thoughts in old age”; R Hoggart (2005)

Cultural Studies 1983 – a theoretical introduction; Stuart Hall et al (2016) which contained the lecture series he gave in the US in that year which was issued only two years after his death

The Novel; a biography; Michael Schmidt (2014)