[In the following excerpt from a study of the use of the pastoral form in several post-World War II French literary figures, Brosman notes the ways in which Giono and poet René Char use pastoral themes as an antidote to the vicissitudes brought by war.]

Although the pastoral, in the narrow sense, has nearly disappeared from modern French literature, certain of its features and conventions, as distinguished from those simply of rustic literature of the pre-Romantic, Romantic and post-Romantic periods, can be identified in fiction and poetry both before and after World War I.¹ In some cases the reflections are oblique, and the work must be considered a contemporary equivalent or transposition of the pastoral. In others the pastoral serves as an explicit model for texts which are, however, modern as well as imitative. André Gide, Paul Valéry, Marcel Pagnol and Jean Giono, who are among those who evoke the bucolic tradition, were all readers of Virgil, and both Valéry and Pagnol translated and commented on his eclogues, while Giono wrote a highly personal introduction to them.² Henry de Montherlant created in Les Bestiaires one of the most extreme of modern bucolic statements, and some of the poems of René Char suggest with deceptive simplicity certain elements of the pastoral tradition. Other reflections can be found in authors as various as Roger Martin du Gard, Albert Camus and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who uses in Vol de nuit the image of the shepherd to express the functions and perspectives of the flyer. I propose to study selected reflections of the pastoral in four of these authors to show how, putting the type to very different uses, they preserve and renew it, some 2200 years after its first illustration by Theocritus.

In his The Great War and Modern Memory Paul Fussell has shown the connection between the pastoral vision and the prewar mentality, or at least what noted British writers identified during the war as the spirit of the years before 1914. They used as a model of their experience this pastoral vision, which is marked by unfulfilled love experiences. “The image of strict division clearly dominates the Great War conception of Time Before and Time After, especially when the mind dwells on the contrast between prewar idyll and the wartime nastiness.”³ He asserts that “the opposite of experiencing moments of War is proposing moments of pastoral. … War … is the ultimate antipastoral” (p. 231). This is well illustrated in French literature by Giono's Le Grand Troupeau (1931). Perhaps Giono comes closest in our century to being a true pastoral writer, in such books as Jean le bleu, Que ma joie demeure, Le Serpent d'étoiles, Solitude de la pitié and Le Chant du monde. He even published in 1931 three eclogues inspired directly by Virgil, and an essay entitled “Arcadie, Arcadie!” His pastorals were based on intimate acquaintance: as a boy he had lived for a while with a master shepherd, or baïle, and had tended sheep.⁴ He had studied Theocritus in translation and was well aware of the literary pastoral tradition. Le Grand Troupeau is one of the most striking examples of the pastoral in his work. The great herd refers to an immense flock of sheep brought down in haste in August 1914 from the higher Alpine pastures, where there will be no more shepherds to care for them, to be penned at lower elevations. Giono evokes beautifully the devotion of man to the flock, the natural rhythms of life in the pastures, the music of pipes and bells; but there is also immense suffering, since the flock is forced to move too fast in great heat, crowded upon one another. Like the abandoned newborn kids in Virgil's first eclogue, lambs and sheep collapse along the roadside, and one of the great rams dies. The herd is also the mass of men who are going to war as sheep to the slaughter, sacrificed senselessly. Giono's repeated insistence on the natural rhythms of human life and the closeness of peasants to the earth underscores the animal metaphor. At the war's end, the survival of one of the young soldiers from the region and the birth of two children have a parallel in the story of the master shepherd and his ram. In 1914 the shepherd had left the ailing beast with acquaintances on the plateau rather than risk its life by forcing it to continue the march down. Returning well after the armistice, he finds the animal cured. When he calls it, the ram comes and puts his head in his lap. The shepherd then blesses the newly-born male child and has the ram breathe on him to give the strength of a leader and the joys which nature provides. The flock of sheep and shepherd never become associated with their usual Christian meaning; it is nature's laws, not God's, which war violates, and the destruction of the beasts seems as criminal as the killing of men. As a shepherd says, looking at the suffering animals, “C'est gâcher la vie.”⁵ It is the fault of men rather than nature: “les temps maudits” are caused not by what one soldier calls “pute de nature,” but rather by “pute de nous” (pp. 22, 74). Though the usual formal pastoral conventions do not appear in the novel, Giono's bucolic is consistent with the classical suppositions about harmony among man, beast and nature, and happiness to be found in the bucolic life. It has, moreover, a social implication which goes beyond that of many idylls: any upheaval or disorder which threatens to destroy the natural order is to be condemned. As Virgil's Ménalque had to make peace with the occupant, Giono was led to extreme pacifism, which ultimately meant collaboration. This seems to be an instance of a denial of the reality of history. As Marx puts it, “The resolutions of our pastoral fables are unsatisfactory because the old symbol of reconciliation is obsolete”; what he calls the “fantasy of pleasure” is not checked by the facts of history (pp. 363-64).

René Char may be one of the truest modern equivalents of the pastoral poets. To be sure, one finds no eclogue in his work, no systematic use of the pastoral conventions, apparently no real borrowing at all. At the most, one can identify a few typically bucolic features: the Mediterranean landscape with its hills and marshes, its bees, olives, almonds, laurel and cypress, an occasional mention of shepherds, lyres and flocks. Yet Char's very understated pieces seem to be imbued with the pastoral spirit. This is, first, because they assert the primacy and sacredness of a nature given as it is; man becomes an intruder when he tries to remake it instead of fitting in. Second, while emphasizing the harmony and fraternity among all living things, they nevertheless present the solitude of the rural figure. Even if this solitude springs in part from the political background against which many of his poems were written—the Occupation—it still reminds us of the traditional herder with his animals. Both of these factors reveal Char's Arcadian nostalgia. “He longs to be in communion with natural world,” writes Virginia La Charité, “and … this yearning is nostalgic, indicating a desire to return to a state of existence known in the past. This feeling of nostalgia attests to man's original experience of harmony with nature. …”⁶ Moreover, there is a political element in Char which reminds one of Virgil—his desire to keep his own fields from the stranger who occupies them.

In addition, the natural setting where Char's imagination spontaneously places itself is not merely a source of images and metaphors: it is an essential factor in the poet's understanding of the human condition. Far from being decorative, his use of nature is essential, since it has priority over man, who, by his intrusions, has almost lost it. The natural order remains uncorrupted; it is the space in which the human ideal can still be visualized. Such a phrase as “la transhumance du Verbe,”⁷ which suggests a transfer or movement of words to higher pastures, that is, levels of meaning, conveys the unity of the thinking and speaking subject and the natural world. “Traverser avec le poème la pastorale des déserts … faire irruption à sa suite, enfin, dans les noces de la grenade cosmique” (p. 76) performs the same function of placing the human drama in the pastoral tradition, where time and existence itself are the wilderness which the poet-shepherd must traverse before the cosmic nuptials. And when he criticizes “le politique, ce nouveau fermier général,” by noting succinctly that under his regime “il n'est plus question que le berger soit guide” (p. 143), we know that he sees human existence according to a traditional pastoral model, in which nature's relation to mind is assumed, and blames the contemporary world for departing from it. This, then, is a metaphysical pastoral, which uses the traditional elements in the service of a call to human spiritual renewal.

The recourse to pastoral figures, conventions and themes among modern writers covers a range of uses and responses. While some are chiefly personal, others are intended more generally as a means of criticizing the 20th-century world, as these authors see it, and provoking a change in the reader's attitude. Giono and Char invite the reader to see that the pastoral is more than a convention and an analogy: implying a biological and metaphysical unity between man and nature, it calls for a reestablishment of a natural order to replace the industrial and urban one. As one critic notes, “The function of pastoral is above all to create an ideal existence in contradistinction to the real world.”⁸ This new order would allow man to be himself again, rather than the mediocre and unjust creature he has become. This is clearly related to neo-primitivism, and, like the call for a return to nature in the 18th century, assumes a political background favorable to the bucolic vision.⁹ The pastoral is not just a call to renewal: it contains in itself the new vision, the dream of Arcadia; it is therapeutic, restorative—both a reawakening and a reassurance.

Notes

1. Little research has been done on the pastoral and its modern equivalents in France. Among general texts which may be consulted, in addition to those listed in the notes below, are the following: William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (London: Chatto and Windus, 1935); John Heath-Stubbs, The Pastoral (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969); Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet: Theocritus and the European Pastoral Lyric (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1969).

2. Jean Giono, Les Pages immortelles de Virgile (Paris: Corrêa [1947]); Marcel Pagnol, Les Bucoliques (Paris: Grasset, 1958); Paul Valéry, Les Bucoliques, in Oeuvres, 2 vols., Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1957-1960), I, 207-81. Gide, although urged by Mme van Rysselberghe to translate Virgil, said he did not want to do any translation which was not needed in order to publicize the work, or one which would not be up to the quality of the original. “Pour Virgile, il ne faut pas y penser, c'est absolument impossible”; see Les Cahiers de la Petite Dame, Vol. IV (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), pp. 149-50.

3. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975), p. 80.

4. Maxwell Smith, Jean Giono (New York: Twayne, 1966), p. 31. See also on the general topic of Giono and the pastoral, Marguerite Mathilde Girard, Jean Giono, méditerranéen (Paris: La Pensée Universelle, 1974), pp. 106-38.

5. Jean Giono, Le Grand Troupeau (Paris: Gallimard, 1931), p. 17.

6. Virginia A. La Charité, The Poetics and the Poetry of René Char, Univ. of North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 75 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1968), p. 112.

7. René Char, Fureur et mystère (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), p. 19.

8. Miriam Yvonne Jehenson, The Golden World of the Pastoral (Ravenna: Longo, 1981), p. 24. That the artist has failed in doing so, or rather, that it is impossible truly to create this ideal existence in any way that can have an effective application to reality in the industrialized world, is argued by Marx, pp. 363-65.

9. On the differences between the pastoral ideal, as illustrated by Virgil and his successors, and pure primitivism, see Marx, pp. 23-24.