BMCR 2009.07.43: Van Sickle on Saunders, Bucolic Ecology. Virgil's Eclogues and the Environmental Literary Tradition

Timothy Saunders, Bucolic Ecology. Virgil's Eclogues and the
Environmental Literary Tradition.  London:  Duckworth, 2008.  Pp. viii,
184.  ISBN 9780715636176.  L18.00 (pb).

Reviewed by John Van Sickle, Brooklyn College
([email protected])
Word count:  2710 words
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With that definite article in his title, Saunders evokes a school of
criticism from which he sets out to rescue the Bucolics by making them
seem "bold, innovative, ambitious and playful"-- terms that this reader
was tempted to apply to Saunders's own work. He defines the apparently
bland if not deadening "environmental" line as comprising "nature-based
readings," which he blames for their emphasis on themes of past and
loss as opposed to his own emphasis on "investment in the future." Most
emphatically (in the categorical and contentious wise we get from our
bucolic subjects) he faults Paul Alpers for turning away from "nature
and landscape" to focus on "the figure of the herdsman."

Staking his claim to improve on Alpers and all "readings in the
Schillerian, and anti-Schillerian, tradition" (as he styles this
school), Saunders asserts that "'nature' is a far more capacious thing
(and concept)" than they "tend to allow"; and he shapes each chapter
"around a different way of configuring and interpreting the natural
world"--Catasterisms, Cosmology, Geography, Topography, Landscape,
Physics. But he does not let this categorical approach inhibit the
philological gusto that leads him to laud the poems for their
"innovative lexicon, by means of which they introduce all kinds of
objects, epithets, concepts, practices and place names to Latin poetry
for the very first time." His taste for lexical priority and its
congeners smacks of Bertil Axelson and his epigones, varying the charge
against Virgil's style for kakozelia: traced to Vipranius/Vipsanius
(sc. Agrippa: cf. Harry Jocelyn of learned memory as weighed by
Nicholas Horsfall, Companion 2000, pp. 224-227). Saunders's zest for
language moved this reader to mark most every margin with varieties of
"NB! Neat! Nice!" and to build an idiosyncratic index.

This "brief summary of...content and purpose" (first topic in BMCR's
guidelines for reviewers) makes clear that Saunders lays claim to a
distinctive "place in current scholarship" (third guideline topic). But
besides his "obvious break" with the "Schillerian" school, he aims in
another direction when he denies that Virgil might "map out a clear
linear progression" through the book ("clear" does sound contentious
given the notorious indirection of the eclogues). He also calls
structure in the whole book a "somewhat static and rigid entity,"
suggesting an analogy with architecture rather than the dynamic and
developmental structures of music adduced by scholarship like mine
(e.g., The Design of Virgil's Bucolics, 1978/2004, also Bucoliche: la
struttura, Enc. Virg I.549-552). My review is thus multivalent:
welcoming thrusts at Alpers et al., profiting from philological lore,
challenged to grasp some venturesome analogies, often chagrined at
mistaken readings, inaccuracies, and interpretive breakthroughs missed,
where accuracy and further reach could have opened and sustained more
cohesive metapoetic vision. I found it ironic that Saunders denies
development to Virgil while claiming for his own book that his
"argument...is cumulative," describable by analogy as a "journey from
the cosmos to the microcosm." In sum, practiced readers of the eclogues
will read this book and find themselves by turns instructed,
challenged, and provoked. Given the sheer density and variety of
arguments, the rest of this review comprises items I felt worth adding
to my personal index at the back, which was shaped too by recent
thinking about cognitive process (Hofstadter, "Analogy as the Core of
Cognition," 2006; Fauconnier and Turner, "The Way We Think: Conceptual
Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities," 2003).

CATASTERISM. The second BMCR guideline dictates "assessment of the
argument and the use of evidence": Saunders justifies catasterism as
his premier theme premising that the eclogues "even on occasion aspire
to participate in this most elevated literary category" (p9). He opens
with the set of contrasting cups (e3.36-48) that "come to act as tokens
of cosmological literature"; and he uses evidence in a way that becomes
a signature of sorts: "Menalcas now waxes increasingly lyrical"
employed to frame commentary on "the celestial epithet diuini
(which...does draw the caelum out of caelatum) and the noun opus...only
here in the Eclogues and which is usually reserved for a 'work', both
literary and literal, of a more august nature." (p13) Even arch
reminders of paronomastic etymological play are welcome, but second
thoughts arise: from what viewpoint can a herdsman be said to wax? what
viewpoint authorizes the presumptive adverb "usually" based on whose
reading of what--all of Virgil? of Latin literature?

A glance back at e3 makes it clear that from first to last property
rights and limits matter, implying metapoetic import, figuring as
causes for contention and themes of burgeoning song: thus not "lyrical"
or merely "elevated" but specifically bordering tragic (Pollio & goat
song [aperc,u from Brian Breed]) testing the respective limits of the
bucolic, georgic, and heroic ranges of epos. Nor does "usually" do
justice to the uses of opus in Georgics and notably Aeneid, above all
maius opus [a7.45] with special structural and developmental import to
inaugurate the whole work's second half (cf. signs of elevated ranging
in maiora [e4.1] and maior [e5.4]).

"Menalcas waxes" exemplifies the book's habitual use of evidence:
taking cues from Virgil's dramatic and rhetorical language to imagine
some fictive character's mind, e.g., an "obvious interpretation" of a
herder's claim not to have put lip to cup: "Menalcas, like Damoetas,
has not yet attempted to compose cosmological poetry, but is instead
keeping this option back for the future." (p17) Whether "obvious" or
not, imputing literary consciousness to a herder tests the reader's
cognitive dexterity if not credulity. Saunders also relates the two
cups (one chiseled with the Alexandrian astronomer Conon, the other
with the mythic Orpheus) to the whole frame of the Georgics: analogical
reach not conceivably a herder's but certifiably Virgil's. Such a
powerful analogy would foster constructive reading if only integrated
with the web of orphic themes (and their contraries) that Virgil weaves
progressively in the course of his first two books: a new critical
voice risks sounding callow when it erases a classic orphic like Marie
Desport.

Tempted to linger over the menu of bold analogies, acrostics, and puns,
I cringe at "it is worth noting that omnis is a word that appears in
every one of Virgil's ten eclogues": cringe because "worth noting"
falls so far short of the memory (confirmed by a cursory glance at a
concordance) of telling differences and developments in a concept's
use, from the poor if secured "all" of Tityrus with its one broad beech
(e1.1, 47) up through mythic fullness (e3.60) and total cosmic
future/past (e4/e6), down to the lost Italian demesnes of Menalcas with
broken beeches (e9) and the final defeat by love in an old Arcadia
where Virgil and Menalcas toil (e10). Similar regrets for insights
slighted come to haunt the margins ever more densely beside the
celebratory marks.

Further using the evidence of the cups, Saunders adds: "when Menalcas
describes them first as caelatum opus..., he demonstrates that he is
conversant with the etymology of caelatum expounded by Varro.... It
would appear that Menalcas is playing upon the dichotomy between
caelare and celare here too when he describes his own caelatum opus as
condita" (p21). At such boldly emergent blends of philology with
psychoplastic fiction, readers will have to figure out for themselves a
cognitive strategy to be able to process choice Varronian reminders
retailed in the fictional "Menalcas waxes" mode.

Catasterism catapults the argument from e3 to e5 with a bold analogy
that the cups not only recur, along with other figures, but develop
into "a kind of synthesis between bucolic and cosmological poetry":
from the cognitive standpoint an emergent blend. Saunders describes the
lament for dead Daphnis as a sequel to Theocritus (id1) and a step
toward "an epic paradigm" (od9.19-20), further remarking Lucretian
resonance in the blend. He also recognizes that "wonder" already
trademarked Theocritean poetics and how e5 both suggests and subverts
"the notion of a clear temporal and generic progression." Despite his
diffidence towards structure, he brings welcome attention to the
structural center of Virgil's book and aptly values the Lucretian echo
in cicuta as metonymy for pipe.

[p28] "interchange between Lucretius and Theocritus...inscribe[s] a
principle of growth and development into Virgilian bucolic": a literary
hybrid (emergent blend) that counters generic (Schillerian) concepts of
timeless pastoral.

[p29] "Menalcas...through his suggestion that they sit down together"
(e5.1-3): not a suggestion in fact but a query, why the two singers
have not sat down, which marks a pointed difference and sign of
development with respect to e3, though Saunders sees merely repetition.


[p30] "Daphnis ascends to the stars, bucolic poetry rises to new
heights and Menalcas grows up as a poet": allowing "clear linear
progression" in the book, yet without remarking that Virgil in e4
evoked a still higher poetic reach with the idea of heroic growth and
poetic breath to "tell your deeds," i.e., produce heroic epos, higher
than the bucolic-georgic range of e3, e5, and e6.

COSMOLOGY. [p34] on e9.30-36, Saunders aptly notes how Virgil alters
Theocritus by marking a contrast between poet and bard (poeta/vates),
but fails to remark the further and crucial contrast drawn between
Virgil's two herders: bumptious young Lycidas rejecting the title of
vates that marked the old and crestfallen Moeris and the exiled
Menalcas.

[p41] on e9, "like the stars, singers such as Menalcas ascend, decline,
and ascend again": the analogy captures the developmental duality of
this figure representing "the past and the promise of the future." The
emergent blend of bucolic with cosmology may be too bold for some, yet
timid since failing to project to the ensuing representation of
Menalcas as an Arcadian (e10).

[pp46-7] concatenation of Catullan precursors for e3 and e4 posits bold
analogy: epithalamion (c61) is to wedding (c64) as e3 to e4. Yet the
analogy glosses over palpable differences, e.g., c64 focused on
horrific climax to life of child (Achilles) as yet unborn, e4 reverses
horror in address to child being born, then imagined as present and
urged to grow.

[p49] "aspiration to produce songs...even better than those of the
archetypal cosmological poet Orpheus": serves supposed hierarchy of
literary types at cost of ignoring hierarchy imposed by Virgil, above
and beyond Orpheus, Calliope, Linus, Apollo Virgil's boast to outdo Pan
even in the god's Arcadian home (cf. e7, e8 and e10 for further
developments).

[p52] "two songs... two different versions of cosmological
verse...antithetical stories about the efficacy of bucolic poetry":
again the "cosmological" thesis overshadows other metapoetic designs in
which Virgil represents Maenalian (sc. Arcadian) verses (sc. furrows,
turns) telling of fatal love as opposed to vatic songs (sc. spells)
that draw a distant lover down from town, but both bringing tragic
traces (Medea) into the bucolic range (further emergent blend, cf.
'Sophoclean buskin' e8.10 and shades of Euripidean tragic passion,
e10).

[p56] aporetic complaint, that "workings of the stars" (rationem
siderum, Quintil. 1.4.4) in eclogues are "overlooked in recent times":
Saunders ignores grist for his cosmic mill, how Virgil imagined song of
cosmic creation by Tityrus redux {Silenus} worked up by Apollo
imitating music of the spheres (Virgil echoing Varro of Atax.
Chorographia: cf. my Design, pp. 234-36, citing Quintil. I.x.12  mundum
ipsum ratione esse compositum, quam postea sit lyra imitata).

GEOGRAPHY. [pp59-61] Saunders rightly notes the importance in the
eclogue book of "concept of the earth taken as a whole." He suggests
that the poems make an analogy between literary tradition and the
"world they not only inherit and inhabit, but also redefine and
reorder"; and he goes on to document singularities in Virgil's
geographical terms and assign them programmatic import. He devotes
careful attention to Virgil's paradoxical (emergent) blend of an
originary Arcadian (hence pre-Sicilian) Arethusa with a Roman
contemporary Gallus configured as an old Sicilian herdsman.

[p71] Saunders refers to "equations between literary codes and
character roles, and between those codes and roles on the one hand and
certain specific places" and infers that "viewed in either its
Theocritean or Virgilian form, it is impossible to extract a purist
notion of bucolic poetry that is either untainted by, or in any way
unrelated to, its epic or elegiac counterparts": pace Schillerites and
hailing a complex of emergent blends.

TOPOGRAPHY. [p73] Saunders refers to "acts of land
confiscation...paradigmatic of, rather than antithetical to, the
conventions of bucolic competition": perhaps the most radical and
post-Schilleristical de/marche.

[p76] "Where are your feet taking you...to town?" (e9.1) spurs Saunders
to metapoetic allegory against reductive genericism: he writes that
this opening query "suggests that...the bucolic is an aberrant form of
epic poetry composed in dactylic hexameters." Thus as elsewhere
Saunders nears my view of bucolic as a range of epos.

[p84] "Topography Tityrus inhabits...connects him both with the natural
origins of the form (...Lucretius) and with its origins in literary
history (...Idyll 1)": yet Virgil draws on two contrasting Lucretian
texts: bucolic myth (Pan and "woodland muse") concocted by rustics to
explain echo (Lucr. 4.589) but "country muse" taught by nature to early
man (Lucr. 5.1387); a contrast marked long ago by Philip Damon (of
learned memory) although occluded here.

[p93] "the designation of patria that Meliboeus earlier assigned his
notion of bucolic ground": an emergent blend fashioned by Saunders but
not by Virgil for his opening speaker. Virgil in configuring Meliboeus
blends civic, georgic, and bucolic motifs, making him a failed seer too
and occasional goatherd-singer, in which latter guise Virgil represents
him as speaking (not singing) on the bucolic ground occupied by a
figure (Tityrus) recycled and amplified from Theocritus.

[p100] "the deductum carmen...does not so much distance itself from
such things as kings and combats as reconfigure them": welcome
cognitive pressure to defamiliarize a metapoetic shibboleth, yet even
so falls short of interpreting "drawn out, away, down" to refer to
Virgil's recursive progress in the second half book, which he composes
by drawing down and reshaping elements from the first half, a process
that Saunders, alert intratextual reader that he is, often describes
but does not adequately theorize.

LANDSCAPE. [p102] A modern term that Saunders deconstructs to focus on
ecphrasis, temporality, and viewpoint / viewer, e.g. ut cernis vs haud
equidem invideo, miror magis (e1.9,11), cf. landscape's "grounding in
the shaping perception of any given viewer" [p112], followed by a
challenging analogy between the viewpoints contrasted in e1 and the
Theocritean Polyphemus and Galatea. [pp112-16] The chapter proceeds
with well-framed comparisons between the bucolic singer of e2 and an
epigram of Meleager, concluding that "The traces of Alexis left behind
in Meleager's text double up as footprints on the ground, so by reading
them Corydon is projected into a landscape that is resonant with
literary references." [p126]: the latter could serve as a specimen to
exemplify cognitive blending and the not so hidden complexities of
minds, both Virgil's and hopefully ours.

PHYSICS. [p128-29] Analogies are posited "between herding and singing"
and between "constitution of bucolic poetry" and "constitution of
physical universe"; hence Saunders notes that seeds at the beginning of
world (e6.31-33) are said to be activated by the same verb used for
herding flocks (coacta semina, cogere pecus, but Saunders translates as
merely 'gather' rather than more energetically bucolic and etymological
'push or drive together').

[134] I close with one final specimen of Saunders's method, ambitions
and risks, here discussing the narrator (Tityrus redux) of e6: "when
this herdsman undertakes to contemplate the woodland muse on a slender
reed (agrestem tenui meditabor harundine musam 8), not only does his
ensuing performance engage the origins of the form as described by
Lucretius, but it also echoes, and to this degree provides a future
for, the songs which Apollo was once contemplating (quondam meditante
82) on the banks of the Eurotas." Overall the emergent blend calls for
cognitive flights, which elusive details ground. Both the context and
the inner philologist warn that meditari here must mean "to plan, work
up, compose" (as at e1.2); this similarity with that programmatic patch
sounds the alert for difference: there "woodland muse" evoked
Lucretius' critique of rustic fictions; here "country muse" (Saunders
nods with "woodland") engages not "THE (my emphasis) origins of the
form" but an alternative, positive version of musical origins offered
by Lucretius. The differences between Virgil's texts and between his
and that of Saunders signal the need for more and more careful reading,
if only Saunders were to blend his flair and fervor, critical mettle,
with acribeia: finer respect for texts and the texture of Virgil's
progressive weave.