Invisible Lives of the Rural Idyll: Midsomer Murders and Cynan Jones’ The Long Dry

Abstract

This article explores how certain rural lives are rendered invisible by the enduring dominance of the genre of the rural idyll, which is particularly strong in British culture. Drawing on my previous work about ‘living ghosts’, on Jacques Derrida and on Akira Lippit, I contend that, when dealing with the invisibilized lives of the rural, it is crucial to ask in what sense these lives are invisible and what each form of invisibility makes (im)possible. Two case studies are discussed: the popular television crime drama Midsomer Murders (1997-present), set in rural England, and the 2006 novel The Long Dry by Cynan Jones, set on a Welsh farm. With regard to Midsomer Murders, I show how it affirms the rural idyll’s construction of the English countryside as a space of whiteness. With regard to The Long Dry, I argue that it exposes the rural idyll, in Lauren Berlant’s terms, as a waning genre whose good-life fantasy is no longer viable, while also opening up the possibility of a posthuman idyll adequate to the contemporary globalized rural.

Keywords

• rural idyll
• living ghosts
• haunting
• invisibility
• spectralization
• avisuality