book review
The New Pastoral by Deborah Lilley
In a lecture on the ‘Staying Power of Pastoral’ delivered to the Royal Irish Academy in 2002 Seamus Heaney had argued that the viability of pastoral poetry continuing to possess a central place in the developing world of poetic modernism has always been dependent upon ‘its ability to meet the challenges of new and sometimes tragic historical circumstances.’ Tracing some aspects of the way pastoral poetry had developed from Theocritus to Virgil and then on towards the present day the lecture mapped out Heaney’s pathway through idealised landscapes which were being constantly modified to take into account shifting social and geographical realities. As Deborah Lilley puts it in her opening paragraph of this new study of the role of the pastoral in modern literature, the pastoral ‘has been used, in varying forms and frames, to represent and query the conditions in which it is called up.’
Lilley’s book examines some of the critical opportunities offered to the reader by looking at concepts of the pastoral in a new way and by some close textual examination of a range of modern fiction she brings the eye to bear upon how the genre of the pastoral ‘is concerned with the interfaces between people and place, with conceptions of and interconnections between the urban and rural, humans and nature, and with the effects of these interrelationships.’ Her focus is upon contemporary British writers who, over the past twenty years, have been discovering new ways of seeing and new ways of using the pastoral mode to explore and understand the concepts of both the human and the natural, the country and the city, the past and the present. Inevitably Lilley compels us to recognize the enormous changes which have faced the genre in the wake of environmental crisis but rather than opting for an all-too-easy dystopian despair her arguments move us forward to examine the critical opportunities offered within such a fast-changing environment. Time and again her focus is upon our understanding of the relationship between ourselves and the moving world around us. As a reader and critic she does not intend to dwell upon a nostalgic movement of retreat but upon a new way of seeing and a firmly perceived sense of both the fragility and the enduring quality of the Now. Quoting Robert Macfarlane from a Guardian newspaper article of 2005 Lilley’s subject is not writing about landscape in some simplified descriptive manner ‘but a restructuring of the human attitude towards nature – and there can be few subjects more urgent or necessary of our attention than this.’
Ranging from Ali Smith’s The Accidental (2005) to Claire Fuller’s Our Endless Numbered Days (2015), and from Liz Jensen’s The Rapture (2009) to Sam Taylor’s The Island at the End of the World from the same year Deborah Lilley guides us along pathways which themselves possess a quality of the mythic. On one side we can see what Richard Kerridge had made clear when he pointed out to us in 2000 the seductive temptation of the language of catastrophe, prophesying disaster with a hint of relish (Ecothrillers: Environmental Cliffhangers) and on the other we can recognize the power of Daniel Defoe’s recognition of the state of mind experienced by Robinson Crusoe whose experience in the early eighteenth-century of the terrifying emptiness of the expanse of ocean leads him to recognize that ‘we never see the true state of our condition till it is illustrated to us by its contrariness; nor know how to value what we enjoy, but by the want of it.’
Sam Taylor’s The Island at the End of the World evokes a post-Flood existence on an island where we are offered a contrast with the preceding destruction of the known and the valued. Recalling the first real flood attributable to climate change in Los Angeles in 2005 the father-figure, resembling a self-elected contemporary Noah, recalls a city left ‘smeared with filth…blocked drains, spilled trash, dead bodies’ accompanied by a sense of shocking apprehension as he remembers witnessing a ‘pack of dogs killing a cat, dogs that used to be pets, their jaws now slick with drool and hunger, eyes wild.’ However, as the novel progresses we become aware that the idyllic, nostalgic escape from a drowned civilization is itself a myth perpetuated by this self-elected saviour who wishes to be seen as a modern counterpart to God’s chosen ark-builder. Pa can be seen visiting a secret cabin which contains both a computer and a damning journal in which he records both his deception and his daily fears of discovery. The Orphic glance over the shoulder to gaze upon what has now gone is a refusal to accept knowledge and the attempt to replace the existing world with a reconstruction of an idealised past is a form of nympholepsy. The failure to come to terms with the reality of the changing world is akin to the seductive desire of Homer’s lotus eaters from Book 9 of The Odyssey and the powerful attraction of the unreal is caught in the father’s written assertion that ‘It is better to forget what you KNOW and to believe only what you can SEE with your own two eyes.’
A similar form of search for a lost Eden of pastoral bliss is central to Claire Fuller’s Our Endless Numbered Days in which we are presented with James, another self-aggrandising father-figure, who takes his eight-year-old daughter Peggy to live in a cabin in the woods. This escape into what is proposed as a ‘retreat’ (and here one might note the merging of a religious desire for spiritual comfort with a removal from the present into the past) is doomed to failure and the ‘pastoral glow’ that eases their entry into their new world quickly fades as James’s grip on reality loosens: ‘he fails to heed the fading of summer’ so that they barely survive their first winter. After some years Peggy escapes to discover that the world is still in fact turning and her mother had been looking for her for a decade. The novelist’s focus is upon what Lilley recognises as the enormous disparity between an imagined pastoral future of James and the Retreaters and the physical hardships faced by his and Peggy’s subsistence presenting the reader with a dark warning against the allure of turning towards pastoral simplicity against the complexity of reality along with the ‘untruths and obfuscations that are required to bring it into being and maintain its illusion.’
The powerfully seductive world of the nympholept signals the dangers of seeking a return to a world which has gone and few writers of pastoral poetry have come to terms with this as effectively as the First World War poet, Edward Thomas whose 1915 poem ‘Sedge-warblers’ contemplates the suicidal beckoning of the pastoral nymph. Thomas dreams of a time ‘Long past and irrecoverable’ where a river bears the reflection of
Another beauty, divine and feminine,
Child to the sun, a nymph whose soul unstained
Could love all day, and never hate or tire…
Recognising the toxic nature of the illusion and before he ‘had drained / Its poison’ he shifts his focus to the song of sedge-warblers
Quick, shrill or grating, a song to match the heat
Of the strong sun…
Their song that lacks all words, all melody,
All sweetness almost, was dearer then to me
Than sweetest voice that sings in tune sweet words.
There is something essentially morbid about being trapped in a world from which the sought-after escape lies tantalisingly in the mind and yet firmly beyond the grasp and the poisonous element of this attitude towards the pastoral world is examined very convincingly by Lilley when she looks at the work of Lawrence Buell whose ‘Toxic Discourse’ had appeared in Critical Enquiry in 1998. Buell had anticipated that ‘narratives of rude awakening’ would themselves reveal the follies of some current attitudes towards environmental concern. In his 2001 book Writing for an Endangered World Buell had alerted us to narratives that present ‘disenchantment from the illusion of the green oasis’ as being accompanied by ‘totalising images of a world without refuge from toxic penetration.’ Buell suggests that ‘Apocalypse is the single most powerful master metaphor that the contemporary environmental imagination has at its disposal’ and yet the shock tactics of apocalyptic writing failed to anticipate the ‘fatiguing effect of the frequency with which images of eco-apocalypse would come to be used.’ The point is taken up by Mike Hulme in Why We Disagree About Climate Change (C.U.P. 2009) when he notes that the ‘counterintuitive outcome of such language…frequently leads to disempowerment, apathy and scepticism among its audience.’ This can of course be seen in Liz Jensen’s 2009 eco-thriller The Rapture which is set in a British seaside town threatened by the interlinked effects of pollution and warming temperatures. What Kerridge had referred to as that hint of relish becomes what Timothy Clark recognises as an ‘indulgence in a pleasurable destructiveness’ which inevitably compromises the novel’s ‘attempted status as a sort of activist fiction.’
The welcoming of death as an inevitable rest is an expression of a nostalgic tendency in which the underlying impulse is not to go forward to meet it as much as a returning to a lost world of freedom from effort, a state which can be approximated to pre-natal life. In his 1922 book Problems in Dynamic Psychology J.T. MacCurdy had pointed out that ‘if reality is difficult to endure, and if acute consciousness is developmentally connected with the recognition of external reality, and if contact with the environment is essentially a function of consciousness…then a most natural regression would appear with a dissolution of consciousness associated with some expression of return to the earlier type of existence.’
In her concluding chapter, ‘Uncertain nature’, Deborah Lilley looks unflinchingly at the sirens of apocalypse and quotes again from Buell:
Since Rachel Carson, environmental crisis has rapidly evolved and
substantially changed in form, not just in nature, but also in human
discourse about it.
She presents us with an uncompromising awareness of the toxicity of some eco-disaster writing:
In the novel, the threat of totalising disaster is weakened by the already-
degraded state of the environment. The insidious character of its toxicity
and the incipient nature of its effects, from the violence of the weather to
its likely impact on food production, result in a sense of inevitability that
generates feelings of helplessness.
However, Lilley also reminds us that any lingering reliance on an ideal past landscape ‘demonstrates a lack of adaptation to the conditions of environmental crisis, and a failure to register the scale and scope of its impact upon the ways that we see and understand the world.’ Looking at Jensen’s ‘new pastoral’ novel Lilley notes that lurid descriptions of an escalating crisis ‘couple with the limited effect that its threat appears to register’ to reflect some of the shortcomings of apocalypse. The dystopian element that invades recent environmental apocalyptic narratives seems to leave behind an unreadable nature.
The seeking for permanence in some of the novels examined by Lilley is different from the awareness of a shifting sense of the present which can be found in some contemporary pastoral poetry. For instance both Alice Oswald and Peter Larkin offer a contrast to the indulgent madness of nostalgia, that Orphic vision which can only present a vanishing reality. When Larkin’s sequence of poems, City Trappings (Veer Books), appeared in 2016 it opened with a note concerning his area of focus:
These poems arise from an ambivalent fascination with new perceptions
of the urban environment and wildlife, especially in terms of remaining
pockets of ‘trapped’ or encapsulated countryside…
The poet’s near-microscopic focus upon what he sees permits the reader to become aware of what might lie behind this fascination and in the concluding poem the pun on the word ‘spell’ offers clarity of communication to accompany the sense of mystery that has always haunted the world of the pastoral:
where urbanisation dives
for no human help, spell
out the survival nodes
coalescent emergency ribbons
a green inference: less of ours
in the more to be given
Similarly it is the ‘numerical workings’ in Alice Oswald’s ‘River’ from her 2005 collection Woods etc. that we are instructed to listen to ‘right down the length of Devon’. The staying power of the pastoral that was the subject of Seamus Heaney’s lecture can be both seen and heard as
the river slows down and goes on
with storm trash clustered on its branches
and paper unfolding underwater
and pairs of ducks swimming over bright grass among flooded
willows
the earth’s eye
looking through the earth’s bones
carries the moon carries the sun but keeps nothing
Writing in The Guardian in December 2005, Alice Oswald had made a very direct statement about the importance of poetry in its dealing with both the world of the pastoral and the world of nature:
“We have a problem with our fields, with our weather, with our water, with the very air we breathe;
but we can’t quite react, we can’t quite get our minds in gear. One reason perhaps is that our minds are
conditioned by the wrong kind of nature poem, the kind that leaves us comfortable, melancholy, inert.
Nostalgic. Dishonest.”
Quoting from this article four years later in Figures of Memory, Poetry, Space, and the Past (Palgrave Macmillan 2009) Charles Armstrong went on to contemplate some of those unignorable crises which have compelled societies to re-evaluate their institutions and heritages and the serious tone of both his and Alice Oswald’s writing goes far beyond that Orphic glance of wistful yearning which is the poison for the nympholept. Armstrong suggests that Oswald’s poetry is obsessed with the ‘fleeting instant’, resolutely pursuing ‘the clap of time’ (‘The Apple Shed’) that vanishes as quickly as it is sensed. He sees her poetry as being alert to the vital movements of the natural world and points us towards ‘Sea Poem’, the opening poem of Woods etc., which does not offer the comfort of a subjective vantage-point from which to look at water but by contrast contemplates the water’s own movement as she questions ‘what is water in the eyes of water’. The poet contemplates an ‘oscillation endlessly shaken / into an entirely new structure’ and ‘a wave, a winged form / splitting up into sharp glances’.
If one wished to suggest a tradition within which Alice Oswald’s poetry can be seen most clearly it is not going to be enough to suggest the names of either Ted Hughes or Seamus Heaney. Indeed it might be interesting to speculate what answer Charles Tomlinson might have given in the spring of 1956 to the question concerning where poetry came from. He might well have been prompted to respond by offering a form of words on a blank page creating the poem he wrote at that time in which waves are ‘Launched into an opposing wind’ before hanging ‘Grappled beneath the onrush.’ The title he gave to the poem was ‘The Atlantic’ and as a wave withdraws down the sand and pebbles it
leaves, like the after-image
Released from the floor of a now different mind,
A quick gold, dyeing the uncovering beach
With sunglaze.
Were Alice Oswald to have been asked the same question in 2005 she might have answered
water deep in its own world
steep shafts warm streams
coal salt cod weed
dispersed outflows and flytipping
and the sun and its reflexion
throwing two shadows
what is the beauty of water
sky is its beauty
Ian Brinton’s most recent publications include Islands of Voices, selected poems of Douglas Oliver (Shearsman Books, 2020). His translation of Paul Valéry’s selected poems, with a Preface by Michael Heller, appeared in early 2021 from Muscaliet Press and Paris Scenes, a translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens has just appeared from Two Rivers Press. He reviews for The London Magazine, PN Review, Long Poem Magazine, Golden Handcuffs Review and co-edits the magazine SNOW.