Revising the Pastoral, Revising the I/Eye: The Pastoral Speaker in Louise Glück’s A Village Life

The possibility of eros—whether defined as intersubjectivity, intercorporeality, multisensory dialogue or something else—can collapse in the face of the tyranny of the visual.

—Burt Welling

Louise Glück’s most recent volume of poetry, A Village Life, sings a pastoral story. The volume laments the inescapable ties between humanity, nature, and death, with an eye focused on the deep, primal knowledge of living in a body. Bodies in this volume are troubled by the constructions of humanity placed upon them and by their mysterious place in the animal world. Human bodies are watched and interrogated by Glück’s speakers, whose subjectivities slip between the human and the animal, often indeterminately. Watching, looking, and gazing are the primary narrative mechanisms in this selection of poems; in describing circular relationships between humans, animals and nature, Glück relies on the universality of human sight to create this village community. Willard Spiegelman argues in his review of the volume that the book’s lyric expression is communal, rather than autobiographical. Spiegelman suggests that in Glück’s obsession with “gathering shadows and setting suns … the author gives herself over to the common life and our common destiny” (177). The commonality that this book explores, like much of Glück’s poetry, is death, and the tyranny it holds over humans, animals, and eventually even our perceptions of nature.

Glück’s continual struggle with the Romantic tradition has been well-documented in criticism of her poetry; revising the pastoral, especially as it is represented by Romanticism, is an ongoing project for Glück. Although I will not review this criticism here, many analyses point towards an issue in the development of the lyric “I” in Glück’s work. Interrogating the “I” is implicit in doing battle with Romanticism’s pastoral.¹

Before delving into a close reading of how Glück constructs and deconstructs the lyric “I” in A Village Life, I think it is useful to discuss briefly the pastoral’s evolution in terms of vision, seeing, and perception. The pastoral, Greg Garrard argues in his book Ecocritcism, is an evolving literary convention that is both nostalgic and utopian. He states that,

The pastoral has always been characterized by nostalgia, so that wherever we look into its history, we will see an ‘escalator’ taking us back further into a better past. … In addition to the elegy and the idyll in Virgil, we can also find a prophetic moment in Ecologue IV that suggests utopian possibilities … the pastoral then need not always be nostalgic, but maybe utopian and proleptic. Both Leo Marx and [Raymond] Williams identify this progressive potential, and both critics later associated it with the emergence of environmental politics.

(49)

The utopian possibility of the pastoral—and the forward-looking gaze that accompanies it—provides a way to think about Glück’s work in A Village Life. I want to qualify my statement concerning the utopian pastoral here; I do not think that Glück is expressly concerned with painting a moral, ecological, or cultural utopia. On the contrary, it seems that the fictional village portrayed here is fraught with complexities about the relationship between culture and nature. The ability of the poems to challenge the way that we see the pastoral is what seems most important. Glück’s poetic philosophy is intensely forward-looking: in her interview with Joanie Fiet Diehl, she states, “If I am not prone to regret, I am most vividly and chronically prone to anxiety; not sorrow over the thing missed, but terror lest the future be missed or contaminated” (Glück, “Interview” 188). By rejecting nostalgia, Glück rejects a common feature of the pastoral by redirecting our gaze forward, rather than backward. If the project of the volume is to revise the utopian pastoral, then Glück does so by questioning the “tyranny” of anthropocentric vision that leads us to construct these natural utopias (Welling 53). Instead, her speakers play with the construction of the “I”/eye, challenging us to experience her poems...