Pastoral and the Poetics of Self-Contradiction: Theocritus to Marvell.

Judith Haber's compact, stimulating Pastoral and the Poetics of Self-Contradiction is a profoundly (and deliberately) unsatisfying but not unsatisfactory book. Initially attempting "to account for the persistence of the antipastoral in pastoral poetry," especially in Renaissance texts as exemplified in Marvell's poetry, Haber, who studied under Paul Alpers at Berkeley, discovered that anti-pastoralism has been a feature of the pastoral since its Theocritean origins. Fundamentally ironic, the genome of the genre is self-contradiction: claiming to be non-heroic, it depends on the heroic in order to make its claim (Theocritus); resolutely questioning its status as art, pastoral evades its poetic limitations (Virgil). Haber, who has a Marvellian penchant for antithetical perspectives and epigrammatic phrasing, offers her exploration of an unstable genre in part as a skeptical response to New Historicist interest in pastoral as primarily a mask for power. Her well-managed (and well-mannered) criticism of the different positions taken by Louis Montrose and Annabel Patterson might be summed up in the following remark: "What is occurring here is a kind of aesthetic scapegoating: the creation of a stable category of pure, 'empty' idyllic formalism allows for the simultaneous creation of a category of pure, 'full' political meaning, of an unmediated real uncontaminated by 'the mirror of art'" (5).

So shrewd is this observation (of the profession as well) that one almost wishes for a different kind of boole one less habitually constrained by paradox and contradiction. But, as Haber no doubt would be quick to point out, it would also only reproduce the sharp division between aesthetics and politics that she sees pastoral as interrogating - at least the version of pastoral she chooses to examine. "A history of pastoral that concluded with Milton rather than Marvell would, undoubtedly, seem more expansive" (11). For one thing, it would have to be politically located. Her "history," however, is rather a series of interwoven essays on Theocritus and Virgil, sensitively attuned to literary allusion, tipped in the direction of Marvell, but passing, somewhat unexpectedly, through Sidney's Old Arcadia. The itinerary reminds us that no English Renaissance pastoralist served Marvell as Spenser served Milton. The inclusion of the Old Arcadia allows Haber the opportunity to investigate Sidney's exploration of the outer limits of Renaissance pastoral, which she identifies as the point when self-contradiction (most familiar in Sidney's famous double sestina) turns into self-cancellation, and the communal impulse of pastoral is thwarted. She notes, without citing David Young's The Heart's Forest (1972), that Sidney's work is completed by Shakespeare in King Lear.

Haber is an agile, illuminating critic of contradictory impulses in their most concentrated form. Although she does not seek to recover Marvell for his celebrated balance, Marvell is seen to escape Sidney's predicament because he accepts the problematic as the root of all pastoral. She offers a brilliant reading of that seemingly most minor of the Mower poems ("The Mower to the Gloworms") in support of her more general thesis that in Marvell innocence depends on the visible suppression of experience, that separation is inextricably linked to connection, that poetry is a necessary fiction. Along with the Mower poems, "Upon Appleton House" receives extensive and acute treatment for its complicated practice of "glancing back" - Marvell's reflexive habit of both correcting and re-enacting a previous scene.

The strengths of this study are also inseparable from its limitations, as Haber would and does admit (7). The telescoping of seventeenth-century pastoral poetry into Marvell, then all of Marvell into a few poems, altogether accomplished in a few sentences, is breathtaking. A decision to "explore" rather than to "explain" contradictions means, too, that we rarely get outside either the immediate text (and the local commentary it has inspired) or the few critical terms (like the overused "problematic") that sometimes cannot bear the weight they are asked to sustain (129). In the repeated spin on (self) reflection in poetry, I think she also misses, in the chapter on Marvell, an opportunity to follow out more fully her own thoughtful advice about the importance of Theocritus to English pastoral. Finally, I would like to invite Professor Haber to extend her "epilogue" into the future; the official terms of pastoral may change after the seventeenth century, but Marvellian pastoral can be seen in some of our best poets writing today, and she seems superbly equipped to explore these opportunities as well.

JONATHAN F.S. POST University of California, Los Angeles