This book is wonderful. The protagonist, Mathew, returns to his home village because his father, Harry, is dying. Over the length of the novel he tries to make sense of his relationship: with his father; the place he has come from, geographically, socially and historically. The mountain view becomes a metaphor for the idealism of his youth and the alienation of intellectual endeavour. One reading of this book by Raymond Williams is through using the metaphor of the polarity of the Agora and Mount Olympus: the market and the rarified high point of the gods; the senex and puer aeternus.
In some ways there is something agoraphobic in the Romantic mind-set: the heroic individual battling against the elements in a mountainous wasteland.; the artist separated from filthy market forces. However, it should be noted that the Agora is not the capitalist market but the produce market where we buy the things we need on a daily basis and interact with each other. It is more a place of direct human exchange than it is of financial transaction. Many of the qualities of the puer aeternus [maybe the Romantic] are necessary for the artist to function: the ability to play; the child's potential for growth and change; love of newness and hope for the future. However there is a negative side to this in the refusal to face up to problems: failure to take responsibility and risk all while hoping that some external force will deliver the desired result, or at the very least offer rescue; the refusal to integrate rather than put up with messy compromise and the bodges of democracy.
Ultimately one would desire to integrate the child and the wise adult. C. G. Jung and before him William Blake [see Job] saw that the fully realized adult is in touch with this creative part of the psyche.
In the passage below we can see that it is possible to eliminate people from landscape. To capture it, to enslave the landscape to one's own vision. This is not dissimilar to the colonial attitude that failed to see the native people in the countries they annexed as having any claim to the land especially if they didn't farm. The Romantic artists sought wilderness as if these places were not inhabited had no history prior to their discovery of the place. We also see his, Mathew's, awareness of this and the beginning of a different way of seeing landscape as a living environment rather than something frozen in a vitrine.
When Mathew got back from town, he walked slowly up the lane. In the bus he had known so few people that he felt like a stranger. Even the faces he recognized were altered, or belonged to a different generation. In Gwenton he had met nobody he knew, and the simple shopping had been difficult, after London: the conventions were different. He had felt empty and tired, but the familiar shape of the valley and the mountains held and replaced him. It was one thing to carry it's image in his mind, as he did, everywhere, never a day passing but he closed his eyes and saw it again, his only landscape. But it was different to stand and look at the reality. It was not less beautiful; every detail of the land came up with it's old excitement. but it was not still, as the image had been. It was no longer a landscape or a view, but a valley that people were using. He realized, as he watched, what had happened in going away. The valley as landscape had been taken, but its work forgotten. The visitor sees beauty; the inhabitant a place where he works and has his friends. Far away, closing his eyes, he had been seeing this valley, but as a visitor sees it, as the guide-book sees it: this valley, in which he had lived more than half his life. [p. 85]
Mathew's task in returning to his place of birth is to recollect his childhood. To understand the world he has come from and measure himself against this. He has to find a way of accommodating the world views of his father, Harry, and his father's friends and neighbours. His mother had wanted to call him Will but his father had registered his name as Mathew. He had spent his childhood as Will then on leaving home had become Mathew, his father's aspirational name for him, his legal name. The realization of the adult, the integration of the puer aeternus and the senex is necessary if he is to fully be himself and join his current life to his childhood and origins, to understand the adult world.
'Not understanding is making harm. That's what I've always said, about this whole place. They're back in the past. It's the same wherever you look.'
'Some things change. Some don't.'
'What, for instance?'
Harry did not answer. He was staring out at the high banks of the road. They were on the old road now, under the black ridge of Darren. To the east the valley was wide, curving up to the sharp peak of the Holy Mountain.
'What don't change, Harry?'
Harry shifted in his seat, but did not answer.
'Well the mountains won't, anyhow,' Will said, behind them.
'Mountains! What do mountains matter? And have some faith in the future, Will. If they're in the way, we'll move them.'
'They won't be in the way.'
'I couldn't bear the mountains to be spoiled,' Eira said.
'Morgan's right,' Harry said suddenly. 'The mountains don't much matter, except to look at. I wasn't thinking of that.'
'You've lived under these mountains all your life and you say they don't matter,' Will protested.
'It's a feeling about things, that's all. The mountains are just there, that's all about them.'
'You wouldn't talk like that if you went up there more often. All you ever go up for is your bees. If you went up there and looked, really looked, you'd see it.'
'See what, Will?' Morgan asked.
'Well, a different view of things, that's all. Something more than keeping your nose to the ground.'
'Grindstone's the word,' Morgan said. 'And of course, certainly it's a good view, and the air's nice. Only you can't live on that. At your age, Will - I don't want to go on about your age, it used to annoy me, but still - at your age you get set on things like that. Mountains, stars, seas, distances. A sort of longsightedness. The things close-up are all too difficult.'
'They stay difficult,' Harry said.
'Aye. Only you don't solve them by going and looking from a mountain.'
'No,' Harry said. 'I've had too much to do down here.'
'And that's the size of it. It's what we all have to come down to.'
Will smiled, nervously. Eira looked at him and pressed her elbow against his arm.
'Well,' Morgan said, 'round the next corner and you'll see it.'
They sat forward, feeling their closeness. They went around a long bend, that was fenced with new concrete posts and taut shining wire. The ground fell away towards Gwenton, and at the top was the level field on which Morgan had built. The factory was small, but stood out with its sharp red-brick walls and white asbestos roof. All around it, the site was churned up into ruts of red earth, where the lorries had turned and tipped. Morgan drew the car up to the fence, which had the same concrete posts but new diamond wire.
'Well here we are.'
'It looks nice, Eira, doesn't it?' Ellen said
'Oh yes, Auntie. And you should see the boilers in there, all lovely and big and shiny. I told Dad when they once see this there'll be no more jam-making over the stove.' [pp. 303 - 305]
Against this engagement with the need to make a living is the mountain, but now changing as he shimmers on the edge of his own vision: seeing the uncluttered vista but also feeling his connection to the landscape, personally, emotionally and intellectually.
...The paths became narrower, the air colder, and the mountains around took on different shapes, their moulding clearer. The sheep, in this great open stretch, were few and scattered. He could see the wild mountain ponies, but always in the distance. In the great silence of the mountain the song of the few birds, the strange high sound of the wind, came in a different dimension.
At last he turned back from the open mountain, and crossed above the Kestrel to where he could see the valley again. It was like coming back, after a long journey, to familiar country, yet the valley was still strange: an enclosing feeling had taken and changed it. There was the patch, its houses half-hidden by the enclosing trees. He knew, at recall, every yard of that ground, and of the fields around it, up to the farm and the water-tank. But from here it seemed like a light, a silence, a feeling not ordinarily accessible, had flowed round and enclosed this familiar ground. The patch was not only a place, but people, yet from here it was as if no one lived there, and yet, its stillness, it was a memory himself.
There were the two chapels by the river, and the Daveys' cottage. There, up the line of the road, was the school, and the boys' playground, and the green rectangle of the bowling green. It was easy to remember the hours he had played there, the voices and the shouting, but from here it was only a memory...
He sat very still, preoccupied by this strange feeling of quiet. Down over the close turf and the hummocks of bracken the black rock of the Kestrel stood out sharply...
But lift with the line of the Kestrel, and look far out. Now it was not just the valley and the village, but the meeting of valleys, and England blue in the distance. In its history the country took on a different shape. On the high ground to the east the Norman castles stood at intervals of a few miles, facing across the wide valley to the mountains. Glynmawr, below them, was the disputed land, held by neither side, raided by both. And there, to the south, was Gwenton castle, completing the chain. The little town lay under it, blue in the haze, and the only clear detail was the green cupola of the Town Hall. All that had been learned of the old fighting along this border stood out, suddenly, in the disposition of the castles and the roads. There on the uplands had been the power of the Lords of the Marches, Fitz Osbern, Bernard of Newmarch, de Broase. Their towers now were decayed hollow teeth, facing the peaceful valleys into which their power had bitten. All that stayed of that world was the memory, the decayed shape of violence, confused in legend with the rockfall of the Holy Mountain, where the devil's heel had slipped as he strode westward into our mountains.
Or look out, not east, but south and west, and there, visibly, was another history and another border. There was the limestone scarp where the hills were quarried and burrowed. There along the outcrop stood a frontier, invisible in the surface, between the rich and barren rocks. On the near side the valleys were green and wooded, but beyond that line they had blackened with pits and slagheaps and mean grey terraces. It seemed only an accident of the hidden rocks, but there, visibly, were two different worlds. There along the outcrop had stood the ironmasters, Guest, Crawshay, Bailey, Homfray, and this history had stayed.
He looked out in each direction in turn, his eyes narrowed against the keen wind, his mind excited as it had been when he stood with Pugh on the church tower, looking up at the shapes in the stars. The mountain had this power, to abstract and to clarify, but in the end he could not stay here; he must go back down to where he lived. [pp. 362 -365
His epiphany comes on the bus.
The bus was crowded, for it was market-day. He had to stand, and could not look out. But in the warmth of the bus he felt a sudden closeness of contact, that was more than the physical effect of the people crowded around him. He became conscious of it, obliquely, by finding himself thinking again of separation. The bus was carrying him away from his parents, and from the village where so much of his active feeling still lay. But, enclosing this, there was some other feeling, that he could not easily name. 'We went and walked in the market', Harry had said. The words came back now with extraordinary force. [p. 391]
In some ways there is something agoraphobic in the Romantic mind-set: the heroic individual battling against the elements in a mountainous wasteland.; the artist separated from filthy market forces. However, it should be noted that the Agora is not the capitalist market but the produce market where we buy the things we need on a daily basis and interact with each other. It is more a place of direct human exchange than it is of financial transaction. Many of the qualities of the puer aeternus [maybe the Romantic] are necessary for the artist to function: the ability to play; the child's potential for growth and change; love of newness and hope for the future. However there is a negative side to this in the refusal to face up to problems: failure to take responsibility and risk all while hoping that some external force will deliver the desired result, or at the very least offer rescue; the refusal to integrate rather than put up with messy compromise and the bodges of democracy.
Ultimately one would desire to integrate the child and the wise adult. C. G. Jung and before him William Blake [see Job] saw that the fully realized adult is in touch with this creative part of the psyche.
In the passage below we can see that it is possible to eliminate people from landscape. To capture it, to enslave the landscape to one's own vision. This is not dissimilar to the colonial attitude that failed to see the native people in the countries they annexed as having any claim to the land especially if they didn't farm. The Romantic artists sought wilderness as if these places were not inhabited had no history prior to their discovery of the place. We also see his, Mathew's, awareness of this and the beginning of a different way of seeing landscape as a living environment rather than something frozen in a vitrine.
When Mathew got back from town, he walked slowly up the lane. In the bus he had known so few people that he felt like a stranger. Even the faces he recognized were altered, or belonged to a different generation. In Gwenton he had met nobody he knew, and the simple shopping had been difficult, after London: the conventions were different. He had felt empty and tired, but the familiar shape of the valley and the mountains held and replaced him. It was one thing to carry it's image in his mind, as he did, everywhere, never a day passing but he closed his eyes and saw it again, his only landscape. But it was different to stand and look at the reality. It was not less beautiful; every detail of the land came up with it's old excitement. but it was not still, as the image had been. It was no longer a landscape or a view, but a valley that people were using. He realized, as he watched, what had happened in going away. The valley as landscape had been taken, but its work forgotten. The visitor sees beauty; the inhabitant a place where he works and has his friends. Far away, closing his eyes, he had been seeing this valley, but as a visitor sees it, as the guide-book sees it: this valley, in which he had lived more than half his life. [p. 85]
Mathew's task in returning to his place of birth is to recollect his childhood. To understand the world he has come from and measure himself against this. He has to find a way of accommodating the world views of his father, Harry, and his father's friends and neighbours. His mother had wanted to call him Will but his father had registered his name as Mathew. He had spent his childhood as Will then on leaving home had become Mathew, his father's aspirational name for him, his legal name. The realization of the adult, the integration of the puer aeternus and the senex is necessary if he is to fully be himself and join his current life to his childhood and origins, to understand the adult world.
'Not understanding is making harm. That's what I've always said, about this whole place. They're back in the past. It's the same wherever you look.'
'Some things change. Some don't.'
'What, for instance?'
Harry did not answer. He was staring out at the high banks of the road. They were on the old road now, under the black ridge of Darren. To the east the valley was wide, curving up to the sharp peak of the Holy Mountain.
'What don't change, Harry?'
Harry shifted in his seat, but did not answer.
'Well the mountains won't, anyhow,' Will said, behind them.
'Mountains! What do mountains matter? And have some faith in the future, Will. If they're in the way, we'll move them.'
'They won't be in the way.'
'I couldn't bear the mountains to be spoiled,' Eira said.
'Morgan's right,' Harry said suddenly. 'The mountains don't much matter, except to look at. I wasn't thinking of that.'
'You've lived under these mountains all your life and you say they don't matter,' Will protested.
'It's a feeling about things, that's all. The mountains are just there, that's all about them.'
'You wouldn't talk like that if you went up there more often. All you ever go up for is your bees. If you went up there and looked, really looked, you'd see it.'
'See what, Will?' Morgan asked.
'Well, a different view of things, that's all. Something more than keeping your nose to the ground.'
'Grindstone's the word,' Morgan said. 'And of course, certainly it's a good view, and the air's nice. Only you can't live on that. At your age, Will - I don't want to go on about your age, it used to annoy me, but still - at your age you get set on things like that. Mountains, stars, seas, distances. A sort of longsightedness. The things close-up are all too difficult.'
'They stay difficult,' Harry said.
'Aye. Only you don't solve them by going and looking from a mountain.'
'No,' Harry said. 'I've had too much to do down here.'
'And that's the size of it. It's what we all have to come down to.'
Will smiled, nervously. Eira looked at him and pressed her elbow against his arm.
'Well,' Morgan said, 'round the next corner and you'll see it.'
They sat forward, feeling their closeness. They went around a long bend, that was fenced with new concrete posts and taut shining wire. The ground fell away towards Gwenton, and at the top was the level field on which Morgan had built. The factory was small, but stood out with its sharp red-brick walls and white asbestos roof. All around it, the site was churned up into ruts of red earth, where the lorries had turned and tipped. Morgan drew the car up to the fence, which had the same concrete posts but new diamond wire.
'Well here we are.'
'It looks nice, Eira, doesn't it?' Ellen said
'Oh yes, Auntie. And you should see the boilers in there, all lovely and big and shiny. I told Dad when they once see this there'll be no more jam-making over the stove.' [pp. 303 - 305]
Against this engagement with the need to make a living is the mountain, but now changing as he shimmers on the edge of his own vision: seeing the uncluttered vista but also feeling his connection to the landscape, personally, emotionally and intellectually.
...The paths became narrower, the air colder, and the mountains around took on different shapes, their moulding clearer. The sheep, in this great open stretch, were few and scattered. He could see the wild mountain ponies, but always in the distance. In the great silence of the mountain the song of the few birds, the strange high sound of the wind, came in a different dimension.
At last he turned back from the open mountain, and crossed above the Kestrel to where he could see the valley again. It was like coming back, after a long journey, to familiar country, yet the valley was still strange: an enclosing feeling had taken and changed it. There was the patch, its houses half-hidden by the enclosing trees. He knew, at recall, every yard of that ground, and of the fields around it, up to the farm and the water-tank. But from here it seemed like a light, a silence, a feeling not ordinarily accessible, had flowed round and enclosed this familiar ground. The patch was not only a place, but people, yet from here it was as if no one lived there, and yet, its stillness, it was a memory himself.
There were the two chapels by the river, and the Daveys' cottage. There, up the line of the road, was the school, and the boys' playground, and the green rectangle of the bowling green. It was easy to remember the hours he had played there, the voices and the shouting, but from here it was only a memory...
He sat very still, preoccupied by this strange feeling of quiet. Down over the close turf and the hummocks of bracken the black rock of the Kestrel stood out sharply...
But lift with the line of the Kestrel, and look far out. Now it was not just the valley and the village, but the meeting of valleys, and England blue in the distance. In its history the country took on a different shape. On the high ground to the east the Norman castles stood at intervals of a few miles, facing across the wide valley to the mountains. Glynmawr, below them, was the disputed land, held by neither side, raided by both. And there, to the south, was Gwenton castle, completing the chain. The little town lay under it, blue in the haze, and the only clear detail was the green cupola of the Town Hall. All that had been learned of the old fighting along this border stood out, suddenly, in the disposition of the castles and the roads. There on the uplands had been the power of the Lords of the Marches, Fitz Osbern, Bernard of Newmarch, de Broase. Their towers now were decayed hollow teeth, facing the peaceful valleys into which their power had bitten. All that stayed of that world was the memory, the decayed shape of violence, confused in legend with the rockfall of the Holy Mountain, where the devil's heel had slipped as he strode westward into our mountains.
Or look out, not east, but south and west, and there, visibly, was another history and another border. There was the limestone scarp where the hills were quarried and burrowed. There along the outcrop stood a frontier, invisible in the surface, between the rich and barren rocks. On the near side the valleys were green and wooded, but beyond that line they had blackened with pits and slagheaps and mean grey terraces. It seemed only an accident of the hidden rocks, but there, visibly, were two different worlds. There along the outcrop had stood the ironmasters, Guest, Crawshay, Bailey, Homfray, and this history had stayed.
He looked out in each direction in turn, his eyes narrowed against the keen wind, his mind excited as it had been when he stood with Pugh on the church tower, looking up at the shapes in the stars. The mountain had this power, to abstract and to clarify, but in the end he could not stay here; he must go back down to where he lived. [pp. 362 -365
His epiphany comes on the bus.
The bus was crowded, for it was market-day. He had to stand, and could not look out. But in the warmth of the bus he felt a sudden closeness of contact, that was more than the physical effect of the people crowded around him. He became conscious of it, obliquely, by finding himself thinking again of separation. The bus was carrying him away from his parents, and from the village where so much of his active feeling still lay. But, enclosing this, there was some other feeling, that he could not easily name. 'We went and walked in the market', Harry had said. The words came back now with extraordinary force. [p. 391]
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