The Missing Keyword: Raymond Williams, Paul ValÉry

This chapter demonstrates abstraction’s elusiveness, or its capacity to hide in plain sight, by juxtaposing the work of Raymond Williams with a specific essay by Paul Valéry, ‘Poetry and Abstract Thought’. Why does abstraction loom large in Williams’s critical vocabulary, yet fail to be theorised by Williams as a ‘keyword’? The answer proposed by the chapter, placed in the context of critical work by Leavis and Eagleton, is a distrust of modernism on Williams’s part, whereby structuralist thought and the defamiliarisation of aesthetic distance are misconceived as forms of abstraction threatening the human from the perspectives of the ‘stranger’. However, even in the short space of an essay which sets out to define abstraction in contradistinction to poetry, Valéry equally demonstrates abstraction’s tendency to slippage and contradiction. The chapter therefore suggests that both Williams and Valéry encounter in their own writing the contradictory work of abstraction within modernism and modernity,