PastoralLiterature and NatureUniversity of Helsinki/Comparative Literature3.11.2014M.A. Pekka Raittinen

Thomas Cole The Course of an Empire. The Arcadian or Pastoral State 1836First was the Golden Age. Then rectitude spontaneous in the heart prevailed, and faith.

Avengers were not seen, for laws unframed were all unknown and needless. Punishment and fear of penalties existed not.

Ovid, Metamorphoses

Joachim Wtewael The Golden Age 1605

Now the last age by Cumae's Sibyl sungHas come and gone, and the majestic rollOf circling centuries begins anew:Justice returns, returns old Saturn's reign,With a new breed of men sent down from heaven.Only do thou, at the boy's birth in whomThe iron shall cease, the golden race arise,

Virgil , Bucolics, Eclogue IV

The pastoral state or the Golden Age In every culture there is a myth of a Golden

Age; no work; no organized state, no laws etc.

Hesiod Works and Days; The five ages of mankind; The Golden Age, Silver Age, Bronze Age; Heroic Age and present Iron Age

Cyclical view of history => Golden Age will return ( later in Vico, Joyce etc)

Ruled by Cronus (Greek) and Saturn (Roman)

Pastoral poetry of Antiquity Bucolic poetry; Greek βουκολικόν, from

βουκόλος => ”cowherd”; shepherd Theocritus (3rd century BC.) Idylls; =>

bucolics, mimes, epics, epigrams ”Idyll”= ”a small picture”; eidos ”small poem Singing matches between the shepherds The dichotomies country versus city; past

versus present already developed by Theocritus

Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) Eclogues (or Bucolics)

70 – 19 BC. Lived in turbulant Augustan period of Roman history Civil war and land campaign of the Octavian era

=> Virgil’s idyll is already an idyll in peril In Eclogues the trope of Arcadia used for the first

time The fourth Eclogue is a prophesy about the birth

of a boy child and the return of the Golden Age (Virgil’s other works; Georgics and Aeneid)

Later developments The Renaissance Italy; Boccaccio,

Petrarch etc. The English tradition: Sir Philip

Sidney Arcadia, Edmund Spencer The Faerie Queen and Shepheardes Calendar; Alexander Pope Pastorals etc

The sub-genre of pastoral elegy; developed from Theocritus => mourning the death of a friend; John Milton Lycidas; Shelley Adonais

Pastoral theory

In Virgils work; pastoral is already an (somewhat) artificial discourse; own tropes and conventions

Friedrich Schiller: On Naive and Sentimental Poetry (1795)

Frank Kermode, English Pastoral Poetry (1952) => A form of urban nostalgia

Raymond Williams: An idealized version of country life in English modern literature => Class conflict dissimulated

Terry Gifford (1999); three definitions; 1). A form, a genre

of literature 2). A looser term for

describing literature depicting the countryside

3). A pejorative term for idealized and simplified depiction of the countryside

Acccording to Greg Garrard (2004) can be: 1). Elegic; looking

backwards 2). Idyll; the

abundant present 3). Utopia;

obtained in the future

American pastoral?

Leo Marx: The Machine in the Garden (1964) Thomas Jefferson;

America as an agrarian utopia

The Shepherd and new a green world

Thoreau ”rapt in a revery” awakens to the sound of steam engine

For Marx ”a middle ground” that combines civilization and wilderness – best of both worlds

Problems?

Ecocritics have been suspicious of pastoral as an idealization of countryside

A (post)modern pastoral; ideal of a garden city / green suburbia => ”back to the nature”; while at the same time ”requiring fantastic amounts of high-technology upkeep” (Wilson 1992)

“ […] a predominantly private landscape controlled by the power and exclusivity of property ownership.” (Bunce 1994

A Finnish Pastoral?

Werner Holmberg: Ideal Landscape, 1860

So-called panoramic motive in Finnish literature, beginning with the national poet Johan Ludvig Runeberg

Runeberg’s hexameterer epic Hanna (1836)

Historian Matti Klinge: ”Idylli ja uhka” (=> ”Idyll in peril”)

In Finnish culture the dichotomy of city and countryside is much less important than in the United States or England

”No shepherd, no pastoral”- Leo Marx