ABSTRACT
Stranger went to Nuneham, in Oxfordshire, where in the 18th century a village was pulled down to improve the view from a new house: what some people call one of the stately homes. Arnold (to get the balance right) used to think of these houses as "the great fortified posts of the Barbarians", and since I have known anything about those 18th-century placemen and agrarian capitalists I have found the description accurate. It was good to see that the house is now a teachers' training college, but watching the children from the displaced village being taken on an educational visit to the monuments of the family that did the displacing stirred rather different feelings. The question was raised whether this was the source of Goldsmith's Deserted Village. It is one of the possibilities, in the quite regular practice of engrossing:
But there are others. What Goldsmith described, in his neglected poem, was a social process and not an isolated incident, and from internal evidence his scene is various:
Before clearance and draining the bittern may have been more widespread, of course. Now, in Survival (Anglia), we saw it getting by accident as far as the parkland of Stansted, where it was at last filmed booming. Hollow-sounding, perhaps. It was in close-up a curious eructation, with what looked like vomiting movements to match. A strange sound to accompany Goldsmith's hope
But at Nuneham or at other places, one could still take his point. 22 October 1970
122 RAYMOND WILLIAMS ON TELEVISION
It is often difficult to decide whether to say that the novel or the character is self-centred. The very act of performing such a work creates a certain inevitable objectivity. We see the character from outside as well as listening to him. More important, we see for ourselves (or so we think) the other persons he meets and can compare his reactions with our own. The film of Room at the Top can be said to be better than the novel on which it was based because this element of objectivity allowed and even compelled us to face certain problems about the central character which the subjective form of the novel had seemed to evade. The fiction of special pleading-the self-explaining, self-justifying voice which is the only real voice in the narrative-is often very powerful but on certain major issues requires, and in performance gets, this other dimension. And it is then difficult to say that The Age of Reason is not self-centred. Mathieu's self-consciousness actually organises the novel, and that he is in the ordinary sense self-centred isn't likely to be doubted.
