Raymond Williams through Sri Lankan eyes

[Part 10]

In today's column I would like to discuss what I think is one of the most important critical books written by Raymond Williams - The Country and the City (1973). It is a book that has stood the test of time and is cited even today with approbation by literary scholars. The Country and the City is significant in its own right; in addition, it seems to me, that it contains important insights that are relevant to our own literary-critical endeavors in Sri Lanka. In this book, Williams has sought to charter the growth of imagery related to the country and the city as inscribed in English literary works since the sixteenth century.

And in doing so, he has pointed out how these images function as imaginative frameworks for the understanding of social and economic issues related to class in England. In The Country and the City, the author jettisons the easy duality between country and city – that the country is natural, paradisiacal, while the city is a breeder of isolation, alienation and the generation of dark forces. He dismisses this facile binary as myth masquerading as memory.

The Country and the City, in many ways, displays Raymond Williams’ erudition and breadth of knowledge. It examines literary sources ranging from Virgil to modern writers and pastoral poetry to modern science diction.

Historical context

He does so with the aim of locating these literary texts in their proper historical contexts and nurturing traditions. The whole book is concerned with the interactions between the country and the city.

As we read Williams book carefully we realise that he is intent on highlighting the temporal as well as spatial connections that exist between country and city.

Temporally, the constant interflow between past, present and future is sensitively charted; spatially the linkages between urban areas and the provinces, the villages and towns, industrially advanced societies and developing countries are highlighted. It is indeed his aim to uncover concealed connections.

And his entire effort is guided by a Marxist vision of social change. That is to say, questions of history, social formations and class antagonisms are central to his interpretive endeavours.

Raymond Williams begins his analysis in The Country and the City by underlining certain important facts about the two terms.

He says that, ‘country and city are very powerful words, and this is not surprising when we remember how much they seem to stand for human communities. In English, country is both a nation and a part of the land.

Human settlements

The country can be a whole society or its rural area.’ He then goes in to point out that in the long history of human settlements, this linkage between the land from which we directly or obliquely get all our living and the various attainments of human beings has been widely known. Indeed, the city has to be recognised as one of these achievements – the large towns, the capital, specific shapes of civilisation.

Williams in discussing the perceived contrasts between the country and the city makes the following point. ’On the actual settlements, which in the real history have been astonishingly varied, powerful feelings have been gathered and generalised.

On the country has gathered the idea of a natural way of life; of peace, innocence, and simple virtue. On the city has gathered the idea of an achieved center; of learning, communication light.

Powerful hostile associations have also developed; on the city as a place of noise, worldliness and ambition; on the country as a place of backwardness, ignorance, limitation.

‘ Williams makes the observation that the opposition between country and city as basic ways of life, reaches back into ancient times.

However, it is important to recognize the fact, as Williams has indicated the history of the country and the city has been immensely varied.

The so-called the country way of life has included diverse practices related to farmers, hunters, pastoralists, and factory farmers; its organisation includes the tribe and the manor to the feudal estate, from the peasantry and tenant farmers to rural communes, from the plantation to the largest capitalist enterprise and the state farm. Similarly the city wears many faces; administrative base, stare capital, market town, port, religious center, mercantile depot and military barracks. What this analysis of Williams underscores is the fact that the country and city have to be understood in their full historical complexity and not yield to simplistic stereotypes. In discussing the objective of the country and the city, Raymond Williams offers the following comment.

Differences

‘In and through these differences, all the same, certain images and associations persist; and it is the purpose of this book to describe and analyse them, to see them in relation to the historically varied experience. For practical reasons I take most of my examples from English writing, though my interests go much wider. It ought in any case to be clear that the English experience is especially significant, in that one of the decisive transformations, in the relations between country and city, occurred there very early; it was based on a highly developed agrarian capitalism, with a very early disappearance if the traditional peasantry.’ While these social transformations were taking place, literary texts still persisted defiantly in clinging to a vigorous notion of the country. Williams makes the following analysis.

‘For it is a critical fact that in and through these transforming experiences English attitudes to the country, and to ideas of rural life, persisted with extraordinary power, so that even after the society was predominantly urban its literature, for a generation, was still predominantly rural.’ He then goes on to make the assertion that even in the twentieth century, in urban and industrial territories, forms of the older ideas and experiences still exert their influence. What Raymond Williams’ interpretation of the country and the city underline is the fact that there is a very complex interplay between the country and the city and only by adopting a rigorously historical standpoint can we uncover its manifold structures of meaning. This approach has great implications for our efforts in evaluating Sri Lankan literature. After all, one of the dominant themes in Sri Lankan fiction – Sinhala, Tamil, and English – has been this interplay between the country and the city.

Throughout the book, Williams points out how the country and the city influenced and even determined each other. This is indeed a point that is well worth remembering. He says that, directly or indirectly most towns seem to have developed as an aspect of the agricultural order itself; at a simple level as markets; at a higher level, reflecting the true social order as centers of finance, administration and secondary production. There was then every kind of interaction and tension, and some towns developed a certain autonomy.

But in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when ideological transition occurred, the effective bases of society were still property in land and the consequent rural production, and the towns, even the capital were, functionally related to this dominant order. What he is seeking to emphasize is the fact that as we read abstract comparisons of rural virtue and urban greed, it is important that we recognize the regular and necessary connections that existed between the social and moral orders which were so facilely and conventionally contrasted.

In establishing his point, Raymond Williams refers to Ben Jonson’s poem to wroth; in it the contrast between the country gentleman and the commercially mined men of the city is deeply etched. However, it is important to note that most of the day, the lawyers are busy trying to prove titles to land. He points out cogently that the greed and manipulative impulses that are so easily detected and criticized un the city run back, very noticeably, to the country houses with their rural splendor.

Williams claims that ‘this is a double process. The exploitation of man and nature, which takes place in the country, is realised and concentrated in the city. But also, profits if other kinds of exploitation – the accumulating wealth of the merchant, the lawyer, the court favorite – came to penetrate the country as if, but only as if, they were a new social phenomenon.’

Objective

The Country and the City is a compelling blending of subjective experience and objective events. Williams himself grew up in the country and later came to the city and this act has surely colored his understandings and interpretations of country and the city. He finds the complex layers of interconnections between the country and the city fascinating, and the power of his personal biography gives these observations greater focus and direction.

He remarks that, ‘whenever I consider the relations between country and city and between birth and learning, I find this history active and continuous; the relations are not only of ideas and experiences, but of rent and interest, of situation and power; a wider system. This then is where I am, and as I settle to work I find I have to resolve, step by slow step, experiences and questions that once moved like light .the life if the country and the city is moving and present; moving in time, through the history of a family and a people; moving in feeling and ideas, through a network of relationships and decisions.’`

‘The Country and the City’ deals largely with the poems of country houses. It is generally believed by literary critics and historians that country-house poems point ti a golden age, a vibrant organic society that was subsequently erased by capitalism.the actual story is more complex than this. As Williams has pointed out, an idealisation premised on a temporary situation and on a deep partiality for stability served to mask the real contradictions, antipathies and fault lines that marked the period.

Raymond Williams’ careful and imaginative readings of these poems go along way in restoring the balance, what Williams is saying is that these country-house poems by Ben Jonson and Thomas Carew and others should not be examined merely in terms of the conventions followed by the writers but more importantly in terms of the social situation in which theu were produced and consumed and the historical contexts which were so much a part of their meanings. Here Raymond Williams opens up an interesting pathway of inquiry that we could follow purposefully in evaluating, say, modern Sinhala poetry – the work of the Colombo poets.

Popular poet

I referred to the Colombo Poets specifically because if a special reason. Oliver Goldsmith was a popular poet among Colombo Pots, and his The Deserted Village was many years ago, translated into Sinhala under the title Palugama. The Deserted Village (1769) is one among several poems that Williams discusses in The Country and the City.

Therefore, let us see what he has to say about this poem and examine some of the ways in which we might profit by his investigative efforts. The poem contains several contradictions and ambivalences that can prove to be illuminating in our efforts to understand the specific period that the poem is dealing with. The poem has many passages that depict simplicities of peasant living and the much vaunted innocence that was rapidly disappearing along with passages that point to acts of eviction, clearance and evacuation.

……..the man of wealth and pride
Takes up a space that many poor supplied;
Space for his lake, his park’s extended bounds
Space for his horses, equipage and hounds.

It is important to note that the vanishing idealised past was perceived as a time when poetry flourished the transformations depicted by the poet signified the end of poetry.

What we find here is a sharp contrast between glamorised peasant way of life and the actual experiences of material deprivation. What Raymond Williams has to say about this matter is extremely illuminating.

‘The present is accurately and powerfully seen, but its real relations to the past and future are inaccessible, because the governing development is that of the writer himself; a feeling about the past, an idea about the future, into which, by what is truly an intersection, an observed present is arranged.’ He proceeds to make the observation that we do not need to doubt the warmth and genuineness of Goldsmith’s feelings for the people driven from the village. This structure becomes problematic when commonly held feelings are widened to include memory and imagination. What now takes over, according to Williams in language and idea, is a different pressure, namely, the writer’s social history.

The deserted village presents us with a blending of nostalgia and protest – nostalgia for a vanishing gold age and the protest against that act of destruction. Passages such as the following testify to this fact.

Sweet auburn1 loveliest village of the plain
Where health and plenty cheered the laboring swain
Where smiling spring its earliest visit paid,
And parting summer’s lingering bloom delayed.

There is a note of pastoral stereotypes in the poem

Dear lovely bowers of innocence and ase
Seats of my youth, when every sport could please

Childhood

Williams says that, ’it is not only the amalgamation of the memory of childhood and the memory of the village; it is that, in this mode of remembering, the object seems to dissolve, in what is really a self-regarding poetic exercise.

How often have I paused on every charm,
The shelter’d cot, the cultivated firm,
The never-falling brook, the busy mill,
The decent church that topt the neighboring hill,
The hawthorn bush, with seats beneath the shade,
For talking age, and whispering lovers made.

In this passage, the reader has a choice – a choice between the unmediated vision of a child and the mechanical application of a common literary representational strategy. It is interesting to observe that the people who inhabit the village are portrayed as lay figures commonly found in pastorals.

And all the village train from labor free
Led up their sports beneath the spreading tree;

In Goldsmith’s poem the village is framed in pastoral poetic terms. The village becomes a pastoral mode, and the forces of greed and extravagance have brought about its destruction. The poet is keen to establish the fact that the old village was pleasant and productive and the new village was the opposite.

One only master grasps the whole domain,
And half a tillage stints thy smiling plain,
No more thy glassy brook reflects the day,
But chocked with sedges, works its weedy way;
Along thy glades, a solitary guest,
The hollow sounding bittern guards its nest;
Amidst thy desert walk the lapwing flies,
And tire their echoes with unvaried cries.

Observations

So what we find in the reading offered by Raymond Williams on Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village is a combination of close reading of literary texts, observations on social history and explorations into literary convention.(Interestingly, he sees literary conventions not in terms of formalistic manifestations but as products of social history).This combination, it seems to me, works very effectively in Williams hands, and we in Sri Lanka can learn a great deal from his efforts.

To be continued