On the pastoral

What is the pastoral? This is difficult to define, as there are several criss-crossing traditions dating back at least to Theocritus in the third century BCE (and maybe Hesiod, depending on whom you believe). The term itself comes from the Latin pastor or “shepherd,” and indeed the pastoral often involves shepherds, others impersonating shepherds, and still others dialogically engaging in what readers immediately recognize as pastoral speech (Alpers). So while not a completely satisfactory definition, it’s not bad to start with an understanding of the pastoral as a mode of poetic production that revolves around fictional shepherds. The general and very brief story of its development goes something like this…

Theocritus was a poet from Sicily (Siracusa) who came to be tightly linked to the Ptolemaic dynasty in Alexandria. We have access to about two-dozen of his Boukolika (ox-herding poems), which are essentially sophisticated re-renderings of Mediterranean, or more specifically Sicilian, folksongs. Essentially hybrid works (the pastoral is a deeply, inherently hybrid phenomenon), they are written in the Doric Greek dialect, but they are also written in dactylic pentameter, which was tightly associated with more prestigious epic compositions such as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. We see this blending of registers, byt the way, also in Virgil’s fourth eclogue – where the pastoral serves as a platform for prophecy and panegyric.

From Theocritus, the general story is that Virgil, writing in Latin during the first century BCE, picked up the tradition and made it even more introspective and complex. Francesco Petrarca and Giovanni Boccaccio (Ninfale fiesolano) would also contribute to the poetic tradition in the fourteenth century; Matteo Boiardo would compose pastoral eclogues in the mid fifteenth century and then Jacopo Sannazaro just a bit later would compose pastoral poetry within a prose frame. From Sannazaro, the pastoral more or less found its groove, and it’s been pretty much a common feature of Western literature since then, even to the present day.

Modern readers often quickly note the conventionality of the pastoral, at least in its Renaissance and pre-Renaissance form. Paul Alpers makes, I think, a key point about the question of conventionality, offering up a sightly forced but ultimately very useful etymology of the term convention as emerging from the Latin verb convenire; quite literally, “to come together.” Our noun “convention” seems to come directly from the Latin legal term “conventio” or “agreement,” but then, to be fair, this term also ultimately comes from convenire. The verbal notion, I would agree with Alpers, makes a good deal of sense for the pastoral, at least up to and including the Renaissance. In this literature, the pastoral is primarily about two or more shepherds “coming together” to share their poetic laments, a convention of suffering, a literary locus of closeness in the most literal sense.

This convention also extends to the linguistic or more broadly discursive features of the pastoral, as well. Both Alpers and William J. Kennedy (though this is a commonly understood idea) point out that the pastoral as a literary and artistic mode is characterized by a high degree of polyphony (in the Bakhtinian sense) and dialogism. As Kennedy argues, Sannazaro’s enthusiasm for the pastoral seems to have had its most direct source in the humanistic project of reproducing, in some meaningful way, the syntax and style of great Latin writers. Faith in the feasibility of this project was largely waning by the end of the fifteenth century, which makes Sannazaro an even more interesting figure. The pastoral, as Kennedy argues, served as an almost ideal laboratory for linguistic and stylistic experimentation, an idea supported by Sannazaro’s eventual move to Latin pastoral after writing the Arcadia in Italian (the first authorized version was published in 1502). So then, we might say that the pastoral is at once about closeness to one’s models, about closeness across time, about getting close to a particular literary, linguistic model. In this much broader sense, we can see the pastoral as highly conventional.

William Empson has defined the pastoral as the “complex in the simple,” and I think this covers well the notion that this is very sophisticated, and often openly philosophical poetry (and prose) set in a much simplified, culturally-structured “natural” setting. But how simple is nature in the pastoral (with all due respect to Schiller)? For Romantic poets, and even John Milton and Luís de Camões before them, the natural is by no means a simple concept, and we can argue that the pastoral in the hands of a Milton or a Wordsworth, or even a Thomas Cole (founder of the Hudson River School) doesn’t exactly present nature as a flat or benign backdrop for ideological, urban speculation. This is more or less Ken Hiltner’s argument, and lately there has been more attention paid to the question of the pastoral as a laboratory, at least since the Renaissance, for theorizing our relation to nature, for reckoning with the growing sprawl of urban centers (even as early as the fifteenth century), and for dealing with the steady loss of natural spaces. In this, eco-criticism has found in the pastoral (once again) a nice field site for digging up early modern European notions and ideologies of human relations to nature and the socio-cultural roots of manmade climate change.

Turning to Theocritus’s first idyll, we already see some of this in play. I’ve already mentioned that Theocritus writes on bucolic themes using epic meters (Camões and Milton would return the favor by writing highly pastoral epics), and we see this hybridity on another level with the description of the drinking cup in Idyll 1 – modeled somewhat intentionally on Homer’s description of Achilles’s shield in the Iliad. Theocritus’s audience would get this reference immediately, and it adds to the productive tension within the poem. Beyond this, the poem is a poetic conversation between a goatherd and a shepherd that is at once a meta-discursive account of their song contest and an account of the amorous suffering and death of Daphnis (embedded within their contest). Readers of the Renaissance pastoral from Boiardo through Garcilaso de la Vega, Jean-Antoine de Baïf, Camões, Edmund Spenser, and beyond likely notice several points in common between this first eclogue and the later works.

There are important contemporary American examples of the pastoral. Again, the pastoral isn’t strictly a classical or Renaissance phenomenon, and it’s useful to discuss the different twists and turns that it has taken in our present context. The first example is no example at all, but rather a general consideration of the pastoral in twentieth-century American poetry. Ann Marie Mikkelsen has spoken recently about the links between American pragmatist philosophy (William James, John Dewey) and American poetic visions of the pastoral (Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, John Ashberry, and Gertrude Stein); for her, the common thread is a transitory, evolving, experimental state of being rather than a static, ironic, or nostalgic worldview. In this, I would say, this poetry has much in common with its Renaissance and Antique predecessors. The pastoral mode in the contemporary US context is, one might say, predominately about flux and even chaos (as Philip Roth teaches us in American Pastoral, which wryly features a domestic terrorist named “Merry”), and in this respect it has very deep roots. In this it intersects with the theme of closeness. I suppose this has to do with my own sense that closeness is likewise about flux and negotiation, about risks and dangers – of dispossession and loss – about all the personal disasters associated with living a life in proximity to others.

The second example is more concrete: Ang Lee’s 2005 film “Brokeback Mountain.” This is a pretty straightforward story of two shepherds in love (strictly speaking, they’re cowboys, but they herd sheep), and of all the immense distances that they somehow manage to close – albeit briefly and provisionally – before being thrown back into the abyss of loss and death. It’s a story – whether we mean Annie Proulx’s original short story or Lee’s filmic adaptation of it – that’s right out of Theocritus’s and Sannazaro’s playbook. What jumps out in this film is its deep meditation on different (often disastrous) forms of closeness and the image of nature as at once a protective shelter and a powerful, even unthinkable force. As an aside, the fact that the two principal actors spend much of their time staring at their feet like a pair of Renaissance melancholics (thanks to Joe Blackmore for this observation) is likewise striking.