The backdrop is quasi Grecian.

It is pouring cats, dogs, and elephants.

Elizabeth Bennet is drenched, and Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy is dripping too.

He tells her he loves her. She rages and refuses him.

Soppy?

***

Lizzie is visiting Pemberley.

Michelangeloesque art is splashed across walls and ceilings.

Naked bodies. Fluttering cloaks.

Nude sculptures are caressed by electronic eyes.

Particularly the butt.

Soft porn?

***

Proud to be Prejudiced !!!

India has done a great job as a democracy: Bush

At the best of times, meeting the most powerful man on the planet can be intimidating. But when he walks into the Roosevelt Room of the White House quite unexpectedly a few minutes ahead of the scheduled interview time holding in his hands a book you have written, and quips, "I've been reading a good book lately!" the most composed journalist can be knocked galley west. You could have felled me with a noodle. I barely managed a "Thank you, Mr President" as he put the book in from of him and settled into his chair. He was flanked to his left by National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley and to his right by Presidential spokesman Scott McClellan. Two other aides sat next to them, and with me was a journalist from the Hindi daily Dainik Bhaskar .

President Bush bantered for a while with other US wire correspondents who were seated behind us but were not allowed to ask questions.

He made a brief preliminary statement about how much he and his wife Laura Bush are looking forward to their first trip to India. He also lavished praise on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh describing him as a "very decent, honorable person with whom we established warm relations... kind person (who) at the same time represented his great country's interests very well."

President Bush then took questions:

Chidu Rajghatta : Mr. President, how and why has India come front and center to US strategic thinking now after being on the margins for so many years?

THE PRESIDENT : Well, as you know there was a history, particularly during the Cold War, that made it difficult for our countries to establish a close relationship. However, things change in the world. And as the post-Cold War thaw developed, as -- attitudes began to shift.

Secondly, the Indian economy, as a result of more transparency and openness and trade, began to change. And as the Indian economy changed, it changed the commercial relationship between the United States and India.

Thirdly, there are some common threats that make it in our interests to work together -- namely terrorism. As I said in my speech today, the United States has been attacked, but India certainly understands what it means to have suffering as a result of terrorist activities. And so there's common interests that have helped to change the relationship. And I intend to seize those interests, as does the Prime Minister, in order to foster what we've called a strategic relationship.

And in my speech today, I made it clear to the American people that this relationship is in our interests. And I described the various ways it was in our interests. It's just I think the evolution of the relationship goes to show that the world is -- changes, and it's never static. And so thank you for the question.

Q : Mr. President, if India's credentials are so good, why isn't the US backing its candidacy for the U.N. Security Council?

THE PRESIDENT : Well, let me make one other point, if you don't mind, that I should have made in my speech today, and that is that there are a lot of Indian Americans who made a tremendous contribution to our country, as well. And there are a lot of -- over the last -- as the high-tech boom helped transform our society, a lot of the brain power behind that boom have been Indian Americans, as well as Indians educated here in America. And so the American people, as well, have begun to get kind of a different perspective on the great contributions that India can not only make to our own country but can make to the world.

Our position on the United Nations Security Council has been very clear. First, we support a U.N.Security Council reform, but we think it ought to happen after other institutions within the United Nations become reformed. What I was always worried about is that we would focus on the U.N. Security Council and nothing else would happen. And so we have -- we have said to all parties concerned, I fully understand the Indian position, just like other nations, that we will take your case under consideration, but first things first.

And a classic case of the reform I'm talking about is the Human Rights Commission. It needed to be reformed. And what I was, again, worried about is that we'd miss opportunity while focusing on the U.N. Security Council.

Q : Mr. President, when do you intend to take the US.-India nuclear deal before the Congress, and before the Nuclear Supplies Group, which is part of the US obligation?

THE PRESIDENT : Yes, it is. As we speak, Nick Burns, of the State Department, is discussing this vital issue with the Indian counterparts. We are working through what has been -- as I said in the speech, a difficult issue for the Indian government, as well for the American government. To change the past, the ways of the past can be difficult at times.

I appreciate the Prime Minister's courage last July of laying out a way forward, which I support. And so first things first is to go to India and hopefully reach an agreement on separation, and then bring that agreement back and start selling it to the Congress.

It's -- but we can't bring anything back until we've agreed to the agreement. And that's what's happening now. There's a spirit of goodwill and cooperation.

It's in our country's interest, by the way, to encourage India -- and aid India in its development of a civilian nuclear power program. The American people are beginning to see high prices of energy, but so are the Indian people. And the reason why is, is that there's growing economies -- ours, India's, China's -- which is adding to global demand for energy. And demand is outstripping supply, and then what happens, you see price.

And one way to help deal with price here at home and/or with India is to develop alternative ways to power homes and businesses, as well as automobiles. I was sincere in my speech today when I said that we're dedicated to research and development to come up with alternative ways to use automobiles, and want to share that technologies with other nations, particularly a nation like India, which has got huge potential and vast room for growth.

And it's in our mutual interests -- I also made it clear that it's in our interests that the Indian economy prosper. And it's a very simple reason why.

One, a prosperous country is one that is -- particularly one that has shown its capacity to deal with a multi-ethnic and multi-religious society -- it will give India more opportunity to lead, particularly in parts of the world where people need to see how democracy can work and function in a proper way.

And secondly, the American people have got to understand a prosperous India is advantageous to our own industries. I mean, we want people buying American products, Indians want Americans buying Indian products, and that exchange of trade in a free and fair way is beneficial for workers and consumers.

And I said an amazing statistic today -- at least I thought it was -- 300 million middle-class citizens in India.

That's larger than the population of the United States. And so we shouldn't fear relations with India -- matter of fact, we ought to welcome them and work on ways to strengthen them. That's really what the purpose of the trip is.

Q : Do you consider India to be a responsible nuclear nation?

THE PRESIDENT : I do, particularly when they signed the IAEA safeguards, and they have a separation between their military and their civilian nuclear parts of their government.

Q : Mr. President, would the United States have a problem if India continued to source oil and gas from Iran?

THE PRESIDENT : I think people are going to have to buy their energy where they can get it. On the other hand, I do want to make it clear to the Indian people and the Indian government that an Iran with a nuclear weapon will destabilize the world, and that those of us who are for peace and stability must work in concert. So there's a difference between energy supply and working closely to achieve a very important objective.

And we will discuss this issue carefully with the Prime Minister. There is a consensus in the world, and that consensus is that an Iranian government that has declared its -- has said that Israel shouldn't exist, for example, and if it were to have a nuclear weapon, would be a danger to all of us. And I will continue to make that point with the Prime Minister.

Q : Why has the US not questioned A.Q. Khan, whose activities intersect proliferation and terrorism?

THE PRESIDENT : Well, we were the nation that exposed the conspiracy to deal with -- more than the conspiracy, the activities, let me rephrase that -- we were the nation that exposed the activities of sharing technologies, sensitive technologies, nuclear-related weapons-related technologies. And we, of course, want to know as much about the A.Q. Khan network as possible. But had it not been for US. intelligence, coupled with British intelligence, this network never would have been exposed. And the light of day helps understand proliferation.

Q : Mr. President, why does India have to jump through the hoops to get a civilian nuclear agreement when its energy requirements are similar to China, another big, growing economy?

THE PRESIDENT : There are the nuclear supplier group, and the IAEA -- in other words, the world has signed on to this.

We think it's in India's interest to do so, as it pertains to its civilian nuclear power industry. It will give confidence to people. It will make it easier for the United States to work with India. This will be a confidence-building measure that we don't believe is an unrealistic request. And we do realize there will be separation between the military side and the civilian side. What we're working on is the civilian side.

Q : Is the US more comfortable dealing with dictators and monarchs?

THE PRESIDENT : Do what now? Do I feel comfortable doing what?

Q : Dealing with dictators and monarchs?

THE PRESIDENT : And monarchs? Well, I mean, I've got a great relationship with Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth of Great Britain. (Laughter.) She's a lovely lady and a great figure in a country that's an important ally. And, of course, that monarchy is very supportive of a free and open and democratic system.

(Getting serious) You must take the words that I said in my second inaugural address very seriously, in that we must end tyranny in the 21st century. It's a goal that all of us can work on. India has got a unique role to play. I mean, when you really think about troubled spots, these are countries many times that are having difficulty dealing with what it means to honor minority rights and welcoming different religions within kind of a social and civil fabric.

And India has done a magnificent job of showing the world how democracy can work. And it's -- India is -- I'm confident the country will play a constructive role and can do so in a much better way many times than the United States can. I mean, after all, there are 150 [sic] Muslims living within the Indian democracy. We got a lot of Muslims in the United States, as well, which shows the world that it's -- your capable of honoring -- worshiping God as you see fit, and you can do so in a free way, and at the same time, be a productive citizen of a state.

And India can help a lot. I was very impressed by its contribution to a new democracy in the neighborhood, and that's Afghanistan. India has provided $565 million of cash, recently pledged an additional $50 million to build the Afghan National Assembly building. And that's responsible -- a responsible nation does that. And it's a -- it goes to show -- at least says to me that India understands that a democracy in our neighborhood will help yield peace, because if you study the history of the world, regions that had been in turmoil are now peaceful as a result of the evolution of democracy.

And one of the points I made in my address to the Asia Society is that there are -- there's more democracies now in the region, which will make it easier for a current Prime Minister, future Prime Minister of India to help achieve the vision that we all want, which is a peaceful world.

Q : Mr. President, in this era of free flow capital,why would -- why are there so many restrictions about inflow of talent -- human capital to the United States, who probably add wealth and knowledge?

THE PRESIDENT : I appreciate that question. I am -- you're talking about visa restrictions for highly educated citizens. I am for lifting those. I think we ought to raise the level of those who are either educated here and stay here and/or come meeting high-- with high skill levels. It's in our interest.

I've always been a proponent of that.And likewise, I would hope that India would lift its investment caps. In other words -- and part of the trip is to kind of work on ways to continue to develop this strategic relationship in a constructive way.

It's a -- you know, I said something interesting -- at least I thought it was interesting -- in the speech.

I said, for a period of time, if you're a friend of Pakistan, you couldn't deal with India, and if you're a friend of India, you couldn't deal with Pakistan.

And we have tried to change the relationships so that people recognize it's in their interest that the United States is a friend of Pakistan's, and people in Pakistan recognize it's in their interest that the United States is a friend of India's to help, if need be, reduce tensions.

Right now, the level of tensions are, relatively speaking, down. I can remember when I first came into office. You might remember there was a series of incidents that got everybody quite nervous, and we had shuttle diplomacy -- Colin Powell. And it seems to me that there is a renewed commitment to resolving problems. I thought it was very interesting that trade between the two countries has doubled, that there's, you know, new transportation hubs. That's all very positive in terms of resolving issues.

You asked me about the relationship, how it's evolved, and I mentioned to you that as time passes sometimes, and circumstances change, relationships are able to develop a new dynamic. I would hope that time and circumstantial change is enabling India and Pakistan to develop a new dynamic. It appears to be that way.

Final question.

Q : Mr. President, you're going to India, but you're not visiting the Taj Mahal...

THE PRESIDENT : I know. It means I'm going to have to

Q : Have you broken the news to the First Lady?

THE PRESIDENT : No, it means I'm going to have to come back. It's a -- I am disappointed with that. People who have seen the Taj Mahal say that it's -- pictures don't do it justice. It's one of the great magnificent sites of the world. And look, if I were the scheduler, perhaps I'd be doing things differently. But you want me doing one thing.

I'll be the President, we've got the scheduler being the scheduler. I'm going to miss a lot of the really interesting parts of your great country. I know that.

I would hope that I would be invited back sometime after this trip.

Q : You could be in trouble with the "Desperate Housewife."

THE PRESIDENT : Yes. Well, she's certainly the star of the family. She's really looking forward to going with me.

Q : Between a cricket match and a Bollywood movie, what would you like watching?

THE PRESIDENT : I'm a cricket match person.

(Laughter.) I appreciate it. As I understand it, I may have a little chance to learn something about cricket. It's a great pastime. (Laughter.)

Q : Mr. President, what is your earliest memory of India.

MR. McCLELLAN : We've got to go to the next one.

Q : What is your earliest memory of India and Indians?

THE PRESIDENT : Gandhi. It's my first memory, as I think about India. You know, a person who was so spiritual that he captured the imagination of the entire world. He's proof positive that -- throughout history there have been individuals that have had the capacity to shape thought and to influence and -- beyond border. And he did that.

Q : You watched the movie?

THE PRESIDENT : I watched that, too. But that's -- but my memory was earlier than that.

Thank you.

Q : Thank you, very much.

THE PRESIDENT : Enjoyed it.

CR: Have a great trip to India, Mr President.



http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-1426634,curpg-1.cms

Another application of all the literary theories we canvass in class....

But before that, it is very
important that you'll take the following psychological test !!

No cheating. Pick your dessert, then look to see what
Psychiatrists think about you!
After taking this dessert personality test, copy,
paste and send this e-mail on to others, with your OWN application of
the various theories that you'll are aware of !!

If you were making a dessert and you had your choice
of those below (or some great bakery was baking the
dessert of your choice), which would you choose?


> *Angel food
> *Brownies
> *Lemon Meringue
> *Vanilla with Chocolate Icing
> *Strawberry Short Cake
> *Chocolate on Chocolate
> *Ice Cream
> *Carrot Cake
>
>
> NO ... You can't change your mind once you scroll
> down!
>
>
>
>
>
>
> So think carefully, what your choice will be!
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> OK - Now that you've made your choice, this is what
> research says about you!
>
> Angel food...
> Sweet, loving, cuddly. You love all warm and fuzzy
> items. A little nutty at times. Sometimes you need an
> ice cream cone at the end of the day. Others perceive
> you as being childlike and immature at times.
>
> Brownies...
> You are adventurous, love new ideas, are a champion of
> underdogs and a slayer of dragons. When tempers flare
> up, you whip out your saber. You are always the
> oddball with a unique sense of humour and direction.
> You tend to be very loyal.
>
> Lemon Meringue...
> Smooth, sexy, & articulate with your hands, you are an
> excellent after-dinner speaker and a good teacher. But
> don't try to walk and chew gum at the same time. A bit
> of a diva at times, but you have many friends.
>
> Vanilla with Chocolate Icing...
> Fun-loving, sassy, humorous. Not very grounded in
> life; very indecisive and lack motivation. Everyone
> enjoys being around you, but you are a practical
> joker. Others should be cautious in making you mad.
> However, you are a friend for life.
>
> Strawberry Short Cake...
> Romantic, warm, loving. You care about other people
> and can be counted on in a pinch. You tend to melt.
> You can be overly emotional and annoying at times.
>
> Chocolate on Chocolate...
> Sexy, always ready to give and receive. Very creative,
> adventurous, ambitious, and passionate. You have a
> cold exterior but are warm on the inside. Not afraid
> to take chances. Will not settle for anything average
> in life. Love to laugh.
>
> Ice Cream...
> You like sports, whether it be baseball, football,
> basketball, or soccer. If you could, you would like to
> participate, but you enjoy watching sports. You don't
> like to give up the remote control. You tend to be
> self-centered and high maintenance.
>
>
> Carrot Cake...
> You are a very fun loving person, who likes to laugh.
> You are fun to be with. People like to hang out with
> you. You are a very warm hearted person and a little
> quirky at times. You have many loyal friends

From: Pallavi Mogre
Date: Sun Nov 30, 2003 5:10 am
Subject: I chose Brownies, BUT according to POSTCOLONIAL tenets.....


...there's a big problem with this test !!! Edward Said would probably
call it "Eurocentric" !!

I may have heard of angel food, and lemon meringues, but I have no
idea as to how they taste etc. Plus, this test OTHERISES vegetarians,
and those whose sweet tooth never erupted !!

Maybe we should invent (or should I say CONSTRUCT, because I don't
particularly believe in these tests) a psychological test with stuff
like jalebis and rasgollas ... or would that be called NATIVISM ??

Also, I can't be sure that these rasgollas were originally Indian,
right? For all I know, they may have come to India from Timbuktu. So,
HOW NATIVE IS NATIVE?

And would I be justified in making these UNIVERSALIST ASSUMPTIONS?
Some people don't even get one square meal a day.

MARXISTS would declare war on these jalebis and rasgollas, and
FEMINISTS would probably brandish statistics telling me that though
chefs at 5 star hotels may be male, the scene at home hasn't changed
all that much, and that women are still frying the jalebis !!!

Oh well.......

..........let's just enjoy our dessert, eh? ;)

Opinion about William Shakespeare’s “As you Like It”, has often been polemic, what with some critics labeling it a ‘sentimental pastoral’, while others like G. B. Shaw contending that it is more ‘lucrative’ than ‘sentimental’. Shakespeare, Shaw tells us, ‘was forced to write popular plays to save his theatre from ruin’, and that ‘he did it (i.e. wrote these popular plays) mutinously, calling the plays “As You Like It”, and “Much Ado About Nothing”’.

William Empson’s critique is a departure from extreme polemics. He identifies as a pastoral any work that contrasts simple and complicated life, to the advantage of the former. In Empson’s view, this mode of life serves as an oblique way to criticise the class structure of society. Shakespeare’s “pastoral” adheres to this definition, though not in its entirety.

Shakespeare’s attitude to either the country or the city is not unproblematic. He cannot be accused of conventional “pastoral” oversimplification. His ambiguous outlook is presented through antagonistic juxtaposition of characters – Jaques Vs. Duke Senior, Jaques Vs. Touchstone, Audrey Vs. Phebe are but some examples of the same.

Classical poets have idealised pastoral life as possessing features of the mythical ‘Golden Age’, and ‘country life’ symbolizes an innocent alternative to ambition, disturbance and war. Here, the court, as Duke Sr. tells us, is nothing but “painted pomp” – it is “envious”, and full of sycophantic “flattery”. To cut a long story short, the country is the city’s antithesis.

If the court is corrupt, the Forest of Arden should have been Elysium. But as we step into the forest with Rosalind and Orlando, we are greeted with the negative – their precise tautology confirms Arden as a “desert place”. Also, the wind is cold, and the weather such that protection becomes preferable. If Andrew Marvell in his “The Garden” painted a picture of plenitude with lines like, “The Nectaren, and curious Peach / Into my hands themselves do reach”, Shakespeare shows us that labour is a sine qua non.

Unlike Ben Jonson, Shakespeare does not declare that “the painted partrich lyes in every field/ And, for thy messe, is willing to be kill’d”. Exploitation is acknowledged through Jaques accusing the Duke of being a greater usurper than the brother who has banished him. Humans are essentially “tyrants” and “usurpers” whether they live in the country or the city, seems to be the message that Jaques wants to convey.

Nevertheless, his moralizing is lopsided. He considers usury, exploitation and neglect of the “bankrupt” not just human, but also “natural”. The deer episode exemplifies this. In a way, he contradicts his own invective against the Duke by providing him a reason for usury – nature is no better than man, so why not exploit it? – capitalist exploitation is absolved. He considers the “careless herd” callous without realising that if they neglect the wounded deer, it is only because the herd cannot help him. Ironically though being a man, and hence being capable of aiding the deer, Jaques isn’t proactive. Pontifical verse is more than enough to quell the qualms of his conscience.

Deviating from the quintessentially romanticized picture of love and friendship that pastoral eclogues portray, “As You Like It”, does not provide a motive (it is either love/lust at first sight) for love. As one critic puts it, ‘Love is all romance and poetry in Orlando and Rosalind Love is pastoral convention carried to ridicule in Silvius and Phebe. Love is a parody in Touchstone and Audrey. Love is prose, matter-of-fact in Oliver and Celia. “As You Like It”, also questions the nature of “true love”. Rosalind and Touchstone are instrumental here.

Rosalind in her “hose and doublet” catechizes Orlando as regards love and informs him that though “men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love”. Touchstone parodies Orlando’s callow love-eclogues, and his love for Audrey is blatantly lecherous and debauched. To speak in capitalist terms, love comes across as a ‘mutual contract’ – an ‘investment’ with its own liabilities. Rosalind while educating Phebe crudely observes that “Sell when you can, you are not for all markets”.

What Helen Gardner calls the ‘Mozartian’ nature of the play also adds to their ideological refrain with its “Most friendship is feigning, most loving, mere folly”. This wonderfully witty play with its bold and outspoken heroine and core of optimism and romance pokes gentle fun at the game of love while praising its virtues and celebrating its triumphs.

In conjunction with love, we see Shakespeare ostensibly questioning what it means to be masculine or feminine. Orlando to Rosalind, to use a cliché, is like the candle held to the sun. Rosalind’s scintillating wit has endeared her to many feminists. Consequently, they have been able to excuse Shakespeare for his rather tawdry representations – namely, Phebe and Audrey – one a coquette, and the other a fatuous country lassie, who not unlike Mr. Morel in “Sons and Lovers”, can make no sense of Touchstone’s poetry and incisive wit. (Weird, isn’t it, that some feminists should find this double indictment of gender and class innocuous?)

Shaw locates the reason for Rosalind’s enduring popularity not in her feminine traits, but in her masculinity. He points particularly to her male attire during most of the play, and to the aggressive manner in which she makes love. Shaw calls her an “incomplete human being”, but contemporary critical verbiage would probably term her behaviour androgynous.

Shakespeare’s vocabulary throughout the play makes it quite clear that Rosalind’s comportment is unlike that of the “natural” Elizabethan female – she is masculine. And if she is successful as a character, it is masculinity that must be lauded. Shakespeare’s transvestite intellectual thus does nothing to blur the gender divide as proposed by a certain faction, but only compounds the binary with obscure misogyny. Once again, to borrow from commerce, femininity is ‘unprofitable’ !!(Nevertheless, one can excuse Shakespeare, because he was not free from discourse – patriarchal or otherwise).

Shakespeare subverts the tradition of the pastoral ‘moral eclogue’ through Corin and Touchstone. Corin’s bucolic pro-pastoral sermon that applauds the ‘dignity of labour’ is negated by Touchstone’s mercantile repartee – he points out that Corin earns his living through the “copulation of cattle”.

In the Touchstone-Corin eclogue, the tension between literal and figurative language is palpable. No wonder then that C. L. Barker feels “As You Like It” is a ‘language play’ – a play wherein there is an almost Metaphysical alliance seriousness and levity. Through adroit verbal callisthenics, Shakespeare exposes how ‘Ways of Seeing’ are negotiated by one’s perspective. Though one can’t agree completely with Touchstone, one sees that Corin is no religious figure – he is not the figure of Christ as the God Shepherd. Rather, Corin is a country capitalist.

Thus we see that Arden is no pastoral idyll. Economy is not elided - the fact that economy directs sociology is acknowledged. Nevertheless, Shakespeare does not produce a counter-pastoral. The Country-City binary is not dismantled. Though Shakespeare exposes pastoral exaggeration, he still maintains the binary. The country is not an Elysium, but nevertheless, it is ‘simple’.

All the original country characters are ‘simple’ people who delight in ‘simple’ things. Hegemony is seen at play when Corin calls himself “a true labourer” who earns what he eats. Even Adam, though city bred, is a ‘loyal’ proletarian. Orlando laments that there aren’t more like Adam in whom is seen the “constant service of the antique world”. Incongruously enough, the proletariat is never shown at its labours. So though, there is no ‘magical extraction’ of the curse of labour’ (Raymond Williams) by the simple process of the extraction of the existence of labourers, there is an elision – there are labourers, but there is no actual labour !!

Thus, we see that though Shakespeare does not fall prey to what Raymond Williams calls the myth of the conventional ‘Golden Age’, he successfully creates a new ‘Golden Age’ that is based on hierarchy. The Lord’s in his manor, and all’s well with the world !!

The Country and The City – Raymond Williams

An Overview

Identity formation more often than not results in the creation, and subsequent consolidation of binaries. One such potent binary that textuality endorses is that between the country and the city.

The ‘Country’ and the ‘City’, Raymond Williams informs us, are very powerful words. In conjunction, they help define the other. If the country signifies ‘peace, innocence, and simple virtue’, the city metamorphoses into ‘a place of noise, worldliness, and ambition’.

On the other hand, if the country stands for ‘a place of backwardness, ignorance, (and) limitation’, then the city gets construed as a centre of ‘learning, communication, (and) light’. Focusing on either the country or the city ensures that consciously or subconsciously, the unacknowledged other makes its presence felt; if not directly, at least in comparison.

Concentrating on the literary interpretation of this binary in his The Country and The City, Williams succeeds in producing what Terry Eagleton calls a ‘librarian’s nightmare’. The book amalgamates divergent academic domains defying conventional criticism. It effectively wields history (rather, alternative history), geography, economics, psychology, sociology, politics, etymology and philosophy in order to contest the established canon.

An overview of canonical literature produces abundant examples that stress the country city/court dichotomy. Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Sidney’s Arcadia, have supported what Williams calls the myth of the ‘Golden Ages’ by lauding certain ‘traditional’ values through its representation (or misrepresentation) of the ‘rural idyll’.

In 1809, John Clare is overcome with nostalgia for the “..happy Eden of those golden years’. In 1796, in The Deserted Village, Oliver Goldsmith laments, “E’en now, methinks, as pondering here I stand / I see the rural virtues leave the land”. Critics claim that George Eliot and Thomas Hardy looked back to the ‘old rural England’ and ‘recorded the great climacteric change in rural life’ – a change that was ‘very recent indeed’, and which resulted in the disintegration of the ‘organic community’ of ‘Old England’.

But, if at the time of the Magna Carta (the charter given to English barons by King John in 1215), Innocent III describes how “the serf serves; terrified with threats, wearied by corvees, afflicted with blows, despoiled of his possessions”, the myth of a bygone ‘Golden Age’ is belied. Did it ever exist? Williams says, in answer to this question, “One answer of course, is Eden”! Williams thus exposes this recurring literary nostalgia as ‘a well-known habit of using the past, the good old days, as a stick to beat the present’, and to escape confronting it.

Constant contextualising enables Williams to identify the reasons for the existence of certain genres like the Pastoral. (Pastoral = a literary work idealizing rural life - especially the life of shepherds) He connects Sidney’s Arcadia, a neo-pastoral to the history of enclosures in England – the joining of small strips of land in order to bring a larger area under cultivation.

Enclosures had resulted in the aggravation of an already existent rural poverty. Arcadia, Williams points out, was written in a park which had been made by enclosing a whole village and evicting the tenants. This rural idyll is thus preserved by a ‘simple extraction of the existence of labourers’. The ‘Christ figure’ of the shepherd becomes a literary construct far removed from social realism. Also, the influence of patronage ensured that the poems were ‘not country life but social compliment; the familiar hyperboles of the aristocracy and its attendants’.

Depopulating the landscape of the proletariat, made ‘natural abundance’ a necessity. It was not “God will provide”, but “God provides” – the intermediary workers were elided and “The Pheasant, Partridge, and the Lark /Flew to my (the land lord’s) house, as to the Ark…/ And every beast did hither (to Saxham) bring / Himselfe to be an offering”. If what Thomas Carew claims in his To Saxham is indeed true, then we must assume that the butcher simply didn’t exist.

Literature, thus promulgated a certain way of seeing through convenient elision. Later, when George Eliot (no comment on her having to use a pseudonym from Williams) tried her hand at redressing the issue through inclusion, she could not but lapse into what Williams calls a “choral mode”, since for her, the working class was not a ‘knowable’, but an alien community, and the rural working class idiom hence escaped this educated narrator. Williams himself, by quoting the likes of Fred Kitchen and Grassie Gibbon succeeds where Eliot failed, and manages to give voice to the deviant that had been if not silenced, at least muffled by traditional cacophony.

Williams does not blame capitalism or the changing modes of production for rural poverty. He does not indulge in regressive nostalgia that resists change – he seeks no refuge in ‘a world of books and memories, in which the scholar can be professionally humane but in his own real world either insulated or indifferent’. Instead, he tackles ‘agrarian capitalism’, and points out that it is the minority ownership of the means of production that results in destitution. Williams, commenting on the conversion of rural land into a ‘landscape’, calls it the ‘high point of agrarian bourgeois art’. This ‘art’ empties a rural landscape of rural labour by banishing the facts of production, and legitimises the ‘exploitation of the agricultural and genuinely pastoral lands beyond the park boundaries’ by a select few.

In the chapter Town and Country, Williams declares that, ‘the greed and calculation, so easily isolated and condemned in the city, run back quite clearly, to the country houses’ as ‘what happens in the town is generated by the needs of the dominant rural class’. It is the dominant rural class that can afford to invest its surplus in new ventures. Thus, Williams, in showing us how the exploitation of man and of nature which takes place in the country is realised and concentrated in the city, rejects the diametric relationship between the country and the city. Both the country and the city are subjected to the same modes of production, and both exhibit minority ownership. So, if we find a poacher in the country, we are sure to find a Fagin in the city.

Williams while retaining a sympathetic outlook where the rural is concerned, manages to deal in a just manner with the city too. If literary tradition sees only the ‘darkness’, Williams sees the ‘light’. London, Thomas Hardy claims,

“appears not to see itself. Each individual is conscious of himself, but nobody conscious of themselves collectively, except perhaps some poor gaper who stares round with a half-idiotic aspect”.

S. T. Coleridge and R. Southey supported this analysis as they saw industrial revolution which was more conspicuous in the cities, as an agency of social atomism. People were seen as living in a monotonous world whose mechanical regularity resulted in apathy and alienation. People in the city were reduced to “crowds”, and a city (here London), to quote Hardy again, became “a monster whose body had four million heads and eight million eyes”. Literary textuality now took a statistical turn that was essentially pessimistic. Publications like Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People of London reduced the poor to objects of study and depersonalised them by classification and grading.

Victorian and Edwardian storytellers, Williams tells us, ignored the problems of a city consciousness and of explicit and controversial ideas by taking recourse to a (contrived) naturalism. This ‘naturalism’ supposedly excluded ‘self-conscious authorial commentary’ as exhibited in Hardy in whom the tension of being a ‘returned native’ like his Jude (Jude the Obscure) is palpably felt. Such ‘naturalism’ can be seen in the carefully rendered ‘Cockney’ dialect in Lizerunt (1893) and The Record of Badalia Herodsfoot (1890) written by Arthur Morrison and Rudyard Kipling respectively. Analysing Kipling’s literary ‘naturalism’ from a postcolonial perspective, we find it tends towards essentialising. It is significant then that Hardy had decided against such idiomatic differentiation because of its ‘falsely distancing effect’ and its ‘reduction of persons to types’.

Though Hardy seems to be justified here, Williams tells us that his traditional insistence on the absence of any ‘collective consciousness’ in a city like London isn’t entirely vindicated. Unlike Hardy, H. G. Wells, though appalled by the social condition in the cities did not fall for the country city dichotomy. As is evident in his fiction, he recognised the connection between the ruling power of the city and the ruling power of the country, and his social satires like Tono-Bungay that incorporate science fiction do not oppose the city by relying on an idealised version of ‘rural order’.

Literature often sees city life as an overwhelming experience. This experience, Williams says, could either turn into ‘an affirmation of common humanity, past the barriers of crowded strangeness; or into an emphasis of isolation, of mystery’. Nineteenth century literature has explored both these avenues, and terms like multitude and solitude, made equal and interchangeable by, what Baudelaire calls, “fertile poets”. In trying to accomplish this, the city acquires a symbolic (Eliot’s ‘unreal city’ - Wasteland) and mythical (Yeats’ Byzantium/ William Blake’s vision of London as the new Jerusalem) dimension.

Like the Pastoral, Williams sees Modernism (only certain aspects of Modernism – he praises James Joyce’s Ulysses for its incorporation of the concept of plural consciousness) as another genre that is somewhat escapist in the sense that it does not bother with social reality. As Williams observes,

‘In his later verse, Eliot related loss of meaning in the city to the loss of God. By implication, or direct statement, the human settlements of the past are given a different significance, and the rural settlements – isolated and remote, visited from the city – acquire, if only by default, a traditional significance. This regular association of rural living with the past and with tradition, and then by symbolic rather than historical association with religious faith, became commonplace. The city, it seemed, was what man had made without God’.

Convincing though Williams’ argument is, postmodernism with its emphasis on poststructuralist tenets can punch holes in his theory by questioning the concept of ‘reality’, social or otherwise. Nevertheless, as a Marxist, Williams’ rejection of symbolism and myth as a concept that legitimises the ‘loss of social recognition and consciousness’ while parading ‘as a condition of understanding and insight’ is understandable.

In The City and the Future, Williams through numerous examples (Wells’ Time Machine etc.) shows how science fiction consolidates the country city binary, but unlike the development of the pastoral where the country was alienated, these cities of the future are a dialogue with urban sociology and planning. They engage with studies of the government of the cities, with the physical environment of an industrial and metropolitan civilisation – to cut a long story short, with urban problems. Nevertheless, it still succeeds in obscuring the present as it sees the country as the past, and the city as the future.

Williams points out the incongruity of such a literary thesis as the city is also a place where new collectivities are formed. For example, ‘the growing organisation of the working class itself: the great civilising response to industrial tyranny and anarchy: the creation of the unions out of the network of urban friendly and benefit societies, and beyond this expression of a new and active neighbourliness, the vision of mutuality as a new kind of society: the cooperatives, (and) the socialism, ..of the ..cities’.

Williams also shows us how Imperialism results in the rebuilding of the country city dichotomy on an international scale, wherein ‘distant lands become the rural areas of industrial Britain, with heavy consequent effects on its own surviving rural areas’. This is reflected in novels like Things Fall Apart and A Grain of Wheat, written by Chinua Achibe and James Ngugi respectively. Closer to home, it is seen in Dadabhai Nowroji’s Economic Drain Theory.

Though a Marxist tract, Williams’ The Country and The City refutes Marx and Engels’ argument in the Communist Manifesto that the bourgeoisie had “rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life”. Giving examples of the Chinese and Cuban revolutions, and other anti-colonial uprisings, he shows us how it is these “rural idiots” and “semi-barbarians” who have been the main revolutionary force in the world.

The country and the city dichotomy even when acknowledged to be a permeable boundary is no longer tenable today without modification. Raymond Williams acknowledges this permeability, but his analytic paradigm would perpetuate and fossilise the dichotomy in today’s interdisciplinary and intertextual times. Social history such as the kind Williams maps now mandates knowledge of feminist movements, subaltern dissidences, postcolonial theory (etc.). Otherwise, it must risk appearing simplistic and ideologically gauche.

Nevertheless, Raymond Williams extraordinary assimilative literary criticism needs to be applauded for exposing The Shadow Lines that circumscribe literary conventions and criticism.