"...Deep England is never attainable -- it moves away the closer you get to it; and like a will-o'-the-wisp it shines most brightly above the most treacherous swamps. Now, most particularly, wise travellers in these lands would do well to question its allure."
This passage is from Melissa Harrison's new book, All Among the Barley, quoted in a Guardian-UK reader comment.
("Deep England"? According to the Free Encyclopedia online:
"Deep England" refers to an idealized view of a rural, Southern England. The term is neutral, though it reflects what English cultural conservatives would wish to conserve. The term, which alludes to la France profonde,
has been attributed to both Patrick Wright and Angus Calder. The concept of Deep England may imply an explicit opposition to modernism and industrialization; and may be connected to a ruralist viewpoint typified by the writer H.J. Massingham. Major artists whose work is associated with Deep England include: the writer Thomas Hardy, the painter John Constable, the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, and the poets Rupert Brooke and Sir John Betjeman....)
(La France profonde? According to the online Free Dictionary:
La France Profonde is a phrase used in French political and social commentary to mean rural, small-town France, as opposed to Paris and other large cities.)
---------------------- "Like the end of the rainbow or a will-o'-the-wisp, Deep England is never attainable -- it moves away the closer you get to it; and like a will-o'-the-wisp it shines most brightly above the most treacherous swamps. Now, most particularly, wise travellers in these lands would do well to question its allure."
Profound; deep -- the French way of saying it, and the English way of saying it. Meaning: out in the country.
People have a way, sometimes, of idealizing someplace where they are not. And that paragraph above, the first time you read it, it feels like the author is "talking up" Deep England.
"shines"
"brightly" ...
...Then read it again, and you see that it's saying, You may feel drawn to the "allure" of Deep England, but it's actually saying beware that allure.... Question it.
push -- pull
yes -- no
Want to go there? Or would it be better to stay away?
On which side of the fence is the grass greener?
Or is there just AstroTurf, and no fence at all??!
-------------------- Type in on Google "la France profonde" and you get some headlines:
"Losing La France Profonde"
^^ The American Conservative
"France profonde: Rural idyll or backwater hell?"
^^ The local.fr
"The deadly side of la France profonde"
^^ Telegraph.co.uk
(Starts to sound like Deliverance....[WHY DIDN'T THOSE PEOPLE JUST STAY HOME AND TAKE BANJO LESSONS????!!!!)
The Harrison paragraph is also interesting to compare to the passage near the end of The Great Gatsby:
Deep England is never attainable -- it moves away the closer you get to it...
Gatsby believed in the green light...
He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it.
Like the end of the rainbow or a will-o'-the-wisp, Deep England is never attainable....
...I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock....
In Melissa Harrison's paragraph, it's people's yearning for something that maybe isn't really there at all; in Gatsby, it's a man's yearning for something he sort of had in the past, but it remains in the past even though he dreamed he could make it present again.
--------------------------- And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes -- a fresh, green breast of the new world.
Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it.
He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter -- tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning --
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
{The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald}
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