In class we’ve considered pushing the boundary of ecocriticism to a pre-Walden space, and the Sayre essay in particular succeeded in tracing Thoreauian impulses back to America’s infancy. Since the beginning of the semester, however, I’ve been wondering if ecocriticism can inform even earlier works, specifically the pastoral literature of antiquity. So I was interested in Bennett’s statement “the pastoral looms large in deep ecocriticism” (303). “Pastoral” can be a pretty general term, and I think Bennett could have spent some more time defining it or at least providing us with some textual examples. As I have not read either the Love essay that he cites or the body of deep ecocritical work that deals with the pastoral, I am uncertain that his representation of the ecocritical view of the pastoral is accurate. But, assuming that it is, I would like to complicate some of the claims about the pastoral by looking briefly at Vergil’s Eclogue I (Loeb edition translated by H. Rushton Fairclough).
First of all, according to Bennett, Love claims that “pastoralism will only become more significant as its chief concern, the interconnections between human beings and nature, comes to dominate a time ‘when the comfortably mythopoeic green world of pastoral is beset by profound threats of pollution, despoliation, and diminishment’ (“Et” 196)” (303). While Vergil’s Eclogue I does depict a “comfortably mythopoeic green world” of sorts, it is a world ravaged by war and under threat from Octavian’s land seizures. Meliboeus says “we are leaving our country’s bounds and sweet fields. We are outcasts from our country” (2-3). This “classic pastoral” world is not, as Bennett claims, a place where “the city dwellers took a refreshing trip to the country in order to return to their home rejuvenated” (303). Rather, it is a world profoundly affected—even infected—by the city; so much so that Tityrus must go to Rome in order to plead his case and maintain control of his lands. The “city dwellers” who enter the pastoral world do not do so for refreshment; they are, according to Meliboeus, “godless soldier[s]” and “barbarians” (70-71). This ostensibly idyllic country is a place where “bare stones cover all,” and “the marsh chokes … pastures with slimy rushes” (47-48). The countryside is populated by miscarrying goats --“the hope of the flock” (14-15)--, which Meliboeus later describes as “once happy” (74). When the poem concludes, the pastoral world itself seems to mourn the strife inflicted upon it: “Even now the house-tops yonder are smoking and longer shadows fall from the mountain-heights” (82-83).
Thus, I fear that without proper definition the traditional pastoral might become a “straw terra,” so to speak, a genre that might be “reconceptualize[d] … [to be] relevant for a contemporary world” on insufficient grounds (303). I suggest that ecocriticism take another look at the classical pastoral to see how a melancholy rural landscape threatened and repossessed by an alien city might overlap or interconnect with our concerns in more contemporary literature.
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I was thinking along similar lines when I was reading Bennett, and I think that alot (maybe all) of what we have read thus far is somewhat blind to any kind of literature that is not American, or at least in relatively modern English. Buell attempted to expand his field of view spatially and culturally, but humans have been intimately involved with nature since before we were humans, and we have seen very little in the way of a temporal expansion of the field ecocriticism covers.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree with your reading of Vergil here, but I was also thinking about Old English and Welsh elegies where natural imagery is used to show the complete impermanence of human undertakings, in many ways a reversal of what you are talking about. I've been struck lately by the natural content of elegies, in the medieval period as well as the classical period (Ovid, Catallus), where images of nature are understood to be always undermining, even belittling the futile attempts of humans to conquer their surroundings. Rather than the natural environment being polluted by the encroachment of civilization in the first Eclogue, civilization itself crumbles and is forgotten in "The Wanderer" ultimately fading away into scenes of storm on the mountains and a "spiteful shower of hail" which "descends upon mankind." Earlier in the poem, the speaker mistakes water birds for his long-dead friends, but "back away they swim, fluttering ghosts." Humans and their works are consistently destroyed and replaced by the inexorable force of the natural world. Nature is even given the agency for the murder of men in battle, for in speaking of the dead, it is said that "one a bird bore over waves, and one the hoary wolf handed over to death."
The bucolic pastorals which Bennett and others are used to from reading Milton and Spenser (authors who were well acquainted with the classical model they were intent on recasting), show nature as passive and pacifying, and never quite wild. For Vergil, clearly nature is struggling to fend off the civilization which is overpowering it, but at the same time it is a forbidding place. The Romans were fond of farm-life and romanticized it, but the hinterlands were feared and to be avoided at all costs. In "The Wanderer," the natural world is dominant, terrible, effacing the speaker and his kin. Civilization, much less the city itself, has already been destroyed when the poem opens. By the days of Lycidas, the wild heaths were no longer frightening places, and American nature writing is the heir to this de-clawed environment which exists only to sooth, even "enlighten" the viewer.
This is an excellent exchange--and a timely one. Greg Garrard, in his 2004 book on ecocriticsm, has a whole chapter on the classical pastoral, so the complexities this tradition adds to the discussion has been recognized. I'm trying to balance things a little bit by introducing Bachelard or Beowulf into the mix, but it occurs to me that Matthew should perhaps talk about this issue a little more extensively in class--maybe even by bringing some Virgil along. Your and Ben's comments also remind me to bring some excerpts of criticism along that takes a wider view, such as Harrison's book on forests.
ReplyDeleteYes, I'd be happy to bring some photocopies of these poems to class tomorrow if people want to take a look at them.
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