Agriculture is another area of modern life where those of us
who don’t actually farm enjoy wallowing in nostalgia.
Last week, we went to a farm show in a nearby village in
Hessen. It was all rather delightful –
beautifully groomed horses, lots of fairly innocuous drinking and tasty treats,
some amazingly choreographed tractor manoeuvres and rides on some old carts and
pony-traps. I was even invited to drive
a 1967 tractor round the field – a new skill which I’m sure will come in
useful.
But why are we so self-indulgent about the past where
farming is concerned? I guess it’s partly just because it’s a convenient
illusion to forget about the more unpleasant aspects of modern farming, upon
which we all choose to rely – from the hard graft, to the more distasteful
treatment of animals, and industrial scale of many operations. I think there may also be something much more
politicised involved. I was initially
inspired in my own research on C14th nostalgia by Raymond Williams’ work on the
growth of a pastoral idyll in industrialised England (The Country and the City).
His literary scholarship is, frankly, unparalleled for its skilful blend
of close reading, contextual engagement, and strong political bent. It is a very complex book, but Williams’ sense
that country life becomes idealised by successive generations, all of whom
manage somehow to claim that it is only in their lifetimes that things have
changed so dramatically, describes nicely the experience of going to a country
show. And there is, of course, a more
sinister edge to this. If cities tend to
embody modernity and mishap, the nostalgic idealisation of the countryside
masks social tensions and inequities which would otherwise be deemed
unacceptable. The nostalgic rural idyll
becomes a morally indefensible form of denial and delusion.
I’d like to defend nostalgia. There are contexts in which it can support a
radical agenda, and there are certainly ways in which nostalgia can refocus us
on crucial values. But that clearly depends on a kind of clear-sightedness which
nostalgia often works precisely to obfuscate.
No comments:
Post a Comment