Counter-pastoral

I don't usually post my actual literary critical work here (though there are some exceptions). This blog is usually just a speculative theoretical space for me. But I've been wanting to show, in a nutshell, what the Marxist Raymond Williams was up to in talking about "counter-pastoral" in The Country and the City, since the general argument there a bit complicated and spans several chapters. And that involves some actual criticism and critical reading, as well as some actual Marxism that focuses on culture. Maybe people can also see what is really involved in all these practices--at least for someone in literature like Williams--that are so much maligned recently, both inside literary studies and outside it.

Williams at first defines counter-pastoral as poetry that continually resists the idealization of village or country life. Crabbe's couplet from The Village is, for Williams, the most succinct formula: “No longer truth, though shown in verse, disdain, / But own the Village Life a life of pain” (Book II, ln. 1-2).

But what is more important is that this insistence isn't just opposition, from the outside, to an idealizing pastoral. Rather, we have a properly generic dilemma: counter-pastoral still is pastoral. The idealization it resists is its own tendency to turns the young laborer into a swain. Thus to "own the Village Life" is not so much a conscious decision  to stay true to the country, so much as a task imposed by the pastoral tradition itself as is felt no longer to reflect anything essential about Arcadia, the countryside.

In other words, counter-pastoral is an intensely reflexive moment in pastoral where the pastoral scene the poet would imagine has to confront the material conditions of the country landscape, since at a certain point he or she feels the pastoral tradition is somehow painfully distant from what it allegedly depicts. It is not that pastoral has always tried to depict the countryside--no. It is just that the pleasure in idealization which is constitutive for the genre has disappeared.

Thus the "pain" of Crabbe is, besides being that of village life itself, the pain of the poet. He or she suddenly feels that a certain sector of poetry itself has disappeared, useless. Thus, together with the disappearance of the commons and the restructuring of the material land itself that goes on after the 17th century, the one cultural product that had the most direct relationship to this materiality also disappears.

The poet's problem then is to make his or her pain less subjective--and this is the task that Crabbe is outlining. Counter-pastoral occurs here, where this act is not so much a unburdening as a reinvention of the pastoral tradition necessary for pastoral poetry to occur at all.

This, of course, involves a lot of description or comparison between what the traditional poetic language evokes and what is actually seen: thus the pastoral becomes, after Denham, the locodescriptive poem. But it also involves a lot of turning in place, a lot of repetition of the tradition in order to try and knock it onto a new track. And it is really this that is always present in the mimetic emphasis so often ascribed to this poetry: where there is fine description, there is also a non-mimetic sort of weighing of words themselves against their own history.

Thus Williams picks up on an aspect of form that regularly appears throughout Crabbe's The Village and sees it as characteristic of the counterpastoral mode: the quick repetition of either an entire word like “life” or, via the deployment of a combination of alliteration, assonance, the spondee, parallelism and the more specific figure of chiasmus, a series of repetitions of similar words within a line of two lines. It is here that this sort of weighing is going on.

Even in the lines we quoted, then, we see “Village Life a life.” Earlier in the poem though we also find “They boast their peasants’ pipes, but peasants now, / Resign their pipes and plod behind the plough” (I.23-4); and “Here too the sick their final doom receive, / Here brought amid the scenes of grief, to grieve,” (I.242-3); and perhaps the most complex of these concrete instances (echoing the specific peculiarity of certain tightly formed structures one finds in Pope--but now without that neoclassical, rhetorical mission),

There, where the putrid vapours, flagging, play,
And the dull wheel hums doleful through the day;
There children dwell, who know no parents’ care,
Parents, who know no children’s love, dwell there (I.232-5).

The irony of the playing of vapors among the children (it should be the other way around!) is particularly evident here, though only after one revisits the whole sentence and, to a degree, grasps its form. We only meet the children after we get the intrusive repetition by assonance and alliteration in “the dull wheel hums doleful through the day,” and perhaps also the reversal in the last two lines (concerning where "children dwell" and "parents ... dwell"), so that the poem calls us back to where the children are dwelling only after we have passed through the distracting intercession of the mechanical.

Now, one could generalize and say that the repetitive structures in the form of the poem here are a highly mimetic evocation of the type of psychic state of the villagers or of the type of the village’s social relationships when these villagers are treated merely as labor and given only rote tasks to perform: repetition mirrors or reproduces the feeling of the unfruitfulness and boredom that according to Crabbe always hangs over the life the villager. But from Williams’ perspective, this would reduce the evident to evidence, and overlook what is really at issue in such description.

Thus he argues that these repetitions at the formal level are instead “dimensions” of that field he specifies as counter-pastoral, “caught” by the poem (see The Country and the City, 68-72). In other words, they are instances of a self-consciousness about how pastoral has failed and will fail to account for the pain of rural life, as we said earlier, at the same time as they are little attempts to reevaluate the words against that failure and actually express and overcome the latter.

One could see, on the other side of the spectrum, the intrusion of the botanical classifications that we find in Thomson in this light. Instead of repetition, we have the use of wholly new poetic words (and the reinvention of the older, repetitive poetic structure of the catalog) as an attempt to break out of the history. In each case, Williams is attentive to these little tics, which are working through the counter-pastoral dilemma.