Toxic pastoral:Comic failure and ironic nostalgia in contemporary British environmental theatre

This article examines the enduring relevance of the pastoral mode and its potential to offer constructive critique of contemporary modes of thinking, writing about, and occupying those spaces marked off as pastoral. In an era characterised by potentially insoluble environmental crises, there is doubt over the relevance of a literary form which promises harmony and prioritises the status quo. However, I argue that two recent versions of the pastoral—Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem (2009) and Thomas Eccleshare’s Pastoral (2013)—provide examples of the vitality which literary comic modes can offer to thinking about ecological dilemmas. Both invert and frustrate the conventional pastoral movement, wherein the equalising effects of release, reconciliation, and return are not realised; and subjects the pastoral mode to actual or threatened displacement—in Eccleshare’s play the forest invades the city, whereas Butterworth dramatizes the efforts of civic authority to evict the green man from his wood—making this failure the basis of its exploration of the possibilities available in an eco-comic mode; finally, in contrast to Terry Gifford’s concept of post-pastoral which makes awe its main affective mode, Eccleshare and Butterworth present what I call toxic pastoral: versions of pastoral in which former certainties are degraded, permitting an engagement with and celebration of the ambivalence in human interactions with the more-than-human world. Each play represents a version of pastoral that is alert and able to give form to the ironies, anxieties, and absurdities that inhere in contemporary environmental discourse

‘Like a Stone’: Ecology, Enargeia, and Ethical Time in Alice Oswald’s Memorial

This article argues that the Anthropocene is marked by haunted time. As the ‘geological agents’ of climate change, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has put it, we both identify with ‘deep time’ processes and conjure the ghosts of those whose lives to come will be shaped in drastic ways by our actions in the present. This article explores a poetics of haunted time via readings of the work of artist/sculptor Ilana Halperin and poet Alice Oswald. Halperin’s recent work with the “slow and fast time” of geological processes (calcification and lava flows), and also with the body’s own capacity to generate geologic material (in the form of body stones), engages with the possibility of “geologic intimacy.” From here, the article reads Memorial, Oswald’s recent translation of the Iliad pared down to snapshot biographies of the soldiers killed in the Trojan wars interleaved with a series of astonishing similes of the natural world, as an example of a poetics of haunted time. Drawing on James Hatley’s theory of ethical time and its ecocritical application by Deborah Bird Rose, I argue that Oswald’s strategy of repeating similes creates a kind of spectral echo, giving expression to an enfolding of diachronic and synchronous time in which intergenerational responsibilities are realised. The haunted time of Oswald’s poem thus represents a passage to the difficult intimacy of rethinking the relationship between past, present, and future actions and effects