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RECENT DEVELOPMENTS AT THE CENTRE 259

authentic need that the text evokes and the crucial site of reproductive
common sense.
‘I love you,’ she whispered, ‘I love you, darling, with all my heart.’
And this time Ian knew it was true and he had found the blue heather which
all men seek and so few discover. 91
The narrative ideological closure is, or seems, complete. But it is precisely
at such a point that we should remind ourselves that neither narrative form
nor common sense itself is ever fully closed. Romance’s concluding
affirmation of a world without contradictions can be seen as close to the
Utopian element in popular religion and may thus provide a clue to its
possible antagonistic uses.
Thus do ideas of equality, liberty and fraternity [we might add, ideas of
love and happiness] ferment among men; among those strata of mankind
who do not see themselves as equals nor as brothers of other men nor as
free in relation to them. 92

In Britain the use of Gramscian concepts for the analysis of literature has been
93
developed by Raymond Williams in a theory of ‘cultural materialism’, by Colin
Mercer and, most specifically, by Roger Bromley in two essays on the analysis
94
95
of popular fiction. Although we have disagreements with Bromley’s use of
Gramscian concepts, it was his work which in many ways set us in a new
direction. He draws analogies between the forms of narrative and
characterization in the popular fiction of the 1930s and the crisis of hegemony
and the reformation of the class alliance in the ruling bloc which was occurring
at the same time the texts were written. It seems to us, however, that to see
characters in texts standing in for social classes is too fast and easy a leap from
text to society, as well as creating a curious blindness to non-class
representations in a text. For example, Bromley sees woman characters as
representatives of the petty bourgeoisie, not particularly as caught in patriarchal
relations. However, the basic thesis that popular fiction has a particular work to
do in the maintenance and struggle for hegemony is important. Gramsci insists
that hegemony is struggled for in every sphere of society, even in those areas
which seem most private and removed from the incursions of politics or the
state.
One of the ways in which Gramsci analyses the presence of domination and
subordination in unlooked-for areas of social life is his discussion of what he
calls ‘spontaneous philosophy’, and particularly his delineation of common
sense. ‘Spontaneous philosophy’ is a term rather similar to Williams’s ‘structure
of feeling’: it does not mean that ideas come from nowhere, spontaneously, into
the minds of the subordinate classes. It holds in tension the idea of ‘philosophy’,
a developed body of ideas (rather like an earlier meaning of the term ideology),
and the recognition that our ideas do seem to be our own, that we speak as much
as we are spoken by language and that the words we use do address the real
situations in which they are spoken.