The English landscape encodes submerged histories of class struggle

Evidence

In Ellis Sharp’s short story ‘The Hay Wain’, a Poll Tax rioter in 1990 takes refuge in the National Gallery and ‘notices what he has never noticed before on biscuit tins or calendars, or plastic trays on the walls of his aunt’s flat in Bradford, those tiny figures bending in the field beyond.’ Constable’s supposedly timeless painting of English landscape ceases to be a kind of pastoral screensaver and becomes what it always really was: a snapshot of agricultural labour. Far from being some refuge from political strife, the English landscape is the site of numerous struggles between the forces of power and privilege and those who sought to resist them. Sharp replaces the dominant pastoral image of the English countryside, not with a deflated quotidian realism, but with a different kind of lyricism, one coloured by revolt: fields and ditches become hiding places or battlegrounds; landscapes that on the surface seem tranquil still reverberate with the unavenged spectral rage of murdered working class martyrs. It is not the sunlit English afternoon that is ‘timeless’, but the ability of the agents of reaction to escape justice. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 541

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly parallels the method of my trees-as-infrastructure piece: reading an apparently ‘natural’ surface as a record of labour and politics underneath.
• STORYSTEM: The conceit of re-seeing a canonical, over-familiar image as a documentary of work and violence — a Poll Tax rioter noticing the labourers in The Hay Wain — is a reusable scene-making engine for fiction about canonical art.
• XREF: connects to: Unaccountable incidents can reveal blind gaps in normal perception — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 417; Landscape painting retroactively reveals nature and society as ideological representations — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 394; Landscape reading answers some histories while opening further questions — Tom Wessels, Forest Forensics: A Field Guide to…, 28 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Landscape painting retroactively reveals nature and society as ideological representations #corroborates (0.82) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 394