What is Pastoral?

Comparative Literature, Spring 1998 by Cheney, Donald

WHAT IS PASTORAL? By Paul Alpers. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996. xiii, 429 p.

Writing about literature is serious business, fundamentally and often quite conspicuously at odds with the pleasures that reading literature provides. Paul Alpers has always insisted on taking the time, in his critical writings, to smell appreciatively the flowers of rhetoric, to describe the winding paths of plot or argument, and in general to avoid getting to the end (or defining the ends) of a work of art before the work itself gets there. In bucking the teleological imperatives of article-and book-writing, he has developed a style of commentary that treasures otium. civil conversation, fantasies of reconciliation and renewal-in short, the qualities associated with the genres and modes of romance and pastoral.

His latest book, What is Pastoral?, is his richest work to date, and one that expresses most frankly the values that have informed his earlier writings. Its title frankly assumes that there is something-an essence that can be described as singular or unified-that characterizes what we recognize (and treasure, he would insist) as pastoral. Other critics have emphasized what pastoral is not, the awarenesses of history, politics, hormones, and death that invade Arcadia and pull us from it. Alpers has taken issue elsewhere with what he considers the errors or distorted emphases of these critics; here he focuses squarely on what is in the pastoral world and what we are drawn to enjoy while we linger.

He frankly admits that Virgil's first eclogue is "about," or is framed by, the threat to pastoral pleasures and the pastoral domain, but he stresses that the poem concludes with an invitation from Tityrus to spend the night in this precious albeit vulnerable milieu. The final line speaks of lengthening shade falling from the lofty hills; these umbrae "are the foreboding shadows of night but also, as the pleasurable sound of the line suggests, a remembrance of the umbra in which Tityrus, in Meliboeus's first description of him, fills the woods with song-as these lines, with their lovely and haunting music, more elusively and ambiguously fill out the landscape of evening and its intimations for the human beings at its center" (p. 168).

The checquered shade of pastoral repose is central to the precious essence of the genre; and the above quotation gives a fair sense of Alpers's repeated appeals to the elusive but palpable delights that poetry affords us. Everywhere in this volume, he keeps drawing us back to what he takes to be the central fiction of pastoral, that the lives and conversation of shepherds and other simple humans embody what is both characteristic and precious about human life in general. In his chapter "Pastoral Convention"-not, one should observe, "conventions"-he suggests that the conventional pertains to its radical essence of coming together, so that the shepherds and shepherdesses are exchanging the same kinds of civil offerings in a relaxed setting that we find-or hope to find-in an academic convention. It follows that although we are too sophisticated to admit that we look forward to such gatherings, and although we like to claim that it is only professional business that causes us to leave our spouses with the burden of domestic responsibilities while we rush off to academic ones, the truth is that we are drawn by a secret desire to realize, however briefly, a little academe, "still and contemplative in living art," and that a similar desire informs our writing and reading of pastoral.

Alpers is not afraid to talk about the pleasures of pastoral, or to take a position at the idealistic end of the spectrum if nobody else will do so. In fact, an important part of this volume's strength comes fiom the amused and gracious dialogue he carries on with the late William Empson, whose Versions of Pastoral takes the ironic, even cynical view of pastoral as "putting" the complex into the simple, in Empson's famous formulation, which is to say, indulging in a piece of specious rhetoric for dubious ends. Alpers would say that pastoral "finds" complexity there; and though there is a fundamental ambiguity in the notion of pastoral invention-finding what was essentially there all the time, or making it all up-he is content to play straight man here to bring out the richness of these ambiguous but delightful shades.

Alpers is at his strongest, I think, in his long and sympathetic retelling of As You Like It, where the good-humored exchanges of the pastoral visitors and inhabitants provide a full anatomy of the issues of kinship and difference that Alpers finds in pastoral. Rosalind is a particularly sympathetic mouthpiece for the point of view that Alpers is championing here: she plays an Alpers to Jacques's Empson. so to speak, but an Alpers whose romantic idealism is level-headed and able to mock the "shepherd's passion" that she has to confess is indeed "much upon my fashion."

Although the commentary on As You Like It will probably offer us little that is new for an understanding of the play-Alpers is almost perverse in his unwillingness to advance novel interpretations-it does give us a fresh understanding of a mode in which the pleasures of shepherd talk are richly nuanced and productive of affectionate bondings that readers need to see clearly if they are to appreciate the powerful appeal that pastoral has had at those times when it informed numerous mixed genres and served as a reference point in others. Alpers has given us a most valuable corrective to the predominantly ironic readings of pastoral "versions," which he would see as turnings away from a central essence.