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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
William Boyd writes on the role of parks in the English novel:"Angus Wilson (1913-1991), novelist and short story writer, identified what he called an essential dichotomy in the English realistic novel dating back to Samuel Richardson in the 18th century, namely the concepts of "town" and "country" and the opposing values that they imply. The division is an intriguing one, even today, and it is still relatively easy to classify a novelist in one or the other camp. Are you essentially "urban" or are you "rural"? This is not an innocent question, as Wilson infers. To categorise yourself as one or the other is tendentious and provokes a series of unconscious judgments. In his long autobiographical essay, The Wild Garden, Wilson lists some of the antitheses that "town" and "country" respectively embody: progress versus tradition; art versus nature; industry versus the contemplative life; reason versus instinct; strained sensibility versus sturdy common sense, bohemianism versus rootedness, and so on.
Charles Dickens and Jane Austen, in the pantheon of English literature, perhaps best illustrate the split between the "town" writer as opposed to the "country" one. It is a very 19th-century juxtaposition, made particularly acute and particularly obvious as the industrial revolution took its remorseless grip on the nation. Mansfield Park.. It best reflects Angus Wilson's dichotomy of "town" versus "country" in the English novel, with Fanny Price and Mansfield Park - and dull Edmund Bertram - representing all that is solid and worthy of "country" values, set against the witty and louche sophistication of the "town" Crawfords from London.
According to Edmund Burke's treatise of 1756, The Sublime and the Beautiful, the sublime finds its source in anything capable of exciting pain or danger. Beauty, however, consists of anything small, smooth, with an absence of angularity and a brightness of colour. This sounds almost park-like to me, the park providing us with those qualities of beauty we require in our life - in contrast to what the "sublime" city represents with its pain and danger."
Wilson's dichotomies are perhaps slightly disingenuous; in Fielding, Burney and Dickens the transition from the country to the city is essentially a journey from rural virtue to urban vice. Of course, Dickens is perfectly capable of writing of rural vice, as in Nicholas Nickleby but the contrast is still at the centre of his work, even as his descriptions of the city seem to echo Baudelaire's celebration of the urban sublime. The comparison with French literature is revealing; Maupassant and Balzac certainly see the division of town and country as a moral one but are rather more likely to portray it as a contrast of sophistication with dullness. Zola is perhaps slightly less withering in his indictment of rural vice to its urban counterpart, but the difference is one of degree not of kind. Conversely, Johnson might have thought that is a man tires of London he tires of life, but it is difficult to discern it from his depictions of 'the great wen.' While London was the first major industrialised city, writers of that era still tended to denounce or avoid it. The nineteenth century English novel frequently takes rural locations as its setting, from the Bronte sisters and Thomas Hardy to George Eliot, with the same applying to poets like Tennyson and Hopkins. Writers like Gissing, Orwell and Hamilton could justly be argued to belong to a minority tradition. Crime writers like Christie and Allingham preferred rural settings, even when their subject matter was considerably better described as an urban phenomenon. Even as technology made buildings like the Crystal Palace possible, medieval gothic became the preferred architectural style and the garden city movement arose. What tends to be interesting in the English tradition isn't so much a conflict between town and city, but between the sentimental or pastoral and the romantic. In Lawrence and Forster, the country represents eros and wildness, while in Dickens and Gaskell it represents tradition and the merely picturesque. Eliot, Hardy and the Bronte sisters depict the country in terms of both these categories.
Of course, modern England's agricultural sector is one of the smallest in Europe, as is the percentage of forested land area. Pastoral is not a mode that can be convincingly deployed today, which may be suggestive for the current condition of English literature.Labels: England, Literature
posted by Richard 3:50 pm
