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.

Bibliography

Bailey, Brian J., The English Village Green, London: Robert Hale, 1985.Bakhtin, M.M., 'Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel', in M. Holquist ed., The Dialogic Imagination, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.Benjamin, Walter, 'Theses on the Philosophy of History', Illuminations, London: Fontana, 1992.Blake, William, The Complete Poems, ed., Alicia Ostriker, London: Penguin, 2004.Davies, Ray, X-Ray, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995.Geldart, Keith, 'From "Dead End Streets" to "Shangri Las": Negotiating Social Class and Post-War Politics with Ray Davies and the Kinks", Contemporary British History, 26:3, September 2012, 273-298.Jameson, Fredric 'Postmodernism: the cultural logic of late capitalism', New Left Review, 146, (July-August, 1984), 53-92.Jovanovic, Rob, God Save The Kinks, London: Aurum Press Ltd., 2013.The Kinks, The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society, © Sanctuary Records Group Ltd., 2004 [1968].---., Muswell Hillbillies, © Kinks Properties Ltd. under exclusive license to Sanctuary Records Group Ltd., 2010 [1971].---., Preservation Act 1, © Kinks Properties Ltd. under exclusive license to Sanctuary Records Group Ltd., 2010 [1973].---., Preservation Act 2, © Kinks Properties Ltd. under exclusive license to Sanctuary Records Group Ltd., 2010 [1974].Krauss, Michael J., ‘The Greatest Rock Star of the 19th Century: Ray Davies, Romanticism, and the Art of Being English’, Popular Music and Society, 29:2, May 2006, 201-212. Loveday, Vik, ‘“Flat-capping it”: Memory, nostalgia and value in retroactive male working-class identification’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 17:6, 2014, 721-735.Lupro, Michael Mooradian, 'Preserving the Old Ways, Protecting the New: Post-War British Urban Planning in the Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society', Popular Music and Society, 29:2, May 2006, 189-200.Makdisi, Saree, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.Mee, Jon, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Otto, Peter, ‘"Rouze up O Young Men of the New Age!": William Blake, Theodore Roszak, and the Counter Culture of the 1960s - 1970s', in S.H. Clark, T.J. Connolly & J. Whittaker eds., Blake 2.0: William Blake in twentieth-century art, music and culture, Basignstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.Rogan, Johnny, Ray Davies: A Complicated Man, London: Bodley Head, 2015.Thompson, E.P., Witness Against the Beast, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.Whittaker, Jason, 'Mental Fight', 'Corporeal War', and Righteous Dub: The Struggle for 'Jerusalem', 1979-2009', in S.H. Clark, T.J. Connolly & J. Whittaker eds., Blake 2.0: William Blake in twentieth-century art, music and culture, Basignstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.Williams, Raymond, Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.Worrall, David, Radical Culture: Discourse, Resistance and Surveillance, 1790-1820, New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993.

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