Landscape and Englishness (Spatial Practices 1) (Spatial Practices: An Interdisciplinary Series Cultural Hist)

Landscape and Englishness

Spatial Practices

An Interdisciplinary Series in Cultural History Geography Literature

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General Editors:

Robert Burden (University of Teesside) Stephan Kohl (Universität Würzburg) Editorial Board:

Christine Berberich Christoph Ehland Catrin Gersdorf Jan Hewitt Ralph Pordzik Chris Thurgar-Dawson Merle Tönnies

Landscape and Englishness Edited by

Robert Burden and Stephan Kohl

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006

Cover Design: Pier Post The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISSN: 1871-689X ISBN-10: 90-420-2102-0 ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2102-0 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006 Printed in the Netherlands

CONTENTS

The Spatial Practices Series

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Notes on Contributors

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1 Robert Burden Introduction: Englishness and Spatial Practices

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Theory 2 Chris Thurgar-Dawson Negotiating Englishness: Choropoetics, Reciprocal Spatial Realities and Holistic Spatial Semantics in William Renton’s ‘The Fork of the Road’ (1876)

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3 Christoph Schubert The Vertical Axis in Landscape Description: Elaborations of the Image Schemas UP and DOWN

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19th Century and Before 4 Ralph Pordzik England’s Domestic Others: The Tourist Construction of Agriculture and Landscape in William Cobbett’s Rural Rides (1830) 5 Patrick Parrinder Character, Identity, and Nationality in the English Novel 6 Bernhard Klein “The natural home of Englishmen”: Froude’s Oceana and the Writing of the Sea 7 Silvia Mergenthal “The Architecture of the Devil”: Stonehenge, Englishness, English Fiction

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20th Century 8 Robert Burden Home Thoughts from Abroad: Cultural Difference and the Critique of Modernity in D. H. Lawrence’s Twilight in Italy (1916) and Other Travel Writing 9 Ben Knights In Search of England: Travelogue and Nation Between the Wars 10 Stephan Kohl Rural England: An Invention of the Motor Industries? 11 Christine Berberich This Green and Pleasant Land: Cultural Constructions of Englishness

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Contemporary 12 Merle Tönnies Foregrounding Boundary Zones: Martin Parr’s Photographic (De-) Constructions of Englishness 13 Ruth Helyer “England as a pure, white Palladian mansion set upon a hill above a silver winding river”: Fiction’s Alternative Histories Index

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The Spatial Practices Series The series Spatial Practices belongs to the topographical turn in cultural studies and aims to publish new work in the study of spaces and places which have been appropriated for cultural meanings: symbolic landscapes and urban places which have specific cultural meanings that construct, maintain, and circulate myths of a unified national or regional culture and their histories, or whose visible ironies deconstruct those myths. Taking up the lessons of the new cultural geography, papers are invited which attempt to build bridges between the disciplines of cultural history, literary and cultural studies, and geography. Spatial Practices aims to promote a new interdisciplinary kind of cultural history drawing on constructivist approaches to questions of culture and identity that insist that cultural “realities” are the effect of discourses, but also that cultural objects and their histories and geographies are read as texts, with formal and generic rules, tropes and topographies. Robert Burden Stephan Kohl

Notes on Contributors ROBERT BURDEN is Reader in English Studies in the School of Arts and Media at the University of Teesside, UK where he teaches modern literature and culture. He is the author of Radicalizing Lawrence (Rodopi, 2000), and is writing a book on travel writing, gender, and imperialism. CHRISTINE BERBERICH is Lecturer at the University of Derby, UK where she teaches 19th and 20th-Century English and European Literature. She has previously published on Orwell, Waugh, Powell, Sassoon, and Englishness. Her manuscript ‘Regression and Reaction: Englishness, Nostalgia and the Image of the English Gentleman in the 20th Century’ is currently under consideration, and she has started work on two new book projects dedicated to Englishness. RUTH HELYER is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Teesside, UK. Her research interests are contemporary fiction and culture. She has published articles in Modern Fiction Studies, Contemporary Literary Criticism and contributed chapters to Cities on the Margin (Universitaires Franc-Comtoises Press, 2003), Transformations in Politics, Culture and Society (Rodopi, 2006) and Masculinities in Text and Teaching (Palgrave, 2007). She is currently editing a collection for South Carolina University Press and working on a chapter for the Cambridge Companion, both on Don DeLillo BERNHARD KLEIN is Senior Lecturer in Literature at the University of Essex. He is the author of two books, Maps and the Writing of Space in Early Modern England and Ireland (Palgrave, 2001) and On the Uses of History in Recent Irish Writing (Manchester UP, forthcoming 2006). He has also edited (or co-edited) several collections, including most recently Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean (with Gesa Mackenthun, Routledge, 2004). His current project deals with the ocean as a cultural contact zone in the early modern period.

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BEN KNIGHTS is Director of the English Subject Centre which is part of the UK Higher Education Academy Subject Network and based at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is interested in the crossover between disciplinary and pedagogic research, and the author of Writing Masculinities: Male Narratives in Twentieth Century Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), and co-author (with Dr Chris ThurgarDawson) of Active Reading: Transformative Writing in Literary Studies (Continuum, forthcoming 2006). STEPHAN KOHL is Professor of English and Cultural Studies at Würzburg University. He publishes on 19th and 20th-century British literature and culture. He is editor of ‘Anglistik’: Research Paradigms and Institutional Policies, 1930-2000 (2005). SILVIA MERGENTHAL is a professor of English and Literary Theory at the University of Konstanz, where she teaches British literature and culture. Her most recent publications include A Fast-Forward Version of England: Constructions of Englishness in Contemporary Fiction and Autorinnen der viktorianischen Epoche (both published in 2003). She is currently writing a book on Edinburgh as the scene of (real as well as literary) crimes. PATRICK PARRINDER is Professor of English at the University of Reading, UK. His research interests are H.G. Wells, science fiction, James Joyce and the history of the English novel. He is the author of Nation and Novel: The English Novel from Its Origins to the Present Day (Oxford UP, 2006). RALPH PORDZIK has taught English literature at the Universities of Essen, Freiburg i. Br. and München, and is now a lecturer in English and British Cultural Studies at Würzburg University, Germany. His most recent publications include The Quest for Postcolonial Utopia: A Comparative Introduction to the Utopian Novel in the New English Literatures (2001), Der englische Roman im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (2001) and The Wonder of Travel: Fiction, Tourism and the Social Construction of the Nostalgic (2005).

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CHRISTOPH SCHUBERT, who is Assistant Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Würzburg, Germany, received his PhD for a thesis entitled Die Hypotaxe in der englischen Lyrik [The Complex Sentence in English Poetry] (Lang, 2000). His publications include articles on English and German film titles, linguistic features of ‘fallible focalization’, the productivity of adjective formation types, and the pragmatics of verbal irony and politeness. His habilitation thesis investigates types of spatial perception and cohesion in descriptive passages of fictional and non-fictional texts. CHRIS THURGAR- DAWSON is Lecturer at the University of Teesside, UK. He is researching in the fields of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Poetry and Fiction as well as Critical and Cultural Theory. He also teaches Creative and Critical Writing. Currently he is working on a book project, titled Active Reading: Transformative Writing in Literary Studies. MERLE TÖNNIES is professor of British Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Paderborn / Germany. Her main fields of speciality can be found in the 19th to 21st centuries. She has recently edited Britain under Blair (Heidelberg: Winter, 2003) and is working on an introduction to British Cultural Studies for Narr Verlag (together with Claus-Ulrich Viol).

Introduction: Englishness and Spatial Practices Robert Burden 1. Symbolic Spaces and Cultural Realities The papers collected in this volume represent a selection of work from an international network sharing a common interest in the representations of cultural identity, space and place. The papers were first discussed at three conferences: at ESSE Zaragosa (September 2004), where we ran a seminar, “Writing Englishness”; at the University of Teesside (December 2004) where we held a one-day conference, “Culture, Landscape, and Environment 1”; and at the University of Würzburg (June 2005) where we held our next one-day conference, “Culture, Landscape, and Environment 2”. We have organised the papers to reflect the broad discussion of landscape and Englishness, beginning with those that focus on the nineteenth century and before, and then moving on to those focusing on the early and mid-twentieth century, ending with work on contemporary British culture. The first two papers are a measure of our desire to be interdisciplinary, the one (Thurgar-Dawson) an example of cultural geography as text analysis, the other (Schubert) an example of cognitive linguistics analysing the semantics of landscape representation. As we say in the preface to the Series, we are attempting to build bridges between the disciplines: literary and cultural studies, linguistics, art history, history and geography – promoting a new interdisciplinary cultural history. This volume has been broadly influenced by a renewed and growing interest in questions of cultural identity – its emergence in Victorian theories and fictions of nationality (Parrinder) – and the new cultural geography. The papers cover a rich variety of spaces and places which have been appropriated for cultural meanings: the rural countryside and farmland of the “Home Counties” in the early nineteenth century as Arcadian idyll in Cobbett (Pordzik), and as the land to die for in war propaganda (Berberich), and as nostalgia for a uni-

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fied, organic English culture in Lawrence (Burden), Morton and Priestley’s travel writing (Knights), but also in the Shell Tourist Guides to motoring in rural England (Kohl); English moorland (Thurgar-Dawson); the “sacred geography” of monuments like Stonehenge in Hardy and others (Mergenthal); the seaside (beaches in Martin Parr’s photography) as image of a deconstructed Englishness (Tönnies), and the sea (as English Victorian imperial “territory”) and its symbolic breezes in Froude’s travel writing (Klein). The English landscape is also a paradigm for landscape description or comparison in foreign travel, as seen in Lawrence’s travel writing (Burden), and for the colonial territory itself in Rushdie writing India (Helyer) – examples of the “metonymic displacement of one landscape into another” (Bunn 2002: 139). In each of these many examples, Englishness is reflected in the spaces it occupies, or dwells in. Symbolic landscapes and places have specific cultural meanings that construct, maintain, and circulate myths of a unified national identity, or whose visible ironies deconstruct those myths as we “think of England”. A national cultural identity like Englishness is thus understood as a “discursive effect”, a set of signifying practices (Easthope 1999: 32 and 43), an “ideology” because the narrative of a unified culture with its search for origins and traditions implies a false universalism that speaks in the voice of the white tribe (even when its history is full of discontinuities). There is a history of Englishness as cultural capital. It has been exported through the Empire and its administrators, educators, and missionaries. It has left its traces in the places of its dominion: in Nairobi, New Delhi, Dar-Es-Salaam, wherever education systems, officer training schools, or police forces are still being modelled on British paradigms – and where the idea of civil society was first defined by the imperial power. Englishness is problematised by the new British cultural realities and literatures represented in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, and Salmon Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath her Feet (as discussed by Helyer) and Martin Parr’s photography (Tönnies) – in the constructions of “a new postimperial space” (Said 2002: 247). However, this cultural crisis has been emerging over a long period, as the papers in this volume testify. We have, though, a more recent historical context for the work we are doing. Intellectual impetus for studying the construction of

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Englishness emerged with the critiques of Thatcherism (Hall 1983, 1988). The revival of a post-Victorian Englishness in the 1980s demonstrates Simon Gikandi’s point that we cannot speak of an English identity “outside the history of Empire and the culture of colonialism” (1996: 213). As he argues, during the 1980s the imperial past was reconstructed as nostalgia and patriotism (see Berberich’s paper). And there is still much vain posturing on the terraces at football matches with the visible signs of a revived English nationalism in the flag of St George, of a virulent anti-Euro little Englandism, and best of all a last night at the Proms nationalist sing-song broadcast around the world on TV promoting a residual ideology from the late-nineteenth century of a “land of hope and glory” – and this event is emulated around the country in concert halls and parks. Paradoxically, such powerful emotions are created so that nobody is excluded for the time it takes to sing “Rule Britannia” – even otherwise marginalized ethnic groups. There is no greater myth of national unity circulated once a year than the Last Night at the Proms (curiously popular too with all ages and cultural subgroups, despite it being a classical music concert, which normally has higher class connotations in Britain today and interests fewer and fewer younger people). And now Gordon Brown has called for a public holiday to celebrate Britain as a Nation – which New Labour has been devolving (Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly). It would be called “British Day” and coincide with Remembrance Sunday in November – to celebrate national unity. Not everyone is in favour of using that Sunday; but there is a general approval for the move to take the Union Jack away from the far-right BNP. Clearly there is a continuing confusion between Britishness – a concept of national unity based on the union of the different cultural and ethnic groups (the passport holders) – and Englishness, as distinct from Scottishness, Welshness. Seen from the point of view of Scottish or Welsh Nationalism, “Britishness is a mask. Beneath it there is only one nation, England” (R.S. Thomas quoted in Bassnett 1997: 101). These calls for separate nationalisms within the one island have a long history. Recent studies of national cultural identity have often taken their cue from Benedict Anderson’s seminal work, Imagined Communities, where he writes that nationalism commands today “such profound emotional legitimacy” (1991: 4). His work called attention to the ways in which, in the formation of modern identity in the British Isles, as Gikandi (1996, xvii) argues, “the national imaginary was

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generated by personal and collective desires whose authority was derived from the narrative and historical forms that they assumed”. The crisis of Englishness is in part, then, produced by “a continuous conflict between the centre and its Celtic and colonial peripheries” (Gikandi 1996: xvii). Britishness was an invention “superimposed over an array of internal differences in response to contact with the Other, and in response to conflict with the Other” (Linda Colley quoted in Gikandi 1996: xviii).1 Britishness seems to have been invented to extinguish the difference between the English, the Scots, and the Welsh, and this is seen at best in the hegemonic status of the English language.2 The papers in this volume offer a historical view of the constructions of national identity. Indeed, the terms of the difference between national character and national identity are argued out in Parrinder’s paper in conjunction with the development of the novel as a literary genre. This volume is a contribution to the growing interest in recent history which has become interdisciplinary – a new kind of cultural history of Englishness, with its myths and internal contradictions, now theorised through deconstructive readings. And one of the most productive methodologies is the new cultural geography for analysing the uses of spaces and places. But also, for those who come from literary and cultural studies, there is now a renewed use of Theory (as the term has been understood since the 1960s) – and this, just at the point when an era of post-Theory is being announced around the conference circuit. We now have semiotic readings of maps and monuments, Bakhtinian dialogism and the focus on the chronotope (as spatial representation of history), Barthesian analysis of contemporary myths, a revived use of Althusserian interpellation in theorising identity, and the addition of certain Lacanian concepts – the mirror stage, the Imaginary, the Other, Desire.3 In all this, there is a general acceptance and promotion of the constructivist approach to questions of culture and 1 2

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See Colley 1992. For a more recent study see Kumar 2003. A fuller version of this discussion would, of course, include the Irish question. One could do no worse than recall the plays: Brian Friel’s (1981) Translations, and Harold Pinter’s (1988) Mountain Language. As in Easthope’s discussion of “national desire” as lack and collective misrecognition (1999: 33-57).

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identity, as we all seem to accept – explicitly or implicitly – that cultural “realities” are the effect of discourses. There is one other aspect of the old Theory debates that is central to what we do: the idea of the Text – that is, cultural objects and their histories and geographies are read as texts, with formal and generic rules (pastoral, georgic, exotic, sublime, picturesque), tropes and topographies. In this sense, Englishness is always “written”, even in visual representations, as the variety of examples in this volume on landscape and Englishness demonstrate.

2. Cultural and Literary Geographies A working country is hardly ever a landscape. The very idea of landscape implies separation and observation. It is possible and useful to trace the internal histories of landscape painting, landscape writing, landscape gardening and landscape architecture, but in any final analysis we must relate these histories to the common history of a land and its society […] The real history is very much more complicated […] Parks, originally woodlands enclosed for preserving and hunting game, were made in England from at the latest the tenth century […] Much of the enclosing land and the building of houses was done at the expense of whole villages and cornfields that were cleared […] It is into this complex of territorial establishment that we must re-insert the self-conscious development of landscape and what is called the ‘invention’ of scenery […] For what was being done [in the eighteenth century], by this new class, with new capital, new equipment and new skills to hire, was indeed a disposition of ‘Nature’ to their own point of view […] to make Nature move to arranged design. (Williams 1973: 121-124)

In his critique of the idealisation of landscape in the Pastoral tradition, Raymond Williams insisted, with his cultural materialist approach, on the separation between art and literature, on the one hand, and “real” history, on the other. He is, of course, in tune with Cobbett (see Pordzik) and his obsession with a land that is efficiently and well worked – a husbanded land. The Country and the City is “a necessary starting point for any investigation of the politics of place in the formation of English cultural identity […] an influential paradigm” (MacLean 1999: 1). But things have moved on, and the limits of Williams’ argument emerged after the development of new kinds of analysis – in Lefebvre (2004), de Certeau (1988), Foucault (1977), Harvey (1989),

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Cosgrove (1998), Cosgrove and Daniels (2002), Matless (1998), Mitchell (2002), Thacker (2003) – of the cultural and ideological significance of space and place. Indeed, the work of Lefebvre and others since the early 1970s on space as signifying practice – on spatial metaphors – “has rendered untenable the kind of simple distinction Williams was able to make between the ‘real histories’ of social relations on the land, and mere ideologies on the other” (MacLean 1999: 2). Conceptions of socially and culturally produced space now inform a greater interdisciplinary project for the study of Englishness. The difference between Williams and the newer work on spatial practice is clear to see in the following statement by Lefebvre: I shall instead be putting the stress on their dialectical character. Codes will be seen as part of a practical relationship, as part of an interaction between ‘subjects’ and their space and surroundings. I shall attempt to trace the coming-into-being and disappearance of codings / decodings. My aim is to highlight contents – i.e. the social (spatial) practices inherent in the form under consideration. (2004: 18)

To separate history or social reality and representation is no longer possible: Social space will be revealed in its particularity to the extent that it ceases to be indistinguishable from mental space (as defined by the philosophers and mathematicians) on the one hand, and physical space (as defined by practico-sensory activity and the perception of ‘nature’) on the other. (Lefebvre 2004: 27)

Space, then, is no longer understood as a void filled by an observation or a representation. It is always already a practice. A place (the English countryside) is a spatial practice (as landscape, scenery, farm, theme park) encoded with aesthetic, cultural, and social relations – including those of class and power. For Lefebvre, space is subject to the laws of production in the classic Marxist sense, with the implications of uneven social relations, minority property ownership and rights, rent – driven by the logic of the market place (“the capitalist trinity is established in space – that trinity of land-capital-labour” [282]). Space is “endowed with exchange value” (337. Italics in original), and is a commodity and a resource (agricultural, mineral, leisure and tourist). There are designated spaces of leisure like the beach, the park. Equally land has predominantly had a patrilineal heritage – the fate of

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the country estate has been in the hands of the sons of England; its preservation often being seen as symptomatic of the condition of England (Elizabeth Bennet surveying Darcy’s Pemberley; Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst” – where country life expresses the dominant social and moral values). And in the wider geopolitical field space is annexed or occupied as colonised territory; decolonisation sees the reclamation of territorial rights. There is a “historical relationship between the state and space” (Lefebvre 2004: 378). Thus we have a politics of space. – It is the use (and misuse) of space, above all, that is being analysed (see Lefebvre 2004: 404). Despite the limits imposed by his classic Marxist reading, social space emerges in Lefebvre’s work as “heterotopic”.4 And his study, The Production of Space has expanded the ways in which we understand the interaction of space and place. We should agree that this study is “a vital theoretical text for recent cultural geography” (Thacker 2003: 16), as it brings social, political and historical questions to the reading of topography. Foucault has also discussed the uses of space in history, focusing on the ways in which spatial metaphors and material space interact in power relations (as opposed to Lefebvre’s over-insistence on relations of production). Examples range from heterotopias like the cemetery to the design of the Benthamite prison with its spatial practice of effective surveillance.5 As, in part, a counter move to Foucault, Michel de Certeau insists that walking in the city can include spatial practices that take us “outside the reach of panoptic power” (de Certeau, “Spatial Stories” in 1988: 95). We can get beyond the “networks of surveillance” that produce disciplinary spaces (96). The lived space of the city is the space of the flâneur / flâneuse, the window shopper casually appropriating that space for the ego’s desire. Walking in the streets – the pedestrianisation of urban space – is its own rhetoric, its phatic discourse for chance meetings with passers-by, its own mapping (“the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space

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In the sense that language for Bakhtin is heteroglossic. See Thacker 2003: 18. See Foucault 1977.

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by walkers” [117]) – as we might see in spatial reading of, say, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.6 The moving about that the city multiplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place […] a network of residences temporarily appropriated by pedestrian traffic […] a universe of rented spaces haunted by a nowhere or by dreamed-of places. (de Certeau 1988: 105)

What makes this interesting for literary and cultural studies is the attempt to understand the relationship between real places and invented / imagined spaces. De Certeau gives a model for reading stories as spatial practices: In modern Athens, the vehicles of mass transportation are called metaphorai. To go to work or come home, one takes a ‘metaphor’ – a bus or a train. Stories could also take this noble name: every day, they traverse and organise places; they select and link them together; they make sentences and itineraries out of them. They are spatial trajectories. In this respect, narrative structures have the status of spatial syntaxes […] Every story is a travel story – a spatial practice. (115)

His work draws on Lefebvre, Foucault, structuralism, but also on psychoanalysis. Childhood memories need places. The house is the location of memory, sometimes turned uncanny in the returns of the repressed, in the familiar becoming strange: “To practice space is thus to repeat the joyful and silent experience of childhood; it is, in a place, to be other and to move toward the other” (de Certeau 1988: 110). Freud likened psychoanalysis to the excavation of the ancient city – a spatial metaphor. Maps colonize, monuments ritualise spaces; travel writing articulates other spaces: “there is no spatiality that is not organised by the determination of frontiers” (de Certeau 1988: 123). Many of the papers in this collection discuss the mapping of spaces – quintessentially English landscapes, or foreign places re-appropriated by a particularly English mindset at a particular moment in history. An example – and one used by Thacker – is Marlow’s fascination with maps in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; where the map of Africa in the late nineteenth-century still has blank spaces, places of 6

See Thacker 2003: chapter 5.

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darkness. In Thacker’s words: “Imperialist expansion is perceived as a process of converting unknowable – to Western eyes at least – spaces into cognised and mapped places.” (37) As this volume demonstrates in so many different ways, this process of cultural mapping is central to the long life of Englishness as a national identity. It is the difference, in de Certeau’s terms, between the tour and the map, where it is the map which “colonizes spaces”, while the tour “actualizes spaces”. 3. Landscape as Iconography In his introduction to the new edition of Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape Cosgrove insists that we interpret landscapes iconographically and intelligently while remaining true to the everyday experience of landscape as the setting for life and work […] landscapes emerge from specific geographical, social and cultural circumstances. (Cosgrove 1998: xi)

Landscape is also important to the myths and memories of a culture. Cosgrove has certainly been a driving force in realigning Geography and the study of landscape, as he himself acknowledges: To locate landscape interpretation within a critical historiography, to theorise the idea of landscape within a broadly Marxian understanding of culture and society, and thus to extend the treatment of landscape beyond what seemed to me a prevailing narrow focus on design and taste. (xiii)

Landscape is now understood as a way of seeing – a scopic regime – at the same time as being symptomatic of the appropriation of land (as Williams, Lefebvre and others have also argued). Surprisingly, as Cosgrove himself admits, what was missing from the 1984 edition of the book was any discussion of desire or gender. The gaze – of tourist or traveller, painter or photographer – is motivated by desire and guided by gender. Lacan writes of the “scopic drive” (1987: 17). The gaze has more than a focalizing function: it has an ontological effect in the scopic field because of the dialectical encounter between the imaginary and the real. It is a mapping of space as méconnaissance (misrecognition) (see 83). In other words there is a

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relationship between the gaze and what one wishes to see. (I engage briefly with this analysis in my paper in this volume.) We may also speak of the gendered landscape, as we might of a feminine and a masculine spatial practice. Male explorers ‘penetrate’ the heart of darkness in Victorian Africa, as space is to be conquered; while Mary Kingsley in 1893 in defiance of the conventions of womanhood travelled unaccompanied in West Africa, protected though by her large heavy skirts. But, as Gikandi argues, hers is a mark of what women can achieve, without restraints, in the open field of empire. Because it seems free of gender ideologies that constrain white women in the metropolis, the imperial field is construed as a social space for freedom and fulfilment. (1996:144)

This usually forbidden space of the colonial frontier “promised female subjects new modes of subjectivity” (122). Back home in England, conventionally in preservationist discourse the ‘virgin’ countryside must be protected, must not be spoilt or violated – it needs defending by “chivalrous Saint Georgic preservationists”, as Matless (1998: 42) wittily puts it. Husbandry is a masculine caring for the land. Thomas Sharp in Town and Countryside (1932) writes about “the strong masculine virility of the town; the softer beauty, the richness, the fruitfulness of that mother of men, the countryside” (cit. Matless 1998: 33). The new health drive in the 1930s, however, gave women a less passive relationship between the body and the landscape as outdoor “eurhythmics” was promoted by the Women’s League of Health and Beauty (see Matless: 1998: 87ff.). Male youth groups were also encouraged at the time, after the example of the German Wandervogel, to get out into the countryside, hiking and camping, so that the nation and the race would be stronger, healthier – a spatial practice with eugenic implication in the early twentieth century. The new cultural geography has broadened its field to include desire, the gaze, gender, and also race. Landscape is “an ideologicallycharged and very complex cultural product” (Cosgrove 1998: 11), and requires an interdisciplinary methodology as an object of study. As a way of seeing, landscape demonstrates how certain classes have imagined their relationship with nature (see 15) – the whole pastoral tradi-

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tion in English literature has class connotations, as Williams (1973) has argued. Landscape also brings the eye of the observer into a vision of nature which combines the aesthetic and the psychological. Paradigms of response – elation and uplift, the picturesque and the sublime – derive from art and literature (Romanticism, for example). In this sense, landscape is already an encoded way of seeing the countryside. And this splendour has then stood for everything that is quintessentially English (in the Lake District, the Chilterns, or the Cotswolds) – something the Heritage industry has commodified. Specific areas of countryside, renowned for their “natural beauty”, have become iconic. Berberich’s paper in this volume has several examples: Betjeman’s idealised village (1943); Vera Brittain’s (1941) “fields and lanes of its lovely countryside” (both expressing nationalist sentiments during the war); Orwell’s (1938) “deep meadows [...] and slow-moving streams bordered by willows” (after his return from the Spanish Civil War); and for the butler, Stevens going one further in Ishiguro’s (1989) The Remains of the Day: the English landscape is “the most deeply satisfying in the world.” – Thus: “If the landscape is regarded as distinctly English, then so too is the way of seeing which offers topographic literacy” (Matless 1998: 277). Landscape, originally a genre of painting (different theories of perspective in art have always directed the observer of nature7), and then also for gardening (with ideological connotations in the 18th century), is synonymous with Englishness. As Cosgrove and others testify, geographers, who by definition always knew the importance of maps, have been coming to terms with other visual representations, in acknowledging the broader field of landscape study – and equally literary and cultural studies have been taking an interest in the iconography of space as an approach to culture and its history.8 In Cosgrove’s subsequent book, with Daniels (2002), the editors claim in the introduction that they are attempting in this collection 7

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“Perspective, then, was a device for controlling the world of things, of objects which could be possessed. It was related to cosmology in the Renaissance which regarded creation as ordained by fixed geometrical rules.” (Cosgrove 1998: 25). For Cosgrove’s cultural materialist analysis of English landscape see his chapters 7 and 8.

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of essays on landscape from different disciplines to get beyond the tendency in human geography “to reify landscape as an object of empiricist investigation” by focusing on “the fertile concept of iconography” defined as “the theoretical and historical study of symbolic imagery” (Cosgrove and Daniels 1). This requires a greater attention to not just formal properties but to symbolic values in historical contexts. Thus a landscape takes on iconic status in response to specific cultural demands (see 3). Many of the papers collected in our volume focus on moments in English history when landscape needed to represent something essentialist about the national culture – as nostalgia for an (imagined) organic past or idyllic childhood (a symbolic regression); as counterweight to an industrialising economy; as consolation for the horrors of war. The most recurrent view is the conservative one of “a ‘deep’ England with its stable layers of historical accretion, so profoundly threatened by modernisation” (8). W.J.T. Mitchell (2002) carries on this kind of work focusing specifically on landscape as a cultural force for the construction and maintenance of national and social identities. In this collection with its focus on art we get a detailed analysis of the “vast network of cultural codes” that makes landscape semiotic (in the radical, materialist postBarthesian sense). Collective fantasies of place are discussed as central to the “national imaginary” (27). Probably the most significant statement about landscape in Matless – from within the burgeoning discipline of Historical Geography – is that “one could argue that the relational hybridity of the term, which is already both natural and cultural, deep and superficial, makes it an inherently deconstructive force” (1998: 12). As the papers in our volume argue, in various ways and with many examples from English cultural history, space represents collective memory and value in a history of Englishness as national identity. However, being a construction – a signifying practice – landscape, once subject to the kinds of readings this introduction has sought to sketch, reveals its contradictions: those between nature and culture, and between nature and the natural world itself once nature itself is understood as a concept – one that like landscape means different things at different times: “the Ideal, the Heroic, the Pastoral, the Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Picturesque” (Mitchell 2002: 14); leisure and health; the rich soil of the nation and the roots of Englishness; heritage; organicism and harmony; ruralism; the “Countryside Alliance”; Mother Earth; good hus-

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bandry (a “working countryside”); the object of conservation; recycling; landfill sites for household or nuclear waste; pollution caused by modern industry, or pesticides; the Garden of England; the Green and Pleasant Land; “some corner of a foreign field that is forever England” (Rupert Brooke). – A history of nature and culture should account for “the constitution of knowledges, discourses, domains of objects” (Foucault quoted Matless 20). Matless’ (1998) study of landscape and Englishness works within Historical Geography, but broadly conceived in the same intellectual terrain as the new cultural history and geography sketched out in this introduction to our volume of the same title. We, though, work from within cultural and literary studies. His study is in the end mostly concerned with legislative governance of the countryside, and the attempts to regulate it in the last hundred years or more. The ideological implications of this work reverberate on the different terrain of ours. Indeed, some of the discussion of travelling in the countryside in search of the real England is taken up in our volume (Knights, Kohl, Pordzik, Burden, Berberich). However, clearly Human Geography, Cultural and Literary Studies, and the New Cultural History have gone interdisciplinary. If Geography now looks at literature, spatial practices are part of cultural studies. Both, however, draw on the work of the theories sketched out in this introduction.

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Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism [1983]. Rev. ed. London: Verso. Bassnett, Susan (ed.). 1997. Studying British Cultures. London: Routledge. Bunn, David. 2002. ‘ “ Our Wattled Cot”: Mercantile and Domestic Space in Thomas Pringle’s African Landscapes’ in Mitchell (2002): 127-173. Colley, Linda. 1992. Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837. New Haven: Yale UP. Cosgrove, Denis E. 1998. Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape [1984]. Madison: Wisconsin UP. –– and Stephen Daniels (eds). 2002. The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments [1988]. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. de Certeau, Michel. 1988. The Practice of Everyday Life. London: California UP. Easthope, Antony. 1999. Englishness and National Culture. London: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish [1975]. London: Penguin. Gikandi, Simon. 1996. Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism. New York: Columbia UP. Hall, Stuart. 1988. The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. London: Verso. –– and Martin Jacques (eds). 1983. The Politics of Thatcherism. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Harvey, David. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell. Kumar, Krishan. 2003. The Making of English National Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Lacan, Jacques. 1987. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis [1973]. London: Penguin. Lefebvre, Henri. 2004. The Production of Space [1974] (transl. Donald NicholsonSmith). Oxford: Blackwell. MacLean, Gerald et al. (eds). 1999. The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1550-1850. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Matless, David. 1998. Landscape and Englishness. London: Reaktion. Mitchell, W.J.T. (ed.). 2002. Landscape and Power [1994]. London: U of Chicago P. Said, Edward. W. 2002. ‘Invention, Memory, and Place’ in Mitchell (2002): 241-259. Thacker, Andrew. 2003. Moving through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism. Manchester: Manchester UP. Williams, Raymond. 1973. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford UP.

Negotiating Englishness: Choropoetics, Reciprocal Spatial Realities and Holistic Spatial Semantics in William Renton’s ‘The Fork of the Road’ (1876) Chris Thurgar-Dawson Abstract: Addressing the idiosyncratic trope of the English moorland as it appears in a short, landscape poem by William Renton, this chapter argues that in order to explore the geographical and socio-spatial discourses of Englishness, practitioners will benefit from a renewed engagement with spatial models and spatial practices. The first of these practices is an awareness of chorological, or socio-regional, writing strategies (‘choropoetics’); the second is a recognition of spatial dialogism and the ability to identify what I am calling ‘reciprocal spatial realities’ (RSRs); and the last is a rudimentary understanding of holistic spatial semantics (HSS), the linguistic analysis of deictic words and phrases in discursive communication. I make the case that all three of these new models involve close attention to what Martin Nystrand has called ‘contexted utterances’ in written English. I further suggest that these research areas might currently pave the way for purposive re-examinations of place, space and identity formation. Throughout the discussion, definitions, examples and elaborations of the above ideas are employed and, as in the work of other contributors to this volume, such illustrations relate once more to the historical construction of Englishness under the influence of spatial identity. Key names and concepts: Henri Lefebvre - Martin Nystrand - William Renton Ragnar Rommetveit - Jordan Zlatev; Borderlands - Chorology - Choropoetics Deictics - Dialogism - Englishness - Cultural Geography - Regional Identity Landscape - Moorland - Negotiation - Place - Poetry - Reciprocal Spatial Realities Space - Spatial Practices - Spatial Semantics.

The Fork of the Road An utter moorland, high, and wide, and flat; A beaten roadway, branching out in grave distaste And weather-beaten and defaced, Pricking its ears along the solitary waste – A signpost; pointing this way, pointing that. (Renton 1876).

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Chris Thurgar-Dawson Roads, tracks, lanes and paths are sure to frustrate, fascinate and tax the minds of all who dare to probe their secrets. (Muir 1981: 115) Even in their avowed disaffection from the state and official Englishness, these young English people cannot flee from a particular set of discourses in which they find their identities. (Easthope 1999: 228) In winter nothing more dreary, in summer nothing more divine (Emily Brontë on moorland, quoted in Hey 2000: 207).

Cultural geography has recently provided a number of new ways of interpreting literary and cultural texts. In particular, considerable headway has been made in what it means to talk about the spatial construction of regional, national and indeed global identities. In this exploratory paper on the spatial modeling and spatial negotiation of Englishness, I aim first to suggest that six key strategies are of significance in decoding such identities (‘choropoetics’), second to show that writers and readers work continually with what I shall call ‘reciprocal spatial realities’ (RSRs) and third, provisionally to introduce the linguistic idea of ‘holistic spatial semantics’ (HSS). The early part of my thinking draws on the well-known spatial materialism of Henri Lefebvre, the middle employs and adds to dialogical concepts pioneered by the Scandinavian cultural theorist, Ragnar Rommetveit, and the last moves from recent research in cognitive linguistics by Jordan Zlatev. Since much of the paper posits new critical theories of spatial analysis, my single source text is short: a five-line poem (above) by the late-Victorian, Lake Poet, William Renton. My claim is that a spatial, or more accurately a ‘choropoetic,’ reading of Renton’s ‘The Fork of the Road’ enables readers more fully to understand the ways in which Englishness can be framed, negotiated and textualized. The general statement of intent underlying this approach to the text follows Krishan Kumar’s assertion that “[t]he Englishness that was defined before the First World War, and that persisted after it, was mostly a cultural rather than a political phenomenon” (Kumar 2003: 238).

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1. Practice One: Choropoetics (Figure 1) I am going to posit six fundamental vectors which together form what I am calling a ‘choropoetic’ writing and reading practice. These are: the production of space; the consumption of space; landscape; place; timing space; and the gender of space. I am using the term ‘choropoetic’ as a shorthand for ‘chorological poetics’ by which I mean to signify the full array of socio-spatial practices available to active writers and readers of space. Histories of the relationship between chorology and human geography, including Kant’s input, can be found elsewhere.1 The first requirement of any interpretation of textualized space can profitably start with these six categories, several of which are present in most cultural texts.

Material Space

Production

Consumption

Landscape

Space-Time

Place

Gender

Textual Space Figure 1. Choropoetic Practice (six vectors)

Firstly, then, what kind of space is produced by the Renton poem, above? Clearly it is a moorland, along with all the associations which moorland implies – wilderness, physical geography, the lie of the 1

For chorology see, among others: Sack 1990: 87-95; Entrikin 1989; and Sauer 1974: 318-20. Kant’s relevant essay is ‘Concerning the Ultimate Ground of the Differentiation of Directions in Space’ [1768].

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land, open agriculture, peat digging, isolation, urban otherness and so on. But there are also signs of a built environment on the horizon in the form of a road, a “roadway”, signifying a human mark, a human geography. Roadways produce links, transport, conveyance, timespace convergence, material means between Walther Christaller’s famous ‘central places’.2 The Renton text is thus producing a space that is at once fearful and remote as well as commodity-bound. Not only is it “beaten” but it leads by analogy to the ‘grave’ and to “distaste” and by metaphor to “grave distaste”. The signpost itself crucially fails to fulfill its deictic function, merely “pointing this way, pointing that”. Its writing has been “defaced” and erased by the elements, a symbol perhaps of time’s unruly march across the face of the earth: uncertain space, terra incognita, ‘here be dragons’. This is potentially a space of positive movement, of the productively mapped, of the speedy transport of animals and goods, but according to Renton, the space is topophobic: effaced, “beaten” and heading for the grave. The main product of the fork in the road is a spatial dilemma, a material choice between one ‘branch’ and another. The ordinary traveller or user of space is forced bodily into a decision. This is a dualistic ideology, not a unitary or even polyvalent system – the former would be hairpin or switchback, the latter a crossroads or meeting of lane ends, each producing its own panoply of productive connotations. No, the “Fork in the Road” is a space writ large in binary code, a do or die, the Greek letter upsilon (Y). The space produced by the moorland is also described as “waste”. In new historicist style we should mention that this is not a random choice of word by Renton, but is in fact the correct discursive marker for such an expanse of common land. Indeed the word ‘waste’ has a long and specific history of its own in relation to the description of such apparently boundless vistas. Alan Everitt provides a succint reminder of this, placing exactly these northern moorlands first in importance in his listings of ‘common waste’ land: What exactly is common land? We are not here concerned with common fields or meadows, but with what in historic language is called ‘common waste.’ It was land that lay outside the arable fields and meadows, whether open or enclosed. [...] Prominent among those 2

See Christaller 1966; and also Losch 1954. There is a nice summary of location theory and the Washington School by Johnston 1991: 62-66.

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areas where commons were especially notable were, first, the great fells and moorlands of the north and west, where much ‘waste’ remains today. (2000: 210)

Secondly, who is the stereotypical consumer of “high, and wide, and flat” moorland roads? Several answers spring to mind – the shepherd with his sheep for market; the rambler or walker, staff in hand; the sight-seer or tourist, en route to the beauty spot; the training soldier; the hard-pressed vet; the dairy-tanker driver. These are some of the likely real-world consumers of minor moorland roads, past and present. I want to pause for a moment for a slightly more detailed look at two such ordinary users of the beaten moorland roadway, both of whom were still very active at the time the poem was written, and both of whom possess a distinctive moorland history of their own: on the one hand, the long-distance carrier; on the other, the professional cattle drover. We can take them both together: The country or village carrier needs to be clearly distinguished at the outset from the long-distance carrier. His function was a different one. The network of long distance routes had grown up during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and its essential purpose was to link one town with another, one area with another, and above all the provinces generally with London. (Everitt 1985: 279) Drove roads and packhorse roads were widely used in the Middle Ages and a growth of industry and trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth century brought them to the height of their usefulness. By the start of the eighteenth century, an active Scottish export trade in cattle had developed. Young beasts were assembled at towns like Falkirk, Dumfries and Crieff, purchased in large numbers by English graziers, and driven to northern English market towns like Hexham and Malham. [...] In their passage across the north of England, the drovers bypassed cultivated areas, villages and turnpikes, traversing long unbroken stretches of upland common. (Muir 1981: 140)

The long-distance carrier in the first passage – a typical consumer of the moorland space described in the Renton text – is a properly chorological user of this space since he is in the very business of connecting regions, of linking “one area with another”. This is the stuff of a local and regional social geography, rather than the subject of a national or global concern. The moor acts as the boundary

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between regions, the common waste barrier between different regional or areal environments. Similarly, the cattle drover is consuming the space of the moorland road in a business capacity and once again we see that the topic is properly regional, and therefore properly the object of a chorological geography. The “young beasts” set off from one regional centre such as Falkirk, and end up being traded in another, for example, Malham. In their passage from one market town to another they consume the space of the drove roads, “traversing long unbroken stretches of upland common”. Again it is interesting to note that these are not just any upland commons, but those between Scotland and England, those border moors that Renton knew well. Such people, then, were the readers and interpreters of the weather-beaten high way: the figure in the landscape, the ordinary everyday consumer of Lefebvre’s ‘ultimate good’, that is, material space (see 1991: 1-67). A further consumer is at work here, however, and this is the real current reader of the text – you and me. We are consuming signs, images and concepts, building our own picture of the narrator’s identity, the (presumably) English seer in the landscape, our visitor, our witness, our subject. But in this case, the focalizer is a regular nobody – no ego, no physical embodiment, no name – an invisible presence to whom we shall later return. The landscape of this text, our third choropoetic, is vivid: it’s right here and now in the present continuous tense. It is a “branching”, “pricking”, “pointing” landscape, a canvas in thrall to the present participle. And it is iconographic in its failure to sign – a landscape that is signed out, timed out, subject in all seasons to meteorological extremes.3 Romantic, phallic, dreamed up in the geographical imaginations of Cathy and Heathcliffe, of The Hound of the Baskervilles, of Jane Eyre, Grahame Swift and King Lear. The moorland landscape is both conspicuous vacuum and symbolic feast. It is also a particularly English trope and topos. Lacking desert, prairie and wilderness, lacking steppe, salt lake and plateau, lacking highland, mesa and glacier, the English moorland wilderness at once becomes the symbolic landscape of multifarious, small-island projections and desires. David Hey helps by framing the issue in terms of aesthetic taste: 3

See Cosgrove and Daniels 1988; but also Fitter 1995: 1-24.

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Earlier taste was for a tamed, cultivated landscape. The moors were dismissed tersely as ‘waste’ or as ‘barren ground’ of no economic value and with no aesthetic appeal. When seventeenth and earlyeighteenth century writers searched for adjectives to sum up their feelings about moorland landscapes they came up with words like frightful, awful, horrible, hideous, dismal, gloomy, unpleasing and inhospitable. (2000: 190)

The fourth vector of choropoetics is place and the poem joins a large category of texts here depicting failures of place or non-place.4 Topologically speaking, our animated signpost that is “pricking its ears” is a failed placeholder – a material thing at once the object of the human gaze and of cognition, yet also the subject of the poem. Between objective and subjective we lean towards what Entrikin has helpfully termed ‘betweenness of place’ or alternatively we could analyse the fork in the road as a liminal place, a threshold between physical direction and metaphysical uncertainty. Indeed the literature on border geographies is not lacking.5 So in terms of place, then, we might focus on betweenness, liminality, border geographies and failures of place. We might also like to take in the cultural importance of material placeholders, often signed as much by heritage objects (statues, columns, memorials) as by actual milestones or finger-posts. The antique signpost is often the herald of a bygone age – a historical geography and a potent marker of previous socio-spatial practices and lifeways. A final way of interpreting place here might focus on argument – the topical and the atopical, the commonplace rhetoric of “pointing this way, pointing that”.6 For this, we should recall that topos is derived both from place and from everyday argument – it is persuasion by everyday means rather than by logical premises. The question remains: is our journeyman, our drover, our carrier going to 4

5

6

There is a great deal on how place ‘fails’ but one of the best discussions is still by Relph 1976: 133-35 (‘Confusion and Proteanism in Present-day Landscapes’). ‘Non-place’ is a useful term coined by Augé 1995. For the problem of border geographies in literature see Kroetsch 1989. For ‘sense of place’ see the considerable body of work by Yi-Fu Tuan 1977 and 1980. Also see Eyles 1985 and Entrikin 1991. See Miller 1995: 7: “I have found myself encountering in different ways within each topography the atopical […] a place that is everywhere and nowhere, a place you cannot get to from here.”

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be persuaded by the half-obliterated script? A further question: does s/he have to be told the direction, being local or being an outsider? I’m going to press on towards my fifth choropoetic which is that of time and specifically the space-time reading practices of local/global geographies. William Renton was born around 1852 in Dumfrieshire, itself a borderline space between Scotland and England. This text hails from his 1876 collection and so under this section I am inevitably thinking about time-space distanciation, time-space compression and late-Victorian, spatio-temporal reception contexts. Steam power, railway building, horse and cart are the dynamics underlying this specific text’s genesis – in short what we might term the pre-Modernist (from a literary perspective). More importantly, perhaps, it hails from the northern border-reivers pre-Modern, a spatio-temporal complex that points back to variform agriculture, small-holdings, the mill, the plough and the cyclical impact of the seasons driving remote pastoral life onward, largely unaffected by India, Empire, Tennyson or the Crimea. So, then, applying someone like Douglas Janelle (1969) we envision a scene of low time-space convergence, taking days to travel between regions; thinking of Anthony Giddens’ (1984) temporal model of structuration, the scene represents high technical distanciation (because of the rift between the communication technologies available to Renton in the late-nineteenth century borderlands and those available in London or Leeds); or, with reference to Bakhtin (1981: 84-258), we could say it is a chronotope that has genre-specific resonance relating to the aesthetics of the bucolic, the idyll, and the pastoral. My sixth and final choropoetic category is gender and I want to spend a moment or two thinking about gender stereotypes in terms of moorland, signposts and the gender politics of the remote. To begin with, we have no gender-specific lexis here, nor do we have strong symbolic or semantic sets to signal a specific gendering of space. On the one hand we can think about the phallic vertical of the post versus the horizontal curves of the moorland; on the other we might figure in uncertainty, the erasure/fading of presumably male writing, the emasculation of the subject via challenges to identity, location and self-awareness. In purely essentialist terms we might make a naive reading of the eruption of negativities – the power of mother nature, the unsustaining landscape, the “weather-beaten” meteorology. This is, after all, a “solitary waste” – sole, singular, male. The masculine

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certainty of the roadway splitting the land is challenged, becomes doubled, loses its forceful oneness, has been trodden-down, rolled over, “beaten”.7 The phallic sign is not working or doing its job; it is out of work, and becomes irrational, animal. Feminist geographers might find a way in here.8 To conclude the first part of my argument, then, we can see how a choropoetic reading practice can open up the spatial practices of a text. It decodes the social and material spaces of the text in relation to six regional, spatial vectors: production, consumption, landscape, place, time and gender. The Renton poem, like any textual representation, deals in social and cultural constructions of place and space. It is written from a material space, through a textualized space and towards a new readerly space. Framing interpretations in such a manner opens doorways to potentially liberating and enriching understandings of cultural geography and regional/national identity – in this case, a rather majestic and remote moorland Englishness, that is “high, and wide and flat” or desires to be, or desires to be seen to be, or similar. In the words of the Canadian poet and critic Robert Kroetsch, faced by his own northern geography, it is a region that exhibits ‘space all over the place’. 2. Practice Two: Reciprocal Spatial Reality (Figure 2) English individualism arose, Macfarlane has argued, when this nexus of the peasant and his land began to break down, when the peasant acquired a personal, as distinct from a familial right in land, and was able to sell it and to acquire other land in ‘fee simple’; that is, to have as full and complete a right in the land as the law allowed. (Pounds 1994: 187)

7

8

‘Beaten’ is a recurrent metaphor in Renton’s poetry, for example the foal who is “beaten by half a head” as it tries to stand, nudged by the mare; ‘The Foal’ (1876: l.6). I am thinking in the first instance of the Women and Geography Study Group and their title, Feminist Geographies: Explorations in Diversity and Difference (London: Longman, 1997). The ongoing journal Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography is a valuable resource here also.

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Individualism may well be an important part of the character of a nation, if such a thing can be said to exist, but even English individualism arises out of a long-running conversation between the peasant and his family and the peasant and society at large. Social expectations, social dialogism and social reciprocity take place under specific linguistic conditions which themselves shift between the tides and times. For this reason I am going to use the second part of this chapter to spatialize the social and communication theories of Ragnar Rommetveit and Martin Nystrand, thinkers who have both made significant contributions to our understanding of social reciprocity and WRITER

RSR 1 (induction / calibration) An utter moorland, high, and wide, and flat; A beaten roadway, branching out in grave distaste

RSR 2 (development / modification) And weather-beaten and defaced, Pricking its ears along the solitary waste –

RSR 3 (desertion / renewal) A signpost; pointing this way, pointing that.

READER Figure 2. Reciprocal Spatial Realities

dialogism. I shall be using the term reciprocity in the same sense that it is used by social interactionists, that is, by applying a “focus more directly on the real-time, contexted discourse of individual conversants” utilizing a “view [of] discourse norms as constituted and continuously reconstituted by the social process of dyadic interactions” (Nystrand, 1992: 102). The underlying social concept (that reciprocity and shared mutuality underlies all socio-cultural interaction) is ultimately derived from Schutz, where it is ‘assumed

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that the sector of the world taken for granted by me is also taken for granted by you, [and] even more, that it is taken for granted by “Us”’ (Schutz, 1967: 12). My project in this middle section is therefore that of spatializing written dialogics, or put another way, of lending extra weight to the spatial in what is already in many cases a dialogical textual geography anyway. Staying with ‘The Fork in the Road’, it makes sense first to summarize Rommetveit’s concept of the ‘temporarily situated social reality’ (TSSR) and then to move it towards my own preferred term, ‘reciprocal spatial reality’ (RSR).9 When a reader first reads a written text, she is inducted into new imagined social contexts. She is launched into a dyadic semantic relationship with the implied author, making inferences about the content as she begins to rewrite the text for herself in her head. Rommetveit refers to this as the “initial calibration of conversants [into] a temporarily shared social reality (or TSSR), and views discourse as a progressive modification and/or expansion of this social reality.” Continuing with Nystrand' s summary, “[a]s the text unfolds for readers, moreover, this accretion of shared knowledge between writer and reader increases” (Nystrand 1992: 165). The move I want to make here is that it is not just social realities that are temporarily shared in the progress of the reader, but spatial realities as well. The active reader of textual space experiences the unfolding of new imaginative landscapes and the reciprocal mental mapping of cognitive geographies as he goes along. In this way what I am calling ‘reciprocal spatial realities’ (RSRs) are introduced, developed and deserted in a deliberate process of negotiation between writer and reader. Skilled writers are therefore able, via careful framing and contextual preparation, to induct the reader into different kinds of spatial arena that are both temporary and dialogical. Frequently these are narrativized spaces where actions or events take place; sometimes they are descriptive settings used as secondary backdrops to character interaction; or perhaps they move centre stage and become synonymous with plot, endowed with Bakhtin’s chronotopic ‘event-hood’. Whatever the case, the above scenarios share something in common – they represent places in the written text where writer and reader succeed in negotiating a temporary ‘spatial reality’ via a process of 9

For Rommetveit’s move towards a dialogical model of communication see especially Rommetveit 1992.

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spatial dialogism – a geographically framed habitus. It seems to me crucial that, in Rommetveit’s terms, not only do “we write on the premises of the reader [and read] on the premises of the writer”, but we write space on the premises of the reader and read space on the premises of the writer. We can see this quite clearly in the Renton example above. Lines one and two are spatially inductive: they introduce us to the moorland, its scale and qualities. Lines three and four are spatially developmental, pointing forwards to a delayed subject, the signpost itself. Line five, naturally, is the third and final ‘desertion’ phase – the reader is now asked to leave the space that has been reciprocally negotiated between writer and reader – to desert the geographical situation that has been mentally constructed. Vacating the mis-enscène, being thrown back out into the wider landscape of the page once more, the reader is then ready, in a longer text perhaps, to be reinducted into a second RSR or habitus. Note also how the transition between induction and development phases is given structural coherence by the strong end rhymes, “distaste [...] defaced [...] waste [...]”. This is the reciprocal cognitive process of spatial dialogism that is constantly at work between writer and reader. The degree to which such a spatial reality is sustained is a matter primarily for the genre concerned. Long poems and novels, for example, share certain characteristics here in that they may reuse a RSR as a repeated motif – a placeholder that is imbued with certain schematic or ideological significance: the churchyard, the haunted house, the castle. Such tropes are of course topologically generic in any case, and because of this can be transformed and renegotiated accordingly. Experienced or skilled active readers of space gain a significant gratification (the ‘pleasure of the text’ as Barthes has put it) from the gradual fulfillment of anticipated spatial realities. Indeed key elements of trust and consistency can be forcefully developed between writer and reader in the use of such imaginary geographies for these purposes. 3. Practice Three: Holistic Spatial Semantics (Figure 3) The third and final part of the chapter makes brief but I hope appropriate consideration of work in the relatively new linguistic field known as ‘holistic spatial semantics’ (HSS). This field of study

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(further contextualized by Christophe Schubert in the following chapter) is derived in the main from cognitive linguistics, and concerns itself with the directionality, dimensionality and transitivity of deictic words and phrases in language, in particular verbs and prepositions. It is a field of enquiry that has been more or less active since the findings of Lakoff and Turner in the 1960s and which has been powerfully readdressed in the new millennium by the Lund School in Sweden and in particular in the work of Jordan Zlatev. I am going to borrow a few of Zlatev’s ideas and bring them across to critical studies via, once again, the poem of William Renton, above. Here, then, are the basics of HSS: A (generic) spatial utterance is an utterance which helps the listener determine the location of a given entity – if the situation is static – or else the trajectory of its motion. Hence, it can be seen as an explicit or implicit answer to a where-question [...] The toothpaste is on the shelf. He is going to school. She comes from the South [...]. (Zlatev 2003: 1)

The terms used by Zlatev are certainly familiar and perhaps equally appealing to the cultural geographer: “spatial utterance”, “location”, “situation”, “trajectory”, “where-question”. But we shall need more than this if the theory is to be useful to social and critical theorists, given that in the current study we have been stressing the dialogical and socio-spatial elements of reader-writer interaction. And it is here that HSS becomes really an essential tool, allowing us to make such connections and to move freely between specific spatial utterances and discursive geographical contexts. This strength is derived from the fact that [a]n approach to spatial semantics that has the utterance (itself embedded in discourse and a background of practices) as its main unit of analysis, rather than the isolated word, may be characterized as dialogical (cf .Wold, 1992) and more importantly for the present context – holistic. Such an approach aims to determine the semantic contribution of each and every element of the spatial utterance in relation to the meaning of the whole utterance – a desideratum for semantics that can be traced back to Frege’s (1983 [1854]) ‘context principle’. (Zlatev 2003: 1)

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Landmark (solitary waste): no ‘motion’

Trajector (signpost): ‘exterior’ & ‘superior’ to waste

Viewer: ‘deictic’ Frame of Reference

“along the solitary waste – ”

Figure 3. Holistic Spatial Semantics

At this point it must be admitted that HSS as developed and deployed by the Lund School is something of a highly specialized nature, moving at times between somewhat esoteric levels of linguistic theory. I propose, therefore, in this current study simply to work through the following example, or “spatial utterance” from Renton: “along the solitary waste”. Clearly this qualifies according to the rubric outlined by Zlatev. It is a locative prepositional utterance that acts as an implicit response to a where-question, in this case, ‘where is the signpost?’ It is, moreover, dialogical in that we have moved beyond individual words into the context of the full adverbial deictic phrase. Finally, it is also holistic through reference to the previously discussed moorland and our anonymous situated observer, at once signing the reader forward to the defaced landmark and backward to the distasteful roadway. But we can do more with this, and HSS rightly supplies a mini-lexicon to deal with such phrases. For ease of use I have shortened the seven ‘universal spatial semantic categories’ of HSS as follows:

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Trajector: The entity (object, person or event) whose location or motion is of relevance. Landmark: The reference entity in relation to which the location or motion of the trajector is determined. Motion: A binary category indicating whether there is perceived motion or not. Frame of Reference: [situating the bearings and axes of the trajector] (a) with respect to the landmark in which case the frame is ALLOCENTRIC (b) geo-cardinal positions, in which case the frame is GEOCENTRIC or (c) according to viewpoint, in which case the frame is DEICTIC. Region: [the trajector] is being located more specifically with respect to the landmark’s INTERIOR, EXTERIOR, LATERAL, SUPERIOR, INFERIOR, ANTERIOR, POSTERIOR and other similar regions. Path: the trajectory of actual or virtual motion in relation to a Region defined by the Landmark in terms of the components BEGINNING, MIDDLE and END, similar to the distinction Source/Medium/Goal (Slobin 1977). Direction: When the trajectory of motion is not characterized in terms of its relation to the Region of a Landmark. (Zlatev 2003: 3-5)

For our example, several of these seven categories can be speedily dispatched: the signpost is the ‘trajector’; the solitary waste is the ‘landmark’; there is no perceived ‘motion’ (the signpost does not literally move “along the solitary waste”) which rules out ‘path’. After all, the signpost is located at a single point on the line of the solitary waste, so there is no ‘direction’ either because ‘trajectory of motion’ does not apply. This is so because we are observing the ‘region’ – which through the narrator’s eyes, is a ‘deictic’, rather than an ‘allocentric’ or ‘geo-cardinal’ ‘frame of reference.’ And while we are on ‘region’, we can complete the HSS analysis by saying that the signpost is ‘exterior’ and ‘superior’ to the “waste” because it is outside and above it, in terms of the imagined, material space it occupies. We might notice that it is neither ‘anterior’ (in front of) nor ‘lateral’ (beside) the ‘landmark’ waste: it would be anterior and lateral only to the viewer, our figure in the landscape, who in this instance is not our operative ‘frame of reference’. Having applied the terms of HSS to line four of the Renton text, we now need to consider the wider holistic aspect of the interpretation. Are other parts of the poem functioning in the same way: are there other deictic, exterior, superior, motionless trajectors? The answer to

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this is affirmative: obviously the “beaten roadway” falls into the same pattern. It is another trajector that is exterior and superior and static in relation to its landmark, the moorland. It is also deictic because its frame of reference is again beheld by the focalizer. If we take the moorland itself as the trajector in line one, the situation is the same: it is exterior to the surrounding borderlands, above the surrounding borderlands and again, unmoving (still no path or physical trajectory). Once more, it is deictically beheld by our narrator, albeit on the larger scale. From this we see that a very dominant spatial mode or pattern has emerged from this short single-stanza pastoral text. Its depiction of Englishness favours the outside over the inside; the above rather than the below; the static instead of the moving; and unsurprisingly, the reifying, deictic gaze of the beholding traveller. This is a snapshot of late Victorian Englishness, a static Northern moment, simultaneously framed by the Romanticism of the past and the threat of a directionless, uncertain future. For a five-line idyll, it remains today an impressive piece. 4. Conclusion: ‘Geography Spaces’ Now, to misquote an apt catchphrase […], geography is not what you think [...]. Despite an all-too-frequent misrecognition, geography does not locate, place or pinpoint, even when it employs an encyclopedia, a map or a Geographical Information System. Still less does it localize, glocalise or earth the so-called global spaces of (late) postmodernity. To the contrary, geography spaces. The trembling of space does not so much reduce to points as open them up. Geography is cracked, fissured and fractal. (Doel, 1999: 103)

In pulling together some provisional conclusions from my discussion of a forgotten reivers chronicler and minor lake poet, I hope that all three of the approaches outlined – choropoetics, reciprocal spatial realities, and holistic spatial semantics – have gone some way in fulfilling my introductory claim: that spatial reading practices enable readers more fully to understand the ways in which Englishness can be framed, negotiated and textualized. I also want to signal briefly the work of Marcus Doel, whose ideas about the “trembling of space” carefully remind us above that “geography is never what we think is”, that it “does not so much reduce to points as open them up” and that “[g]eography is cracked, fissured and fractal”. He is right to insist on

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the transitivity of the verb. Geography, and indeed textual geography, does indeed space: it causes a new space to be formed both on the page and in the mind of the reader, it is spatially performative, not merely constative or mimetic. As spatial methodologies continue to make their impact felt on both written English and Englishness, perhaps we all need to be alert to such research that is taking place between disciplines across the spatial divide. In this chapter I have attempted in various ways to bring together a new socio-spatial reading practice, a new dialogical spatial model of reader-writer interaction, and a new way of using the basics of spatial semantics within a literary environment. All three approaches have built upon existing scholarship in the field, principally work by Henri Lefebvre, Ragnar Rommetveit and Jordan Zlatev. The updated practices are, I hope, not too difficult for readers (and students) to apply in their own area of textual studies, and may in time join forces with other emerging epistemologies of space and place.

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Works Cited Primary Reference Renton, William. 1905. ‘The Fork of the Road’ in Oils and Water-Colours [1876]. Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas. Repr. in Daniel Karlin (ed.). 1997. The Penguin Book of Victorian Verse. London: Allen Lane.

Research Literature Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (transl. John Howe). London: Verso. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: U. of Texas P. Christaller, Walther. 1966. Central Places in Southern Germany [1933]. Englewood Cliffs/NJ: Prentice Hall. Cosgrove, Denis and Steven Daniels (eds). 1988. The Iconography of Landscape. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Doel, Marcus. 1999. Poststructuralist Geographies: The Diabolical Art of Spatial Science. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Easthope, Antony. 1999. Englishness and National Culture. London: Routledge. Entrikin, Nicholas. 1989. ‘Place, Region and Modernity’ in John A. Agnew and James S. Duncan (eds). The Power of Place. London: Unwin. ––. 1991. The Betweenness of Place. London: Macmillan. Everitt, Alan. 1985. Landscape and Community in England. London: Hambledon. ––. 2000. ‘Common Land’ in Thirsk (2000): 210-235. Eyles, John. 1985. Senses of Place. Warrington: Silverbrook. Fitter, Chris. 1995. Poetry, Space, Landscape: Toward a New Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Giddens, Anthony. 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Cambridge: Polity. Hey, David. 2000. ‘Moorlands’ in Thirsk (2000): 188-209. Janelle, Douglas G. 1969. ‘Spatial Reorganization: A Model and Concept’ in Annals of the Association of American Geographers 59: 348-364. Johnston, Ronald John. 1991. Geography and Geographers. London: Arnold. Kant, Immanuel. 1992. ‘Concerning the Ultimate Ground of the Differentiation of Directions in Space’ [1768] in David Walford (ed.). The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge UP: 361-372. Kroetsch, Robert. 1989. The Lovely Treachery of Words: Essays Selected and New. Toronto: Oxford UP. Kumar, Krishan. 2003. The Making of English National Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space (transl. Donald Nicholson-Smith). Oxford: Blackwell. Losch, August. 1954. The Economics of Location [1940]. New Haven/CT: Yale UP.

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Miller, J. Hillis. 1995. Topographies. Stanford/CA: Stanford UP. Muir, Richard. 1981. Reading the Landscape. London: Michael Joseph. Nystrand, Martin. 1992. ‘Social Interactionism versus Social Constructionism: Bakhtin, Rommetveit, and the Semiotics of the Written Text’ in Wold (1992). ––. 1992. The Dialogical Alternative: Toward a Theory of Language and Mind. Oslo: Scandinavian UP. Pounds, Norman J. G. 1994. The Culture of the English People: Iron Age to the Industrial Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Relph, Edward. 1976. Place and Placelessness. London: Pion. Rommetveit, Ragnar. 1990. ‘On Axiomatic Features of a Dialogical Approach to Language and Mind’ in Ivana Markova and Klaus Foppa (eds). The Dynamics of Dialogue. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. ––. 1992. ‘Outlines of a Dialogically Based Social-Cognitive Approach to Human Cognition and Communication’ in Wold (1992). Sack, Robert. 1990. Conceptions of Space in Social Thought. London: Macmillan. Sauer, Carl. 1974. Land and Life. Berkeley/CA: U. of California P. Schutz, Alfred. 1967. Collected Papers. Vol. 1: The Problem of Social Reality. The Hague: Nijhoff. Thirsk, Joan (ed.). 2000. Rural England: An Illustrated History of the Landscape. Oxford: Oxford UP. Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1977. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. London: Arnold. ––. 1980. Landscapes of Fear. Oxford: Backwell. Wold, Astri Heen (ed.) 1992. The Dialogical Alternative: Toward a Theory of Language and Mind. Oslo: Scandinavian UP. Zlatev, Jordan. 2003. ‘Holistic Spatial Semantics of Thai’ in Gary Palmer and Eugene H. Casad (eds). Cognitive Linguistics and Non-Indo European Languages. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

The Vertical Axis in Landscape Description: Elaborations of the Image Schemas UP and DOWN Christoph Schubert Abstract: This paper investigates the vertical axis in landscape description by applying image schemas, which are defined as fundamental experiential structures in Cognitive Semantics, to relevant texts by Edmund Hillary, Paul Theroux, and Mark Twain. Consequently, the schemas under discussion are UP and DOWN, which are described as specific configurations of trajector and landmark. Within that framework, a distinction is drawn between a ‘body tour’ performed by a dynamic focalizer and a ‘gaze tour’ resulting from a static focalizer. On the basis of different profiles of word classes, the article also analyses orientational metaphors connected to verticality, emphasizing the interrelations between language, spatial cognition, and culture. Key names and concepts: Edmund Hillary - Mark Johnson - George Lakoff - Ronald W. Langacker - Leonard Talmy - Paul Theroux - Mark Twain; Body Tour - Cognitive Semantics - Deixis - Figure and Ground - Focalizer - Gaze Tour - Image Schema Landmark - Landscape Description - Orientational Metaphors - Path - Spatial Perception - Sublime - Trajector - Vertical Axis - Word Classes and their Profiles.

1. Image Schemas and the Description of Spatial Prepositions With regard to visual perception, Gestalt psychology has drawn the well-known distinction between figure and ground (cf. Goldstein 1997: 176). The figure is defined as the visual stimulus which has a “thing-character”, a distinct shape, and a clearer structure. Furthermore, it is usually smaller and brighter than the ground. The ground, on the other hand, has a “substance-character” (Rubin 2001: 226), it is less clearly structured, larger and often darker than the figure. The importance of this dichotomy for spatial perception becomes obvious in view of the fact that Cognitive Semantics uses it for the description of spatial prepositions (cf. Herskovits 1988: 274). In a sentence like The cat is on the mat, the cat forms the figure on the ground mat. In

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other words, the preposition on has the function of locating a smaller object by means of a larger reference entity. Since prepositions in collocation with verbs often express movement in space, figure and ground have been renamed ‘trajector’ (TR) and ‘landmark’ (LM) in Cognitive Linguistics, whereby the TR is typically dynamic, while the LM is usually static (cf. Talmy 2000a: 315, Croft/Cruse 2004: 56). In a sentence like The cat jumped over the fence, the TR performs a route with respect to the LM which is called its ‘trajectory’ or ‘path’ (cf. Langacker 1987a: 217).1 Configurations of TR, LM and path form ‘image schemas’, which are defined as “structures for organizing our experience and comprehension” (Johnson 1987: 29, emphasis original), or shorter as “basic experiential structures” (Lakoff 1987: 271), derived from our interaction with our environment.2 They are called schemas, because they are abstract, neglecting non-essential information, which makes them suitable for graphic representations. On the basis of these premises, the aim of the present paper is to investigate elaborations3 of the image schemas UP and DOWN by applying them to landscape descriptions and to discuss related conceptual metaphors from a linguistic perspective. Since the focus is on the vertical axis of spatial perception, the selected texts contain depictions of travels in mountainous regions of Central Amer-

1

2

3

It is noteworthy that “paths” and “landmarks” are also subsumed under the heading “elements of landscape” in John Hedgecoe’s guide book on landscape photography (cf. 2000: 136 and 144). Tversky points out that in route descriptions, landmarks are understood more easily than information about direction or distance (cf. 2003: 132-143), so that they are preferably used. In more elaborate terms, image schemas are interpreted as “gestalt structures, consisting of parts standing in relations and organized into unified wholes, by means of which our experience manifests discernible order” (Johnson 1987: xix); as such, they are “construals of experience” (Croft/Cruse 2004: 45) which are “bound up with our sense of orientation, motion, and shape” (Lindstromberg 1998: 24). Ungerer/Schmid use the term “elaboration” for “variants [of image schemas] which only specify certain components of a schema, but do not diverge from its general configuration” (1996: 164).

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ica,4 the Alps, and the Himalayas written by Paul Theroux, Mark Twain, and Sir Edmund Hillary.5 2. The Expression and Functions of Verticality For human orientation in space, the vertical axis plays a fundamental role,6 since it operates in a gravitational field (cf. Levinson 2003: 75). Man lives on the surface of the earth and walks in an upright position, so that the ground level forms a fixed zero point, with the sky as its counterpart. Moreover, the human body itself is asymmetric on the vertical axis (cf. Tyler/Evans 2003: 135).7 Whereas the two horizontal dimensions of LEFT-RIGHT and FRONT-BACK undergo deictic changes resulting from body movements, UP and DOWN remain constant. Thus, verticality provides a geocentric frame of reference which may be labelled ‘absolute’, since it is independent of the speaker’s location,8 comparable to the earth’s absolute coordinate system of east/west and north/south.

4

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6

7

8

Although contemporary travelogues usually do not focus on factual accounts of geographical details, Kohl points out that they have a “descriptive tradition” (1997: 113). In their pronounced verticality, these landscapes form a sharp contrast to the ‘horizontal world’ of other geographical regions, e.g. Canada’s arctic north (cf. Collis 1998: 226). The outstanding character of the vertical axis is highlighted by various authors: “verticality is physically and psychologically the most salient of the spatial dimensions: linguistically, as we shall see, it is the primary dimension” (Lyons 1977: 690), and “in most situations the vertical dimension is massively overdetermined and unproblematic – we think about things as in their canonical upright position, viewed from an upright stance, with ‘upright’ determined by the gravitational field” (Levinson 2003: 75). Moreover, vertical and horizontal lines are more likely to be perceived as ‘figure’ than other orientations (cf. Goldstein 1997: 177). Conclusively, the earth has an asymmetric geometry on the vertical axis as well, since in contrast to the downward path, the upward path is virtually unlimited (cf. Talmy 2000a: 202). Locative expressions can appear in three frames of reference, which are the absolute, the relative (or deictic), and the intrinsic one (cf. Slack/van der Zee 2003: 10). Consequently, these frames of reference can also be applied to the vertical dimension (cf. Levinson 2003: 75).

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vertical space axis

The meanings of the prepositions up and down can be graphically represented by a locative relationship between TR, LM and path in an image schema (cf. fig. 1 and 2). In the sentence She walked up/down the hill, the TR is expressed by the personal pronoun she, the LM by the concrete noun hill. The vertical orientation of the path is made clear by the prepositions up and down, while walk is a scalar verb which expresses motion without a definite direction. In Cognitive Linguistics, three-dimensional space is labelled a fundamental ‘domain’ (cf. Langacker 1987a: 150), serving as a base against which single objects can be profiled.9 Consequently, TR, LM and path in an image schema have the function of representing certain entities in a spatial domain, which can be realized by a landscape.

path trajector

landmark

horizontal space axis

vertical space axis

Fig. 1: The image schema UP in She walked up the hill

landmark trajector path horizontal space axis Fig. 2: The image schema DOWN in She walked down the hill

9

Domains are “generalized ‘background’ knowledge configuration[s]” (Taylor 2002: 195) such as space, time, temperature, or emotion (cf. Langacker 1987a: 150).

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Before the analysis of relevant passages, it is necessary to look at the semantic roles of different word classes (cf. fig. 3). The nominal profiles of nouns and pronouns by which TR and LM are verbalized have the typical function of expressing cognitive ‘things’ or ‘regions’, whereby the term ‘thing’ is used to denote a physical entity in space, including human beings (cf. Langacker 1987b: 58 and 70, Taylor 2002: 205).10 On the other hand, the path in an image schema is usually verbalized by a preposition, which profiles the path as a cognitive ‘relation’ between TR and LM. In this respect, we can draw a distinction between nouns and pronouns on the one hand and prepositions, verbs, adverbs, and adjectives on the other. The former profile things or regions, while the latter profile relations between them. For instance, the vertical relational meaning of the preposition up can also be conveyed by the adverb up,11 by vector verbs like climb, rise, ascend, and soar,12 and by dimensional adjectives like high or tall.13 Therefore, they all contribute to the construction of the vertical path, since they express similar relations between TR and LM. (cf. Ungerer/Schmid 1996: 192)14 The antipodal downward path, on the other hand, can be verbalized by the preposition and adverb down, by the 10

11

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14

According to Langacker, a “region” is defined as “a set of interconnected entities” (1987b: 62) in a given domain. With the adverb up, there is often no need for an overt LM, as in The balloon flew up, where the LM is unspecified (cf. Ungerer/Schmid 1996: 163): “Most of the time, the nature of this medium is so self-evident (e.g. ‘the air’) or so abstract (e.g. the domain of physical space), that it is not overtly elaborated” (Boers 1996: 79). Additionally, Burgschmidt points out the importance of the centre of the earth as a superordinate point of reference (cf. 1975: 38). Vector verbs convey motion and direction (e.g. climb, mount, fall, drop, dive), while scalar verbs merely express motion without direction (e.g. walk, fly, run) (cf. Leisi 1985: 68). For the relational profile of such dimensional adjectives see Dirven/Taylor (cf. 1988: 379-402). The vertical place relators up and down can be complemented by above/over and below/under respectively. However, whereas up/down express orientation and direction, the other four place relators usually convey location and can express “relative destination” or “passage” only in collocation with suitable verbs of motion (cf. Quirk et al. 1985: 681). Moreover, above, under, below, and over divide the vertical axis into four distinct spatial locations (cf. Tyler/Evans 2003: 130), and above and below preclude physical contact between TR and LM (cf. Lindstromberg 1998: 152).

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verbs fall, drop, dive, and descend, as well as by adjectives like low and deep (cf. Taylor 2002: 221).15 DOMAIN three-dimensional space

PROFILE ' thing' ,' region'

PROFILE ' relation'

WORD CLASSES nouns, pronouns

WORD CLASSES prepositions, verbs, adverbs, adjectives

TRAJECTOR

LANDMARK

PATH

Fig. 3: Realizations and functions of TR, LM, and path

3. The Application of Image Schemas to Vertical Landscape Description In order to apply prepositional image schemas to landscape description in texts, we must consider three modifications. First, we leave the unit of the single sentence and climb to the textual level by investigating descriptive sequences of sentences. Therefore, TR, LM, and path will be expressed by various lexemes which add up to a complete picture of the scenery. Second, the image schema must be complemented by a focalizer (cf. Genette 1980: 186-187, Rimmon-Kenan 2002: 73), through whose eyes or senses the scenery is portrayed. This focalizer can be static, so that his or her16 gaze proceeds along a suc15

16

However, while prepositions merely express location or direction, verbs can additionally give information about manner and cause of the motion (cf. Talmy 2000b: 28-29). For reasons of linguistic economy, the focalizer will henceforth be referred to by the masculine pronoun he, which also appears justified in view of the fact that all focalizers in the chosen texts are male.

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cession of distinct windows of focalization (cf. Jahn 1996: 253-54).17 Alternatively, the focalizer can be dynamic, performing the vertical movement himself. For the pictorial representation, it is most appropriate to adopt the conventions of Arijon’s film grammar (cf. 2003: 48), so that a schematic camera icon will represent the focalizer.18 Third, since landscape descriptions often contain subjective evaluations, it is revealing to investigate metaphorical extensions of the two schemas, i.e. the ways in which the basic source domain of space is mapped onto various abstract target domains (cf. Boers 1996: 24). Hence, according to Lakoff/Johnson, the directions of up and down give rise to orientational metaphors (cf. 1980: 14-21), in which spatial relations are used for abstract cognitive concepts. Very often, DOWN has pejorative connotations and negative values, whereas UP implies favourable connotations and positive values (cf. Boers 1996: 24, Ungerer/Schmid 1996: 168). For instance, UP and DOWN form opposite poles in terms of status and power, as the expressions high society, climb up the social ladder, on top or at the bottom of sth, the lower classes and the blend higherarchy show.19 The foundation of this metaphor is the fact that power can be derived from physical strength, and in a fight the winner is usually on top (cf. Lakoff/John17

18

19

Talmy uses the psychological term ‘attention’ for the wandering gaze: “[l]inguistic forms can direct the distribution of one’s attention over a referent scene in a certain type of pattern, the placement of one or more windows of greatest attention over the scene, in a process that can be termed the windowing of attention. In this process, one or more portions of a referent scene [...] will be placed in the foreground of attention while the remainder of the scene is backgrounded” (2000a: 258, emphasis original). Along these lines, Chatman sees parallels between a focalizer and the camera in spatial perception: “discourse-space as a general property can be defined as focus of spatial attention. It is the framed area to which the implied audience’s attention is directed by the discourse, that portion of the total story-space that is ‘remarked’ or closed in upon, according to the requirements of the medium, through a narrator or through the camera eye––literally, as in film, or figuratively, as in verbal narrative” (1978: 102, emphasis original). Other examples are upbeat, upgrade, upstanding, uptrend, on the up and up, and rise to sth in contrast to go down the drain, down-hearted, downbeat, down at heel, decline, collapse, breakdown, fall ill, and drop dead. The fact that Englishmen always go up to London, independent of their starting point in England, demonstrates the high status of the capital (cf. Lindstromberg 1998: 188). From this perspective, the term down under for Australia can hardly be seen as flattering.

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son 1980: 15). It is particularly remarkable that features of landscape can also be used as the physical basis for metaphors, as in the peak of one’s career, a summit meeting, or a landslide victory. The two poles of verticality also stand for the distinctions of ‘more/less’ and ‘happy/sad’, as the following expressions and idioms demonstrate: sales are going up/down, to be in high/low spirits, one’s spirits rise/sink, to feel up/down, or up and coming vs. down and out. The ground of the metaphor in this case is “one’s upright posture” (Boers 1996: 157), which signals confidence and health, while a supine posture shows the opposite.20 Landscape again enters spatial metaphor in phrases like hit a peak, go downhill (cf. Lakoff/Johnson 1980: 16), on cloud nine, reach rock-bottom or the peaks and troughs of married life. These examples demonstrate that elevations and depressions in landscape can undergo metaphorical extensions to denote psychological and sociocultural hierarchies.21 4. Elaborations of the Image Schema DOWN Although the image schemas UP and DOWN denote antipodal directions, they are connected by their vertical orientation, which can lead to a cause-effect relationship. After moving upwards, e.g. climbing up a hill, the focalizer has the possibility of looking down and vice versa. On the basis of the focalizer’s static or dynamic behaviour, the image schema DOWN can be realized in two fundamental elaborations in landscape descriptions.

20

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As Lakoff/Johnson point out, “[d]rooping posture typically goes along with sadness and depression, erect posture with a positive emotional state” (1980: 15). Taylor summarizes the metaphorical applications under the three main headings of “quantity” (e.g. high price), “quality” (e.g. high opinion), and “control” (e.g. high-born) (2003: 137). Tyler/Evans add that “[w]e experience positions described by down as being negative precisely because they correlate with limited access, or visiblity, or loss of control or vulnerability” (2003: 142). In other words, “[u]pwards and frontwards are positive, whereas downwards and backwards are negative, in an egocentric perceptual and interactional space based on the notions of visibility and confrontation” (Lyons 1977: 691).

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4.1. Dynamic Focalizer

vertical space axis

A dynamic focalizer is an immediate part of the image schema, since he embodies the TR moving down the LM. Hence, this is the case of a focalizer-TR performing a ‘body tour’ with shifting deictic centres.22 In terms of cinematography, it equals a moving shot (cf. Dick 2002: 73), as the camera travels alongside its target objects (cf. fig. 4). Of course, image schemas have a prototypical character, as concrete vertical movements can appear in a variety of forms.

LM

focalizer-TR (dynamic) path

horizontal space axis Fig. 4: An elaboration of the image schema and body tour

DOWN:

dynamic focalizer

In the following extract from Paul Theroux’s travelogue The Old Patagonian Express, the focalizer describes a downhill ride in a train through a valley in Guatemala.23

22

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Levinson distinguishes between the two linearization strategies of “a gaze tour perspective – effectively the adoption of a fixed viewpoint where one’s gaze travels over the path (a deictic or viewer-centred perspective) – and a body or ‘driving’ tour – effectively an intrinsic perspective, where a pathway is found through the array, and the imagined tour of oneself along the path is used to assign ‘front’, ‘left’ etc. from any one point (or location of the window in describing time)” (2003: 32-33, emphasis original). A gaze tour is largely expressed by state verbs and adverbials with positional meaning, while a body tour is typically verbalized by motion verbs and directional adverbials (cf. Ullmer-Ehrich 1982: 234). The driving tour has also been labelled “walking tour” (Ullmer-Ehrich 1982: 234), which is more appropriate for most scenes of mountaineering. Theroux’s travelogues clearly abound with body tours, as continuous movement for him is “affirmation of existence”, whereby “[t]he idea is not so much about being anywhere as getting somewhere. That’s why he loves the cocoon of the train [...]” (Hoffman 1998: 197, emphasis original). Similarly, Caesar

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When the dust storm passed and the sky turned blue and large, the train’s racket was swallowed by the empty air, and we seemed to be in a low-flying plane, gliding at tree-top height towards the valleys below. It was a trick of the landscape, the way the train balanced on its narrow ridge and gave a view of everything but its tracks. And though the train had been slow before, on this downhill run it had gathered speed: but the clatter was not so obvious. This old engine and its cars had taken to the air like a railway lifted and travelling down the sky. It is not often that one gets a view like this in a train and it was so beautiful that I could forget the heat and dust, the broken seats, and was uplifted by the sight of the hills way down and the nearer hills of coffee and bamboo. For the next half-hour of this descent, it was an aerial railway diving across hills of purest green. (Theroux 1979: 128)

The LM, which is here most generally verbalized as the “landscape” (l. 4), is additionally realized by noun phrases profiling its different parts. It is the noun “hills” (ll. 11 and 13) which occurs thrice and thus illustrates the elevated position of the focalizer-TR,24 who is on the one hand profiled by the first person pronoun “we” (l. 2), but on the other hand also by his vehicle named “plane” (l. 3) and “train” (ll. 4 and 6). As the complement of the preposition “towards” (l. 3), the noun “valleys” (l. 3) profiles the end-region of the path. The relations between TR and LM are indicated by the adverbs “below” (l. 4) and “down” (l. 11), by the preposition “down” (l. 8), and by “downhill” (l. 6), a compound adverb consisting of a place relator and a spatial noun. Additionally, the vector verb “diving” (l. 13) conveys the vertical progression, while the scalar verbs “gliding” (l. 3) and “travelling” (l. 8) express the directional movement only in collocation with appropriate place relators. The exceptional travelling height of the railway is expressed not only by the vector verb “lifted” (l. 8), but also by its paraphrase as “aerial railway” (l. 13) and “plane” (l. 3), as well as by the fact that it has “taken to the air” (l. 8). The power of gravity manifests itself in the train’s accelerating “speed” (l. 7), contradicting

24

reaches the conclusion that in The Old Patagonian Express “the very idea of a destination is still another trap” (1990: 105). A moving focalizer usually looks into the direction of his movement: “For human beings, the direction of the perceptual apparatus is also the normal direction of movement” (Herskovits 1986: 158); see also Lyons (cf. 1977: 691). Of course, the schematic representation in fig. 4 neglects the fact that a focalizer in a train may look out of the windows to the left and the right.

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its initial “slow” (l. 6) movement. This fact is acoustically reflected by the train’s initial “racket” (l. 2), which later turns into a “clatter” (l. 7). Special attention should be given to the conceptual metaphor in the focalizer’s statement that he “was uplifted by the sight of the hills way down” (l. 11). In terms of the focalizer’s downhill body tour, the use of the morpheme up- in combination with the vector verb lift seems to imply a contradiction partially undermining the binary system of UP/DOWN. Regarding his vantage point, however, the metaphor of “HAPPY IS UP” (Lakoff/Johnson 1980: 15) is actually retransferred to its physical source domain. By means of his elevated location, the focalizer enjoys “a view like this” (l. 9) and a “sight of the hills” (l. 11) which he assesses as “beautiful” (l. 10), so that his high location is mirrored in his high spirits. The upright body posture, which symbols health and happiness, is here substituted by the focalizer’s lofty location. Additionally, owing to “a trick of the landscape” (l. 4), the focalizer’s spatial perception is distorted: he compares the train with a plane, emphasizing not only the subjective height, but also a feeling of serene delight (cf. l. 10),25 so that the descriptive passage culminates in an introspective mood.26 4.2. Static Focalizer A static focalizer in the image schema DOWN is located at an elevated vantage point, from where he can scan the panorama in a high-angle tilt shot (cf. Dick 2002: 56), letting his gaze wander from the top to the bottom of a LM (cf. fig. 5). Since the focalizer is static, the dynamic TR is realized by his gaze moving along the LM, so that the focalizer’s vantage point is ultimately external to the image schema proper.27 Conclusively, we may speak of a gaze-TR performing a gaze tour. 25

26

27

See Foster Stovel for examples of views from airplanes in English literature (cf. 1984: 23). This procedure is typical of Theroux’s travelogues; for instance, Kohl shows that in The Great Railway Bazaar the descriptive passages are complemented by autobiographical and allegorical levels of meaning (cf. 1993: 152). In this case, contact between TR and LM can only be claimed by allowing the concept of the ‘haptic’ eye resulting from intensive scanning: “The optical eye

Christoph Schubert

vertical space axis

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focalizer (static)

gazeTR

LM

path horizontal space axis Fig. 5: An elaboration of the image schema DOWN: static focalizer and gaze tour

The following extract from Sir Edmund Hillary’s travel narrative with the promising title View from the Summit exemplifies this case. The focalizer, whose aim is the summit of Mount Everest, is in this passage situated on the crest of a mountain ridge. Despite all our efforts, we were a very happy and relaxed group. Our location was spectacular. Still rising above us was the craggy summit of Lhotse, but we could look over mighty Nuptse and see the superb peaks of Ama Dablam and Kangtega. Thousands of feet below us we could look down on Advanced Base Camp in the Western Cwm and it was even further down the other right-hand side to the Kangshung Glacier in Tibet. We were all going well but very much aware of the tremendous slopes sweeping down on both sides of us. (Hillary 2000: 23)

The LM is here constituted by a large mountainous region profiled by a sequence of noun phrases containing toponyms (ll. 2-7). These nominal profiles embody different parts of the mountain-LM and form successive stages of the vertical tilt resulting in the gaze-TR. The path is initiated above the focalizer’s eye level by the vector verb “rising” (l. 2) in collocation with the preposition “above” (l. 2). Since the personal pronoun “us” (l. 2) is the complement of the spatial preposition, it becomes obvious that the focalizer adopts a fixed deictic vantage point. In contrast to above, the ensuing preposition “over” (l. 3) signals a downward movement of the gaze path, which corresponds to the topographical reality expressed by the place names. The image merely brushes the surfaces of things. The haptic, or tactile, eye penetrates in depth, finding its pleasure in texture and grain” (Gandelman 1991: 5).

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schema DOWN then becomes apparent from the preposition “below” (l. 4), which is again used within the permanent deictic frame of reference, since its complement is once more “us” (l. 4). The threefold use of the place relator “down” (ll. 5, 6, 8) concludes the vertical extension of the path, whereby the adverb “further” (l. 6) demonstrates its progressive development.28 Since the focalizer is static, there are no verbs of motion contributing to the path, as opposed to a dynamic focalizer. In contrast to prepositional image schemas, the TR is not explicitly expressed by a noun, as it is not a physical ‘thing’, but the immaterial gaze. The TR is only implicitly present in the verbs of perception “see” (l. 3) and “look” (ll. 3, 5) collocating with the place relators over and down. In addition to an account of the physical situation, the text exhibits a subjective appraisal of the perceived landscape. The adjective “spectacular” (l. 2) expresses the pleasure of viewing and corresponds to the evaluating attribute “superb” (l. 3), while the adjective “tremendous” (l. 8) is ambiguous, as it can denote a favourable judgement or a classification in terms of size. Hence, the orientational metaphor of UP equalling ‘more’ and ‘better’ here manifests itself in more and better views. Lakoff and Johnson’s diagnosis that “HAPPY IS UP” (1980: 15) is even made explicit by the adjective “happy” (l. 1), which describes an elevated emotional state obviously based on the elevated location. The focalizer is delighted, as he is physically victorious over the mountain, which corresponds to the metaphorical equation of UP with power. Furthermore, the phrase “look down on” (l. 5) is ambiguous, since it can also be understood figuratively, conveying the notion of superiority and creating a correlation between a high position in terms of physical reality as well as status. The question remains whether there is the possibility that a static focalizer can be identified with the LM as well. This can only happen if the focalizer’s body itself turns into a landscape. It is the case, for instance, in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, in the Voyage to Lil28

As is typical of the proto-scene of down, the bottom of the LM is profiled most extensively (cf. Tyler/Evans 2003: 141). The preposition down can be dynamic, expressing a “movement with reference to an axis or directional path”, or it can be static (Quirk et al. 1985: 682-683). A metaphorical horizontal use of down is possible in phrases like the station down the street. Within the framework of Cognitive Semantics, Schulze summarizes different meanings of down in a series of clusters (cf. 1988: 406-407).

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liput, since here the focalizer Gulliver is called “Quinbus Flestrin”, which is translated as “the Great Man-Mountain” (1985: 69). In one passage, he lies on his back, trying to free himself, and comments: “some of them, as I was afterwards told, were hurt with the falls they got by leaping from my sides upon the ground” (1985: 56). Therefore, the inhabitants of Lilliput act as TRs performing a path with reference to Gulliver’s body as the LM. 5. Elaborations of the Image Schema UP Like DOWN, the image schema UP can be subdivided by the parameter of a dynamic or static focalizer.29 With the help of sample texts it can again be ascertained that the focalizer’s position with respect to the vertical axis corresponds to conceptual metaphors. 5.1. Dynamic Focalizer Since a dynamic focalizer moves up the LM, he is an integrated part of the image schema. Related to his motion, his deictic centre is shifted according to the path he travels along during his ‘body’ or ‘walking’ tour (cf. fig. 6). In the following excerpt, for example, Hillary describes a mountaineering test run on the Maximilian Ridge of Mount Elie de Beaumont in the Southern Alps. It was a clear night and we made our preparations for our big climb. We knew it would be a long day so we left at 1 a.m. George Lowe and I climbed together and Earle Riddiford and Ed Cotter followed along behind. [...] By 7 a.m. we had ascended the long glacier again, climbed along the crest of the subsidiary ridge and reached the summit of the virgin peak. Cramponing along steep slopes off the peak we were soon down on an extensive snowfield. We turned one large crevasse on the right under the great precipices of Elie de Beaumont and then carried on up the steepening snowfield. By 9 a.m. we reached the extremely impressive Maximilian Ridge. Above us was a prominent 29

In several ways, the preposition up behaves like down. It can have a dynamic and a static meaning (cf. Quirk et al. 1985: 682-83), and its use can be metaphorically extended to the horizontal level in sentences like He ran up the street (cf. Lindstromberg 1998: 185).

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vertical space axis

rock step and we were at 9,000 feet but still a long way from the summit. (Hillary 2000: 96)

focalizerTR (dynamic)

LM

path horizontal space axis Fig. 6: An elaboration of the image schema UP: dynamic focalizer and body tour

The LM is profiled as an extensive region by means of several nouns expressing different parts of it. They are introduced in the sequence of the path, which is divided into two phases. The first stage of the body tour is expressed by the succession of “glacier” (l. 4), “ridge” (l. 5), and “summit of the virgin peak” (l. 6). The second stage is realized by the sequence of the common noun “snowfield” (ll. 7, 9) and the proper noun “Maximilian Ridge” (l. 10), while the “summit” (l. 12) in this extract is reached merely by gaze.30 The vertical spatial relations between these distinct regions are profiled by verbs of motion as well as by locative prepositions. Notably, the path is framed by the aspectually transitional verbs “left” (l. 2) and “reached” (l. 9) (cf. Quirk et al. 1985: 201), which foreground its initial and final stages.31 The central 30

31

The emphasis on the upper regions accords with the fact that in the protoscene for up, the top is primarily profiled (cf. Tyler/Evans 2003: 136) as the aspired aim: “[a]ccording to the experiential ‘logic’ of the PATH schema, for instance, the goal of the path is the desired location that one wants to reach. As a result, motion towards the goal is positively valued, while immobility or motion away from the goal are negatively valued” (Boers 1996: 24). The perfective use of the particle up in verbs like drink up (cf. Lindstromberg 1998: 187) corresponds to the arrival at the summit, which is also the conclusion of the upward motion. Furthermore, the upward movement expressed by verbs such as turn up or crop up can express visibility: “[t]he meanings of the[se] Verb + up combinations derive in part from the fact that when something comes up toward our face, it becomes easier to see. And since being seen is one of the main ways in which existence is noticed, visibility suggests existence, and becoming visible suggests coming into existence” (Lindstromberg 1998: 189-190).

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vector verbs here are “climbed” (ll. 3, 5) and “ascended” (l. 4), while the scalar verbs “followed” (l. 3) and “carried on” (l. 9) express the upward movement only in the given context. The two prepositions “up” (l. 9) and “[a]bove” (l. 10) add to the direction of the path, whereby the latter indicates the deictic vantage point at the present stage of the body tour, as its complement is the pronoun “us” (l. 10) denoting the focalizer-TR. Moreover, the adjective “steep” (l. 6) and its verbal derivative “steepening” (l. 9) support the vertical orientation of the path. In contrast to the downward views, the suitable conceptual metaphor here is not “HAPPY IS UP”, but rather “MORE IS UP” and “HIGH STATUS IS UP” (Lakoff/Johnson 1980: 15). The focalizer is overwhelmed by the enormity of the mountain and its summit, which is here demonstrated by the adjective phrase “extremely impressive” (l. 10). Moreover, the two adjectives “big” (l. 1) and “prominent” (l. 10) are polysemous, stressing the relation between physical and metaphorical magnitude. In this case ‘more’ means more splendour and magnificence, since reaching the summit of a mountain is usually the summit of a mountaineer’s career. In view of the peak, the focalizer appears powerless at his relatively low location, so that the metaphor of “HAVING CONTROL OR FORCE IS UP” (Lakoff/Johnson 1980: 15) is corroborated. At the moment described, the summit above the mountaineers’ vantage point physically prevails over them, which corresponds to the ground of the metaphor that the victor of a fight is typically on top. 5.2. Static Focalizer A static focalizer in the image schema UP is situated at a lower level, from where he is able to let his gaze wander to a target located above his vantage point. The camera is static but rotates vertically in a lowangle tilt shot (cf. Dick 2002: 57 and 72),32 so that the focalized object appears larger than it is, which can suggest power and dominance on 32

As Dick shows, “[t]ilting also mimics eye movement: in this case the eye’s tendency to move up the face of a building to take in its height, or down a column of names” (2002: 73). However, vertical tilts are not as frequent as horizontal pans, and they are usually rather slow to give the viewers time for observing (cf. Arijon 2003: 456).

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its part (cf. fig. 7).33 In the following extract from A Tramp Abroad, Mark Twain humorously describes his ascent of Mont Blanc by telescope. It is a special case, since the focalizer portrays the eye, which performs the gaze tour, as a hiker moving up to the peak.34

vertical space axis

Harris was afraid and did not want to go, but I heartened him up and said I would hold his hand all the way; so he gave his consent, though he trembled a little at first. I took a last pathetic look upon the pleasant summer scene about me, then boldly put my eye to the glass and prepared to mount among the grim glaciers and the everlasting snows. [...] We passed the glacier safely and began to mount the steeps beyond, with great celerity. When we were seven minutes out from the starting point, we reached an altitude where the scene took a new aspect; an apparently limitless continent of gleaming snow was tilted heavenward before our faces. As my eye followed that awful acclivity far away up into the remote skies, it seemed to me that all I had ever seen before of sublimity and magnitude was small and insignificant compared to this (Twain 1997: 327-28).

path gazeTR

LM

focalizer (static) horizontal space axis Fig. 7: An elaboration of the image schema gaze tour

UP:

static focalizer and

The mountainous LM is profiled by the nouns “glacier” (l. 6), “scene” (l. 8), and “continent” (l. 9), while the path is verbalized by the vector verb “mount” (ll. 5, 6) as well as by the spatial adverbs “up” (l. 11) and “heavenward” (l. 10), whereby the latter denotes the orientation 33

34

Hedgecoe points out that “from a low viewpoint nearby subjects loom larger, and trees converge steeply skyward” (2000: 42). This pseudo-hike closely corresponds with the motif of fraud, which is at the centre of Mark Twain’s travel writings: “[f]rom his earliest travels to his last tour of the globe, he was impressed most of all with the apparently universal impulse to deceive and the perversely answering impulse to be deceived” (Robinson 1995: 28).

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antipodal to the earth. Once again, the transitional verb “reached” (l. 8) evokes a sense of path-completion. Although the TR is at first expressed by the personal pronoun “[w]e” (l. 7), the noun phrase “my eye” (l. 10) makes clear that it is a genuine gaze-TR. Usually, in contrast to DOWN, physical upward motion has to overcome gravity, which can have effects on its speed in case of a focalizer-TR. The “great celerity” (l. 7) of motion is possible only because of the fact that the focalizer carries out a gaze tour. Therefore, the deictic centre undergoes a ‘pseudo’-shift, since the actual focalizer is constantly located behind the telescope in the French town of Chamonix. Before the focalizer’s companion Harris can be persuaded to move his eye up the mountain via telescope, he must be “heartened [...] up” (l. 1). Consequently, the action expressed by the metaphorical use of up is presented as a premise for the intended physical upward motion. Moreover, the text alludes to the idea of the sublime, once more establishing an analogy between physical reality and metaphor. The topographical greatness of the higher regions accounts for their figurative greatness as well, as the nouns “sublimity” (l. 12) and “magnitude” (l. 12) demonstrate. It is illuminating to see that in his treatise on the sublime and the beautiful (1757), Edmund Burke also establishes a correlation between the sublime and the vertical dimension of colossal objects. Extension is either in length, height, or depth. Of these the length strikes least; an hundred yards of even ground will never work such an effect as a tower an hundred yards high, or a rock or mountain of that altitude. I am apt to imagine likewise, that height is less grand than depth; and that we are more struck at looking down from a precipice, than at looking up at an object of equal height, but of that I am not very positive. (1958: 72)

Although Burke tentatively emphasizes downward views, he does not deny the possible sublime effect of looking upward, as it manifests itself in Mark Twain’s account. Furthermore, according to the OED, the etymology of the lexeme sublime goes back to Latin subl mis, which can be literally translated as ‘up to the lintel’ (Simpson and Weiner 1989). Hence, in this extract, UP is ‘more’ in the sense of ‘more important and momentous’, and the LM becomes a kind of norm serving as a yardstick for the focalizer. The adjective “awful” (l. 10) in its archaic meaning of ‘awe-inspiring’ underlines this im-

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pression. Clearly, the fact that the focalizer does not actually conquer the summit in a body tour results in the parodistic tone of this passage.35 Once again, one might ask whether the focalizer can be identical with the LM as well. This state of affairs can also be detected in the first voyage of Gulliver’s Travels, where the Lilliputians take Gulliver’s measurements in order to make clothes for him, as he reports: “I kneeled down, and they raised a ladder from the ground to my neck; upon this ladder one of them mounted [...]” (Swift 1985: 100). Although the ladder is the immediate LM, Gulliver’s body is the basic LM constituting the central object in the schema. 6. Conclusion To conclude, there is textual evidence that the portrayal of vertical landscape features is based on interrelations between language, cognition, and culture-related metaphors. First, the samples have shown that the prototypes of vertical image schemas can be adapted for landscape descriptions by reducing the sceneries to their most basic constituents. Thereby, LM, TR, and path are repeatedly realized in the form of cohesive chains in sequences of sentences. Second, the focalizer can interact with the image schema in three basic ways. While a dynamic focalizer-TR performs a body tour, a focalizer external to the schema triggers a gaze-TR carrying out a gaze tour. In exceptional cases, a LM-focalizer can be the static reference entity for other movements, so that the focalizer’s body itself is turned into a landscape. Third, it has become clear that the conceptual metaphors of UP and DOWN can be retransferred to their spatio-physical basis, in this case realized by complex topographical sceneries. Downward views typically correspond to the focalizers’ pleasure and contentment, as their elevated positions are emphasized, while upward views tend to have an aweinspiring effect, making the focalizers aware of their inferior situa-

35

In a variant of the gaze tour, the gaze is led by a moving object, as it can be found in a focalizer observing other mountaineers climbing up to a summit (cf. Hillary 2000: 15-16).

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tion.36 By projecting affective and connotative meaning onto mountains, hills, and valleys, the metaphorical reading of landscape provides an alternative to the conventional personifications based on what John Ruskin called the “pathetic fallacy” (1995: 267). Moreover, the UP/DOWN “discourse metaphor[s]” (Dirven 1985: 93) complement traditional metaphysical interpretations of the vertical axis in literature,37 illustrating that in many cases a more secular and individual understanding is appropriate. Ultimately, the cultural coherence established by the system of UP/DOWN metaphors is not only confirmed,38 but also refined in vertical descriptions of landscape.

36

37

38

Although the vertical axis is most prolific with regard to orientational metaphors, the two horizontal axes of front/back and left/right might prove interesting for literary analyses as well. Quoting passages from Milton’s Paradise Lost and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Foster Stovel reaches the conclusion that “the aerial view has been used traditionally in literature either as a device for idealizing earth’s glory or as vehicle for satirizing earthly vanity in comparison with heavenly virtue” (1984: 18). Along these lines, Lakoff/Johnson state “that our values are not independent but must form a coherent system with the metaphorical concepts we live by” (1980: 22).

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Works Cited Primary Texts Hillary, Sir Edmund. 2000. View from the Summit [1999]. London: Corgi Books. Swift, Jonathan. 1985. Gulliver’s Travels [1726] (ed. Peter Dixon and John Chalker). London: Penguin. Theroux, Paul. 1979. The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas. London: Hamish Hamilton. Twain, Mark. 1997. A Tramp Abroad [1880] (ed. Robert Gray Bruce and Hamlin Hill). New York: Penguin.

Research Literature Arijon, Daniel. 2003. Grammatik der Filmsprache. 2nd ed. Frankfurt/Main: Zweitausendeins. Boers, Frank. 1996. Spatial Prepositions and Metaphor: A Cognitive Semantic Journey along the UP-DOWN and the FRONT-BACK Dimensions. Tübingen: Narr. Burgschmidt, Ernst. 1975. Die englischen Präpositionen. Dortmund: Lambert Lensing. Burke, Edmund. 1958. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful [1757] (ed. J. T. Boulton). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Caesar, Terry. 1990. ‘The Book in the Travel: Paul Theroux’s The Old Patagonian Express’ in The Arizona Quarterly 46(2): 101-110. Chatman, Seymour. 1978. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell UP. Collis, Christy. 1998. ‘Vertical Body/Horizontal World: Sir John Franklin and Fictions of Arctic Space’ in Dale, Leigh, and Simon Ryan (eds). The Body in the Library. Amsterdam: Rodopi: 225-236. Croft, William and D. Alan Cruse. 2004. Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Dick, Bernard F. 2002. Anatomy of Film. 4th ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Dirven, René. 1985. ‘Metaphor as a Basic Means for Extending the Lexicon’ in Paprotté, Wolf and René Dirven (eds). The Ubiquity of Metaphor: Metaphor in Language and Thought. Amsterdam: John Benjamins: 85-119. –– and John R. Taylor. 1988. ‘The Conceptualisation of Vertical Space in English: The Case of Tall’ in Rudzka-Ostyn, Brygida (ed.). Topics in Cognitive Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins: 379-402. Foster Stovel, Nora. 1984. ‘The Aerial View of Modern Britain: The Airplane as a Vehicle for Idealism and Satire’ in Ariel 15(3): 17-32. Gandelman, Claude. 1991. Reading Pictures, Viewing Texts. Bloomington: Indiana UP. Genette, Gérard. 1980. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Goldstein, E. Bruce. 1997. Wahrnehmungspsychologie: Eine Einführung. Heidelberg: Spektrum Akademischer Verlag. Hedgecoe, John. 2000. Photographing Landscapes. London: Collins & Brown. Herskovits, Annette. 1986. Language and Spatial Cognition: An Interdisciplinary Study of the Prepositions in English. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. ––. 1988. ‘Spatial Expressions and the Plasticity of Meaning’ in Rudzka-Ostyn, Brygida (ed.). Topics in Cognitive Linguistics. Amsterdam: Benjamins: 271-297. Hoffman, Tod. 1998. ‘Paul Theroux’s Travels’ in Queen' s Quarterly 105(2): 195-203. Jahn, Manfred. 1996. ‘Windows of Focalization: Deconstructing and Reconstructing a Narratological Concept’ in Style 30(2): 241-267. Johnson, Mark. 1987. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago: U of Chicago P. Kohl, Stephan. 1993. ‘Reiseromane/Travelogues: Möglichkeiten einer ‘hybriden’ Gattung’ in Maack, Annegret and Rüdiger Imhof (eds). Radikalität und Mäßigung: Der englische Roman seit 1960. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft: 149-168. ––. 1997. ‘Imagining the Country as ‘The Country’ in the 1830s: William Cobbett, William Howitt, William Turner’ in Journal for the Study of British Cultures 4(1-2): 113-127. Lakoff, George. 1987. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: U of Chicago P. –– and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: U of Chicago P. Langacker, Ronald W. 1987a. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, vol. I: Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford: Stanford UP. ––. 1987b. ‘Nouns and Verbs’ in Language: Journal of the Linguistic Society of America 63: 53-94. Leisi, Ernst. 1985. Praxis der englischen Semantik. 2nd ed. Heidelberg: Winter. Levinson, Stephen C. 2003. Space in Language and Cognition: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Lindstromberg, Seth. 1998. English Prepositions Explained. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Lyons, John. 1977. Semantics. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Quirk, Randolph et al. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. 2002. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Robinson, Forrest G. 1995. ‘The Innocent at Large: Mark Twain’s Travel Writing’ in Robinson, Forrest G. (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Mark Twain. Cambridge: Cambridge UP: 27-51. Rubin, E. 2001. ‘Figure and Ground’ in Yantis, Steven (ed.). Visual Perception: Essential Readings. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U: 225-229. Ruskin, John. 1995. Selected Writings (ed. Philip Davis). London: J. M. Dent. Schulze, Rainer. 1988. ‘A Short Story of down’ in Hüllen, Werner and Rainer Schulze (eds). Understanding the Lexicon: Meaning, Sense and World Knowledge in Lexical Semantics. Tübingen: Niemeyer: 395-414. Simpson, John A. and Edmund S. C. Weiner (eds). 1989. The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 20 vols. Oxford: Clarendon.

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Slack, Jon and Emile van der Zee. 2003. ‘The Representation of Direction in Language and Space’ in van der Zee, Emile and Jon Slack (eds). Representing Direction in Language and Space. Oxford: Oxford UP: 1-17. Talmy, Leonard. 2000a. Toward a Cognitive Semantics, vol. I: Concept Structuring Systems. Cambridge/MA: MIT Press. ––. 2000b. Toward a Cognitive Semantics, vol. II: Typology and Process in Concept Structuring. Cambridge/MA: MIT Press. Taylor, John R. 2002. Cognitive Grammar. Oxford: Oxford UP. ––. 2003. Linguistic Categorization. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP. Tversky, Barbara. 2003. ‘Places: Points, Planes, Paths, and Portions’ in van der Zee, Emile, and Jon Slack (eds). Representing Direction in Language and Space. Oxford: Oxford UP: 132-143. Tyler, Andrea and Vyvyan Evans. 2003. The Semantics of English Prepositions: Spatial Scenes, Embodied Meaning and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Ullmer-Ehrich, Veronika. 1982. ‘The Structure of Living Space Descriptions’ in Jarvella, Robert J. and Wolfgang Klein (eds). Speech, Place, and Action: Studies in Deixis and Related Topics. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons: 219-49. Ungerer, Friedrich and Hans-Jörg Schmid. 1996. An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics. Harlow: Pearson Education.

England’s Domestic Others: The Tourist Construction of Agriculture and Landscape in William Cobbett’s Rural Rides (1830) Ralph Pordzik Abstract: This essay seeks to locate William Cobbett’s travel account Rural Rides in the modernisation debate of the mid-nineteenth century. Applying Dean MacCannell’s theory of tourism to the realities of British travel discourse, it argues that Cobbett’s construction of the agricultural worker and his life is couched within the paradox of tourism: the book’s traveller-narrator presents a peaceful view of rural England which is itself based on the discourses of modernity that helped destroy it in the first place. In a variety of ways, Rural Rides sentimentalises the independent farmer as the last representative of an Arcadian idyll in England and in the process turns him, paradoxically, into a marketable product of the modern alterity industry. Traditional farm life is thus inscribed into and made available as an ‘organic’ part of the modernising process Cobbett the journalist and popular critic so uncompromisingly rejected. Key names and concepts: Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury - William Cobbett, The History of the Protestant ‘Reformation’ in England and Ireland; The Political Register; Rural Rides - Graham Huggan - Dean MacCannell - John Urry - Raymond Williams - George Woodcock; Tourist Gaze - Alterity Industry - Nostalgia - Modernising Process - Romanticism - Rural Society - Grand Tour - Paradox of Tourism - Napoleonic Wars.

1. Introduction Every society harbours another society inside itself: its past ages and cultural periods and its less ‘developed’ and more ‘developed’ subjects or, for that matter, domestic others. British society in the 1830s, only partly disengaged from the imperial routines of the Napoleonic Wars, proved especially vulnerable to change from within through nostalgia, sentimentality and other tendencies to regress to a previous age of spontaneous feeling and genuine experience, which retrospec-

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tively appears to have been more orderly or normal. The rise of Romanticism had re-awakened interest in the ‘primitive’ imagination, in idyllic nature and in the presentation of feelings of rebellion, protest and restlessness. Financial capital, at that time, was abundant, new markets were opened and widened by improvements in transport; commerce was regarded by many as a source of social injustices and evils. The awareness of rural depopulation led to a literature of “indignant contrasts” and “nostalgia” (Bellringer and Jones 1986: 3). Conservatives and radicals alike rediscovered the importance of local culture and the language of the ‘common people’ – to restore remnants of dead or dying traditions and modes of life after this fashion was an essential component of the cultural process in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Bits and pieces of the ‘domestic other’ were preserved and reproduced as instances of a lost authenticity and original identity. In 1830, William Cobbett (1763–1835) published the first version of a travel book remarkable for its important position in this process of ‘marketing’ the domestic margins: Rural Rides offers a subjective account of the writer’s travel experiences in rural England after the devastations of the Napoleonic Wars, an informed exploration of domestic otherness and a romantic celebration of an impoverished people’s ancient ways of life. It is not, however, a romantic book in the sense of the bizarre emotionalism and passionate morbidity his contemporaries associated with that age (cf. Bulwer-Lytton 1874: 251). Far from offering a naïve vision of simple and unchanging rural ways in the manner of landscape painting, Cobbett’s practical and fact-finding book set the tone for a huge body of travel writing exploring the consequences of the economic forces known as the Industrial Revolution, i.e., the breaking up of traditional hierarchies by new means of production and consumption, mechanised labour and a ruthless taxing and funding system drawing national property into the hands of a small elite. Known as one of England’s foremost radicals – in 1810 he was tried for sedition and sentenced to two years of imprisonment in Newgate, London – Cobbett was young enough to live through the Napoleonic Wars and their aftermath. He saw the effects in country and town of the profound changes under way in the 1820s, and what he saw aroused his indignation and inspired his proverbial furious social criticism. Upholding the traditional values of independent yeomanry, he attacked the economists and those who were buying

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up the old estates, the “tax-eaters” and “stock-jobbers” who were capitalising on the new financial system. Every instance of real or imagined oppression that met his eye during his travels gave rise to a “rustic harangue” (Cobbett 1985: 46) or caustic article in his weekly newspaper The Political Register. His outstanding gift for publicity went with a “pugnacious, if erratic, political commitment” (Bellringer and Jones 1986: 13).1 As Raymond Williams puts it, Cobbett is, in large measure, the type of the very worst kind of popular journalist. There have indeed been, since his day, a thousand petty Cobbetts, imitating the vices of the position and lacking the virtues. (Williams 1958: 13)2

Images of change and modernisation govern large parts of Rural Rides which acknowledges the potential danger of these external influences upon the traditional ways of life Cobbett so admired. Critics have never ceased to see the book as a memorial to the vanished culture of ‘old rural England’ and as a delightful self-portrait of a “remarkable Englishman”3. George Woodcock, editor of the 1967 edition of Rural Rides, praises above all the roundabout way in which the forces of change are dramatised: [Cobbett] was not easily convinced by merely intellectual arguments, and he had a plain man’s distrust of any statistics but his own. His thought is rarely abstract or speculative; he is concerned with the actual, concrete world, and one of his special characteristics is that he responds most easily to what he actually sees and experiences. (1985: 19f)

What Woodcock fails to grasp is that Rural Rides is not merely a factridden and straightforward account of post-war England and its economic struggles; in fact, it is also a book full of tensions, paradoxes and contradictions resulting from the writer’s desire to find a panacea for the problems and grievances caused by the bankruptcy of the state. Cobbett’s therapeutic discourse, his desire to employ the text as a 1

See also the fine study by Leonora Nattrass 1995.

2

For further details as well as an informed reading of Cobbett’s work in the context of emerging popular culture, see Dyck 1992.

3

See blurb of the 1985 Penguin paperback edition of Rural Rides.

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remedial instrument set against the corruption, greed and materialism of his time, is couched within what must be viewed as the modern paradox of tourism: although his account self-consciously presents an image of rural England trying to preserve the cultural integrity of its customs and ways of life, it is itself based on the discourse of modernity that helped destroy these ways of life.4 Sentimentalising the independent farmer as the last survivor of a bucolic idyll, turns him into an eminently marketable product of the ‘alterity industry’ already firmly under way in the early nineteenth century. In Rural Rides, the yeoman as opponent of the metropolitan bourgeois is exhibited as a human showpiece, a monument to England’s glorious agricultural past. He and his whole family are restored and kept functioning as living reminders of a vanished culture, that is, Cobbett’s idealistic view of a largely autonomous community sustained by domestic manufacture and family self-sufficiency.5 Nowhere is the agricultural proletariat so nicely domesticated as in this unique portrait of English rural society. Wanting to protect the farmer by special laws, Cobbett turns him into a modern artefact and thus inscribes himself into the modernising process he vehemently decries: for it is this gradual process which contains the various experimental models for cultural revision and which is therefore a precondition of Cobbett’s reappraisal of a rural alternative. In his seminal study of tourism in the modern age, Dean MacCannell has pointed out that travelling is a kind of collective striving for a transcendence of the modern totality, a way of attempting to overcome the discontinuity of modernity, of incorpora4

This indicates a key conflict in British Romanticism: the first-generation romantics turned against classicism because they saw it associated with the artificiality of the new industrial production process. They were unaware of their own highly marketable position within this emerging commodity culture.

5

See in particular his book Cottage Economy (1822), in which Cobbett advocates the revival of village industry and agriculture as an alternative to Robert Owen’s utopian socialism which he saw as an abstract scheme of regimentation and control. Works conceived after the fashion of this pre-industrial idealism lead in an almost direct line to the present time and such nostalgic writings as John Seymour’s The Complete Book of Self-sufficiency (1976) and The Forgotten Arts and Crafts (2001). Like Cobbett before him, Seymour thrives on the commercial system he criticises.

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ting its fragments into unified experience. Of course, it is doomed to eventual failure: even as it tries to construct totalities, it celebrates differentiation. (1999: 13)6

Relocating Cobbett in the modernisation debate of the nineteenth century, its growing engagement with travel and with an other it requires to understand and define itself, may help integrate the growing body of heterogeneous opinion on this “reactionary yeoman” (Bellringer and Jones 1986: 14) who was also one of the most advanced and radical political thinkers of his time, a studious cultivator of his own image as well as active member of the Reformed Parliament, a late romantic rebel at times visceral in his criticism but always committed to correcting the errors of the rapidly changing social system. 2. Transformations of the Tourist Gaze Let me elaborate on this by taking a closer look at the text itself. Cobbett’s outspoken and self-legitimising interest in the education of the country-dwellers who feel exploited by the system without knowing how to respond to it is unabashedly demonstrated in the following passage: Mrs Mears, the farmer’s wife, had made, of the crested dog’s tail grass, a bonnet which she wears herself. I there saw girls platting the straw. They had made plat of several degrees of fineness; and, they sell it to some person or persons at Fareham, who, I suppose, make it into bonnets. […] The farmer, who is also a very intelligent person, told me, that he should endeavour to introduce the manufacture as a thing to assist the obtaining of employment, in order to lessen the amount of the poor-rates. A most important matter it is, to put paupers in the way of ceasing to be paupers. […] From the very first; from the first moment of my thinking about this straw affair, I regarded it as likely to assist in bettering the lot of the labouring people. […] I have the pleasure to know, that there is one family, at any rate, who are living well through my means. […]

6

For further criticism addressing in particular the concept of authenticity and subjectivity in modern travel, see Pearce and Moscardo 1986 and Cohen 1988.

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Ralph Pordzik It seems that this farmer at Durley has always read the Register, since the first appearance of little two-penny trash. Had it not been for this reading, Mrs Mears would not have thought about the grass; and had she not thought about the grass, none of the benefits above mentioned would have arisen to her neighbours. (1985: 136f)

The formula is a familiar one: accurate in his description of the labourers’ lot, Cobbett remains idealistic if not naïve in his judgement of the journalist’s success and pedagogic efficacy as a political reformer. Certainly, few English writers have been more passionately involved in their daily routine with the problems of rural life in England. In 1805, having worked for five years as a journalist in London, the great “Wen” on the “sickly body” of England, Cobbett bought a property at Botley and resolved to settle down as an independent farmer. Within two years, however, he declared himself a Radical and went back into the political arena in order to fight the corruption which riddled English public life in the pre-Reform epoch. In three more years he was up for trial on a charge of sedition, and his life in the country became intermittent, broken by the years in prison and in American exile. In 1821, he settled in Kensington where he continued editing his independent radical journal, The Political Register (1802– 35), until his death in 1835. In the quoted passage, Cobbett focuses on what are the two major themes in all his writing: the “unnatural effects”, as he calls them, arising out of the wealth of the country having been drawn “unnaturally” (Williams 1958: 15) together in the hands of a few rich, and their consequences for the “poor men of England” (Williams 1958: 13) he wishes to return to the idyllic state they were in when he was born. ‘Unnatural’ is the constant emphasis in his writing, and the word provides the keystone of his social criticism of the new industrial civilization. ‘Natural’, according to this view, is to be a respected independent farmer, anxious from day to day about the weather, the conditions of the soil and the state of the markets. (As Rural Rides vividly and impressively documents, Cobbett kept himself well informed about the methods of subsistence farming and suggested ways to improve them without the help of machines.) It is to live as a free man in a country of shepherds and herdsmen […] having more leisure for contemplation, and therefore more likely to form a just estimate of their rights and

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duties […] having, at all times, in their houses, plenty of flesh to eat and plenty of woollen to wear. (Cobbett 1985: 507)

Cobbett did not live to share the prosperous era of high farming which replaced the old open-field system during the mid-Victorian decades. However, Cobbett also expected the farmers to resist the oppressive order imposed upon them, and in this he proved one of the most uncompromising political thinkers of his own time. He saw labour as the only ‘property’ of the rural poor, and he demanded the same rights for this as for other property. Cobbett positively anticipated the then unorthodox schemes employed by the Marxists and militantly opposed every kind of repression by State authority. As he writes: “I seek a remedy in an alteration in the machine. There is now nobody […] who will pretend, that the country can […] go on, […] unless there be a great change of some sort in the mode of managing the public affairs.” (1985: 91) The political system, according to Cobbett, “is unnatural. It is the vagabond’s system. It is a system that must be destroyed, or that will destroy the country.” (1985: 191)7 He was among the few intellectuals at the end of the Romantic period who had not recanted their revolutionary intentions, and who were not disturbed by the aggressive policies of France: What they [i.e. the English “Ministers”] wanted, was to […] prevent the example of the French from being alluring to the people of England. […] They wanted to keep out of England those principles which had a natural tendency to destroy borough-mongering, and to put an end to peculation and plunder. (1985: 200)

All of his writing and thinking in this respect is thus in truth a confirmation of the modernising process he purports to combat, his stern 7

“Vagabonds” referring to statesmen, “stock-jobbers”, “Jews”, and the “infamous London press” (Cobbett 1985: 184) alike. Often absurdly prejudiced against some of the most advanced critical positions of his time, Cobbett was also one of the first to attack the liberation myth underlying enlightenment thought: “It has been the fashion to ascribe the French Revolution to the writings of Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, and others. These writings had nothing at all to do with the matter: […] The Revolution was produced by taxes, which at last became unbearable; by debts of the state; but, in fact by the despair of the people, produced by the weight of the taxes.” (1985: 497)

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criticism basically an act of emotional support for the ‘flawed’ system of permanent social change he takes issue with. However, as his manner of presenting landscape and farming system documents, Cobbett himself failed to become aware of this internal contradiction. In a telling scene, he chastises the new industrial classes for having “perverted” the picturesque valley of Chilworth, according to his words one of the “choicest retreats of man”, by making it “instrumental in effecting two of the most damnable of purposes […] that ever sprang from the minds of men under the influence of the devil! namely, the making of gunpowder and of the bank-notes!” (1985: 97) A few lines later, however, he avers the superiority of gunpowder when put into the service of a just and honourable cause, that is, “when it sends the lead at the hordes that support a tyrant” (1985: 97). A curious paradox the writer never undertakes to resolve! What Cobbett only grudgingly admits is that it is the setting up of printing machines in the homely valley of Chilworth which permits him to write and say as he does, on clean white paper, regularly issuing a newspaper dedicated to advance radical political thought and to promote theories of social progress and material well-being (“… part of these springs have, at times, assisted in turning rags into Registers!” [1985: 97]). It is a technological culture, not a backward-looking agrarian society, which provides journalists with the stock-in-trade for their daily breadwinning – a professional caste Cobbett self-derisively abuses as “base hirelings” and “infamous traders” (1985: 184) who own and conduct the “beastly press” (1985: 91). As a general rule, the judgemental dilemma of the text is exposed most blatantly in those passages in which Cobbett tends to suppress the ironic duplicity of his own statements – e.g., when he emphasises that, after the war, the currency had been inflated by great issues of paper money, and thus indirectly affirms the concomitant ‘inflation’ of newspapers and opinions. This failure to reflect the premises of his own argument is reinforced by his often spontaneous and self-righteous handling of historical truth. On the one hand, he preaches conformity with fact, presenting himself as a firm and resolute opponent of all kinds of lies and falsehoods, while on the other he continues to shed erroneous notions about representatives of Church and State which border on defamation (cf. Woodcock 1985: 20, 519). It is simply untrue, e.g., that Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury and

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author of History of My Own Times (1724/1734), was responsible for the staggering increase of national debt.8 Long term loans of various kinds, some of them forced, had been part of the fiscal policy ever since the times of the Stuart kings (Woodcock 1985: 521). Neither is it correct to say that the population “has not increased, in England, one single soul since I was born” (Cobbett 1985: 67). There are no reliable figures for the time of Cobbett’s birth, but according to the first census in England and Wales of 1801, the population was then roughly 8.9 million, rising to 13.9 million around 1830 (cf. Woodcock 1985: 516). However, some rural areas saw considerable depopulation after the war, and on his knowledge of this fact Cobbett based his stubborn refusal to accept figures which pointed to a population increase. His factualist ideology, we are led to conclude, prefers to propagate its own manufactured truths and half-truths. It disguises the real differences it helps to produce by “appealing to ones of [its] own imagining”. And this, Graham Huggan has demonstrated, is the basic assumption of all sentimental or, for that matter, ‘agricultural’, tourism (Huggan 2001: 177). As a travel book, Rural Rides emerges out of a journey begun with practical motives; it succeeds largely because of the sensibility that makes its author respond in an unplanned and unforeseeable fashion to the physical and mental stimuli of travel in unfamiliar territory. John Urry has argued that western travellers have tended to adopt a colonialist style of writing which assumes the superiority of the travellers’ cultural and moral values and leads to their taking possession of what they see in a kind of “tourist gaze”.9 Even when sympathetic towards the people being described, the colonial rhetoric positions them as innocent, helpless or lacking in reason. Variations on this theme have characterised English travel within Europe and beyond since the Romantic age. The Grand Tour took whole elites on cultural pilgrimages to the ‘great sites’ of western civilization.

8

Though he obviously had a hand in bringing the Dutch William as king to England: “This vile paper-money and funding system; this system of Dutch descent, begotten by Bishop Burnet and born in hell; this system has turned everything into a gamble.” (1985:153)

9

The term was coined by John Urry 1990.

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Cobbett’s travel in the form of (semi-)permanent migration to rural areas is obviously based upon motivations and couched in expectations bearing strong resemblances to these travels outside Europe. Despite the new industrial realities, the countryside is predominantly represented as immediate, natural and timeless in contrast to the hardhearted business and modernity of metropolitan life: This country though so open, has its beauties. The homesteads in the sheltered bottoms with fine lofty trees about the houses and yards, form a beautiful contrast with the large open fields. The little villages, running straggling along the dells […] are very interesting objects, even in the winter. You feel a sort of satisfaction, when you are out upon the bleak hills yourself, at the thought of the shelter, which is experienced in the dwellings in the valleys. (1985: 57)

The various objects depicted here involve looking at scenery in the sense of a landscape taken in as a totality or appreciated for qualities spread evenly throughout mountain ranges, valleys, foothills and coastlines – landmarks, that is, of continuity and rest in themselves. To emphasise this ideal of paradisal harmony, Cobbett places it in stark contrast to the artificial landscapes made by men: … this enclosure and plantation have totally destroyed the beauty of this part of the estate. […] The dying trees, which have been planted long enough for you not to perceive that they have been planted, excite the idea of sterility in the soil. (1985: 44)

At first sight, such a contrast seems to imply a deeply felt solidarity on the writer’s part with the untouched wildness of the landscape. At closer inspection, however, it turns out that this ‘innocent’ return to the rural world is itself made possible by the process of social differentiation underlying it. It is itself determined by the modern move of dissecting ‘unified’ experience into smaller units of distinct and individualised experiences.10 The implied contrast between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ is itself a deliberate construction of opposites, the writer the organizer of those attitudes possible readers may take towards it. 10

For this view of modernity and western modernising processes, see in particular Habermas 1988: 41ff.

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Every motivated effort to preserve nature, culture and the past, and to present them ‘authentically’ thus contributes to an opposite tendency, that is, the present is made more unified against its past, more in control of the natural realm than before. Quite obviously, there is no such thing as a genuine rural culture beyond the various layers of differentiation, beyond the spiralling quest for fresh alternatives. At best, it marks a social space in which the new spirit of reform Cobbett subscribes to joins forces with the Benthamite tradition of utilitarian practicality and its belief in material advantage and administrative expediency. Cobbett himself constantly admits the contingencies of this process – e.g., when he describes in full detail the sublime beauties of the landscape near Morning hill while at the same time registering their uselessness in terms of practical expediency: “You see the Isle of Wight in one direction, and in the opposite direction you see the high lands in Berkshire. It is not a pleasant view, however. The fertile spots are all too far from you.” (1985: 139) Here, the early romantics’ Claude glass view of nature and landscape is coldly sacrificed to the appraiser’s calculating glance at the soil’s possible market value. Let me emphasise my argument by adducing a further example from Cobbett’s works. Author of a great variety of journalistic and polemic writing, Cobbett shares in the responsibility for the idealisation of the Middle Ages which is so characteristic of much nineteenthcentury social criticism. As a literary movement, Medievalism had been growing since the middle of the eighteenth century. For Cobbett, one of its most central ideas was that of the monastery as a symbol for the solidity and beneficence of the old English social institutions: the image of communal society as a welcome alternative to the rapid urbanisation in the industrial age and the claims of utilitarianism and individualism. As Raymond Williams has pointed out, Cobbett was responsible for a large measure of the popularisation of Medievalism in Britain. His History of the Protestant ‘Reformation’ in England and Ireland (1824) had, by contemporary standards, a “huge circulation”, and “thousands of readers […] came to these ideas through Cobbett

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rather than through contact with any of the more reliable sources” (Williams 1958: 19).11 Again, it is important to note that for Cobbett the originating affect was recoil from the very different social ideals of industrialism, such as charity schemes for the poor or popular education programmes. He takes issue with the teachers, e.g., for having “discovered the way of living, without work, on the labour of those that do work” (1985: 179), and makes fun of those “frivolous idiots that are turned out from Winchester and Westminster School, or from any of those dens of dunces called Colleges and Universities” (1985: 41). This view is symptomatic of Cobbett’s sweeping rejection of formal education and his hatred against the then popular National Schools that fostered docility and appreciation rather than criticism and imagination. Thus shaping the culture and ideas of English Medievalism on the one hand, Cobbett contributed to the profusion of new incentives and approaches to reform in the nineteenth century on the other. A “conservative-hearted rebel” (Woodcock 1985: 21), he was motivated by his wish to dissociate himself from others and therefore deeply enmeshed in the prevailing culture of differentiation and individualisation with its constantly increasing range of choices within the spectrum of cultural innovation. This conflict of attitudes is reinforced by the fact that elsewhere in Rural Rides, he violently attacks the endowments of the Church along with the “sermons” and those “at once stupid and malignant […] and roguish things, called Religious Tracts” (Cobbett 1985: 137). Rejecting Protestantism on spiritual grounds, Cobbett argues in favour of the older rituals of worship according to which “there was no distinction; no high place and no low place; all were upon a level before God at any rate” (1985: 186).12 Like his fellow campaigners, he wishes religion to play a dominant role in unifying British society in the pursuit of moral and humanitarian goals. Yet, 11

Cobbett’s book in turn was inspired by John Lingard’s History of England (1819–30), the principal object of which was to demonstrate the ‘disastrous’ effects of the Reformation.

12

See also Samuel T. Coleridge’s similarly reactionary thoughts on the matter in his late work On the Constitution of Church and State, According to the Idea of Each (1829).

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the ‘ideal’ religious practice or mode of life he embraces is not unequivocal: reducing the farm workers to a pious and docile lot, he at the same time wants them to be rebels against the “vile boroughmongers” (1985: 219) and the complacency of the “friends of the System” (1985: 220). The same hard-working farmers he wishes to rejoice at the “atheistical decree” (1985: 200) of the French revolutionaries are now supposed to kneel before the image of a medieval God who is positively beyond the pressing social and economic issues of the age. Once again, the discrepancy between Cobbett’s polemic against the new agendas and his view of his own involvement in these forces turns into the open. On the social as well as on the political level, he seeks to salvage the space of a domestic other beyond the bounds of modern civilisation. But he fails to understand the dialectic of this process, the fact that he himself contributes to the modern rhetoric of nostalgia and rustic exoticism and thus reinforces the economic structures underlying and sustaining it. Conversely, it is the social change he combats which has enforced a separation between Church and State and thus affords him the freedom of religious choice and instruction of others. Like the emerging colonial traveller, Cobbett thus feeds on the manufactured reminiscences of the pastoral and the medieval, the assumedly timeless essences of the vanished culture he himself helps wipe out. He seeks a past of his own invention he knows in advance to be impossible, a paradox revealed in George Woodcock’s homage to Cobbett, when he argues that after his death “the forces of change which he had helped to generate moved on to create a new England in which the England he had loved was buried and forgotten.” (Woodcock 1985: 25) 3. Cobbett and the Modernisation Debate On the whole, Cobbett’s technique of musealisation must be seen as one that contributes to the consolidation of the bourgeois world of the early nineteenth century, to the increasing control over history and tradition by middle class values and ideas of culture. Picturing the English rustic as the last survivor of an Arcadian society, he turns him

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into a fashionable commodity of the tourist industry gradually emerging after the end of the Napoleonic Wars.13 He ‘produces’ the domestic other as a human being with a clearly identifiable yet also conveniently fabricated past, and in this he replicates the divisiveness of modern competitive society he attacks, making it all the more appealing to his middle-class readership. Cobbett thus reinforces the modern paradox of tourism: forging an idealistic view of Merry Old England in which the ‘authenticity’ of its experiences and rural ways of life are preserved, this view relies itself on the commodity relations it critiques and which continue to destroy these ways of life. It never ceases to distort and suppress what it seeks to represent authentically and thus cannot help but defeat its own objectives. In the final consequence, Cobbett thus contributes to the (bourgeois) sameness of a world whose cultural differences he requires to argue his point. That this paradox is created, in part, by the demands of capitalist expansion in the early nineteenth century and the rise of a modern commodity industry gradually taking the place of a self-sufficient subsistence economy need not be emphasised. Cobbett’s later writings appear to confirm this view; they demonstrate his ability to make constant revisions as the “result of direct experience” (1985: 492)14 and thus reveal the distinct modernity of thought underlying his work. After a ride through Sheffield inspecting the factory system and seeing the “general ruin” of the regional farmers, e.g., Cobbett concedes that “there is no hope of any change for the better but from the working people” (1985: 497). His gloomy account of the Sheffield furnaces bears witness to the mushrooming of newly industrialised areas, giving full expression to his patriarchal fascination with the modernising process he refuses openly to acknowledge:

13

See Brand 1957, especially 2f. James Buzard has elaborated some of Brand’s more general views in his wide-ranging study The Beaten Track (1993: 6f). For an account of British travel literature since the nineteenth century see my book The Wonder of Travel (Pordzik 2005).

14

The accounts of Cobbett’s later tours through England appeared first in the Political Register and in Tour in Scotland and the Four Northern Counties of England in the Autumn of 1832 (1833). Some of them were included in the 1853 expanded edition of Rural Rides.

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All the way along from Leeds to Sheffield it is coal and iron, and iron and coal. It was dark before we reached Sheffield; so that we saw the iron furnaces in all the horrible splendour of their everlasting blaze. Nothing can be conceived more grand or terrific than the yellow waves of fire that incessantly issue from the top of these furnaces, some of which are close by the way-side. Nature has placed the beds of iron and the beds of coal alongside of each other, and art has taught man to make one to operate upon the other, as to turn the iron-stone into liquid matter, which is drained off from the bottom of the furnace, and afterwards moulded into blocks and bars, and all sorts of things. (1985: 494)

What matters here is that Cobbett, the declared enemy of public wealth, progress and the “System”, turns into an ardent follower of the ‘new’ himself – seeing with new eyes the small workshops in Sheffield, the truck system at work in the industrial towns and the mechanised ways of farming in the North of England, and recognising with renewed national pride the rise of England as a powerful ‘global player’: “whatever other nations may do with cotton and with wool, they will never equal England with regard to things made of iron and steel.” (1985: 495)15 His former prejudices have bowed to new experience, and with this have allied him with those sections of society whose interests and beliefs could only propel them towards a future which he never clearly envisaged and would probably have rejected if he had experienced it. On the whole, then, it seems that Cobbett’s political commitment to the pressing issues of his time made him articulate and maintain a series of contradictory positions and attitudes in which finally he became hopelessly enmeshed. Distancing himself from the prevailing ideology of money, commercial progress and social differentiation, he could only add new components, new aspects, to that ideology, further isolating himself from the distinct realities and rapidly developing forms of English rural life he sought to unify. Some of these tensions have been expressed in Raymond Williams’ sharp analysis of Cobbett’s contribution to English literature: 15

This change of mind is also reflected in the fact that when the Radicals finally led Cobbett as member into the Reform Parliament of 1832 it was not for the rural constituencies on behalf of whose people he had fought so long but for Oldham, a crowded and dismal factory town in Northern England!

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Ralph Pordzik The growth of the new society was so confusing, even to the best minds, that positions were drawn up in terms of inherited categories which then revealed unsuspected and even opposing implications. (1958: 20)

As a traveller in times of painful transition, and staged within an unstable ensemble of older institutions in crisis, Cobbett thus illustrates one of the most salient features of the modernising process in relation to travel discourse: the constructivity and cultural transferability of the touristic gaze, the unintended but also inevitable shift of preconstituted views about self and other, individual and society, and the ubiquity of this process by which the actual object of desire – the myth of an unsullied native culture and its original mode of life – irreversibly tends to move out of focus.

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Works Cited Primary References Bulwer-Lytton, Edward. 1874. England and the English [1834]. London: Routledge. Cobbett, William. 1871. A History of the Protestant ‘Reformation’ in England and Ireland [1824]. Dublin: Duffy. ––. 1979. Cottage Economy: Containing Information Relative to the Brewing of Beer, Making of Bread, Keeping of Cows, Pigs, Bees, Ewes, Goats, Poultry and Rabbits […] [1822]. Oxford: Oxford UP. ––. 1984. Cobbett’s Tour in Scotland [1833] (ed. Daniel Green). Aberdeen: Aberdeen UP. ––. 1985. Rural Rides [1830] (Introd. George Woodcock). London: Penguin. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1972. On the Constitution of Church and State According to the Idea of Each [1829] (ed. John Barrell). London: Dent. Lingard, John. 1837-39. A History of England: From the Invasion by the Romans (to the Revolution in 1688). [1819-30]. s.l. Seymour, John. 1976. The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency. London: Faber. ––. 2001. The Forgotten Arts and Crafts. London: Dorling Kindersley.

Research Literature Bellringer, Alan W. and C.B. Jones (eds). 1986. The Romantic Age in Prose. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Brand, Charles Peter. 1957. Italy and the English Romantics: The Italianate Fashion in Early Nineteenth-Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Buzard, James. 1993. The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature and the Ways to ‘Culture’, 1800–1918. Oxford: Clarendon. Cohen, Erik. 1988. ‘Authenticity and Commoditization in Tourism’ in Annals of Tourism Research 15: 29-46. Dyck, Ian. 1992. William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Habermas, Jürgen. 1988. Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: Zwölf Vorlesungen. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Huggan, Graham. 2001. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. London: Routledge. MacCannell, Dean. 1999. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class [1976]. Berkeley: U of California P. Nattrass, Leonora. William Cobbett: The Politics of Style. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Pearce, Philip and Gianna Moscardo. 1986. ‘The Concept of Authenticity in Tourist Experiences’ in Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology 22: 12132. Pordzik, Ralph. 2005. The Wonder of Travel: Fiction, Tourism and the Social Construction of the Nostalgic. Heidelberg: Winter.

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Urry, John. 1990. The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies. London: Sage. Williams, Raymond. 1958. Culture and Society. London: Chatto and Windus. Woodcock, George. 1985. ‘Introduction’ in Cobbett (1985): 7-25.

Character, Identity, and Nationality in the English Novel Patrick Parrinder Abstract: Both in the novel and in political theory, the last two hundred years have seen a shift from a discourse of national character to one of national identity. This shift is exemplified by the debate between two Victorian theorists of nationality, Walter Bagehot and John Stuart Mill. The novel, however indissolubly linked to the concept of character, has increasingly become a forum for questioning identities. Moreover, the novel’s affiliation with the ‘cultural’ rather than the ‘political’ nation associates it with a radical definition of Englishness, fluid and welcoming to new immigration. The questioning of identity can be seen as early as Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, so there is a direct link running from the early nineteenth-century novel to contemporary English multicultural fiction. Key names and concepts: Monica Ali, Brick Lane - Perry Anderson - Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice - Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution, Physics and Politics - Ernest Barker - Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, Villette - ‘John Bull’ - Edmund Burke - Charles Edward, Prince (Bonnie Prince Charlie) - Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, ‘The True-Born Englishman’ - Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge; Little Dorrit - George Eliot, Daniel Deronda - Henry Fielding - E. M. Forster, Howards End - George IV, King - Oliver Goldsmith - David Hume - Rudyard Kipling, Kim - Krishan Kumar - Paul Langford - Andrea Levy, Small Island - Ian McEwan, Atonement - Friedrich Meinecke - John Stuart Mill, Representative Government - Franco Moretti - Andrew Salkey, Escape to an Autumn Pavement - Walter Scott, The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Waverley - William Shakespeare - Anthony D. Smith - Zadie Smith, On Beauty, White Teeth - Tobias Smollett - Laurence Sterne Virginia Woolf, ‘The Niece of an Earl’; National Character - Englishness - Environment - ‘Euphuism’ - National Identity - Landscape - Monarchism - Cultural Nation Political Nation - English Novel - Republicanism - Scotland.

1. Between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries there is a semantic shift from the discourse of landscape to that of environment, and another, equally significant, shift from the discourse of national character to that of national identity. ‘Landscape’, like ‘character’, is a term

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that took on its modern meaning in English in the seventeenth century, coinciding in each case with the emergence of a new art-form: landscape-painting on the one hand, and the novel on the other. ‘Environment’ in its modern sense did not emerge until the mid to late nineteenth century. ‘Identity’ is a much more complex term, but the modern sense of personal identity does not become prevalent until the nineteenth century, and the term ‘national identity’ is still more recent. Each of these terminological shifts, from landscape to environment and from character to identity, reflects some fundamental aspects of modern thought. Landscape is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary either as “a pictorial representation of scenery”, or as “an expanse of terrain which is visible from a particular place or direction”. ‘Character’ in its new seventeenth-century senses means either “a person portrayed in a novel or drama” or “collective peculiarities; … the distinctive mental or moral qualities of an individual [or] a people”. Both ‘landscape’ and ‘character’ are comprehensive or holistic concepts, assembling a number of different elements into a ‘composition’ or composite whole which must be observed from outside. We have to detach ourselves from landscapes and characters in order to appreciate them; thus we can know other people’s characters, or a character in a novel, much more easily than we can know our own character. Being holistic and composite concepts, they are also somewhat fragile. Landscapes require protection and conservation, while ideas of national character are felt to be threatened by the dynamics of human development, especially migration, economic exploitation, cosmopolitanism, and globalization. Contrast now the ideas of ‘environment’ and ‘identity’, both of which are inherently plastic and plural. ‘Environment’ covers all aspects of our physical surroundings, but we think in quite separate ways about our cosmic, social, and microbiological environments. We also interact with these environments, constantly changing them rather than seeking to preserve them as fixed frames of reference outside us. The same is true of ‘identity’. Identity “always possesses a reflexive or subjective dimension” (Anderson 1991: 7), and in most modern uses of the term it is both provisional and performative. The modern self, as Anthony D. Smith explains, is composed of multiple identities and roles: we have different kinds of identity, class, family, occupational, sexual, national, and so on, and these identities are to a considerable extent self-conscious projections which we can either embrace

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or seek to reject (1991: 4). We can lay claim to two or more identities in any of these categories, including national identity, Moreover, we can deliberately change our identities, but not our ‘character’; and neither identity nor environment simply invites a response of conservation, or resistance to change. In speaking of a shift from an older to a newer set of ideas I do not, of course, mean the complete replacement of the one by the other. We can argue that the concerns we now call ‘environmental’ were always to some extent implicit in the idea of ‘landscape’: the traditional genre of landscape painting is almost always a landscape with figures, just as the novel portrays characters in a setting. The word ‘character’ remains indispensable in discussions of novels or plays, as the last sentence indicates; yet ‘character’ as a theoretical concept is one of the deadest terms in the literary vocabulary. We still hear talk of ‘national character’, and popular books about Englishness invariably take the form of a ‘biography’ or a ‘portrait’, either celebrating the national character or lamenting its passing. But ‘national character’ is also an apparently outmoded concept, since current theoretical discussions of nations and nationalism invariably refer to national identity instead. Perry Anderson has pointed out that the last academic study of the idea of national character (by Ernest Barker) was published in 1924 (1991: 6). 2. The shift in political theory from a discourse of ‘character’ to one of ‘identity’ is not only reflected in, but was (I believe) anticipated by, the presentation of character and identity in English fiction. This leads to the broader question of how ideas of English character and identity have been, and are still being, formed by English novels. The explicit concern with identity in the novel begins with characters who ask themselves “Who am I?” – a question which often involves confusion over national as well as personal identity. But the novel has traditionally been seen as a medium in which national character was exemplified, not as a forum for questioning national identity. There are innumerable discussions of Defoe, Fielding, Austen, Dickens, and so on as representatively English novelists, English as a result of the peculiar Englishness of their narration and their characters. The historian Paul Langford describes the English novel as the

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“single most potent agent of English culture” in continental Europe during the eighteenth century, since the popularity of English fiction “made national character seem a peculiarly appropriate tool of analysis” (2000: 10). But there is something paradoxical even in this apparently common-sense observation, since novels are concerned both with contrasts and differences between characters, and with ways in which people’s characters develop and change in the course of experience. It is no accident that the most famous characterization of the typical Englishman, John Bull, originated in a brief satirical tract of 1712, and not in the pages of a novel – and that it was greatly embellished by cartoonists and illustrators, not by writers of fiction. The second main candidate for the figure of the typical Englishman in the eighteenth century – Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe – comes from a novel which for most of its length is more sparsely populated than almost any other work of world literature. More recently it has frequently been asserted, not that the novel exemplifies national character, but that it is, in Franco Moretti’s words, the “symbolic form of the nation-state” (1998: 20). But there is no coherent sense in which novels can be said to represent the nationstate which was not already true of, for example, Shakespeare’s history plays. Moreover, the ‘nation-state’ during the classical period of English fiction was a United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland ruled over by the British monarchy, whereas the English novel – since I am speaking of the English, not the British novel – is not only centred in the UK’s most powerful national area but is, I will suggest, implicitly republican rather than monarchist in outlook. To explain this we need to adopt Friedrich Meinecke’s important distinction (recently endorsed by Krishan Kumar in his book The Making of English National Identity) between the ‘political nation’ – the ‘statenation’, or nation seen from the top down – and the ‘cultural nation’ (cf. Kumar 2003: 21-4). It is the cultural nation, the nation defined from the point of view of its people rather than its governing institutions, that is central to the English novel. And this is one of the principal ways in which the novel differs from traditional drama. The novel’s peculiarity as a narrative form is that it is intended for silent reading. Because it could never form part of the display of wealth and power put on by a monarchy or an aristocratic court, the novel’s relationship to the state and civic authority was always different from that of poetry and drama. There are no court novelists or laureate novelists, and patronage has played very little part in the his-

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tory of fiction. The brief attempt to produce a kind of prose fiction flattering the English monarchy foundered in the Elizabethan period, in the dead end of an unreadable style known as ‘Euphuism’. Since then, the novel has been a commercial product first and foremost. Kings and queens are virtually absent from fiction (apart from the special case of historical romance), and English novels on the whole have faithfully reflected the view of the English constitution put forward a century and a half ago by Walter Bagehot: that the national political reality is not that of a monarchy but a “disguised republic” (1964: 226n). Since the novel represents the cultural nation, not the political nation, it cannot be successfully adopted for the purposes of state propaganda. The novel’s subversive tendency can be seen even in the work of writers who were obsessed with the idea of aristocracy and who were themselves professed royalists. Walter Scott, for example, is notorious for his abject expressions of allegiance to King George IV. In his historical romances set in earlier centuries, there is nothing more important for many a Scott hero than the possibility of gaining an interview with the British King. Moreover, Scott filled the position of national writer of Scotland as Shakespeare did in England; his statue still dominates Princes Street in Edinburgh, and just beneath it is what must be the only main railway station in the world named after a fictional character, ‘Edinburgh Waverley’. And yet Waverley, Scott’s first fictional hero, is a traitor to the King’s cause who deserts from the Army and joins the forces of Bonnie Prince Charlie, while the “Heart of Midlothian”, in the novel of that name, is not Edinburgh Castle or the old Scottish parliament building but the Tolbooth prison. Scott inspired Dickens, the typical middle-class radical and implicitly republican English novelist, to put the prison at the centre of his London novels, most notably in Barnaby Rudge and Little Dorrit. 3. How do English novels set out to answer the central questions of national identity and national character, ‘Who and what are the English?’ There are conservative and radical definitions of Englishness, but the novel has normally been associated with the radical definition. At the risk of oversimplification it may be said that the conservative definition of Englishness turns on inherited national character, while

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the radical definition turns on identification (so that we can speak of becoming as well as being English). All historians agree that the English are by origin “a mixed race from all parts of Europe, settling down into one common name and people” (Hazlitt 1933: 381). But when did the process of immigration and racial mixing come to a stop (if it has ever stopped), and is there a permanent and definitive English settlement? Edmund Burke exemplifies the line of conservative theory stressing the ancientness of the English establishment and presenting the British constitution as the natural expression of the English people. The Burkean view is defensive, xenophobic and backward-looking, where the radical view, classically set out in Defoe’s satire on the “True-Born Englishman”, is fluid, hospitable, and welcoming to new immigration. We should remember that Robinson Crusoe, who has so often been seen as exemplifying the English character, is the son of a German immigrant father whose very name is anglicized from the German Kreutznaer. The history of how Crusoe came to be seen as a typical ‘true-born Englishman’ (a phrase used of him by critics who have completely forgotten Defoe’s irony) is a history of ideological appropriation and, to some extent, textual misreading. But, in terms of the radical definition of Englishness, it clearly does make sense to regard Crusoe as ‘typically English’, since he identifies himself as English. Defoe and many of his successors contrasted England, as a nation of immigrants, with the apparent ethnic and cultural homogeneity of the Welsh and the Scots. England was supposedly more cosmopolitan than other nations, hence in advance of other nations, and a natural centre for liberal imperialism: all other nations would eventually have to catch up with the English, since cosmopolitanism was the shape of the future. In 1748 David Hume, in his essay “Of National Characters”, argued that the English were unique in the world in not really possessing a ‘national character’. In England, as opposed to his native Scotland, Hume said that there was a wonderful mixture of manners and characters in the same nation. … The great liberty and independency, which every man enjoys, allows him to display the manners peculiar to him. Hence the ENGLISH, of any people in the universe, have the least of a national character, unless this very singularity may pass for such. (1994: 78)

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Hume uses the ideas of ‘peculiar[ity]’ and ‘singularity’, and a generation after him (and partly due to the influence of novelists such as Fielding, Smollett, Goldsmith, and Sterne) ‘eccentricity’ would become one of the buzzwords for the English character. ‘Eccentricity’, however, implies a common norm or ‘centricity’ from which it deviates (cf. Langford 2000: 301); but this reference to a norm is more a matter of identity – the fact that all these very different kinds of people identify themselves as English – than of character. The shift from character to identity was already beginning. In the mid-Victorian period the tension between ideas of character and identity is reflected in two leading theorists of nationality, Walter Bagehot and John Stuart Mill. Mill writes in Representative Government that [a] portion of mankind may be said to constitute a Nationality if they are united among themselves by common sympathies which do not exist between them and any others – which make them co-operate with each other more willingly than with other people, desire to be under the same government, and desire that it should be government by themselves or a portion of themselves exclusively. (Mill 1993: 391)

The emphasis here is on ‘desire’, the will to co-operate, and common sympathies, suggesting that Mill is a theorist of identity rather than character. By contrast, Bagehot in his book Physics and Politics (more or less a conscious reply to Mill) defines a nation as a “like body of men, because of that likeness capable of acting together, and because of that likeness inclined to obey similar rules” (Bagehot 1881: 21). Here the nation is defined by what people are – that is, by their national character – not simply by what they desire. For Bagehot, national character is an inherited, residual phenomenon that is threatened by the processes of globalization and cosmopolitanism in the modern world. From his Darwinian viewpoint, national character is a ‘survival’, the product of an earlier phase of social evolution, although he believes that a deeply rooted national character like that of the English is strong enough to survive the pressures of modernity.

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4. But modernity, in the sense of the uprooting, migration, and mixing of peoples, seems to be on the side of Mill rather than Bagehot. In the novel during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – for all the importance of character and characterization – the emphasis increasingly falls upon the protagonists’ questioning and determination of their identities. First-person narratives and interior monologues tend to take over from omniscient third-person narration. Identity in these narratives is not simply hidden (as, for example, when we are kept ignorant of the secret of the hero’s birth); it is self-fashioned or self-constructed. Eventually the choice of national identity becomes one of the principal subjects of fiction, in novels like Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, Eliot’s Daniel Deronda and Kipling’s Kim. The choice of identity is often linked to contrasting ideas of environment and landscape. Jane Eyre, for example, dreams as a young girl of the icy wastes of the polar regions, and feels herself to be an alien in English society. She is almost miraculously preserved from a union with the cosmopolitan Mr Rochester, with his continental mistresses and his secret West Indian wife, and she also rejects the missionary imperialist St John Rivers who tries to take her out to India. She marries a tamed and domesticated Mr Rochester once his blindness more or less confines him to a secluded English estate, so that both hero and heroine may be said to have undergone a process of self-naturalization. There is a comparable logic in one of the earliest canonical nineteenth-century novels, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. Catherine Morland is a devoted fan of Gothic fiction. The novels she reads all have exotic settings some two or three hundred years earlier in continental, Catholic Europe. Typically they are set in exotic, mountainous (or ‘moorland’) landscapes where the hero or heroine is made to suffer at the hands of political tyranny, feudal class relationships, and intense religious superstition. All this can be seen as the expression of Catherine’s teenage rebellion against her highly respectable background as the daughter of a Church of England clergyman. When Catherine goes to stay at Northanger Abbey with her new friends, the Tilneys, she comes to suspect a hidden tale of ghastly Gothic goings-on in this quiet English country mansion. Henry, the son of the house, rebukes her for her fevered speculations:

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‘Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your observation of what is passing around you – Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing; where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies and where roads and newspapers lay everything open?’ (Austen 1970: 163; my emphasis)

Typically of Jane Austen, this passage combines strongly patriotic convictions with a subtly undermining irony. Henry appeals to what he takes to be Catherine’s underlying character – her “understanding”, her “observation”, her “sense of the probable” – and he suggests that it is deeply English since it so neatly corresponds to the institutions of English society. It is English education that has produced her “understanding”; the English press and the English legal system have produced her sense of what is “probable”; and the nosy, gossipy traditions of English neighbourliness have produced her “observation of what is passing around” her. She is English, so she must know there is nothing nasty at Northanger Abbey. But, of course, Austen will show us that there is something nasty there. For the time being Henry succeeds in convincing our overimpressionable heroine that her favourite Gothic fiction has no relevance to what she calls “human nature, at least in the midland counties of England” – though she continues to believe that the “Alps and Pyrenees”, “Italy, Switzerland, and the south of France”, and also the “northern and western extremities” (that is, the Celtic fringes) of her own country might be as “fruitful in horrors” as a Gothic novel. “Among the Alps and Pyrenees, perhaps, there were no mixed characters. But in England it was not so; among the English … there was a general though unequal mixture of good and bad.” (Austen 1970: 165) Here the “mixed” English character is linked to the temperate English landscape, just as in Henry’s speech the “openness” of English life is linked to the idea of a crowded, heavily populated landscape, crisscrossed by roads, where people live close enough together to be able to see or read about what everyone is doing. But Henry’s view of England and Englishness is gradually revealed to be self-interested and complacent, and, wide of the mark as her suspicions are, Catherine is right to detect that something is rotten

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at Northanger Abbey. Rotten, but not irremediably so. Catherine’s dilemma is, in fact, stated in the passage about the ‘mixed’ English character quoted above. Suspicious of Northanger, but strongly drawn to Henry who is the heir to the estate, she knows she will have to settle for someone of slightly mixed character. And it is here that Henry’s appeal to her sense of identity, in that strongly marked passage that I have not yet commented upon, comes into play. “Remember that we are English: that we are Christians.” The novel shows Catherine getting over her teenage rebellion and accepting that she is English, and “Christian” (by which, of course, is meant ‘Protestant’); but there is more than this. Her actions in the novel, concluding in her marriage – like all the actions of Austen’s novels and, we may say, the actions of every English novel of courtship – constitute a political allegory or statement about the English nation. Catherine (like Jane Austen) is an Anglican clergyman’s daughter, which makes her background stereotypically Tory, while Henry Tilney is the son of an army general who is both a landowner willing to sacrifice his son’s future to the interests of property accumulation, and a public figure seen to be deeply immersed in affairs of state. Henry’s speech about Englishness to Catherine shows that he is likely to follow his father into politics, while the aspects of the family that I have outlined – landownership, moral corruption, and political power at the highest level – all suggest that in Austen’s time the Tilneys would be seen as stereotypically Whig. Austen dreams of a political alliance which would bring the Tories back to power and allow Tory virtue to cleanse Whig corruption – we see exactly the same plot in Pride and Prejudice – and this is why Catherine Tilney is destined to forget her Gothic diversions and follies and marry Henry Tilney. If she is ‘moorland’ or uncultivated ground, his role is to ‘till’ or plough her and make her fertile and agriculturally productive. 5. Northanger Abbey, then, is a novel which debates ideas of national character, and which argues that character is closely related to landscape or setting; but it is not really ‘about’ national character in any straightforward sense. Instead, the novel enacts a choice of marriage partner which is also a choice of national identity. This use of a ‘national marriage plot’ is a familiar feature of English fiction down to

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Forster’s Howards End and beyond; and Ian McEwan, in his recent bestselling novel Atonement (2001), used the Jane Austen passage I have analysed as an epigraph, just as Zadie Smith in On Beauty (2005) has even more recently revived Howards End. There is a continuity in this kind of fiction; it could even be said there is too much continuity, since so much present-day fiction is overshadowed by the fiction of the past. Is traditional fiction’s concern with character and identity still sustainable in a modern cosmopolitan or globalized world? Predictions – failed predictions, in fact – of the imminent ‘death of the novel’ have been made innumerable times in the last hundred years, and I want to end by looking at one such prediction, made in 1932 by Virginia Woolf. In her essay, “The Niece of an Earl”, Woolf suggested that the future of the English class system was tied to the future of the novel: the novel, by implication, could not survive in a classless society. “English fiction is so steeped in the ups and down of social rank that without them it would be unrecognizable”, she wrote. Its characters were typically and, she thought, almost necessarily “the nieces of Earls and the cousins of Generals”: It is useless to suppose that social distinctions have vanished. Each may pretend that he knows no such restrictions, and that the compartment in which he lives allows him the run of the world. But it is an illusion. [ . . .] We are enclosed, and separate, and cut off. Directly we see ourselves in the looking-glass of fiction we know that this is so. The novelist, and the English novelist in particular, knows and delights, it seems, to know that Society is a nest of glass boxes one separate from another, each housing a group with special habits and qualities of its own. (Woolf 2003: 215)

We have seen these “glass boxes” in Northanger Abbey, where the daughter of a clergyman marries the son of a general, resulting in a symbolic reunification of the Tory gentry and the Whig aristocracy. It is striking that Woolf’s distinctions depend on genealogy – the cousin of a general or the niece of an earl – and not on education or employment, since most people would assume that the significance of genealogy was rapidly vanishing from English society by 1932 when she wrote this essay. Her suggestion that in a “truly democratic age” the complicated English social comedy would disappear, and therefore the English novel would disappear (Woolf 2003: 217), has manifestly not been borne out as the nation has grown somewhat more democratic. But I suggest that her idea of “glass boxes” can be understood in a

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rather different way, since it models the transition from character to identity as the explicit concern of the novelist. It can be argued that Woolf’s intuition about English society as represented in the novel as being a “nest of transparent boxes” is still basically correct, although the contents of the boxes have changed almost beyond recognition. Nowadays they are ‘identity boxes’. English novels of the last fifty years portray English society not primarily as a network of different kinds of character, but of different kinds of more or less deliberate and self-conscious identities. To describe how this has come about would be to map the still largely unrecognized influence of the novel of immigration in modern English fiction, and how this has affected the much older kind of novel in which the protagonist deliberately sets out to cross boundaries of class. Just as Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey believed there was a fit between the English social institutions and Catherine’s character, so the idea of England as a nest of glass ‘identity boxes’ seems to fit with the contemporary ideology of British multiculturalism. Perhaps, like Tilney’s admonitions, the idea of ‘identity boxes’ is in some respects a complacent liberal illusion? If so, it is an illusion that all the recent novels of immigration – Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003), Andrea Levy’s Small Island (2004), and many others – seem to support. Kim’s question, “Who am I?”, was echoed in one of the early novels of Caribbean immigration to Britain, Andrew Salkey’s Escape to an Autumn Pavement published in 1960, where a character expresses his bewilderment about living in London by asking, “Where does anybody actually come face to face with his national identity?” (Salkey 1966: 41) – possibly the first time that the term ‘national identity’ was actually used in a novel. Insofar as national identity is both a singular possession and a complex and multilayered construction, we may say that where the old English novel was thought to display national character, contemporary English fiction questions our experiences of national identity. But it is arguable that the author of Northanger Abbey got there first.

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Works Cited Primary References Ali, Monica. 2003. Brick Lane. London. Doubleday. Austen, Jane. 1970. Northanger Abbey [1818]. London: Dent. Bagehot, Walter. 1881. Physics and Politics [1872]. London: Kegan Paul. ––. 1964. The English Constitution [1867]. London: Watts. Brontë, Charlotte. 1969. Jane Eyre [1847] (ed. Margaret Smith). Oxford: Oxford UP. Defoe, Daniel. The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe [1719] (ed. J.J. Grandville). New York: Trident. ––. 1997. The True-Born Englishman and Other Writings (eds P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens). London: Penguin. Forster, E. M. 1973. Howards End. London: Arnold. Hazlitt, William. 1933. Works. Vol. 16 (ed. P. P. Howe). London: Dent. Hume, David. 1994. Political Essays (ed. Knud Haakanson). Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Levy, Andrea. 2004. Small Island. London: Hodder Headline. McEwan, Ian. 2001. Atonement. London: Cape. Mill, John Stuart. 1993. Utilitarianism, On Liberty, Considerations on Representative Government, Remarks on Bentham’s Philosophy (ed. Geraint Williams). London: Dent. Salkey, Andrew. 1966. Escape to an Autumn Pavement [1960]. London: New English Library. Smith, Zadie. 2002. White Teeth [2000]. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ––. 2005. On Beauty. London: Hamish Hamilton. Woolf, Virginia. 2003. The Common Reader. Vol. II (ed. Andrew McNeillie). London: Vintage.

Research Literature Anderson, Perry. 1991. ‘Nation-States and National Identity’ in London Review of Books 13 (9): 3-8. Kumar, Krishan. 2003. The Making of English National Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Langford, Paul. 2000. Englishness Identified: Manners and Character 1650-1850. Oxford: Oxford UP. Moretti, Franco. 1998. Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900. London: Verso. Smith, Anthony D. 1991. National Identity. London: Penguin.

“The natural home of Englishmen”: Froude’s Oceana and the Writing of the Sea Bernhard Klein Abstract: The version of ‘Englishness’ discussed in this chapter is not rooted in the local landscape but discursively imposed upon the global sea. In his bestselling travelogue Oceana, or England and Her Colonies – a mid-1880s panorama of the state of the Empire in the southern hemisphere – the historian James Anthony Froude almost casually appropriates the ocean as “the natural home of Englishmen”, revealing with this phrase a late imperial anxiety about the very possibility of the containment of home, self and nation. The essay begins with an outline of Froude’s aims in writing the book, examining in particular the role of the sea in his grand imperial design of a “United British Empire”. It then moves on to unpack some of the historical baggage of Froude’s imperial project by focusing on three ocean-related cultural and political issues: legal ownership of the sea, the cost of imperial expansion, and the cultural consequences of maritime ‘exposure’. Reference is made to the writings of Sir James Harrington, John Selden, Hugo Grotius, William Blake, Luís de Camões, and others. The essay aims to show that by adopting the international and ‘free’ space of the sea as both a personal ‘home’ and a textual site of national identity, Froude discovers in the colonial ‘periphery’ not the persistence, but the irrevocably altered state, perhaps ultimate loss, of the Englishness he is trying to resurrect in his writing. Key names and concepts: James Anthony Froude; Colonialism (19th century) - British Empire - Englishness - Cultural Geography - Maritime Culture - National Identity Ocean Studies - the Sea in Literature - Victorian Literature.

There are alternative states in Western Europe that have no seat in the United Nations and no international dialling code. They are self-styled sovereign ‘countries’ that come with all the trappings of independent republics. Since 1971, an old naval fortress on the eastern edge of Copenhagen has been home to the ‘Free State of Christiania’, a hippie commune that attracts visitors from across the globe, and that in the 1980s gradually morphed into a ‘social experiment’ tolerated by suc-

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cessive Danish governments.1 For three decades, this alternative community has existed “outside [the] rules, rates, public utilities and laws” of Copenhagen (Walsh 2004: 2-3), spawning its own, hash-induced brand of civil society and democratic self-government. And six miles east of Felixstowe, on the southeast coast of England, the old World War II anti-aircraft fort Rough’s Tower, designed in the 1940s to shoot down Nazi airplanes and boasting a steel surface of 6000 square feet in total, has been since 1967 the sovereign territory of the ‘Principality of Sealand’, founded by ex-army major Roy Bates, reigning governor and self-proclaimed ‘Prince of Sealand’.2 Sealand offers its own passport, issues its own stamps, and has its own currency, the ‘Sealand Dollar’. These statelets are constitutional oddities, curious landmarks on the world map of international politics, and hardly serious contenders to head the list of ‘the world’s smallest nations’. They are unlikely to generate national sentiments in its citizens; no one, to my knowledge, is currently editing a volume on ‘Landscape and Sealandishness’. Perhaps we could think of these places as ‘heterotopias’ (Foucault’s kind of heterotopia): cultural spaces that are different, that define themselves against the culture and society that enclose them, that act as counter-sites or reflective mirrors for these surrounding cultures. In this sense they are living dreams, or “effectively enacted utopias” (Foucault 1986: 24) – no mere paper fantasies but realizations of alternative societies. On the surface, Christiania and Sealand have little in common: one is a more or less successful experiment in communal living, the other an almost farcical imitation of monarchical omnipotence. But as miniature exercises in nation-building, they share the same source of inspiration, recorded in their respective names: on the one hand, the Christian ideal of an egalitarian humanity, here realized in the small band of dedicated followers committed to swim against 1

2

For more information on Christiania see the official website, online at www. christiania.org (consulted 14.07.2004). For more information on ‘the Principality of Sealand’ see the official homepage, online at http://www.sealandgov.com (consulted 14.07.2004). For an outside view visit http://www.npr.org/programs/wesat/features/2001/sealand/ 081101.sealand.html (consulted 14.07.2004), and for a sustained recent look at Sealand’s possible future as a data haven see Simson Garfinkel, ‘Welcome to Sealand: Now Bugger Off’, online at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/ 8.07/haven.html (consulted 14.07. 2004).

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the tide, an eddy in the sea of the capitalist world order; on the other, a tiny, hard-won spot of land (hardly land at all but a steel platform), reclaimed from the hostile and inhospitable sea. What intrigues me is the extent to which both these eccentric undertakings are circumscribed by the maritime imaginary: the Christian Ark and the Floating Fortress are pushed beyond allegory into fact and form, in an effort to create alternative territorial definitions as the enabling sites of new social realities. It is with these links – both symbolic and real – between the sea and the utopian dream of nation-building that this essay is concerned. For the dream that sustains both Christiania and Sealand is not as mad or absurd as it might appear. What has shrunk to microscopic proportions in these two examples rather seems – once we re-imagine it on the global stage – like a staple of political thought in the imperial age. Modern English writing has produced at least two visionary accounts of ‘Oceana’, a maritime empire with England at its centre and a vast global periphery as its supporting structure. The first of these was Sir James Harrington’s mid seventeenth-century republican treatise The Commonwealth of Oceana, written during the interregnum and dedicated to Cromwell. The work is formally a utopian fiction but may be more accurately described as a political architecture, complete with foundation and superstructure. Harrington places political authority firmly with the landed gentry but his work is especially noteworthy (in my context at least) for its conceptual use of the sea. Harrington describes Britain’s island location as particularly suited for the imaginary commonwealth he proposes, because it offers both the isolation necessary to prevent outside interference and the military strength required for further expansion. The sea, imagined as a centrifugal force, here acts as a protector and enabler of nationhood. Harrington’s concern with maritime expansion is clearly related to his conception of ‘preservation’ through ‘increase’ (these are his own terms); he can dismiss negative precedents such as Venice, which suffered collapse after expansion, by claiming for his maritime republic of Oceana a superior mastery of the sea: “The Sea giveth law unto the growth of Venice, but the growth of Oceana giveth law unto the Sea” (Harrington 1656: sig. B2v)3 – a slightly circuitous (and proleptic) way, it would seem, of saying that Oceana rules the waves. 3

On Harrington, see also Armitage 2000: 138.

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In the late Victorian age, Harrington’s dream served as the starting point for the reflections on empire by the popular but controversial historian James Anthony Froude, the “anatomist of the British Empire” (Hulme 2000: 82), who in 1886 published his bestselling travelogue, Oceana, or England and Her Colonies, a mid-1880s panorama of the state of the Empire in the southern hemisphere. Froude begins by evoking Harrington’s celebratory mode of unrestrained expansion but quickly has to concede that “the vision is but half accomplished” (2). His disenchantment is caused by the lack of structure and the apparent difficulty of achieving political, economic and cultural balance in the sea-based empire he surveys two centuries and a half after Harrington. What makes this late imperial elegy relevant to the purposes of the present volume is Froude’s conception of the sea as a genuinely English space – so deeply English, in fact, that he refers to it emphatically as “the natural home of Englishmen” (18). I intend to dwell on this phrase a little in this essay. What I want to argue is that this smooth appropriation of the sea as a textual site of ‘Englishness’ is nowhere as seamless or ‘natural’ as Froude would like to make it appear. Harrington could enthusiastically offer maritime expansion (or ‘increase’) as the nation’s future in the face of Spanish imperial decline, but for Froude expansion has really become a danger to the integrity of the nation, or so I will suggest: the Englishman’s adopted ‘home’, the sea, is threatening to turn into a place of exile, its ‘Englishness’ dispersed and rendered invisible. Given my concern with the sea, this is probably less a paper on cultural geography – methodological focus of this volume – but on cultural hydrography, “the description of the waters of the earth’s surface” (OED). Hydrography was a central concern of early modern cosmographers and mapmakers; cartographers especially had to come to terms with the fact that seven tenths of the earth’s surface were covered by water – which meant they were most frequently required to map the fluid, formless sea rather than the fixities of terra firma. This realization posed serious problems to some early theorists on navigation. Martin Cortes, for instance, in his hugely influential navigation manual first translated into English in 1561, described the sea as “fluxible, wauering, and moueable ... uncerten and unknowen ... [and therefore] hard to make ... vnderstode by wordes or wrytynge” (Cortes 1561: sig. 56r). How can you depict, or ‘understand’ (in Cortes’s phrase), a space that appears to defy an elementary precondition

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of visual representation: a recognizable, enduring form? The Victorians, whose technological advance made seafaring less of an existential risk, had their own answer to the problem, brilliantly satirized by William Golding in his novel Fire Down Below, the final part of his sea trilogy, in which the following conversation occurs on board a ship en route from England to Australia in the early nineteenth century: ‘We have been at sea.’ ‘Not all the time!’ ‘I did not know there was so much, Mr Talbot, that is the fact of the matter. One sees maps and globes but it is different.’ ‘It is indeed different!’ ‘Most of it you know, sir, is quite unnecessary.’ ‘Quite, quite, unnecessary! Away with it! There shall be no more sea! Let us have a modest strip between one country and another – a kind of canal –’ ‘The occasional ornamental lake in a prospect –’ ‘A fountain or two – ’ (Golding 1989: 288)4

Canals, lakes or fountains rather than huge oceans would have solved one of Froude’s central problems: how to hold together an empire so scattered in geographical space as the British Empire in the late nineteenth century? His political adversaries thought it was impossible: “Our colonies were dispersed over the globe. What nature had divided, man could not bind together; without continuity of soil there could be no single empire.” (Froude 1886: 10)5 Froude responds to this pessimism by desperately clinging on to a sense of the ocean as a unifying rather than a divisive force: “The ocean which divides, combines also.” (10) What concerns me in this paper is principally Froude’s own attempt at political ‘hydrography’, and the extent to which his ‘domestic’ sea of connections and crossings suggests tension and conflict rather than a smooth structural fit with the general 4

5

I owe this reference to Philip Steinberg’s book on the social construction of the ocean (2001: 117-8). The comic intent of Golding’s passage hides a more serious engagement with the ocean, indicated by the indirect quote from Revelation 21:1 (‘And there was no more sea’). For a brilliant discussion of the implications of this phrase in the context of Western and Eastern thinking about the ocean, see Connery 2005. Froude is here summarizing views he opposes.

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outline of his oceanic vision. The metaphorical status of his sea as a private but placeless ‘home’ already announces a semantic conflict with the very public nature of his survey, and as we will see, faced with the practical difficulties of empire, Froude can indeed do little more than reinvent the sea as a place of retreat, as a momentary escape from the pressures of time and office. Nowhere does the sea emerge as the structured spatial network – a political map of connecting waterways, support conduits, and protected trade routes – that his imperial vision would require. Froude’s project in writing Oceana was in many ways one of nostalgic recovery. His opening move – the reference to Harrington – is a look back to the days when Britain was still proudly swinging the “sceptre of the sea” (1), when the glory and heroic effort of empirebuilding were beyond the petty doubts of small-minded politicians. Having lived the life of a Victorian ‘man of letters’ in which he passionately defended the political dream of Oceana, or “United British Empire” (339), but in which he gained no “personal knowledge of the colonies”, he determined [...] to make a tour among them, to talk to their leading men, see their countries and what they were doing there, learn their feelings and correct my impressions of what could and could not be done (14).

He wanted, in other words, to put his theories to the test. In December 1884, at the age of 66, he embarked on a world tour which took him first from Plymouth down the Atlantic to the Cape, from there across the Indian Ocean to Australia, then on to New Zealand, and from there across the Pacific to San Francisco. He crosses the US by train, boards a Cunard Line steamer in New York, and arrives back in Britain in May 1885. His narrative is faithful to the trajectory of this journey. Descriptions of place and people, flora and fauna, are interspersed with historical, philosophical and cultural reflections. Even though the book is principally making a case for a specific political vision, the long passages on board different ships, as well as frequent train or coach journeys, are not edited out; rather, they fill entire chapters or sections of chapters.

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The sections at sea are curiously metaphysical interludes in Froude’s otherwise highly politicized narrative. They are timeless intervals, moments without history, when the world stands still: On the ocean no post brings us letters which we are compelled to answer. No newspaper tempts us into reading the last night’s debate in Parliament, or sends our attention wandering, like the fool’s eyes, to the ends of the earth. The sea breezes carry health upon their wings, and fan us at night into sweet dreamless sleep. Itself eternally young, the blue infinity of water teaches us to forget that we ourselves are old. For the time being we are beyond the reach of change – we live in the present; and the absence of distracting incidents, the sameness of the scene, and the uniformity of life on board ship; leave us leisure for reflection; we are thrown in upon our own thoughts, and can make up our accounts with our consciences. (16)

Behind these reflections clearly lurks a sense of the ocean as a space of the sublime – a genuine invention of the Enlightenment – described by Addison (1712) and Burke (1757) among others, reinvented much later by Freud as a “sensation of eternity” (Freud 1962: 11), and inspiring much Romantic and nineteenth-century writing about the sea.6 It is hardly surprising that a well-read Victorian man of letters draws on these readily available models, except that Froude’s political concerns should perhaps lead us to expect a more strategic interest in the sea, in practical matters of the navy, and in the military control of specific sea routes – the only means, as he was well aware, of unifying a heterogeneous political space stretching across five continents and two hemispheres. When Froude later reflected, in his Oxford lectures of 1893/4, on English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century, the sea is evoked in far more directly political terms – not as a space of metaphysical brooding, as in the quotation above, but as an arena for the exercise of power:

6

See Raban 1992 for extracts from Addison and Burke, and for many literary examples of the sea as a sublime and transcendental space. See also Raban’s introduction (1-34) for a survey of the changing meanings of the sea in anglophone (principally English and American) writing. For an inquiry into the conceptual change of the sea from a detested, demonic space of unfinished creation to a reflective site of modern, expansive subjectivity, with the seaside as the epitome of the modern ‘vacationscape’, see Corbin 1994.

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While the navy occupies his mind occasionally in Oceana, it never does so in any more than the purely metaphorical sense evident here in the image of Britain and its colonies as a tree with falling leaves. “England”, he affirms, had spread her race over the globe, and had planted them where they were now flourishing, because she had been supreme upon the seas. The fleet was the instrument of her power and the symbol of her unity. (182-3)

Such martial reflections advertise the concerns of his lectures delivered a decade later, but here in Oceana they remain abstract insertions in a travelogue in which Froude’s own time traversing the seas is never governed by a comparable sense of the material importance of the maritime. Instead, he spends his days on board reading the classics: Virgil, Homer, Ovid (who disappoints him), Pindar, and others. What looks suspiciously like the deliberate infusion of his ‘oceanic’ project with the mystique of myth is in fact clearly disconnected from the writer’s present: “The Odyssey is a voice out of an era that is finished, and is linked to ours only by the identity of humanity.” (68). This is escapist reading, and seen as such by the narrator. No lessons are to be learned any more from the classics, there can be no spiritual, certainly no practical gain from re-imagining the days of ancient Mediterranean glory. Froude’s own present – and this is perhaps not surprising for a historian whose magnum opus remains the 12-volume history of Tudor England – starts with the Elizabethans: “Shakespeare interprets to us our own time and our own race” (68). As far as the sea is concerned, the Oxford lectures were to make this point in the appropriate historical depth, as one heroic era of maritime supremacy is rejected in favour of another: Drake wins out over Odysseus; the models to be followed are Gloriana’s sea-dogs, not

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ancient Roman or Hellenic seafarers.7 Thus, filling his days on board with such seeming trifles as reading the Iliad depoliticizes this ‘English’ ocean – “in an attempt”, Simon Gikandi has suggested, “to recover a past beyond utilitarianism and use value” (1996: 104) – which curiously turns the nation-at-sea into a space of no meaning and little consequence. For Froude cannot describe the sea as a ‘home’ in any profoundly symbolic sense, or with the anthropological meaning of a hearth (notional centre of the oikumene), or in terms of a telluric bond between man and place. His maritime ‘home’ is a version of the domestic, it is a place of refuge or retreat, a peaceful, protected enclave – a place apart, untouched by history and change. The sea is invested, loaded, with national meaning, and yet at the same time reduced to the “nothingness of water” that Bachelard (1983: 6) saw in it: a vacant, featureless, even Lethean space of blue ‘infinity’, ‘sameness’, forgetting. In his more directly political argument, Froude is guilty (as is well known) of some of the worst aspects of the colonial mindset: he is never in any doubt about the validity of the centre/periphery model as a description of colonial relations (“Great Britain was the stem, and the colonies the branches” [182]); everything he sees on his journey is compared to the British norm, the ‘gold standard’ of proper form and behaviour; natives are ‘savages’, not real people8 (“The poor creatures [Aboriginal people in Australia] were clothed, but not in their right minds, if minds they had ever possessed” [128]); he affirms without question the natural ascendancy of the white man. And yet, although his confidence in the superiority of the white ‘race’ is unshaken, his voice is almost one of despair: he despairs of the incompetence of the British and their politicians to shape the Empire into a healthy, powerful union; he despairs of what he sees as a failure of the will, undermining the “physical vigour of the race” (9); he fears decay, doom, and decline as a consequence of rapid industrialization (it will come as no surprise that Froude was a close friend of 7 8

For a different view on Froude’s use of the classics, see Döring 2002. In his book about the West Indies, published two years after Oceana and very similar in structure and style, Froude famously wrote that “there are no people here [in the West Indies] in the true sense of the word” (1888: 347), a sentence Derek Walcott quotes in his 1992 Nobel lecture. On Froude in the West Indies see also Hulme 2000: 98-101, and Gikandi 1996: 84-118.

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Carlyle’s). Losing its colonies, through blunder or deliberate policy, would turn England into an industrial wasteland, “miles upon miles of squalid lanes, each house the duplicate of its neighbour; the dirty street in front, the dirty yard behind, the fetid smell from the ill-made sewers” (8). It is against the scenario of “poor children [...] choking in fetid alleys” and the “smoke-encrusted lungs” of Britain’s factory workers that Froude offers the colonies as that breath of “fresh air” (10) needed for the survival of the ‘race’, evoking the wind-swept sea as a spatial correlate of refreshed Englishness, a ‘home’ away from home: [W]e [ie, Englishmen] rove over the waters, for business or pleasure, as eagerly as our ancestors. [...] When we grow rich, our chief delight is a yacht. When we are weary with hard work, a sea voyage is our most congenial ‘retreat’ . (16)

This sentiment is offered early on in the book, it serves as a kind of tone-setting exercise or atmospheric introduction to the recollections of his voyage. It both lifts a natural condition to the level of political destiny and literalizes a metaphor: the wind across the ocean will blow away the coal dust settling on Britain’s depressed cities, and the ‘fresh breeze’ from the sea is offered as a working template for future political action. The image begs the question, though (for me at least), how it can accommodate the full passion of national desire: how can the fluid, amorphous, anti-human sea define a sense of belonging – of ‘Englishness’ – superior to the safety, reassurance, and fixity of land? What remains of this essay is largely an attempt to offer a preliminary response to this seeming paradox. By deepening the historical context I want to relate Froude’s text to three ocean-related cultural and political issues – all of them crucial, I suggest, to an understanding of this late imperial condition: legal ownership of the sea, the cost of imperial expansion, and the cultural (in a sense psychological) consequences of maritime ‘exposure’. Froude’s sense of the sea as a ‘home’ to all Englishmen is to some extent in conflict with what one cultural geographer has recently described as “the industrial capitalist construction of ocean-space” emerging in the mid-eighteenth century, “in which the deep sea was a non-territorial void of anti-civilization traversed by naval mini-societies – territorial extensions of land-based societies” (Steinberg 2001:

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131). In economic reality as well as in cultural representation (especially in literature), this sea was ‘idealized’ as a ‘great void’9 – in the sense of it being a non-national, non-social, and especially noncivilized expanse in space – because that notion best suited the economic interests of the global players who saw the sea primarily as a “non-territorial transportation surface” (Steinberg 2001: 135) and a reservoir of one specific resource, crucial to the success of international trade: “connection” (125). Any national, proprietorial claims on the ocean would only serve to disrupt the trading interests of the major maritime powers. So is Froude, by appropriating the sea in the name of a single nation, by domesticating a neutral, ideologically ‘empty’ sphere of pure commerce, deliberately flying in the face of what was beginning to emerge as an international consensus? Is he perhaps giving voice to some British version of saudade, expressing a deep existential longing for a recovery of Britain’s unrivalled status as the predominant sea power of the modern era?10 There are clearly several discursive layers in Froude’s writing about the sea: the ocean is on one level a heroic space – won for the English by Hawkins, Drake, and those other Elizabethan seafarers who ‘singed the King of Spain’s beard’; it is also a haven or refuge, a ‘home’, in need of protection; and it is a national terrain or property in exclusive possession of the English. The last notion might be considered strangest of all – how can you ‘own’ the sea? – but this curiously proprietorial stance is in fact related to a seventeenth-century legal wrangle over precisely this issue: a single nation’s right to ‘own’ (or ‘close’) the sea. The first sustained attempt by an English writer to claim the sea or any part of it as a genuinely national possession was John Selden’s treatise Mare clausum (first published 1635, though it appears to have been completed as early as 1617/18), a late intervention in the quarrel over the fishing rights on British and Irish coasts (1652). James had issued a proclamation in 1609 barring all foreigners (especially the Dutch) from fishing in these waters, an act that has been rightly called 9

10

These are Steinberg’s terms throughout his fourth chapter, ‘Ocean-space and industrial capitalism’ (2001: 110-58). For a famous exposition of the theory that Britain’s rise to the status of imperial superpower was owed to its early understanding of the strategic relevance of the sea, see Schmitt 1997.

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“the beginning of the English pretension to the sovereignty of the sea” (Fulton 1911: 10). Selden’s text was a direct response to the Dutch lawyer’s Hugo Grotius provocative Mare liberum of 1609, a text still widely considered to mark the beginning of international law.11 Grotius was writing in defence of the Dutch East India Company who needed some good legal reason to justify the seizure of a Portuguese vessel in Asian waters in 1603, and its subsequent sale in Holland as a prize of war. Grotius’s argument was, in essence, that because the seas were free to all, the Portuguese had committed an act of war by claiming the ocean as their exclusive domain, an act that justified in turn the capture of one of their ships.12 Grotius’s treatise attracted several rebuttals, most prominently among them Selden’s Mare clausum and the long legal treatise De justo imperio Lusitanorum Asiatico (1625) by the Portuguese scholar Serafim de Freitas (1983). Of the two, de Freitas argued most directly in defense of a ‘closed sea’, or mare clausum, pointing out that the right to free, unlimited travel and trade has never, in fact, been an absolute right (as Grotius had claimed), and giving as his principal reason for this the spiritual responsibilities of the pope, which “might require him [the pope] to restrict European Christian trade and contact with a particular people in order to achieve a higher goal, the religious conversion of such people” (Muldoon 2002: 22). Defending the right of the pope to intervene in international affairs did not cut any ice with Protestant English historians, of course. Selden’s position is probably best described as situated half way between Grotius and de Freitas. He argued that while the deep sea was indeed free, monarchs had the right to lay exclusive claim to waters adjoining their coasts, but only if they could effectively control them. This meant that the fishing regions around the British Isles were by right the domain of the English king, and in view of the English colonization of Newfoundland, the king could, by right of conquest, also 11

12

Mare Liberum was first translated into English by Richard Hakluyt, whose huge, late sixteenth-century collection of voyages and travelogues, The Principal Navigations of the English Nation, was put forward as England’s national epic in the nineteenth century. For a more recent English translation see Grotius 1916. See Steinberg’s summary of the mare liberum vs. mare clausum debate (2001: 89-98). For another survey of the debate (different in nuance and emphasis from Steinberg’s) see Muldoon 2002. See also Armitage 2000: 100-24.

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lay claim to these north American coastlines, including that part of the north Atlantic stretching west from Ireland which constituted England’s corridor of access. In Selden’s argument, then, the sea was to some extent both open and closed, depending on a nation’s powers to exert effective control over it. What this brief (and simplified) summary shows is that the concept of national ‘ownership’ of the sea – as well as the opposing idea of the ‘freedom of the seas’ – has its origins in pragmatic considerations of physical access and the increase of economic revenue. The Dutch, Portuguese and English argued whatever legal position suited them best with a view to the protection of their respective trading circuits. The impact that the debate had on the actual practice of international seafaring seems limited; the seventeenth-century Navigation Acts may perhaps be seen to have produced a mare clausum of sorts, but from the eighteenth century onwards, as industrial capitalism began to replace the mercantilism of an earlier era, the Grotian model of a ‘free’ and open sea effectively became the accepted norm. Importantly, though, the sea did not stop being imagined in terms of exclusive national access. Froude’s nostalgic meditations on an ‘English’ sea are not the only nineteenth-century traces of a Seldenian instinct to claim ocean-space as a country’s property; Robert Louis Stevenson, for instance, thought in 1878 that “[t]he sea [...] has been the scene of our greatest triumphs and dangers, and we are accustomed in lyrical strains to claim it as our own.” (Stevenson quoted in Behrman 1977: 26; my italics) The quotation reveals the Victorian interest in the sea as at least partly motivated by the need, in the days of growing mechanization and social alienation, to rediscover a ‘natural’ site of national ‘triumph’ and individual heroism, a notion to which Froude, as we have seen, is also easily susceptible. Both in Stevenson and Froude, the impulse to appropriate and take possession of the sea is equally marked, and insofar as both proprietorial claims are implicitly based on Selden, they threaten to deflate the heroic rhetoric of English mastery of the ocean by introducing the purely mercantile considerations that prompted Selden’s intervention in the mare liberum debate in the first place. But a pragmatic view of sixteenth-century maritime activity is not what Froude’s view of the sea as a space successfully ‘Englished’ by Elizabethan heroism really allows, even though the back-

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ground of the debate reveals it as just that: the audacious act of taking textual possession of a space as boundless and unstable, literally as fluid as the sea, was in fact never a glorious conquest but simply an erasure, a flattening, of the waves, and a redefinition of the sea as a scene of speed, rapid mobility and distance reduction. By appropriating the ocean in the name of the nation, Froude is effectively draining, emptying, the sea of the heroic Englishness he wants to find in it. When he does discover evidence of genuine Englishness on his long voyage it is always already somebody else’s. At several points of his narrative Froude describes that authentic English spirit – which he cannot find any longer in England itself – thriving in the colonies, “where children grow who seem once more to understand what is meant by ‘merry England’” (Froude 1886: 15). The sentiment might just seem hopelessly nostalgic, but it can also be seen as haunted by the fear of loss, uprootedness, and dispersal of the national idea, implicitly registered in Froude’s anxious realization that “there are other Englands beside the old one” (15). Elsewhere Froude notes that Englishness has been transferred to the margins of the Empire, leaving the centre empty and dispirited: “I found the Australians, not cool and indifferent, but ipsis Anglicis Angliciores, as if at the circumference the patriotic spirit was more alive than at the centre.” (131)13 This spreading of the English spirit is a development Froude nominally welcomes, of course, since it only proves the existence of a solid cultural foundation for his grand vision of an oceanic empire. At the same time, though, the global multiplication of Englishness threatens to blur the distinction between original and copy, authenticity and simulation. Writing, for instance, about the absence (in his experience) of a distinctive Australian accent, he comments that “[o]n the one side, it showed how English they [the Australians] yet were; on the other, it indicated that they were still in the imitative stage” (163). This curiously twisted juxtaposition effectively suggests that genuine Englishness is no more than cheap imitation, second-hand knowledge. Froude’s unspecified sense of a simulated Englishness dispersed around the globe seems to me an articulation in modern terms of the decline and disintegration anticipated three centuries before by 13

For related examples see Froude 1886: 106; 135.

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Luís Vaz de Camões for the Portuguese empire. Camões wrote his great poem, The Lusiads, as a national epic of discovery, conquest and outstanding national achievement, yet his glorification of empirebuilding does not come without the clearly articulated warning that excessive exposure of the nation to the limitless expanse of the ocean might be a particular danger of overseas travel. In Canto 4 of The Lusiads, as Vasco da Gama’s fleet is about to set sail from Belem, to “explore new regions of the globe” (Camões 1997: 94), the Old Man of Restelo steps forth from the crowd of wailing women and hurls the most hurtful abuse at the young men on board – who are about to squander, as the old man sees it, the precious resources of a small nation for nothing more than fame and empty flattery: “O pride of power! O futile lust / For that vanity known as fame!” (96)14 Interestingly, this anger is directed at the demonic art of seafaring: “The devil take the man who first put / Dry wood on the waves with a sail!” (97)15 Clearly, the old man who accuses Vasco da Gama of draining away the nation’s strength in the vain pursuit of fame sees dispersal and waste rather than consolidation as the result of maritime expansion. Selden and Harrington, writing several decades after Camões, do not seem to share this fear; their respective maritime empires are centred in a firm belief in the possibility of the containment of self and nation. But in Froude, the Old Man of Restelo’s sense of disintegration through wilful dispersal stages a comeback: versions of Englishness transplanted to the colonies can only be ‘imitative’, not genuine, suggesting a distortion to the point of unrecognizability, or simply the draining away, of the common identity that should spiritually unite nation and empire. This is the cost of imperial expansion: small nations (and from a suitably global perspective, all nations are small) are stretched to breaking point, their human resources scattered randomly across the globe. Englishness is also under threat from what I want to call ‘exposure’, meaning by that the cultural exposure to the foreign and unfamiliar (or otherness) implied in the wide stretch across the ocean. In 14

15

Canto 4, stanza 95, lines 1-2: “Ó glória de mandar, ó vã cobiça / Desta vaidade a quem chamamos Fama!” Canto 4, stanza 102, lines 1-2: “Oh! Maldito o primeiro que, no mundo, / Nas ondas vela pôs em seco lenho!”

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social terms, the seas were never culturally homogeneous regions that could in any meaningful sense be described as the property or even the sphere of influence exclusive to only one nation. Ships might have legally been territorial extensions of land-based national societies but the reality of the multicultural crews on board – certainly on the deepsea sailing ships of the sixteenth century and beyond (see Smith 1993) – turned them rather into what Peter Linebaugh has called “an extraordinary forcing-house of internationalism” (1982: 112) or what Paul Gilroy sees as a “living, micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion” (1993: 4). Marcus Rediker has recently described the ‘red’ Atlantic of the eighteenth century as a space of intense ideological struggle where global capitalists, “merchants, manufacturers, planters, and royal officials” came up against the resistance of “dispossessed commoners, transported felons, religious radicals, insurgent servants and slaves, riotous urban laborers, and mutinous soldiers and servants” – a confrontation resulting in a violent clash leading “from mutinies and strikes to riots and insurrection and revolution” (111-2; see also Linebaugh and Rediker 2000). The modern sea, in historical reality, was never what Froude saw in it, the tranquil retreat or safe ‘home’ where Englishmen could recover in peace from their civilizing missions in the colonial periphery. Rather, the oceans on which Froude travels were, from Columbus onwards, highly contested contact zones (in Mary Louise Pratt’s terminology), social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination – like colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today (1992: 4).

Rediker’s crown witness for his reconstruction of the ‘red’ Atlantic is William Blake, who in 1793 wrote America: A Prophecy, in which he identifies as a long-term effect of European imperial pressure the counter-expansion it necessarily, if unintentionally, produces. Led by Orc, Blake’s symbol of revolution, a motley crew of slaves, sailors and revolutionaries reverse the direction of the imperial drive from east to west as the wild “Atlantic waves” now threaten the “gloomy nations” of old Europe (Blake 2000: 191). The text of America and its

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accompanying prints use the image of the raging sea as a metaphor for the circulation of revolutionary energy around the Atlantic, an energy that constantly redefines notions of Englishness even as it erases them (Olaudah Equiano, a contemporary of Blake’s, may be the best example here [see Klein 2004: 103-6]). The sea, in Blake’s Atlantic vision, is wrested from the clutches of a single nation and enlisted in support of a transnational project that aims to re-establish in a political (not economic) sense Grotius’s freedom of the seas. Exposure and expansion, rather than enabling the safe overseas export of stable notions of ‘Englishness’, produce entirely new forms of cultural identity and cross-ethnic solidarity. This Englishness is, finally, not a metropolitan imposition but (in Simon Gikandi’s words) a “phenomenon produced in the ambivalent space that separated, but also conjoined, metropole and colony” (1996: xii). The sea, providing the actual physical link between diverse geographical regions, is the most obvious natural correlate of that “ambivalent space”, but in a sense quite different from what Froude had in mind when he wrote that “[t]he ocean which divides, combines also” (Froude 1886: 10). My attempt to unpack some of the hidden cultural and historical baggage in Froude’s Oceana was intended to show how much the text can be seen to work against itself: every single example from the colonies which Froude records could show him, not the persistence, but the irrevocably altered state, perhaps ultimate loss, of the Englishness he is trying to resurrect in his writing. The ideological need to turn a blind eye to these realities might then best explain why Froude represents his experience of ocean travel as a way, really, of avoiding the exposure that has irreversibly changed the secure notions of Englishness that Selden and Harrington could triumphantly impose upon the sea. I want to offer one final observation in support of this argument. Oceana, despite its pretensions to a political master plan, is formally a travelogue: it is the narrative of one long sea journey to the Antipodes, frequently interrupted by authorial digressions and observations prompted by the events of the moment. Generically, this implies the loss of an overall imperial design (such as Harrington’s architecture), as Froude replaces the fixed viewpoint of the map with the shifting horizons of the wanderer, the fixity of form and structure with

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the contingency of travel. Not a single map is included in Oceana: the book contains many views or ‘prospects’ that imply a ground-level observer subject to the limitations of human eyesight, but not a map user with the ability to translate cartographic abstraction into spatial omniscience. The lack of maps is paralleled by the lack of any formal exposition of Froude’s imperial grand design, Oceana. What we have instead is deep sentiment, a sense of loss and nostalgia, and perhaps the only form of Englishness Froude really commands is that of imperial mourning. E Mare Libertas – ‘From the Sea, Freedom’ – is Sealand’s national motto, as quoted on its webpage. The patriotic investment in a rusty steel platform that costs a fortune to maintain and serves no recognizable purpose ironically repeats in nuce Froude’s emotional attachment to a vast empire that in the end proved equally impossible to keep up. The motto defines for Prince Roy of Sealand a gesture of defiance – in the face of Britain’s territorial claims on the waters adjoining its shoreline – that arrogantly privatizes a universal human right and signals little respect for the violations of human liberty that were actually contested on the high seas. The ‘freedom’ that came from the sea historically was, for a privileged few, the economic freedom Grotius had defined in Mare liberum, for many others, the recovery of a social and political space that lies ultimately beyond the claims even of the greatest sea power of the modern era. The open sea is ‘home’ either to all, or to no one, certainly not to a single nation alone; historically, it is a space of encounter, struggle and violence, of artificial (most often racial) antagonism, but also a space of solidarity and cross-cultural alliance: a transnational space that will resist all efforts at national appropriation.16 Somehow, I cannot help but see this insight emerge as the unacknowledged subtext of one of the most passionate defenses of empire in late Victorian times, written by one of the greatest prose stylists of the period – and perhaps this is just one good reason why the Empire is no more.

16

A point our volume Sea Changes argues at more length (see Klein and Mackenthun 2004).

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Works Cited Primary references Blake, William. 2000. Selected Poetry and Prose (ed. David Fuller). Harlow: Longman. Camões, Luís Vaz de. 1997. The Lusiads [1572] (transl. Landeg White). Oxford: Oxford UP. Cortes, Martin. 1561. The Arte of Nauigation (transl. Richard Eden). London: Richard Jugge. Freitas, Frei Serafim de. 1983. Do Justo Império Asiático dos Portugueses. 2 vols. Lisbon: Instituto Nacional de Investigação Científica. Froude, James Anthony. 1886. Oceana, or England and Her Colonies. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. ––. 1888. The English in the West Indies, or The Bow of Ulysses. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. ––. 1909. English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century: Lectures Delivered at Oxford, Easter Terms 1893-4. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. Golding, William. 1989. Fire Down Below. London: Faber. Grotius, Hugo. 1916. Mare Liberum: The Freedom of the Seas [1609] (transl. Ralph von Deman Magoffin). New York: Oxford UP. Harrington, Sir James. 1656. The Commonwealth of Oceana. London: J. Streater. Raban, Jonathan (ed.). 1992. The Oxford Book of the Sea. Oxford: Oxford UP. Selden, John. 1652. Mare Clausum: Of the Dominion, or Ownership of the Sea (transl. Marchamont Needham) [1635]. London: William Du-Gard. Walcott, Derek. 1993. The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory. London: Faber.

Research Literature Armitage, David. 2000. The Ideological Origins of the British Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Bachelard, Gaston. 1983. Water and Dreams [1942] (transl. Edith R. Farrell). Dallas: Pegasus. Behrman, Cynthia Fansler. 1977. Victorian Myths of the Sea. Athens/Ohio: Ohio UP. Connery, Chris. 2005. ‘ “ There was no more sea”: The Supersession of the Ocean, from the Bible to Cyberspace’. Paper presented at the Conference The Maritime in Modernity (Stanford University, 29-30 April 2005). Corbin, Alain. 1994. The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World, 1750-1840 [1988] (transl. Jocelyn Phelps). Cambridge: Polity. Döring, Tobias. 2002. ‘The Sea Is History: Historicizing the Homeric Sea in Victorian Passages’ in Klein (2002): 121-40. Foucault, Michel. 1986. ‘Of Other Spaces’ [1967] (transl. Jay Miskowiec) in Diacritics 16 (1): 22-7. Freud, Sigmund. 1962. Civilization and Its Discontents [1930] (transl. James Strachey). New York: W.W. Norton.

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Fulton, Thomas Wemyss. 1911. The Sovereignty of the Sea. Edinburgh and London: Blackwood. Gikandi, Simon. 1996. Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism. New York: Columbia UP. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge/MA: Harvard UP. Hulme, Peter. 2000. Remnants of Conquest: The Island Caribs and Their Visitors, 1877-1998. Oxford: Oxford UP. Klein, Bernhard (ed.). 2002. Fictions of the Sea: Critical Perspectives on the Ocean in British Literature and Culture. Aldershot: Ashgate. ––. 2004. ‘Staying Afloat: Literary Shipboard Encounters from Columbus to Equiano’ in Klein and Mackenthun (2004): 91-109. –– and Gesa Mackenthun (eds). 2004. Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean. New York: Routledge. Linebaugh, Peter. 1982. ‘All the Atlantic Mountains Shook’ in Labour/Le Travailleur 10: 87-121. –– and Marcus Rediker. 2000. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon. Muldoon, James. 2002. ‘Who Owns the Sea?’ in Klein (2002): 13-27. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge. Rediker, Marcus. 2004. ‘The Red Atlantic; or, “a terrible blast swept over the heaving sea” ’ in Klein and Mackenthun (2004): 111-30. Schmitt, Carl. 1997. Land and Sea [1944] (transl. Simona Draghici). Washington/DC: Plutarch Press. Smith, Roger C. 1993. Vanguard of Empire: Ships of Exploration in the Age of Columbus. New York: Oxford UP. Steinberg, Philip E. 2001. The Social Construction of the Ocean. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Walsh, John. 2004. ‘Up in Smoke’ in The Independent Review (6 April 2004).

“The Architecture of the Devil”: Stonehenge, Englishness, English Fiction Silvia Mergenthal Abstract: This paper discusses representations of Stonehenge in three novels, Frances Burney’s The Wanderer, Thomas Hardy’' s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and Peter Ackroyd' s Hawksmoor. It initially aligns these literary representations with their respective discursive environments, that is, with contemporaneous archaeological discoveries and historical, philosophical, and scientific speculations as to the monument’s origins and purposes. In a second move, the paper then borrows, for a more detailed discussion of the place of Stonehenge in the three novels, from recent archaeological attempts to describe the “sacred geography” of Stonehenge, drawing, in particular, on the concept of structuration, that is, on the notion that the compartmentalisation of – material as well as literary – space can serve as an indicator of the cosmologies of the societies which inhabit it. Key names and concepts: Peter Ackroyd - John Aubrey - Edmund Burke - Frances Burney - Anthony Giddens - Thomas Hardy - Samuel Johnson - Iain Sinclair - William Stukeley; Axis - Cartography - Cosmology - Englishness - Internal Geography Psychogeography - Structuration.

1. According to a frequently quoted dictum of Jacquetta Hawkes, “every generation gets the Stonehenge it deserves”.1 Seen as space, Stonehenge has been a feature of the English countryside since at least the 4th millennium BC; defined as a place, that is, as space to which meaning has been ascribed, Stonehenge has been endowed with different meanings, not only by an estimated sixty generations of prehistoric users, but by successive generations of English antiquarians, 1

In an article entitled ‘God in the Machine’, Antiquity 41 (1967); quoted in Chippindale ²1994: 264.

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writers, and artists from the early Middle Ages to the present (and, for that matter, by modern-day Druids, New Age travellers, or advertising agencies). As Christopher Chippindale puts it: For centuries the people who have gone to see it have found it a mirror which reflects back, more or less distorted, that view of the past which the onlooker takes there. (²1994: 6)

In his Stonehenge Complete, Chippindale sketches a history of attitudes towards Stonehenge, aligning artistic or literary representations with contemporaneous archaeological discoveries and/or historical, philosophical, and scientific speculations as to this prehistoric monument’s origin and purposes; he also traces patterns of interdependence between various discourses. Following Chippindale’s lead, I shall, in this paper, start out by relating three English novels in which one or several key scenes are set in Stonehenge to their respective discursive environments. Thus, Frances Burney’s description of Stonehenge in The Wanderer (1814) owes its register of “vastness”, “magnitude”, “enormity” to Edmund Burke, who, in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), explicitly refers to Stonehenge when he outlines one of the properties of the Sublime, namely, difficulty.2 In addition, one of Burney’s characters, Sir Jasper Herrington, in his role as “nomenclator”3, reviews several pre-eighteenth and eighteenth-century hypotheses as to Stonehenge’s builders; Sir Jasper draws on William Stukeley’s extremely influential Stonehenge of 1740 when he discredits the legend that Stonehenge was built by “Gog and Magog”, and opts for the Druids instead.4 2

“When any work seems to have required immense force and labour to effect it, the idea is grand. Stonehenge, neither for disposition nor ornament, has anything admirable; but these huge rude masses of stone, set on end, and piled on each other, turn the mind on the immense force necessary for such a work.” (Chippindale ²1994: 96)

3

Burney 1991: 766; a “nomenclator”, in the sense in which Burney appears to use this term, is “one who gives a name to, or invents a designation for, something; spec. one who classifies natural objects under appropriate designations” (OED).

4

On Stukeley see Chippindale ²1994: 71-81 and 82-86; William Blake is indebted to Stukeley for Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion (1804-

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In Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) (1994: 502-503), yet another “nomenclator”, Angel Clare, supplies Tess with the standard nineteenth-century account of Stonehenge as a heathen temple in which, on the “Stone of Sacrifice”, human beings were sacrificed to the Sun by the Druids.5 Finally, Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor (1985) is indebted to post-1960s alternative archaeology, which sees Stonehenge as a needle-point in the earth’s acupuncture system through which pre-civilisation forces (in the case of Hawksmoor, the forces of evil) can be tapped. Ackroyd himself, in an interview with Julian Wolfreys, acknowledges his debt to Iain Sinclair’s poem Lud Heat, with its emphasis on psychogeography, or psychic cartography (see Gibson/Wolfreys 2000: 250).6 In its eighteenth-century plotline, Hawksmoor, incidentally, once again reviews older traditions regarding 1820). As to Gog and Magog, they start their long career in Western mythology in the Bible (chapters 38 and 39 of the Book of Ezekiel), as the names, respectively, of a king and of his supposed kingdom; they then reappear in various Alexander romances. They are introduced to Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia Regium Britannicae (1136), in which Brutus, the great-grandson of Aeneas, comes to Albion and decides to settle there. One of the giants who inhabit the island is called, by Geoffrey, Gogmagog (spelled Goemagot, and hence perhaps an independent name which later became corrupted due to Biblical influence); see online at: http://www.iras.ucalgary.ca/~volk/sylvia/GogAndMagog. htm (consulted 17.03.2004) and http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06628a.htm (consulted 17.03.2004). On Gog’s and Magog’s afterlives as papier-maché giants see Sinclair 1997: 121-123. 5

The term “Stone of Sacrifice” is Hardy’s own. Tess reposes on what is normally (and probably equally erroneously) called the “Altar Stone”. The notion of the Druids as practicing human sacrifice is, as Chippindale explains, ultimately derived from Tacitus’s Annals: “The image that lingered was of the sweet maiden, expired on the altar slab with her guts pulled across the grass, with the Druid priests crowded round her in metaphorical darkness like a Wright of Derby painting.” (²1994: 95)

6

Lud Heat includes a section on Hawksmoor churches, contending that, “Hawksmoor planned the churches according to a strict ‘geometry’ of oppositions, capable of producing a ‘system of energies, or unit of connection, within the city’, similar to those formed by ‘the old hospitals, the Inns of Court, the markets, the prisons, the religious houses and others’. According to Sinclair, Hawksmoor arranged Christ Church, St. George’s in-the-East, and St. Anne’s, Limehouse, to form a power-concentrating triangle, while St. George’s, Bloomsbury, and St. Alfege’s, Greenwich, made up ‘the major pentacle star’ [...].” See Onega 1999: 44.

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Stonehenge, including the tradition that it was built by the Devil; as an architect – and practicing satanist – himself, Ackroyd’s eighteenthcentury protagonist, Nicholas Dyer, believes that ancient buildings such as Stonehenge, or the Pyramids, are erected on the principles which rule the cosmos, so that, by studying these principles, he can model the churches he builds in London on Stonehenge’s “Architecture of the Devil” (Ackroyd 1986: 60; see Onega 1999: 44). In a second move, I shall now enact an alignment of my own, by borrowing, for a more detailed discussion of representations of Stonehenge in Burney, Hardy, and Ackroyd, from recent archaeological attempts to describe the “sacred geography” of Stonehenge and its environs. Thus, in an article entitled “Ever Increasing Circles: The Sacred Geographies of Stonehenge and its Landscape”, Timothy Darvill (1997: 167-202; see also Whittle 1997: 145-166) adapts Anthony Giddens’s concept of “structuration” (see 1984: 1-40 and 110-144), initially designed to analyse patterns and recurrences in modern timegeographies, to archaeological contexts. Darvill, following Giddens, asserts that people categorise space in accordance with social rules and norms, that is, their compartmentalisation of space is based on their general interpretative schemes, their “cosmologies”; material culture, in the case of Stonehenge the monument itself in its relationships with other archaeological sites in its environment, can thus serve as indicator of the cosmologies of its builders and users: “[...] the categorisation of space is often ‘nested’ in the sense that arrangements apply at several different levels simultaneously as interpretative schemes impinge on almost every dimension of life.” (1997: 173) My own alignment will proceed in two steps: firstly, I shall map the internal geographies of The Wanderer, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and Hawksmoor, by establishing axes (a favourite pastime of Stonehenge archaeologists) between their Stonehenge settings and other settings of these novels. Secondly, on the bases of their internal geographies, I shall speculate about the cosmologies which inform these texts, specifically, upon their constructions of ‘Englishness’. As will be seen, the three novels, in spite of their considerable differences in subject matter as well as narrative technique, collectively perform what can be called a “temporal layering of place upon place, event upon event” (Gibson/Wolfreys 2000: 173).

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2. True to her designation – she is the “Wanderer” of Burney’s title – Juliet Granville travels restlessly through the South of England, either in search of her family and her friends, or to make a living, or else to escape from various persecutors (and suitors). The novel mentions around thirty towns, country seats, or physical features of this area, plus an additional nine London streets and squares.7 Out of these, various settings can be linked to Stonehenge: one of them is Salisbury Cathedral, along an axis proposed by Samuel Johnson when he states that “Salisbury Cathedral and its Neighbour Stonehenge, are two eminent models of art and rudeness, and may show the first essay, and the last perfection, in architecture” (see Chippindale 21994: 96), a statement which is echoed in Burney’s description of Salisbury Cathedral as the “latest and finest remains of ancient elegance, lightness, and taste” (1991: 663). Other potential points of reference are indicated by Doody: in her introduction to The Wanderer, she explains that the novel “presents a series of circles that become more and more broken”, among them Juliet’s wedding-ring, and the seaside grave of her friend Gabriella’s child (1991: xxxv-xxxvi). However, the narrative voice of the novel explicitly stresses the contrast between Stonehenge and Wilton, the (equally non-fictitious) lavishly appointed mansion of the Earl of Pembroke, to which Juliet is taken by Sir Jasper Herrington on their way to Stonehenge: The beauties of Wilton seemed appendages of luxury, as well as of refinement; and appeared to require not only sentiment, but happiness for their complete enjoyment; while the nearly savage, however wonderful work of antiquity, in which she was now rambling, placed in this abandoned spot, far from the intercourse, or even view of mankind, with no prospect but of heath and sky, blunted, for the moment, her sensibility, by removing her wide from all the objects with which it was in contact; and insensibly calmed her spirits; though not by dis8 sipating her reverie. (1991: 765-766)

7

See Burney 1991: 888-892 for the novel’s geography.

8

Burney herself, incidentally, undertook the same journey in reverse, from Stonehenge to Wilton; see Hemlow 1972: 21-22.

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The Wanderer, then, establishes a set of dichotomies between beauty (Wilton) and sublimity (Stonehenge), and between the variety of the first and the monotony of the second, but also, as in eighteenthcentury aesthetics the visual qualities of an object are invariably linked to the impact it has on its beholders, between happiness and sadness. In addition, Burney’s text seems to hint at yet another opposition, namely, that between, in Lacanian terms, the (pre-linguistic) Imaginary and the Symbolic.9 In these terms, Wilton can be seen as providing an excess of signs, an “assemblage of painting, statuary, antiques, natural curiosities, and artificial rarities” (1991: 759), which temporarily deprives Juliet of her subjecthood: “not as Juliet she followed”. In this state of, as it were, suspended individuality, Juliet, as Everywoman, finds herself at Stonehenge, a place apparently devoid of signs. In Burney’s account, Stonehenge is initially nameless, while Juliet herself is, for the greater part of the chapter under consideration, and indeed of the novel as a whole, virtually speechless: she either speaks through her body, by blushing, or bursting into tears, or else her speech is reported, that is, mediated by the voice of the narrator. The one instance of direct speech in the Stonehenge episode is, significantly, “‘Where are we?’ she cried, ‘Sir Jasper? and whither are we going?’” With Sir Jasper’s answer to these questions the Symbolic reenters the novel: as “nomenclator”, he names the place, lays down its laws, and also reveals that he has taken Juliet to Stonehenge in order to seduce her. Sir Jasper’s usurpation of the Stonehenge space quite literally culminates in the following vignette: While pondering upon her precarious destiny, [Juliet] perceived, through an opening between two large stones, that Sir Jasper had placed himself upon an eminence, where, apparently, by his gestures, 10 he was engaged in animated discourse. (1991: 767)

9

Doody refers to the realm of the Symbolic when she argues that “[Juliet’s) entrance into this place of ruins symbolises the momentary death of law, culture, names” (Burney 1991: xxxvi).

10

While Sir Jasper’s amorous designs upon Juliet are ostensibly foiled, he does present her with a new set of clothes, displayed (though as yet in their boxes),

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3. In contrast to The Wanderer, the spatial arrangements of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles are much more overtly charged with meaning. As a result, the novel also foregrounds two geometrical properties of axes, namely: unlike vectors, they are not unidirectional, and unlike bounded lines, they do not terminate at fixed points but extend beyond them. Translated into narrative structure, this implies that the Stonehenge scene in Chapter 58 invites an analeptic reading of the scene, which can be identified as its point of reference, as well as a (proleptic) projection beyond itself, to the ending of the novel. In the penultimate chapter of the novel, Chapter 58 of “Phase the Seventh: Fulfilment”, Angel Clare and Tess arrive at Stonehenge, the “heathen temple”; Tess has killed Alec d’Urberville, and she and Angel are on their way to a port in the north, from which they hope to escape abroad. After a conversation about Stonehenge’s immense age, and about its purpose – Angel, acting as Tess’s “nomenclator”, believes that “the heathen” sacrificed to the sun there – Tess falls asleep on what Hardy, as already indicated elsewhere, calls the “Stone of Sacrifice”. While Angel keeps watch over her, the sun rises, and Angel realises that they are surrounded by their pursuers: When they saw where she lay, which they had not done till then, they showed no objection, and stood watching her, as still as the pillars around. He went to the stone and bent over her, holding one poor little hand; her breathing now was quick and small, like that of a lesser creature than a woman. All waited in the growing light, their faces and hands as if they were silvered, the remainder of their figures dark, the stones glistening green-grey, the Plain still a mass of shade. Soon the light was strong, and a ray shone upon her unconscious form, peering under her eyelids and waking her. (Hardy 1994: 504-505)

At first glance, the relationship between this scene and its point of reference in Chapter 37, in the third chapter of “Phase the Fifth: The Woman Pays”, is chiastic. In the final chapter of “Phase the Fourth: The Consequence”, Angel Clare and Tess, now his wife, have mutuupon what he calls “a flat surface of [the Druids’] petrification”, that is, on one of the Stonehenge horizontals (1991: 768).

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ally confessed to premarital affairs, but while Tess is prepared to forgive Angel his “eight-and-forty hours’ dissipation with a stranger” (Hardy 1994: 286), he responds to her involvement with Alec d’Urberville by rejecting her, and demanding a separation. His subconscious reaction to this situation of estrangement is described in Chapter 37, when, walking in his sleep, he picks up Tess (who is wide awake), carries her to the grounds of a ruined abbey, and deposits her in the stone coffin of an abbot; throughout, he sincerely mourns her death, which is, of course, the death of his perception of her as a pure and unspoilt child of nature. It is only retrospectively, that is, from the perspective of the Stonehenge chapter, that a pattern common to both scenes emerges beneath the “criss-cross” surface arrangement of sleeping/waking, waking/sleeping: in both scenes, Tess finds herself within the confines of a sacred site in ruins, the one (the abbey) devoted to Christian, the other (Stonehenge) to pre-Christian sets of beliefs. To Tess, neither of these beliefs conveys the assurance of an existence in the after-life, except through the continuation of her bloodline, which is why, at Stonehenge, she offers Angel her sister Liza-Lu as her replacement. In this, as well as in the notion of sacrifice, the Stonehenge scene foreshadows the final chapter of the novel, in which Tess’s sacrifice is completed in her execution, and Angel has accepted Liza-Lu as his new companion: “As soon as they had strength they arose, joined hands again, and went on.” (Hardy 1994: 508) In Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, then, the relationship between the Stonehenge scene and its counterpart is not as straightforwardly dichotomous as it is Burney’s The Wanderer; in other words, Stonehenge and the abbey are not so much contrasted to one another as superimposed one upon the other (and vice versa, as it were). As a result, Hardy’s novel blurs spatial and temporal boundaries – the latter with regard to both the (internal) chronology of the novel and the (external, that is, “real-life”) histories of the two sites. 4. In Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor, this blurring of boundaries can be regarded as the overall narrative programme of the novel, with its Stonehenge

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and Royal Society settings as small but important contributing factors to this programme.11 Hawksmoor has two plot-lines: the unevenly numbered chapters contain the story of Nicholas Dyer as told by himself in confessional mode, and rendered in (a pastiche of) late seventeenth-century English. Dyer is presented as an early eighteenthcentury architect, the erstwhile disciple and now friend and professional associate of Sir Christopher Wren; he thus occupies, in the novel, the place which, in a non-fictional account of the period, would be filled by Nicholas Hawksmoor (with whose “real” churches Dyer is credited). Ackroyd’s eponymous Nicholas Hawksmoor, on the other hand, is a twentieth-century police officer, to whose investigations into a series of murders committed in the vicinities of “Dyer” churches the evenly numbered chapters of the novel are devoted. As already indicated, the Stonehenge episode in Chapter 3 forms part of the Dyer plot-line; in it, Dyer and Sir Christoper Wren visit Stonehenge, and attempt to come to terms with its meaning. Dyer, as a satanist, experiences the place as imbued with “the Labour and Agonie of those who erected it, the power of Him who enthrall’d them, and the marks of Eternity which had been placed there” (Ackroyd 1986: 61).12 By contrast, Sir Christopher reduces the complexities of Stonehenge to an exercise in geometry, to be mastered by applying “Rule and Crayon” (Ackroyd 1986: 61). Their attitudes towards Stonehenge are neatly juxtaposed in the following exchange, as related by Dyer: When we were not close to one another I could talk freely again: For these are all places of Sacrifice, I call’d out, and these Stones are the Image of God raised in Terrour! And Sir Chris. replied in a loud Voice: The Mind of Man is naturally subject to Apprehensions! (Ackroyd 1986: 60)

Even so, the irrational – or, at any rate, the inexplicable – invades Sir Christopher’s mind when he has a sudden vision of his son on his 11

Ackroyd’s “transgressive” tendencies in Hawksmoor (and elsewhere) have become a critical commonplace and need not be reiterated in this context; see for example Onega 1999: 43-58; De Lange 1993: 145-165; Janik 1995: 160189.

12

Dyer’s “He” is the Devil.

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death-bed; as this son has lived and died abroad, Sir Christopher will only learn several months later that what he has intuited at Stonehenge has, in fact, come to pass. Another impingement of the irrational upon the rational occurs when Dyer pays a visit to the temple of Enlightenment rationality, namely, to the premises of the Royal Society at Crane Court. Again, Dyer can be perceived as a representative of the Dark Ages of scientia umbrarum, that is, of the occult sciences with their Neolithic, hermetic, cabbalistic, or gnostic elements, while Sir Christopher acts as proponent of the Enlightenment New Sciences.13 As Onega has shown, though, the exhibits displayed in the Royal Society’s “Repository and Library”, and the experiment conducted by Sir Christopher on a black cat are endowed with significance not only in the context of the New Sciences, but in scientia umbrarum as well. If Hawksmoor were a conventional historical novel, this interplay, or perhaps interpenetration, between the rational and the irrational, and between pre-Enlightenment and Enlightenment scientific discourses, could be dismissed as characteristic of a specific moment in history when pseudo-scientific superstitions had not yet been eradicated, and the New Sciences had not yet carried the day. However, as eighteenth-century and twentieth-century times and worlds overlap and blur in the novel, it implicitly casts into doubt teleological constructions of human history as progressing from superstition to scientific truth, and from darkness into light – as it does notions of time as a vector, that is, as uni-directional rather than cyclical. 5. Before one moves from the internal geographies of The Wanderer, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and Hawksmoor to their cosmologies, specifically, to their constructions of ‘Englishness’ at three crucial moments in English history, it is perhaps worth observing that the notion of ‘Englishness’ is inscribed in AD theories about Stonehenge from their incipience. As a result, Peter Ackroyd, in his magisterial Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination, states, apropos of the Venerable Bede, that 13

On scientia umbrarum in Hawksmoor see Onega 1999: 48-50.

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[l]ike Stukeley and Aubrey, almost a thousand years later, he was already possessed by a vision of English antiquity among old stones and broken monuments; like other Anglo-Saxons before him he wondered at the spectacle of dilapidated temples or ruined towns. Antiquarianism, in England, has always been compounded by a vision of English14 ness itself. (2002: 37)

From this perspective, Burney’s The Wanderer, written in France during the Napoleonic Wars and imaginatively revisiting the last decade of the eighteenth century, suggests that political differences between post-revolutionary France and Britain are merely superficial, concealing, as they do, the victimisation of women by patriarchy in both countries. Stonehenge, in this scenario, signifies both the site of this victimisation and, as has been argued above, a potential site of resistance. Published in another period of national crisis, in the sombre final years of the nineteenth century, Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles attributes to Stonehenge a meaning which is not dissimilar to that which it is given in The Wanderer, especially as Hardy’s novel possesses an equally marked gender bias: Stonehenge seems to demonstrate – as does the abbey in which Tess is laid to rest in a stone coffin – that English religious and legal institutions across the centuries have been founded, not on (or for) the protection of the weak, but on (or for) their victimisation. Finally, Hawksmoor, written at a time when the nation experiences, yet again, a crisis of national confidence, provides a counter-narrative to received histories of England as histories of Enlightenment and progress by insisting that the darker forces of the human psyche, and of human life, be acknowledged, and incorporated in them.

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John Aubrey, like William Stukeley, argues the case for the native British, as against a foreign (Roman, Danish, Phoenician) origin of Stonehenge. See Chippindale ²1994: 66-71.

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Coda: Academic archaeologists tend to accuse amateurs, particularly adherents of psychogeography or psychic cartography, of gross over-simplification, if not wilful misinterpretation, of physical data, as when leys are drawn between points differing in age. Chippindale sums up three main objections to the concept of leys, the second of which “resists the inclusion of sites of widely differing dates, ranging from a Neolithic long barrow to a church some 5,000 years younger, as equal markers in the ley system” (Chippindale 21994: 237). With this proviso, it can still be argued, tentatively, that the maps which The Wanderer, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and Hawksmoor draw of England do include some of the archetypal sites of the English cultural imagination; Stonehenge, by acting as common reference point, adds a third dimension to these maps, namely, the dimension of historical depth.

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Works Cited Primary References Ackroyd, Peter. 1986. Hawksmoor [1985]. London: Abacus. Burney, Frances. 1991. The Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties [1814] (eds Margaret Anne Doody, Robert L. Mack and Peter Sabor). Oxford: Oxford UP. Hardy, Thomas. 1994. Tess of the d’Urbervilles [1891] (Penguin Popular Classics). Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Research Literature Ackroyd, Peter. 2002. Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination. London: Chatto and Windus. Chippindale, Christopher. ²1994. Stonehenge Complete. London: Thames and Hudson. Cunliffe, Barry and Colin Renfrew (eds). 1997. Science and Stonehenge (Proceedings of the British Academy, 92). Oxford: Oxford UP. Darvill, Timothy. 1997. ‘Ever Increasing Circles: The Sacred Geographies of Stonehenge and its Landscape’ in Cunliffe/Renfrew (1997): 167-202. De Lange, Adriaan M. 1993. ‘The Complex Architectonics of Postmodernist Fiction: Hawksmoor – A Case Study’ in D’Haen, Theo and Hans Bertens (eds). British Postmodern Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi: 145-165. Gibson, Jeremy and Julian Wolfreys. 2000. Peter Ackroyd: The Ludic and Labyrinthine Text. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Giddens, Anthony. 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Cambridge: Polity. Hemlow, Joyce (ed.). 1972. The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney (Madame d’Arblay). Vol. I. Oxford: Clarendon. Janik, Del Ivan. 1995. ‘No End of History: Evidence from the Contemporary English Novel’ in Twentieth-Century Literature 41 (2): 160-189. Onega, Susana. 1999. Metafiction and Myth in the Novels of Peter Ackroyd. Rochester: Camden House. Sinclair, Iain. 1997. Lights out for the Territory: Nine Excursions in the Secret History of London. London: Granta. Whittle, Alasdair. 1997. ‘Remembered and Imagined Belongings: Stonehenge in its Traditions and Structures of Meaning’ in Cunliffe/Renfrew (1997): 145-166. http://www.iras.ucalgary.ca/~volk/sylvia/GogAndMagog.htm (consulted 17.03.04). http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06628a.htm (consulted 17.03.04)

Home Thoughts from Abroad: Cultural Difference and the Critique of Modernity in D. H. Lawrence’s Twilight in Italy (1916) and Other Travel Writing Robert Burden Abstract: In this paper I look at how landscape in Lawrence’s travel writing is constructed out of the codes of western art and classical myth. The mythic-Romantic real of the Lawrentian landscape will be seen to be a necessary illusion to counter the real world of a modernising and industrialising Europe. The foreign landscape is also modelled on the English countryside. Abroad, Lawrence searches for difference, but sees it in the light of his critique of the condition of England: the changes in the region of Lake Garda to the countryside and the indigenous people, on the eve of the outbreak of the Great War, described in Twilight in Italy (1916) are the same as those that have already happened back home around Eastwood. Driven by the desire to travel, the real of place is a misrecognition expressing itself as a failed encounter with the Other. The compulsion to repeat the primal scene of a new cultural space beyond modernity is what Freud called the other space, between perception and consciousness. The real of place is also in the “spirit of place”. Lawrence locates native individuals in their cultural space, which then, like the Mexican landscape, is represented as a psychic condition; or the bush in Australia as biding its time as it watches the intrusion of white men, like Conrad’s Africa jungle watches the invasion of the west. This paper draws on postcolonial and Freudian-Lacanian theory to demonstrate that in Lawrence’s travel writing there is a conflict of desires between the need to experience other places and customs and the drive to recover what he saw as the lost potency of a beleaguered masculinity. The conflict of desires sometimes leads to outbursts of racism and reactionary patriarchal attitudes making Lawrence’s position contradictory. Key names and concepts: M. M. Bakhtin - Sigmund Freud - Jacques Lacan - D. H. Lawrence - Thomas Mann - Oswald Spengler; Chronotope - Contact Zone - Cultural Decline - Cultural Difference - Cultural Unconscious - Desire - Englishness Imperialism - Landscape - Literary Geography - Masculinity - Modernity - Modernism - the Other - Post-colonial Theory - Primitivism - Psychic Symbolism - Race - the Real - Space and Place - Transculturation - Travel and Travel Writing.

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1. Why Travel? My paper addresses Lawrence’s travel writing, beginning with the collected volume Twilight in Italy where Lawrence focuses on the perceived cultural decline of the west – a “twilight” –, which is also for him a loss of instinctive masculine identity, before he abandons Europe altogether for the New World. I begin by asking what motivates travel. “Comes over one an absolute necessity to move. And what is more, to move in some particular direction.” (Lawrence 1997a: 1) These are the opening words of Lawrence’s travel book Sea and Sardinia (1921). He is quite specific too about the direction of travel: “one must travel west or south”, he declares in Twilight in Italy (1916). Going west in England takes you to Cornwall and Ireland, the centres of ancient Celtic civilisation; going south in Europe takes you to Italy and the remaining mountain peasant villages still unaffected by modernity. In his further travels, Lawrence insisted on approaching America from the west, via Ceylon, Australia, New Zealand and Tahiti to San Francisco, thus avoiding New York;1 and then staying in Taos, New Mexico, and from there going on further south into Mexico which he believed to be the real America. In 1920, he wrote in the article, “America, Listen to Your Own” that America should “turn again to catch the spirit of her dark, aboriginal continent” and get back to pre-Columbian native cultures, and the time before the Pilgrim Fathers (Lawrence 1967: 90). It is not that he is insisting on a complete return to primitivism (Lawrence 1967: 99), but for him like for many others writing in the period of Modernism the attraction to pre-modern civilisations becomes both the goal of travel and a device for a critique of modernity. Travel has also a more general aim, and one usually expressed in the ideal form of a quest for some Edenic paradise. In a review published in 1926 of H.M. Tomlinson’s Gifts of Fortune: Some Hints to Those about to Travel, Lawrence wrote: “We travel, perhaps, with a secret and absurd hope of setting foot on the Hesperides, of running 1

“I would really like to miss New York”. See letter to Mabel Dodge Sterne, 5 November 1921 (Lawrence 1997b: 226).

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our boat up a little creek and landing in the Garden of Eden.” However, high hopes always lead to disappointment: “There is no Garden of Eden, and the Hesperides never were. Yet in our very search for them, we touch the coasts of illusion, and come into contact with other worlds.” (Lawrence 1967: 343) In this paper I want to address some of the wider implications of Lawrence’s claims to “touch the coasts of illusion”, and whether by doing so he can actually “come into contact with other worlds”. The utopian desire of travel is expressed in fictional as well as travel narratives. Indeed, it is a common impulse. However, my focus is the emergence of this desire, its precise historical location, just prior to and during the Great War, 1914-1918. Thomas Mann in Death in Venice (1912) represents the force of this desire to travel as a passionate need for an exotic landscape: He now became conscious, to his complete surprise, of an extraordinary expansion of his inner self, a kind of roving restlessness, a youthful craving for far-off places, a feeling so new or at least so long unaccustomed and forgotten that he stood as if rooted, and his hands clasped behind his back and his eyes to the ground, trying to ascertain the nature and purport of his emotion. It was simply a desire to travel; but it had presented itself as nothing less than a seizure, with intensely passionate and indeed hallucinatory force, turning his craving into vision. His imagination, still not at rest from the morning’s hours of work, shaped for itself a paradigm of all the wonders and terrors of the manifold earth, of all that it was now suddenly trying to envisage: he saw it, saw a landscape, a tropical swampland under a cloud-swollen sky, moist and lush and monstrous, a kind of primeval wilderness of islands, morasses and muddy alluvial channels; far and wide around him he saw hairy palm-trunks thrusting upwards from rank jungles of fern, from among thick fleshy plants in exuberant flower; saw strangely misshapen trees with roots that arched through the air before sinking in the ground or into stagnant, shadowy-green, glassy waters where milk-white blossoms floated as big as plates, and among them exotic birds with grotesque beaks stood hunched in the shallows, their heads tilted motionlessly sideways; saw between the knotted stems of the bamboo thicket the glinting eye of a crouching tiger; and his heart throbbed with terror and mysterious longing. (Mann 1998: 199-200)

Gustav von Aschenbach is divided by his impulsive need to take a holiday from his disciplined life as a writer in Munich. He wants to have some “dolce far niente”, some carefree idleness. But this desire to travel has been repressed by self-discipline common to what Mann

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calls here “the collective European psyche”. Aschenbach, though, will travel too far from western civilisation in Thomas Mann’s story, as the sexual impulse expressed figuratively in the text as a Dionysian landscape of homoerotic desire will be the death of him, in that location of decadence, the Venice Lido circa 1912. In Lawrence’s narrative fiction, the journey of self-awakening is also a common paradigm for his female and male characters. In the travel writing this journey is his own, and develops into a masculine quest that will enable him to blame the repressive evils of modernity on both industrialisation and the feminisation of the culture2 prefigured in the instrumentalisation and self-consciousness of the modern subject, respectively. The influence of modernity on the Italians is seen everywhere on his travels to and around Lake Garda in 1912 – the focus of Twilight in Italy (1916). The process of turning travelling into travel writing reworks observations made in one frame of mind into reflections made later in another: first impressions of the young man in the first flush of writing success and newly in love, and having escaped England, are later reworked with knowledge of hindsight into forebodings of war for the 1916 publication of the text, and after the banning of his novel The Rainbow (1915).3 Freud wrote in “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis” (1936): My longing to travel was no doubt also the expression of a wish to escape from that pressure, like the force which drives so many adolescent children to run away from home. I had long seen clearly that a great part of the pleasure of travel lies in the fulfilment of these early wishes – that it is rooted, that is, in dissatisfaction with home and family. (Freud 1978: 247)

Travel enables liberation from the limits of home. Even as early as 1908 a 23 year old Lawrence is complaining that “one does seem bur2

3

The novel Aaron’s Rod (1922) is a story which insists that men should break away from women once and for all. Early versions of some of the essays were first collected in Italian Studies: By the Lago di Garda in September 1913.

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ied in Eastwood”.4 Once in Italy he writes of the “hopelessness … grubbiness and despair” of England.5 And by 1913 Lawrence does not want to live in England anymore, as he feels he is a different person for his travels in Italy because “[t]his is all so different from anything I have known before”.6 After the war, travel becomes both a narrative trope in Lawrence’s fiction and a personal quest for a different way of life to the perceived mechanising effects of modernity. In Twilight in Italy, as in Sea and Sardinia, he still believes in old Europe. Once disillusioned though, he will search further afield in the New World for cultural and religious alternatives. We get views of Lawrence’s mood on leaving England in the largely autobiographical novel, Kangaroo (1923). It is expressed in the thoughts of his alter ego, Somers: As he looked back from the boat, when they had left Folkestone behind and only England was there, England looked like a grey, drearygrey coffin sinking in the sea behind, with her dead grey cliffs, and the white, worn-out cloth of snow above. (Lawrence 1997c: 258)7

The leaving of England is thus remembered in a symbolic topography – a dead landscape. Much later, after living in New Mexico, Lawrence returns home and describes the view from a train: Outside, a tight little landscape goes by […] with sunshine like thin water […] Here you get an island no bigger than a back garden, chock-full of people who never realise there is anything outside their native back garden, pretending to direct the destinies of the world. (“On Coming Home”, quoted in Worthen 2005: 296-7)

4 5

6 7

Letter to May Holbrook, 2 December 1908 (Lawrence 1997b: 17). Letter sent from Villa di Gargnano to Arthur McLeod, 4 October 1912 (Lawrence 1997b: 47). Letter to Helen Corke, 29 May 1913 (Lawrence 1997b: 59). Similar words occur in The Lost Girl (1920), as Alvina and Cicio leave England for Italy on the ferry from Folkestone: “For there behind, behind all the sunshine, was England […] England, like a long, ash-grey coffin slowly submerging.” (Lawrence 1988: 347)

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In Mr Noon, Lawrence recalls waking up for the first time abroad, in Bavaria. On a Spring morning in 1912 another of his alter egos, Gilbert Noon, is intoxicated by a new sense of space: the “vast patchwork of Europe”, its landscape, rivers and mountains opening up “infinite multiplicity of connections”. He “became unEnglished”, and sees England from the outside as “tiny […] and tight, and so partial”, a culture whose “truths and standards and ideals were just local, not universal” (Lawrence 1984: 107). Therefore in answer to the question: Why Travel? Lawrence insists on the necessity to get away from the perceived limits of England prefigured in the tropes of death – as in being buried at home, or the grey-dreary coffin. In this frame of mind he is bound to idealise the alternative landscapes in Italy and elsewhere. And as topography symbolises the essence of the culture, landscape and cultural differences enable a critical perspective on home. In the next section, I shall briefly outline the theoretical framework I am using in this paper. 2. Constructions of Space and Place Andrew Thacker in his recent study of space and geography in Modernism makes a convincing case for a new literary geography, an approach to textual spaces which draws on the work of Lefebvre and others within the new cultural and literary geography (Lefebvre 1991, Norquay and Smyth 1997). They have given us a conceptual framework in which to make sense of the representation of landscape in art and literature as a “cognitive map” (Thacker 2003: 1). Cognitive mapping should also be understood as cultural practice, a subjective and a social process, but also a text with semiotic processes and ideological connotations. Like texts there are different cultural formations of narrative and generic typologies (pastoral, georgic, exotic, sublime, picturesque). But, additionally, like ideology, there is a process at work of “representing an artificial world as if it were simply given and inevitable”, and making that representation “operational by interpellating its beholder in some more or less determinate relation to its givenness as sight and site” (Mitchell 2002: 1-2).

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In Mitchell’s sense, then, Lawrence’s travel writings are cultural reconstructions of place, but at a definable historical moment, and in a particular English mind set. As I argue in this paper, for Lawrence rural Italy is beginning to suffer the fate of rural England; and this is visible in the landscape of the degenerating lemon groves in the Lake Garda region and the threat to traditional masculine identity in its village communities. The condition of England (ideology) is projected onto the Italian landscape and its people, as are the representational codes of western landscape (cultural formation). Lawrence appropriates the places he visits to illustrate his concerns about the depredations of modernity, and the concerns draw on discourses common at the time – those of cultural decline, degeneration, and the consequences for masculinity. I shall return to the question of modernity later. In the new literary geography, attention has also been drawn to the representation of space in texts by postcolonial theory. The geographies of conquest and the struggle over territories have been central to imperialism. Travel writing has played a key role in the colonialist mindset, and Lawrence is no exception in accounts of cultural difference and otherness. As I shall argue, he occupies a contradictory position as sometime critic of dominant western values, but one who all too often resorts to the racist and patriarchal discourses in circulation. There are two other perspectives I draw on in this paper: Bakhtin’s idea of the “chronotope”, and Lacan’s conceptualisation of the position of the Other and the place of the “real”. Landscape is a chronotope, in Bakhtin’s sense – that is an interrelation of the spatial and the temporal in the one image or trope, enabling a historical dimension to have a precise location in the text. In Bakhtin’s words: “Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history.” (Bakhtin 1994: 84) Further examples of chronotopic perspective in travel narrative, and we see this particularly in Lawrence, is what Bakhtin calls “adventure-time” and “quest-time”. The former is characterised by the contingencies of the journey to different places where the traveller observes cultural diversity without in any

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way being affected by cultural difference.8 It is the paradigm of the imperialist traveller. The latter, “quest-time”, is characterised by a predetermined goal that will change the traveller as he or she searches for cultural difference. In Lawrence’s travel writing, Sea and Sardinia is an example of “adventure-time”, while Mornings in Mexico and Etruscan Places are examples of “quest-time”.9 In his travel writing, Lawrence reiterates his desire to see and experience “the real landscape”.10 Thacker, after Lefebvre, rightly calls this “the space of the psyche” (2003: 3); and here we could take this notion further by returning to Lacan. For Lacan the real is “the accomplice of the drive” (Lacan 1987: 69). From this perspective, the desire for the encounter with the cultural Other and the true spirit of the Other space,11 is the driving force behind travel abroad, and a necessary misrecognition: “The real has to be sought beyond the dream – in what the dream has enveloped, hidden from us […] This is the real that governs our activities more than any other.” (Lacan 1987: 60) I return to this Lacanian reading in the last part of this paper. In the next section I shall discuss Lawrence’s home thoughts which come from being abroad. 3. Home Thoughts: The State of England In his travel writing, the “foreign reality” is sometimes observed from the outside; at other times Lawrence attempts to understand the locals in more intimate portraits of particular individuals. In Twilight in Italy there is, for example, a woodcutter from the mountains who is admired for his dancing. Lawrence focuses on the male body: “he is inconceivably vigorous in body, and his dancing is almost perfect […] He is like a god, a strange natural phenomenon, most intimate, com-

8

9 10 11

For the distinction between “cultural diversity” and “cultural difference” see Bhabha 1994, “The Commitment to Theory”. This discussion is indebted to Roberts 2004:121. Twilight in Italy in Lawrence 1997a: 145. Subsequent references in text (TI). “The spirit of place is a great reality” (Lawrence 1971b: 12).

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pelling”. And this Southern sensuousness is contrasted to “the vague Northern reserve” of the English women present (TI: 99-101). Here we see a tendency to dehumanise the local individuals by essentialising them. Lawrence is not always able to get beyond the popular romanticising of the Italian. The local men, Il Duro and John are described in similar discourse as instinctual and primitive. But in the latter case – and Lawrence explains the changes to the man after he has returned from America: “John […] had suffered very much in America”. He had been jeered at and called abusive names – he had become an unwanted foreigner. Modernity had taken away his innocence, his “pure elemental flame” had been “shaken out of his gentle, sensitive nature”; but he had made money (TI: 116-117). Here, travel is about unsettled migrating people seeking a better life elsewhere, but for purely material purpose – Lawrence’s quest is precisely to get away from such effects of modernity, and hang on to his desire for a primitive, unchanged masculinity. The problem with Twilight in Italy is that Lawrence searches for cultural difference, but sees it only in the light of his critique of England – the changes in the region of Lake Garda to the countryside and the indigenous people are the same as those that have already happened back home around Eastwood, Lawrence’s home region, as he describes it in the late essay (1929), “Nottingham and the Mining Countryside” (in Lawrence 1967). In this as in much of his writing landscape is given a greater symbolic force as the essence of the culture. This places Lawrence in the Ruralist tradition of English literature where the agricultural past is idealised as a time when English life was organically unified. By contrast, in the industrialised present life has become mechanical. In this version of English history, old rural England has gone forever with its organic, village communities. Modern industrial Britain has spoilt the country and the life of the people. The organic has given way to the mechanistic, instinct to self-consciousness.12 The old England of Lawrence’s youth where “Robin Hood and his merry men 12

Lawrence says all this in the novel he had just written, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. See for example Connie’s thoughts as she travels in her chauffeurdriven car around Tevershall: “England my England! But which is my England? ...” (1994: 156).

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were not very far away” (Lawrence 1967: 133) is the “old agricultural England of Shakespeare and Milton and Fielding and George Eliot” (134). The people lived an almost instinctive existence; the men brought with them from the coal mines a “curious dark intimacy [...] a lustrous sort of inner darkness”. The conclusion to this reminiscence is the frequently quoted words: “The real tragedy of England, as I see it, is the tragedy of ugliness. The country is so lovely: the man-made world is so vile.” (137) And it is the women who “nagged about material things”, spoiling the men as men. The mothers encouraged the sons to “get on”: “In my father’s generation, with the old wild England behind them, and the lack of education, the man was not beaten down.” With the addition of the gender gloss, this critique is a familiar one: Raymond Williams argued back in 1958 that Lawrence adopted a nineteenth-century critique of industrial capitalism which derived from Carlyle’s Romantic humanism13 and from William Morris’s socialism. In Lawrence, this critique consistently takes the form of dramatising the loss of the instinctual, spontaneous self, and one which he located deep in the place of his origin, a place and a way of life from which he had escaped. Williams points to the key words in the Lawrence lexicon: “mechanical”, “disintegrated” and “amorphous”, to describe the effect of industrial capitalism on the individual and society (Williams 1958: 119). For Lawrence, travel is a quest for other ways of life where old organic relationships still obtain. He sees in Europe that “the race of men is almost extinct” – like the old coal miners of his father’s generation (Sea and Sardinia in Lawrence 1997a: 62). Even when he travels further afield to the New World in search of regenerative cultural paradigms, they will continue to be based on a fundamentalist masculinity – the representative cultural Other will be male. He hoped that travelling to America he would get “some kind of emotional impetus from the aboriginal Indian and from the aboriginal air and land, 13

In 1906 (aged 21) Lawrence is reading Carlyle obsessively. “What had bitten him were almost certainly Carlyle’s energetic denunciations of Mammon and self-consciousness, and his assertions of Soul, Aristocracy and Individual.” Of course, “Lawrence took from Carlyle what he needed – and then transformed it into his own way of understanding and feeling” (Worthen 1991: 122).

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that will carry one over this crisis of the world’s soul depression, into a new epoch” (quoted Roberts 2004: 49). In the next section I shall address Lawrence’s critique of modernity. 4. Home and Abroad: Modernity and the Crisis of Western Civilisation Lawrence and Frieda stayed for about seven months, from 18 September 1912 to 3 April 1913 in Villa di Gargnano, on the western side of Lake Garda in Northern Italy, with a view of the lake. It is interesting for the purposes of this discussion to compare two representations of this view. The first one is from the recent introduction to the essays, written by the Italian Lawrence scholar Stefania Michelucci: For hundreds of years, the hills around Gargnano were transformed into a paradise of lemon orchards [...] Although the large-scale cultivations of lemons died out at the beginning of the twentieth century, the structures of the lemon houses have left an unmistakable mark on the landscape [...] The lemon industry, which had originally brought wealth and stability to the region, had already undergone an initial decline at the beginning of the twentieth century, with the building of the railway. This facilitated the importation of lemons from Sicily, which were cheaper since they grew in open orchards and did not require such painstaking care as those cultivated beside Lake Garda. (1997: xv-xvi)14

Michelucci goes on to explain that inland, in the hills, there are remote villages where time seems to have stood still. Some of the villages retain their simple way of living off the land, and Lawrence was attracted to this aspect. Here is his description of San Gaudenzio in 1912 – just before the War: In the autumn the little rosy cyclamens blossom in the shade of this west side of the lake. They are very cold and fragrant, and their scent seems to belong to Greece, to the Bacchae. They are real flowers of the past. They seem to be blossoming in the landscape of Phaedra and Helen. They bend down, they brood like little chill fires. They are lit14

See also Michelucci 2002.

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Michelucci’s lemon orchards are a place with a geography, history and economy. The description is factual, in the recognisable discourse of the travel guide. Lawrence’s description of the landscape is constructed out of the codes of western art and classical myth. The last part of the description appears to have been painted by Turner!15 The mythic-Romantic real of the Lawrentian landscape will be seen to be an illusion, but a necessary illusion for Lawrence to counter the real world of a modernising and industrialising Europe. As Neil Roberts claims, in his recent study of Lawrence and travel, “Lawrence never did ‘purely descriptive’ writing [...] Interpretation is inwoven with description in an artful way.” (Roberts 2004: 89) Despite this idealized first encounter with the other landscape, Lawrence travelling in Italy will end in the disillusion of a bleak twilight. The European Twilight gives the travel writing a leitmotif: on the eve of war, “old Europe” is descending towards destruction. The later essays in this volume, Twilight in Italy and the final revision for publication confirmed the premonitions felt in the early essays (cf. Merchelucci 1997: xvii). The loss of stable regional communities belongs to a common restlessness, as local economies collapse, and the men leave to seek their fortune in America. Even within that part of Europe there are migrant workers crossing borders, becoming despised foreign workers, as greater pan-European virtues celebrated by Lawrence elsewhere in his text collapse into petty parochial tensions. These tensions were soon to be expressed on the larger stage of the Great War. Twilight in Italy records a period of crisis in the region of Lake Garda with the collapse of the lemon industry, but also the greater crisis of modernity and of the coming of the War, symbolised in the spread of the industrial machine:

15

Cosgrove and Daniels (2002: Introduction) write about landscape as a “cultural image” with symbolic value. They treat landscape as encoded text.

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And England was conquering the world with her machines and her horrible destruction of natural life […] teeming swarms of disintegrated human beings seething and perishing rapidly away […] the people disappeared, swallowed up in the last efforts towards a perfect selfless society. (TI: 53-55)

As well as it being the start of Lawrence’s own restless migrations in search of a new cultural space, we could read this work as belonging to a common discourse of cultural decline through the force of modernity in the work of Nietzsche, Nordau, and Spengler. Lawrence’s cultural analysis resorts once again to the discourse of “decomposition” and “disintegration” common in the analysis of the crisis in western culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: “It is as if the whole social form were breaking down, and the human element swarmed within the disintegration, like maggots in cheese.” (TI: 165) He takes up again what began with a description of the decaying lemon gardens of San Gaudenzio – the twilight of a peasant culture and then the coming of war: It is passing away from Italy as it has passed from England. The peasant is passing away, the workman is taking his place. The stability is gone […] it is all passing away. Giovanni is in America, unless he has come back to the War. (TI: 94-5)

The landscape itself is degenerate, and is described in a gendered language: masculinity has become sterile (“And there they stand, the pillars and walls erect, but a dead emptiness prevailing” [TI: 94]).16 Towards the end of the text, the coming war fuels a critique of militarism and industrialism in the same breath: At the bottom was a little town with a factory or quarry or foundry, some place with long, smoking chimneys; which made me feel quite at home among the mountains. It is the hideous rawness of the world of men, the horrible, desolating harshness of the advance of the industrial world upon the world of nature, that is so painful. It looks as though the industrial spread of mankind were a sort of dry disintegration advancing and advancing, a process of dry disintegration [...] Everywhere were soldiers moving about the livid, desolate waste of this upper world [...] as the 16

See Nyman (2000: 110).

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This portrait of the cultural crisis focuses on the common social organism as a disintegrating body (TI: 165). There are still pockets of isolated life where the “process of disintegration had not reached” (TI: 165-6). But Milan, although full of vivid life, was final proof in this Italian journey of “the perfect mechanising of human life” (TI: 168). The analysis of the cultural crisis that we see in Lawrence was made popular at the time by Oswald Spengler.17 He also describes the decline of the West as a displacement of an organic by a mechanical state of being (Spengler 1991: 4 and 20-21). And even though Spengler, like Lawrence, attempts to maintain an openness towards other cultures (13), the discourse of decline is modelled on that of the decline of the Roman empire, that is classical culture which represents a history of what Spengler calls a “higher mankind” (12). The twilight of a culture for Spengler is when it becomes a civilisation. A “pure Civilisation, as a historical process, consists in a progressive exhaustion of forms that have become inorganic or dead” (25). For Lawrence this is the process of modernity, prefigured in the loss of the organic connection between man and the land, between essential cultural tradition and the Americanisation of the Italian peasant. It is also an atrophy of the instinctual life by modern self-consciousness and materialism, seen in the migrant worker leaving for America (TI: 117-119). Spengler also laments this development in the early twentieth century where a people “born of and grown on the soil” becomes a “new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utter matter-of-fact […] not a folk but a mob” (25). For Spengler, a culture “blooms on the soil of an exactly definable landscape, to which plant-wise it remains bound” (73).18 In this sense, a culture is an organism. Once the “living culture” is uprooted from the native soil it disintegrates. Lawrence argues the same

17

18

Michelucci (2002: 89) also draws attention to “the Spengler-like reflections on the destiny of Europe and western civilisation” in TI. Spengler also writes that “the Culture is born out of its mother-landscape” (93).

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point in his travel writing, where place has vital, organic connection with the indigenous culture. Modernity is the end of the “creative life-force” of the culture, in both Spengler’s and Lawrence’s cultural history (34).19 Freud’s version of the crisis does not insist on the distinction between culture and civilisation in the Spenglerian manner. “Kultur” for Freud (1930) is civilisation in its distinction from primitivism but at the price of repression and neurosis. Sublimation is all that remains for the modern, civilised subject, which for Lawrence is a mental activity, and thus not instinctive enough (Freud 1975, Lawrence 1971a). In thinking the decline of the culture, Lawrence and his contemporaries assumed the connection of culture and race. For Spengler: “A race has its roots. Race and landscape belong together […] the landscape exercises a secret force.” (Spengler 1991: 254) For Lawrence, “every continent has its own great spirit of place. Every people is polarised in some particular locality, which is home, the homeland.” (Lawrence 1971: 12) For him, the spirit of place was most visible in the great expansive landscapes of New Mexico and Mexico, landscapes where he could experience “a surviving religious culture” (Worthen 2005: 273) and its deep connections with a “savage” nature. After the visit to the Lake Garda region, an extended stay in Sicily and a brief visit to Sardinia, Lawrence also finds Europe “weary and wearying” (quoted in Worthen 2005: 304). The travelling Lawrences “strike camp, and pack up things, and go on” (quoted in Worthen 2005: 277) – via Ceylon, and Australia, to New Mexico in search of a place that was “freer, less constricted, less industrial, less civilised” (Worthen 2005: 240). New Mexico would become “the place Lawrence had been looking for all his life” (Worthen 273), away from the degenerating effects of modernity in England and old Europe, where Lawrence could get beyond his Englishness.20 In the final part of this paper I want to approach Lawrence’s travel writing from a postcolonial perspective with the addition of 19

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For Lawrence see TI: 154 where industrialisation is “a process of dry disintegration”. Thanks to Patrick Parrinder for the idea that Lawrence gets beyond his Englishness in New Mexico.

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some ideas from Bakhtin and Lacan, drawing out some contradictions in that writing. 5. The Real of Travel: Landscape and the Other in the Field of Postcolonialism As I have been arguing, landscape in travel writing is an object of cultural knowledge. Foreign places are described by the traveller through the codes of landscape representation. This tends to have the effect of collapsing difference, even while desiring contact with the Other, of appropriating it into the same, so that a picturesque sunset will be recognised as a work of western art. Thus art paradigms give the English traveller in Italy a ready-made perspective and a descriptive language. A landscape in New Mexico is an anti-picturesque construction: not nature as the object of sublime contemplation in the European Romantic tradition, but a “savage” landscape. In Bakhtin’s terms, Lawrence’s chronotopic perspectives in Twilight in Italy, represented in his landscapes, combine “adventure time” and “quest time”: the traveller witnesses and records cultural diversity, but laments the collapse of real difference which he blames on the process of sameness caused by modernity. Nevertheless, the foreign culture is an inferior version of England, destined to make all the same mistakes. Lawrence embarks on travel to find a place where he can live a more instinctive life apart from modernity, where he can be himself. Once disappointed, he will travel to the next hopeful destination. It is not that Lawrence does not attempt to understand difference from his perspective as visitor, outsider, even intruder. He defines the contact zone as that place “where the life of strange creatures and beings flickers on us and makes it take strange new developments” (Lawrence 1967: 345). Estrangement is a key term here, because Otherness is always recognised and acknowledged but never really known: When I stand with another man, who is himself, and when I am truly myself, then I am only aware of a presence, and of the strange reality of Otherness. There is me, and there is another being […] There is only this strange recognition of present otherness. (Lawrence quoted by Chaudhury 2003: 181-182)

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Early on in Twilight in Italy Lawrence observes an old woman spinning, and what attracts him is that she takes no notice of his presence while she works unselfconsciously, and from this he draws the conclusion that “there is something which is unknown to me and which nevertheless exists […] that world is not my world. I can only know there is that which is not me. I am the microcosm, but the macrocosm is that which is not me.” (TI: 22-24)21 Otherness is a positive term when first expressed in the novel, Women in Love: “For she was to him what he was to her, the immemorial magnificence of mystic, palpable, real otherness.” (Lawrence 1995: 320) However, later, in a letter to Lady Cynthia Asquith (30 April 1922) from Ceylon Lawrence writes: “you don’t catch me going back on my whiteness and Englishness and myself” (Lawrence 1997b: 239). Here the Other is a less positive term by implication as Lawrence echoes the colonialist fear of “going native”. Encounter with the indigenous Other is not a transformative experience at all as it should be, according to Bakhtin, in “quest time”. And by the time Lawrence has travelled to Australia and Mexico, the Other has become a threat: the Australian bush is an evil force (“He felt it was watching, and waiting”, Lawrence 1997c: 14), and the native Mexican, in Neil Roberts’ words, “an unbridgeable difference” (2004: 19).22 In Lawrence’s essay on Fennimore Cooper the native American landscape has a powerful disintegrating influence upon the white psyche […] The American landscape has never been at one with the white man […] the very landscape, in its very beauty, seems a bit devilish and grinning, opposed to us. (Lawrence 1971b: 55-61)

The Other is not only observed but is watching you. The subject position of the traveller is being redefined as an object of curiosity for the native gaze:

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A key question of Cambridge philosophy in the early twentieth century is that the world exists whether I perceive it or not. For a thorough discussion of the epistemology debate in Modernism see Banfield 2000. This discussion of otherness draws on some of the ideas in Roberts’ study.

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Thinly disguised as a fictional account of the Lawrences arriving in Australia, and making good use of a free indirect style to mimic the Aussie speech, Lawrence captures the moment of the traveller being seen as Other by the local inhabitant. Pretending indifference is a strategy to defend an inviolable sense of identity against the critical gaze of the Other. Returning the gaze is a gesture of defiance. It is also a conflict among men in a chauvinistic battle of masculine wills and superiority that captures the classic colonial encounter. This feeling of being jeered at by the natives recurs throughout Lawrence’s travel writing and fiction. It follows, as Neil Roberts argues, that “when difference (for example sexual or cultural) is experienced as Otherness, any genuine engagement is foreclosed, but the encounter will be of intense if unacknowledged unconscious significance” (2004: 24).23 The encounter in the contact zone can only be one of misrecognition. By the end of Twilight in Italy, on “The Return Journey”, Lawrence describes the prospect from the top of a hill overlooking Lake Zurich: I could not bear to look at it [...] I had a feeling as if it were false, a large relief-map that I was looking down upon, and which I wanted to smash. It seemed to intervene between me and some reality. I could not believe that that was the real world. It was a figment, a fabrication, like a dull landscape painted on a wall, to hide the real landscape. (TI: 145) 23

This follows Lacanian thinking that “the unconscious is the discourse of the Other” (1995: 193).

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But what is “the real landscape”? The “real” here reads like the Lacanian “real of desire”, which came to mean something like the effects of the imaginary in the symbolic, as both traumatic trace or symptom: The place of the real […] stretches from the trauma to the phantasy – in so far as the phantasy is never anything more than the screen that conceals something quite primary, something determinant in the function of repetition. (Lacan 1995: 60)

The real, in this sense, is to be distinguished from reality, because it is what is revealed in the text in “distortions of the accurate representation of reality” (Žižek 2000: 79). Driven by the desire for the encounter with the cultural Other, Lawrence constructs the real of landscape. It is in this sense a misrecognition, an Imaginary text revealing an unconscious wish-fulfilment. Thus the real expresses itself as a failed encounter with the reality of the Other (cf. Lacan 1995: 53), because “the real” is “the accomplice of the drive” (Lacan 1995: 69). The real of place for Lawrence is the “spirit of place”: Every continent has its own great spirit of place. Every people is polarised in some particular locality, which is home, the homeland. Different places on the face of the earth have different vital effluence, different vibration, different chemical exhalation, different polarity with different stars: call it what you like. But the spirit of place is a great reality. (Lawrence 1971b: 12)

We might ask how you can know the spirit of place. Presumably by intuition: you can sense it by simply being there. But can you get beyond the real of desire for travel and encounter to the so-called reality of the place? And if the reality of that other culture is spatial and spiritual at the same time, it is hardly surprising that Lawrence locates native individuals in their cultural space. For example, the Mexican landscape is represented as a “psychic condition” in The Plumed Serpent;24 the bush in Australia is “biding its time with a terrible ageless watchfulness, waiting for a far-off end, watching the myriad intruding white men” (Lawrence 1997c: 15) – reminding us of the African jun24

A point made by Michael Bell 1992: 170, and discussed by Roberts 2004: 123.

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gle watching that other fantastic invasion in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In “The Crucifixes Across the Mountains”, which opens the collection Twilight in Italy, Lawrence describes the crucifixes he sees by the roadside in the Bavarian Alps on his way South: The crucifixes are there, not mere attributes of the road, yet still having something to do with it. The imperial processions, blessed by the Pope and accompanied by the great bishops, must have planted the holy idol like a new plant among the mountains, there where it multiplied and grew according to the soil, and the race that received it. (TI: 3)

In both travel writing and fiction, as Michael Bell has argued, there is “continuity between the landscape and a given psychic quality. In both modes he combines literal geographical observation with psychic symbolism” (Bell 1992: 171). Lawrence appears to be psychoanalysing the landscape as the projection of a perceived collective cultural unconscious: This is what is so attractive about the remote places, the Abruzzi, for example. Life is so primitive, so pagan, so strangely heathen and half savage. And yet it is human life. And the wildest country is half humanised […] Wherever one is in Italy, either one is conscious of the present, or of the mediaeval influences, of the far, mysterious gods of the early Mediterranean. Wherever one is, the place has its conscious genus. Man has lived there and brought forth his consciousness there and in some way brought that place to consciousness, given it its expression, and, really, finished it […] So that for us to go to Italy […] Strange and wonderful chords awake in us […]. (Sea and Sardinia in Lawrence 1997a: 123)

The “real landscape” for Lawrence is the imagined one, driven by desire, constructed through western cultural paradigms of the picturesque, the sublime, and the savage, and symptomatic of the brighter mood of the observer at the start – or dawn – of his travels. The compulsion to repeat the primal scene of a new cultural space, abroad, and beyond modernity is what Freud called, “die Idee einer anderer Lokalität, the idea of another locality, another space, another scene, the [space] between perception and consciousness” (Lacan 1987: 56). For Lawrence, understanding otherness requires the extinction of self: “The Indian way of consciousness is different from and fatal to

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our way of consciousness. Our way of consciousness is different from and fatal to the Indian […] And we can understand the consciousness of the Indian only in terms of the death of our consciousness.” (Lawrence 1986: 53)25 Mary Louise Pratt traces the “imperial imaginary” in the signifying practices of travel writing (2003: 4-5), where questions of race and gender emerge. The key critical term here is “transculturation”, which happens in the “contact zone”, and which is defined as that “space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict” (Pratt 2003: 6). It is transculturation because it requires a new improvised language on the colonial frontier to trade and assert the asymmetrical relationship between cultures as the coloniser establishes his innocence at the same time as his hegemony. The European male subject sees the foreign landscape through “imperial eyes”, even when an enlightenment traveller. How much transculturation is there in Lawrence’s travel writing, when he claims he wants “to come into contact with other worlds” (Lawrence 1967: 343)? Even in his early travels to the peasant cultures of the Mediterranean, to what extent does he represent difference as cultural superiority, as in the conventions of British writing of the period? Following Pratt’s example, we might look at Lawrence’s twin concern with race and gender in his quest for a new masculinity, and, I would add, a revived potency. Dollimore calls this an “aesthetics of energy” whereby “human desire is revitalized and rescued from a social decadence […] Lawrence, like other modernists, was attracted by potency in proportion to his conviction that the energies of the modern world were failing.” (1998: 259) Lawrence’s masculine quest itself appears as phallic desire: So that for us to go to Italy and to penetrate into Italy, is like a most fascinating act of self-discovery – back, back down the old ways of time. Strange and wonderful chords awake in us, and vibrate again af-

25

This example is also discussed in Roberts 2004: 32.

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The desire behind Lawrence’s quest for an authentic masculinity beyond modernity and western feminism seems, necessarily, directed towards the misrecognised object. This ranges in his work from the idealised mountain peasant of the early travel writing to the morally questionable native Other in the novel, The Plumed Serpent, where Lawrence’s “white psyche” fractures his perception. These regimes of looking are more revealing of the looker than the terrain of the visible. One recurrent example in Twilight in Italy of the object of the traveller’s regime of looking is the male body. John Worthen writes about Lawrence’s “specific attraction to a man’s body” throughout his writing (2005: 172-3).26 Whether it is the Bavarian mountain peasant or the Italian equivalent around Lake Garda or, later, on Sardinia, the figure in the landscape is, necessarily for Lawrence, “remote, out of contact” with modern civilisation. (TI: 3) He has a purely physical, unself-conscious blood relationship with the land, exemplary of an ancient unchanging way of life, prefigured in the Brangwen farmers working the land in the opening pages of the novel, The Rainbow. Indeed, the paratactic style drawn from Biblical paradigm serves to enact the oneness of the peasant farmer with the soil, enforcing a “blood and soil” racial ideology: The body bent forwards towards the earth, closing round on itself: the arms clasped full of hay, clasped round the hay that presses soft and close to the breast and the body, that pricks heat into the arms, and the skin of the breast, and fills the lungs with the sleepy scent of dried herbs […] It is this, this endless heat and rousedness of physical sensation which keeps the body full and potent, and flushed the mind with a blood heat, a blood sleep […] It is the life and the fulfilment of the peasant, this flow of sensuous experience. (TI: 4-5)27

This purely physical sense of being, living only in the sensate body, is of course a limitation – admired but not ultimately serving as ontological paradigm for the perceived cultural crisis. It acts as a foil for 26 27

Worthen insists that “attraction was not the same as desire”. See for comparison The Rainbow (1995a: 10) where the Brangwen men farmers work the land and feel “the pulse and the body of the soil”, and so on.

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the limitations of its opposite: the modern, self-conscious, cynical being, where the life of the mind denies the life of the body. In the “carved Christs” – the crucifixes in the mountains – are the first images of the male body, tormented (TI: 11). In San Gaudenzio, Lawrence observes the local men dancing with each other, focusing on the “vigorous” masculine body (TI: 99), a pan-like masculinity. Here, Lawrence embellishes his gender essentialism with the mythologising of the man (TI: 107-8). The conclusion, though, is one that is recurrent in Lawrence after the idealising moment: that, “there was nothing between us except our complete difference. It was like night and day flowing together.” (TI: 109) But this is mingled with a modern restlessness with the old culture in the character of Il Duro himself, and also a diminished masculinity in the man who has succumbed to the call of the West. His “elemental” being now shaken by his degradation as migrant worker in his “sordid American clothes” as he is about to return to the USA, “belonging in his final desire to our world, the world of consciousness and deliberate action [...] he seemed like a prisoner being conveyed from one form of life to another, or like a soul in trajectory, that has not yet found a resting-place” (TI: 119). And here we see Lawrence’s own sympathies for the traveller uprooting, going abroad to an uncertain future – as in his own case, migration carrying with it more than a sense of changing places. It becomes in Lawrence a challenge to our sense of being – an ontological hybridisation; which, in the case of the Italian male peasant is a loss, a process of disintegration. Lawrence soon realises, however, that the exclusive “preoccupation with the physical was just as limiting as the northern gratification of the mind” (Tracy 1983: 14). What is waiting for the pre-modern peasant is exemplified in the Englishman Lawrence meets at an inn in the Alps on “The Return Journey”: he represents the “machine principle”: I could feel so well the machine that had him in its grip. He slaved for a year, mechanically, in London, riding in the tube, working in the office. Then for a fortnight he was let free. So he rushed to Switzerland, with a tour planned out. (TI: 150)

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The man is, of course, the ever despised tourist on his packaged holiday. Lawrence makes it clear that what has gone wrong with England is a premonition of the future for Italy: Yet what should become of the world? There was London and the industrial counties spreading like a blackness over all the world, horrible, in the end destructive. And the Garda was so lovely under the sky of sunshine, it was intolerable. Far away, beyond, beyond all the snowy Alps, with the iridescence of eternal ice above them, was this England, black and foul and dry, with her soul worn down, almost worn away. And England was conquering the world with her machines and her horrible destruction of natural life. She was conquering the whole world. (TI: 53)

6. Conclusion As I have been arguing in this paper, for Lawrence the condition of England is the paradigm of all that is wrong with modernity.28 It is the future of Italy, a future whose first stages are already visible in the landscape and the people. In this, Lawrence’s travel writing belongs to the contexts of Modernism and the crisis of modernity, but also to a continued and deep-seated sense of Englishness, in the age of Imperialism, which Lawrence – despite his rage against the limits of home – keeps as baggage on his journey around the world. This characterises the contradictions we find in Lawrence’s writing. There are racist and pro-colonialist comments, but also a questioning of Western values. In his writing life between 1917 and 1925 Lawrence attempted to engage with other cultures and their people in the hope of regenerating old Europe. But he does not seem to get beyond the prevailing colonialist discourses. He did believe that new landscapes could provide alternative ways of living. He is questioning the superiority of western civilisation, and its belief in progress. Yet, In the Memoir to Maurice Magnus (1922) he wrote: “One felt the splendour of the British Empire, let the world say what it likes.” He laments its decline, and this “view that the British Empire is weakening” is blamed on its decline in masculinity (quoted in Booth 2000: 209). Lawrence’s dis28

See Nyman (2000: 86-116) for a discussion of Lawrence’s construction of Italy.

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like of Ceylon, where the natives are described as “silly dark people” reads like the reactionary comments of a “beleaguered British imperialist” (Booth 2000: 210). At other times in his travels Lawrence continues to reinforce his theory that it is necessary to engage with the Other, even the non-European Other, to attempt to reverse the process of dissolution and decay, and get beyond his Englishness. But the conclusion seems unavoidable that it was impossible, as Howard Booth has argued, “to think and write in the modernist period wholly outside colonial and racist discourses” (Booth 2000: 219).

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Works Cited Primary References Lawrence, D.H. 1995a. The Rainbow [1915]. London: Penguin. ––. 1967. Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence (ed. Edward D. McDonald) [1936]. London: Heinemann. ––. 1971a. Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious [1921]. London: Penguin. ––. 1971b. Studies in Classic American Literature [1923]. London: Penguin. ––. 1984. Mr Noon (ed. Lindeth Vasey). Cambridge: Cambridge UP. ––. 1986. Mornings in Mexico [1927]. London: Penguin. ––. 1988. The Lost Girl [1920]. London: Penguin. ––. 1994. Lady Chatterley’s Lover [1928]. London: Penguin. ––. 1995b. Women in Love [1920]. London: Penguin. ––. 1995c. Women in Love [1920]. London: Penguin. ––. 1997a. D.H. Lawrence and Italy [1921]. London: Penguin. ––. 1997b. The Selected Letters of D. H. Lawrence (comp. and ed. James T. Boulton). Cambridge: Cambridge UP. ––. 1997c. Kangaroo [1923]. London: Penguin. Mann, Thomas. 1998. ‘Death in Venice’ in Death in Venice and Other Stories (transl. David Luke). London: Vintage.

Research Literature Bakhtin, M.M. 1994. ‘Forms of Time and the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes Towards a Historical Poetics’ [written 1937-1938] in Holquist, Michael (ed.) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: U of Texas P. Banfield, Ann. 2000. The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Bell, Michael. 1992. D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. ‘The Commitment to Theory’ in The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Booth, Howard J. 2000. ‘Lawrence in Doubt: A Theory of the “Other” and its Collapse’ in Booth, Howard J. and Nigel Rigby (eds) Modernism and Empire. Manchester: Manchester UP. Chaudhuri, Amit. 2003. D. H. Lawrence and Difference: Postcoloniality and the Poetry of the Present. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cosgrove, Denis and Stephen Daniels (eds). 2002. The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments [1988]. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Dollimore, Jonathan. 1998. Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture. London: Allen Lane. Freud, Sigmund. 1975. Civilisation and its Discontents [1930]. London: Hogarth Press.

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––. 1978. ‘A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis’ [1936] in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. XXII: 1932-1936 (transl. and ed. James Strachey) [1964]. London: Hogarth Press. Lacan, Jacques. 1987. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis [1973] (transl. Alan Sheridan). London: Penguin. ––. 1995. Ecrits: A Selection (transl. Alan Sheridan) [1966]. London: Routledge. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space [1974]. Oxford: Blackwell. Michelucci, Stefania. 1997. ‘Introduction’ to Twilight in Italy and Other Essays [1994]. London: Penguin, 1997. ––. 2002. Space and Place in the Works of D. H. Lawrence (transl. Jill Franks) [1998]. Jefferson/NC.: McFarlane. Mitchell, W. J. (ed.). 22002. Landscape and Power [1994]. Chicago: U of Chicago P. Norquay, Glenda and Gerry Smyth (eds). 1997. Space and Place: The Geographies of Literature. Liverpool: John Moores UP. Nyman, Jopi. 2000. Under English Eyes: The Constructions of Europe in Early Twentieth-Century British Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Pratt, Mary Louise. 2003. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation [1992]. London: Routledge. Roberts, Neil. 2004. D. H. Lawrence, Travel and Cultural Difference. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Spengler, Oswald. 1991. [1918] The Decline of the West: An Abridged Edition (transl. Charles Francis Atkinson). Oxford: Oxford UP. Thacker, Andrew. 2003. Moving Through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism. Manchester: Manchester UP. Tracy, Billy T. 1983. D. H. Lawrence and the Literature of Travel. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Research P. Williams, Raymond. 1958. Culture and Society. London: Penguin. Worthen, John. 1991. D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885-1912. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. ––. 2005. D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider. London: Allen Lane. Žižek, Slavoj. 2000. The Žižek Reader (ed. Wright, Elizabeth and Edmond Wright). Oxford: Blackwell.

In Search of England: Travelogue and Nation Between the Wars Ben Knights Abstract: Focusing particularly on early travel writing by H.V. Morton and on J.B. Priestley’s English Journey, this paper argues that a search for authentic Englishness informs more than simply travel writing in the period after the 1914-18 war. Substantial cultural energy was devoted to reading the land for meanings. Ironically, the search for stability and authenticity was conducted through the very technologies that were held to be undermining locality, particularity, and difference. Travel literature is thus ambivalently placed between celebrating continuity and colluding in the very standardisation it lamented. In the inter-war period, a common set of beliefs and values informed both ‘in search of England’ narratives and the rise of English Studies. In particular, the modernist practice of literary criticism was deeply influenced by conceptions of the organic community, continuity, and the craft tradition. Key names and concepts: H.V. Morton - J.B. Priestley; Continuity - Difference English Studies - Guide Books - Individualism - Modernity - Motoring - Narrative Encounter - Nation - Organic Community - Rural England - Speed - Standardisation Touring - Tourism - Tourist Gaze - Travel Literature.

A writer on England to-day addresses himself to a wider and a more intelligent public than ever before. And the reason is …that never before have so many people been searching for England. (Morton 1929: vii) We kept to the fields and copses and commons, and breathed the same sweet air as the nibbling donkeys and the browsing sheep, whose woolliness seemed to me, in those early days of acquaintance with English objects, but a part of the general texture of the small dense landscape …. Everything was full of expression for [the] visitor – from the big, bandy-legged geese, whose whiteness was a ‘note’, amid all the tones of green, as they wandered beside a neat little oval pool, the foreground of a thatched and whitewashed inn, with a grassy approach and a pictorial sign – from these humble wayside animals to the crests of high woods which let a gable or a pinnacle peep here and there …. I was forever stopping to say how charming I thought the

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Ben Knights thread-like footpaths across the fields, which wandered, in a diagonal of finer grain, from one smooth stile to another. Mark Ambient was … as much entertained with my observations as I was with the literary allusions of the landscape. (James 1999: 888) Vince is walking across the field to where it starts to slope steeply, his red tie flicking like a tongue over his shoulder. It’s not so much a field as an open hillside. We can see the full sweep of the view, like we’re standing on the rim of a big, crooked bowl. Down in the valley it’s all green and brown and patchy, woods marked off with neat edges and corners, hedges like stitching. There’s a splodge of red brick in the middle with a spire sticking up. It looks like England, that’s what it looks like …. (Swift 1996: 145)

1. Writing the Land When in 1956, the year of the Suez crisis, Kazuo Ishiguro’s butler Stevens sets off on his motor tour, his guide is the pre-war The Wonder of England by one Jane Symons (see 1989: 11 and 231). While Mrs Symons’ volumes are unknown to the British Library Catalogue, the English travelogue was a popular genre, analogous in many ways to the gazetteers and companions of the early railway age. Closely related to the Guide Books which proliferated from the late nineteenth century (e.g. Baedeker, Michelin), and fuelled by an exponential rise in car ownership, some quasi-literary itineraries attained best seller status. While Ishiguro’s allusion to the ‘great good place’ of the country house has its Jamesian dimension (see Kelsall 1993), his astute allusion to the travelogue genre captures the subject of this paper: the literariness of travel and the national topographic urges of literature. Throughout, I would like as it were to keep two windows open, moving between the historically local subject matter and some wider questions about travel writing framed through the lenses (among others) of John Urry on The Tourist Gaze (1990) and Consuming Places (1995), and Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s pioneering 1977 study of the phenomenology of rail travel (1986). So, underlying these more historically specific notes, run ideas about the guided tour: ideas to do with learning how to read a landscape and a land as text, about who is the guide in that process and of who are the addressees of such discourses. I am concerned with the movement of topographies between

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the realistic and symbolic dimensions, and the principles of discursive selection at work. Thus for example a core concern will be with the transaction – basic to any study of literary spaces or the conversion of denotative discourse into literariness – between metonymy and metaphor, and the tendency of the first to slide into the second. Not that writers themselves were unconscious of this process. Here is J.B. Priestley in the East Durham pit village of Shotton, where the spoil heap dominated his attention. He moves out of the descriptive mode to ruminate: If I had been completely alone when I saw it I should be accusing myself of creating a weird Shotton fantasy, as a symbol of greedy, careless, cynical, barbaric industrialism …. Imagine then a village … at the base of what looked at first like an active volcano. … There must have been a lot of labour put into the ground and a lot of wealth taken out of it before that “tip” began to darken the sky and poison the air. (1934: 336-37)

Examining Lawrence’s story “England my England” David Lodge long ago made the observation that this is “a mode of writing that is continually turning its realistic particulars into symbols and its descriptive metaphors into thematic ones” (1979: 167). It is an insight that applies to other seekers for England, and I suggest that in the genre discussed here the metonymic is always poised on the cusp of the metaphoric, details always about to shade into the avatar of a larger truth. The exponent of that truth is a narrator guide whose interpretative role in some important respects parallels the mobile and classificatory gaze of the narrator of realist fiction. This was a parallel not lost on George Eliot (herself after all a reader of Wilhelm Heinrich von Riehl whose Natural History of the German People she reviewed for the Westminster Review). The opening of Felix Holt (1866) deploys the figure of the exemplary coachman who, after cursing the railway, “would soon relapse from the high prophetic strain to the familiar one of narrative …” (1995: 8) – a gossipy narrative which zooms in to provide the starting place of the novel. Epic narrative, locality, and speed come together in her narrator’s words. Memory, narrative, and nation are intertwined: Posterity may be shot, like a bullet through a tube, by atmospheric pressure from Winchester to Newcastle: that is a fine result to have among our hopes; but the slow old-fashioned way of getting from one

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In this metaphorical set, travel is identified not just with narrative but with articulate, discriminating speech itself. The discourse of the tourist narrator simulates face-to-face orality as it seeks to invoke Englishness in the reader. This paper will examine some instances of the travelogue genre, in particular the early writings of Henry Canova Vollam (H.V.) Morton (1892-1979) (In Search of England 1927, The Call of England 1928, I Saw Two Englands 1942). To a lesser extent I shall also examine (as a cross reference) the English Journey (1934) of the playwright and critic J.B. Priestley. Such travelogues became an important element in a post-1918 re-affirmation of the identity of ‘Britain’ (and more specifically ‘England’)1 as heritage and as a sequence of spaces scored with the histories whose meanings and pathos might be read by the informed traveller. When the public really feels that these signposts along the road which the English people have followed in the course of their development are not mere dead shells of the past but a living inspiration to the present … and that they possess a personal interest to them as part of a common racial heritage, then we shall have advanced a long way. (1929: viii)

The tour becomes a form of narrative which integrates the nation. At the same time it occupies a contradictory position in relation to locality whose degeneration before the forces of modernity the guide is simultaneously apt to lament.

1

There is an instructive parallel with the post-second world war Festival of Britain Guides About Britain edited by Geoffrey Grigson and published in 1951, which as ‘guides to the living Britain’ similarly sought to re-integrate the country through the synoptic eye of the informed traveller. For a helpful unpicking of the nomenclature Britain / England, see the opening chapter of Davies 1999.

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The new mobility and the physical speed of touring both attenuate difference, and enable the synoptic gaze of the traveller (see Urry 1990 and 1995). It is the narrator of E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) who remarks: “Did not a gentleman once motor so fast through the Westmoreland that he missed it? … [Hertfordshire is] scarcely intended for motorists.” (1998: 142) The itinerary thus both celebrates the newfound freedom of the motor-borne tourist and seeks to rationalise this hedonistic experience as a homage to land and heritage. As will be clear from Stephan Kohl’s paper in this volume, we must relate the rise of English travel literature not only to the rise of the touring guide book in the late nineteenth century but also to the rise of motor travel and touring. To summarise briefly: between 1919 and 1939 the number of motor vehicles in Britain multiplied by three (330,518 to 3,148,600), and cars by 20 (109,715 to 2,034,000). The motor industry pioneered systems of mass production which took Britain to being the second largest producer of cars in the world (after the United States) by the early 1930s. Pressed steel bodies and the rapidly popular saloon tourer became available from 1926. At the same time it is worth remembering that at the end of our period there was still only one car to 24 people. Motoring remained, as Harold Perkin (1976) points out, very much a middle and upper class amenity. Nevertheless, the car whether as reality or as aspiration impacted on the self image of the middle classes (McKibbin 1998). One effect of the rise of the motor car was to place the individual, the couple, or the family group at the centre of experience of travel. Then as now the celebration of the car embedded negative attitudes to public transport …. “[T]he motor car has restored the romance of travel” begins Edith Wharton’s 1908 Motor-Flight Through France. This was the case whether, like Wharton, you relied on Cook the chauffeur, or, like Kenneth Grahame’s Mr Toad, aspired to drive yourself: ‘Glorious, stirring sight!’ murmured Toad, never offering to move. ‘The poetry of motion! The real way to travel! The only way to travel! Here to-day – in next week to-morrow! Villages skipped, towns and cities jumped – always somebody else’s horizon! O bliss! O pooppoop! O my! O my!’ ‘O stop being an ass, Toad!’ cried the Mole despairingly. ‘And to think I never knew!’ went on the Toad in a dreamy monotone. ‘All those wasted years that lie behind me …. But now ….

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The railway by contrast was contaminated with industrialism – from the routes it followed, to the collective experience of travel itself. Sean O’Connell quotes the magazine Autocar (1929): “public transport, no matter how fast and comfortable, inflicts a sensation of serfdom which is intolerable to a free Briton” (1998: 79). And Morton, somehow contriving to conflate motoring with Walter Scott-like romantic adventure, asserts that the “roads of England, eclipsed for a century by the railway, have come to life again; the King’s highway is once more a place for adventures and explorations ….” (1929: vii). The car provided an industrialised mode of transport which could so to speak suppress the conditions of its own production. Motoring and the motor itinerary are steeped in the ideology of individualism. 2. In Search of England H.V. Morton’s In Search of England which I shall use as my core text was first published 1927.2 Whether or not we accept the perhaps hyperbolic claim of the Morton Society website that it is “the best-loved travel book of the 20th Century”, it certainly pioneered the genre (12 editions by 1936) and went on being re-issued after the War.3 As Valentine Cunningham has pointed out, the genre also has strong affinities with the realist novel. As he has noted, “30s writing ‘was obsessed by the topography of England” (1988: 226). The motoring tour genre rapidly became popular. In 1934 the Shell Guide to the Counties of England began publication, under the general editorship of John Betjeman whose own guide to Cornwall was also the first volume. 2

3

The book was based on a tour undertaken in 1926 in Morton’s Bullnose Morris which he called Maud. It is perhaps no coincidence that this trip (originally undertaken for Express Newspapers) took place in the year of the General Strike. The British Library lists the 39th edition in 1949, and even a 1960 Penguin edition. It has been suggested that George Orwell’s 1939 novel Coming Up For Air is an intertext with Morton’s book (London Review of Books 21 April 2005).

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The task Morton sets himself in the presence of his reader followers was one of interpreting the land – reading off the pathos of place from its landscapes and monuments. The analogy with pilgrimage is one that Morton frequently makes himself, for example his passages on Stratford upon Avon and on Glastonbury (see Urry 1995:144-45). Industry is on the whole occluded, though he did to some extent redress this balance in the later volume The Call of England.

‘A Lane in England’. Frontispiece to H.V. Morton. 1927. In Search of England.

The England for which Morton and implicitly his readers were searching was rural, or small town, an England of thatched cottages, market towns and cathedral closes, its centre of gravity in the Georgian South

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Country of Richard Jefferies, Edward Thomas, and the ruralists. It is a vision of England manifested and fed by sources as various as Cecil Sharp’s scholarship of folk songs, the country dancing movement, the illustrations of Helen Allingham, the garden design of Gertrude Jekyll, and the music of Edward Elgar and Ralph Vaughan Williams.4 This synoptic and almost spiritualized vision points forward to Edmund Blunden’s English Villages (1941) and The Face of England (1932). Even when Morton got to the North he found that the real North (which, he maintained, the South misunderstood) “remains one of the most historically romantic and naturally beautiful divisions of England”, industry a mere “scratch on the landscape” (1929: 207). In the writings discussed here, an aesthetic construction of Englishness becomes a point of reference and a norm. Priestley ruminates on East Durham: The country itself was very queer …. It did not seem like an English landscape at all. You could easily imagine that a piece had been lifted out of the dreary central region of some vast territory like Russia or America, and dropped on to this corner of our island. (1934: 335)

Beneath all this lurks a degeneration thesis that links Morton and his followers back to the 1890s and the world in which Baden-Powell was formed. The rural embodies and engenders racial strength. A “virile and progressive nation is that which can keep pace with the modern industrial world and at the same time support a contented and flourishing peasantry.” “The ‘Back to the land cry’ is a perfectly sound instinct of racial survival”. (1929: ixx) This he has in common with none other than T.S. Eliot who proposed that agriculture is “the foundation of the good life in any society; it is in fact the normal life” (Cunningham 1988: 231). We need however to remember that in the years on either side of the Great War this position was not the sole prerogative of the political right. As Howkins notes in his essay “The Discovery of Rural England”, one form or another of ‘back to the land assumptions’ spread across all political parties and groupings in the years before the First World War (see 1986: 67-69).

4

The 1920s also saw a revival of the painting of Samuel Palmer following a retrospective exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1926, the same year as Morton’s journey. See Vaughan 2005: 15 and 56.

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For this sort of journey a guide is indispensable if the putative traveller is to see beyond the surface of things. Let us turn to the nature of the narrative and the narrative pose. The word ‘guide’ itself is ambiguous, and both Morton and Priestley cultivate a quasi-oral mode of address. The narrator, the person who explains, is leader, guide, or indeed surrogate for viewer. Just as much as a contemporary travel writer like Bill Bryson, both construct a persona through paratactic detail (see Bryson 1996). Morton (like Priestley and Blunden) was both factually and by narrative stance a returning soldier – some one who had not stayed behind to furnish a pinch of English dust to the corner of “some foreign field”. Perhaps in instinctive contrast to the cold unhappy mountains of Palestine there rose up in my mind the picture of a village street at dusk with a smell of wood smoke lying in the still air and, here and there, little red blinds shining in the dusk under the thatch. (1929: 1-2)

Paul Fussell has powerfully documented the literariness and pastoral nature of the ‘England’ of the soldiers’ anthologies and keepsakes (1975: chapter 7). Morton’s England, too is an ‘Arcadian recourse’. He deals in impressions, anecdote, legend, and entertains a humorous contempt for archaeology and history – always in his view prosaically apt to spoil a good yarn. A recurrent motif is Morton’s dislike of those “who say that her ladyship never rode naked through Coventry and that Alfred never burnt the cakes, those nosey, confounded archaeological busybodies …” (1930: 6). His procedure is to garner impressions. Thus on Bath: “I am too tired and lazy to look up the files to find out details.” (1929: 139) The implicit stance is that of the novelist: the narrator’s imagination and informed sensibility are so to speak truer guides than those produced by amassing facts. In turn, the selfconscious, garrulous narrator provides a role model for the reader who would truly understand England. Above all the traveller is free to be alone with his thoughts. In the later volume, The Call of England, this thread develops into a sketch for a Wordsworthian theory of the social self as being inauthentic and in need of renewal through solitary travel: One grave error of civilization is that we are seldom allowed to be alone. Our thoughts and our expressions are never quite our own. We

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Travel, remarked Roland Barthes “according the Blue Guide is thus revealed as a labour-saving adjustment, the easy substitute for the morally uplifting walk” (1972: 74). But of course at another level the lone venture is inescapably social. A recurrent motif is one of encounters. Memorable encounters have remained a central organising motif of travel writing from The Pilgrim’s Progress via Wordsworth in “Leech Gatherer” mode to Bruce Chatwin. Such encounters bring the narrator face-to-face with an unsuspected truth and hint as they do in Songlines at ancient continuities, and a potentially spiritualised landscape. Morton’s journeys are organised around significant meetings, frequently opened with the proleptic “He was standing ….”. Not least among these are the ubiquitous fleeting visions of lovely girls – so insistent a motif that one speculates about a neo-Darwinian, eugenicist, interpretation of the roving male’s exogamous quest. At all events they tend to suggest that the implied reader and therefore representative tourist is a heterosexual male. Another variant is Morton’s tourist ‘other’: the Americans whom he meets everywhere, and who in their different incarnations of folly or – occasionally – wisdom become a sort of foil for him as informed traveller. Organised around a linear sequence of encounters and revelations, narrative in the travel genre presents a particular formal problem in respect of endings. There is no inherent as opposed to pragmatic reason why a cumulative succession of visits, events and vignettes should ever stop. This is a formal problem with which W.G. Sebald in his own English journey, The Rings of Saturn, was still working in the 1990s, his solution something like the Joycean epiphany. Morton’s endings come as close to epiphanic revelation as the form will allow. This is especially the case with the final encounter of In Search of England, his meeting with the wise vicar. “I met him in the churchyard” (1929: 273). All these impressions and the loosely associative journey actually lead towards a form of narrative closure that endows what preceded with a shape. The country church, the wise old man, the spiritual father of his timeless village community generate a sacramental significance. Dining at the vicarage, author and clergymen create their own ceremony.

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We held the wine to the candlelight, bowed slightly to one another and drank. I thought that I had never seen a finer picture than this kind, experienced face in the glow of the two candles, the dark oak panelling behind his white head ….’ (1929: 277-8)

If this is a quest narrative of sorts, the country churchyard is where the quest ends. “I took up a handful of earth and felt it crumble and run through my fingers …. ‘You have England’, I said.” (1929: 280)5 3. English Journey The pastoral quest does not always lead to utopia. It was always possible for the travelogue format to articulate a darker, more contradictory, even dystopian vision. Mutations of the search of England theme include Priestley’s book, itself an ancestor of George Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier, and continue on into Morton’s own later I Saw Two Englands (1942). With Priestley the returned soldier motif recurrently expands into a metaphor of war – a metaphor which he passed on to the wartime architects of the Welfare State. Here he contemplates East Durham: “In these unhappy districts there is a war on, and the allied enemies are poverty, idleness, ignorance, hopelessness and misery.” (1934: 325) There is very clearly a tension here between myth (in the dehistoricised sense of Roland Barthes) and Priestley’s historical vision. The ‘England’ of the subject is actually a conflicted domain, where the labour and wealth of the north is being exploited and drained by the wealthy of the south. The passage on Shotton quoted earlier carries on to give rise to a piece of animism which owes as much to Marx as to Dickens: There must have been a lot of labour put into the ground and a lot of wealth taken out of it before that “tip” began to darken the sky and poison the air. I stared at the monster … and thought of all the fine things that had been conjured out of it in its time, the country houses and town houses, the drawing rooms and dining rooms, the carriages and pairs, the trips to Paris, the silks and jewels, the peaches and ice puddings, the cigars and old brandies; I thought I saw them all tum5

Again, this moment resonates with Eliot’s ‘nourishing’ “the life of significant soil” (T.S. Eliot 1969: 190).

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Priestley has much more in common than Morton with the social investigators and condition of England novelists of the 1840s and 1850s. His cumulative judgment moves towards shocking readers into a social and political rather than merely an aesthetic response. England has “far more than its share of people who have regular incomes, people of independent and private means … [who] are probably yawning their heads off ….” I suggest that if some of these people would also realise there is a war on and that they too can do some bonny fighting in it, they would soon be busier and more useful and happier. And if any reader thinks this is a priggish suggestion, and that the writer of these chapters is rapidly turning himself into a prig as the book grows, I can only ask that reader … to make the same journey that I have done …. (1934: 325)

Offset against the industrial horrors is another, ideal England. In a tradition that goes back to Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Present (1843), a normative England, rooted in the deep past, has become a rhetorical device with which to incite readers to action. But in the books examined here hopelessness, poverty and squalor are not the only ills laid at the door of industrialism. 4. Standardisation Travel writing is perhaps by definition a celebration of difference. In the case of Morton much of that difference is embedded in a sense of all that is in the process of passing away. The plangency of decline is the motive of his search. Not that he pays much attention to the agricultural depression of the 1920s, being perhaps predictably more anxious about the break up of traditional estates. While I have used in a sense as Morton and Priestley as foils to each other, my own argument also requires me to note how much they also have in common. Both articulate a narrative of standardisation, about the loss of eccentricity, difference, the industrialisation of pleasure. For both, the ‘England’ that is passing away represents a domain above all of local particularity. This, it is important to stress, is also an argument about the standardisation of the human, and the spread by way of print culture and

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the new broadcast media of social mimesis. In the heart of Birmingham Morton found a commercial travellers’ hotel and its host, “Old John”: Modern critics say that Charles Dickens exaggerated. He did not. He lived in a world that had not heard of standardisation in men or material. What we now call eccentricity was in his day the normal expression of a man’s personality; it was an unself-conscious world; a world in which a man was not afraid of being himself. To-day, even in remote villages, outside influences react on a man and tend to whittle down personality to a common denominator ….(1930: 189)

This sense of the passing of an older, idiosyncratic England is of course widespread in writing of the period. This narrative of loss and disenchantment in turn became embedded in the post-1945 visions of those intellectual populists J.R.R. Tolkien and T.H. White. Both saw some form of ambiguous rescue as coming about through a male quest, one form or another of ‘the return of the King’: The travellers trotted on, and as the sun began to sink towards the White Downs far away on the western horizon they came to Bywater by its wide pool; and there they had their first really painful shock. This was Frodo and Sam’s own country, and they found out now that they cared about it more than any other place in the world. Many of the houses that they had known were missing. Some seemed to have been burned down. The pleasant row of old hobbit-holes in the bank on the north side of the Pool were deserted, and their little gardens that used to run down bright to the water’s edge were rank with weeds. Worse, there was a whole line of the ugly new houses all along the Pool Side, where the Hobbiton road ran close to the bank. An avenue of trees had stood there. They were all gone. And looking with dismay up the road towards Bag End they saw a tall chimney of brick in the distance. It was pouring out black smoke into the evening air. (Tolkien 1955: 283)

The lament for the passing of the ‘organic community’ and for a traditional world may – as we shall see in a moment – be heard across the domains of travel, fiction, and education. Even the faces are changing, muses Morton at a Devon market: An artist should go down to these country markets and make a record of the wonderful faces of the older generation … such mild blue eyes; such Falstaffian contours. The younger generation is different, less in-

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The reference to Shakespeare is all of a piece. For it is above all the industrialisation of pleasure that troubles both Morton and Priestley, as indeed it also troubled both D.H. Lawrence and F.R. Leavis. Coming away from Nottingham Goose Fair, Priestley reflected: I could not honestly feel that I had been attending a genuine popular festival. Not even a sensation of real gaiety remained with me … none of these new amusements, for the most part so passive and tepid, could be said to take the place of the old roaring saturnalia …. (1934: 148)

Blackpool depressed him even more. The problem was the Americanisation and mechanisation of culture: there is, too, a racial dimension to this diagnosis – his distaste for what he called the ‘negroid’ art of jazz. The entertainers are more calculating, their shows more standardised, and the audiences more passive. It has developed a pitiful sophistication – machine-made and not really English – that is much worse than the old hearty vulgarity. (1934: 267)

It is in Morton’s much more sophisticated and darker travel book I Saw Two Englands (1942), the record of journeys undertaken in 1939 and again in the early months of the War, that his convergence with Priestley can be clearly seen.6 He talks to a builder at work on a suburban house, and reflects: ‘Tooder’ may be deplorable or amusing, and it is easy to make fun of, but it seems to express a longing for something good and, above all, something English. In a better world our rulers and our educationalists would seek out the meaning of it, and if they found, as I think they might, that it expresses a turning away from a pitilessly mechanised age … they would see what could be done to deepen that instinct, to develop it and save it from the speculator. (1943: 65)

6

Note that contrary to the Disraelian impression given by the title, Morton’s ‘two Englands’ are those of pre-War and wartime.

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This lament over standardisation, the perceived loss of traditional culture, of eccentricity, and of local difference provides a route to a conclusion. 5. England and English Self-evidently, there is contradiction running through this genre, certainly in its more celebratory variants: it urges what Urry has called the romantic gaze upon an anonymous collectivity of readers (1995: 138-9). Further, it searches for authenticity, and residual pre-modern values through the very technology of modernity that – along with the wireless and the mass production of household goods – was breaking down the remote, the isolated, the local. The high cultural value placed upon the consumption of an almost imaginary traditional urban world encouraged the continual encroachment of modernity into that environment. The car’s role in this process was central, both symbolically and materially. (O’Connell 1998: 154)

The Morris car works at Cowley outside Oxford were the very opposite of both dreaming spires and wheelwright’s shop. The motor industry after all pioneered automated mass production, and filled the roads with its standardised products. Emerging from the traffic jam around Ambleside, Morton was moved to quote Wordsworth: “How sweet the solitudes will be tonight, I thought, as I kept my eye on the packed highway”. (1929: 191) Leisure travel itself was helping to generate that very standardisation whose absence the travel guide celebrated. Priestley was himself strongly aware of the paradox: To travel swiftly in a closed car, as so many of us do nowadays, is of course to cut oneself off from the same [sic – sane?] reality of the regions one passes through, perhaps from any sane reality at all. Whole leagues of countryside are only a roar and muddle outside the windows, and villages are only like brick-coloured bubbles that burst as we pass. Their life is temporarily as remote as the moon …. Our new, rapid, closed-in sort of travel has its sinister aspects, and here is one of them. When people moved slowly in their travel, there was time to establish proper communication with what was strange, to absorb, to adjust oneself. Now that we are whizzed about the world, there is no time for absorbing or adjusting. Perhaps it is for this reason that the

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Dwelling in the gaze could in the end only very approximately be reconciled with the compression of space needed to get to the viewpoint. We do not, as in different ways Schivelbusch and Stephen Kern have shown us, have to adopt a technological determinism to understand that the physical speed of journeying influences and structures perception. Narratives of mobility require as their reference point a counter narrative of stasis. Country people waiting at Shrewsbury bus stops encapsulate Morton’s exchange motif: The baskets which they brought to market are now full of other things – gramophone records and ribbons, wireless valves …. They stand patiently waiting for the homeward charabanc that has done more than anything since the railway train to alter English country life …. (1929: 180)

It is at this point that I want to suggest that Morton’s ‘cure for amnesia’ converges obliquely with that embedded in the post-war rise of English literary criticism. An appeal to an artisan tradition represented by George Sturt is ubiquitous in the writings of F.R. Leavis, Denys Thompson and their fellow editors of Scrutiny.7 As Francis Mulhern put it, “the sovereign topos of Leavisian discourse was precisely the continuity of Englishness” (1990: 253).8 In an argument to be developed in the primer Culture and Environment (1933), Denys Thompson made a case to which both travel writers and educationists could have subscribed. Instead of continuous organic life, we have organization – machine technology with a malignant emphasis of its own, progressing away from human ends. Where before man had a place in a desirable scheme, now as worker he is an easily replaceable component …. In the past, satisfying ways of living have grown out of the struggle with the natural environment … now men are pitted against each other in a 7

8

Sturt’s books, particularly The Wheelwright’s Shop (1923) and Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer (1907), and written under the name George Bourne, became foundation documents of English literary criticism. See the counter-argument made by Simon During in the same volume (Bhabha 1990: 138-153).

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squalid fight for survival in which art, religion and morality go by the board …. If the wheelwright’s shop was representative of the old, its destroyer and successor, the car, symbolizes the new civilization. It is the foundation of American prosperity, and typical of the stimulated pleasures to which machine workers are adapted; and in America … it has destroyed the family, reduced religion and radically altered social custom. (Thompson 1933: 8-9)

The rise of ‘English’ as an educational subject, and of Englishness as the goal of imaginative travel have much in common. The selfconscious literariness of Morton reaches out to hold hands with the recommendations of the contemporary Newbolt Report, The Teaching of English in England.9

‘Tooder’. Illustration (‘Stockbrokers Tudor’) from Osbert Lancaster. 1938. Pillar to Post: English Architecture Without Tears. London: Murray.

Of Frank Benson’s Stratford festivals and the revival of Shakespeare Morton wrote: “only through Stratford, the common meeting place of the English-speaking world, could we heal the pains of Industrialism and make England whole again.” (1929: 257). It might not surprise us that Morton should espouse a romantic nationalist view of Shakespeare and the literary heritage. But here at the end I would like to go 9

The Report was a foundational document for English Studies. Chaired by the patriotic poet Henry Newbolt, the Committee included the literary critics Arthur Quiller-Couch, Caroline Spurgeon, and Dover Wilson.

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one step further. Let me suggest that the pre-eminently ‘low-brow’ tradition I have been discussing also had more in common with the endeavours of the modernist guardians of high tradition than either party might have been comfortable with. Thus T.S. Eliot’s journal The Criterion became, in Valentine Cunningham’s words “a kind of house journal for the spokesmen of post-war British ruralism” (1988: 231). And Eliot’s own Four Quartets is perhaps in a sense an outcrop and re-working of the travel genre I have been discussing. …..In succession Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended, Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass. (1969: 177 [“East Coker”])10

In their search for the meaning of England, and their construction of narratives of homage, Morton and his like share a common history with English Studies. The mission of the travel writers overlaps with that of those other guides who struggled to preserve continuity and tradition through the educational medium of literary critical practice.

10

Compare Eliot’s poem ‘Defence of the Islands’ (1940) – written for the Ministry of Information after Dunkirk (T.S. Eliot 1969: 201).

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Works cited Primary References Betjeman, John (ed.). 1934. Cornwall Illustrated: In a Series of Views (Shell Guide). London: Architectural Press. Blunden, Edmund. 1932. The Face of England: In a Series of Occasional Sketches. London: Longmans Green. ––. 1941. English Villages (Britain in Pictures). London: Collins. Board of Education (ed.). 1921. The Teaching of English in England: Being the Report of the Departmental Committee Appointed ... to Inquire into the Position of English in the Educational System of England. London: HMSO. Bourne, George. 1907. Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer. London: Duckworth. Bryson, Bill. 1996. Notes from a Small Island [1995]. London: Black Swan. Carlyle, Thomas. 1918. Past and Present [1843] (ed. A.M.D. Hughes). Oxford: Clarendon. Eliot, George. 1995. Felix Holt, the Radical [1866] (ed. Lynda Mugglestone). London: Penguin. Eliot, Thomas Stearns. 1969. The Complete Poems and Plays. London: Faber. Forster, Edward Morgan. 1998. Howards End [1910] (ed. Paul B. Armstrong). New York: Norton. Grahame, Kenneth. 1993. The Wind in the Willows [1908]. London: Diamond. Grigson, Geoffrey (ed.). 1951. About Britain. London: Collins. Ishiguro, Kazuo. 1989. The Remains of the Day. London: Faber. James, Henry. 1999. ‘The Author of “Beltraffio” ’ [1884] in Complete Stories: 18741884 (ed. William Vance). New York: Literary Classics of the United States: 865-910. Leavis, Frank Raymond and Denys Thompson. 1933. Culture and Environment: The Training of Critical Awareness. London: Chatto & Windus. Morton, Henry Vollam. 1929. In Search of England [1927]. 9th ed. London: Methuen. ––. 1930. The Call of England [1928]. 5th ed. London: Methuen. ––. 1943. I Saw Two Englands: The Record of a Journey Before the War and After the Outbreak of War, in the Year 1939 [1942]. 4th ed. London: Methuen. Orwell, George. 1937. The Road to Wigan Pier. London: Gollancz. ––. 1990. Coming Up for Air [1939] (Twentieth-Century Classics). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Priestley, John Boynton. 1934. English Journey: Being a Rambling but Truthful Account of What One Man Saw and Heard and Felt and Thought During a Journey Through England During the Autumn of the Year 1933. London: Heinemann. Sebald, Winfried Georg. 1998. The Rings of Saturn (transl. Michael Hulse) [1995]. London: Harvill. Sturt, George. 1923. The Wheelwright’s Shop. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Swift, Graham. 1996. Last Orders. London: Picador. Thompson, Denys. 1933. ‘A Cure for Amnesia’ in Scrutiny 2.1. Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel. 1955. The Return of the King: Being the Third Part of the Lord of the Rings. London: Allen & Unwin.

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Wharton, Edith. 1995. A Motor-Flight Through France [1908] (Picador Travel Classics). London: Picador.

Research Literature Barthes, Roland. 1972. Mythologies [1957] (transl. Annette Lavers). London: Cape. Bhabha, Homi (ed.). 1990. Nation and Narration. London: Routledge. Cunningham, Valentine. 1988. British Writers of the 1930s. Oxford: Oxford UP. Davies, Norman. 1999. The Isles: A History. London: Macmillan. During, Simon. 1990. ‘Literature – Nationalism’s Other? The Case for Revision’ in Bhabha (1990): 138-153. Fussell, Paul. 1975. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford UP. Howkins, Alan. 1986. ‘The Discovery of Rural England’ in Robert Colls and Philip Dodd (eds) Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880-1920. London: Croom Helm: 62-88. Kelsall, Malcolm. 1993. The Great Good Place: The Country House and English Literature. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Kern, Stephen. 1983. The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Leavis, F.R. and Denys Thompson. 1933. Culture and Environment: The Training of Critical Awareness. London: Chatto and Windus. Light, Alison. 1991. Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars. London: Routledge. Lodge, David. 1979. Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature. London: Arnold. McKibbin, Ross. 1998. Classes and Cultures: England 1918-1951. Oxford: Oxford UP. Mulhern, Francis. 1990. ‘English Reading’ in Bhabha (1990): 250-264. O’Connell, Sean. 1998. The Car in British Society: Class, Gender and Motoring 1896-1939. Manchester: Manchester UP. Perkin, Harold. 1976. The Age of the Automobile. London: Quartet. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. 1986. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization and Perception of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century [1977] (transl. Anselm Hollo). Berkeley: U of California P. Urry, John. 1990. The Tourist Gaze. London: Sage. ––. 1995. Consuming Places. London: Routledge. Vaughan, William et al. 2005. Vision and Landscape. London: British Museum. Morton website: http://www.tameside.gov.uk/tmbc8/hv_morton.htm. Morton Society: http://members.optusnet.com.au/%7Ebillgoman/.

Illustrations: The author unsuccessfully tried to trace copyright holders, and would be grateful for any information.

Rural England: An Invention of the Motor Industries?1 Stephan Kohl Abstract: The link between rural landscapes and pastoral meaning was broken by the Modernist movement: at the beginning of the 20th century, literary landscape scenes ceased to exist as obvious affirmations of cosmic harmony and social justice. While modernist authors refused to give a new, more contemporary meaning to the signifier ‘Rural England’, guidebooks, written for motorists, seized the opportunity of delivering the comforting message that visiting the countryside was still a pleasant and useful activity. This article identifies the conservative social message of these texts, by analysing the literary strategies used in the process of creating an inter-war version of Rural England, and traces the social function of inter-war guidebook literature. Key names and concepts: Thomas Burke - Harold Clunn - Charles Bradley Ford - E. M. Forster - Charles Houghton - W. Somerset Maugham - Arthur Mee - H.V. Morton - R.A. Moss - Alexander Pope - J.B. Priestley - Edward Thomas - Evelyn Waugh H.G. Wells; Burrow’s Guidebooks - The Council for the Preservation of Rural England - Countryside - Modernism - The National Trust - Rural England

1. The Notion of Rural England 1.1. Rural England in Literature Ever since literature has existed, rural scenes have been used to make readers aware of the cosmic harmony to be detected, by the discerning observer, behind the irregular surfaces of nature. Thus, whenever classicist poetry presented its readers with rural scenes it emphasised the harmonious relationship between all the components of a landscape.2 Through images of well-ordered nature, this type of poetry also conveyed the message that the given structure of society also reflected a 1

2

An earlier version of this article (“Rural England in Moderne und Zwischenkriegszeit: Zur Nachgeschichte eines literarischen Konstrukts”) was published 1995 in Poetica 27: 374-395. See Pope’s “harmoniously confus’d” in his “Windsor Forest”: l. 14.

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divinely ordained plan of social hierarchies (cf. Turner 1979, Bermingham 1986, Battestin 1989, Everett 1994). However, these assumptions were eroded during the Victorian ‘age of doubt’, until, finally, for many writers the belief in a divine order was shattered under the impact of the scientific models of geology, biology, and physics as developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Consequently, when Modernism arrived landscape poetry as an affirmation of cosmic harmony and social justice had ceased to exist. Indeed, it was one of the more important functions of the modernist novel in Britain to make readers aware of the death of rural England as a site where divine order manifested itself. When modernist novels filled the signifier ‘Rural England’ with a new sense of the past, with myth or concepts of life, they first had to break the existing link between the sign ‘Rural England’ and its conventional meaning. Only then could the sign ‘Rural England’ be given a new meaning, and it is the purpose of this paper to trace the history of the process through which a new meaning for ‘Rural England’ was defined and propagated. However, as this article is interested in the popular new meaning of ‘Rural England’ it will not discuss the Modernists’ redefinitions, but the concept of ‘Rural England’ as developed in inter-war guidebook literature. In this article, attention is focused on prose as the analysis of narratives and non-fictional prose best reveals the various signifying processes relating to Rural England. Landscape poetry of the first part of the 20th century debated the fate of a literary convention, the Pastoral (cf. Seeber 1979: 125), and this discussion of a literary convention distorts a clear view of the history of the meaning of the signifier ‘Rural England’. In prose, however, the continued existence of the signifier ‘Rural England’ – a signifier which had, at first, no meaning – provides an opportunity for tracing the invention of new meaning and for determining the function of various types of prose in propagating this new meaning of ‘Rural England’. 1.2. ‘Rural England’ as a Signifier For this article, ‘Rural England’ is an aesthetically arranged combination of byroads, brooks, hedges, fields, small forests, thatched cottages and a few other ingredients. It is not the countryside, or nature, but a

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representation of the country, constructed from traditional material along conventional lines of combination. These representations of Rural England are landscapes arranged according to traditional rules and with well defined limits. In other words, they are signifiers in the context of a language the rules of which are known to painters and writers. But as the meaning of signifiers is determined by society, representations of nature do not have a natural meaning at all,3 rather, their meaning is open to redefinition by interested parties – as will be shown. 2. Rural England and Modernism 2.1. Notions of the Countryside in Early 20th-Century Britain As signifying processes reflect the needs and desires of society, a short survey of the public perception of the countryside at the beginning of the 20th century is needed before contemporaneous representations of Rural England can be analysed in more detail. In the years before the Great War, it was generally felt that the countryside suffered from alarmingly severe continuous depopulation (see Marsh 1982: 1-2). This impression, though, was not true (see Howkins 2003: 8-9) as it was based on the rather superficial observation that, for more than a century, people had been moving into towns and that, accordingly, the percentage of town dwellers had risen from 20% of the population in 1801 to 80% in 1911 (see Marsh 1982: 2; Howkins 1991: 9). Yet, it was only the relation of town dwellers to inhabitants of the countryside which had changed: in absolute terms, just as many people lived in the countryside early in the 20th century as had been living there early in the early 19th century. Nevertheless, people at the beginning of the 20th century were convinced that they were witnesses to a process which would, at its end, empty the countryside of people (see Howkins 1986). A sense of loss, then, pervaded discussions of the countryside, and various movements – as, for instance, the rapid expansion of the National Trust proves – were founded or given new life in order to oppose this development (see Loew 1989: 114). 3

Obviously, this discussion of landscape follows the pattern of cultural geography as set out in England by Daniels/Cosgrove 1988.

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The general notion of an empty rural space implied, theoretically at least, that one could now write about the countryside as an unknown territory: a rural landscape could be composed from various elements of the countryside without paying any attention to the traditional use of the land. In contrast to authors of earlier centuries, then, modernist novelists wrote about the countryside without taking any account of rural activities like farming, hunting, fruit growing etc. Combined with the freedom from the literary tradition of using country scenes as manifestations of a cosmic order, this led indeed to a vaguely defined and certainly empty signifier ‘Rural England’. 2.2. Literary Landscapes in Modernist Novels 2.2.1. The Dissolution of the Signifier ‘Rural England’ The notion of empty rural spaces corresponds for certain, in modernist novels, with literary strategies aimed at the destruction of the conventional signifier ‘Rural England’. In this context, one especially popular technique was to introduce protagonists who lacked any sense of place when looking at rural scenes. These characters fail to recognise the countryside as their English home space and thus literally lose their sense of direction. In Forster’s Howards End (1910), for instance, the English countryside is presented as a series of distorted subjective impressions, which are characterised as displacements. Thus, when Helen Schlegel surveys part of rural Southern England she is unable to make sense of it even in geographical terms: “Frome was forced inward towards Dorchester, Stour against Wimborne, Avon towards Salisbury, and over the immense displacement the sun presided [...].” (1973: 172) At this moment, Helen does not succeed in her attempt to re-establish what once was a well-known Rural England and is reduced to listing some village names vaguely reminiscent of the harmonious world of the past. In Howards End, then, the signifier ‘Rural England’ no longer exists. To a large degree, this disappearance is due to the novel perceptions provided by mechanical transport (see Matless 1998: 63-67): travelling by car reduces the countryside to a series of fleeting impressions, not solid enough to form a reliable sign:

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Though robbed of half its magic by swift movement, it [Shropshire] still conveyed the sense of hills […]. They began to quote from their respective handbooks while the motor carried them deeper into the hills. Curious these were rather than impressive, for their outlines lacked beauty, and the pink fields on their summits suggested the handkerchiefs of a giant spread out to dry. An occasional outcrop of rock, an occasional wood, and occasional ‘forest’, treeless and brown, all hinted at wildness to follow, but the main colour was an agricultural green. The air grew cooler; they had surmounted the last gradient, and Oniton lay below them with its church, its radiating houses, its river-girt peninsula. (209)

For the motorists, Rural England is reduced to forms (“outlines”, “handkerchiefs” etc.) and colours (“pink”, “brown”, “green”). Only at the end of their journey, when the vehicle slows down, do the travellers again have an awareness of the well known features of an English rural landscape. During the journey, then, the signifier ‘Rural England’ has, for them, the quality of a cubist painting at best, and it is certainly no longer able to carry a well-defined meaning. The motorists’ only attempt at a definition of the scene does not rise above the level of childhood analogies as their comparison of fields with ‘handkerchiefs, spread out by giants’, proves. Even consulting their guidebooks fails to restore their sense of place. In Howards End, Rural England makes its appearance as a series of highly personal fleeting impressions. It certainly is no longer represented as a landscape which could serve as a signifier. The protagonists are still looking for the message once provided by this landscape, but their efforts to discover that meaning end in futility. The material signifier, for them at least, seems to have disappeared and with it all former certainties. “What did it mean?” (172) is Helen Schlegel’s question when she reflects on her vision of a distorted rural space, and the passengers on that motor excursion are equally helpless when they try to make sense of their impressions: “Quiet mysteries were in progress behind those tossing horizons: the west, as ever, was retreating with some secret which may not be worth the discovery, but which no practical man will ever discover.” (209) The novel uses Helen Schlegel, one of its more sensitive characters, to state explicitly that literature can no longer make use of all those meanings traditionally linked with ‘Rural England’. Walking along a path which seems to have been taken straight from a handbook on ‘How to Depict Rural England’ she airs the modernist disappoint-

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ment with literature’s failure to have given Rural England a reliable and enduring meaning: Deep and true as the native imagination can be, it seems to have failed here […] It cannot vivify one fraction of a summer field, or give names to half a dozen stars. England still waits for the supreme moment of her literature – for the great poet who shall voice her, or, better still, for the thousand little poets whose voices shall pass into our common talk. (264)

In sum, the use of ‘Rural England’, in Howards End, gives evidence of the modernist crisis of memory and representation (see Terdiman 1993: 13): Rural England is but a broken signifier. Forster’s novel A Room With a View (1908) disassociates itself from all attempts to conserve the traditional meaning of ‘Rural England’ under the conditions of modern life. In an ostensibly ironic fashion, Cecil who persists in a belief in the conventional meaning of ‘Rural England’ is at the same time a character devoid of any understanding of nature. When, for instance, he classifies larches as evergreens (Forster 1978: 119), this detail about the quality of his knowledge of nature is carefully placed just before he is given the chance to enlarge on the essential harmony between man and nature – a view disqualified by now, no doubt: I do believe that birds and trees and the sky are the most wonderful things in life, and that the people who live amongst them must be the best. It’s true that in nine cases out of ten they don’t seem to notice anything. The country gentleman and the country labourer are each in their way the most depressing of companions. Yet they may have a tacit sympathy with the workings of Nature. (119)

The lack of any empirical foundation for this naturalist’s ideas of Rural England is further underlined by his tentative manner of speaking (“they may have a tacit sympathy”, “they don’t seem to notice anything”) (119). No wonder his remarks pass unnoticed: “Mrs Honeychurch […] had not been attending. […] Lucy had not attended either.” (119)

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2.2.2. Emptying of Meaning If, in modernist literature, the signifier ‘Rural England’ is not destroyed, if the traditional rural landscape still makes its appearance in modernist novels (see Cunningham 1988: 226-238), another strategy of dissociating this signifier from its old meaning can be observed, and the reader is witness to a gradual emptying of meaning, a discarding of the idea that rural England is a manifestation of cosmic order. A good case in point is provided by H.G. Wells’s fictitious autobiography Tono-Bungay (1909). Bladesover, a splendid manor house and home of the protagonist in his youth, is situated in an essentially rural Kent. The countryside explicitly carries all the traditional meanings of cosmic harmony: Bladesover […] represented the Gentry, the Quality, by and through and for whom the rest of the world, the farming folk and the labouring folk, the trades-people of Ashborough, and the upper servants and the lower servants and the servants of the estate, breathed and lived and were permitted. And the Quality did it so quietly and thoroughly, the great house mingled so solidly and effectually with earth and sky, the contrast of its spacious hall and saloon and galleries, its airy housekeeper’s room and warren of offices with the meagre dignities of the vicar, and the pinched and stuffy rooms of even the post-office people and the grocer […] enforced these suggestions. (Wells 1925: 10)

Here, as in the texts of the past, ‘Rural England’ signifies social order: whoever lives in the manor house belongs to the gentry and is characterised by corresponding inner qualities. “Gentry” and “Quality” are identical terms. This message of a natural social hierarchy is also conveyed by the parallelisms which insist on the link between ‘Rural England’ and society: The gentry work “quietly and thoroughly”, just as the house fits “solidly and effectually” into its rural position between “earth and sky”. Thus, the more constricted living conditions of “the rest of the world” are presented as entirely natural. No wonder that the narrator, looking back on his youth, states: “I thought this was the order of the whole world.” (11) Later in life, though, he gives up this belief under the pressure of his growing scepticism regarding social matters: “I’m no believer in the English country-side under the Bladesover system as a breedingground for honourable men.” (91) In this way, the novel’s initial claim

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of a rural social harmony is invalidated, and as a new meaning for ‘Rural England’ is not suggested, Tono-Bungay can be read as an explicit separation of the signifier ‘Rural England’ from its socially accepted meaning: Rural England, as it had been known, no longer exists, although the signifier remains intact. This separation of signifier and signified serves as one of the manifestations of the novel’s modernist polemical thrust. Tono-Bungay’s use, and discussion, of the signifier ‘Rural England’ demonstrates in an exemplary fashion the modernist novel’s attitude towards Rural England, its fusion of wistful remembrance of a past when this signifier’s meaning was still valid, and the polemical discarding of its meaning as useless for modern times. For modernist novelists, ‘Rural England’ is at best just a quotation from the past which bears no relevance for the present – as is made obvious in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall (1928): Surely, he thought, these great chestnuts in the morning sun stood for something enduring and serene in a world that had lost its reason and would so stand when the chaos and confusion were forgotten? And surely it was the spirit of William Morris that whispered to him […] about seed-time and harvest, the superb succession of the seasons, the harmonious interdependence of rich and poor, of dignity, innocence, and tradition? (Waugh 1937: 124)

In Tono-Bungay as in Decline and Fall, a fraudulent, commercialised society devalues the virtues of the traditional social harmony and its environment, yet Rural England continues to exist as a memorised foil against which the modern world displays its seamier sides. Sometimes, even the protagonists have their nostalgic moments. At one point in his career, Wells’s hero admits: “Bladesover has never left me” (81). Indeed, quite a few modernist heroes would certainly like a return to Rural England to compensate for the moral shortcomings of their modern lives, but Rural England can hardly provide them with a short breathing space to recover from the conditions of their present (see Eysteinsson 1990: 6).

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2.3. Lack of Meaning and its Function It can be generally stated that modernist novels refuse to give a new, more contemporary meaning to the signifier ‘Rural England’. Instead they state the loss of this conventional signifier or insist on the fact that the connection between ‘Rural England’ and its traditional meaning has been broken. In these novels, a ‘Rural England’ without meaning is just another manifestation of their programmatic opposition to the conventions and the ideas of the past. In the first part of the twentieth century, it was left to writers who either wanted, often in a polemical fashion, to cultivate traditional ways of thinking or just to tell good stories to continue in the traditional use of the signifier ‘Rural England’. However, the memory of the old signifier ‘Rural England’ could not be eradicated, and in the troubled inter-war years a consistent effort was made to give this signifier a new meaning and to propagate ‘Rural England’ as a sign of true, patriotic Englishness. 3. Rural England in the Inter-war Period 3.1. Notions of the Countryside in the Inter-war Period Before analysing this new type of texts on Rural England, it might be helpful to sketch the common perception of the English countryside in the inter-war years.4 It can be seen, then, that the inter-war literature on Rural England was developed by a society which found it difficult to face the anxieties caused by the radical implementation of modern life during these decades. This demand for a conservative image of England was served by writers working for the rapidly expanding motor industries of the time. The general feeling of the twenties and thirties was that the very existence of the countryside was at stake (see Jeans 1990, Marsh 1982: 70). And indeed, the destruction of the countryside was real enough. The building boom of the inter-war years turned much of agricultural England into housing estates and industrial sites (see Rogers 1989: 97), and as the number of private cars rose between the 4

For a discussion of the social and economic development of the countryside in the inter-war years, see Howkins 2003: 55-76.

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wars from 110,000 to 2.3 million, and as coach-tour operators multiplied from 330 to 4000, tourism considerably affected the unspoilt character of even those parts of the countryside that had not been changed by the spread of suburbia. Thus, housing developments, industrial sites along arterial roads, and road building destroyed considerable parts of the countryside, much to the resentment and regret of contemporary observers: “A wonderful heritage of beauty, we feel, is being recklessly squandered”, complained J. B. Priestley in 1935 (9). This sense of loss was felt all the more painfully as people living in towns – about 85% of the population, all in all (see Sheail 1981: 21) – had developed an idealised view of nature and strongly believed in the enjoyment of natural scenes as a most important factor that guaranteed mental well-being (see Sheail 1981: 21). Consequently, Rural England had to be preserved for hygienic reasons, and among the many institutions established to this end, The Council for the Preservation of Rural England, founded in 1926, is perhaps the best known example (see Sheail 1981: 6, Jeans 1990: 250-1). 3.2. Rural England in Inter-war Novels Given these anxieties, it is not surprising that the comforting fiction of the continued existence of Rural England should also be found in some inter-war novels which do not belong to the modernist movement. Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ales (1930) can be singled out as being representative of this type of narrative. The novel abounds with rural scenes. Its setting, “the most rural country in Kent” (119), is devoid of any signs of modernity: Winding roads that ran between the great fat fields and clumps of huge elms, substantial and with a homely stateliness like good old Kentish farmers’ wives, high-coloured and robust, who had grown portly on good butter and home-made bread and cream and fresh eggs. And sometimes the road was only a lane, with thick hawthorn hedges, and the green elms overhung it on either side so that when you looked up there was only a strip of blue sky between. And as you rode along in the warm, keen air you had a sensation that the world was standing still and life would last for ever. (119-120)

Here, the cyclists move in a timeless world which seems to have preserved the harmony of creation. Men and nature exist in a natural rela-

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tionship as is indicated by that grammatically diffuse linking of “highcoloured and robust” (120), which can refer to elms just as well as to farmers’ wives. Similarly, the summer mood of the landscape correlates with the “high spirits” (120) of the young men. All details of this passage indicate that humanity and nature live in perfect harmony just as in 18th or 19th-century novels. Novels of this type, though, did not develop any new meanings of the signifier ‘Rural England’. This innovation took place in a type of text which became very popular in the inter-war years: guidebooks. 3.3. Rural England in Inter-war Guidebooks After the destruction of the signifier ‘Rural England’ and its meaning by the modernist novel, guidebooks on the countryside seized the opportunity of delivering the comforting message that visiting the countryside was both a pleasant and useful activity. The loose term ‘guidebook’ is used, in the context of this article, for nature books, journey planners and a variety of booklets and journals propagating the joys of ‘day runs’ and ‘country weekends’, all written for the – mainly middle-class – motorist and published under the imprints of the motoring and petrol industries (see Lowerson 1980: 260-264). The main function of this literature, as will be seen, was not pragmatic at all: usually, these books and brochures and magazine articles did not give any practical advice to tourists in a strange environment, but they concentrated on redefining the meaning of the signifier ‘Rural England’. With this common function, and with their insistence on recommending the same destinations, this literature forms a ‘collective text’ as defined by Antony Easthope (1991: 166-167). It is the essential characteristic of this collective text ‘the guidebook’, to propagate a new meaning of the signifier ‘Rural England’, by repeating again and again the same reasons for visiting certain parts of the English countryside. The purpose of this newly defined sign was to re-establish Rural England as a space with a clear meaning from which the English could derive a sense of national identity (see Taylor 1994: 135, Howkins 2001: 146-148).

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3.3.1. The Restitution of the Signifier: Pastoral Dreams As a strategy for the acceptance of the new meaning of the signifier ‘Rural England’, guidebooks relied on the effectiveness of their promise that touring Rural England would lead to mental peace:5 Ancient Wessex […] is the playground of the quiet man. In its oldworld villages of thatch and creeper and grey stone life pursues a course remote from the strife of cities and the madding crowd. […] It is the realm of contentment and peace. (Burrow’s Hardy Country n. d.: 8)

This correlation of rural order with human contentment echoes, no doubt, the conventions of pastoral landscape poetry and painting with their praise of the secluded life. In order to convey this link with tradition to those who may not have the literary or visual memories of the more leisured classes, the text has to rely on a paradox: Rural England is characterised both as historic – with its “old-world villages” – and timeless in its ideal natural existence: the “fragrance of the cloverfields”, “the whisper of the wind” and “sweet unbroken solitude” (Burrow’s Wiltshire n. d.: 8) all conjure up an idea of nature without any human interference. This paradox alone makes the discerning reader aware of the basically non-pragmatic character of these guidebooks. Indeed, without intending any ironic reading, one guidebook contains the revealing statement: “The true Devon village is a dream.” (Burrow’s Devon 1927: 18) How far this process of constructing a dream-like countryside may lead is revealed by the next few sentences of the paragraph: The true Devon village is a dream. Its pretty cobb-built cottages, dainty and warm, invite you to enter. If you knock at the door, maybe a hospitable housewife will give you tea – tea of real Devon fare with perhaps cream and home-made pasties. (18)

When visitors to the place leave this village with regained mental contentment – “with peace in your heart” (18) – they have recovered from the demands of urban life through the contemplation of a dream. Strictly speaking, then, no material signifier ‘Rural England’ exists in 5

The Arcadian, peaceful aspects of the countryside were also emphasised in contemporary art; see Mellor 1980: 187.

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this and countless other examples. Instead the reader is asked to believe: “In much less than fifteen crowded miles from the City you can enter your land of dreams.” (Moss n.d.: 5) Consequently, a clearly defined new meaning of ‘Rural England’ is not offered in this type of guidebook: rural Arcadian England is just an escapist territory where “all desire for haste, all consideration of time, fades as though it had never been” (Houghton 1930: 676). Paradoxically, even if the authors of these guidebooks insist on the historical continuity of the English countryside, it is, for them, a realm of the imagination. In this sense, one can note a fusion of literary ideas of Rural England with ideas which were familiar historically. It is this fusion of imaginary landscape and real history which results in the connotations of an essentially English stability which is so typical of the guidebook literature of the inter-war years and was – perhaps – meant to compensate for the anxieties caused by the economic problems of those decades: set against the foil of a perennial rural English landscape, contemporary concerns lose their impact on people’s minds, especially if this historic England literally speaks to the present: “There were little villages in which men still spoke Elizabethan English.” (Morton 1944: 256) But history, in these texts, is only used to emphasise the ideal aspect of the past: comments like “it is the presence of the Past that makes our countryside so wonderful” (Mee 1936: 29) indicate that the rhetorical fusion of literary with historical perspectives creates a rural territory enchanted by manifestations of English history. Following this argument, it is history which creates the dream of an ideal rural England, “a realm rich indeed in memories and old-time romance” (Burrow’s Sussex 1927: 3). Accordingly, touring the countryside is interpreted as a romantic pastime: “There is adventure to be found in the Sussex byways.” (Burrow’s Sussex, 1927, 4) It seems as if Rural England was not accessible by simply venturing out on one of the many new arterial roads since Rural England was a realm of the imagination: Our valleys are like so many secret places, with their hidden treasures, murmuring stream, old mills, sleepy hollows, green meadows, deep gorges, mysterious caverns, footpaths trodden for a thousand years. (Mee 1936: 1)

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But then, the romantic adventure should not be presented as a risky pastime. After all, the motor and petrol industries, the real authors and publishers of this guidebook literature, did not want their potential customers to shy away from risky adventures, rather it should be emphasised that touring the countryside was well within the capacities even of inexperienced or particularly cautious drivers. Paradoxically, again, the roads to and through these imaginative adventures had to be recommended as perfectly safe: The great new arterial roads leading out of London, constructed since the Great War, are amongst the finest in the world. [...] As a further protection against accidents, notices are now prominently displayed in by-roads near the junctions with the main roads, which read Slow – Major Road Ahead. (Clunn 1936: 5)

In the guidebook literature of the thirties, then, Rural England is presented as an aesthetically conceived historical and timeless space (see Taylor 1994: 121), situated between Britain’s industrialised conurbations and – implicitly, at least – the European continent with its dangerously expansionist German core (see Jeffrey 1984: 7, Potts 1989: 162). At the same time, through the fusion of historicity and timeless presence, Rural England is seen as a central element of a store of memories (see Terdiman 1993: 8) which, taken together, define English identity. Being historical it can be used to make people aware of an English identity derived from the past. It is indeed the function of the numerous historical remarks in these texts to reassure the readers of their national identity. 3.3.2. New Meanings: Rural England as Historic/Historical Landscape It is at that moment when the signifier ‘Rural England’ is used metonymically for ‘England’ that a clearly defined new meaning is introduced. Dating the birth of this new sign ‘Rural England’ with any precision is not really possible. But one could argue that this moment had arrived when, in 1927, in his book In Search of England – the founding text of the guidebook literature on Rural England – H.V. Morton located Rural England in the mind of English people: “The

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village that symbolises England sleeps in the subconsciousness of many a townsman.” (1944: 2) The implications of this statement are very far-reaching indeed: if the rural English village symbolises England, then, obviously, towns and industrial areas do not really belong to England. And as the agents of this exclusion of towns from England are the inhabitants of these towns themselves, the very spaces in which the majority of people live and work are marginalised as un-English (see Mellor 1980: 191). The impression of an essentially rural character of England was not new, of course, but it existed, as Morton himself said, in the subconscious part of the mind. Guidebook literature, though, by insisting tirelessly on England’s rural quality, turned this subconscious association into an accepted truth that everyone was aware of now: the southern English village, and – to a lesser degree – the village of the Midlands and the countryside they were embedded in had developed into a well defined signifier ‘Rural England’. No doubt, this process of giving ‘Rural England’ its new meaning was completely successful; some outsiders even blamed the popular acceptance of this new meaning for Britain’s temporary economic crisis in the 1960s and 1970s by claiming that the identification of England with Rural England prevented the managers of its industries from organising proper growth (see Wiener 1981: 42). Indeed, given all this guidebook literature between the wars, one can hardly assume that the inhabitants of Britain’s industrialised conurbations identified their environment as at least one legitimate manifestation of Englishness when the popular collective guidebook of the thirties kept repeating the message: “The true England is for him [the Englishman] the country, whether beautiful or commonplace.” (Burke 1933: 20) On the other hand, in the inter-war years, the signifier ‘Rural England’ served an important purpose by reminding people of their Englishness, in spite of all modernist attempts at devaluing the past, and Victorian values in particular. Thus, the signifier ‘Rural England’ certainly contributed to the unquestioned survival of a national identity in the inter-war years (see Jeans 1990: 252). Evidence for this patriotic task is amply provided by the rhetorical strategies employed by the authors of inter-war guidebook literature.

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3.3.3. Literary Strategies of Guidebook Literature While intent on linking the countryside’s historicity with its timeless presence it was one of the more popular strategies of this type of text to fuse the motorist’s point of view with the perspective of a famous historic character who, at one stage of his or her life had lived in Rural England. Through this strategy, the historical dimension of the countryside could be used as proof that the claim for a patriotic meaning of the signifier ‘Rural England’ was indeed correct: From the lack in logic of this use of evidence attention was deflected by a clever rhetorical pattern of argumentation, which made the tourist look at Rural England with the eyes of a historic person: Through some of Warwickshire’s stillest lanes we come to the village of Binton standing out on a little wooded hill and looking far across the valley to the Avon. By this stream there walked, and in this church there sat, a very gallant Englishman. It was almost the last village that knew Captain Scott. He loved the babbling of this little brook, and spent his last country days in England in the parsonage set among the trees below the church […]. Often as he lay in his tent the unspoiled beauty of this little place in the very heart of England must have come to his mind. The window to his memory tells the story that must thrill an Englishman as long as England lasts. (Mee 1936: 171)

Here, the historic character who had spent his childhood in this village comes alive by way of a technique of portrayal which depicts him as occupied with activities and amusements which are typical of the average tourist (“by this stream there walked”). Historic Scott and the contemporary motorist share the same preferences, and they are indeed seen engaged in common actions and pastimes. Thus, visiting Rural England is guaranteed to be a patriotic exercise. Furthermore, in this rhetorical pattern, the aesthetic category “unspoiled” is turned into a piece of historical information, when this impression is presented as Scott’s acts of memory shortly before his death. And just in case the modern motorist should have failed to grasp the patriotic significance of his visit to Binton, the passage quoted ends on clear instructions on how to take all this in an appropriately emotional frame of mind. A reading of this quotation, though, cannot fail to discover the usual paradoxes that this rhetorical approach to the establishment of the new signifier ‘Rural England’ is bound to produce: as Rural England is to be presented as part of English history (see Loew 1989: 121)

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the village of Binton is, at the same time, the result of human building activities (“church”, “parsonage”) and yet an example of “unspoilt” rural environment. The second striking feature of the literary strategy of this guidebook literature of the inter-war years, then, is its aim to present the results of human activity as ‘natural’. This intention results in variously phrased statements that the everlasting beauty of the English countryside is the result of continued farming: It is sometimes consoling to remember how much of the pleasantness of the English country is due to men, by chance or design. The sowing of various crops, the planting of hedges and building of walls […] and so on, are among the designed causes of this pleasantness. Here men have obviously co-operated with Nature. (Thomas 1972: 27)

In this argument, guidebook authors do not bother to make a distinction between natural growth and human intervention: It has been found impossible to dissociate it [the scenery] in treatment from the agelong and manifold activities of Englishmen, whose labours upon the land, both in agriculture and building, have left so profound a mark upon the face of England. (Ford 1935: vi)

In spite of the historicising tendencies manifest in the signifier ‘Rural England’, in passages like this the impression of timelessness is conveyed: the village represents a natural state of things, and its history is part of nature (see Chase 1989: 133). This naturalising process successfully hides the arbitrary character of the link of ‘Rural England’ as a signifier with its new meaning, and it does so most effectively as it partly coincides with the reference ‘land’. In this way the average contemporary reader could easily follow the rhetoric of ‘naturalness’ and accept the national meaning of ‘Rural England’ as a given fact: for contemporary readers, ‘Rural England’ signified the nation, and the newly defined sign made it easy for them to identify with this historical and aestheticised space.

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4. ‘Rural England’: the Nation A historical – and yet timeless landscape; a realm of the imagination – and yet accessible by road; filled with buildings and farmed by generations – and yet natural: no doubt, ‘Rural England’ is a constructed signifier, and forms part of the repertoire of those invented traditions considered essential for the formation of national identity.6 Rural England is an invention for forming Englishness, and its rhetorical approach serves the purpose of habituating a patriotic enjoyment of English landscapes. Every motorist touring the countryside will have to feel “an affection for English fields and hills and streams which no other fields and hills and streams can evoke” (Burke 1933: 11). As soon as people feel like this, they will not mind the paradoxes in the construction of the signifier ‘Rural England’.7 Whereas the modernist British novel either destroyed the conventional signifier ‘Rural England’ or deprived the sign of its conventional meaning, the guidebook literature of the inter-war years reconstructs the signifier and defines a new meaning for the sign ‘Rural England’. This new meaning, however, does not follow the pattern of the past – rural scenes no longer signify cosmic harmony and social order –, rather they give ‘Rural England’ a purely secular national meaning and a patriotic dimension (see Giddens 1990: 27-53). Thus, countryside scenes, in the inter-war years, produce Englishness and patriotism, where modernist novels could only detect the fragments of a Waste Land (see Cunningham 1988: 52).

6 7

See Hobsbawm 1983, Schwarz 1987: 147, Chase 1989: 128, Taylor 1994: 98. See Terdiman 1993: 18 and 34, Chase/Shaw 1989: 9.

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Works Cited Novels / Poetry Forster, E.M. 1978. A Room With a View [1908] (ed. Oliver Stallybrass). Harmondsworth: Penguin. ––. 1973. Howards End [1910] (Abinger Edition). London: Arnold. Maugham, W. Somerset. 1930. Cakes and Ale or The Skeleton in the Cupboard. London: Heinemann. Pope, Alexander. 1963. ‘Windsor Forest’ [1713] in The Poems of Alexander Pope: A One-Volume Edition of the Twickenham Text (ed. John Butt). London. Routledge: 195-210. Waugh, Evelyn. 1937. Decline and Fall [1928]. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Wells, H.G. 1925. Tono-Bungay [1909] (The Works of H.G. Wells, Atlantic Edition 12). New York: Scribner.

Guidebook Literature Burke, Thomas. 1933. The Beauty of England. London: Harrap. Burrow’s RAC Country Road and Gazetteer: Wiltshire and Dorset: The Hardy Country [1927]. s.d. (c1933). 3rd ed. Cheltenham: Burrows. Burrow' s RAC Country Road and Gazetteer: Devon and Cornwall. 1927. Cheltenham: Burrows. Burrow’s RAC Country Road and Gazetteer: Sussex. 1927. Cheltenham: Burrows. Clunn, Harold. 1936. The Face of the Home Counties. London: Simpkin Marshall. Ford, Charles Bradley. 1935. ‘Foreword’ in The Legacy of England: An Illustrated Survey of the Works of Man in the English Country. London: Batsford: viiviii. ––. 1933. The Landscape of England (English Life Series). London: Batsford. Houghton, Charles. 1930. ‘A Pathway to the Past’ in The Autocar (11 April): 676679. Mee, Arthur.1936. Enchanted Land: Half-a-Million Miles in the King’s England. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Morton, H.V. 1944. In Search of England [1927]. 3rd ed. London: Methuen. Moss, R.A. [1927]. ‘A Wheel Beyond London’s Roar’ in Burrow’s RAC Country Road and Gazetteer: Middlesex, Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire. 3rd ed. Cheltenham: Burrows, s.d. (c1933): 5-7. Priestley, J.B. 1935. ‘The Beauty of Britain’ in The Beauty of Britain: A Pictorial Survey. London: Batsford: 1-10. Thomas, Edward. 1972. ‘Chalk Pits’ [1928] in The Last Sheaf: Essays (Essay Index Reprint Series). Freeport: Books for Libraries Press: 27-37.

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Research Literature Battestin, Martin C. 1989. The Providence of Wit: Aspects of Form in Augustan Literature and the Arts [1974]. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia. Bermingham, Ann. 1986. Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740-1860. Berkeley: U of California P. Chase, Malcolm. 1989. ‘This is No Claptrap: This is Our Heritage’ in Shaw, Christopher and Malcolm Chase (eds) The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia. Manchester: Manchester UP: 128-146. –– and Christopher Shaw. 1989. ‘The Dimensions of Nostalgia’ in Shaw, Christopher and Malcolm Chase (eds) The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia. Manchester: Manchester UP: 1-17. Cunningham, Valentine. 1988. British Writers of the Thirties. Oxford: Clarendon. Daniels, Stephen and Denis Cosgrove. 1988. ‘Introduction: Iconography and Landscape’ in Cosgrove, Denis and Stephen Daniels (eds) The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments. Cambridge: Cambridge UP: 1-10. Easthope, Antony. 1991. Literary Into Cultural Studies. London: Longman. Everett, Nigel. 1994. The Tory View of Landscape: New Haven: Yale UP. Eysteinsson, Astradur. 1990. The Concept of Modernism. Ithaca: Cornell UP. Giddens, Anthony. 1990. The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity P. Hobsbawm, Eric. 1983. ‘Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870-1914’ in Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger (eds) The Invention of Tradition (Past and Present Publications). Cambridge: Cambridge UP: 263-307. Howkins, Alun. 1986. ‘The Discovery of Rural England’ in Colls, Robert and Philip Dodd (eds) Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880-1920. London. Croom Helm: 62-88. ––. 1991. Reshaping Rural England: Social History 1850-1925. London: Harper Collins. ––. 2001. ‘Rurality and English Identity’ in Morley, David and Kevin Robins (eds) British Cultural Studies: Geography, Nationality, and Identity. Oxford: Oxford UP: 145-156. ––. 2003. The Death of Rural England: A Social History of the Countryside Since 1900. London: Routledge. Jeans, D.N. 1990. ‘Planning and the Myth of the English Countryside, in the Interwar Period’ in Rural History 1(2): 249-264. Jeffrey, Ian. 1984. The British Landscape 1920-1950. London: Thames and Hudson. Loew, Philip. 1989. ‘The Rural Idyll Defended: From Preservation to Conservation’ in Mingay, G.E. (ed.) The Rural Idyll. London: Routledge: 113-131. Lowerson, John. 1980. ‘Battles for the Countryside’ in Gloversmith, Frank (ed.) Class, Culture and Social Change: A New View of the 1930s. Brighton: Harvester: 258-280. Marsh, Jan. 1982. Back to the Land: The Pastoral Impulse in England From 1880 to 1914. London: Quartet. Matless, David. 1998. Landscape and Englishness. London: Reaktion. Mellor, David. 1980. ‘British Art in the 1930’s: Some Economic, Political and Cultural Structures’ in Gloversmith, Frank (ed.) Class, Culture and Social Change: A New View of the 1930s. Brighton: Harvester: 185-207.

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Mitchell, W.J.T. 2002. ‘Introduction’ [1994] in Mitchell, W.J.T. (ed.) Landscape and Power. 2nd ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P: 1-4. Potts, Alex. 1989. “ Constable Country’ Between the Wars” in Samuel, Raphael (ed.) National Fictions (Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity 3) (History Workshop Series). London: Routledge: 161-186. Rogers, Alan. 1989. ‘A Planned Countryside’ in Mingay, G.E. (ed.) The Rural Idyll. London: Routledge: 91-102. Schwarz, Bill. 1987. ‘Englishness and the Paradox of Modernity’ in New Formations 1: 147-153. Seeber, Hans Ulrich. 1979. Moderne Pastoraldichtung in England: Studien zur Theorie und Praxis der pastoralen Versdichtung in England nach 1800 mit besonderer Berücksichtigung von Edward Thomas (1878-1917). Frankfurt: Lang. Sheail, John. 1981. Rural Conservation in Inter-War Britain (Oxford Research Studies in Geography). Oxford: Clarendon. Taylor, John. 1994. A Dream of England: Landscape, Photography and the Tourist’s Imagination (Photographic Critical Views). Manchester: Manchester UP. Terdiman, Richard. 1993. Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis. Ithaca, NJ: Cornell UP. Turner, James. 1979. The Politics of Landscape: Rural Scenery and Society in English Poetry 1630-1660. Cambridge/MA: Harvard UP. Wiener, Martin J. 1981. English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Wright, Patrick. 1985. On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain. London: Verso.

This Green and Pleasant Land: Cultural Constructions of Englishness Christine Berberich Abstract: Nostalgia and Englishness – Englishness and Nostalgia: these two topics nowadays seem interrelated. Englishness inevitably appears tinged with nostalgia and consistently evokes pictures of an older, more tranquil England, an England of times gone by. George Orwell in 1941 praised “the clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to-and-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road, the queues outside the Labour Exchanges, the rattle of pin-tables in the Soho pubs, the old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn mornings – all these are not only fragments, but characteristic fragments, of the English scene.” For hundreds of years now, the English countryside has been used as the most effective evocation of Englishness: in times of war and peace alike it has been used, by the English as well as by foreigners, to express both nostalgia and hope, a sense of belonging, a yearning for home. The English landscape was held up to the soldiers of both World Wars as ‘what they were fighting for’. Literature has, over the centuries, perpetuated this myth, although some more recent work has begun to interrogate and challenge it, too. This article is setting out to describe this phenomenon in its historical context, describe some of its literary manifestations, but also, ultimately, to problematise it: why is there still this celebration and evocation of landscape in the 21st century when things have moved on? Key Names and concepts: Julian Barnes - Kazuo Ishiguro - George Orwell - Siegfried Sassoon; Imagined Communities - Identity Formation - Cultural Geography - Invented Traditions.

1. Historical Developments The most celebrated – and most lasting – evocation of England as the green and pleasant land was coined by Blake, in 1804: And did those feet in ancient time Walk upon England’s mountains green? And was the holy Lamb of God On England’s pleasant pastures seen?

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Christine Berberich And did the Countenance Divine Shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here Among these dark Satanic mills? Bring me my bow of burning gold! Bring me my arrows of desire! Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold! Bring me my chariot of fire! I will not cease from Mental Fight, Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand, Till we have built Jerusalem, In England’s green & pleasant Land. (Blake 1804)

Blake’s poem does twofold: on the one hand, it paints two contrasting pictures of England. We have the idea of pastoral England, the green and pleasant land, competing for space with the newly industrialised England, the scene of rapid developments and equally fast spoliation of the beautiful scenery by industrial establishments belching out black smoke. Simultaneously, Blake’s poem is a call to arms: this new England, threatening the beauty of the old, has to be combated at all cost to uphold the traditions and pastoral qualities of the old. The timing of Blake’s poem is interesting. The eighteenth century had seen the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in England and by the early nineteenth century it was in full swing. The nation’s future, and, importantly, the nation’s fortune, depended on further, and more effective industrialisation: new factories sprang up, in particular in the North, new technologies were rapidly developed. As a direct consequence of this, England became a much more urbanised society. The huge labour demand of the new industries meant that people left the countryside in order to seek their fortune in the new factories and industries. New cities grew up around the largest industrial areas; the countryside was slowly depopulated. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Michael Bunce points out, “Britain had become a thoroughly industrial nation, leading the world in manufacturing and trade. …[and] it [had become] the first predominantly urbanised nation” (1994: 9). It seemed as if English society wholeheartedly bought into the new image of England as industrialised nation. Simultaneously, however, another, contradictory development took place: the new industries, though foundation for the nation’s fortune, were largely ig-

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nored in the cultural scene. Martin J. Wiener points out that, despite success during the Industrial Revolution, “the English nation even became ill at ease enough with its prodigal progeny to deny its legitimacy by adopting a conception of Englishness that virtually excluded industrialism” (1981: 5). This had much to do with historical developments. The adulation of the pastoral idyll has its origins in ancient history already but gained particular prominence in Augustan Rome through the work of Virgil and Horace. As Bunce points out, this interest in the rural came as a reaction to an increasing urban decadence (1994: 5ff). It is consequently important to remember that the celebration of the countryside ideal at any given time might, potentially, be a reflection of a nation’s present discontent. Up until the industrial revolution, England was a predominantly rural society. Feudal landowners controlled the majority of the land and also had increasing political influence. Nevertheless, Renaissance England had already seen a revival of interest in pastoralism. The court of Elizabeth I. celebrated the pastoral work of Sydney and Spenser, for example (see Sidney 1973 and Spenser 1978). The upper classes played an important role in the dissemination of the rural ideal through their patronage of the arts and literature. Their ideal version of the countryside – gentrified and serving their country pursuits – became established as the norm in both writing and painting of the time. With the industrial revolution there came a shift from the upper to the middle classes. But the focus remained much the same. The increasingly influential middle class was the driving force behind most of the country’s industry and commerce. Nevertheless, once their businesses had consolidated, the newly influential middle-class businessmen and industrialists aspired to leaving factories and counting shops behind and setting up homes in the country as country gentlemen. They aimed to emulate upper-class and aristocratic landowners and subsequently join the ranks of the gentry. They modelled their estates on those of the established upper-classes, and paid for their sons to acquire public-school and university educations which, in turn, would enable that younger generation to fully join the ranks of the upper classes. In art and literature, representations of the countryside were similarly affected by middle-class ideals. More and more emphasis

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was placed on the ‘spiritual’ experience that the countryside could provide. Terms such as ‘beautiful’, ‘sublime’ and ‘picturesque’ gained in importance: as Wendy Joy Darby explains, landscapes which were cultivated, smooth, calm and harmoniously gradualistic in their variety were ‘Beautiful’. … Those that were wild, rugged, and so vast as to lie beyond the imagination’s capacity to encompass them, were ‘Sublime’: … The Picturesque could be found in either realm and enabled ‘the imagination to form the habit of feeling through the eye’. (2000: 53)

This new craze for the countryside immediately led to some problems of representation – problems that still have repercussions today. W.J.T. Mitchell asserts that the notion of ‘landscape’ “originally and centrally constituted as a genre of painting associated with a new way of seeing” (2002: 7). This new way of seeing was crucial: elements that were not pleasing were simply ignored. Landscape painting, for example, either emphasised the beauty of the tamed countryside of the aristocratic estates the middle classes aspired to, or, if depicting truly rural scenes, at least attempted to leave out the rural poor to avoid an added social dimension (see, for example, Barrell 1980). Don Mitchell points out that ‘ landscape’ was and is a particularly bourgeois way of seeing. … It was chiefly a result of sponsorship by the increasingly wealthy urban merchant classes. Landscape became a means of depicting not just their control over space (and, importantly, property) but also a means of representing their status and wealth. (2000: 116)

And this development soon led to an important further one: what initially started as a private movement to look at personal property in a different way, had effects on the nation as a whole. As Elizabeth Helsinger asserts: The aesthetics of landscape, and the activities of viewing and displaying English places through which it was experienced, created for those who could participate in it a claim on England as their national aesthetic property. What began in the eighteenth century with the improvement, display, and representation of private property, quickly gave birth to a concept of public property.” (2002: 105-6)

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This establishes the link between the countryside and the nation as a whole; it shows that the one is important for the overall feeling of identity in the other. 2. Identity Formation The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were, of course, periods of intense identity construction in Britain. As Linda Colley (1992) has pointed out, Britain as a nation was ‘forged’ in the long eighteenth century. That, however, had repercussions on England’s own status: where, in the union of ‘Britain’, did Englishness have its place? England, after all, was the driving force behind the political union of the island countries. But while Scotland, Ireland and Wales always tried to retain their respective ‘Scottishness’, ‘Irishness’ and ‘Welshness’, England sacrificed an individual ‘Englishness’ for the sake of a collective, political ‘Britishness’.1 One way to reassert ‘Englishness’ was by reconsidering old traditions and values, and rural traditions and rituals in particular had always had a high status. It was those old traditions and values that were increasingly reconsidered during the industrial revolution. The English countryside became the locus of timeless stability precisely as it was poised to undergo, or was indeed already undergoing, rapid change with the concomitant transformation of social relations. (Darby 2000: 78)

There seemed to be no space for compromise: England was either to be the ‘workshop of the world’ or the ‘green and pleasant land’. A combination of the two images – although based on reality – seemed unfeasible, and the English countryside was consequently elevated to mythical status. As Don Mitchell asserts: If the desires and landscapes of a particular class can be shown … to stand for the identity of the nation as a whole … then what choice do those who live and toil in those national landscapes have but to identify with them? (2000: 119) 1

A more negative view of this might claim that ‘Englishness’ was supposed to become synonymous with ‘Britishness’; that ‘Englishness’, consequently, sought to repress ‘Scottishness’, ‘Irishness’ and ‘Welshness’.

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With this statement we have moved squarely into the realm of politics – and ultimately power. And this is where theories of cultural geography put their emphasis. Already in 1925, the American geographer Carl Sauer explained that cultural landscape is fashioned from a natural landscape by a culture group. … Culture is the agent, the natural area is the medium, the cultural landscape the result. … The shaping force … lies in the culture itself. (2000: 27)

In the case of English landscape, it was clearly the vision of a small group within society – the land-owning upper and middle classes, who helped shape the notion of England as a green and pleasant country idyll. Iain Robertson and Penny Richards explain that as landscape is transformed, it is the dominant element in society who will seek to write their own landscapes in their own image, in accordance with their own view of the way in which the world should be organised. Landscape projects and communicates that view to the remainder of society who accept that view as natural. (2003: 4)

Catherine Brace echoes this: “landscape [is] something that works in the service of individuals and human groups” (2003: 121). It is, of course, commonly acknowledged that landscape is instrumental in shaping a people’s identity; however, the notion that the landscape has been actively changed, shaped and manipulated to fit in with the views and opinions of a small group within that society, is disturbing. It is important to see here that those dominant groups do not necessarily take an existing landscape and use it for their means, but that they actively manipulate its presentation to fit their requirements. And that can, of course, indicate ‘exclusion’ of elements that are of little aesthetic or, crucially, ideological merit. While the nineteenth-century middle classes predominantly made their money from industry and commerce, smoking chimneys, ugly factory buildings and unhygienic slum dwellings of their work force did not fit their world view. Instead, they wanted images of pastoral idylls; and they worked hard – through the patronage of arts and literature – to get this image of England into common usage. As Bunce points out: “the main inspiration for the idealisation of the countryside has … been the images and values presented by literature and art and, more recently, by an increasingly dominant range of mass

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media” (1994: 37). This interpretation gives new meaning to Anderson’s theory of nations as ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 1983). In the case of England, it can be argued, an ‘imagined’, idealised landscape, that has decreasing foundation in reality, has come to overwrite other images of the country. The invention of a (rural) Englishness equals the invention of traditions. As Mike Crang points out, The quest for authentic national cultural identity often results in efforts to reconstruct a lost national ethos as though it were some secret inheritance or that cultural identity were a matter of recovering some forgotten or ‘hidden music’. Although tradition appears as a coherent body of practice and customs handed down over generations, it is often retrospectively invented. These invented traditions reinforce the idea that national identity can be passed down over generations as though it were some precious essence and that the rituals are a container for a pre-given national identity. (1998: 166)

Although the groundwork for the notion of England as the green and pleasant land was done in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is an idea that still predominates today. The media in particular perpetuate this image of England as a rural idyll. We only have to think of successful TV programmes such as All Creatures Great and Small, Emmerdale or ITV’s recent Marple, all set in a seemingly timeless England of chocolate-box villages and rolling hills. In advertising, too, this trend is clearly visible; in particular the tourist industry uses images of pastoral England to attract visitors. In many cases, images are actively manipulated to fit pre-existing notions. Catherine Brace, for example, has analysed the representation of rural England on the dust jackets created by Brian Cook for the publishing house Batsford’s series of travel books in the 1930s: The result [of Cook’s dust jackets] was often an amalgam of the most pleasing rural images. The cover for The Landscape of England (1933) … comprised a view of the coastline at Coombe Martin in Devon with a Cotswold church and village nestling in the valley providing a focal point for the front of the book. … the dust jackets [consequently] create an imaginative geography, [but] they still have the power to suggest the ideal condition of rural England. (2003: 131)

Although those idealised notions of England as the green and pleasant land are still upheld by advertising and the media, much contemporary writing approaches them with a more critical eye. Ian Buruma com-

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mented in 1999 that “Englishness is a romantic, not a political concept” (1999: 18), a statement that is intrinsically true. But of course it should not detract from the fact that the present-day conception of romantic Englishness had its origins in the political machinations of a small social group in order that their idealised world view would become the accepted and ‘natural’ norm. They were so successful that even now, as Rebecca Scutt rightly explains, in English the word ‘country’ can be used to describe both a nation and a specific landscape. It can be the whole of society or just its rural area. However, it would seem that in England at least, the English countryside has become the image of the nation. (1996: 1)

Despite more critical, contemporary approaches, much literary writing still uses the idea of England as a pastoral idyll. Throughout the nineteenth and even into the twenty-first century, this has been done to either uphold that particular notion of Englishness or, in some more recent instances, to ironically challenge it. In some cases, the representation of the English countryside in literature comes close to indoctrination, and a particular case in point here is children’s literature. We only have to think of acclaimed children’s classics to realise that most of them are placed in an idealised, idyllic rural setting: Winnie the Pooh, The Wind in the Willows, Peter Rabbit, Black Beauty, The Railway Children and The Secret Garden to name but a few. Even contemporary children, we can say, consequently unconsciously imbibe a specific discourse depicting England as a pre-lapsarian, unspoilt Arcadian idyll with enchanted forests and magical gardens which further perpetuates the myth of the green and pleasant England from generation to generation. 3. Literary Landscapes Countryside depictions have consequently always been popular in literature – be it for ideological or purely escapist purposes. Throughout the centuries, many authors have become synonymous with the areas they lived in and which in many cases featured in their writing. We only have to think of the Brontës’ Haworth, Hardy’s Wessex, Daphne du Maurier’s Cornwall or Shakespeare Country around Stratford-upon-Avon. Having a famous author’s name distinctly linked to a

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certain village or region has proven benefits – and not only for the tourism industry. A 1994 Coffee Table book, for example, praises The Spirit of Britain in a publication that claims to be ‘an illustrated guide to literary Britain’(Hill 1994). In her introduction to the beautifully illustrated book, the novelist Susan Hill points out that absorbing a sense of place, a landscape … through … imaginative literature is … not a second best. Sitting in an armchair we are transported to places … They bear a close relationship to actual places and yet at the same time are landscapes of the mind, invented, endowed with a spirit that does not actually exist… We see a place through the writer’s eyes and it is their place and that of their work …: another writer will capture the physical aspects of the landscape in a quite different way according to his purpose and outlook, circumstances of the time and necessities of the narrative. (1994: 7-8; emphasis added)

Hill’s point of “landscapes of the mind” in comparison to ‘real’ landscapes is an important and often (conveniently) overlooked one. Of course the subjectivity of literary descriptions of landscape has to be taken into consideration; literary landscape descriptions should not be taken as the sine qua non but should be read and interpreted with caution and seen in the context of their time. Mike Crang points out in this context that literature becomes another set of geographical data available for use. … it [used to be] downplayed as ‘subjective’ … [But] literature is not flawed by its subjectivity; instead that subjectivity speaks about the social meanings of places and spaces. (1998: 43-44)

These social meanings of place and space are particularly prominent in writing done at times of conflict. The Second World War, for example, saw much predominantly nostalgic celebration of Englishness, and here in particular rural Englishness. John Betjeman elaborated in 1943 that to me … England stands for the Church of England, eccentric incumbents, oil-lit churches, Women’s Institutes, modest village inns, arguments about cow parsley on the altar, the noise of mowing machines on Saturday afternoons, local newspapers, local auctions … local talent, local concerts, a visit to the cinema, branch-line trains, light railways, leaning on gates and looking across fields … (1943: 296).

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L. Rowse in 1945 echoed this with his “deep love for, English things, for our countryside and towns, with their memories of the people who inhabited them and of the things that took place there” (1945: v). In 1941, at the height of the Blitzkrieg, Vera Brittain concluded that more than [everything else], England for me means the fields and lanes of its lovely countryside; the misty, soft-edged horizon which is the superb gift to the eyes of this fog-laden island; the clear candour of spring flowers; the flame of autumn leaves; the sharp cracking of fallen twigs on frosty paths in winter. These are the things which, no matter where I may travel, I can never forget; this is the England which will dwell with me until my life' s end. (1941: 257-8)

Other writing, however, is more discerning. Much British literature originating in the Great War, for example, is replete with evocative, though in many cases also seemingly nostalgic visions of pastoral England. In many cases, beautiful countryside scenes are set in contrast with those of bloody trench fighting. The most prominent example here is Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man of 1928 (Sassoon 1999). Before the war, Sassoon had already published several volumes of elegiac, pastoral poetry that earned him popularity as a Georgian poet. His poetry changed with his increasing experiences of modern warfare and became considerably more vitriolic. Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man, at first reading, appears to continue in his early pastoral vein of writing with 243 out of 313 pages dedicated to the rural pre-war idyll of Butley in Kent rather than the protagonist George Sherston’s experiences in Flanders field. If taken at face value, Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man could consequently be read as an exercise in pre-war nostalgia, a celebration of a world irrevocably lost due to the horrors of the war. But the book has deeper meaning than that. Throughout the most evocative landscape descriptions, Sassoon cunningly hides hints about death and the destruction that is to come, and the discerning reader finishes the book with the distinct feeling that the countryside Sassoon celebrates in his work is nothing but a figment of his imagination that sustained him throughout the horrors of the war (see Berberich 2004). When George Orwell returned from the Spanish Civil War in 1938, he relished finding himself once more in the English countryside:

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Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens. (2000: 187)

But Orwell’s writing, like Sassoon’s, holds a different dimension: he concludes this elegiac paragraph with a stark warning to his countrymen: “all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs” (2000: 187). While much of Orwell’s writing, possibly surprisingly for those who see him as a predominantly revolutionary writer, praises and cherishes the beauty of the English countryside, he always, simultaneously, inserts a political dimension to it: warnings of political inactivity, for example, that could lead to war (see Berberich 2005). Orwell’s most famous evocation of Englishness, his 1941 celebration of “characteristic fragments … of the English scene” such as the image of “old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn mornings” (1941: 11) has since its publication often been interpreted out of context and used for political propaganda and spin, for example in the 1990s when John Major famously took up this quote to further ‘traditional’ notions of Englishness. It is, in particular, in more contemporary writing, with the onset of literary deconstruction, that countryside depictions have achieved much more of a double meaning. We find authors consciously playing with their readers’ expectations. One particularly relevant example is the following lengthy section from Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1989 novel The Remains of the Day: And yet tonight, in the quiet of this room, I find that what really remains with me from this first day' s travel is not Salisbury Cathedral, nor any of the other charming sights of this city, but rather that marvellous view encountered this morning of the rolling English countryside. Now I am quite prepared to believe that other countries can offer more obviously spectacular scenery. Indeed, I have seen in encyclopedias and the National Geographic Magazine breathtaking photographs of sights from various corners of the globe; magnificent canyons and waterfalls, raggedly beautiful mountains. It has never, of course, been my privilege to have seen such things at first hand, but I will nevertheless hazard this with some confidence: the English landscape at its finest such as I saw it this morning - possesses a quality

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Christine Berberich that the landscapes of other nations, however more superficially dramatic, inevitably fail to possess. It is, I believe, a quality that will mark out the English landscape to any objective observer as the most deeply satisfying in the world, and this quality is probably best summed up by the term ‘greatness’. For it is true, when I stood on that high ledge this morning and viewed the land before me, I distinctly felt that rare, yet unmistakable feeling – the feeling that one is in the presence of greatness. We call this land of ours Great Britain, and there may be those who believe this a somewhat immodest practice. Yet I would venture that the landscape of our country alone would justify the use of this lofty adjective. (1993: 28)

Taken at face value, Ishiguro does celebrate the beauty of the English countryside. But this simplistic reading has to be problematised by the fact that his protagonist, the traditional butler Stevens, is narrowminded, has never travelled and hardly ever been outside the confines of the stately home he serves at, Darlington Hall. He is certainly no reliable authority on the merits of the English landscape as compared to that of other countries. Stevens’ feelings about the landscape he describes might be what the readership, used to evocative coffee-table publications, expects or is used to. It might also ring true for readers familiar with the landscape described. But it has to be read in context; and the context here is the attitude of the author, who is aware – and judgemental – of contemporary trends in the heritage and tourism industry. In an interview, Ishiguro admitted that the kind of England that I create in The Remains of the Day is not an England that I believe ever existed. I’ve not attempted to reproduce, in a historically accurate way, some past period. What I’m trying to do here … is to actually rework a particular myth about a certain kind of England. I think there is this very strong idea that exists in England at the moment, about an England where people lived in the not-sodistant past, that conformed to various stereotypical images. That is to say an England with sleepy, beautiful villages with very polite people and butlers and people taking tea on the lawn. Now, at the moment, particularly in Britain, there is an enormous nostalgia industry going on with coffee table books, television programs, and even some tour agencies who are trying to recapture this kind of old England. The mythical landscape of this sort of England, to a large degree, is harmless nostalgia for a time that didn’t exist. The other side of this, however, is that it is used as a political tool. (Vorda 1993: 14-15)

Ishiguro consequently does not set out to perpetuate the myth of an Arcadian England, but rather to tackle it outright. And with this, he

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consciously attacks political movements of the 1980s and 1990s that tried to encourage a reconsideration of Britain’s past ‘greatness’ – Margaret Thatcher’s notorious call for a return to Victorian values, for example, or also John Major’s previously mentioned evocation of a peaceful British idyll.2 It could be argued that Ishiguro also consciously chose the very area in Stevens’ landscape description to hit an even more sensitive nerve with his English readership. The area around Salisbury, with the ancient, revered sites of Amesbury and Stonehenge has, of old, been hailed as a mythical but also quintessentially English place, the very cradle of Englishness, so to speak. This attitude is reflected in much – and very diverse – writing of the twentieth century, for example E.M. Forster’s The Longest Journey, or V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival, not necessarily two novels that are normally looked at in conjunction. Both praise the mythical beauty of the area around the stone circles and hail them as a “national shrine.”3 The area around Salisbury is 2

3

In a 1988 Daily Mail interview, Margaret Thatcher praised the 1950s and blamed the 1960s for a general deterioration of manners and morals: “Permissiveness, selfish and uncaring, proliferated under the guise of new sexual freedom. Aggressive verbal hostility, presented as a refreshing lack of subservience, replaced courtesy and good manners. Instant gratification became the philosophy of the young and the youth cultists. Speculation replaced dogged hard work.” See the interview with Margaret Thatcher, Daily Mail (29 April 1988), quoted in Sinfield 1989: 296. Forster 2000: 126. The text of the full quotation runs as follows: “The Rings were curious rather than impressive. Neither embankment was over twelve feet high, and the grass on them had not the exquisite green of Old Sarum, but was gray and wiry. But Nature … had arranged that from them, at all events, there should be a view. The whole system of the country lay spread before Rickie … He saw how all the water converges at Salisbury; how Salisbury lies in a shallow basin, just at the change of the soil. He saw to the north the Plain, and the stream of the Cad flowing down from it … He saw Old Sarum, and hints of the Avon valley, and the land above Stonehenge. And behind him he saw the great wood beginning unobtrusively … and into it the road to London slipped … Here is the heart of our island: the Chilterns, the North Downs, the South Downs radiate hence. The fibres of England unite in Wiltshire, and did we condescend to worship her, here we should erect our national shrine.” See also Naipaul 1987: 15: “The grassy way, the old river bed … sloped up, so that the eye was led to the middle sky; and on either side were the slopes of the downs, widening out and up against the sky. On one side there were cattle; on the other side, beyond a pasture, a wide empty area, there were young pines, a little forest. The setting felt ancient; the impression was of space, un-

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also one of the most important English tourist destinations; within relatively easy reach from London, it sees a daily influx of tour buses carting American and Japanese tourists to the very heart of mythical England, and Ishiguro’s novel arguably points a critical finger at this.4 The significant relationship between the English countryside and the tourism industry is one that is mercilessly lampooned in Julian Barnes’ postmodern 1998 novel England, England. Barnes’ novel is divided into three parts: the short, opening segment “England” acquaints the readers with the protagonist Martha Cochrane as a child, when her favourite pastime was pouring over her Counties of England jigsaw puzzle. The long middle section, “England, England” reintroduces Martha in her late thirties, and an employee of the ambitious Sir Jack Pitman whose new pet project is the construction of an Englandin-miniature themepark in the Isle of Wight. The final section, “Anglia”, shows Martha in old age, forcibly evicted from the theme park “England, England” and now living in the one remaining part of ‘old’ England, seemingly a haven for old, predominantly rural English traditions. The main focus here has to be on the construction of the park “England, England” itself, as well as the surviving traditions of “Anglia”. Sir Jack spares no expense to organise his theme park. Market research, he believes, is everything when it comes to new projects, and he authorises an extensive interrogation into all things English. Countryside elements feature heavily in the subsequent list of the “Fifty Quintessences of Englishness”: we find the typical Christmas image of a robin in the snow, quintessential tourist attractions such as the White Cliffs of Dover and Thatched Cottages, and, predictably, Stonehenge again (Barnes 1998: 83-84). Sir Jack attempts to, literally, rebuild England in his theme park and, crucially, make it better than the original by sheer exclusion: items on the list or historical events that do not fit his notion of England, are ruthlessly cut out. This links back to several points this chapoccupied land, the beginning of things. There were no houses to be seen, only the wide grassy way, the sky above it, and the wide slopes on either side.” 4

See, for example, http://www.visitsalisbury.com – a detailed webpage praising the beauties of Salisbury and its surrounding areas, featuring convenient translated guides in the most relevant tourist languages Japanese, Chinese, German, French, Italian and Spanish (accessed 19.02.2006).

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ter listed earlier: eighteenth-century notions of the beautiful, the sublime and the picturesque; the idea of ‘exclusion’ in landscape painting of the period; and the creation of a national identity on the strength of the convictions of only a handful of powerful and influential people. Sir Jack does exactly this: his notion of England is the only notion that counts in “England, England”. His employees have to obey his dictate – or leave, as in the case of Martha Cochrane. The newly established park of “England, England” soon surpasses the ‘original’ England. Its popularity is particularly great with tourists who, quite literally, are offered England in miniature in the small, conveniently contained space of the Isle of Wight rather than having to face extended torture on the British public transport system to visit the original sites. Both the King and Queen and Parliament soon turn their backs on England to settle, permanently, in “England, England”. Old England is robbed of its feeling of identity and steadily declines. The last remnant of it, “Anglia”, where Martha Cochrane eventually finds her home, is reminiscent of the pastoral, rural England of yore. The irony here lies in the fact that “Anglia” is only seemingly a pastoral idyll. In reality, all knowledge of old rituals and traditions has been lost. This is evidenced in the population’s attempt to recreate a traditional Village Fête: as the villagers cannot remember the traditions involved with a fête, they simply make them up. In other words, they invent traditions in Hobsbawm’s sense of the word (see Hobsbawm 2000). Martha’s surviving memories of traditional fêtes are initially distrusted, and ultimately discarded. The village committee comes to the conclusion that it is safer to “start from scratch” (Barnes 1998: 247) – and, like Sir Jack before them, they discard what does not please. Both Ishiguro’s and Barnes’ novels, it can be argued, consequently stand in direct opposition to the attempts of spin doctors to market England solely as the green and pleasant land. They point out the shortcomings of marketing a country according to a mythical image, and they warn, especially in Barnes’ case, of the potential consequences of doing so. Considering the importance that literature has, over the decades, been awarded in the idealisation of the countryside, this relatively new trend is important for future development. But as long as, in particular, the media uphold the notion of rural England being stuck in a time-warp, literature will have an uphill struggle.

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This chapter has attempted to briefly outline various developments in the construction of England as the green and pleasant land. Taking eighteenth and nineteenth-century historical developments as its starting point, it has then given a brief outline of different depictions of rural England in literature, predominantly throughout the twentieth century. There are many more examples that could have been listed. Nothing, for example, has been said about the importance of travel writing for maintaining the notion of England as a pastoral, pre-lapsarian idyll. If travel reports from English and foreign travellers alike are to be trusted, then England predominantly consists of green pastures, rolling hills, majestic trees and happy sheep.5 Even somebody as cynical as the American travel writer Bill Bryson comes to the conclusion that “[England] is still the best place in the world for most things … [among them] to go for a walk … or stand on a hillside and take in a view” (1995: 352). It seems to be true then, that “identity is created by what others see. People see themselves through others’ eyes” (Taguchi 2000: 21). Much literature and art, the country’s official tourism policy, the media and journalism uphold a notion of England that has its foundation in myth. The question is: how long will the twenty-first century, modern and forward-looking England accept this? Ultimately, it might all again come down to power and how to maintain it. The country seems to have moved on from the nineteenth century when a small group of influential middle-class men could dictate the course of all her policies. But then, maybe, not.

5

See, for example, Collier 1909; Kazantzakis 1965.

apek 1944; Keun. 1934; Chaudhuri 1960;

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Works Cited Primary References Barnes, Julian. 1998. England, England. London: Cape. Betjeman, John. 1943. ‘Oh, to be in England’ in The Listener 29.739 (11 March 1943): 295-6. Blake, William. 1804. “Jerusalem”. Brittain, Vera. 1941. England's Hour. London: Macmillan. Bryson, Bill. 1995. Notes from a Small Island. London: Black Swan. apek, Karel. 1944. Letters from England [1924]. London: Geoffrey Bles. Chaudhuri, Nirat C. 1960. A Passage to England. London: Readers Union. Collier, Price. 1909. England and the English from an American Point of View. London: Duckworth. Forster, E.M. 2000. The Longest Journey [1907]. London: Penguin. Ishiguro, Kazuo. 1993. The Remains of the Day. London: Faber & Faber. Kazantzakis, Nikos. 1965. England. Oxford: Cassirer. Keun, Odette. 1934. I Discover the English. London: Lane. Naipaul, V.S. 1987. The Enigma of Arrival. London: Penguin. Orwell, George. 2000. Homage to Catalonia [1938]. London: Penguin. ––. 1941. The Lion and the Unicorn. Socialism and the English Genius. London: Secker & Warburg. Rowse, A.L. 1945. The English Spirit. Essays in History and Literature. London: Macmillan. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1999. Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man [1928]. London: Faber & Faber. Sidney, Sir Philip. 1973. The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia [1581-84] (ed. Jean Robertson). Oxford: Clarendon. Spenser, Edmund. 1978. The Faerie Queene [1590-96] (ed. Thomas P. Roche, jr) London: Penguin.

Research Literature Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Barrell, John. 1980. The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730-1840. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Berberich, Christine. 2004. ‘I was meditating about England: The Importance of Rural England for the Construction of Englishness’ in Phillips, Robert and Helen Brocklehurst (eds). History, Nationhood & the Question of Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave: 375-85. ––. 2005. ‘Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: Orwell, Landscape and Englishness’ in Gomis, Annette and Susana Onega (eds). George Orwell. A Centenary Celebration. Heidelberg: Winter: 173-86.

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Brace, Catherine. 2003. ‘Landscape and Identity’ in Robertson/Richards (2003): 12140. Bunce, Michael. 1994. The Countryside Ideal. Anglo-American Images of Landscape. London: Routledge. Buruma, Ian. 1999. Voltaire's Coconut, or Anglomania in Europe. London: Weidenfels and Nicolson. Colley, Linda. 1992. Britons. Forging the Nation, 1707-1837. London: Vintage. Crang, Mike. 1998. Cultural Geography. London: Routledge. Darby, Wendy Joy. 2000. Landscape and Identity. Geographies of Nation and Class in England. Oxford: Berg. Helsinger, Elizabeth. 2002. ‘Turner and the Representation of England’ in Mitchell (2002): 103-25. Hill, Susan (ed.). 1994. The Spirit of Britain. An Illustrated Guide to Literary Britain. London: Headline. ––. 1994. ‘Introduction’ in Hill (1994): 6-12. Hobsbawm, Eric. 2000. ‘Introduction: Inventing Traditions’ in Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger (eds). The Invention of Tradtion [1983]. Cambridge: Cambridge UP: 1-14. Mitchell, Don. 2000. Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction. Malden/MA: Blackwell. Mitchell, W.J.T. (ed.). 2002. Landscape and Power [1994]. Chicago: U of Chicago P. ––. 2002. ‘Imperial Landscape’ in Mitchell (2002): 5-34. Robertson, Iain and Penny Richards (eds). 2003. Studying Cultural Landscapes. London: Hodder Arnold. ––. 2003. ‘Introduction’ in Robertson and Richards (2003): 1-18. Sauer, Carl. 2000. ‘The Morphology of Landscape’ [1925] in Mitchell (2000): 27. Scutt, Rebecca. 1996. In Search of England: Popular Representations of Englishness and the English Countryside. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Centre for Rural Economy Working Paper Series. Sinfield, Alan. 1989. Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain. Oxford: Blackwell. Taguchi, Tetsuya. 2000. ‘Looking for New England: Popular Images of Englishness after the Beatles’ in Wadham-Smith, Nick and Naomi Clift (eds). Looking into England. BSN Special Report, British Studies Now 13 (summer 2000): 21-22. Vorda, Alan. 1993. ‘Stuck on the Margins: An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro’ in Vorda, Alan (ed.). 1993. Face to Face: Interviews with Contemporary Novelists. Houston: Rice UP: 1-35. Wiener, Martin J. 1981. English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 18501980. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

Foregrounding Boundary Zones: Martin Parr’s Photographic (De-)Constructions of Englishness Merle Tönnies Abstract: The paper focuses on contemporary photographic representations of the most important territorial boundary of Englishness – the beach. In contrast to touristic images, Martin Parr's photographs place the emphasis directly on the boundary between nature and culture. They use the liminal quality of this space to represent Englishness as a site of strife: it is threatened both by the potential invasion of outside Others and by the internal struggle between dominant and excluded groups. The lack of regional specificity in the photographs stresses the general applicability of these observations. At the same time, it highlights the increasing commodification of spaces like the seaside, which intensifies the current dis-location of Englishness. Key names and concepts: John Fiske - Martin Parr; Beach - Boundary - Commodification - ‘Crisis’ of Englishness - Difference - North-South Divide - Englishness Exclusion - Globalisation - English Home - (National) Identity - Nature vs. Culture Otherness - Photography - Region - Representation - Liminal Space - Tourism.

1. It is by now a truism in cultural theory that identity definitions depend on difference and that no self can be securely established without a clear-cut boundary which separates it from the Other(s). In terms of national identity, the territorial manifestations of such boundaries assume great importance, allowing political entities to naturalise their own wholeness and uniqueness (cf. Sack 1992: 92, Paasi 2003: 464). This process is of course especially effective when physical markers in the landscape can be used as a visible dividing line between two nations – the so-called limites naturelles to which the 19th-century nation states aspired (Paasi 2003: 466). Englishness is traditionally bound up with the island status of Great Britain; one need only remember John of Gaunt’s famous geo-

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graphical blunder of England as the “scept’red isle”, the “precious stone set in the silver sea”, separated by this very sea from “less happier lands” (Shakespeare 1961: II.1. 40, 46, 49) – or nations, as we would now say. The boundaries of the land – be it the white cliffs of Dover, pebbled beaches or sandy ones – have thus always played a significant role in established conceptions of Englishness. They constitute those parts of the land that are physically in closest contact with the non-English Other beyond or on the sea – and thus form the vulnerable (or rock-armoured) skin of the body politic. The picture of a ‘typically British’ landscape that the designers of the National Portrait in the Millennium Dome’s Self Portrait zone constructed artificially in 1999 to serve as a backdrop for actual images of British people took the same approach. Although it was Britishness rather than Englishness that was at issue here, the picture prominently included beach scenes (cf. anon. 1999: 28-29). Only cliffs were marginalised, probably in order to endow the projected national character with openness and accessibility. Even this pointedly up-tothe-moment representation of British national identity thus could not do without the key geographical element of traditional Englishness, simply modifying it to fit the current political requirements. The special importance of beaches in conceptions of Englishness is heightened by the fact that they also constitute boundaries in a far more general sense, separating the familiar (the land or ‘culture’) from the natural wilderness of the sea. Accordingly, John Fiske (2000: 43-44) has called the beach an ‘anomalous’ zone, which is removed from the everyday reality of the land – a fitting frontier indeed for the distinction between self and Other in terms of national identity. 2. It is thus not surprising that Martin Parr, who can be called the visual chronicler and critic of Englishness in the 20th and 21st centuries, has focused on beaches from the very beginning of his career. While in his first paid job as a holiday photographer in the Butlin’s holiday camp in Filey, North Yorkshire, this motif may not have been entirely his own choice, it certainly was in the project that made his reputation in Britain: In 1983, Parr chose New Brighton near Liverpool as a fitting subject matter for his move into colour photography. It had originally

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been built as a rival of the southern seaside town of the same name, but had become a rather run-down resort by the 1980s, frequented mainly by working-class day-trippers from the hinterland. With characteristic sarcastic ambiguity, Parr published the photographs under the title The Last Resort (1986), a volume that he has since called his favourite from among his own extensive oeuvre (cf. anon. n.d.). The connection between his work and national identity is foregrounded by the name of a more recent collection, in which seaside photographs play a central role and which will be the main focus of this paper: Think of England (2000). Parr’s 1999 BBC2 film Modern Times – Think of England will be drawn upon as an additional source. The context in which the beach scenes are placed in the book shows that Parr is examining the relationship between identity concepts and boundaries on a more general level as well: Another important, even though less predominant motif is the proverbial English home. It is separated from the surrounding public space by a physical borderline, which usually consists in a strip of lawn, sometimes combined with a hedge. Just as Fiske has shown for the meeting of land and sea in the beach zone (2000: 45), such frontiers actively transform some elements of nature into culture. They thereby create a liminal space which mixes elements of both sides and effectively cushions the area associated with the self against the potentially threatening Other outside. It is obvious that in choosing these subjects, the artist automatically relates his work to the countless existing representations prompted by (and themselves reinforcing) the association of landscape boundaries with Englishness. Among these, touristic photographs as used in postcards and advertisements are very important. Significantly, Parr himself owns immense postcard collections,1 and he has also repeatedly stated his interest in the work of John Hinde, the pioneer of the colour postcard on the British market. Some of his works even include explicit meta-representational comments in this direction. The 1997 exhibition ‘West Bay’ at the Rocket Gallery, London, for instance featured a picture of a highly conventional postcard rack (cf. Williams 2002: 11, Badger 1997: 77). 1

Parr published samples of his collections his Boring Postcards books (cf. Parr 2004).

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His photographs can thus be read as deliberately using images with which the viewer will be only too familiar, as a contrastive foil in producing their own effect. Parr himself has indeed called the works in The Last Resort “anti-postcard pictures” (Blanchard 2002). His representations of both beaches and homes spell it out for the audience that their emphasis is different: They often pick out elements that a conventional gaze would marginalise, e.g. making individual garden plants take up more space than the houses and blurring the latter into the bargain. Parr also likes to focus the viewer’s attention on his sunbathers’ legs and feet, completely omitting the faces – apparently the natural focal points – or reducing them to more or less indistinguishable coloured shapes. This reversal of established hierarchies of perception can find an ironic echo in the photographed situations themselves, although Parr stresses that he did not set them up (cf. anon. n.d.). In a picture from Eastbourne (Parr 2000: no. 12, plate 1),2 for instance, the focus is not only on the central figure’s feet, but he is also lying the ‘wrong’ way round: By keeping his head rather than his feet close to the unpredictable Other, the sea, he is unable to monitor the progress of the waves, which beach-dwellers generally like to keep well in view. If one proceeds from such individual reversals to the general construction of landscape in the photographs, it becomes clear that it highlights boundary zones like beaches, hedges or lawns enclosing houses as spaces in their own right. In touristic images, by contrast, the focus would be on the countryside behind the beach (or on the sea) or on the houses themselves. The respective borderline would be nothing more than an attribute of the main subject which enhances its visual attractiveness. Parr’s pictures thus alert the viewer to the fact that traditional embodiments of Englishness in the landscape make light of the boundaries inherent in national identity and thereby ignore the problems that may be associated with them. Some of his photographs even explicitly draw attention to the frontier as a (potential) site of strife. A picture taken at West Bay, Dorset, which appears as a double spread in the book (Parr 2000: no. 120, plate 2), shows two sea-gulls – classic embodiments of the sea as 2

All pictures in the book are untitled; only the locations are given in a concluding list. This paper will in each case cite the location and the number of the photograph.

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nature – facing each other over a portion of chips – the epitome of processed food (‘culture’).

Plate 1. © Martin Parr/Magnum Photos/Agentur Focus

The viewer anticipates a fight, especially as one bird has apparently already started feeding and the two of them are positioned on opposite sides (and pages!) of the photo like contestants in a ritualised combat.

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Plate 2. © Martin Parr/Magnum Photos/Agentur Focus

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At the same time, the balustrade on which they are perched is situated exactly between land and sea, so that its narrowness – preventing the gulls from finding a secure hold – symbolises the awkwardness of the frontier zone, where opposites meet and possibly clash. The transfer to national identity is suggested in the picture itself by marking the land with a Union Jack. Together with the title of the book, this draws attention to Britishness as an identity threatened by disintegration after internal differences have been suppressed for too long and the whole nation has often been implicitly assumed to be identical with England. With regard to the present analysis, the picture can be taken to point out two interrelated ways in which the drawing of boundaries can give rise to conflict, one internal and the other external. On the one hand, the creation of a group identity always means pasting over internal divisions by privileging certain elements and neglecting or even suppressing others. In this way, certain members of the group are marginalised. On the other hand, the constructed identity is vulnerable to the invasion of the excluded outside Other, and it is therefore of paramount importance to keep the boundaries of the group intact and clearly visible. 3. Especially Parr’s seaside pictures highlight the process of inwarddirected exclusion, showing the beach-dwellers not as a unified community – as they would (if at all) appear in a postcard image – but as separate from each other. In another picture from Eastbourne (Parr 2000: no. 71, plate 3), for instance, this separation is represented by a telling empty stretch of pebbles between the Asian family in the foreground and the other (white) people on the rather crowded beach.3 In addition, the two groups look in completely opposite directions, as if the majority were deliberately averting their heads from the outsiders, who concentrate on their own affairs. These, in turn, mirror the overall tension in the picture, as the family members seem locked 3

Blake Morrison (2000) has considered this photo to evoke a “frisson of surprise […] in the viewer” that the family is present at all – thereby reading it as a statement on the lack of genuine multiculturalism in Britain without, however, analysing how the effect is produced.

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in a thinly-disguised internal struggle about the last drops of lemonade in a bottle. This scarcity of resources may even be read as a hint at how the depicted larger social divisions have come about or are justified.

Plate 3. © Martin Parr/Magnum Photos/Agentur Focus

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Parr also visualises such conflicts within Englishness by using the clearly demarcated areas that Fiske observes between land and sea (2000: 44-45). According to the latter, there is generally a whole series of zones between the two extremes, including an esplanade and a lawn. Fittingly, a photo from Filey (Parr 2000: no. 93) places the ethnic Other – an Asian woman in traditional clothes – closest to the lawn that borders on the beach. The white English, by contrast, are more securely cordoned off by a strip of tarmac or gravel. As they are seated on benches instead of walking past like the woman, they seem to be united with the viewer as spectators of the ‘natural’ spectacle that includes her. Tellingly, her gaze is directed towards the sea, so that there is no eye contact between the two sides and she is associated with the outside even more strongly. Differences in age and class are highlighted in a similar manner. In a Weymouth view (Parr 2000: no. 77), a group of elderly people in deckchairs has withdrawn (or is expelled) from the beach itself to the esplanade and is therefore cut off from the younger beach-dwellers by railings. They may still watch the display of (conspicuously deindividualised) bodies on the beach, but not take part in it any longer. The foreground of the image is taken up by a comparatively large but blurred female face with retro-style sunglasses. Together, these two seemingly disconnected elements of the picture stress that today’s mainstream society is only interested in the past as a commodified remake. The retro-products are as completely removed from any personal experience as the depicted woman herself is rendered anonymous by the photographer’s focus. The old people, who still have an individual relationship with the past as part of their own lives, can no longer find a place in this standardised world and are ostracised. Conversely, in a picture from Scarborough (Parr 2000: no. 11, plate 4), it is a group of young lads who are literally ‘sitting on the fence’ (or rather on a stone wall). Their boots and leather-trousers as well as the beer cans in their hands stereotypically mark them as working class. This seems to relegate them to the edge of the betterdressed beach society, unsure whether they can be part of the group and therefore unable (or unwilling) to take part in the ritualised interaction with nature. The viewer, however, is not allowed to marginalise the lads, as the photograph’s focus is directly on them and their outstretched legs almost block the view of the blurred beach activities behind them.

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Plate 4. © Martin Parr/Magnum Photos/Agentur Focus

4. Thus, according to Parr, it seems as if the shared Englishness embodied by the setting could always be exploded from within by the divisive power of ethnicity, age or class. At the same time, he also pays

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attention to the potential outside threat to Englishness, stressing his sunbathers’ near-naked vulnerability by making their sun-burnt flesh take up a lot of space in the photographs. They are obviously not very well prepared for handling ‘wild’ natural forces like the sun or the sea and thus – by implication – for defending themselves against potentially aggressive non-English Others. Indeed, the above-cited example of the Eastbourne sunbather exposing his bare head to the sea (cf. Parr 2000: no. 12) can be read as foregrounding this lack of adequate boundary control. Similarly, a picture from West Bay (Parr 2000: no. 14) shows a cliff in the background, but instead of concentrating on this classical geographical boundary of nationhood the focus is on two shaved heads bending over the sea directly before the viewer. They are similar in shape and colour to the geological formation, but obviously represent a far less formidable barrier to nature. The equation of unprotected flesh with Englishness is even made explicit in one photograph in the book (Parr 2000: no. 16): A Weymouth sunbather, whose head, neck and back add up to one solid pink mass, proudly wears a cheap ‘England’ tattoo. Parr’s film Modern Times – Think of England still includes another aspect. In contrast to the sunny beach photographs in the book, it contains a number of scenes with extremely bad weather. Nevertheless, the interviewees consistently claim that they are enjoying their holidays, sometimes explicitly referring to the storm as ‘good English weather’ that brings out everyone’s characteristic (English) resilience. The film unmasks this self-deception with almost brutal irony. It seems that in their struggle against the forces of nature people’s only ‘protection’ is their belief in a strong English identity. They try to integrate the perceived menace into this self-definition and thereby apparently defuse it. For the viewer, however, this process only emphasises the people’s actual defencelessness, as it makes them overconfident both about their superiority to nature’s threats and about the inviolability of their traditional nationality. As – according to Parr – misconceptions play such a prominent role in English identities, it is only logical that they have hardly been able to keep up with contemporary developments. The time when Parr took the photos for the book (1995-1999) was also one when the so-called ‘crisis’ of Englishness reached its

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highpoint (cf. Mergenthal 2003: 9-17), with publication after publication trying to define this increasingly fuzzy notion in order to strengthen its boundaries. 5. The photos of English homes highlight vulnerability in a parallel way, as Parr makes the zones enclosing their cosy privacy look accessible instead of providing genuine protection. The hedge often takes the more symbolic form of a few blossoming plants, with many gaps inbetween, and the viewer is positioned directly in front of this ‘barrier’, so that s/he is fully aware of its flimsiness. In the suburban areas selected by Parr for such pictures, the standard hetero-stereotype of traditional Englishness ‘My home is my castle’ will be an important auto-stereotype. The owners clearly have a profound sense (or illusion?) that everyone shares this view and will automatically respect their space. They explicitly insist in Parr’s film that all their neighbours are happy and content. Nevertheless, the almost excessive neatness in which the boundary zones are kept4 (often visibly so in pictures of lawn-mowing and gardening) testifies to an unconscious desire to keep out the uncultured Other. In the first place, this is of course natural growth, but implicitly, the home-owners are also trying to distance themselves from those sections of society who ‘live rough’ (as one interviewee puts it in the film) and might easily destroy the suburban idyll. Unusually, a photograph from West Bay (Parr 2000: no. 124) shows the insiders to have apparently become conscious of this vulnerability to some extent: The house is almost invisible behind a seemingly impenetrable hedge, which takes up most of the picture and is cut so regularly as to resemble a castle wall. Indeed, the whole of the private space is elevated in relation to the viewer’s position like a true ‘castle’ on a mound. The desire to exclude the Other is thus stated in the

4

See Cressida Connolly’s reading of “the vivid flowers behind neat railings, the plump blackbirds half-hidden in laurel hedges” in Parr's pictures as speaking of “security, calm and order” (1999). She, however, entirely fails to notice the darker side of the images.

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strongest possible terms; English domesticity has for once realised the importance of maintaining intact and visible boundaries. The threat that the home-owners want to exclude obviously comes from within the nation on a literal level. Metaphorically speaking, however, the kind of Englishness for which the homes stand clearly ends at the borderline between suburbia and the poorer quarters of the city. The pictures therefore both demonstrate defencelessness against potential attacks and reveal the internal processes of exclusion involved in national identity. In this way, they perfectly embody Parr’s own self-confessed ambiguous relationship with Englishness (cf. anon. n.d.); while registering the dangers to which it is exposed, he is also well aware of the exclusionary forces and illusions it contains. 6. As the relationship between identity and landscape boundaries plays such a prominent role in the Think of England pictures, it may at first sight seem surprising that they do not pay any attention to regional differences. Indeed, Parr only provides the locations where the photos were taken in a rather inconspicuous list at the very end of the book (and pointedly fails to include the region where the sometimes rather obscure places are situated). In one instance, he even makes the photographs (and regions) on two facing pages of the volume mirror each other symmetrically through the beach-dwellers’ outstretched legs (Parr 2000: nos. 10, 11, plates 4 and 5). However, only by consulting the list can the viewer find out that it is geographical extremes – Scarborough and Eastbourne as epitomising England’s great North-South-divide – which are visually equated here. With this knowledge (and against the background of what was said above about the photograph with the lads, plate 4), one can then of course read the sandals and white socks in the Eastbourne picture and the leather-trousers and boots in the Scarborough one as a wry comment on the close connection between region and social position in England. On the whole, however, Parr is clearly more interested in the generic rather than the (regionally/locally) specific of his beaches and houses; the pictures’ messages about Englishness are meant to apply to the whole of England.

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Plates 5 and 4. © Martin Parr/Magnum Photos/Agentur Focus

7. At the same time, the pointed lack of specificity also sets the photographs apart from conventional touristic representations of Englishness, which always include a linguistic message superimposed on the image or printed on the verso to tie the landscape portrayed to a concrete location. They obviously cannot do without this element, since it is their aim to ‘sell’ the places they show to the addresses of the advertisement or the recipients of the postcards (themselves potential visitors). In addition, postcards are also meant to give buyers the chance to recreate individual touristic experiences (cf. Sack 1992: 157). Producers depend on the caption to reach these aims, because commodification tends to make postcard pictures look rather similar. This is especially true when the landscapes themselves have – like the seaside – become objects of mass-consumption through modern tourism (cf. Sack 1992: 158-159). By refusing to add an obvious product designation, as it were, Parr’s beach pictures can thus also be read as criticising this process. The photos demonstrate how commercialisation has – both literally and on the level of representation – deprived these proverbially Eng-

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lish landscapes of their specific traits, so that despite their fixed geographical localisation, they now add to rather than prevent the dislocation of Englishness. The landscapes and the identities connected with them have been sold and consumed so often and in so many ways that they have lost any distinctive meaning – an interpretation which is supported by Parr’s criticism of touristic globalisation in ‘Small World’ (1995, cf. Williams 2002: 257-263). Similarly, his blurred houses can be taken to highlight that the importance of home-ownership in English self-concepts has often entailed the loss of individual qualities: Houses are prefabricated to become affordable for large sections of the population and are decorated with interchangeable commercially produced items.5 Parr himself indeed portrayed home-owners in front of their prefab bungalows in ‘Prefabs’ (cf. Williams 2002: 163-167). Similarly, home decoration was the topic of his 1974 installation Home Sweet Home at Manchester Polytechnic (cf. Williams 2002: 34-53) and the 1992 ‘Signs of the Times’, which was produced in association with an eponymous film by BBC’s Nick Barker (cf. Williams 2002: 212-214, 238-245). Once more, mass consumption has eroded a key manifestation of traditional Englishness in the landscape. These two interpretations are supported by the prominence of commodities in the book which the viewer is more or less directly invited to equate with England, ranging from garishly coloured sweets (cf. Parr 2000: nos. 75-76) to souvenirs or scones (cf. Parr 2000: nos. 36, 105, 113). On this basis, it is possible to conclude that the statements the volume makes on Englishness are shot through with fundamental irony: While Parr analyses the problems of contemporary national identity critically and scrutinises standardised representations more or less parodistically, he, too, uses the typical English landscapes to reach his own aims. He does not propose to rediscover the special qualities of many places that have been eroded by commercialisation. On the contrary, Parr stresses the generic and foregrounds similar5

Cf. Williams’s comment that the “race for owner-occupancy in housing” was accelerated by Thatcherism and led to an explosion of new homes (2002: 213). On a more general level, Sack stresses how commodities are nowadays used to “define ourselves and separate our private world from the public world” but paradoxically end up “bring[ing] the public realm into our homes” (1992: 149, 151).

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looking boundary zones at the expense of characteristic landmarks or recognisable, individualistic houses. Thus, he deliberately confines himself to reflecting what has happened, dissecting the established national identity but showing little interest in revitalising it on a reliable and more up-to-date foundation. It is therefore only fitting that he mostly focuses on traditional Englishness instead of engaging with Britishness, which was considered the more progressive nationality of the two in surveys and initiatives carried out at the time of Think of England.6 If one wanted to read Parr’s work against the grain, one could even point out that it involves a further commodification of both landscapes and identities, as he appropriates them as part of his commercially successful photographic signature. This, however, does not in any way diminish his pictures as profound and inspired contributions to the ongoing discussion about Englishness in contemporary Britain.

6

See e.g. Phoenix 1995, Leonard 1997.

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Works Cited Primary References Parr, Martin. 1995. Small World. Stockport: Dewi Lewis. ––. 1999. Modern Times – Think of England. London: BBC2 [film]. ––. 2000. Think of England. London: Phaidon. ––. 2004. Boring Postcards [1999]. London: Phaidon. Shakespeare, William. 1961. Richard II (ed. Peter Ure) (The Arden Shakespeare). London: Methuen.

Research Literature Anon. n.d. ‘Martin Parr – Photographer’. Online at: www.bbc.co.uk/blast/about/ask/ martinparr_transcript.shtml (consulted 06.01.2006). ––. 1999. Millennium Experience. London: The Dome. Badger, Gerry. 1997. ‘Beside the Seaside. Martin Parr at the Rocket Gallery’ in Contemporary Visual Arts 16: 77. Blanchard, Tamsin. 2002. ‘A Life Less Ordinary’ in The Observer (13 January 2002). Connolly, Cressida. 1999. ‘A Pram’s-Eye View of Britain’ in The Independent on Sunday (13 June 1999). Fiske, John. 2000. Reading the Popular [1989]. London: Routledge. Leonard, Mark. 1997. Britain TM: Renewing Our Identity. London: Demos. Mergenthal, Silvia. 2003. A Fast-Forward Version of England: Constructions of Englishness in Contemporary Fiction. Heidelberg: Winter. Morrison, Blake. 2000. ‘England at Sea’ in The Independent on Sunday (27 August 2000). Paasi, Anssi. 2003. ‘Boundaries in a Globalizing World’ in Anderson, Kay et al. (eds) Handbook of Cultural Geography. London: Thousand Oaks: 462-472. Phoenix, Ann. 1995. ‘The National Identities of Young Londoners’ in Gulliver 37: 86-110. Sack, Robert David. 1992. Place, Modernity, and the Consumer’s World: A Relational Framework for Geographical Analysis. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP. Williams, Val. 2002. Martin Parr. London: Phaidon.

“England as a pure, white Palladian mansion set upon a hill above a silver winding river”1: Fiction’s Alternative Histories Ruth Helyer Abstract: Using Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath her Feet, this chapter explores the construction of ‘Englishness’ via cultural history and geography. It questions whether such a thing as an autonomous identity can be attained and compares postmodern and post-colonial thinking relating to this question. Both postmodern and post-colonial texts portray History as a past which is still present in the future and therefore includes ghosts, dreams and parallel versions – especially those not validated within the ‘official’ version. They both reconfigure the world in spatial terms and see identity encompassed within a ‘travelling’ that is bound up with returns, ruptures, repetitions and remembrance. Existing becomes an ‘out of body’ experience, with the trappings of various personae slipped in and out of. The narrative journey takes a pivotal role; all levels of cultural material are encompassed from popular music to ancient myths. These imaginative ways of telling tales may not reveal any more ‘facts’, but what they crucially attempt to do is reveal events as they were understood, thus elaborating on, and explaining, versions rather than totally refuting them. Key names and concepts: Homi Bhabha - Julia Kristeva - Jacques Lacan - Salman Rushdie - Zadie Smith; Constructions - Englishness - Geography - History - Hybrid Identity - Myth - Popular Culture - Postcolonial - Postmodern.

1. Copying Identity Traits Identities, rather than inherent or intrinsic, appear to be constructed – built upon stereotypes and copied and perfected until copies become more like what they are imitating than that thing itself ever was; careful imitation exceeds the supposed original. ‘Typical Englishness’ once seemed an anachronistic joke; the easily parodied stereotype had the potential – in keeping with its copied status – to outstrip the so1

Rushdie 1999:86.

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called original, despite of the fact that, or perhaps especially when, the mimic originates from countries geographically distant from England. In keeping with the Platonic simulacra, copying ‘Englishness’ illustrates that every version is a copy. These copies replace any possibility of originality in an endless line of copies of copies of copies. The persona the immigrant creates from copying and mimicking can soon appear more authentically English than those with a supposedly English pedigree. According to Homi Bhabha colonised Indians have every chance of behaving in a more stereotypically, clichéd English way than the English do themselves. However, Englishness has become increasingly difficult to mimic as its defining characteristics transmute, fluctuate, even disintegrate. Activities which might once have been cited as ‘typically English’, for example, playing cricket, drinking tea, attending public school, obeying strict class demarcations are reflected in varying forms of hybridity in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet. As Smith summarises, ‘It was cricket basically – the Englishman’s game adapted by the immigrant’ (2001: 5), the sporting activity representing a process of adaptation and blending necessary to identity formation. Later in White Teeth Irie’s urge to merge with the imagined Englishness of the Chalfen family further illustrates this: It wasn’t that she intended to mate with the Chalfens […] but the instinct was the same. She had a nebulous fifteen-year-old’s passion for them, overwhelming, yet with no real direction or object. She just wanted to, well, kind of, merge with them. She wanted their Englishness. Their Chalfishness. The purity of it. It didn’t occur to her that the Chalfens were, after a fashion, immigrants too (third generation, by way of Germany and Poland, nee Chalfenovsky), or that they might be as needy of her as she was of them. To Irie, the Chalfens were more English than the English. (328)

The truth is they are no more ‘English’ than she is, demonstrating the depth of the cultural mix and diversity known as ‘Englishness’. The gradual erosion, adaptation, even active rejection, of family heritage is one of the results of a culturally mixed environment. Rather than the typical English traits listed above cultural identity is based in teenage activities, connected to music, drugs and searching for new knowledge. Humans are influenced by everything they are exposed to:

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books, film, events, what Jean Baudrillard terms, “the networks of influence” (1985:133). Fictional writing with its multitudinous allusions, borrowings and echoes seems the perfect forum in which to dissect these ideas of identity as constructed, changing and endlessly reproduced; the layered palimpsest constitution of narrative ensures that the already ambivalent demarcations around what is considered authentic begin to unravel ever further. White Teeth and The Ground Beneath Her Feet show that the idea of a pure and authentic national identity is itself a fiction. Both narratives follow generations of families as they attempt to come to terms with what their histories and geographies have inflicted upon their identities. In White Teeth the immigrant families struggle to align their origins with English society whilst in The Ground Beneath Her Feet the impact of English colonial rule manifests itself. The mimicked English identity in these novels veers between a celebration of difference and outright confusion as changing ideas of what makes ‘Englishness’ evolve, with religion, animal rights, even vegetarianism joining the equation. Mimicry mocks any comfortable or complacent notions, it mocks the supposed power of history by repeating and re-presenting events, people and ideas. Typically post-colonial and postmodern narrators will tell stories erratically and eccentrically, their text refusing to be representative of anything definitive but rather opting to be shifting and indistinct, offering more than one version, more than one voice and different versions from the same voice. Efforts to achieve authenticity are illustrated as futile and the ultimate irony of representation. 2. Postmodern/Post-colonial These texts illustrate the similarities between postmodern and postcolonial fiction by embracing multiplicity and difference. Although these two categories of text have distinct similarities they are also quite different in other ways – for example postmodernism is considered, largely, a western school of thought whilst post-colonialism is distinctly eastern in its viewpoint. However, this division is instantly blurred by eastern post-colonial critics being based in western universities and so on. However, both explore identities claimed through shared histories, often those of minorities, with ‘official’ versions of

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the past (usually white, western and male) being challenged. Those usually silenced or ignored are given voice through the story-telling of multiple narrators capable of singing, shouting and speaking (even from beyond the grave and before birth). In The Ground Beneath Her Feet myths and legends (Greek, Roman, Hindu, Scandinavian, Muslim) combine with personal testimony – these voices are not cited as offering truer or more authentic versions of history, merely alternatives; they challenge history’s dominance by giving different versions equal status. Rushdie’s narrator suggests that myths offer a ‘vessel into which any moron could pour his stupidities’ (1999: 6), reminding the reader that there is no clearly defined translation or record of events: myths, like all stories and histories, are open to interpretation. The voices repeating the stories are inventive – capable of word-play and multiple languages. They represent not only multiplicity between individuals but also within individuals where personalities demonstrate different, even contradictory, characteristics. The English identity is not superior, rather, it is seen to be a necessarily delicate balancing act between nationality, sexuality and occupation, where strands do not sit easily together and existence can begin to feel like an ‘out of body’ experience, with the trappings of various personae slipped in and out of and observed. Rushdie and Smith present narratives which challenge chronology by replaying acts in differing and over-lapping timescales. This replaying skews the order of events; life is far more random than a set order allows it to be – instead actions reflect thought patterns, rarely well-ordered or logical. The consequence of this is that the reader is obliged to re-think connections between events, actions and opinions. The narrative of White Teeth freely mixes the order of London 1974, India 1857, the second world war 1945, and the cyber potential of the future. There is a distinct lack of teleology or explanation, echoing what Rushdie’s narrator suggests: In spite of all the evidence that life is discontinuous, a valley of rifts, and that random chance plays a great part on our fates, we go on believing in the continuity of things, in causation and meaning. But we live on a broken mirror, and fresh cracks appear in its surface every day. (30-1)

It is not only versions between differing witnesses which vary, humans’ own versions told only to themselves change and mutate, as

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Rai, the photographer and narrator, so astutely comments, ‘Now, however, as my adult self observes the scene through my nine year old eyes and ears, I see and hear other things too.’ (70) Perception changes with experience and hindsight. Sections of the past are rewritten entirely; for example, White Teeth offers differing accounts of the second world war and two very different ‘English’ soldiers, whilst The Ground Beneath her Feet freely mixes real and invented people and events, then places them in random international locations, the blurring effect of this illustrating that nothing is real, but rather fantastic, surreal and dreamlike, with the most dreamlike phenomenon being a true ‘English’ identity. Place and space become associated with feelings and emotions rather than merely lines on maps. If a physical country is made unavailable to a person they still need something to relate to emotionally, some typicality. Those far distant from their perceived roots look for what is ‘typical’ in the location where they find themselves; or alternatively amongst the new incoming inhabitants of their own, original environment. But whilst geography offers the potential to define strands of identity it also offers the potential to grasp a confused identity – Sir Darius Xerxes Cama does just this with his misplaced devotion to all that is English, his idea of England and the English is entrenched in representations of architecture and archaic customs. Geographical markers, rather than offer clear definitions, may offer blurred and ill defined elements: Touch the sea and at once you’re joined to its farthest shore, to Araby (it was the Arabian Sea), Suez (it was the year of the crisis), and Europa beyond. Perhaps even – I remember the thrill of the whispered word on my young lips – America […] Let Sir Darius Xerxes Cama dream his colonialist dreams of England. My dream-ocean led to America, my private, my unfound land. (Rushdie 1999: 59)

Whilst a certain ‘Englishness’ could be explored in Bombay, Rai senses that there are permeable borderlines which will take him to other countries where he can experience first hand what he has witnessed being copied and adopted. He repeatedly swims further out to sea than is safe causing his mother to wade in after him. His urge is to put enough distance between himself and India in order to look back at it dispassionately. Sir Darius has already suggested that, “‘The only people who see the whole picture […] are the ones who step out of the

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frame.’” (43) After viewing England from afar the immigrants of White Teeth have developed fixed ideas about where it will be desirable to live. They begin in east London, but always with the intention of moving north. The area which is chosen for a house also relies upon the proximity of the houses of families, friends and neighbours. Bound up in this unshakeable faith in their surroundings are beliefs about England’s ability to deliver a better life via “‘[a] substantial garden area, regular meals, clean clothes from Marks ‘n’ Sparks, A-class topnotch education’ and so on” (218-9) – England is perceived as a ‘safe’ environment where families can be raised in a civilised manner amongst desirable surroundings and available consumables. What England can offer via education and location is perceived as potentially giving superiority and a hierarchical edge. The uncomfortable truth is that England’s ‘safety’ has been built upon the destruction of others, a destruction now deemed unacceptable hence a safety now crumbling. 3. Doubles, Twins, Ghosts and Others Both novels elaborate on memories; the return of ghostly others; déjà vu and doubling – popular themes also in magic realism (a label often attached to Rushdie’s work) where they are used as playful, ironic ways to deal with painful histories. Magic realism is aligned with postmodern and post-colonial writing as it questions what is ‘real’, in particular ‘pasts’ and ‘histories’ and the way in which these are experienced. The themes of doubling both arise from and encourage further scrutiny of the experiences of immigrants, the homeless, the mentally ill and others who are abused, displaced or in some way castadrift. There is a high incidence of schizophrenia amongst those who leave their homeland and, for whatever reason, are required to ‘fit-in’ elsewhere. The act of taking on an alien language is always traumatic and alienating. Colonial missionary education was always delivered “uncompromisingly in English” with no allowances made for the established languages of a country and no reciprocal learning, changes are enforced with an emphasis on who is ‘superior’ and it is their language which is allowed to overwhelm and eradicate the established language (Bhabha 1984). Some English language teaching systems still use this method with only English being spoken in the lessons.

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Acts of doubling are necessary to survive such drastic changes. The acts of doubling undertaken to embrace the identity of a new home and/or country encourage the schizophrenic behaviour mentioned above. A postmodern self-awareness of plural selves leads to a resistance to conforming and this ensures that these texts are densely populated with characters struggling to fulfil what society requires of them, either in an England which is not their homeland or in an invaded homeland where some mongrel form of ‘Englishness’ prevails. Bhabha posits the way in which authorised versions of otherness spring up; to retain domination the colonisers try to enforce an acceptable stereotypical identity upon native inhabitants. They cannot change the colour of their skins (although modern technology may be able to eventually) but the colonisers can force the colonised to change the way they behave and even the way they think by social conditioning. Bhabha cites this process as encouraging the doubling mentioned above, the citizens are the people they were before but now also have to encompass what their self-appointed leaders require them to be: Samad is fighting for the army of his adopted country but at the same time is passionate about his family’s history and his religion, he is forced to be a waiter to survive but sees himself as an intellectual. Such doubling is further facilitated in these texts through twins and doubles, the parallel realities of the pairings showing individual autonomy to be a non-sustainable concept by questioning the idea of totality and notions of separation from parents, siblings, lovers and self. Bhabha notes ‘the twin figures of narcissism and paranoia’ as repeating furiously and uncontrollably within colonial power, illustrating the notion of twins as two halves of a whole and proving their aptness as fictional tropes (1984: 6). Within White Teeth the reader is offered Magid and Millat, the twin sons of immigrant Samad. One son precociously intellectual the other sexual, beautiful and wild. Irie has sex with both boys in a deliberate bid to not know which of them is the father of her child, just as she never knew who her grandfather was or the details of her colonial beginnings. By copying and imitating the behaviour of English colonisers the oppressed reveal the constructed nature of their oppressors and therefore threaten their authority. This reciprocal double-sided effect results in twinned and multiple images. In The Ground Beneath Her Feet Ormus Cama’s twin does not survive childbirth, yet still haunts him throughout the narrative. “It

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might not be so fanciful […] to say that his dead twin was, in the shifting shape of Ormus’s monochrome, protean shade, still alive.” (54) Twins always invite comparisons: which one arrived first? Who is the most pleasing? Who behaves the most appropriately? Who becomes the most successful? Who stays alive? In White Teeth one twin is chosen to be sent back to the homeland. It is Magid who is selected for this honour and although he seems the most studious and devout he is in fact as eager as his tearaway brother Millat to fit in unobtrusively in England, rather than Pakistan, even telling school friends that his name is Mark Smith. When he returns from his time in his supposed homeland he is more ‘English’ than ever and determined not to take on the identity of holy man his father is so enamoured of: ‘The one I send home comes home a pukka Englishman, white suited, silly wig lawyer. The one I keep here is fully paid-up green bow-tiewearing fundamentalist terrorist […] it feels to me like you make a devil’s pact when you walk into this country. You hand over your passport at the check-in, you get stamped, you want to make a little money, get yourself started […] but you mean to go back! Who would want to stay? Cold, wet, miserable; terrible food, dreadful newspapers – who would want to stay? In a place where you are never welcomed, only tolerated. Just tolerated. Like you are an animal finally housetrained. Who would want to stay? But you have made the devil’s pact […] it drags you in and suddenly you are unsuitable to return, your children are unrecognizable, you belong nowhere […] and then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging, it seems like some long, dirty lie […] and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident. But if you believe that, where do you go? What do you do? What does anything matter?’ (407)

4. The Abject Identity is thrust upon a country’s inhabitants because if they can be identified they can be dominated. White Teeth uses the boundaries of India and Pakistan to illustrate this and furthermore shows what Julia Kristeva is referring to in her work on abjection when she claims the abject to be, “hemmed in and thrust aside” (1982: 16). Abjection can be tied to oppression, degradation and discrimination. Even Samad, a Bangladeshi himself has difficulty in describing what the origins of his country are but his wife delights in a dictionary definition that

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claims them to be irretrievably mixed and largely Indo-Aryan. His son’s teacher repeatedly calls him Indian and can seem to see no tangible difference between India and Pakistan, grouping them together as non-English, the other side of a large important boundary with the subtler ones between them not mattering so much, if at all. In The Ground Beneath Her Feet Sir Darius refers to this same boundary and what is thrust beyond it, But what about outsideness? What about all that which is beyond the pale, above the fray, beneath notice? What about outcastes, lepers, pariahs, exiles, enemies, spooks, paradoxes? What about those who are remote? (Rushdie 1999: 42-3)

Despite difference there is also always sameness, making it impossible to simply differentiate oneself from that deemed ‘other’, or as Sir Darius terms it ‘remote’. In keeping with Kristeva’s abjection thesis the suggestion is that the membrane between self and other is very fine. Confusion can easily arise as that which identifies a human may also be exactly the same as that which does not – what is accepted as part of the whole and that which is rejected appear blurred or even identical. That which attracts also repulses; it seems unambiguous to define clearly what is not like us – but these definitions also illustrate our fascination with that category. Apt examples of this are waste products; humans are routinely repulsed by their own waste products, yet these products are part of them and made by their body. Babies are fascinated by what they produce, but are trained that they should be disgusted; it is therefore not a natural reaction to shy away from bodily waste, but rather a conditioned response. Food is a perfect example of both loving and fearing/hating the same product. Food is eaten, usually enjoyed, but once it has travelled through a body the relationship changes. In The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Rai, takes on the identity of a dead photographer by stealing his roll of film and therefore getting the kudos of the dead man’s corruption-exposing photographs – these are the pictures which launch Rai’s career despite him not having taken them. He assumes fragments of the other photographer’s life preferring it to what may appear more inherently his own life, which he chooses to reject. Kristeva’s use of the term ‘abjection’ describes the process by which, in a bid for substance, the subject rejects innate parts of itself, she likens this to a trapped animal biting off its own

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limb. This rejection of certain elements of the self results in what remains gaining a status as more valid. The abject occupies the borderlands of entities, where separate identities become blurred and indivisible, at the peripheries, the edges – where matter can leave and enter your body and therefore potentially alter how that body is identified. Other than food and waste the other major abject group is signs of sexual difference. These are all complex and ill-defined categories, capable of instilling desire for that which is also feared and rejected. Music, such a large part of both of these narratives, could similarly be viewed as abject, associated as it is with outpourings and irrational responses, it also enters and leaves the body via orifices as do the other signs of abjection. In White Teeth the music the teenagers chose vitally identifies them. In The Ground Beneath Her Feet the narrative charts the rise of a super-group, argues that Rock and Roll originated in the East and encourages characters to speak in song lyrics. When establishing identity what is craved is completeness, wholeness and cleanliness, ragged blurred edges which leak into dirt and back again are seen as a distinct threat. This is why ambivalence surrounds attempts to clearly demarcate identity – opposites can apply simultaneously – love and hate, welcome and repulse, dominate and assist. The rituals of the English boarding school listed by Sir Darius exemplify this: “cold baths, bad food, regular beatings and highquality academic instruction” (Rushdie 1999: 47). They seem extreme and mostly negative yet Sir Darius sees them as desirable and character-building, illustrating the urge to embrace that which may seem painful or hard to bear. Such blurred edges are all that any identity can hope for. The abject compromises the boundaries of singular identities by negating any ability to claim a complete and clean body. This has obvious implications for any psychoanalytic attempt clearly to define a separate subject and object. Westerners become torn between adhering to the prototype of white, heterosexual, bourgeois – a fine upstanding citizen sanitised by the cultural influences of consumer society; – or alternatively giving in to wild disorder. The idea of succumbing to urges, especially if they are violent and anti-social, is frowned upon and hopefully restrained by the strategic use of stereotypes. As already noted Sir Darius, and his wife Lady Spenta Cama, try constantly to anglicise themselves. Sir Darius’s idea of Englishness is bound up in perfectly manicured lawns and white lace curtains, belonging to large

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houses with several wings, orangeries, statuary and fountains. England has a ‘history’ whose refinement he craves and shuns in equal measure; the statues are ancient and based upon civilisations even more ancient; England sustains the concept of ‘family’; and Sir Darius repeatedly dreams of finding his long dead mother there, in his much fantasized idea of a perfect mother country. He yearns for a stately home and draws pleasure from reciting lists of their names to himself and his family, in no particular order. He longs to move his family there, and whilst it is his wife who prevents this happening she will ironically move there herself with her second husband, after Sir Darius’s death. Lady Spenta and Lord William Methwold live in the house Sir Darius has dreamt of so often, his obsession with all things English centring on old-fashioned and easy to mimic qualities: ‘Old virtues – mastery of firearms, pleasure in falconry, formal dancing, building of character through sport’. He claims that, ‘these things have lost meaning (in India). Only in the mother country can they be rediscovered’ (Rushdie 1999: 86-7),

when in fact they are equally parodied wherever he might find them, deeply entrenched in the creation and re-creation of a stereotypical, and ultimately unachievable supposedly ‘traditional’ national identity. Kristeva’s definition of abjection as “the abject (as) the violence of mourning for an ‘object’ that has always already been lost, and this ‘object’ is the elusive, and impossibly perfect ‘I’ we all attempt to resurrect” (1982: 15) firmly connects abjection to the nostalgia and parody of such striving, the constant hankering after a perfect something that never existed anyway. The aftermath of western colonial rule shows that colonisation cannot be undone, there is never any possibility of returning to a perceived version of events, especially when viewing these events through the images of what has occurred since reveals them as irredeemably coloured. The “mourning” Kristeva speaks of arises from the ‘forever spoilt’ nature of that which is looked back at, its perceived fall from grace. What she further reiterates is that humans strive towards that which is impossible to achieve – the idea of an ‘authentic’ self, secure within a national identity, free from the taint of abjection. This is always impossible and unreachable because ‘the other’ (selected to be thrust away), the dirt and disorder humans attempt to push over a borderline into the ‘dark side’ is still, and always, an undeniable part of identity – like Vina’s sordid past;

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Ormus’s dead twin; Rai with his guilty secret – humans cannot escape the things that identify them. For everything that is selected for identity processes there is something rejected that also carries an identificatory message. What is selected and rejected is entrenched in the ideology of the ruling class and enforced upon those new to a particular society, or those in the position of having their former society hijacked. English society is no exception to this. Indeed, those with power encourage the creation of traditions because of their usefulness as controlling mechanisms; this means that celebrating traditions which have an impact on national and personal identity should be viewed with suspicion. Bhabha discusses the problematic nature of the notion of origins and the manner in which a supposedly ‘pure identity’, attributed to origins and linked to traditions and ideology is a dangerous concept as it can be used for discrimination and oppression. Mike Sutton suggests that Britishness has a formal and civic link with tradition whilst Englishness might be viewed as a culture-bound identity, developed in answer to what is felt and experienced (2005). It seems difficult to keep up with the ever-changing English experience. The characters of both of these books find that no sooner do they achieve what they thought would make a difference than the parameters have been changed. For example in White Teeth the emphasis was on getting to England but this soon changes to living in particular areas, which can always be bettered. The customs and habits of England followed by the characters of The Ground Beneath Her Feet are soon out-dated. The lives of the characters of both of these books perfectly encapsulate the ever-changing ‘English experience’. 5. Heritage, Tradition and National Identity Sutton also goes on to suggest that most countries are far more celebratory of their identity and heritage than the English. However, he does not think that the English reticence is necessarily a bad thing, taking into account the created nature of identity and the contemporary need to be self-aware, “[…] perhaps all national identities are doomed, and the English are simply the first at the funeral?” (2005) The ironic self-reflection is a useful survival mechanism; selfawareness of the created and constantly changing nature of our iden-

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tity is crucial in understanding the manner in which others identify us. Kristeva discusses identity as not inherent or given but rather constructed inline with external forces and influences: To take account of this de-stabilization of meaning and of the subject I thought the term ‘subject in process’ would be appropriate. ‘Process’ in the sense of process but also in the sense of a legal proceeding where the subject is committed to trial, because our identities in life are constantly called into question, brought to trial, over-ruled. (1986: 19-21)

Sir Darius poses as a lawyer who, despite, or perhaps because of, his faked qualifications, has lost his faith in the law (even with its English heritage). His loss of faith springs from the very thing Kristeva cites, the propensity of ‘others’ to call us to trial and hold us to account. This process of being identified by others encourages the creation of stereotypes, named and described against those who are not as you are and the potential to use this as a domination tool is obvious. Samad hates being identified as a ‘waiter in an Indian restaurant’, but tellingly the alternative identities he prefers are equally stereotypical and constructed: I AM NOT A WAITER. I HAVE BEEN A STUDENT, A SCIENTIST, A SOLDIER, MY WIFE IS CALLED ALSANA, WE LIVE IN EAST LONDON BUT WE WOULD LIKE TO MOVE NORTH. I AM A MUSLIM BUT ALLAH HAS FORSAKEN ME OR I HAVE FORSAKEN ALLAH, I’M NOT SURE. I HAVE A FRIEND – ARCHIE – AND OTHERS. I AM FORTY-NINE BUT WOMEN STILL TURN IN THE STREET. SOMETIMES. (Smith 2001: 57-8; capitals in original)

There is nothing inherent about the way Samad identifies himself, all of his potential identities are dependent upon outside influences and requirements. In The Ground Beneath Her Feet Sir Darius is equally typecast, as a scorned, old man, finally invited to England only to be confronted with his inadequacy and pushed closer to the death that will allow his widow to marry into English aristocracy, to Sir Darius’s former friend, turned exposer, smug with his enviable heritage. Sir Darius’s dogged mimicry of all things English takes him further away from what he desires. Copying is not straightforward, but instead complex and conditional.

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Copies are never identical, not to the original and not even to each other, so nobody will ever quite conform to a stereotype, indeed all attempts to do so will slightly differ. Bhabha defines this anomaly in terms of metaphor and metonymy where description is aided by terms representing each other. Sir Darius provides a good example, with his desperation to be ‘English’ standing as a symbol for English colonial rule and its impact on the colonised. A dysfunctional anglicised population comes to represent the politically unsound domination of another country, illustrating that because metaphor and metonymy function via representations the visible surface is always misleading. Bhabha refers to Lacanian theory to suggest that mimicry is like camouflage, not so much a repression of difference but an attempt to blend in. The high incidence of doubles and multiple personae is indicative of this permanent presence of difference. The identity’s other facets have not been overwhelmed, merely hidden. This creates further ambiguity because when the colonised are efficient in their imitation of their oppressors then this must in turn affect the identity of these oppressors. Identity is made against ‘otherness’ – with wealth, beauty, status, sanity always compared to some ‘other’. The colonisers are identified by those they colonise – they are only superior until those they colonise become equally civilised, religious, educated, ‘English’. When the colonised become experts at imitating a stereotype then identity crises will arise. It becomes difficult to patronize people if they exceed the parameters set for them. So although standards exist, if they can be set or exceeded they only serve to illustrate their own constructed nature. Bhabha connects the construction of identity via otherness to fetishes because both are metonymic, illustrating that one object or notion can represent another. He claims that both fetish objects and mimicry undermine what they are replacing in terms of identity – the powerful one in the relationship relies on the ‘other’ for identity. In White Teeth the Chalfens use Irie, Magid and Millat to support their own questionable ‘Englishness’. There is the potential to reverse the balance of power. For example although the sexual act is the ultimate aim of the person with a fetish, if they cannot achieve arousal without the fetish object then that object becomes more powerful than the act. Likewise the colonisers cannot be powerful, superior and civilised without an original population on which they attempt to force oppositional terms – such as weak, inferior, uncivilised or wild. ‘Englishness’ cannot seem desirable or

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even discernible without a derided ‘Non-English’. This is (particularly) easily applied to appearance. Modern technology offers the potential to alter appearance – a temporary and cosmetic answer to fear of abjection. Technology’s alteration and perfection of bodies and faces carries implications of control especially if it offers a prescriptive bid for sameness. Appearance, habits and language are increasingly forced upon those joining communities. In White Teeth this is illustrated by the immigrants bid for standard Englishness through slimming and drastic hair alterations. The painful straightening, “Two minutes after having the thick white ammonia gloop spread on to her head, she felt the initial cold sensation change to a terrific fire […] and Irie started screaming” (Smith 2001: 277), and ‘necessity’ for extensions – 2 Metres. Natural Thai. Straight. Chestnut. 1 Metre. Natural Pakistani. Straight with a wave. Black. 5 Metres. Natural Chinese. Straight. Black. 3 Metres. Synthetic hair. Corkscrew curl. Pink. (279)

– reminding the reader of the long-standing exploitation behind such practices as selling hair, “but that’s not your hair, for fuck’s sake, that’s some poor oppressed Pakistani woman who needs the cash for her kids” (283).2 The determination to alter, control and dominate is further illustrated in White Teeth by the genetic modification of a mouse: Creating mice whose very bodies did exactly what Marcus told them. And always with humanity in mind – a cure for cancer, cerebral palsy, Parkinson’s – always with the firm belief in the perfectibility of all life. (312)

Marcus’s research with the mouse emphasises the power of science and technology. Post-colonial texts typically address issues of migration and invasion, within postmodern texts this might be an invasion by the media or technology. Whilst White Teeth focuses on altering human physicality via genetic experiments on animals in The Ground Beneath Her Feet the alterations are made to the built environment and the culture. Rushdie gives culture its dictionary definition: 2

The exploitation of such practices is documented in Hardy 1975.

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‘A group of micro-organisms grown in a nutrient substance under controlled conditions’. A squirm of germs on a glass slide is all, a laboratory experiment calling itself a society. Most of us wrigglers make do with life on that slide: we even agree to feel proud of that ‘culture’. Like slaves voting for slavery or brains for lobotomy, we kneel down to pray before the god of all moronic micro-organisms and pray to be homogenized or killed or engineered; we promise to obey. (1999: 95)

The Bombay culture in his narrative is a hybrid mix of influences, the characters pass from India to America, Europe and England in seemingly borderless fluidity. The earth cracks wide open to assert its fluid and insecure nature in violent earthquakes. The constantly altering nature of our environment means that there is always a process of metamorphosis around stereotypical national identity traits and this leads to a lack of clarity surrounding mimicry, because it produces identities which are “almost the same but not quite”. Bhabha aligns mimicry’s slippage with mockery, reminding us that mimicry is always both a conformance and a threat (1998: 4). It threatens as it has the potential to outdo, and consequently usurp the original. It is contradictory; simultaneously caught up in sameness and disavowal, “discourse uttered between the lines and as such both against the rules and within them” (4). Bhabha plays with words, using the phrase, “almost the same but not white” to echo the Freudian sentiment above (3). He claims this system produces hybrids – “mimic men” – “Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions in morals and in intellect” (3). It is impossible to define the exact ingredients of a national identity, it cannot be pinned down to the way the people look, speak or act, even their place of birth is inadequate. Sir Darius illustrates this amalgam, as do the twins in White Teeth. Bhabha insists that to be anglicised is not to be English, in the same way that a nation and an empire can never be the same; one overturns the racial and cultural priorities of the other. He summarises this as an empire centring on taking land from others by force, and inflicting the ways of the coloniser on the people there already, whilst Nation epitomises roots and a feeling of belonging, being born in a place and subsequently feeling a claim upon it. Postmodern notions about origins wreak havoc with this definition, upsetting, as they do, any possibility of ‘knowing one’s place’.

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The colonisers’ infliction of an identity on the colonised largely takes place through surveillance. Jacques Lacan’s mirror stage provides an insightful way to analyse this. At the mirror stage humans are only aware of being a singular ‘me’, until they see their reflection for the first time as a baby and that reflected image becomes ‘I’. However, as it is always a reflected image – reflected back from a mirror, or a window, or somebody else’s eyes – ‘me’ and ‘I’ are not congruent. Without others, and the larger world that humans are thrust into, babies would be perfectly satisfied with ‘me’. Looking causes identity formation; what is initially seen by the baby is the mirror image, the baby then begins to form an identity to go with this mirror image without realising that the image is also the ‘me’ they have been feeling. Without the mirror the self has only previously been seen in fragments and because of this process the image in the mirror seems too unified, too complete to possibly be ‘me’. The formation of the ‘I’ as a separate entity emphasises Bhabha’s assertion that ‘looking’ is connected to control; looking fixes an identity on the viewed, just as the mirrored reflection does but this identity becomes forever separate from the person who feels, breathes and thinks. Bhabha also reiterates that looking is a two-way operation: the dominant party looks but they are also looked at. The mimicry of Englishness then is always also about surveillance and the control it offers – looking exerts control no matter how subtle. Observation is needed for control, but also for copying. This creates further ambivalence – the copier of Englishness and the supposedly original English identity they are copying are tied together by looking, they identify each other, it is not a simple oneway process, indeed it is one which becomes increasingly complex in our technologically sophisticated visual culture as the looker and the looked-at become much harder to differentiate from one another.

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Works Cited Primary References Hardy, Thomas. 1975. The Woodlanders [1887] (New Wessex Edition). London: Macmillan. Rushdie, Salman. 1999. The Ground Beneath her Feet. London: Random House. Smith, Zadie. 2001. White Teeth [2000]. London: Penguin.

Research Literature Baudrillard, Jean. 1985. ‘The Ecstasy of Communication’ in Foster, Hal (ed.) Postmodern Culture. London: Pluto: 126-34. Bhabha, Homi. 1984. ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’ in October 28: 125-33; http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/wyrick/ DEBCLASS/bhab.htm. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (transl. Leon S. Roudiez). New York: Columbia UP. ––. 1986. ‘A Question of Subjectivity: An Interview’ in Women’s Review 12: 19-21. Kumar, Krishan. 2003. The Making of English National Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Lacan, Jacques. 1977. ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the “I” as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’ in Ecrits: A Selection (transl. Alan Sheridan). New York: Norton. Sutton, Mike. 2005. ‘England, Whose England? Class, Gender and National Identity in the 20th-century Folklore Revival’. http://mustrad.org.uk/articles/england. htm.

Index Ackroyd, Peter 125-126, 130-132 Ali, Monica 100 Alterity Industry 74 Anderson, Benedict 15, 213 Anderson, Perry 90-91, 101 Arijon, Daniel 62 Armitage, David 111 Aubrey, John 133 Augé, Marc 19, 33-34, 37, 143, 152153 Austen, Jane 91, 96-101 Axis 60-63, 66, 127 Bachelard, Gaston 111 Badger, Gerry 227 Bagehot, Walter 93-96, 101 Bakhtin, Mikhail. M. 16, 19, 37, 143, 152 Banfield, Ann 153 Barell, John 210 Barker, Ernest 91 Barnes, Julian 220-221 Barthes, Roland 16, 24, 38, 174-175 Battestin, Martin C. 186 Baudrillard, Jean 245 Beach 18, 226-238 Behrmann, Cynthia Fansler 115 Bell, Michael 155-156 Bellringer, Alan W. 72-75 Berberich, Christine 15, 23, 216-217 Bermingham, Ann 186 Betjeman, John 170, 215 Bhabha, Homi K. 144, 180, 244, 248249, 254-259 Blake, William 103, 118-119, 207208 Blanchard, Tamsin 228 Blunden, Edmund 172-173 Body Tour 55, 57, 61-62, 65

Boers, Frank 51, 53-54, 61 Booth, Howard J. 160-161 Borderland 34, 42, 252 Boundary 225, 228, 235-236, 240, 251 Bourne, George 180 Brace, Catherine 212-213 Brittain, Vera 216 Brontë, Charlotte, 32, 96, 101 Brontë, Emily 28 Bryson, Bill 173, 222 Bunce, Michael 209, 212 Burgschmidt, Ernst 51 Burke, Edmund 64, 94 Burke, Thomas 199, 202 Burnet, Gilbert 78-79 Burney, Frances 125-128, 130, 133 Burrow's Guidebooks 196-197 Buruma, Ian 213-214 Buwler-Lytton, Edward 72 Buzard, James 84 Caesar, Ferry 55 Camões, Luís Vaz de 103, 117, 121 apek, Karel 222 Carlyle, Thomas 112, 146, 176 Cartography 125, 134 Chase, Malcolm 201-202 Chatman, Seymour 53 Chaudhuri, Nirat C. 222 Chippindale, Christopher 123-127, 133-134 Chorology 29 Choropoetics 28-29, 33, 42 Christaller, Walther 30 Chronotope 16, 34, 143 Clunn, Harold 198 Cobbett, William 13, 17, 72-86 Cognitive Semantics 47, 59

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Index

Cohen, Erik 75 Colley, Linda 16, 211 Collier, Price 222 Collis, Christy 49 Colonialism 15, 103, 118, 152, 245 Commodification 238, 240 Connery, Chris 107 Connolly, Cressida 236 Constructions 6, 14, 16, 35, 126, 132, 142 Contact Zone 118, 152, 154, 157 Continuity 80, 99, 107, 156, 180, 182, 197, 246 Corbin, Alain 109 Cortes, Martin 106 Cosgrove, Denis 18, 21-24, 32, 148, 187 Cosmology 23 Countryside 195-202, 209-221, 228 Crang, Michael 213, 215 Crisis of Englishness 235 Croft, William 48 Cruse, D. Alan 48 Cultural Decline 143, 149 Cultural Difference 84, 142-145 Cultural Geography 7, 13, 16, 19, 22, 28, 35, 106, 212 Cultural Nation 92-93 Cunningham, Valentine 170, 172, 182, 191, 202

During, Simon 180 Dyck, Ian 73

Daniels, Stephen 23-24, 32, 148, 187 Darby, Wendy Joy 210-211 Darvill, Timothy 126 Davies, Norman 168 De Lange, Adriaan 131 Defoe, Daniel 91-94, 101 Desire 139-140, 144-145, 155-159, 187, 197, 211, 236, 252 Dialogism 16, 36, 38 Dick, Bernard 55, 57, 62 Dickens, Charles 91, 93, 175, 177 Difference 169, 176, 179, 231, 233, 237, 245, 251-254, 256 Dirven, René 51, 66 Doel, Marcus 42 Döhring, Tobias 111 Dollimore, Jonathan 157

Fielding, Henry 91, 95, 146 Figure and Ground 47-48 Fiske, John 226-227, 233 Fitter, Chris 32 Focalizer 32, 42, 52-65 Ford, Charles Bradley 201 Forster, E.M. 99, 101, 169, 183, 188190, 203 Foster Stovel, Nora 57, 66 Foucault, Michel 17-20, 25, 121 Freitas, Frei Serafim de 114 Freud, Sigmund 20, 109, 137, 140, 151, 156, 258 Froude, Kames Anthony 5, 14, 103, 106-120 Fulton, Thomas Wemys 114 Fussell, Paul 173

Easthope, Antony 14, 16, 28, 195 Eliot, George 96, 146, 167, 172, 175, 182-183 Empire 103, 106-108, 160 English Home 188, 227, 236 English Novel 5, 10, 90-93, 98-101 English Studies 181-182 Englishness 13-18, 21-28, 35, 42-43, 90-94, 97-98, 103, 106, 112, 116-120, 126, 132-133, 151, 153, 160-161, 168, 172, 180181, 193, 199, 202, 207-220, 225-228, 233-240, 243-249, 252-259 Entrikin, Nicholas 29, 33 Environment 13, 30, 32, 43, 48, 8991, 96, 123-126, 162, 179180, 192, 195, 199, 201, 244, 247-248, 257-258 Euphuism 93 Evans, Vyvyan 49, 51, 54, 59, 61 Everett, Nigel 186 Everitt, Alan 30-31 Exclusion 199, 212, 220-221, 231, 237 Eyles, John 33 Eysteinsson, Astradur 192

Index

Gandelman, Claude 58 Gaze Tour 55-58, 63-65 Genette, Gérard 52 Geography 7, 13-16, 19-25, 35, 37, 42-43, 123, 127, 142, 148, 213, 247 George IV, King 93 Gibson, Jeremy 125-126 Giddens, Anthony 34, 126, 202 Gikandi, Simon 15-16, 22, 26, 111, 119, 122 Gilroy, Paul 118, 122 Globalisation 239 Golding, William 107 Goldsmith, Oliver 95 Goldstein, E. Bruce 47, 49 Grahame, Kenneth 169-170 Grand Tour 79 Grigson, Geoffrey 168 Grotius, Hugo 103, 114, 119-120 Guide Books 166 Habermas, Jürgen 80 Hardy, Thomas 14, 125-126, 129130, 133, 196, 214 Harrington, Sir James 103, 105-108, 117, 119 Hedgecoe, John 63 Helsinger, Elizabeth 210 Hemlow, Joyce 127 Herskovits, Annette 47, 56 Hill, Susan 215 Hillary, Edmund 49, 58-61, 65 Hobsbawm, Eric 202, 221 Hofman, Tod 55 Houghton, Charles 197 Howkins, Alun 172, 187, 193, 195 Huggan, Graham 79 Hulme, Peter 106, 111, 122 Hume, David 94-95 Hybrid 24, 159, 244, 258 Identity 5, 7, 16-17, 34, 72, 89-100, 110, 117, 122, 143, 154, 211212, 221-224, 231, 237, 243256, 259 Image Schema 54-65

263 Imagined Communities 15, 213 Imperialism 94, 143, 160 Individualism 35-36, 81, 170 Invented Traditions 202, 213 Ishiguro, Kazuo 166, 217-221 Jahn, Manfred 53 James, Henry 163 Janelle, Douglas G. 34 Janik, Del Juan 131 Jeans, D.N. 193-194, 199 Jeffrey, Ian 198 John Bull 92 Johnson, Mark 48, 53-54, 57, 59, 62, 66 Johnson, Samuel 127 Johnston, Ronald John 30 Jones, C.B. 72-75 Kant, Immanuel 29 Kazantzakis, Nikos 222 Kelsall, Malcolm 166 Kern, Stephen 180 Keun, Odette 222 Kipling, Rudyard 96 Klein, Bernhard 5, 9, 14, 103, 119120 Kohl, Stephan 7, 10, 14, 25, 49, 57 Kristeva, Julia 250-255, 260 Kroetsch, Robert 33, 35 Kumar, Krishan 16, 28, 44, 92 Lacan, Jacques 143-144, 152-156, 256, 259 Lakoff, George 39, 48, 53-54, 57, 59, 62, 66 Landmark 41-42, 48-52, 80, 240 Landscape 24-29, 32-38, 41, 48-59, 65-66, 72, 78-81, 89-91, 9698, 126, 137-160, 166, 171174, 185-191, 195-197, 202, 207, 210-221, 225-228, 237240 Landscape Description 14, 48, 51-54, 65, 215-216, 219 Langacker, Ronald W. 48, 50-51 Langford, Paul 91, 95, 101 Lawrence, D.H. 137-161, 167, 178

264 Leavis, Frank Raymond 178, 180 Leisi, Ernst 51 Leonard, Mark 240 Levebvre, Henri 18-21, 28, 32, 43, 142, 144 Levinson, Stephen 49, 55 Levy, Andrea 100 Liminal Space 227 Linebaugh, Peter 118 Linstromberg, Seth 48, 51, 53, 60-61 Literary Geography 142-143 Lodge, David 167 Loew, Philip 187, 200 Losch, August 30 Lowerson, John 195 Lyons, John 49, 54, 56 MacCannel, Dean 74 McEwan, Ian 99 Mackenthun, Gesa 9, 120 McKibbin, Ross 169 Mann, Thomas 139-140 Maritime Culture 103 Marsh, Jan 187, 193 Mascardo, Gianna 75 Masculinity 137, 143-146, 149, 157160 Matless, David 22-25, 188 Maugham, W. Somerset 194 Mee, Arthur 197, 200 Meinecke, Friedrich 92 Mellor, David 196, 199 Mergenthal, Silvia 5, 10, 14, 123, 236 Michelucci, Stefania 147-148, 150 Mill, John Stuart 95-96, 101 Miller, J. Milles 33 Mitchell, Don 210-211 Mitchell, W.J.T. 24, 142-143, 210 Modernising Process 74, 77, 84, 86 Modernism 142, 153, 160, 186, 245 Modernity 143-152, 156-160, 168, 179, 194 Moorland 28-42, 96, 98 Morreti, Franco 92 Morrison, Blake 231 Morton, H.V. 165, 168, 170-182, 197-199 Moss, R.A. 197

Index Motoring 169-170, 195 Muir, Richard 28, 31 Muldoon, James 114 Mulhern, Francis 180 Myth 7, 14-16, 21, 77, 86, 110, 125, 137, 148-149, 175, 186, 207, 214, 218-222, 246 Naipaul, V.S. 219 Napoleonic Wars 71-72, 84, 133 Nation 15, 22, 24, 36, 91-95, 98-99, 105-106, 113-120, 133, 167168, 172, 201, 209-214, 218, 226, 231, 237, 258 National Character 16, 89-95, 98, 226 National Identity 14, 16, 21, 24, 26, 35, 44, 89-93, 96-103, 195, 198-199, 202, 205, 213, 221, 225-228, 231, 237-240, 245, 253-254, 258 National Trust 187 Nattrass, Leonora 73 Negotiation 28, 37 Norquay, Glenda 142 North-South Divide 237 Nostalgia 9, 13, 15, 24, 71-72, 83, 120, 207, 216, 218, 253 Nyman, Jopi 149, 160 Nystrand, Martin 27, 36-37 Ocean Studies 103 O'Conell, Sean 170, 179 Onega, Susana 125-126, 131-132 Organic Community 177 Orientational Metaphors 53, 66 Orwell, George 170, 175, 216-217 Otherness 30, 72, 117, 143, 152-156, 161, 225, 236, 249, 253, 256 Paasi, Anssi 225 Parr, Martin 226-240 Path 59-65 Pearce, Philip 75 Perkin, Harold 169 Phoenix, Ann 240 Photography 14, 48, 226 Place 13-21, 24, 28-30, 33-37, 42-43, 56-59, 82, 84, 90, 105-108,

Index 111, 123, 126, 128, 131, 137139, 142-148, 151-152, 155156, 159, 166, 170-171, 180181, 188-189, 196-197, 200, 210-211, 215, 219, 222, 233, 237-239, 247-250, 258 Poetry 92, 169, 185-186, 196, 216 Political Nation 92-93 Pope, Alexander 185 Popular Culture 73 Pordzik, Ralph 5, 10, 13, 17, 25, 84 Postcolonial 10, 137, 143, 151-152 Postmodern 26, 42, 220, 245, 248249, 257-258 Potts, Alex 198 Pounds, Norman J. 35 Pratt, Mary Louise 118, 157 Priestley, J.B. 172-179, 194 Primitivism 151 Psychic Symbolism 156 Psychogeography 125, 134 Quirk, Randolph 51, 59-61 Raban, Jonathan 109 Race 94, 110-112, 146, 151, 155-157, 239 Real 137, 144, 155 Reciprocal Spatial Realities 28, 37, 42 Rediker, Marcus 118 Region 31, 35, 41, 48-52, 56, 58, 61, 64, 96, 117-119, 143-148, 151, 172, 179, 237 Relph, Edward 33 Renton, William 28-35, 38-41 Representation 13, 16-18, 23, 35, 48, 53, 56, 90, 107, 113, 126, 142-143, 147, 152, 155, 187, 190, 209-210, 213-214, 226228, 238-239, 245, 247, 256 Rimmon-Kenan 52 Roberts, Neil 144, 147-148, 153-157 Robertson, Ian 212 Robinson, Forrest 63 Rogers, Alan 193 Romanticism 23, 42, 72-74 Rommetveit, Ragnar 28, 36-38

265 Rowse, A.L. 216 Rubin, E. 47 Rural England 72-74, 143, 145, 172, 185-202, 213, 221-222 Rural Society 74, 209 Rushdie, Salman 6, 14, 244-248, 251253, 257 Ruskin, John 66 Sack, Robert 29, 225, 238-239 Salkey, Andrew 100 Sassoon, Siegfried 216-217 Sauer, Carl 29, 212 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang 166, 180 Schmid, Hans-Jörg 48, 51, 53 Schmitt, Carl 113 Schulze, Rainer 59 Schutz, Alfred 36-37 Schwarz, Bill 202 Scotland 32, 34, 84, 87, 92-94, 211 Scott, Walter 93, 170 Scutt, Rebecca 214 Sebald, Winfried Georg 174 Seeber, Hans Ulrich 186 Seinberg, Philip E. 107, 112-114, 122 Selden, John 103, 113-121 Shakespeare, William 92-93, 110, 146, 178, 181, 214, 226 Sheail, John 194 Sidney, Sir Philip 209 Simpson, John A. 64 Sinclair, Jain 125 Sinfield, Alan 219 Slack, Jon 49 Smith, Anthony D. 90 Smith, Roger C. 118 Smith, Zadie 6, 14, 99-100, 244-260 Smollet, Tobias 95 Space 13-24, 28-38, 41-43, 48-55, 58, 61, 63, 81, 83, 103-120, 123, 126, 137, 142-144, 149, 155157, 167-168, 180, 188-189, 192, 195, 198-201, 209-211, 215, 219, 226-228, 236, 247 Spatial Perception 11, 47-48, 53, 57 Spatial Practices 18-20, 25-29, 33, 35 Spatial Semantics 28, 38-39, 42-43 Speed 56, 64, 116, 167, 169, 180

266 Spengler, Oswald 149-151 Spenser, Edmund 209 Standardisation 176-179 Sterne, Laurence 95 Structuration 34, 126 Stukeley William 133 Sturt, George 180 Sublime 17, 23-24, 64, 81, 109, 142, 152, 156, 210, 221 Sutton, Mike 254 Swift, Graham 166 Taguchi, Tetsuya 222 Talmy, Leonard 48-49, 52-53 Taylor, John 50-54, 195, 198, 202 Terdiman, Richard 190, 198, 202 Thacker, Andrew 19-21, 142, 144 Theroux, Paul 49, 55-57 Thomas, Edward 172, 201 Thompson, Denys 180-181 Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel 177 Touring 169, 196-198, 202 Tourism 74-75, 79, 84, 166, 194, 215, 218, 220, 222, 238 Tracy, Billy T. 159 Trajector 20, 39-42, 48-52, 108, 159 Transculturation 157 Travel Writing 58, 63, 72, 75, 79, 84, 86, 117, 137-148, 151-160, 166-170, 173-176, 179-182, 222 Tuan, Yi-Fu 33 Turner, James 39, 186 Tversky, Barbara 48 Twain, Mark 49, 63-64 Tyler, Andrea 49, 51, 54, 59, 61 Ullmer-Ehrich, Veronika 55 Ungerer, Friedrich 48, 51, 53 Urry, John 79, 88, 166, 169, 171, 179 Vaughan, William 172 Vertical Axis 48-51, 60, 66 Victorian Literature 103 Vorda, Alan 218 Walcott, Derek 111 Walsh, John 122

Index Waugh, Evelyn 192 Weiner, Edmund S.C. 64 Wells, H.G. 191-192 Wharton, Edith 169 Whittle, Alasdair 126 Wiener, Martin 199, 209 Williams, Raymond 17-18, 21, 23, 73, 76, 81-82, 85, 146 Williams, Val 227, 239 Wold, Astri Heen 39 Woodcock, George 73, 78-79, 82-83, 87 Woolf, Virginia 99 Word Classes 51-52 Worthen, John 141, 146, 151, 158 Zee, Emile van der 49 Žižek, Slavoj 155 Zlatev, Jordan 28, 39-41, 43