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Abstract
This article examines Blake’s importance for our understanding of a certain type of subaltern ‘Englishness’ which is characterised 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).
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
* Village Green Preservation Society (front cover) https://www.kindakinks.net/discography/showimage.php?imgnum=737
* Village Green Preservation Society (rear cover): https://www.kindakinks.net/discography/showimage.php?imgnum=735
* Muswell Hillbillies (front cover gatefold): https://www.kindakinks.net/discography/showimage.php?imgnum=843 and https://www.kindakinks.net/discography/showimage.php?imgnum=844
* Muswell Hillbillies (centrefold): http://www.thinglink.com/scene/447400523939708930
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 ‘counterculture’ see Peter 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, Complete Poems, 514.
8. Ibid., 186.
9. For a discussion of the role of the village green in 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, 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. 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.
21. For detailed accounts of the way in which the Preservation project occupied Ray Davies’ energies see Jovanovic, God Bless The Kinks, 196–218, and Rogan’s Ray Davies: A Complicated Life, 440–60. 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).
22. Rogan, 17/18.
23. Ibid., 355, 359.
24. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast, xviii.
25. 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.
26. 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.
27. For Gramsci’s definition of the ‘organic intellectual’ see Q. Hoare & G. Nowell-Smith eds., Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Grmasci, 6–20. For a more detailed evaluation 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, 273–98.
28. 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’.
29. Ibid., 726, the phrase ‘defetishiz[es] the existing’ is taken from Jedlowski.
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Notes on contributors
Michael Sanders
Michael Sanders is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester. He is the author of The Poetry of Chartism (2009) as well as numerous articles and chapters on the literature and culture of Chartism, which remains, for him, an endlessly fascinating topic. This article is the product of a long-standing admiration for both William Blake and Ray Davies. He prefers crooked roads.