PASTORALISM Introduction

1- Leo Marx’s theory (as developed in The Machine in the Garden)

According to American critic Leo Marx, one possible dominant feature of American literature is the pastoral tradition, or pastoralism. What makes Leo Marx’s theory especially interesting is that it provides a key to American literature in general. Many great American writers, especially novelists, use the pastoral theme in their works.

2- Definition of pastoralism

Pastoralim is a literary tradition that, according to Leo Marx, has long existed in American literature. Its main theme is the happiness of rural life, away from the tensions of city life and the savagery of wild nature or wilderness.

3- Leo Marx’s theory summarized

Very roughly, Leo Marx compares America at the beginning of its history to a sort of happy garden, between the savagery of the wilderness in the West and the corruption of the cities of Europe: America was the pastoral ideal come true. Suddenly, a locomotive rushes noisily into the happy garden. This irruption is a symbol of progress, as brought about by the industrialism of the 19th century, and the tensions it creates. It is also a return to reality, to History. Nobody can stand in the way of progress.

A- Away from the city: the pastoral retreat

1- The city

Leo Marx argues that the American pastoral tradition considers that the city has long been regarded as a place of tension. The city may be a center of civilization, the place where the fine arts flourish. Literature, music, poetry can be found in the city. But the city is the place of civilization, with its power and its complexity. The city and civilization are perceived as an artificial world of organized power, authority, suffering and disorder. It is not a good place to live in.

2- The pastoral retreat

No wonder then that the pastoral hero moves away from the city to the countryside where he finds his pastoral retreat. This move is a move away from centers of civilization toward their opposite, that is to say nature. It is a move away from the sophistication of the city toward the simplicity of nature. The move from the city to the countryside is a restoration of the harmony between man and nature. The natural landscape also provides the pastoral hero with a feeling of felicity. This move away from the city to the country can also be interpreted as an escape from reality. In nature, the pastoral hero experiences "a state of being in which there is no tension either within the self or between the self and its environment." The good place for the pastoral hero or the pastoral writer is "a lovely green hollow."

3- The wilderness

But this move away from the city and civilization to nature stops before the hero reaches wild, unimproved, raw nature, that is to say, the wilderness. The wilderness in America meant dark forests and dangerous animals, not to mention harsh weather conditions and attacks by Indians. Deprivations and anxieties are therefore associated with the wilderness. The wilderness means violence. It evokes danger and death. It is a place where men lose their humanness.

Therefore, the good place is the middle ground, somewhere between the city and the wilderness. Living in an oasis of rural pleasure, the pastoral hero enjoys the best of both worlds—the sophisticated pleasures of art and the simple pleasures of nature.  The pastoral retreat provides peace, leisure, and economic sufficiency. In other words, nature supplies most of the hero’s needs and does virtually all of the work. There is a harmonious relation between the hero and the natural environment.

B- The counterforce

1- Definition

The counterforce is the element, the force that brings the real world in juxtaposition with the idyllic pastoral world. It usually comes from the world of civilization. An example of the counterforce is the whistle of the train that destroys the peaceful atmosphere of the pastoral retreat. The sudden irruption of the machine brings in tension which replaces repose, harmony. The noise of the machine brings in a sense of dislocation, conflict, and anxiety.  Of course, this whistle is only a symbol for the forces of industrialism. The locomotive, associated with fire, smoke, speed, iron, and noise, is the leading symbol of the new industrial power. It appears in the woods of Walden, where throeau had found his pastoral retreat, suddenly shattering, destroying the harmony of the green hollow, the happiness of early nineteenth-century America.  Generally, it is industrialization, represented by images of machine technology, that provides the counterforce in the American pastoral ideal. The function of the counterforce is to bring back the pastoral hero to reality, time now, to history, change : "the writer [is] sitting in his green retreat"  "and then suddenly, the startling shriek of the train whistle bearing in upon him, forc[es] him to acknowledge the existence of a reality alien to the pastoral dream."

2- Tension creates good literature

The sudden irruption of the machine into the garden creates tension. It is the tension between the two systems of value—between the pastoral tradition and industrialism. It is the tension between the feeling of felicity, serenity, security and repose on the one hand, and change on the other. It has to be resolved.  How can this tension be resolved? In literature, there can be a symbolic resolution of tension. By words and symbols, the writer finds a way out to annihilate the tension in the story he is writing. Let us study an example of the resolution of tension.
In literature the tension between two opposite forces is usually given a virtual resolution, not a real resolution. For example, in Moby -Dick, one of the greatest American novels, the conflict is to be found between the beauty and serenity of the sea—a symbol of nature's harmony—and the tension created by Ahab's hunting the white whale. The hunting of the white whale is a symbol for man's metaphysical quest of course. In the final episode, Moby Dick the white whale, Captain Ahab and the whaling-ship—a symbol for mankind—all disappear into the sea. Only Ishmael, the narrator, is left alone, floating on the sea, so that he can tell the story of Moby Dick. The tension has thus found a resolution: the shipwreck.  But it was not a real shipwreck, it was just a shipwreck in a book. The shipwreck put an end to the tension between Ahab’s hunting and the feeling of harmony at sea, but it was not a real shipwreck, and the resolution of the tension was only symbolical.
Literature therefore often proves to be a way of expressing conflicts and tensions at work within society. Literature symbolically expresses the tensions at work in a community and tries to find a way to give them a symbolical resolution. This is the reason why, usually, in times of conflicts, literature produces great novels. It happened in America when American society had to face the deep changes that took place with the industrial revolution. Great novels were written at that time. The machine had become the symbol of an impressive new order called industrialism. The happy days of the American pastoral age had come to an end.

C- Pastoralism and American literature

1- American masterpieces of the 1850’s

The tension between the two systems of value—the pastoral tradition and industrialism—had the greatest literary impact between 1840 and 1860, when America reached a decisive stage in its economic development. Interestingly, this was the time when some of the most famous American writers published their masterpieces:
1840 Edgar Allan Poe, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque
1841 James Fenimore Cooper, The Deerslayer
1841 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays
1845 Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven and Other Poems
1846 Herman Melville, Typee
1850 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
1851 Herman Melville, Moby Dick
1851 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables
1852 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
1854 Henry David Thoreau, Walden
1855-82 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
1859 Emily Dickinson, Poems

2- Pastoralism proves to be a relevant key to American literature, even today

Leo Marx argues that pastoralism proves to be a relevant key to American literature not only for the nineteenth century, but for twentieth century literature too. He even maintains that the greatest American writers, those who are part of the canon, used the pastoral theme of the move from the city to nature to express the essence of American experience. For the nineteenth century, he mentions Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Henry Melville’s Typee (1846) and Moby Dick (1851). For the twentieth century, he mentions The Great Gatsby (1925), by Francis Scott Fitzgerald, The Grapes of Wrath (1939) by John Steinbeck, Faulkner’s "The Bear," (1942). Many other writers like Henry James and Ernest Hemingway could be included into this list.

This is what Leo Marx writes:

One has only to consider the titles which first come to mind from the classical canon of our literature—the American books admired most nowadays—to recognize that the theme of withdrawal from society into an idealized landscape is central to a remarkably large number of them.
We hear such a sound [the sound of the whistle of a machine] or see the sigh which accompanies it, in The Octopus, The Education of Henry Adams, The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath, "The Bear"—and one could go on. Anyone familiar with American writing will recall other examples from the work of Walt Whitman, …, Henry James, Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, Eugene O’Neill, Robert Frost, … T.S. Eliot, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, —indeed it is difficult to think of a major American writer upon whom the image of the machine’s sudden appearance in the landscape has not exercised its fascination.

Conclusion

As a conclusion, a few words about complex pastoralism. Pastoralism is usually defined by its four basic elements:
- 1 - the move away from the city,
-2 - the pursuit of happiness in the ideal pastoral retreat of the middle ground,
-3 - the dangers and threats of the wilderness,
-4 - the sudden irruption of the counterforce that brings back the pastoral hero into time now, to reality.

There are very many possible variations on this rather simple pattern.
Leo Marx examined these variations of basic pastoralism and he has come to the conclusion that in modern literature, American writers have more and more acknowledged the reality of history. Authors like Faulkner, Hemingway, Francis Scott Fitzgerald do refer to a green landscape, a pastoral ideal retreat, the middle ground. They acknowledge that the middle ground is a place of value and meaning. But at the same time, they also acknowledge the power of the counterforce. The counterforce, usually the machine as the symbol of progress, has destroyed the value and meaning of the pastoral retreat. Complex pastoralism acknowledges the reality of history. In complex pastoralism, the fantasy of pleasure in the pastoral retreat is checked or destroyed by history.  This is possibly the sign that American literature has reached maturity.
 

Pastoralism in contemporary cultural studies in France

Date: Sun, 03 Mar 2002
 

Si la tradition pastorale demeure vivante au Siècle des Lumières, elle ne se limite pas au domaine littéraire. Une véritable fiction pastorale se développe dans différents champs de la vie culturelle. La tradition pastorale picturale suscite la création de formes littéraires qui la fictionnalisent. Deux exemples ont été abordés, le conte moral de Marmontel intitulé Palémon, inspiré par deux tableaux de Poussin, Les bergers d'Arcadie et l'Homme au serpent, et un compte-rendu de Diderot d'un tableau de Loutherbourg, qui voit l'entrée progressive du spectateur dans le tableau et sa tranformation en univers fictionnel littéraire. L'art des jardins est lui aussi parfois une fiction pastorale, lorsque des textes littéraires pastoraux en informent la création (par exemple la prairie arcadienne d'Ermenonville, où le hameau suisse du Comte d'Albon à Franconville.) La vogue des hameaux et fermes ornées à la fin du siècle témoigne aussi de cette dissémination d'une tradition, qui allie peinture et littérature à l'art tri-dimensionnel du jardin, pour créer l'illusion d'un monde pastoral dans le réel. Ont été ainsi évoqués Moulin-Joli, le hameau de Chantilly et la laiterie de Rambouillet. ©Haquette, 2002.

- bibliographie/bibliography

* Baridon,Michel. Les Jardins (Paris: Laffont, 1998), pp. 928-930.
*Ketcham,Diana. Desert De Retz; A Late Eighteenth-century French Folly Garden, the Artful Landscape of Monsieur De Monville. (Rev. Ed//100 Illustrations, Photographs, Engravings, Notes,138 pages. Published: August 1994. The MIT Press ISBN: 0262111861 - The Desert de Retz is the supreme surviving example of the folly garden. This edition has been expanded to reflect recent scholarship and physical changes to the site. Photographs show the restored landscape and the restoration of the Broken Column to its original state as a false ruin.)

- sites internet/internet sites:

* Vous pouvez rapidement vous faire une idée du Désert de Retz en examinant le site internet suivant (l'information qui s'y trouve n'engage que l'auteur du site)/ You may look up one of the following internet sites if you want to be given a rundown (responsibility about the information and copyright related to these sites lies with the authors of the sites themselves)

http://www.multimania.com/parcsafabriques/retz
http://www.geocities.com/Paris/6093/
http://www.tulane.edu/~newcomb/deretz.html/
http://gofrance.about.com/cs/gardensoffrance
 Le parc ayant servi au tournage du film sur Jefferson à Paris, vous pouvez également voir Monsieur Choppin de Janvry guidant l'équipe du film sur http://www.people.virginia.edu/~tsd3r/Paris00pics.html.

Jacques Carré - Laurent Châtel- Pierre Dubois - Sylvie Grenet
© The New Dilettanti, March 2002.