Meanwhile the rural ditties were not mute…-Milton
The Country and the City’s account of Crabbe and Goldsmith cuts through an immense network of problems surrounding the use of pastoral to eventually lodge itself deep within the difficulties of relating to history and historicity that Cowper encounters in front of his oak. This path of the account constituted by the book’s opening chapters (most notably, in “A Problem of Perspective,” “Pastoral and Counter-Pastoral,” and “Nature’s Threads”) begins to be concretely established when Williams considers two lines from the beginning of the second volume of Crabbe’s
The Village: “
No longer truth, though shown in verse, disdain, / But own the Village Life a life of pain” (II.1-2). Williams asks two questions regarding them: “
Where did it come from, that tone of apology about verse? Who was it aimed at, that insistence on the truth?” He then gives us a task: “
Crabbe’s poem … needs to be read between these questions.” (
The Country and the City, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1973, p. 13. Cited parenthetically as
CC.)
In other words, Williams seeks to constitute a field where the feeling in what Crabbe articulates—namely, that pastoral verse has failed and will continue to fail to account for the pain of country-village life—plays itself out. But Williams does not see this field as merely reactionary, even though he brings Crabbe’s articulations under the heading of “counter-pastoral.” Counter-pastoral is not so much an interruption and overturning of a particular poetic genre by the creation of another as it is the embodied indistinctness of Crabbe’s articulations with respect to this genre—an indistinctness that actually may work to prevent any discernible break with pastoral. Counter-pastoral, for Williams, is thus a change in poetic form—in the most all-inclusive, indeterminate (and yet still determining) sense of this word “form:” whether considered as the governing principle(s) of the artwork or the structure of the elements that make it up, counter-pastoral is operative only within this particular range covered by the word “form” since it is more specific than a social attitude (though it expresses one) and less specific than the content of the work itself (though it can overlap with this and also, perhaps, be “in” content). I leave “content” unspecified, for this term of course varies with any definition of “form.” (For a discussion of the resonances of “form,” one should look at Williams’ entry “Formalist” in
Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1983. 137-140.)
I dwell on this point because correctly conceiving of this formal shift in Crabbe is key in showing how we can link him (or rather, the particular significance of his articulations) with Goldsmith via Cowper—which, I will maintain, is the audacious thesis of these chapters in
The Country and the City. In short, I dwell on this point because it is our reason for considering Williams on these poets rather than the poets themselves: the field opened up by articulations like those in
The Village, when conceived in Williams’ manner, allows us to consider some 18th century poetry in such a way that the developments of the thought around it (whether these be aesthetic theories or social chatter) and the roles it plays (whether these be within the sphere of material production and consumption or in debates on social values) inject themselves, as it were, into form. The upshot is that these thoughts and these roles thereby become immediately visible as form within the various poems as they develop through time one after the other (allowing us to track them within a period such as the 18th century in their various instantiations), and yet remain the function of apparently—when one looks at a poem to specify this thought or role there—non-chronological concerns (the “sense of place,” notions of “culture,” etc.). (I am of course (without pretending to know exactly what Williams’ verbiage means) referring to what governs the “structures of feeling” within the “keywords” of 1) “culture” as it gets analyzed in
Culture and Society, and 2) also “place” in John Barrell’s amazing
The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place—another work that has affinities with Williams’ approach. It should be obvious that all this is not directly a recommendation of Williams’ approach but an attempt to show how it (or those approaches like it—Bourdieu’s or some aspects of Foucault’s come to mind, though this requires substantiation) might impact the concerns of our class. Indirectly, however, it might seek to point towards the (somewhat recent) hint of John Barrell that some of the basics of Williams’ approach need to be revisited differently if (and perhaps only if) one finds that the current interpretations authorize an expansive “recovering” of historical documents to index the plurality of the representations of subjects involved in historical struggles at the expense of the representations of the subjects themselves. According to Barrell, this would be a recovery that does not recover, but merely works to “
replace… the question of who won and who lost.” See his “Afterword: Moving Stories, Still Lives.” In
The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1550-1850. Ed. Gerald Maclean, Donna Landry, Joseph P. Ward. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. 231-250. One might (only?) then see if Williams can be recommended.)
From this perspective, Williams can define counter-pastoral positively, then, as poetry that continually insists upon its inability to idealize village or country life. I say positively, because this poetic insistence is the very form of a poem like
The Village—the “reaction” to pastoral in the movement counter to it is not negative, so we can clearly specify it (there need be no hermeneutics of suspicion). This, then, is how Williams reads between these two questions in Crabbe: the particular logic (I hesitate to call it “logic,” for this sounds like it requires a rational structure. Even though it may be rigorously specified (even perhaps mapped, graphed and put in trees), Williams is far from claiming this logic is rational. On this point, I might emphasize that I am only considering Williams here with respect to poetic language, even though he also reads “between” prose. The level at which he analyzes in that field might not be the same. Williams, as far as I can tell, thus is not claiming that rationality or irrationality inheres in the logic of this poetic language)—the particular logic behind and yet within the lines “
No longer truth, though shown in verse, disdain, But own the Village Life a life of pain,” gathers itself together at the level of the form that they both rely on, resist, and share in their inhabiting of it.
We can specify this formal charge (to borrow a formulation of Susan Wolfson's) or logic at both its more specific or general levels (as Williams does in his analysis). Here we will do so only at the specific level merely to illustrate (so while we use Williams’ analysis of the poem’s specificities, we are expanding it beyond him). In the lines from Crabbe, already Williams is able to pick up on a more specific aspect of the form which regularly appears throughout the poem: the quick repetition of either an entire word like “life” or, via the deployment of a combination of alliteration, assonance, the spondee, parallelism and the more specific figure of chiasmus, a series of repetitions of similar words within a line of two lines. Here, we see “
Village Life a life;” but earlier in the poem we also find “
They boast their peasants’ pipes, but peasants now, / Resign their pipes and plod behind the plough” (I.23-4); and “
Here too the sick their final doom receive, / Here brought amid the scenes of grief, to grieve,” (I.242-3); and perhaps the most complex of these concrete instances (echoing the specific peculiarity of certain tightly formed chiasmic structures one finds in Pope),
There, where the putrid vapours, flagging, play,
And the dull wheel hums doleful through the day;
There children dwell, who know no parents’ care,
Parents, who know no children’s love, dwell there (I.232-5).The irony of the playing of vapors among the children (it should be the other way around) is particularly evident here, though only after one revisits the whole sentence and, to a degree, grasps its form. We only meet the children after we get the intrusive repetition by assonance and alliteration in “
the dull wheel hums doleful through the day,” and perhaps also the reversal in the last two lines, so that the poem calls us back to where the children are dwelling only after we have passed through the distracting intercession of the mechanical.
Now, one could generalize and say that the repetitive structures in the form of the poem here are an evocation of the type of psychic state of the villagers or of the type of the village’s social relationships when these villagers are treated merely as labor and given only rote tasks to perform: repetition mirrors or reproduces the feeling of the unfruitfulness and boredom that—we must say—according to Crabbe always hangs over the life the villager. But from Williams’ perspective, this would reduce the evident to evidence. For him, these repetitions at the formal level are, in (or rather as) their logic, “
dimensions” of that field he specifies as counter-pastoral, “
caught” by the poem (Williams uses these words with extreme care to set up many of his small but numerous quotations: cf. CC, 68-72). In other words, they are instances of a poetic insistence that pastoral has failed and will fail to account for the pain of rural life, as we said earlier.
It is at this level that we can ascribe what is articulated in these lines to Cowper—though it also is at this level we precisely cannot confine it to him alone. Indeed, this movement of counter-pastoral is a wider, and yet more delicate formation than any one author’s set of actions: according to Williams it finds its beginnings in Goldsmith and its most concrete or exemplary expression in Cowper. It thus moves at the level between material history and the history of ideas, folding itself at particular times and for determinate reasons back into one or another of these domains (which, Williams reminds us—though perhaps less often than someone like Bourdieu—are also
our historiographical constructions).
We can only quickly indicate Williams’s treatment of Goldsmith as the poet at the beginnings of this counter-pastoral history. However, we can see how it immediately launches us into a consideration of Cowper as this history’s most thoroughly articulated (though perhaps also the most fragmented—two qualities that are not necessarily opposed by Williams) concretization.
Goldsmith’s endless comparisons between “now” and “then” (I put them in quotes because they are quite vague and act more as names than as things) form a stage in the transition from “reflection to retrospect” in the consideration of the country (
CC, 82). Williams is quite clear how this transition is achieved (quoting T
he Deserted Village, ln. 397-8):
The poems to the happy tenant, the idealized and independent self of the reflective pastoral tradition, are succeeded by poems of loss, change, regret: that structure of feeling, at once moved and meditating, appalled and withdrawn, which is caught so exactly in Goldsmith’s couplet:
E’en now, methinks, as pondering here I stand
I see the rural virtues leave the land (CC, 68).But, Williams contends, it is not achieved by Goldsmith himself. Notice how Williams instead points out at a more general level the precise point at which this transition is most active, that these lines (not merely, but concretely) mark: Goldsmith brings the entire scene back to his own vision as something taking place between now and then, as a concrete process glimpsed within the past that has just gone by, congealing into a memory like those the poet has of “then.” This “
as pondering here I stand,” far from being merely a depiction of a scene of writing qua textual self-consciousness, is an instance at which the inscription gets taken up into a larger movement than any conscious “now,” yet more finely composed than that of “then.” This moment of composition, in its texture, is precisely that of a reflective movement turning into a sense of history or rather of historicity—of the flowing away and yet congealing of time into a recent memory. This is why the countryside in Goldsmith, according to Williams, becomes more of a spectacle, an “
observation,” a “
dissolving of the lives and work of others into an image of the past” (
CC, 74-77): any possible violence of Goldsmith’s gaze upon the people and places he describes is due more to a basic and wide-reaching sense of the fleetingness of the old countryside itself than any sort of snobbery or privilege. The latter, while most definitely at play, obscure a more interesting phenomenon by reducing it to fit within a clean-cut framework.
We see now, perhaps, how problematic it is to stop at any reading of
The Village as a mere attempt at a refutation of
The Deserted Village: even though it does function as this, the dialogue (or possibility of a lack thereof—the two standpoints are indeed quite different) between the two poems is much more complex because, according to Williams, the formations or forms that they constitute are beyond themselves as much as present in their most elemental units (words, spaces, stresses), happening always “meanwhile,” though never remaining mute. Thus we must try and see their relationship in the following way: there is a moment in Goldsmith where the recent memory of the countryside pulls itself away from the “now” and the “then” as they function in his poem and proceeds to gather a thickness of its own—a thickness that, in Crabbe gets “pulled up,” as it were, and deployed in a form that both has a tone of apology and constitutes an insistence on its own truth. (I am using a term applied now more when someone is dealing with “windows,” “sites,” or “alerts” with computers—that is, in a space and time of the technical, of the hyper-mnemonic—and which, with this term’s combination of a verb-form and preposition, might fit somewhere between the Wieder
bringen and
Uberlieferung—that is, bringing-again and or handing-over—of Heidegger. See the section on historicity’s repetition in Being and Time: “
Repeating is handing down [Uberlieferung] explicitly;” “
The repeating of that which is possible does not bring again [Wiederbringen] something that is ‘past,’”
Being and Time. Tr. Macquarrie and Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1962, p. 437 and passim. However, I am here only giving some consistency to the idea of the time and space of Williams’ history by stressing its unnatural or out-of-joint character—though one should be hasty in mapping a thoroughly technical time completely onto Williams.’) In other words, the degree of the disappointment in the poem of Goldsmith as it confronts and becomes memory turns into—but by no simple process, occurring by means of the complex and unnatural temporality “hacked-into” by Williams’ historiography and literary analysis—the bitterness, the sense of mission, the shame within the poetry of Crabbe.
We can also see how it might be possible for Cowper to insert himself within this apparently non-chronological (one might be more accurate in saying that its chronology is different, and perhaps also goes “backwards”) field of formations, between Goldsmith and Crabbe (though, at the most extreme level and beyond Williams, one might perhaps say that, if conceived rigorously, in this field there are only “betweens” or “meanwhiles,” so “insertion” would be difficult to conceive—see above note). The movement of memory is again “pulled up” and pressed into such exact articulations that it poses new problems beyond the sphere of changes in the distribution of land in the countryside. In other words, the articulation has, in Cowper, caught up with the changes of which it is a function and in which it is a player, and has thereby allowed it to connect with other changes (of which it is a function and in which it is a player, etc.). According to Williams, these changes (which again, are thoroughly specifiable) are the role of the country’s nature in its more general relation to humanity, and in its own relation to itself: anxieties begin to grow as to whether humanity as a whole is alienated from any and every country:
What is at issue, really, is a dialectic of change. A much later poem [than Thompson’s The Seasons, under consideration in the chapter “Nature’s Threads”], Cowper’s Yardley Oak (1791), is in the main a traditional and melancholy reflection on history and the mutability of fortune, in the sight of the centuries-old oak that has become hollow and rotten. But there is an intermediate reflection, which seems to catch the dialectic of just the change that was being widely experienced:
Natures threads,
Fine, passing thought, e’en in her coarsest works,
Delight in agitation, yet sustain
The force that agitates, not unimpar’d,
But, worn by frequent impulse, to the cause
Of their best tone their dissolution owe.
This sense, of a dissolution within a lively and productive exercise, is exact (CC, 71-2).Perhaps now we can see by what other criterions than his particular analysis in
The Country and the City Williams judges this phrase “
exact,”—and how they inform his extremely influential study of 18th century poetry.
