Unsettling environments: new pastorals in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper addresses the persistence of pastoral in contemporary British writing in conjunction with classical and contemporary pastoral writing and theory. The paper argues that the pastoral continues to be used to represent and reflect upon the British landscape and the relationships between people and place that it comprises in the twenty-first century. However, brought into new contexts by contemporary environmental concerns, it is being put to new uses, and adapted into new forms in these instances.Critics of pastoral have been sceptical of its continuing relevance since at least the 1970s, including Raymond Williams’s critique of the social, political and ecological glosses of the ‘enamelled’ depictions of people and places in pastoral in The Country and the City and the argument against its distinction from the realities of contemporary life made by John Barrell and John Bull in The Penguin Book of Pastoral Verse. Whilst Leo Marx suggested in his 1992 essay ‘Does pastoralism have a future?’ that the ‘wholly new conception of the precariousness of our relations with nature is bound to bring forth new versions of pastoral’, attempts to recover the critical potential of the mode in the context of environmental concerns by critics such as Lawrence Buell have rightly received criticism for the selective versions of the mode that they appear to depend upon.Here, I argue that contemporary versions of the mode are constructed with these criticisms in mind in order to approach environmental concerns. Further, I argue that to do so, these versions employ aspects of the mode picked up by critics of its classical versions: specifically, its ‘discontinuously mimetic’ character recognised by Charles Martindale in his analysis of Virgil’s Eclogues in ‘Green Politics: the Eclogues’ and the ‘fundamental’ ‘tension between what is being represented and the act of representation’ highlighted by Kathryn Gutzwiller in Theocritus’ Pastoral Analogies: The Formation of a Genre. The capacity of these aspects of the mode to unsettle expectations of people and place is taken up in order to highlight and question the ways that they may be seen and understood. I argue that these ideas can be seen to inform uses of pastoral in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army. Accounting for ecocritical perspectives upon the mode by critics including Greg Garrard, Terry Gifford and Martin Ryle, I will argue that in these examples, new uses for and new formations of the pastoral tradition can be seen to emerge to depict, query and challenge contemporary understandings of people and place.