Introduction: Pastoral Echoes in the Forest of Literary History
Xanthe Ashburner and Timothy Chandler
In classical Latin, silua (“forest”) is a figure for literary history. The echoes
in this forest are in turn figures for reception—the handing down and
reworking of literary material. We decided on “Pastoral Echoes” as the title
for this special section of Colloquy because “echoes” evokes the kind of
spatio-temporal relations we see in the essays collected here. While
echoes have a source they are not continuous with that source; they have
a peculiarly disjunctive relation to their origin, which implies a particular
time and space, but which cannot necessarily be inferred from the echoes
themselves. Here seven literary critics and one poet speak the word
“pastoral” into the forest of literary history, producing vastly different echoes
from the same word. That the concept of pastoral preserves the semblance
of unity despite its myriad translations across time and space is, we
believe, aptly described by the echo. Accordingly, all these essays are
written with a concern for both the similarities and the differences that
relate and disjoin their respective texts to and from the history of pastoral
literature. Pastoral from its origins has always been conscious of its status
with respect to literary history, which is to say, it has always been modern.
Similarly, the essays that follow take a manifestly modern approach to the
pastoral; whether that be figured as a consideration of old texts under a
new light or new texts under an old light, these essays conceptualise
pastoral differently than at other points in literary history, but always with a
self-conscious relation to that history.
text theory critique 23 (2012). © Monash University.
www.arts.monash.edu.au/ecps/colloquy/journal/issue023/pastoral_introduction.pdf
COLLOQUY
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Introduction: Pastoral Echoes
Such framing would make deciding upon a satisfactory definition of
pastoral seem very difficult, if not impossible. Since the publication in 1935
of William Empson’s seminal Some Versions of Pastoral, much
consideration has been given to the question of defining this enduring item
of critical vocabulary. As several of our contributors note below, Empson’s
formulation of pastoral as the putting of the complex into the simple has
proved highly productive for critics working in his wake, whether they be
sympathetic like Paul Alpers or hostile like Raymond Williams. Yet at the
present moment, when pastoral is not dismissed out of hand as untenably
naïve or regressive, it is often assumed to have lost its generic specificity,
merging over the course of the twentieth century with nature writing.
Readers like Terry Gifford look favourably on such assimilation, positing
that pastoral in its contemporary expressions may provide an unexpected
forum for ecological or post-human perspectives.1 Certainly, nature and the
rural feature significantly in all the essays and poems collected here. But on
the whole our authors remain undecided on the question of pastoral’s
relation to the natural world. Nature is never far off in pastoral, yet our
attempts to grasp the essence of the genre and account for its multiplicity
are at once shadowed and stimulated by an awareness of the difficulties
attendant upon the claim that pastoral is genuinely “about” nature, or even
necessarily about our relation to it.
Indeed, the essays presented in “Pastoral Echoes” tend to eschew the
business of finding a single, monolithic definition of pastoral in either its
historical or contemporary guises. Instead, they focus in various ways on
particular elements of pastoral writing: tropes, gestures, aspects of form or
style. The sense is of the flexibility of pastoral, its ability to adapt to a range
of literary forms that are themselves historically determined. More
particularly, the papers are concerned with the utility of pastoral not just for
writers and other artists but also for critics. What does it mean to approach
a text as pastoral, and what might such a reading reveal? Pastoral, says
Alpers, “historically transforms and diversifies itself,” while at the same time
retaining the imprint of certain age-old structures and moods.2 The same
might be said for pastoral scholarship, and although the papers in this issue
collectively traverse a range of historical periods and artistic forms, they are
united by a desire to understand, and indeed to affirm, the significance of
pastoral for contemporary critics. In this way, the essays are not only about
pastoral echoes, which is to say, they are not only studies of literary texts
with a hermeneutic relation to the pastoral; rather, each one is also,
individually, an exemplary pastoral echo, an essay into the forest of literary
history and a recording of the findings therein.
We begin the collection with a paper by Indy Clark on the poetry of
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Thomas Hardy, whose name, perhaps more so than that of any other major
British writer of the nineteenth century, is strongly associated with pastoral.
Clark draws on the work of Toliver, Williams and Bakhtin to present the
pastoral as a series of unresolved dialectical pairings (in particular that of
work and leisure) to be found in the texts of Theocritus and Virgil and
onwards, and which Clark finds also in Hardy’s poems. Here this dialectical
tension occurs not only in the content of the poems (where it is well
established by existing criticism) but also in their form, which Clark shows
through metrical analysis alongside readings of Hardy’s subject matter.
Clark’s scansion uncovers “Gothic” rhyme schemes that carefully introduce
elements of irregularity or imperfection into otherwise regular forms. The
dialectic of sophistication and rusticity, high art and low, informs pastoral
from its origins and Clark makes a significant contribution by identifying this
as a formal pastoral aspect of Hardy’s poetry.
Clark’s suggestion that pastoral is a matter of poetic form or style as
much as content resonates with Xanthe Ashburner’s essay on the
American poet A. R. Ammons. Drawing on the influential formulations of
Empson and Alpers, Ashburner approaches pastoral as a particular way of
thinking through or structuring experience, one that affirms the value of life
and in particular the generative potential of poetry and other art forms.
Ashburner’s reading of Ammons illuminates his commitment to the local,
the humble, and the ordinary; activating the multiple valences of the idea of
the “common,” she suggests that Ammons frames poetry as a continual
reworking of local materials. It is this treatment of writing as fundamentally
rewriting that constitutes Ammons’s connection to the pastoral mode, an
idea Ashburner develops in readings of two of Ammons’s most significant
poems, “Corsons Inlet” and “Saliences.”
The pastoral insistence on ecumenism and regeneration is examined
further in Mary Trabucco’s reading of Pat Barker’s 2003 novel Double
Vision. Trabucco questions the prevailing view that Barker here
interrogates and eventually disables pastoral, offering instead that the
pastoral mechanism, with its rejection of heroism and tragedy in the face of
suffering, enables exploration of the kinds of complex ethical ideas that
acquired fresh urgency in the West following 9/11. Reading Empson’s
Some Versions of Pastoral alongside contemporary trauma theory,
Trabucco acknowledges Barker’s hostility toward the more stultifying
aspects of what is commonly taken as pastoral convention (chiefly, in
Barker’s reckoning, the myth of an unchanging countryside), but argues
that Double Vision is underpinned by a pastoral affirmation of the role of
community and social life in managing grief. As in many of the papers
collected here, the figure of the artist is central: Trabucco contends that
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Barker “emphasises the ability of the artist to present society with a double
vision that is morally performative, which continues to act as if morality
existed and renewal were possible, despite full awareness of the contrary.”
In their various ways, these three essays offer views on the question
of how pastoral has transformed or diversified over time. Following them
are three papers that address more specifically the genre’s flexibility across
space. In the first of these, Richard Newman discusses the Lake Wobegon
stories of Midwestern author and entertainer Garrison Keillor, suggesting
that these exemplify a kind of pastoral modesty. This modesty functions at
several levels: in the thoughts and actions of Keillor’s characters, in the
techniques of narration and organisation Keillor employs, and in the
implicated experience of the stories’ audience and readership. Keillor’s
work is pastoral in the vernacular sense, in that it is concerned foremost
with rural life; however, Newman argues, it is also pastoral in a stricter
sense, in that it takes modesty as the principal operand in the tension
between individual and society that occurs within a fundamental grounding
in place.
The next two papers address how pastoral convention has played a
role in the imaginative appropriation of colonial land and, conversely, how
such relocations have tested the genre’s more comfortable
accommodations. Helen Blythe examines the efficacy of pastoral in figuring
the hopes and frustrations attendant upon the imperial projects of the
Victorian poets Robert Browning and, in particular, Alfred Domett. Finding
in Domett’s emigration to colonial New Zealand and later return to London
an echo of the pastoral narrative of retreat and return, Blythe reinvigorates
the old connection between pastoral and romance to posit the former’s
location on the threshold between civilisation and wilderness as the basis
of its appeal to Domett for the representation of settler experience. Her
reading of Ranolf and Amohia (1872) hones the argument, uncovering the
various tensions—between fantasy and realism, art and nature, civilisation
and primitivism—held in abeyance by the poem’s pastoral frame. Similarly,
Victoria Bladen’s essay on Picnic at Hanging Rock locates pastoral in an
Australian context. Teasing out the key themes and topoi characteristic of
pastoral writing, and examining how these are at once deployed and
contested in Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel and Peter Weir’s 1975 filmic
adaptation of it, Bladen brings an important historical perspective to the
issue of the genre’s contemporary relevance. Like Trabucco and
Ashburner, she insists that pastoral does not claim to “console, rectify or
repair”; rather, it is geared toward the recognition of absence and loss, and
as such is a fitting lens through which to view such postcolonial works as
Picnic at Hanging Rock.
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The essays conclude, as it were, at the beginning, with a piece by
Timothy Chandler on Virgil’s Eclogues, a text which (as Chandler points
out) literary history has loaded with the greatest responsibility for pastoral’s
abundance. Chandler is less concerned with establishing a working
definition of pastoral than exploring a specific attribute of it, namely the
locus amoenus, which translates as “the pleasant place” and which has
been a keyword in Virgil criticism since ancient times. Chandler draws on
the work of the contemporary German philosopher Gernot Böhme and his
Frankfurt School predecessors Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno,
thereby formulating a theory of aesthetic atmospheres in order to explain
how the concept of the locus amoenus functions to establish a relationship
between textuality and the natural world in reading experiences of the
Eclogues.
Finally, “Pastoral Echoes” concludes with four poems by Angela
Gardner, contributions to the millennia-spanning canon of pastoral
literature. Gardner’s nuanced, complex poems are true pastoral, for they
are not simply nature poems (which, as we have noted, all too often pass
for pastoral in the present moment); rather, they explore the relationship
between humanity and the world as constitutive of aesthetic experience
and as the basis for poetic production.
Several of the papers collected here emphasise pastoral’s feeling for
unification and community. The genre foregrounds in particular the
generative relations of giving and exchange forged between writers,
readers and audiences, embodied historically in that most pastoral of
tropes, the song contest. So it is perhaps fitting that this special section has
its origins in a one-day symposium entitled “Reimagining Pastoral,” which
was convened by Xanthe Ashburner and took place in the School of
English, Media Studies and Art History at the University of Queensland in
February of 2011. This symposium in turn arose from the regular meetings
of a reading group at UQ. We thank the School and the University for
supporting these projects, and in particular Dr Ruth Blair and Dr Judith
Seaboyer for their continuing warmth and enthusiasm. We also thank the
editors of Colloquy for responding positively to our proposal to publish this
special section and for providing proofreaders and designers. Finally, we
extend our thanks to the peer reviewers of these papers for providing
thorough, challenging reports to the authors; the scholarly rigour and
standard of expression has improved greatly as a result of their input.
University of Queensland
[email protected]
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Introduction: Pastoral Echoes
University of Melbourne
[email protected]
NOTES
1
See, for example, Terry Gifford’s conceptualisation of the “postpastoral” in his book
Pastoral (London: Routledge, 1999), 146-74.
2
Paul Alpers, What is Pastoral? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 25.
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