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George Crabbe, William Cobbett, John Clare, Thomas Hardy, Fred
Kitchen -- truth tellers who gradually bring the laboring poor into the
landscape, then into the life of their writings. His villains are canonical
poets like Ben Jonson and Pope, novelists like Jane Austen, who accept
the "illusions" of their kind of writing and who exclude from their
visions all except the wealthy classes.
There are obvious drawbacks to such an approach, of course. Al–
though Williams's verdicts are determined by the extent to which writers
tell the truth as he understands it, the extent to which their fictions
ratify their grief, a specialist in Renaissance literature would find his
summary unacceptable; so far as it ignores a great deal of morose and
cankered Renaissance pastoral, he might even find it untruthful: And an
ordinary reader may wonder if Williams's anger blinds him to literature's
other uses. The standards of journalism are not always those of poetry;
fictions are not always false . In the background is Lionel Trilling's
famous attack on the limitations of one kind of literary realism, where
ideas count for nothing and where "reality is always material reality,
hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant."
Yet Williams rarely falls into the trap of confusing simple un–
pleasantness and realism. He is saved from it in part by his own complex
responses to literature which cut through ideology, in part by his interest
in describing the literature of the city as well as the country. His title
suggests the opposition of the two, but his argument urges us to see them
as interacting and finally, in one sense, as identical.
It
is misleading, he
claims, to understand the country as settled, peaceful, "natural" and the
city as a chaotic furnace for industrialism: both city and country work
together as unknowing agents of a larger system, which he calls agrarian
capitalism and which exploits its elements equally. Those periods in a life
or in a national history when we look back to a golden age are only
moments of special stress, for the modes of production and distribution
that we call characteristically urban began and persist in the rural
economy: "What the oil companies do, what the mining companies do, is
what the landlords did, what plantation owners did and do." The great
service of the city, however, unencumbered by a pastoral tradition,
undistracted by natural beauty, has been to allow an expansion of. con–
sciousness -- its massive, astonishing squalor
forces
us to perceive the
distortions of social life that capitalism produces.
Williams begins his discussion of English cities with Blake and
Wordsworth, because in them he finds the first expression of what has
come to be a modern consciousness, a feeling of disconnection, of mean–
inglessness that we now call alienation.. Against this view he places
