翻译CULTUREISORDINARY
CULTURE IS ORDINARY
Raymond Williams
The bus stop was outside the cathedral. I had been looking at the Mappa Mundi, with its rivers out of Paradi, and at the chained library, where a party of clergymen had got in easily, but where I had waited an hour and cajoled a verger before I even saw the chains. Now, across the street, a cinema advertid the
Six-Five Special and a cartoon version of Gulliver’s Travels. The bus arrived, with a driver and a conductress deeply absorbed in each other. We went out of the city, over the old bridge, and on through the orchards and the green meadows and the fields red under the plough. Ahead were the Black Mountains, and we climbed among them, watching the steep fields end at the grey walls, beyond which the bracken and heather and whin had not yet been driven back. To the east, along the ridge, stood the line of grey Norman castles; to the
west, the fortress wall of the mountains. Then, as we still climbed, the rock changed under us. Here, now, was limestone, and the line of the early iron workings along the scarp. The farming valleys, with their scattered white hous, fell away behind. Ahead of us were the narrower valleys: the steel-rolling mill, the gasworks, the grey terraces, the pitheads. The bus stopped, and the driver and conductress got out, still absorbed. They had done this journey so often, and en all its stages. It is a journey, in fact, that in one form or another we have all made.
I was born and grew up halfway along that bus journey. Where I lived is still a farming valley, though the road through it is being widened and straightened, to carry the heavy lorries to the north. Not far away, my grandfather, and so back
through the generations, worked as a farm laborer until he was turned out of his cottage and, in his fifties, became a roadman. His sons went at thirteen or
fourteen on to the farms, his daughters into rvice. My father, his third son, left the farm at fifteen to be a boy porter on the railway, and later became a
signalman, working in the box in this valley until he died. I went up the road to the village school, where a curtain divided the two class- Second to eight or nine, First to fourteen. At eleven I went to the local grammar school, and later to Cambridge.
Culture is ordinary: that is where we must start. To grow up in that country was to e the shape of a culture, and its modes of change. I could stand on the
mountains and look north to the farms and the cathedral or south to the smoke and the flare of the blast furnace making a cond sunt. To grow up in that
family was to e the shaping of minds: the learning of new skills, the shifting of relationships, the emergence of different language and ideas. My grandfather, a big hard laborer, wept while he spoke, finely and excitedly, at the parish meeting, of being turned out of his cottage. My father, not long before he died, spoke
quietly and happily of when he had started a trade-union branch and a Labor
Party grou p in the village, and, without bitterness, of the ‘kept men’ of the new politics. I s
peak a different idiom, but I think of the same things.
Culture is ordinary: that is the first fact. Every human society has its own shape, its own purpos, its own meanings. Every human society express the, in
institutions, and in arts and learning. The making of a society is the finding of
common meanings and directions, and its growth is an active debate and
amendment under the pressures of experience, contact, and discovery, writing
themlves into the land. The growing society is there, yet it is also made and
remade in every individual mind. The making of a mind is, first, the slow
learning of shapes, purpos, and meanings, so that work, obrvation and
communication are possible. Then, cond, but equal in importance, is the testing of the in experience, the making of new obrvations, comparisons, and
meanings. A culture has two aspects: the known meanings and directions, which its members are trained to; the new obrvations and meanings, which are
offered and tested. The are the ordinary process of human societies and
human minds, and we e through them the nature of a culture: that it is always both traditional and creative; that it is both the most ordinary common meanings and finest individual meanings. We u the word culture in the two ns: to mean a whole way of life- the common meanings; to mean the arts and learning- the special process of discovery and creative effort. Some writers rerve the word for one or other of the ns; I insist on both, and on the significance of their conjunction. The questions I ask about our culture are questions about our general and common purpos, yet also questions about deep personal meanings.
Culture is ordinary, in every society and in every mind.
- Selected from: Diana George & John Trimbur. Reading Culture-Contexts for Critical Reading and Writing(5th Edition). Longman Publishers. 2004
