Countryside and Literature: The Modern Gaze

2020/12/14

First, a short anecdote about Germany. The British author John le Carré, who has many fans in Japan, called the capital Bonn a "capital village" at the beginning of his Cold War-era spy novel "A Small Town in Germany." This is, of course, an ironic exaggeration, but the regional character of this country has its own historical background. In the German-speaking world, where no unified state existed until the end of the 19th century and multiple sovereign states were scattered about, there was long a lack of cultural and political centers like Tokyo or Paris. In that era, where "small towns" and "villages" were ubiquitous, so to speak, an interesting literary genre was born. This series of stories, known as "Village Tales," ran counter to the urban novels typical of 19th-century literature, shedding light on the lives of peasants in narrow backwaters and blossoming into a massive trend that swept across Europe (for those interested, please see my forthcoming edited volume, "Western Village Tales").

"Village Tales" in the German-speaking world was a genre that conveyed the lives of narrow, limited regions to a broad readership, aiming to cultivate a common national spirit for future national unification. Naturally, there was a tendency to criticize the old-fashioned ways of rural villages from an urban perspective, but this trend also changed over time. As waves of industrialization and urbanization eventually reached the country, urban dwellers living amidst civilized bustle began to yearn for the slow life of the countryside. Typical examples of such movements, fueled by a backlash against the city, include the "Wandervogel" (Migratory Bird) and the "Heimatkunst" (Homeland Art) movements that arose at the turn of the century; this current would eventually merge with the agrarian ideology of Nazi Germany. Behind the scenes of the modernization process that concentrated people's living bases in a few urban areas, the reality of the countryside was sometimes idyllically idealized and sometimes used to justify exploitation by the center, suffering the misfortune of distortion.

Now, with these thoughts in mind, I feel somewhat conflicted when I hear that the number of people wishing to move to rural areas is increasing, sparked by remote work becoming the default during the COVID-19 pandemic. Just when one might think the general modern flow of population from the countryside to the city is finally reversing, the essence remains unchanged. It is merely an attempt to realize and physically repeat the one-sided gaze of desire that modern cities have directed toward the countryside.