Imagining Arcadia in Renaissance Romance

Marsha S. Collins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317478843
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

From Theocritus' Idylls to James Cameron's Avatar, Arcadia remains an enduring presence in world culture and a persistent source of creative inspiration. Why does Arcadia still exercise such a powerful pull on the imagination? This book responds by arguing that in sixteenth-century Europe, a dramatic shift took place in imagining Arcadia. The traditional visions of Arcadia collided and fused with romance, the new experimental form of prose fiction, producing a hybrid, dynamic world of change and transformation. Emphasizing matters of fictional function and world-making over generic classification, Imagining Arcadia in Renaissance Romance analyzes the role of romance as a catalyst in remaking Arcadia in five, canonical sixteenth-century texts: Sannazaro's Arcadia; Montemayor's La Diana; Cervantes' La Galatea; Sidney's Arcadia; and Lope de Vega's Arcadia. Collins' analyses of the re-imagined Arcadia in these works elucidate the interplay between timely incursions into the fictional world and the timelessness of art, highlighting issues of freedom, identity formation, subjectivity and self-fashioning, the intersection of public and private activity, and the fascination with mortality.

This book addresses the under-representation of Spanish literature in Early Modern literary histories, especially regarding the rich Spanish contribution to the pastoral and to idealizing fiction in the West. Companion chapters on Cervantes and Sidney add to the growing field of Anglo-Spanish comparative literary studies, while the book's comparative and transnational approach extends discussion of the pastoral beyond the boundaries of national literary traditions. This book's innovative approach to these fictional worlds sheds new light on Arcadia's enduring presence in the collective imagination today.

1 Weaving the Arcadian Tapestry

Visions of Arcadia

On July 29, 2010, a barge struck a wellhead in Louisiana’s Barataria Bay, releasing oil and natural gas into the heart of the local shrimp industry and home to muskrats, brown pelicans, and other wildlife threatened by the invasive substances. This incident added more extensive injury to the Deepwater Horizon petroleum disaster, the largest marine oil spill in history, which began with the explosion of the drilling rig at Macondo Prospect on April 20, 2010. The well was capped on July 15 and finally pronounced dead on September 19, after disrupting, and in some cases, destroying the lives of millions of residents of the Gulf Coast region. The most riveting images of the tragedy remain those of the helpless animals coated in oil—the fish, turtles, and above all, the birds, of at first Louisiana’s, and then of the Gulf Coast’s, protected but ecologically fragile wetlands.¹

For lovers of the pastoral tradition, how ironic that this five-month, humanmade catastrophe should unfold in places bearing such fanciful, literary names as Barataria and Macondo, the former, the name of Sancho’s imaginary island in Don Quixote, Part 2 (1615), and the latter, the imaginary locale of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), which initially possesses much of the lush innocence of Eden only to end as a place of the damned. The fact that the despoilment began off Louisiana’s coast, land of the “Cajuns,” the anglicized version of “Acadians,” compounds the irony. According to legend, Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano, inspired by the plentiful trees and greenery he saw on the Atlantic littoral north of Virginia, dubbed that coastal land Arcadia, and so it appears in the 1548 Gastaldi map of the world, with later reinforcement from Samuel de Champlain’s use of “Arcadie” in Des Sauvages (1603). Nevertheless, with the passage of time and the growth of French settlers’ contact with the Micmac Amerindians who inhabited part of what would become Canada’s maritime provinces, the “r” began to disappear. This shift from “Arcadia” or “Larcadia” to “Cadie,” and/or “Acadie” supports the more prosaic notion of the toponym’s origin as an adaptation of the Micmac word “Quoddy” or “Cady.” Eventually, with the eighteenth-century Acadian diaspora, some of the descendants of those pioneering French settlers would move southward from Canada to Louisiana, carrying with them a label merging Micmac language with Grecoroman myth, and the full weight of an imaginary land and community whose origins extend back thousands of years (Clark 71–74).

Ernst Robert Curtius has characterized Arcadia as one version of the “ideal landscape” topos, observing that this idyllic place is perpetually being recovered or rediscovered, appearing over time in a wide, diverse array of genres (Curtius 187).² At the most fundamental level, Arcadia is a symbolic landscape that first emerged in the Idylls of Theocritus (3rd century BCE) as an idealized, green world that contrasted with the actual Arcadia, a wild land on the Peloponnese inhabited by rustics and barbarians. Virgil subsequently established in his Eclogues (43–37 BCE) the essential, enduring conventions of Arcadia, including the standard Arcadian topographic features—lush forests, verdant fields and mountains, rocky caves and outcroppings, crystalline pools and streams, and the remarkably well-behaved herds inured to many hours of benign neglect by their human caretakers. Even within this most basic view of Arcadia, we encounter ambiguity and complexity, for as Simon Schama points out, “both kinds of Arcadia, the idyllic as well as the wild, are landscapes of the urban imagination, clearly answering to different needs.” Schama notes the ongoing presence of this combative interaction, even in more contemporary environmental movements such as that of the Greens, concluding that the persistence of the quarrel suggests that the two Arcadias are “mutually sustaining” rather than mutually exclusive (Schama 525).

But symbolic topography alone does not Arcadia make, since these verdant lands invariably sustain the inhabitants of a pastoral community. While Benedict Anderson has stated that all communities are imagined, the only difference residing in the ways in which they are imagined, even in the context of fictional communities the Arcadian one flaunts its fictional nature in highly dramatic fashion (Anderson 6–24). In fact, Paul Alpers asserts that too much emphasis has been placed on idyllic nature as the essential, defining characteristic of the pastoral rather than on the humans who dwell in Arcadia, the representative herdsmen and -women who discuss their lives, and who meet at pastoral convenings on a regular basis for colloquies and exchanges of song and poetry. Alpers observes that the “shepherds of pastoral are figures devised to engage certain issues of poetry and poetics, to express certain ethical attitudes, and to locate poets and readers in cultural and political history” (Alpers 174). Their songs, verse, and discussions frequently involve the themes of art, love, and nature, woven together in myriad ways and serving a compensatory function for a loss, separation, or absence (Alpers 81, 134). Alpers thus places the representative shepherd at the heart of Arcadia, rendering the pastoral “a generative fiction, which can be elaborated or transformed in accordance with the needs of representation or the claims of representativeness” (Alpers 174). The ready adaptability of the Arcadian inhabitants and community, as individuals and/or a collective, accounts as well for the high-profile contextualized interpretation that has been assumed in recent criticism of the pastoral, from Lawrence Buell’s concept of multiple ideological frames of interpretation to Annabel Patterson’s notion of changing ideological responses. For Patterson, ideology encompasses a wide range of values, beliefs, and cultural markers (Patterson 7–17; Buell 36–44). As suggested here, beneath the superficial appearance of pastoral simplicity and a lifestyle of placid otium or leisure, Arcadia functions as a theatrical space for staged encounters between conflicting views and contrasting ideologies voiced and/or enacted by representative shepherds, and their visitors, in varying relationships with the Arcadian community. These interactions enliven the pastoral tranquility, to be sure, but they also often give way to intense expressions of passion or displays of violence that create rifts in the bucolic peace or threaten it with destruction all together. And as Erwin Panofsky reminded us in his iconic essay “Et in Arcadia ego” (1936), death remains a painful, persistent presence in the Arcadian landscape in both literary and visual representations.

Imagining Arcadia assumes that whether Arcadia is refashioned in Renaissance eclogues or Romantic lyrics, in Longus’s Greek romance Daphnis and Chloe (c. 200) or James Cameron’s eco-adventure movie Avatar (2009), in Nicolas Poussin’s Arcadian Shepherds (1640) or Ansel Adams’s photographs of Yosemite National Park (1930s onward), in Torquato Tasso’s pastoral play Aminta (1573) or Ben Okri’s novel In Arcadia (2002), this enduring green space invites audiences of varying times and cultures to enter into an alternate, fictional world—a liminal, borderland place that blends dreaming and waking worlds, the possible with the improbable. Thomas Pavel observes that in general a fictional world “refers to a complex entity that needs careful logical and aesthetic disentangling: The worlds that mix together in texts may resemble the actual world, but they may be impossible or erratic worlds as well. Works of fiction more or less dramatically combine incompatible world-structures, play with the impossible, and incessantly speak about the unspeakable” (Pavel, Fictional 62). More recently, Pavel has written of the pastoral as an “intermediary genre,” between the lengthy, idealistic novels of adventure in a “wide, hostile world” and the short novellas “confined to a narrow space” delimited by characters’ powerful emotions. Pavel follows this spatialized rendering of literary genre by characterizing the pastoral as a literary form that “imagines” Arcadia in this in-between, literary space: “The pastoral imagines a conspicuously fictional, secluded Arcadia, in which gentle young people go back and forth between constancy and weakness, caprices and devotion, and, not unlike the narrators of elegiac stories, live only for love” (Pavel, Lives 91).³ As Renato Poggioli observes, Arcadia emerges from a deeply rooted longing for innocence and happiness, and belief that “it is easier to reach moral truth and peace of mind (in other terms, innocence and happiness) by abandoning the strife of civil and social living and the ordeal of human fellowship for a solitary existence, in communion with nature and with the company of one’s musings and thoughts” (Poggioli 2). Ostensibly constructed in opposition to the city or court, Arcadia nevertheless mobilizes what Terry Gifford calls “oppositional potential,” that is, the opportunity to escape or retreat from the norms, customs, problems, and complexities of everyday life, often at the same time to explore preoccupying issues within the confines of an imaginary world, simpler and less intricate than the social world we, or the protagonists, inhabit. The limitations of the Arcadian fictional world allow freedom to meditate and concentrate on other ideas and solutions, or freedom to become other—in alternate lives, selves, and universes (Gifford 36). Entrée into this imaginary world permits escape into a different culture, not as dense as that of daily life. Vicarious participation in the lives and events in this ostensibly simpler environment may actually facilitate lucidity and clarification of the complexities posed by life at court or in the city (Tuan 23). While all fictional worlds are microcosms, incomplete worlds, requiring different degrees of audience engagement in the process of imagining them, Arcadia frequently foregrounds an act of border-crossing that mirrors the reader’s or viewer’s retreat into the imaginary world. As a result, Arcadian space exhibits a high metafictional quotient, and in drawing attention to its own fictionality, poses complex questions regarding how the audience should interpret that fictional world in relation to the actual one.⁴

The sixteenth century, the period of time on which this book focuses, constitutes an era of great expansion and diversification in the conceptualization of Arcadia as a fictional world. Pavel states that fictional worlds “are, in most cases, related to the worlds of common sense, and bear the weight of ontological and epistemic assumptions, but they also reflect the technical sophistication of the author and his milieu and the different purposes that the construction is meant to achieve” (Pavel, Fictional 146). Yi-Fu Tuan remarks that in this period the West experienced “the rebirth of a sensibility, the reenchantment of land as landscape, that has persisted, with alterations and improvements, to our time,” a sensibility that he asserts had largely been lost since Roman antiquity (Tuan xvi). A new gardenist aesthetic appeared at this time that nourished art forms as varied as poetry and the court masque, as well as the elaborate, formal gardens perhaps most identified with the aristocratic villas of Renaissance Italy.⁵ Moreover, the origins of contemporary Western environmentalism can be traced to the European quest to locate Arcadias, Edens, utopias, and Golden Ages in the New Worlds “discovered” in the sixteenth century.⁶ Notably, this expansion and multiplication in visions of Arcadia occurs within the context of aperture and sea change in Early Modern European history—the Age of Discovery, the Age of Imperialism, the Age of Criticism, the Renaissance, and so forth—in which exploration and experimentation in literature, the visual arts, and natural philosophy (the forerunner of modern science) also reached new heights. What is clear is that during this epoch, important changes took place in imagining Arcadia that significantly enriched and complicated the concept of this alternate, green world, opening up new possibilities for meaning and symbolic signification. These momentous occurrences altered creative visions of Arcadia forever, in ways that have enabled the idyllic green world to grow, adapt, and endure, propelling the ideal of Arcadia as an imaginary construct into our contemporary consciousness and into the future.

This book examines five of the expanded visions of Arcadia that emerge in major pastoral romances of sixteenth-century Europe: Jacopo de Sannazaro’s Arcadia (1501–1504), Jorge de Montemayor’s Diana (1559), Miguel de Cervantes’ La Galatea (1585), Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1593), and Lope de Vega’s Arcadia (1598). Together these literary works—all composed by canonical authors and all works of significant impact on a national and/or transnational level—span the sixteenth century, which marks the inception and zenith of Renaissance pastoral romance.⁷ The Arcadias they depict feature the static and conventional elements, the timeless characteristics one would expect in the Arcadian world, and yet those familiar topographic markers and the representative herds men and -women who occupy this instantly recognizable, imaginary terrain, are dramatically reconfigured into a world that enables transformations and metamorphoses. In so doing, these sixteenth-century Arcadias provide valuable insight into the enduring vision of a dynamic Arcadia that continues today and that remains an integral part of our collective consciousness, even as they offer a paradigm of how fictional worlds in general, and those of prose fiction in particular, create generative spaces in which the human imagination may dream and wander among other possibilities and possibilities of becoming other.⁸ Imagining Arcadia accordingly turns a discerning eye on the green worlds crystallized as transformative spaces in the pages of Early Modern pastoral romance, in which the imaginary Arcadian inhabitants grapple with cases of identity change and formation, stage debates on art and literature, and enter into dialogues that to varying degrees engage with some of the prominent aesthetic and sociohistorical issues of the time.

When Sannazaro set quill to paper, weaving the Arcadian conventions inherited from classical antiquity with those of the upstart genre romance, the popular rising star of the recently invented printing press, he embedded into the text new, demanding protocols for his intended readers. This book also seeks to elucidate the audience’s enactment of these new reading parameters and interpretive protocols, recovering important links between the expanded, imagined Arcadia and the audience’s sociohistorical context. In addition, while Sannazaro’s and Sidney’s respective Arcadias are more familiar imaginary worlds in the canon of Western literary history, the green worlds of Montemayor, Cervantes, and Lope remain largely the province of hispanists, who recognize the powerful impact of such worlds in the tradition of Early Modern Spanish Literature and beyond. Imagining Arcadia’s comparative, transnational approach to the green worlds of sixteenth-century pastoral romance restores these Spanish Arcadias to their prominent place in Early Modern European literature and thought, shedding new light on their major contribution to the enduring Arcadian legacy.

Fashioning Arcadia

The foundation for these expansive, self-conscious sixteenth-century Arcadias, of course, lies i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Weaving the Arcadian Tapestry
• 2 In the Ending Is the Beginning: Sannazaro’s Arcadia (1504)
• 3 The Metamorphosis of Arcadia: Montemayor’s Diana (1559)
• 4 Romancing Arcadia: Cervantes’ La Galatea (1585)
• 5 Romancing Arcadia: Sidney’s Arcadia (1593)
• 6 Courting Arcadia: Lope’s Arcadia (1598)
• 7 Conclusion
• Index