Literature and the Pastoral by Andrew V. Etin (review)

284Rocky Mountain Review structures, then, to contain works or categorize them. And perhaps if one wants to be tidy, one should. By doing so, however, one risks omitting the untidy writers whose works simply will not fit any specific category save the writers' own. Cooke's idea of "intimacy," however, is thought-provoking and gives us a soft word to describe the feeling the works of Zora Hurston and Alice Walker, among others, provoke in us, just by being. LILLIE P. HOWARD Wright State University ANDREW V. ETIN. Literature and the Pastoral. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. 199 p. This ambitious survey of the pastoral as a mode important to individual writers from the Greeks through the twentieth century is not written as a history of the genre in the usual sense, but instead surveys and analyzes the pastoral mode in all its multiplicity and ambiguity. Etin emphasizes the central formal and thematic characteristics of pastoral as these emerge in both pastoral and non-pastoral literature. Fully aware of the history of pastoral and the enormous body of scholarship and criticism treating pastoral, he states that his "main purpose is to tease out what I believe to be the rather shady borders of a complicated and seasonally changing body of literature that is not always neatly marked off from the literary terrain that adjoins it" (7). In the first chapter, Etin explores the early appearance of pastoral motifs in Homer, Hebraic scriptures, and Hesiod, and then demonstrates that pastoral is often an ironic form "based on a perceivable distance between the alleged and the implied. It lets us know either that its point of view is significant largely because it contrasts with some other point of view, or that its real subject is something in addition to (or perhaps even instead of) its ostensible subject" (12). This point of view loosely organizes Etin's approach and is exemplified in wide-ranging discussions of pastoral motifs in writers as varied and distanced as Theocritus, Sidney, Joni Mitchell, and Unamuno. The latter's poem, "En un cementarlo de lugar castellano," for example, is shown to employ pastoral motifs and traditions to gain expressive power as well as an ironic stance toward experience. In the second chapter Etin analyzes the functions of pastoral. In addition to individual expressions about circumstance, pastoral appeals to a desire to return to origins and allows a writer to explore any number of antitheses, such as that between nature and nurture. From Etin's point of view, pastoral can either express an ideal or criticize that ideal. These points are demonstrated in discussions of writers' various personal uses of pastoral ranging again from ancient writers — Horace and Tibullus, for example — through more modern writers — Mary Shelley, for example. One of Etin's purposes is to show the reader that by recognizing the pastoral elements and motifs in any given work, we can begin to better understand that writer's values and analysis of experience. In the next chapter, Etin discusses, with what should be by now for the reader a familiar subtlety, modes which are easily recognized as generically pastoral — Gongora's poem, "En los pinares de Jucar," for example — and works which are more problematic in genre — Schiller's Kabale und Liebe. Works like the latter constitute a mode of pastoral for Etin. These works are not directly pastoral, but Book Reviews285 once we recognize their pastoral mode, we gain greater insight into the work. Various writers' abilities to use pastoral allusively and modally have preserved the genre and allowed it to be used in new forms for analyzing experience. From the modal form of pastoral, Etin moves to the pastoral inset, that is, the existence of pastoral within a non-pastoral universe, or as an inset within a larger frame of reference. There are, according to Etin, two types of insets: one explicit, where pastoral as a setting is set within a non-pastoral context, such as in Wagner's opera Tannhaüser; and the other implicit, with a more vague, suggestive employment ofpastoral in a non-pastoral world, such as found in Eduard Mörike's WaideIdylle . Etin's purpose is not to insist...