3 Examples of Pastoral
At its outset, in ancient Greece, the Pastoral mode was just writing
about shepherds in the countryside. However, over the millennia of its
development, Pastoral came to embody descriptions of perfect countryside scenes
that implied criticism of the present through the elevation of that perfect
countryside as representing a golden age.
I want to look at this mode in the Polish epic poem Pan Tadeusz, by Adam Mickiewicz, Book 3 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Woody Allen’s film A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy.
[Grant Wood's painting American Gothic above has nothing much to do with this post - except that it reminds me of what I see when I look out my own - pastoral - window]
Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz (Poem - 1834) & (Film, directed by Andrej Wajda - 1999):
The Late Romantic Pastoral
Mickiewicz wrote this as an exile in Paris. He was
homesick/lovesick for a Poland that probably never existed outside of his head
and certainly hadn’t existed since the Russians, Germans and Austrians divided
up the Poland – Lithuania Confederation for the last time after the failure of
Napoleon’s invasion of Russia.
The story begins as a paean to the late – feudal social
harmony of the Polish – Lithuanian Confederation. Everyone is in his place, the landscape is
appropriately beautiful and love is the only cause of tension.
This harmony is expressed by the
Judge, the head of the Soplica family:
For the Judge
at his home still the old customs kept
And never
would allow that here anyone lacked
For age,
birth, rank or wisdom the proper respect.
"By this
order", said he, "homes and nations will flourish
And with its
downfall, houses and nations will perish"
The opening book of the epic (and the opening scene of the
film) has key elements of pastoral. The Polish countryside is a benign place,
the seat of a golden age of happy peasants, benevolent lords, devotion to God
and a surfeit of beautiful, bountiful women and handsome men.
However, before too long, conflict
rears its ugly head. A property dispute between two noble families over a
castle taken from one and given to the other by the Russians turns violent. So
Poles are set against Poles but as soon as the Russians step in to stop the
fighting, the two families unite against the common foe.
The Poles wait for Napoleon’s attack on Russia so that Poland
can be liberated from the Russians. Eventually, they do and Pan Tadeusz decides
that he’ll free the peasants: a true revolutionary.
Historically, of course, Napoleon lost and Poland didn’t become
a state until 1918. And so this is a poem about the loss of nationhood and longing
for it to be returned. It is an exile’s prayer. No wonder then that the Poland he
imagines is desiccated and fantastic.
Neither the women nor the territory nor
the peasants in this poem have a will of their own. They are mute, passive and
idealised. The language used to describe Poland/Lithuania is the language of
longing for a lost love:
Lithuania, my country! You are as
good health:
How much one should prize you, he
only can tell
Who has lost you. Your beauty and
splendour I view
And describe here today, for I
long after you.
It is ironic that for all Mickiewicz’s
longing the dream he longs for ignores the reality of what that dream is
ostensibly about: Poland.
Actaeon and Diana
from Book 3 Metamorphoses by Ovid - The Vivid Pastoral
2 Key themes of Pan
Tadeusz (feminine beauty and hunting) remind me of the story of Actaeon and
and Diana. The Greek/Roman myth is far
more alive for me, though.
For one thing the woman in the myth – Diana/Artemis - is
perverse, independent, psychopathically vengeful whereas the woman in Pan
Tadeusz – Zosia – is insipid, stupid and dependent.
At the start of Pan Tadeusz the hero accidentally views Zosia in a state of undress.
She giggles and runs away, he falls in
love and they eventually live happily ever after with Zosia telling her husband
towards the end that she will defer to him in all matters that involve thinking
or making decisions. Yawn. Zosia is insipid, stupid, and incapable of
independent thinking.
What does Diana do when Actaeon accidently sees her in a
state of undress? She turns him into a stag and he ends up getting eaten alive
by his own dogs!
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not looking to meet either of these
two women in the flesh but the contrast between Diana and Zosia is clear. Diana is living – really living
– in a vivid pastoral. Zosia is a prisoner of an exile’s antiseptic and
ahistorical fantasy about a country that does not exist – no wonder she is
insipid, stupid and dependent.
The hunting episode in Pan
Tadeusz involves hunting a bear. Bear=Russia? I think so. Perhaps I am
reading this too literally. At best, the hunting episode serves to show
buffoonery of the hunters and the marksmanship of the ‘hidden’ hero of Jacek
Soplica (disguised as a priest). I wanted the bear to win. Not because he may represent Russia; Jesus, no. I hate hunting. It's thuggery, plain and simple.
He doesn’t win. I love the reversal of Actaeon and Diana. The
hunter becomes the hunted. Not metaphorically; actually! Actaeon is turned into
a stag and devoured by his own dogs.
If you have an imagination why not use it to its fullest
extent?
A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy Woody Allen - 1982: The Hollywood
Pastoral
This is a pastoral film because:
- It is set in a beautiful country estate – somewhere in New England
- It is set in the very early Twentieth Century - an almost inescapably pre-lapsarian period in Anglophone thinking.
- The countryside is a place of retreat from the city for the 6 characters’ lives in the city
- The philosophical ‘ether’ of the film – that of unbridled spiritualism – is an antidote to the materialism of the late Twentieth Century and more particularly, it is an antidote to the mindless garbage churned out by Hollywood as a rule.
This is a really sweet film. It
opens with a speech by professor Leopold who disdains any reality that is not
empirically verifiable. Leopold is a genius. A late Nineteenth Century
genius from the school of Pragmatist Philosophy, sure; but a genius, nonetheless. Over the course of
the film he abandons his philosophy and falls in lust with a promiscuous
beautiful nurse (Dulcy)who is, very much not
a genius.
Leopold dies at the very moment
of orgasm with Dulcy, his spirit flies off into the woods to fly around with
all the other spirits who die in exactly the same way.
As a pastoral alternative to any
conventionally posited afterlife this could only have come from the head of
Woody Allen.
Allen’s character is a crackpot
inventor/Wall Street dealer who’s having a sexual crisis in his marriage that
is not being helped by the arrival for the weekend at his country house of his
ex-lover and Leopold’s fiancée (Ariel,
played by Mia Farrow).
His best friend – who comes for
the weekend with the nurse, Dulcy – is also in love with Ariel and has in the
past slept with Woody Allen’s character’s wife.
The erotic interplay between the
characters has all of the excitement and magic but none of the psychopathy of
the Actaeon/Diana myth.
If ever Woody Allen and Quentin
Tarantino were to make a film together I think the psychopathy deficit could be
made up!
Allen’s film has a lightness of touch
that is impossible in an essentially political text like Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz. Allen’s is an idyll that knows that it is an idyll. I
think this is because its celebration of magic is really a celebration of the ‘magic
of Hollywood’; in other words, cinema is always already magical and Woody Allen’s
pastoral is pointing to itself as a golden age of possibilities that has not
been lost; rather it has been neglected in favour of the lowest common
denominator product of most popular film making.
So finally: import or export?
Pan Tadeusz: Well, you can keep insipid, stupid, dependent women and moronic, belligerent men. You can keep fantasies about a golden age that take the place of reality. Export.
Actaeon and Diana: I love strong women. Import.
A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy: Love and Magic are often treated as the refuges of the mentally deficient. For good reason? No! Import.
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