Gelikman - Cold Pastoral - Werner Herzog's Version of Empson (2008)

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    MLN123 (2008): 11411162 2009 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

    Cold Pastoral:Werner Herzogs

    Version of Empson

    Oleg Gelikman

    Quoi donc? Faut-il dtruire les socits,anantir le tien et le mien, et retourner vivredans les orts avec les ours?

    Rousseau1

    Lhomme ordinaire est dj ddoubl et sesent une me; mais il nest pas maitre delui-mme.

    Marcel Mauss2

    The origin o the documentary genre is an accursed question o lmtheory. Insoar as the answer exists, it usually involves a reerence to

    Robert Flahertys Nanook o the North.3

    It is easy enough to underminethis response on historical grounds: ater all, was not the entirety oearly cinema documentary in its approach? Wasnt regular or ctionallm, built as it was out o vaudeville, sideshows and theater, a laterphenomenon? True as these objections may be, they still do not war-rant dismissing Nanookas an arbitrary abrication. On the contrary,they raise an additional question: why, out o the tremendous rangeo documentary material accumulated over the rst three decadeso cinema, was itNanook, a primal drama about an Inuit hunter that

    came to dene the genre o the documentary? What expectationsdid Flahertys Nanookulll that other lms did not? What imaginarysatisactions did it discover? What desires did it capture or conjureor cinematic use? And what reasons, i any, may one still have or

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    continuing to reer to Nanookas a denitive documentary in the aceo all the evidence to the contrary? The key to answering these ques-tions, I believe, lies in recognizing Flahertys choice o the pastoralas his undamental convention.

    Robert Flaherty was not a lmmaker by trade but a prospector orSir William Mackenzie, a Canadian railroad baron. It was Mackenzie

    who suggested that Flaherty take a camera on his third expedition in1913, thereby changing Flahertys lie and, eventually, the course o

    world cinema. Flaherty made no secret o the act that his lm hadundergone long gestation beore its triumphant release in 1922. Onthe contrary, he was proud o the artistic choices he made over thenine years he spent working on the Nanookidea. From the standpointo documentary representation, these choices are consequential: theearly version oNanookwas a travelogue replicating a newsreel struc-ture conventional to the lms distributed by the Lumire company.The 30,000 eet o original ootage was lost in a re in 1916. Flahertyhad barely escaped the fames himsel. Having secured the sponsor-ship o the Rvillon Frres, a ur-trading group, Flaherty returned tothe northeast coast o Hudson Bay in 1920. The lm he shot at this

    point was quite dierent rom the rst one. It recounts two dramaticdays rom the lie o Nanook, whose real name was a considerablyless catchy Alakariallak. Flaherty exercised his Adamic privilege andrebaptised his subject the bear, derived rom the indigenous nanaq.4Over the course o the lm, the legendary hunter and his amilycanoe to the trading post, build an igloo, traverse icy expanses o the

    Arctic, and participate in a climactic seal hunt. The cult o simplicitydominates the lm: it appears in the emphasis on Nanooks stoicismin the ace o harsh conditions; his childishness; his endless cheer-

    ulness, or a smile appears on his ace whenever he is in the rame.The joy Nanook derives rom satisying his basic needs represents atruth so primal and secure as to make explanation superfuous. Ina revealing comment on the evolution o the lm, Flaherty elevatesNanook into a judge o the destruction which the West had alreadyinficted upon pure lie:

    I am not going to make the lms about what the white man has made oprimitive people. . . . What I want to show is the ormer majesty and char-acter o these people, while it is still possiblebeore the white man hasdestroyed not only their character, but the people as well.5

    Through these isolated remarks, we can see Flaherty discovering theideological ramework within which cinematic narrative can appear

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    incontestable. Suppression o criticism ennobles the lmic discourseby placing it beyond dispute, encouraging the ction o the camera asan instrument exempt rom the vagaries o rhetoric and contingencieso knowledge. Capturing exotic location distracts rom the real sourceso lms pathos; in truth, the lm stages the return o the hero as thesimplest and obscurest o men and plunges the audience into thestream o mythic time which has grown nearly inaccessible.6 Thereby,Nanooktransgures humanity arbitrarily dierentiated according to cli-mates into a single community o loss; it insinuates that we are denedby the irreversible attrition o the heroic as much as the Eskimos. Bysuppressing explicit criticism, the lm acquires the power to reconcileto the inevitable harshness o lie, gured by Arctic weather, and theinevitable harshness o history, which one eels more acutely in themoment o obscure empathy with the pastoral hero. The alchemicusion o atalism and criticism nearly extinguishes the heroic impulse

    which the lm revives. As spectators, we are meant to derive dignityrom the idea o survival and to be consoled by the act that we haveit better than Nanook.

    To make sel-sucient existence into a moral value and a rallying

    point o cultural critique is a tell-tale conceit o the pastoral pro-cess. This is where the signicance o Nanook or criticism lies. Inendorsing Nanook as the rst documentary, we accept the pastoralidentication o stoic simplicity and cultural critique as the basis orthe documentary pretense to truth-telling. When in ront oNanook,

    we are not revisiting a history o lm; we are endorsing Flahertyschoice o truth-convention. That truth, William Empson would say,is a version o pastoral.

    Empson on Film: Documentary Versions of Pastoral

    Empson catches on to the connection between the documentary andthe pastoral in the rst essay oSome Versions o Pastoral. In ProletarianLiterature, Empson singles out John Griersons The Driters(1929), alm about British herring shermen, or having delivered an authenticrevival o a pastoral eeling and declares it to be the only successulinstance o proletarian art by an Englishman:

    [A] man dislikes proletarian art because he eels that it is like pastoral, andthat that is either patronising or romantic. The Englishman who seemsto me nearest to a proletarian artist (o those I know anything about) isGrierson the lm producer;Dritersgave very vividly the eeling o actually

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    living on a herring trawler and (by the beauty o shapes o water and netand sh, and subtleties o timing and so orth) what I should call a pastoral

    eeling about the dignity o that orm o labour.7

    This is a remarkable statement o Empsons belie that, the ormalpossibilities o camerawork are capable o retrieving the aestheticcapabilities o the pastoral, and, more importantly, that the pastoralorm, while remaining undamental to documentary lm, is sucientlycomplex to operate beyond its perceived ideological limits (viz. thetendency either to patronize or to romanticize its subject matter).Given that exhibiting what Empson calls the tricks o pastoral is

    the task oSome Versions o Pastoral, one is led to suspect that the con-nections between the book and cinema run deeper than the passingreerence toDriterssuggests.8

    Empson rst sketched the key elements o his theory o the pastoralprocess in lm reviews he published in Cambridge student magazines,such as Grantaand The Cambridge Review. Among those elements werethe critical unction o double plot; mediation o complex as simplethrough reerence to nature as what does not develop; portrayal obeautiul relationship between socially antagonistic groups such as

    rich and poor, noble and common; theological weight carried byostensibly mundane plots. For instance, reviewing Walter RuttmansBerlin: Symphony o a Great City, Empson attributes the success o thelm to the resurgence o pastoral imagination as structuring device:[The producers] wanted to lay bare the works, the economics, the

    whole order o a great city; to show it opening like a fower and goingthrough a composed cycle, to show you its unctions, its explanation,its organism, to make you all down and worship a power and gloryo the world.9 The lie cycle o the fower yields a temporal orm

    enabling an elegant containment o urban disorder. But even whilepraising this ormal triumph, Empson cannot help reacting to disturb-ing ambiguities it brings orth. In saying that Berlinwants the audi-ence to all on its knees, he registers the ideological pressure lurkingbehind the admiration o appearances. Idyllic pastoral is an inspiringgenre, to be sure, but there is a catchit insists that you kneel and

    worship the power and the glory o the world as it is without youknowing it; Berlin, a oreign city, is a perect oil or encouragingsuch devotions.10

    A striking anticipation o Empsons theory o pastoral occurs in hisreview o Cecil B. De Milles King o Kings(1927) when he points tothe dog-like quality o Christs ace: The Christ in lms . . . is always

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    dog-like; you can read anything into the aces o dogs; they are rev-erent yet non-denominational (Haenden 1: 139). In Some Versionso Pastoral, the critic will argue that the pastoral hero is universalbecause he always stands or the whole, either the whole o natureor the whole o society (127, 198201). In addition to bolstering theuniversality o Christs persona, the dog-like expression o the actorsace substantiates humility as its dominant trait. This is why Empsonnds this dog-like appearance less convincing in the violent episodesrom the New Testament: a spaniel running amok in a temple doesnot convey moral grandeur.11

    It is quite clear, then, that in preparing Some Versions o Pastoralorpublication in 1935, Empson was not breaking new ground. Rather,he was consolidating the lines o thought pursued over the years andcomplicating them with explicit political and theological accents thatmade only casual appearance the rst time around. The unexpecteddemise o his academic career, the subsequent transplantation to Japan,and his experience o the eects o military dictatorship there in 1932no doubt sharpened his sensitivity to the political ideas latent in thegenre concerned with the representation o a proper or beautiul

    relation between parties to social antagonism, or, as Empson puts itwith deceptive simplicity, between the rich and the poor (196).12

    There is nothing simple about putting complex into simple, nobleinto common, power into powerlessness. To work as narrative, suchcondensation needs support rom an implicit web o arguments,metaphors, plots, and other tricks o thought. Versions o pastoraldo not and cannot stand on their own; they appear as statements

    within a system o statements that readers are meant to recognize,apprehend, and employ as inevitable points o comparison rooted in

    their pre-aesthetic experience o social antagonism. These pre-aestheticroots o pastoral serve as guarantors o meaning, assuring and evenoverriding the limits o specically dramatic credibility. (Thus, thepastoral voyage, like the one in The Tempest, can compel even whenit involves spirits and miracles because it evokes a deeper truth: notan imitation o social appearances, but o the essential confict theymask. The audience senses this and accepts the incredible as valid.)From the standpoint o criticism, then, virtual scaolding around theplot matters more than any particular narrative point: pastoral owes its

    vitality to its ability to establish complementary relations with aectiveterms (equality, simplicity, truth) located in the political imaginary.The task o Empsons book, then, is to reconstruct this pastoral system

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    both as an aesthetic artiact and ideological orce. Among other things,this means: to show that pastoral is not a thematic convention but aprinciple o representation rich in metaphysical subtleties; to mapthe development o pastoral rom the Elizabethans to Restoration; toexamine the rise and all in its credibility thereater, and especially inRomanticism; and to discern a use which contemporary literatureproletarian or modernistmay still have or this capacious poeticorm. Because the ambition o this program is theoretical, Empsondoes not reer to pastoral as a genre, but calls it a process ormachinery.13

    Ater Barthes, Althusser, and others, one may be tempted to say thatEmpsons denition o pastoral as putting complex into simple inthe interest o representing or imposing an image o beautiul rela-tions between rich and poor is one o the most prescient attemptsto schematize ideological subject-ormation. This is a truth, but apartial one. Naturalization o the antagonism is a version o pastoral,namely, the one in which the idyllic mode dominates the heroic, anddemystication is the proper response to it, as Empsons own tren-chant analysis o Grays Elegy Written in A Country Church Yard

    demonstrates (45). But demystication itsel is a version o irony, anddetecting ironies is part o reading pastoral. Does that mean that allpastoral plots satisy themselves with irony at the expense o the richor o readers who all under the spell o the idyllic? Leo Marx thinksthey do: The pastoral design, as always, circumscribes the pastoralideal.14 Raymond Williams implies as much: [Pastoral is an] idealisa-tion, based on a temporary situation and on a deep desire or stability,served to cover and to evade the actual and bitter contradictions othe time.15 Empson, or one, distrusts irony because it mirrors the

    omniscience the ironist takes as his target; because irony is irreduciblyhierarchical and conjures into being distinctions as rigid as the ones itannihilates; because the consciousness it posits is liable to overestimatethe impact o its intervention and, when all is said and done, leavethings as they are. In the last case, irony promotes reconciliation inthe guise o asserting a confict. For these and other reasons, irony,or Empson, is not ambiguous enough a concept to exhaust the tasko reading pastoral.

    Ideology is a version o pastoral. Pastoral recognizes its own hyper-

    bole and authorizes irony as the proper response when the heroicshades into mock.16 But the system o pastoral is larger than ideologyand irony put together. Pastoral has designs more ambitious thanduping others or duping onesel, and so probes deeper than the audi-

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    ences nave susceptibility to manipulation or the authors willingnessto deceive. ThroughoutSome Versions o Pastoral, Empson hints at thelimitations o the Romantic cult o irony and promotes device priorto irony as undamental to pastoral.17 A version o ambiguity, thisdevice prior to irony is a parallelism that can be established throughan oxymoronic duality o the pastoral hero (criminal as judge, noblesimpleton, mature child, doglike human, etc.), through a doubleplot (tragic/comic; idyllic/heroic), or even by means o somethingas elementary as a semantic disjunction between the couplet and thegay irrelevant rerain: She leaned her back against the thorn (Finefowers in the valley) (86). Mapping irony back onto device priorto irony, Empson substantiates his claim that the pastoral processis coherent and that ideology critique may be a reproduction o thesimple, rather than its decisive demystication.

    This limitation o irony may explain why Empson consistently reusesto be satised with demonstrating that the aesthetic coalescence o thesimple and the complex serves a class interest or normalizes powerrelations. Stopping the analysis there would presume that eliminationo class dierence or pathological power relations is the ultimate hori-

    zon o pastoral orm. Condemning antagonism as arbitrary, however,courts the sense o omnipotence which pastoral criticizes as acileand sel-blinding (when it becomes mock). It is an instance o themagical idea o the pastoral, that is, the elimination o antagonismthrough a redemptive journey into the wilderness; through recoveryo the primordial ground o social coherence which such journeyinadvertently permits; or, even more directly, through Orphic controlover the universe via omnipotent modes o thought. Empson wasa more skeptical reader o Marx than most o his contemporaries,

    perhaps as a result o taking two trips across Russia and keeping hiseyes open.18 Unlike Marx, he believed that social antagonism wouldpersist even into the realm o reedom, and that Grays Elegy wasbound to remain vital even under communism: When communistssay that an author under modern capitalism eels cut o rom most othe lie o the country, and would not under communism, the remarkhas a great deal o truth, though he might only exchange a sense oisolation or a sense o the waste o his powers; it is certainly not socompletely true as to make the verse rom Gray pointless to a man

    living under communism (18).19 Here Empson recalls the reerenceto the waste even in ortunate lie (5, italics mine) in his analysis oGrays elegy and anticipates the ollowing remark on unemploymentin MarvellUnemployment is too painul and normal even in the

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    ullest lieor such a theme to be trivial (123, italics mine). Pastoralcan never be trivial inasmuch as it revives a claim to ull existence

    which is an ineradicable condition o the human and the source oits incompletion, ambiguity, waste, unemployment, or pain. Pastoralachieves its deepest resonance when it engages social antagonism asan irreducible, mythic element o the political; when it intuits andexploits the ambiguous relations we orge with its promises and eva-sions; when, instead o urging the imminence or pastness o the idyllicstate, it reconciles us to the act that desire or such a state can neitherbe ullled nor obliterated. The waste remains, the waste remains andkills, writes Empson in Missing Dates, and I. A. Richards (wisely)calls this deep humor.20 The poem places remains and kills ina complex juxtapositionthe waste kills, but incompletely; and soone lives impersonated by its persistence. Waste, in short, is Emp-sons distinctive mode o acknowledging cosmic incoherence as ananimating orce.

    Empson attributes to pastoral an ability to connect social antagonismto the domain that Marcel Mauss called integral phenomena, thatis, modes o thought and actionsuch as magic, ritual, mass mania,

    etc.which neutralize the distinction between individual and collec-tive, psychic and ideological, and thereby achieve extreme symbolicecacy.21 By rationalizing integral phenomena, institutional orms olie overwhelm individuals with a sense o unemployment and waste.Counteracting this suppression, pastoral machinery developed as thesophisticated means to evoke, exploit, mask and otherwise control itseectan acute sense o incommensurability between what one is and

    what is allowed to be, between what one eels to be independent oall becoming and what one becomes. Pastoral evokes this primordial

    political ground as the need to connect to what is dierent. The gloryand misery o Empsons idea o literature is to recognize that, unlessconnected to another version o the human, one is not even human;unless connected to the innite, one is not even nite; unless con-nected to the undying, one is not even mortal.22 This exposure to thenon-human remains uncontainable even when contained: establishingreciprocity between the opposing terms is an ideal but never an out-come o the pastoral process in literature. Exorbitant empathy with thenon-human cannot be eradicated; one can only enact the contradic-

    tions and promises inherent in its persistence, and literature, as ar asEmpson is concerned, is the only coherent way o doing so.

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    The Ambiguity of the Orphic: Marvells Garden

    and Treadwells Kingdom

    How could such sweet and wholesome HoursBe reckond but with herbs and fowrs!

    Marvell, The Garden

    Empsons stress on the meta-politics o pastoral becomes explicit inhis analysis o Marvells The Garden. Pointing to the lines closingstanza six, Annihilating all thats made / To a green thought in agreen shade, Empson speaks o the vehemence o the couplet, and

    this hint o physical power in thought itsel . . . may hint at an ideathat one would like to eel was present, as otherwise it is the onlymain idea about Nature that the poem leaves out; . . . the Orpheusidea, that by delight in Nature when terrible man gains strength tocontrol it (120).23

    The Orphic idea asserts that mind depends on nature or the knowl-edge o its power, but it makes the use o this power conditional uponhow nature is accessed. As Pierre Hadot has shown in The Veil o Isis,that idea encompasses both the empowerment o the mind by the

    spectacle o terrible nature and the pacication o the terrible, rudesociety by the spectacle o the peaceul, tranquil nature.24 The tricko thought remains the same in both scenarios, namely, recoveringthe preternatural, primordial dependence o mind upon nature as theonly ground on which the social antagonism can be adjudicated. Inthe rst case, this happens because the recognition o powerlessnessempowers the spectator; and in the second, by the production o themiddle termthe middle landscapewhich assures the spectatorthat upon his return to the world he will possess the secure ground

    enabling the healing o the confict that precipitated his exile.Empsons reservations about the presence o the Orpheus ideain the Garden do not stop him rom reerring to it, but, paradoxi-cally, prompt him to return to its unsuccessul exclusion. Thus, laterin the essay Empson remarks: Nature when terrible is no theme oMarvells, and he gets this note o triumph rather rom using nature

    when peaceul to control the world o man (122). Rude nature maynot be a theme in Marvell, but Empsons theory o pastoral is notthematic. Complementary themes tend to imply each other. Quite

    regularly, they communicate in spite and because o the separationsput up in their textual exposition. Besides, Annihilating all thatsmade is a ormulation suciently strong to vindicate more than ahint o attributing destructive powers to thought.25 Even the note

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    o triumph echoes the absence o terror and drags in the possibilityo its return. As a structural complement to the pacication scenario,the rude nature idea impinges upon it as a threat does upon a promiseand thereby lends conviction and depth to the promise o pacication.

    When debating the presence o the Orphic idea in Marvell, Empsonpoints to contemporary reincarnations o empathy with the terribleside o Nature and remarks that it is still strong, one would think,among mountain climbers and oten the scientists (120).

    Timothy Treadwell, the protagonist o Werner Herzogs 2005 lmGrizzly Man, ts well into Empsons categories, or he was somethingo a hybrid between the two typesa survivalist and a bear expert, abear scientist in the mountains. A man who understands bears appearsimpressive to himsel and, more importantly, to others: by incarnatingrude nature as subdued, his quiet rhetoric o empathy glows with thethreat o suppressed violence and a promise that this suppression canbe extended to the social terrain as well. The pastoral process placestwo Orphic scenarios in a relationship o cause and eect. Via thepastoral hero, empathy with primal substance o creation becomestransgured into the energy o pacication o the rude society. It

    is with moments o such exorbitant empathy that Herzog opens hisventure into the Alaskan wilderness, and takes the documentary genrealong with him.

    In the opening sequence o the lm, Herzog constructs a monu-ment to his protagonista speaking tombstone. Timothy Treadwell,aka the Grizzly Man, has barely begun to promulgate his royal statusas the Lord o the Bear Country when a caption appears, TimothyTreadwell (19572003), thereby suggesting a disturbing connectionbetween the idyllic setting and the ending o a human lie.

    Floating into the rame, Treadwell emanates out o the monumentalsurroundings, materializing the natural world and its creatures andspeaking a primary language inaccessible to those who had not par-taken o his journey. Ater delivering the monologue, Treadwell allssilent and reezes in the kind warrior attitude. For a brie moment, hisprole mirrors that o the bear in the background, and this spontane-ous likeness reads like a miraculous yet necessary conrmation o hisrhetoric. This gesture uses Treadwell with his kingdom and consecratesthe pastoral order he has already established in discourseTreadwell

    as the equal and the Lord o the creature: his rival, his superior, hisrepresentative and, perhaps, redeemer. Grizzly Manstarts out as a testi-mony and a tribute to the vitality o pastoral as a mode o restorationo the authentic relations between the unequals.

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    Despite the crudeness o Treadwells theatrics, we cannot help but beimpressed by the distance his understanding seems to have traversed.We eel guilty and amazed at our own unwillingness to imagine suchcapacious modes o empathy. We are awed by the dignity he is capableo bestowing on the world around him and wounded by our habitualreusal to do the same.

    The Orphic encounters rely on the collapse o distancesimulta-neously in a spatial and in a symbolic senseas their basic device.By dwelling too close to the creatures, Treadwells images violate

    the sense o distance required or perceiving them as animals andthus make them into more uncanny presences located between theanimal and the human. Showing the creatures up close does notbring them nearer; on the contrary, optical proximity distances thecreatures, and so they appear less accessible than beore. Thereby, themanipulations o cinematic space reveal mimesis and distance as col-laborators in the minutely-orchestrated game, the game whose rulesTreadwell is deliberately violating. The merging o the animals intosuch uncanny presences cannot but tinge these images with terror and

    encourage assimilating this terror to Treadwells evident mastery andassurance; Herzogs editinghe had a hundred hours o ootage tochose romcapitalizes on the collapse o distance as a trope o theOrphic. In Grizzly Man, Herzog redoubles his protagonist and thus

    Figure 1.Exegi monumentum: Timothy Treadwell becomes his own tombstone.

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    Figure 2. Visual rhyme as identity o substance. Ater delivering the openingmonologue, Treadwell assumes the kind warrior attitude. His earth-bound posturemirrors that o the bear in the background. This spontaneous likeness reads like amiraculous, yet necessary conrmation o his Orphic rhetoric.

    gives an Orphic perormance o his own, although not quite in thesame spirit as Treadwells.

    These imagesa new kind o wildlie lm, Herzog calls themretrieve the horror o mimesis that we have almost unlearned, the

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    Figure 3. Visual rhyme as dramatic value. The bears posture echoes Treadwellsdrooping arms. Herzog introduces the Orphic visual rhyme into the dramaticinrastructure o his narrative. In this scene, the rhyme precedes a conrontationbetween the creature and the lorda mock spectacle o rebellion andreconciliation. The Orphic visual rhyme establishes the primordial anity as astarting point o the episode, and anticipates Treadwells assertion o omnipotent

    love which ends it.

    Figure 4. Treadwells game: Youre a big bear! Once the grizzly leaves the scene,Treadwell takes his place and ecstatically re-enacts the animals gestures. Though thisgame o mimetic substitution, he absorbs the bears magical substancea compoundo power and innocence, terror and playulness, independence and humility.

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    horror that speaks to us only through dislike o being mimicked,unease in ront o oversize mirrors or this comment o Goethes ontableaux vivants:

    The attitudes were so right, the colors so harmoniously distributed, the

    lighting so cleverly arranged, that one truly thought onesel to be in anotherworld, except or the act that the presence o the real, substituted orappearance, produced a kind o impression o anguish.26

    The collapse o distance in Orphic encounters leads to the same sub-stitution o the real or the appearance that Goethe evokes. Herzogsediting remakes Treadwells ootage into the gallery otableaux vivantsthat accumulate such an excess o the real over appearance. To theextent that these super-mimetic images revive the ambiguity immanentto imitation, Treadwells reduction o this ambiguity through appropria-

    tion seems all the more impressive. And so, thanks to Herzog, we areated to perceive the rituals devised by Treadwell as heroic eorts atmastery and pacicationindications o humanitys grandeur whichare all the more impressive and pure or being misdirected.

    Figure 5. The Orphic communion: It [the bears excrement] is still warm. Thedisappearance o the taboo is now an actuality in Treadwells middle landscape. Bymeans o contact with mystical substance, he has become an Adamic man who existsoutside o dierences between the permissible and the orbidden, the pure andthe impure. This de-dierentiation signals the ulllment o the claim to absolute

    existence thwarted in Treadwells proane vocations as an athlete and an actor.

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    By means o recurrent visual rhyming and collapsing the distancebetween Treadwell and the creatures, Herzog reinorces the credibilityo Treadwells interaction with the grizzlies while highlighting its sacral,ritual nature. He shows that the Orphic delight in terrible nature,rather than being a contemplative attitude, indicates a persistence oritual behavior based on the magic idea o control. Moreover, Herzogsediting species the terms o Treadwells Orphic pact: by entering intohermeneutic communion with creatures, the pastoral hero is ableto purge nature o its contamination by the terrible and thereby tostabilize the ambiguity o the Orphic construct as a whole. Treadwelltakes evident delight in having cheated death repeatedly. Avoidanceo death, in turn, conrms his sel-perception as an exceptional char-acter, thereby validating the missionary return to the civilization andcementing his role as both its critic and scapegoat, a duality centralto Empsons idea o the pastoral hero.

    Even when Herzog limits himsel to reconstructing Treadwellswilderness, he reveals the camera as an accomplice indispensable tostaging the primordial encounters with rude nature. More than once,the viewer, like Treadwell, becomes convinced that communication

    between Grizzly Man and his charges is taking place, that they dounction as members o the community he has constructed by meanso Adamic naming (he calls bears Chocolate, Rowdy, etc.), and thatthe mission that Treadwell extracted rom the pastoral interplay oear, delight and pacication is valid.

    Herzog pays an impressive homage to the persuasiveness o cinematicrhetoric, but only in order to make it more vulnerable to subsequentcritique. Treadwell is no bear expert, and his claims to knowledge areOrphic: they rest on ritual, not research. His expertise eeds o the

    energies o pastoral machinery, making his wild success with educa-tional institutions and the media a testimony to the entrenchment othe ideological versions o pastoral. Far rom exhibiting Treadwellsootage as a simple record o contact with Nature, Herzog showsTreadwell engaging in the game o re-appropriation and recovery othe claims which the world had denied him. Like any true adventurer,the pastoral hero plots his triumphant return to the terra infrmaosocial antagonism and will vigorously maintain his claim to being anoutsider, even in the ace o enthusiastic acceptance by the world.

    Treadwell does just this when he rants against the park rangers andthe government, who are supposedly interering with his mission. Itis this exorbitant claim to the role o an outsider-as-judge which leadshim to ruin.

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    Double Plots: Herzogs Bifurcations

    This power o suggestion is the strengtho the double plot; once you take the twoparts to correspond, any character may takeon manabecause he seems to cause whathe corresponds to or be Logos o what hesymbolizes.

    Empson (34)

    Herzog begins his lm by reconstructing Treadwells ctional world

    as a primal drama dened by the undamental polarities betweenthe Enemy and the Friend, the God above and Creatures below (seeDiagram 1). The diagram encapsulates theabulao the auto-diegeticnarrative level o the lm where Treadwell narrates and Herzogedits. Sjuet, or narration, begins at the center and then proceeds ina centriugal spiral pattern. In the rst part o the lm, the cameracirculates between the terms o Treadwells universe: it moves romCreature to Friend, rom Enemy to God, barely seeming to disturb

    Diagram 1. Treadwells Wilderness: The Primal Drama

    GodTheWorldState oNature

    Lordthe kind warrior

    Prayer

    Judge Scapegoat

    Internal(Spirit the Fox)

    External(Grizzly People,Children,Supporters)

    Communication

    warpeace

    Friend Enemy

    Creature

    External(Park Service,government)

    Internal(poachers,rangers)

    State oNature TheWorld

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    or question the reality o the universe it is exploring. Even thoughthe Grizzly Man never made his lm, Herzog pays Treadwell the lm-maker a handsome compliment and contrasts his ootage with theordinary wildlie documentary. Interviews with riends, supporters, orgirlriends are presented at ace value. Their objections to the worldoutside Treadwells ourold maintain the veneer o reasoning.

    Soon enough, however, Herzogs camera begins to brush up againstthe limits o Treadwells universemarked by dotted lines on thediagramand, eventually, to transgress them. In the guise o veriyingthe claims o Treadwells primal drama, Herzog constructs a series oplots redoubling Treadwells own. (Double plot is a standard device inpastoral, and the parallelism it establishes alls in the range o Emp-sons device prior to irony.) Two o these supplementary plots mattermost to the problem o pastoral: Treadwells devolution to being anaccomplice in the death o his girlriend and Herzogs reassertion othe dierence between his version o pastoral and Treadwells.

    Though he maintains the pretense o piety, Herzog criticizes thepastoral modes o reasoning rom the start. In one o the earliestbarbs in Treadwells direction, a helicopter pilot wearing dark, police

    shades, himsel a straight talking, no-nonsense mock pastoral gure,declares that [Treadwell thought] he was dealing with men in bearcostumes. The other side o this equation, however, is that Treadwell

    was a bear wearing mans body as a costume. The lm narrates a legiti-mate pastoral transormation o the scapegoat into critic, an outcastinto king, o the man who, because he includes his environment, canrepresent and control both nature and society. Herzog chroniclesthe transormation o Treadwell into a sacricial Christ-gure and ascapegoat as perormed and recorded by Treadwell himsel. However,

    by letting Treadwell prattle on, Herzog collapses the integrity o thectional space o his drama and superimposes an additional plotupon Treadwells. This one ollows the logic o Aristotelian tragedythat prescribes that the protagonist all prey to a faw in his charac-ter. At the end o what was to be his last summer, Treadwell reusedto board a plane back to Caliornia ollowing an altercation with anairline agent. Then, he did what he had never done beore, namely,return to the bear territory in the all, the season when his bears gointo hibernation and cede the territory to the old, sick, desperately

    undernourished members o their species. The return rom the air-port signies Treadwells loss o the power to mediate between theextremes o his world. Pastoral machinery breaks down, leaving theman prey to his hubris. Following the logic that seems all the more

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    implacable or appearing unstaged, Treadwell loses his lie as soon ashe completely merges with his setting.

    The gure that matters most in the tragic plot, however, is notTreadwell but Amie Huguenard, his girlriend. By stressing thatTreadwell omitted any reerence to her existence rom his ootage,Herzog makes the violence o her needless death seem an extensiono the violence o Treadwells pastoral designs. Why was Amie excludedrom Treadwells tapes? Nature and solitude go together in MarvellsGarden and Treadwells delusion. The presence o a woman wouldcompromise his devotion to the creatures, disturb the illusion o hisprimordial belonging, undermine his claim that communion withthe wilderness is ullling and restorative, and ultimately undercuthis claim to martyrdom. Even i Amie was there by his side, Treadwellbelieved that he was alone with the bears, since she was absent romthe scene o the pastoral, except, perhaps, as a trace o the world hehad already annihilated. In the garden, a woman is not a being buta shameul aterthought.

    Restoring this disturbing omission concentrates the tragic energy othe lm, or i one could discern a crude divine justice in Treadwells

    death, Amie Huguenard upstages him as a more authentic martyr. Herend exposes Treadwells survivalist narrative as too well-crated to becrediblerather a sel-ullling prophecy which, in the nal piece ogrim dramatic irony, worked out only too well.

    Out of Thought: Herzog in the Wild

    Thou, silent orm, dost tease us out o thoughtAs doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!

    Keats27

    Placing a mad hero-king at the center, the main plot o Grizzly Manstages the triumph o the tragic tendency within the pastoral mode.But Herzogs second plot, built around a simple dramatic irony o theman rendered inhuman and murderous by communion with beasts,undoes the rst.

    The critical violence o Herzogs re-appropriation o Treadwell doesnot rest in irony, however. It reaches its peak when, his voice hovering

    over the ootage o Amie Huguenards unintentional intrusion intothe rame and a close shot o a grizzly staring down the camera, heutters words that strike at the heart o Treadwells pastoral design: and

    what haunts me is that, in all the aces o all the bears Treadwell ever

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    lmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see onlythe overwhelming indierence o nature. To me, there is no such thingas the secret world o the bears, and this blank stare speaks only o ahal-bored interest in ood. Overwhelming is Herzogs most reveal-ing word, or nature does overwhelm, not only through splendor, butalso through persistence o lie, hunger, pain, unemployment andwaste. The vehemence o Herzogs rebuttal bespeaks an identica-tion with his protagonist, or the indierence o nature overwhelmsonly as part o the pastoral scheme. The sentiment o indierencepresupposes an irreducible demand or empathy.

    Thus, i Herzog rejects a sentimental view o the story and reusesto be teased out o thought, he does so precisely because he allsunder its power, not because he evades it. We do the same: the con-

    ventions o Herzogs lm make it impossible to experience pastoralwithout ambiguity. In demanding a conrontation with our vulner-ability to mimetic modes o reasoning, pastoral recovers the dignitythat Herzogs meticulous exposition appears to have taken away romit. Rather than placing us in contact with nature, Herzogs lm stagesan interpretative encounter with the claim to proper relations that

    no poetic orm, not even pastoral, can ulll or contain.In the end, even as Treadwells version o pastoral leaves Herzogcold, it also makes him more engaged with the energy o documentaryas an unsentimental, sober venture into the domain o antagonisticrelations between simple and complex, act and ction, power andpowerlessness. This ongoing dependence o the documentary uponpastoral convention justies recognizing Herzogs lmmaking asanother chapter in the Empsonian analysis o the archaic orm.

    Soka University

    NOTES

    1 Discours sur lorigine et les ondements de lingalit parmis les hommes; Discours sur lessciences et les arts(Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1992) 188.

    2 Questions poses la psychologie, Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris: PUF, 1989[1950]) 306.

    3 See, or instance, Eric Barnow, Documentary: A History o Non-Fiction Film, 2ndRevised Edition (New York: Oxord, 1993); Barsam, Richard, Nonfction Film:A Critical History (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992); Bill Nichols, Introduction toDocumentary(Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001); Barry Keith Grant and JeannetteSloniowski, Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings o Documentary Film andVideo, Contemporary Film and Television Series (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1998);Patricia Auderheide,Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction(New York: Oxord

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    UP, 2007); Jack C. Ellis and Betsy A. McLane, A New History o Documentary Film(New York: Continuum, 2005).

    4 Alan Marcus cites these details in his Nanook o the Northas Primal Drama VisualAnthropology19.3 (2006): 205. This essay contains a close discussion o Nanooksproduction history and cultural legacy. Robert J. Christopher oers the rst ull-fedged account o Flahertys path to Nanookin his Robert and Frances Flaherty: ADocumentary Lie, 18831922(Montreal: McGill-Queens UP, 2005).

    5 Cited in Barnow 45.

    6 Thoreau denes the hero as the simplest and obscurest o men in Walking,an ambitious venture into pastoral representation in its own right; see CollectedEssays and Poems(New York: Library o America, 2001) 239.

    7 Some Versions o Pastoral(New York: New Directions, 1974 [1935]) 8. Further reer-ences will be given in the text.

    8 Flaherty will later make a Grierson-style sherman lm, Man o Aran(1934).

    9 Cited in John Haenden, William Empson, Vol. 1: Among the Mandarins(New York:Oxord UP, 2005) 141. Book and lm reviews Empson wrote as a Cambridgeundergraduate were collected as Empson in Granta(Tunbridge Wells: FoundlingPress, 1993).

    10 Empson sticks to his insistence on the idyllic pathos o the urban pastoral evenwhen challenged with an alternative view oBerlinas criticism o dehumanization.The critical side o pastoral, or Empson, cannot be presumed to be active by de-nition; its pertinence to a particular instance needs to be argued; c. Haenden 1:142.

    11 Empson had an extraordinary sensitivity to aces and read widely in the physiog-nomic tradition. He wrote a book about Buddha aces which was lost in 1947 andrecovered ty years later (Haenden 1: 31819). For a close reading o Empsonon Buddha aces, see Sharon Cameron, Impersonality(Chicago: Chicago UP, 2007)120.

    12 Toward the end o the Proletarian Literature, Empson admits to an uncontrol-lable tendency to read political literature as pastoral and pastoral as politicalliterature (20); c. also his remark on the political circumstances in Japan: oneeels the popular jingoism and ocial militarism like a weight on the back o theneck (Haenden 1: 320). Antagonism ts Empsons conception o pastoralbetter than confict or struggle to the extent that this concept invokes the ideao an irreducible confict as the structuring orce in any society regardless o itsmode o production. Empson comes close to this usage whenever he speaks o aclash. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Moue develop the concept o antagonismin Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London:Verso, 1985). The dierence between the orthodox struggle and the revisionistantagonism was urther elaborated under the rubric o the loss o the lossby Slavoj iek in For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor(London: Verso, 1991) 16870. For a useul synthesis o the debate, c. GeorgeHartley, The Abyss o Representation: Marxism and the Postmodern Sublime(Durham,NC: Duke UP, 2003).

    13 Even i Empson goes about ullling his theoretical ambition in an anti-systematicashion, opting to convince by the range o examples and strength o isolated

    analyses, he throws out some essential considerations along the way. For instance,he argues that the question o power is inherent in pastoral setting since the shep-herds were the rulers o the sheep (12). Pastoral becomes explicitly political whenit comments on the possibilities open to social groups located at the opposite endso the continuum o power. Because Grays Elegy naturalizes this continuum,

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    Empson reserves harsh words or it. He argues that in placing the powerless inthe same ontological category as pearls and fowers, Gray had acquiesced with

    the utter impossibility o a dierent social order (45). Thus, pastoral representsa relationship between rich and poor, powerul and powerless, while aiming toremedy or neutralize this inequality through a resurgence o mythic past, symbolicpresent or utopian uture. Empsons pastoral is a discourse o inequality.

    In addition, Empson suggests that as the class dierences got progressively morecomplex, the appeal o the pastoral increased (199). Walter Benjamin registersthe same process in his discussion o baroque drama (The Origin o German TragicDrama[London: Verso, 1977] 93), in which the representation o nature beginsto intrude upon the political intrigue. In terms o the history o dramatic orm,it appears as i nature comes into play whenever the representation o politicalconfict can no longer be handled through representation o action. Hence, theawareness o the tricks and turns o pastoral should be developed in tandem with

    a theory o action, especially because the pastoral principle arrogates the rightto critique as it makes the civilizing process its target. A theory o pastoral, onthe other hand, distinguishes between pastoral process as such and a version opastoral which contains critique by means o atalistic resignation in the ace ohistorical change. For an in-depth discussion o Empsons conception o pastoral,see Paul Alpers, Empson on Pastoral New Literary History10.1 (1978): 10123;Christopher Norris, For Truth in Criticism: William Empson and the Claims oTheory, The Truth about Postmodernism(Oxord: Blackwell, 1993); John Haen-den, Among the Mandarins, 37699; Matthew Beavis, Introduction: Empson in theRound, Hugh Haughton, Alice and Ulyssess Bough: Nonsense in Empson, andSeamus Perry, Coleridge, Christ and Contradiction in Empson collected in SomeVersions o Empson(New York: Oxord UP, 2007); and Paul H. Fry, William Empson:Prophet Against Sacrifce(London: Routledge, 1991).

    14 The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America(New York:Oxord UP, 1967) 72; also 74.

    15 The Country and the City(London: Chatto &Windus, 1973) 45.

    16 For a recent reexamination o the poetics o mock, c. Simon Jarvis, Mock asscreen and optic, Critical Quarterly46.3 (2004): 119.

    17 Revision o the concept o irony is the second overriding concern o Empsonssecond book, and requires a separate discussion. Three out o seven essays col-lected in Some VersionsDouble Plots, They That Have Power and The Beg-gars Operamake irony into a turning point o their overall critical argument.

    Section Two o Double Plots discusses device prior to irony in detail; see also86, 212.

    18 Thus, in Empsons dispatch rom the Trans-Siberian trip in 1937, his second:Nobody with any sense o history is going to be surprised at the orgy o killingbureaucrats in modern Russia. . . . I think them a tremendous people; and eventhis awul present day despair is only a thing lanced and let to the surace. Butgoodness me, tell a Durham miner that Marx has something to tell him, and sohe may, but dont pretend Stalin has (cited in Haenden 1: 435).

    19 In a well-known passage rom Volume Three oCapital, Marx argues that, whilethe division o labor will still be present in the post-capitalist society o the associ-ated producers, it will no longer engender an antagonistic relationship between

    social groups; c. On the Realm o Necessity and the Realm o Freedom, TheMarx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1972) 31920.

    20 Jean-Jacques Lecercle cites I. A. Richards comment as he analyzes the comic ele-ment o Empsons poetry in William Empsons Cosmicomics, William Empson:The Critical Achievement, ed. Christopher Norris and Nigel Mapp (New York: Cam-

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    bridge UP, 1993) 28081. Frequently anthologized, Missing Dates was includedin Collected Poems(London: Chatto & Windus, 1959) 60.

    21 Marcel Mausss studies in total phenomenamagic, git, thanatomania, anati-cism, vendetta, to cite just a ewoer a suggestive t model or theorizing symbolicecacy o poetic orms: Venons maintenant ce oisonnement gigantesque de lavie sociale elle-mme, de ce monde de rapport symbolique que nous avons avecnos voisins. Ne peuvent-ils pas tre compars directement limage mythique et,comme elle, ne se rverbrent-ils pas linni? . . . Car cest l quest un des pointsondamentaux la ois de la vie sociale et de la vie de la conscience individuelle:le symbolegnie voqua sa vie propre; il agit et se reproduit indniment(300).

    22 The same pattern o reading resuraces in Empsons reactions to Freud, Otto Rank,Coleridge, T. E. Hulme and Wyndham Lewis. Death is the liminal gure o such

    grounding dierence, and hence any consistent pastoral must expose its hero todeath. Pastoral necrophilia, however, is a ploy, or it anticipates resurrectionand return; Ovids Orpheus story both glories and criticizes the notion o returnrom Hades (c. Arguying: Essays on Literature and Culture[Iowa City: University oIowa P, 1987] 555, n.3 and the whole o Death and Its Desires [53455]). Pain,waste and unemployment result rom the ailures to sustain such groundingdierence, but they also name the renewal o the attempts to re-establish suchdierence, not least because the acts and events thus named cannot simply beailures or successes.

    23 Empson is commenting on lines 4148 o the poem, The Poems and Letters o AndrewMarvell, vol. I, ed. H. M. Margoliouth (Oxord: Clarendon Press, 1927) 49. Theull text o the stanza runs:

    Mean while the Mind, or pleasure lessWithdraws into its happiness:The Mind, that Ocean where each kindDoes straight its own resemblance nd;Yet it creates, transcending these,Far other Worlds, and other Seas;Annihilating all thats madeTo a green Thought in a green Shade.

    24 For instance, in the ollowing summary: nature is both a spectacle that ascinatesus, even i terries us, and a process that surrounds us. The Orphic attitude, whichrespects it, seeks the preserve a living perception o mature; at the opposite ex-treme rom the Promethean attitude, however, it oten proesses a primitivism thatis not without danger either (The Veil o Isis, trans. Michael Chase [Cambridge,Mass.: Belknap, 2006] 98). Hadot makes the contrast between the Orphic andthe Promethean tendency in Occidental thinking aboutphusisa recurrent themeo his encyclopedic volume.

    25 Empsons didence comes as a surprise to any reader oSeven Types o Ambiguity.It is unusual to see Empson vacillate like this, arguing or the inclusion by omis-sion, unless we assume that it is done to orce the point on his reader, not as aninterpretation, but as an inevitability built into the logic o The Garden.

    26 Goethe, Elective Afnities, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1971)191.

    27 John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn, lines 4445, Poetical Works, ed. H. W. Garrod(London: Oxord UP, 1970) 210.