University of Manchester · Web viewMike Sanders. God Save the Ecchoing Green: the uses of...
Transcript of University of Manchester · Web viewMike Sanders. God Save the Ecchoing Green: the uses of...
Mike Sanders
God Save the Ecchoing Green: the uses of imaginary nostalgia in William Blake and Ray
Davies
Abstract: This article examines Blake’s importance for our understanding of a certain type of
subaltern ‘Englishness’ which is characterized by imaginary nostalgia and an attachment to the
local, and exemplified by the trope of the village green. It compares representations of the green in
the work of Blake and Ray Davies and The Kinks in order to demonstrate the political consequences
which attend the reinscription of the local (the green) as the national (Englishness).
Key words: Blake, Ray Davies, The Kinks, Englishness, imaginary nostalgia, village green,
chronotope, working-class, structure of feeling, organic intellectual
They expect me to be this wandering poet walking around Hampstead Heath with a notebook
and a scarf round my neck looking like William Blake. (Ray Davies interview, 1997)1
The 'counter culture' of the 1960s and 1970s frequently hailed William Blake as prophet,
visionary, rebel and shaman.2 It constructed a version of Blake as an exotic and esoteric figure: a
'cosmic' Blake operating beyond the confines of time and space. Whilst, in many respects, this is an
attractive vision of Blake, it also obscures, even obliterates, the 'earthy' or 'rooted' Blake: the Blake
whose feet repeatedly trod the ‘charter'd streets’ of London. It is this intensely local Blake and his
ongoing cultural significance, particularly as regards our understanding of a certain type of
'Englishness', which is the central focus of this article. Methodologically, the article 'constellates'
the work of Blake with that of his fellow Londoner, Ray Davies of The Kinks (focusing on The
Village Green Preservation Society, Muswell Hillbillies, and the Preservation albums) in order to
explore the ways in which a class-specific (essentially artisanal) experience of the 'local' as locale
(exemplified by the idea of the village green) is also able to serve as an expression of (English)
national identity.3
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The article begins by noting the ongoing significance of 'Jerusalem' in the formation and
articulation of ideas of 'Englishness'. It then offers a brief analysis of a specific ‘structure of
feeling’4 at work in 'Jerusalem' which, it argues, is vital to understanding the political ambivalence
inherent in artisanal forms of ‘Englishness'. Furthermore, the article argues that this structure of
feeling which it calls ‘imaginary nostalgia’ depends on a particular chronotope or articulation of the
time-space relationship.5 It then examines the ways in which the village green and imaginary
nostalgia inform the work of William Blake and Ray Davies. In particular, this comparison
demonstrates the political ambivalence inherent in the misrecognition (or reinscription) of the local
as the national.
Blake and Englishness
Blake's single most potent contribution to ideas of English national identity is the extract
from Milton better known as 'Jerusalem'.6 In the setting by Hubert Parry, setting of 'Jerusalem' has
become England's semi-official national anthem (it is regularly sung before the beginning of play at
Test matches) and, for many, its closing image of England as a ‘green & pleasant Land’ provides a
self-evident description of the country. However, I want to draw attention to the poem's structure of
feeling and its attendant chronotope. In temporal terms, 'Jerusalem' contrasts an actual present of
‘dark Satanic Mills’ with a possible past and a possible future, both of which are signified by
'Jerusalem'. Similarly, in spatial terms, an England of ‘clouded hills’ and ‘dark Satanic Mills’ is
contrasted with an England as a ‘green and pleasant land’, an England of ‘mountains green’ and
‘pleasant pastures’. Thus a dark present is counter posed with a green and radiant past. It is
important to note the hypothetical (or prophetic) status of past and future here. The poem does not
assert that Christ once walked ‘upon England's mountains green’; it identifies this as an imaginative
possibility. Similarly, the future building of Jerusalem will only arise as a result of ‘Mental Fight’ -
it too is an imaginative possibility rather than an historical inevitability.7
Thus, 'Jerusalem' expresses a strong desire for a time and place which has 'passed' while
simultaneously acknowledging that its ostensible object might not have existed ‘in a finite organical
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perception’.8 In short, it offers an example of imaginary nostalgia as the precondition for utopian
possibility. Following Blake's death, aspects of this imaginary nostalgia will play an important role
in the construction of English nationalism. However, in its nationalist variant both vision and
chronotope are simplified and transmuted. The complex temporality of imaginary nostalgia (which
situates the present in relation to both past and future) is reduced to a simple binary (present/past).
This, in turn, facilitates the articulation of a more straightforward nostalgia for an idealized past
(whose existence is assumed). In spatial terms, ‘England's green and pleasant land’ is increasingly
subject to metonymic representation as the village green.9 As the work of Ray Davies will show,
while this version of the village green remains a site of utopian desires, those same desires are
increasingly identified with a lost past rather than as an object of future realisation.
The Village Green
In Blake's The Songs of Innocence and of Experience, the (village) green is a privileged site.
It plays a significant role in four poems which can be seen as forming two ‘contrary’ pairs: 'The
Ecchoing Green' and 'Nurse's Song' (Innocence), and 'The Garden of Love' and 'Nurses Song'
(Experience). 'The Ecchoing Green' which is the first poem in this sequence also offers the fullest
statement of the positive values which are embodied in the village green. 'The Ecchoing Green' is a
site of communal and inter-generational solidarity, freedom and joy. The poem opens with a series
of joyous sounds (both natural and human) which manifest the harmony which exists both between
and within the natural and the human world. The second verse offers a vision of inter-generational
sympathy as the ‘old folk,/...laugh at [the] play,’ of the village children.10 These positive aspects of
the village green are repeated in the 'Nurse's Song' from Innocence which also depicts the green as
the site of childhood play (and thus as an emblem of freedom), which exists in a harmonious
relation to the natural order (in this poem the shouts and laughter of the children are ‘ecchoed’ by
the hills).11 The green also provides an eirenic moment for older observers of the scene. These
positive attributes of the green are, paradoxically, reinforced by their absence from their 'contrary'
poems in Songs of Experience. In 'The Garden of Love', the (ecchoing) ‘green’ has been destroyed
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by the repressive ‘Chapel’ which has been built on it. Similarly, freedom of movement has been
curtailed by ‘shut’ gates, freedom of action by proscription (‘Thou shalt not, writ over the door;’),
and life and love have been replaced by death (‘graves/ And tomb-stones’). In addition, both the
children and their joyful sounds are absent from the garden, and the sympathising adults of
'Innocence' are replaced by the reproving and repressive ‘priests’.12 The speaker of 'Nurses Song'
from Experience provides a female counter-part to the reproving priests of 'The Garden of Love'
with her characterisation of play as ‘wasted’ time, and concomitant desire to impose restraints on
her charges.13
However, it is important to note that Blake's village green is more than a spatial site, it also
operates within a complex set of temporal relationships. 'The Ecchoing Green' opens in the present
tense – ‘does arise’ - but the end of the first stanza sees a shift into the future which promises that
‘our sports shall be seen’. In similar fashion, the second stanza begins in the present with the ‘old
folk’ actively enjoying the children's play and although it remains in the present tense, a
retrospective note is sounded with the injection of memory into the scene:
Such such were the joys
When we all girls and boys,
In our youth-time were seen,
On the Ecchoing Green.
These recollections add a further degree of complexity to the poem as they both invoke and negate a
sense of loss. The ‘joys’ of childhood are lost to the ‘old folk’ but are reaffirmed and re-enacted by
the current generation of children. Joy is simultaneously lost and found on the village green; it is at
one and the same time/in one and the same place - present and lost, not always present but also not
lost for ever.
In comparison to the abundant energy of the opening stanzas, the third seems entropic, ‘the
little ones weary/...The sun does descend./And our sports have an end;’. Similarly, the poem's final
image can be seen as striking a distinctly ominous tone; ‘the darkening Green’ can be read as a
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threatening image of loss and constriction. However, if we bear in mind the poem's complex
temporality, an alternative reading presents itself. The third stanza can also be seen as reaffirming
the natural, organic cycles identified in verse two in which childhood both precedes and follows old
age (as generations), the difference in the third stanza is that the emphasis falls on the natural limits
to play as experienced by the children. This need not be read purely as a negative phenomenon for
as Blake will affirm in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, ‘Contraries...are necessary to Human
existence.’14 Seen from this perspective, the final stanza can be read as a promise - it ends just at
the point where the cycle will begin anew - the fall of night which is the necessary contrary to the
daybreak with which the poem opens.
Blake's green is best understood in chronotopic terms. It embodies both utopian space and a
complex temporality, and these features enable the green to represent a series of positive, communal
values; the green variously stands for freedom, a 'known' community, and through the exercise of
memory it can even overcome loss. Moreover, with its celebration of non-hierarchical and
unalienated relationships, the green offers a distinctly subaltern, even plebeian, utopia. In Blake's
London, often described as a series of villages, the green can be an urban space. However, well
before the second half of the twentieth century, the green becomes the village green and its
associations are more often conservative and rural than radical and urban. Nonetheless, I want to
suggest that Blake's utopian green although submerged never entirely disappears and occasionally
resurfaces in English culture. Indeed, it is precisely this tension between, and the passage from, the
conservative-rural to the radical-urban iteration of the (village) green which informs the work of
Ray Davies and The Kinks.
Ray Davies and the Village Green
Unsurprisingly, the village green features prominently in The Village Green Preservation
Society where it provides the focus for two songs, the titular 'The Village Green Preservation
Society' and also 'The Village Green'.15 The similarity between the two song titles marks a
significant difference in the vision which underlies the two tracks. Significantly, 'The Village
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Green' preceded the album by almost two years and it offers a conventional (conservative-rural)
view of its subject.16 In this song the village green is a literal space, characterized as rural, simple
and innocent (despite also being the site of lost erotic pleasures). Its register is one of simple
nostalgia, a then/now construction within which the lyric's ‘I’ expresses a desire to return. In
contrast, the green of 'The Village Green Preservation Society' is a much more complex entity. It
offers a metonymic representation of the 'England' of the common people; it is noticeable that the
song's heterogeneous list of objects and characters to be celebrated is predominantly and
unmistakably drawn from working-class culture.17 Furthermore, the village green also serves as a
symbol for anything which possesses immanent as opposed to financial value (a dimension of the
village green which will become clearer in the Muswell Hillbillies and Preservation albums).18
Opposing this carnivalesque heterogeneity in the song (as in real life) are the office blocks and
skyscrapers, those iconic developments of late-capitalist modernity. In The Village Green
Preservation Society, Davies' tone is one of playful subversiveness as evidenced by the invocation
with which the album's title track ends, ‘God save...’ - not the monarch, but – ‘the village green’.
For Davies, as for Blake, the village green is a site associated with joyous laughter, inter-
generational memory (Mrs Mopp, Desperate Dan and Mother Riley are all comic figures whose
origins precede Davies' own childhood) and immanent value. Similarly, for both, it provides a way
of figuring unalienated and non-hierarchical relationships. This dimension of the village green is
not only crucial to its radicalism but, in its privileging of relationships over physical space, it also
guarantees the portability of the former, enabling them to be re-inscribed and re-articulated in an
urban milieu. The significance of this recovery of the urban green can be demonstrated by
comparing the artwork for The Village Green Preservation Society with the Muswell Hillbillies
albums.
The front cover of Village Green Preservation Society presents itself as 'psychedelic' (see
weblink: https://www.kindakinks.net/discography/showimage.php?imgnum=737 ). The group is
photographed within concentric circles of light (which spill beyond the album cover) organized
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around a dark centre, while in the upper left of the image blurred, reflected lights are suggestive of
solar flares (this play of light and dark hinting at 'cosmic' overtones). This image proclaims both
the Kinks' ultra-modernity and their inviolability - the group stands within the light, staring out at
the audience. In contrast, the image on the back of the album speaks of the pastoral; (see weblink:
https://www.kindakinks.net/discography/showimage.php?imgnum=735 ) the band are shown
walking through grassland (so yellow that it almost suggests a cornfield) against an unbroken
backdrop of green trees. Only the group's brightly coloured clothes and the cartoonish purple font of
the album's title, speak of 'modernity'. What's more, in this image the group exists purely for itself,
they appear to be unaware of the presence of the camera. The significance of the 'village green' is
emphasized by the presence of the lyrics to 'The Village Green Preservation Society' and
underscored by the song's closing words, ‘God save the Village Green’. In one sense the movement
from front to back cover can be read as an exercise in simple nostalgia, a journey from ultra-
modernity 'back' to the village green.
At first sight the cover photo for Muswell Hillbillies appears to suggest a completely different
universe (see weblinks: https://www.kindakinks.net/discography/showimage.php?imgnum=843 and
https://www.kindakinks.net/discography/showimage.php?imgnum=844 ) It shows the interior of a
traditional London pub. The five members of the group stand leaning against the bar; two of the
group are engaged in conversation, two seem lost in their own thoughts, while Ray Davies (alone of
the group) stares directly at the camera. The pub has other customers, all male, of various ages, the
majority are working-class (signified by flat caps) although the presence of two grey-suited men at
a table near the door suggests that the pub is also used by the middle-classes. The far left of the
image (which is furthest into pub's interior) is noticeably darker than the right-hand third of the
image which is dominated by sunlight which floods in through the windows and door. The street
which is clearly visible through the window confirms that we are in a decidedly urban setting.
However, as urban as this setting is, it is important to realize that we are still looking at a
version of the 'village green' - the ‘Draught Beer Preservation Society’ is part of the 'Village Green
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Preservation Society'. More importantly, the album cover situates the group firmly within this
milieu - they are at home here, there is a strong sense of belonging. However, the album sleeve
clearly depicts this 'village green' as under threat. This is suggested by the darkened interior of the
bar and also, perhaps, by the presence of the men in grey suits on the right hand edge of the picture
(their significance will be made clearer by one of the album's tracks, 'Here Come the People in
Grey'). It is unmistakably present in the inside gatefold image which shows the group in front of
corrugated iron fencing which encloses an entire street of houses which have been earmarked for
'development' (see weblink: http://www.thinglink.com/scene/447400523939708930 ). This is a
potent image of community destroyed in pursuit of monetary gain. The muted opposition of Village
Green Preservation Society has become fully visualized and verbalized protest in Muswell
Hillbillies. Indeed this album, described by Davies as ‘our most working-class album’, stands in the
same relationship to The Village Green Preservation Society as Songs of Experience does to Songs
of Innocence.19 Like Experience, Muswell Hillbilllies understands that in order to affirm and protect
innocence, it is necessary to identify, catalogue and analyze the forces of repression and alienation
which threaten it.
The threat to the 'village green' in Muswell Hillbillies comes from two distinct, but related,
sources: the forces of capital and its attendant functionaries who oversee the bureaucracy of an
ironically named 'welfare state'. 'Twentieth-Century Man' complains of being ‘Controlled by civil
servants/And people dressed in grey’ and these grey clad figures (perhaps including the ones
occupying the table by the door on the album cover) are Davies' counterparts to the ‘Priests in black
gowns’ who destroy 'The Garden of Love' in Songs of Experience. In 'Here Come the People in
Grey', the song's persona has received a letter from the borough surveyor (one of the people in grey)
informing him that his home has become the subject of a compulsory purchase order. Urban
regeneration, late capitalist improvement rather than repressive religion, destroys both community
and domesticity (which includes sexual pleasure) in the song. Furthermore, Davies reveals an
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important change in the State's strategies of domination, the ‘Thou shalt not’ of 'The Garden of
Love' has been replaced by the 'Thou Shalts' of modern bureaucracy.
Significantly, the opening track of Muswell Hillbillies, 'Twentieth-Century Man' contains a
definite allusion to Blake, ‘What has become of the green pleasant fields of Jersualem’ asks the
singer. Even more tellingly, this allusion occurs immediately after an opening verse which laments
the misuse of technology to produce ever more destructive weapons of war. Truly this is an Albion
in which ‘all the Arts of Life [have been] changed into the Arts of Death’.20 Davies also shares with
Blake a sense that the degradation of human society also extends to the arts - the singer of
'Twentieth-Century Man' rejects those ‘smart modern’ painters and writers alike, declaring his
preference for a variety of old masters (including Shakespeare, Rembrandt and Titian). For Davies,
as for Blake, this fundamental misdirecting of human energies splits the individual subject too. In
place of Blake's ‘emanations’ and ‘spectres’, Davies offers paranoid schizophrenia as the way in
which social fragmentation reproduces itself at the level of the individual; the singer of 'Twentieth-
Century Man' describes himself as a ‘paranoid schizoid’, while the second track on the album is
titled 'Acute Schizophrenia Paranoia Blues'.21
The question for Davies, as for Blake, is how these forces of domination and degradation are
best resisted. 'Here Come the People in Grey', on Muswell Hillbillies, imagines a privatized,
individual rebellion – ‘I’m gonna fight me a one man revolution’ – which encodes a desire for self-
sufficiency and autonomy rather than for social transformation. Davies’ apparent dissatisfaction
with this response prompted the construction of a quasi-Blakean mythic system in the shape of
Preservation Act 1 and Preservation Act 2, a sprawling thirty-four track collection (one single and
one double album) and accompanying stage show which engrossed Ray Davies' creative
imagination between 1973 and 1975 (and beyond).22 In a sense, the Preservation project is Ray
Davies' equivalent to Blake's Vala, an uneven attempt at a total, multi-media artwork, which
remains not simply unfinished but radically unfinishable, and to which, therefore, the artist returns
repeatedly in later projects. Both projects are the result of a defiant, uncompromising artistic vision.
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Preservation Act 1 and Preservation Act 2 also share with Vala the dubious distinction of being
amongst the least discussed works of their respective creators.
Taken together the Preservation albums chronicle a second 'English Revolution' in which the
socialist leader Mr Black, leads a People's Army which overthrows the corrupt, capitalist
dictatorship headed by Flash and his cronies. Mr Black promises freedom and equality, but once
installed in power becomes as oppressive and tyrannical as Flash. In terms of its narrative
Preservation offers an unoriginal dystopian vision of revolutionary change which, as Johnny Rogan
observes) leans heavily on Orwell's anti-Soviet satires, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm (the
former text had held a particular fascination for Davies from his childhood).23 The significance of
the Preservation albums resides not in their over-arching vision, but in their 'minute particulars' -
the contradictory, often confused interplay of the contradictions and confusions of the historical
conjuncture within which Davies writes.
One of the key stakes in the struggle between Flash and Mr Black is control over the 'Village
Green', which serves as a metonymic representation of an actuality (England as she is) and a
memory which might also be a vision and vice versa (England as she was/might be). In effect,
Davies' work shares a structure of feeling with 'Jerusalem'. In interviews, Davies has repeatedly
drawn attention to the imaginary status of his vision of England:
The Village Green is where I set my imaginary world which almost existed before I came
along. The album was a series of dreamscapes about an imaginary England.
[...]
Maybe it was an England that was lost, but could have been there. An England that suddenly
stopped.24
The opening line of Preservation Act 1 (assigned to the chorus) is ‘Daylight over the Village Green
early in the morning’ and, at first sound, the art-folk song style in combination with the almost
cliched ballad opening (‘early in the morning’) would seem to suggest a pastoral setting. However,
as the song's fourth line makes clear this particular village green includes ‘the field and the
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factories’, and has bankers, spinsters, health fanatics and schoolboys for its denizens. In short, the
'village green' is modern day England. The start of 'Daylight' also recalls Blake's 'The Ecchoing
Green' (‘The sun does arise’). However, unlike its Blakean counterpart, the inhabitants of Davies'
songs are not characterized in terms of present fulfilment or plenitude. Rather each of the denizens
of the 'village green' experiences a particular type of longing which also causes them to live either
in, or for, a past or future rather than the present moment (for example, the bankers dream of their
youth while the spinsters dream of future romance).
England as village green is threatened by the figure of Flash, a property speculator who
(on the song ‘Demolition’) dreams of buying ‘all the cottages’, ‘every house and every street’ and
crucially ‘Every...village green’, and then demolishing the lot. In Flash’s vision thatched cottages
will be demolished and replaced with rows of ‘identical boxes’. Flash's methods and his language
recall the song 'Here Come the People in Grey' from Muswell Hillbillies with the destruction of
particularities in favour of mass production, the total domination of 'exchange-value' over 'use-
value' (money over homes) as the dominant features of late capitalist society. The song's final verse
emphasizes the fact that demolition is financialisation (and vice versa); homes are demolished in
pursuit of quick profits and ‘greed’ is proclaimed as both Flash's ‘faith’ and his ‘religion’ i.e. both
belief and practice.
While the conflict between Flash and Mr Black provides the main narrative drive of
Preservation, it is punctured by a series of interludes from a character called the Tramp. This figure
is Preservation''s equivalent to Blake's Los insofar as he both observes, or beholds, the horrors of
modernity and strives to assert the value of 'art' (imagination and creativity) as the negation of those
same horrors. The Tramp's existence is governed by organic, natural rhythms rather than the drives
of the capitalist economy. In ‘Sitting in the Midday Sun’, the Tramp does indeed simply sit in the
midday sun and watch the world go by. He exists without a job, money, a home and its
accompanying material possessions (stereo, telephone, radio and video). However, he refuses to be
defined by what he lacks and asserts that he retains his ‘pride’. The Tramp thus defines himself in
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opposition to acquisitive consumerism and, therefore, to the tyranny of instrumental reason in its
late capitalist expression.
In a later song, 'Nobody Gives', the Tramp describes a world of conflict in which
‘everybody's guilty and everybody's innocent’ and declares that it has been ‘the same throughout all
history’. However, this cosmic pessimism is unexpectedly interrupted by a specific historical
memory, a moment of possibility in the form of the General Strike of 1926, described as a moment
when the people ‘decided to be free’. However, in both song and history, the popular desire for
freedom is contained and defused by the institutional forms of unions and government. Finally, the
song the returns to the present where the Tramp bemoans a general unwillingness to give - in the
sense of a readiness to compromise and negotiate. Thus the Tramp articulates both a classical and a
cliched 'liberal' position (conflict arises from misunderstanding, resolution occurs through both
sides agreeing to compromise, or to 'give' a bit). Yet the song seems unconvinced by this formula
and ends by returning to the impasse of 1926 - the intransigent contradiction between labour and
capital simultaneously ends and criticizes the song. The song's understanding exceeds that of its
singer, the Tramp sees giving in terms of compromise, but the song's title - 'Nobody Gives' -
gestures beyond this limited understanding to suggest two negations which must be overcome: the
failure of generosity (nobody gives) and the failure of commitment (nobody gives a damn). The
song which follows - 'Oh where oh where is love?' sung by the Tramp and the Do-Gooders -
addresses some of the limitations of 'Nobody Gives' by identifying the absence of love as a key
aspect of society's problems. The song identifies love with hope, sympathy, trust, faith, ‘joy in
simplicity’, regard, respect and even more unexpectedly and significantly with ‘the ordinary things
people did long ago’. This appeal to radical nostalgia is the Tramp's final contribution to
Preservation.
As the Tramp recedes, his place is taken by the defeated Flash who, in a drunken dream, is
visited by his soul. The charges which are laid against Flash by his soul read like a modern
paraphrase of Jerusalem plate 65 (‘And all the Arts of Life....simple rules of life.’):
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You lied and schemed and took over a simple village and turned it into a
vulgar playground for your own money-making ends. Before you came
people lived simple lives. This was a happy place. Then you ploughed up
the fields, sold off the land and lined your own pockets with the profits.
Flash protests that he acted in the national interest, but his soul rejects this defence claiming that
Flash has always acted out of self-interest or, as it is named in this song ‘preservation’.
The invocation of ‘preservation’ by Flash's soul complicates the entire ideological schema of
Davies' work at a stroke. Preservation, which from the days of the Village Green Preservation
Society onwards has invariably carried a positive charge, is now revealed as its own 'contrary' (to
use Blake's term). However, Preservation is unable to move beyond this moment of realisation.
Although Flash's soul invokes ‘the people’ as a (possible) agent of sublation, the remaining songs
on the album are unable to embody this vision. 'Flash's Dream' returns to the impasse of 'Nobody
Gives', the popular desire for freedom is unable to find an authentic mode of expression. Where
'1926' was betrayed by the government and the unions, the current dissatisfaction leads to the rise of
Mr Black, whose regime merely offers an uglier, more brutalized version of the old order
('Scrapheap City'). The Preservation cycle. Ends with the ironically entitled 'Salvation Road' - the
entire cast declares that they are ‘walking down Salvation Road’ whilst the audience is far from
convinced that this is the direction of travel. Yet even in this song, amidst the by now discredited
cliches of solidarity ‘brothers...sisters/Citizens ...comrades’, the desire for an authentic solidarity,
for the return of the village green, makes one final appearance:
The workers of the world
Shall give the profits to the people.
Class will disappear.
Conclusion: Blake and Davies – Nostalgia and the obstructed Organic Intellectual
E.P. Thompson in Witness Against the Beast observes that one aspect of Blake that is often
overlooked by his 'polite' champions, is his ‘posture’:
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[Blake’s] conscious posture of hostility to the polite culture, this radical stance, is not some
quaint but inessential extra, added on to his tradition. It is his tradition, it defines his stance, it
directs and colours his judgement.25
‘Posture’ here is akin to the idea of style, something which is readily apparent and thus superficial
but which is simultaneously constitutive and foundational – a quality which makes the work what it
is. In Blake’s case, what Thompson describes as ‘posture’ is better grasped as structure of feeling;
not least because as the work of Thompson along with that of Mee and Worrall has shown, this
cluster of ideas, values and ways of interpreting the world was in no way the individual possession
of Blake.26 Rather they were common to a milieu which can be described as antinomian, artisanal
London.
The broad outlines of this structure of feeling are clearly visible in the work of Ray Davies
writing some two hundred years after Blake.27 Both Blake and Davies can be understood as
'obstructed organic intellectuals'.28 Through their art both sought to represent and interpret the
wider forces shaping their historical period. Moreover, both were critical of the social and
economic changes they were witnessing and, crucially, grounded their critique in the values and
practices of a local subaltern class fraction, understood to be under threat (or even already
destroyed) from those same social and economic changes. However, unlike the Gramscian organic
intellectual neither Blake nor Davies was able to identify, much less identify with, a collective
social agent capable of realising their political desires, hence their status as obstructed organic
intellectuals.
Once we recognize Blake and Davies as obstructed organic intellectuals, other shared features
of their work become both visible and intelligible. Firstly, their strong attachments to the local (in
terms of place) and the customary (in terms of practice) can be seen as forms of resistance to the
universalising and revolutionising drives of capitalist modernity. Both attachments share (and
contribute to) the political ambivalence of artisanal Englishness insofar as they are simultaneously
oppositional and conservative. Secondly, it enables us to recognize that those images of a lost
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village green are constructed within a complex temporal framework for which the catch-all term
‘nostalgia’ is inadequate at best, and reductive at worst. In a recent study of the uses of nostalgia by
working-class men, Vik Loveday argues that ‘nostalgia has the capacity to perform a critical
function in the present beyond that of mere retrogression.’29 When it is deployed as a ‘retroactive
strategy’, suggests Loveday, nostalgia ‘defetishiz[es] the existing’ and then ‘acts as a form of
critique’.30 The imaginary nostalgia of Blake and Davies, with its combination of accurate (if
selective) historical memory and self-conscious fantasy, is an enhanced version of such a
strategically retroactive use of nostalgia.
For both Blake and Davies the local, the locale, the village green, all provide a metonymic
representation of an England which, variously is, was, might have been and might yet be. It offers a
subaltern class vision of England which is simultaneously hostile to the established powers yet
structurally vulnerable to capture by those same forces. In its attempt to identify the class as the
‘people’ (or nation), it runs the risk of reversal in which the ‘people’ identify with the ‘nation’. As
the preceding analysis suggests this risk increases when imaginary nostalgia (with its complex
temporality and awareness of its own imaginary status) is displaced by a reductive nostalgia
characterized by a past/present binary and its attendant idealized past.
Precisely because the village green is capable of standing in for England, what it represents is
crucial. In the Songs of Innocence and of Experience, the village green carries a generally positive
charge as a site and time of communal solidarity, freedom and joy. For Ray Davies, while the
village green embodies positive values, the emphasis usually falls on the extent to which the green
is a threatened (or lost) site and time. Above all, for both artists the 'village green' names the desire
for non-alienated relationships and redeemed time (that is time experienced as plenitude, rather than
loss). It is not necessary that this time-space really existed in the past. However, it is necessary that
it can be imagined as having existed in the past - as this provides the possibility that it can be
realized in the future.
15
The 'village green' is not simply a spatial location, it is also a complex temporal state. As the
accusations of nostalgia suggest, the village green is frequently associated with a past time, a 'then'.
However, it should be noted, that this 'then' usually exists in a self-reflexive present which is the
'now' of the lyric. Unless it is irretrievably lost, the village green is remembered not just as a
repository of positive value but also as an expression of the desire to see those values realised in the
present. It is this latter aspect which prevents 'nostalgia' (in the pejorative sense of that term) by
rendering the move into the past not as a retreat but as a way of (possibly) side-stepping into a
transformed future. Similarly, in the case of the self-conscious fantasy, the move into the past
enables the construction of an imaginary time and space which nurtures and protects those positive
values in anticipation of their future realisation – ‘What is now proved was once, only imagin'd.’31
Class will disappear.
Empire is no more! and now the lion & wolf shall cease.32
Notes
16
1 Krauss, Michael J., ‘The Greatest Rock Star of the 19th Century: Ray Davies, Romanticism, and the Art of Being English’, 201.2 For details of Blake's standing within the 'counter culture' see Otto ‘’Rouze up O Young Men of the New Age!’: William Blake, Theodore Roszak, and the Counter Culture of the 1960s - 1970s'.3 This method is drawn from the work of Walter Benjamin, particularly his 'Theses on the Philosophy of History'. 4 'Structure of feeling', for an elaboration of this concept see Williams, Marxism and Literature.5 For details of the chronotope see Bakhtin, 'Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel'.6 For a discussion of the role played by 'Jerusalem' in English national culture see Whittaker 'Mental Fight', 'Corporeal War', and Righteous Dub: The Struggle for 'Jerusalem', 1979-2009'.7 Blake, The Complete Poems, 514.8 Ibid., 186.9 For a discussion of the role of the village green to English national identity see Bailey, The English Village Green, and Lupro, 'Preserving the Old Ways, Protecting the New: Post-War British Urban Planning in the Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society'.10 Blake, The Complete Poems, 105/6.11 Ibid., 114.12 Ibid., 127.13 Ibid., 123.14 Ibid., 181.15 The Kinks, The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society (1968).16 For the genesis of the song 'The Village Green' see Rogan, 353.17 For example, the list of admired characters includes Donald Duck, Mrs Mopp and Mother Riley, while of the cited objects only Tudor houses and antique tables might be consider to lie outside working-class culture. For a reading of these lines as self-parody on the part of Ray Davies see Rogan, 356.18 The Kinks, Muswell Hillbillies (1971), Preservation Act 1 (1973), Preservation Act 2 (1974)19 Davies, X-Ray, 385. The importance of Muswell Hillbillies for an understanding of Ray Davies’ work can hardly be overstated. In his ‘unauthorized autobiography’, X-Ray, over half of the book’s chapter titles are lyrics taken from this album. Similarly, towards the end of the book, ‘R.D. declares, ‘I rate the Muswell Hillbillies album up there with Preservation.’’, 386.20 Blake, The Complete Poems, 766-767.21 Ray Davies effectively anticipates by a decade, Fredric Jameson's analysis of schizophrenia as one of the defining features of postmodern culture. See, Fredric Jameson, 'Postmodernism: the cultural logic of late capitalism', New Left Review, 146, (July-August, 1984), 53-92. 22 For detailed accounts of the way in which the Preservation project engrossed Ray Davies’ energies see Jovanovic, God Bless The Kinks, 196-218, and Rogan’s Ray Davies: A Complicated Life, 440-460. An indication of the importance Ray Davies attached to Preservation is given by two statements made by the character ‘R.D.’ in X-Ray. Early in the book, ‘R.D.’ ascribes prophetic status to the albums, ‘I predicted this,’[R.D.] muttered, “in my Preservation Trilogy’ (47), and a few pages later he says to his interlocutor, ‘I somehow think you are capable of grasping my whole theory about society, and that the Preservation Trilogy has obviously had a profound effect on you.’ (51). 23 Rogan, 17/18.24 Ibid., 355, 359.25 Thompson, Witness Against the Beast, xviii.26 Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s, and Worrall, Radical Culture: Discourse, Resistance and Surveillance, 1790-1820, show the connections between Blake and London radicalism. More recently, Makdisi, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s, situates Blake rather differently but no less firmly within this same milieu. 27 This is not to claim that these two structures of feeling are identical. There are important differences, not least the role of religious ideas and images, but the shaping pressures exerted on life and work by the relationship of capital to skilled creative labour, exercise a determining role in both instances. Similarly, whereas for Davies, time is usually seen as two-dimensional and only rarely as three-dimensional, for Blake time is invariably four-dimensional. In addition to the past, present and future which characterize time in the 'vegetable' world of the mundane shell, there is also the temporal state known as 'eternity' which is, simultaneously, the synthesis and the negation of the modes of vegetable time. This, Blakean, conception of eternity finds no real counterpart in Davies's temporal schema.28 For a more detailed account of Davies' status as organic intellectual see Geldart, 'From “Dead End Streets" to "Shangri Las": Negotiating Social Class and Post-War Politics with Ray Davies and the Kinks", Contemporary British History, Vol. 26, No. 3, September 2012, 273-298.29 Loveday, ‘“Flat-capping it”: Memory, nostalgia and value in retroactive male working-class identification’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 729. This article also offers a very useful overview of the current theoretical debates around the idea of ‘nostalgia’.30 Ibid., 726 (the phrase ‘defetishiz[es] the existing’ is taken from Jedlowski).31 Blake, The Complete Poems, 184.32 ‘Salvation Road’, Preservation Act 2. Blake, The Complete Poems, 195.
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