The company began to sing, from the Workers' Own Songbook, though mostly without aid of the text, choral selections including Hubert Parry's recent setting of Blake's "Jerusalem," taken not unreasonably as a great anticapitalist anthem disguised as a choir piece, with a slight adjustment to the last line—"In this our green and pleasant land."
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"Workers' Own Songbook"
When I search for this on the Internet, I only get referred back to Against the Day. So I'm going to assume this is a fiction on Pynchon's part. And maybe this fiction will help me to understand the enormous error in the second half of this sentence.
"Hubert Parry's recent setting of Blake's 'Jerusalem,'"
This setting of Blake's "Jerusalem" to music is super recent in 1893 because he didn't actually do it until 1916. But that fact seems way too easy for Pynchon to have missed. He's placed so many other subtle clues to how to read a scene or why certain words were used for the time to suddenly place a quite specific moment in time twenty-three years too early. Perhaps this is why he places it inside a fictional book of songs taken up by Unionizers and Socialists. Perhaps he saw the historical path of the song and Parry's love and hate for having written it and decided it was a good metaphor for his 1893 story about workers fighting for their rights in the century after the Industrial Revolution.
You see, Parry's song was written for a Fight for Right campaign. The Fight for Right Movement was a patriotic movement to bolster failing morale among the British people in the advent of the terrible death toll of the first World War. Parry began to find the super patriotic fervor of the Fight for Right Movement distasteful and withdrew his support of the movement which seemed implicit due to his writing of the music for "Jerusalem" for the Fight for Right campaign. It even seemed like he might withdraw the music entirely from general use. But then he was approached by the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies for its use at Suffrage events, eventually asking to make it the Women Voters' Hymn. Parry was delighted to see his music used for a good and joyful cause, even giving the copyright over to the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies.
So you can see how Parry and the history of the song make it a perfect song for the oppressed and downtrodden. So do we forgive Pynchon for this anachronistic error because it fits the theme?
Or do we chalk this up to a reference to Doctor Who seeing as, according to Wikipedia, "An extract was heard in the 2013 Doctor Who episode 'The Crimson Horror' although that story was set in 1893, i.e., before Parry's arrangement." Against the Day is set in 1893! So this is probably Pynchon commenting on the show's error and not an error of his own, right? Or it's Pynchon's way of incorporating Doctor Who into the Against the Day universe, seeing as how Doctor Who messed up time by bringing Parry's musical version of "Jerusalem" back to 1893!
I know Against the Day was written in 2006 and that Doctor Who episode was from 2013! But that's just more time travel shenanigans!
"Blake's 'Jerusalem,'"
I've mentioned multiple times how this book has reminded me in various ways of Alan Moore's Jerusalem and now we have Pynchon mentioning the poem here. I've also theorized that Randolph St. Cosmo might be reminiscent of Blake's character Orc from America a Prophecy written exactly 100 years before this story.
But more to the point, Blake's "Jerusalem" can be seen less as a patriotic call to make England great but as a call to the masses to forsake and throw down the system which keeps us from experiencing heaven on Earth. Throw down the dark Satanic mills and lift up your golden bow fit with the arrows of your desire. Grab up your spear and ride your chariot of fire into battle. He basically calls for revolution. Which makes it perfect then to subvert via patriotic propaganda. "Oh, no, no, no! This isn't calling for reform at all! This poem is about, um, making England Great Again! Pish posh now! Off you go to die in the trenches! God bless us!"
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