(with an introduction to a debate between Genette and Derrida)

Cyhoeddwyd yn y Gymraeg fel: / Published in Welsh as:
Schimanski, Johan. “‘Y Fugeilgerdd Delynegol’: Genre Naturiol? gan gynnwys cyflwyniad i ddadl rhwng Genette a Derrida”. Cyf. Simon Brooks. Y Traethodydd CXLIX.630/Ionawr 1994 (1994): 38-49.

My fascination for the "Lyric Pastoral" (whatever that is) begins with a gesture by Jacques Derrida, at the very beginning of his essay "La loi du genre", `The Law of Genre' from 1980[1]. "Ne pas mêler les genres. Je ne mêlerai pas les genres." he writes - `Genres are not to be mixed. I will not mix genres.'

 With these statements Derrida sets out to rewrite the concept of genre, using their "resonances" to generate a complex proliferation of levels and contexts. I will be returning to some of these later; and also to some of the accusations which Gérard Genette - with whom Derrida is in constant dialogue in this essay - has to level against a Romantic handling of genres.

 To begin with, however, Derrida's call to order, which is really the call to order that genre implies. Can genres be called "mixed"? Are some genres "purer" than others? My purpose here is to provide an example of one attempted mixing of genres - the lyric with the pastoral - which perhaps takes away more than it puts in:

The Reader will observe, that the term Lyric Pastoral has been often used, and will, perhaps ask, for what reason?—It is this—We often observe Shepherds, and other rural characters, diverting themselves with songs, which are always, in the proper sense of the word, sung to a tune; the verse of course must be Lyric. SHENSTONE'S Pastoral Ballads are, for this reason, amongst others, far more natural than the Bucolics of Theocritus, Virgil, and many more that could be named; this at last is a Welsh Bard's opinion, who admits of no authority but that of NATURE. We often hear the fields resound with Chevy Chase, Tweed Side, and such popular songs. Shepherds, Ploughmen, and Goatherds, will often write verses to favourite tunes in praise of their Phillidas, their Annies, and their Delias. But we never meet with them spouting Heroics, "sub tegmine fagi." At least it is thus in every part of BRITAIN. But some, it seems, are of the opinion that we should write for other countries, climates, and times, rather than our own. Bravo! my good Critics!

 The first of these, pp.182-185, discusses the "content" at being able to live a life in natural, and not urban, surroundings. That is to say, alone with a "happy lot", outside society, and free of ambition and desires. It finishes off, however, with the hope that this content may never be found - a wish rather to strive for virtue and thus remain humble before "thou from whom all comfort flows".

 A short poem, titled only "A Song" separates this "lyric pastoral" from the next. It describes the singer's love for Phillis, comparing it to the natural surroundings of "the grove".

 The second "lyric pastoral", starting on p.187 and titled "The Parting", is also a love-poem. It projects what will happen while the singer, shepherd, and lover Colin's love Delia is away, and what will happen on her return. The first two poems I have described are in the first person, meditative, with only slight narrative movements - the shepherd rises in the morning, the lover takes his beloved in his arms. "The Parting" is also meditative - it recounts Colin's thoughts at the moment of parting. But with the lines (p.187):

I leave thee my constant heart;
Thy Colin shall, in plaintive song,

 There is no direct admission in this poem that the singer is a shepherd. We assume so because of the word "pastoral" in the sub-title (a "paratext" to the poem), and because he and Delia are obviously inhabitants of a natural region. The indications of pastoralism in the poem on "Content" are similarly scant. While the focus of the poem appears to be the unidentified owner of a "sequester'd cot" and a "little flock of sheep", upon seeing a shepherd he exclaims (p.183):

Oh! let my days like his be spent,
In rural shades, with mild Content.

 Similarly, in the second "lyrical pastoral", the authoritative literary voice of the "I" contrasts with the rudeness of the third person "Colin", as used here. We are asked to respect the convention that the shepherd of the pastoral is also a kind of poet, but then have to ask: what kind of poet?

 Neither of these poems are very interesting, and the same can be said of the rest of the two volume collection, which is full of different pastorals and lyrics: though no other such "lyric pastorals". In addition to poetry, we find a great many remarks and footnotes, like the one quoted above.

 This text follows directly upon the end of the last of the three poems, as a supplement explaining the sudden, perhaps unexpected, use of the term "lyric pastoral". To me, these poems seem a sort of preamble to this argumentative fragment, rather than this fragment being an explanation of the poems.

 Seeing as my concern is genres, one might observe that I am obviously having problems with the genre of this text - is it a supplement, a fragment, a remark, an explanation, a comment? Or even a note or a short essay? Some of these terms pertain to literature, some to philosophy. And considering the aggressively ironic note on which this text ends -

But some, it seems, are of the opinion that we should write for other countries, climates, and times, rather than our own. Bravo! my good Critics!

 Iolo Morganwg had his Poems, Lyric and Pastoral printed at the age of 47, by J. Nichols, editor of The Gentleman's Magazine. This was at the end of his second stay in London - he had, for several years, been posing in various literary and radical circles as the last "Welch bard". He was up to his neck in propagating the Madoc-legend, and still hadn't given up hopes of travelling to America. Two years before, he had arranged the first druidical gorsedd on Primrose Hill.

 Iolo was something of an eccentric visionary, a stonemason, antiquarian, druid, activist and poet, mainly in Welsh. Relevant to the publication of these poems in English are two biographical facts. Firstly, that his first tongue was English and not Welsh. Secondly, that he claimed that the muse had left him after marriage in 1781[3].

 In 1926, G. J. Williams revealed[4] that after that point, Iolo had become a literary forger, building up an intricate Romantic vision of Wales and his native Glamorgan in scale far exceeding the forgeries of Macpherson or Chatterton. It appears that while the muse had left him, his ability to write very good poems in the medieval Welsh metres had not.

 In the introduction to Poems, Lyric and Pastoral, Iolo proceeds to rewrite his own personal history in a sentimental vein, so as to complete his vision of himself as continuator and mediator of the Welsh bardic tradition. The whole apparatus of footnotes and commentary thus takes part in an attempt to rebuild an economy of import and export on the borders between two cultures. And the potential demand for his edited version of himself and of Welsh culture is based on the increasingly Romantic desires of the subscribers to the two volumes. These included such people as George Washington, Tom Paine, William Cowper, the Prince of Wales, William Wilberforce, Horace Walpole, and several of the more prominent women of the literary salons. Many of these people he knew personally, and his book was no doubt also read by his champion Robert Southey.

 So, what are Iolo Morganwg's intentions with this particular piece of argument on the lyric pastoral? What does he need the "lyric pastoral" for, what does he think the "lyric pastoral" is, and how does this help him?

 The text contains several generic terms, and also several versions of the genre pastoral; but they quickly resolve themselves into two camps. On the one hand, we find Iolo's "Lyric Pastoral", the "songs" of shepherds, "lyric" verse, Shenstone's "Pastoral Ballads", "popular songs" like "Chevy Chase" and "Tweed Side", and "verses to favourite tunes". On the other we find the "Bucolics" of Theocritus and Virgil, and "Heroics `sub tegmine fagi'" - the last Latin phrase, meaning "beneath the cover of the beech", being a reference to the first line of the first of Virgil's eclogues.

 So, there are several things happening behind the scenes of Iolo's short discourse on the "lyric pastoral". The main contrast is between the classical and the natural, a contrast of "countries, climates, and times". That is to say, Doric Greece versus "Britain", the Greek versus the British environment, and the past versus the present.

 There are two problems with such a strategy. The first is that Iolo implies a defect with certain contemporary verse, that is, with the well-worn classical conventions of pastoral poetry. Like many others, he felt that pastoral poetry had become a stiff cliché during his own century. Thus he posits a difference within contemporary poetry between poetry which belongs to the "time" and poetry which doesn't. This is a sort of literary absolutism. His solution is to engage in a struggle against inappropriate, anachronic poetry, cleansing the pastoral to its "natural" state.

 It might seem strange that he should choose the pastoral, which we might think to be an inherently nostalgic form, as a field for struggle. It must be noted however that neither of the poems I have described are nostalgic - both look forward to future potentials.

 The second problem lies in his very Romantic appeal to "nature", whereby Theocritus and Virgil, who no doubt wrote for their own countries and times in their own ways, appear as unnatural. They admit of other "authorities" than "that of NATURE". Perhaps Iolo detects in them an urbanity, and at least a literary reference to "Heroics", which may be denied by a recourse to the songs of the shepherds themselves.

 "Nature" here obviously means what we might call "culture". The fields "resound" with song: that is to say, nature (if fields can be called natural) provides a space in which humans can sing. Shepherds, Ploughmen, and Goatherds "will often write verses" - it is human custom which is natural. And the split between Britain and the Mediterranean is one of natures, of the difference in cultures, of where one was born or had one's natio.

 This problem of nationality is further complicated by Iolo's description of himself as a "Welsh Bard". Whereas he is writing these lyric pastorals in English and attempting to respond to English critics by appealing to a condition valid "in every part of BRITAIN". This difference, between Iolo as Welsh bard and Iolo as an English poet, is summed up in this word "Britain". At one and the same time he is talking of a British past (the Celtic "Prydain") which he himself represents as a remnant of the original British culture, and of the modern concept of Britain as a geographical and political unit. Iolo, in his attempt to belong to both nations, presages that later imperialist confusion of the word British which has proved so ideological successful. In the process, he reveals a cultural complex, whereby the Welsh intellectual not only needs outside response in the formation of his own literary identity, but also feels that he has direct access, through the language, to the English literary sphere.

 So what is the "lyric pastoral", this natural bucolic genre? The defining characteristic is that it should be sung to a tune; thus Iolo gives it the name "lyric", which for him means poetry made to be sung. The operation by which he reaches this defining characteristic is one in which he starts with the genre "pastoral", defined thematically as being about rural life, and arrives at the genre "lyric pastoral", defined formally as, or as if, sung by rural characters. With this operation he wishes to transform a genre which celebrates nature into a natural genre, or what Gérard Genette might call a "mode".

 In his 1977 essay, "Genres, `types', modes"[5], Genette accuses the Romantics of initiating the implosion or explosion of basic modes into great systems of genres. This appears to involve a choreography of movements which Genette reduces to a confusion of mode and genre. Firstly, certain genres (epic, lyric, drama) are identified as a triad involving the whole of literature. This triad is legitimated by a misreading of the Platonic and Aristotelian divisions of modes of representative discourse. The traces of mode in the concepts of these three genres make them subject to a process of "naturalisation" - whereby genres come to be taken as modes. But at the same time, the triad (of "archigenres") is used as the starting point for a complicated, hierarchical system of genres developed by a combinatorial logic. All these resulting sub-genres are again, by analogy, naturalised. For Genette, modes are basic categories of verbal discourse; they are ahistorical, and purely formal, modes of enunciation - whereas genres, on the other hand, are categories "dont la définition comporte inévitablement un élément thématique" (Poétique, p.417)[6], impure, completely heterogeneous to the field of modes.

 The formation of "lyric pastoral" follows the combinatorial logic of the different genre systems developed during the Romantic period. According to Genette then, Iolo's error would lie - on a more general level - in letting the lyric infect his new genre with modality. In "La loi du genre", Derrida tries to tease out at least one of the presuppositions underlying Genette's argument - an opposition of nature to all its others (history, for example) - and points out that this opposition is subsidiary to Romanticism itself, to "quelque chose qui a aussi constitué un des motifs romantiques, à savoir la mise en ordre télélogique de l'histoire". He goes on to say that "la romantisme obéit simultanément à la logique naturalisante et à la logique historisante."[7]. Besides, throughout his article, Derrida makes quite clear that all he has to say about genre can also be said about mode[8], and that both are either pure or impure, historical or ahistorical, natural or unnatural.

 It would be obvious here to take a closer look at the two poems labelled "lyric pastoral" and see if they stand comparison with Iolo's ideals. I would not do this in order to moralise. For one thing, because Poems, Lyrical and Pastoral cannot be read within a rhetorics of "face-value". For another, because Iolo's trajectory is not the normal one of "from upper to lower class via literature" - with his background it is his "right" to claim, or to steal, literature for the peasant; to let shepherds, ploughmen and goatherds write verses to favourite tunes. However, there is one problem here, and that is that the term "lyric" brings with it a confusion between two modes: a) poetry sung to a tune, originally a lyre, and b) non-mimetic poetry, in which the poet does not deal with the "men in action" of Aristotle, but rather with inner life, sentiment and emotions. This confusion is clearly repressed by Iolo in his fragment, which pretends to limit "lyric" to song; while the poems in question are clearly also written in the more modern version of the lyric mode.

 The pastorals which Theocritus or Virgil wrote were not lyrics for either Iolo or the ancients. Not only does Theocritus not figure among the Alexandrian canon of 9 lyric poets; but the poems are written in the epic hexameter; they contain more than one voice; and only parts of them are - fictively - written to be sung - and not to a lyre. Similar pedantic objections can be put to Virgil's Eclogues being lyrical in anything but a very broad sense.

 However, both Theocritus and Virgil prefigure the "lyric pastoral" by thematising songs, "sung to a tune". Parts of the Idylls are rustic folksongs - though often with mythological themes - put in the mouth of one of the shepherds in the respective texts. Ultimately, the "lyric pastoral" is a completion of this movement towards song, even a "purification". One of the main things to be learned from Derrida's discussion in "La loi du genre", is that the lines dividing genres, these lines which must transgress themselves, are not much different from the lines dividing texts, and that the genre identification of a text is in fact dependant on the "legal" status of the text as a separate, delineated entity. A genre like the pastoral, which gives room for several genres - drama in the alternation of voices, epic in the mythological material, or lyric in the embedded songs - such a genre must be disturbing, and will in certain contexts divide itself into the purer forms of pastoral drama, pastoral romance, pastoral lyric, etc.

 But something of the same discomfort must face us when we try to position this text in relation to Romanticism, when setting about the hair-splitting work of deciding whether it is a Romantic or a Pre-romantic text. As Derrida reminds us, the Law of Genre applies to all classes and types[9], the corpus of Romantic texts no doubt included. The question might be: whether the text works Romantically on the Other, or whether it just provides the Other. We must be forced to say that the text is splintered into Romantic and Pre-romantic fragments - its rebellious parts being Romantic, its sentimental parts being Pre-romantic, say. The very status of the text as a fragment in itself, not clearly delineated from the text of Poems, Lyric and Pastoral as a whole, must be the source of this undecidability; and consider then the paradox that the fragment as a type of text is a typically Romantic genre?

 Part of Genette's accusation in "Genres, `types', modes" is that the Romantics confused the modern lyric with the ancient lyric; that is to say, in making a triadic system of lyric, epic and drama, their most decisive misreading was to identify the lyric with the Platonic mode of pure narrative (a mode of representation where the poet is the only voice in the text). This fatal misunderstanding both involves pretending that Plato identified this mode with the Greek lyric - a poem to be sung to a lyre - and pretending that the modern lyric involves a mode of representation of the world, Plato's main concern.

 Iolo Morganwg's theory of the "lyric pastoral" provides us with a clue to the implementation of this last "misunderstanding" or misprision. The ancient pastoral does indeed tend to belong, with the modern lyric, outside the Platonic modes of representation: as representation, it functions mainly (if at all) on an allegorical level. Many later pastorals remove themselves from any referentiality at all to the actions of men, and these creations of fictitious worlds may just prefigure the internalisation of the lyric genre during the 18th century. This is what Iolo "means" by the attempt to portray the pastoral absolute as a lyrical genre. The pastoral has had a privileged rôle to play in the re-inscription of the lyric in Romantic culture.

In spite of Derrida's pledge at the beginning of "La loi du genre" not to mix genres, he makes quite clear throughout the article that genre, while resting on a pledge of this sort, cannot avoid being mixed. Genre always makes an appeal outside literature, to the Law; but the Law is mad: "La Loi est folle."[10] (Kris p.38, Parages p.286). It seems that genre simultaneously posits pureness and opens for infection.

 Iolo's poem "Content" (to be pronounced with a stress accent on the second syllable, though the Derrida/Genette exchange on genre invites a reading with the accent on the first syllable) finishes with such an appeal to the Law - in this case, God's laws:

Oh! let me never find content,
But in meek thoughts on virtue bent;
Whilst, of thy laws enamour'd still,
I bow submissive to thy will.

 But what does the poem bring before the Law? A contrast, of sorts, between two "genres" of lifestyle - that of pastoral content, and that of "the bustles of a Crowd" and "the mansions of the Proud". And on the line is a poet who seems to be a shepherd, but might also be a poetic observer of shepherds. The reflection within this split "I" creates an invagination along the line dividing the pastoral and its others.

 The "law of the law of genre", writes Derrida[12]:

C'est précisément un principe de contanimation, une loi d'impureté, une économie du parasite. Dans le code de la théorie des ensembles, si je m'y transportais au moins par figure, je parlerai d'une sorte de participation sans appartenance. Le trait qui marque l'appartenance s'y divise immanquablement, la bordure de l'ensemble vient à former par invagination une poche interne plus grande que le tout, les conséquences de cette division et de ce débordement restant aussi singulières qu'illimitables.

 Iolo, as a borderline figure, participates without belonging to English literature. The poetic, reflective "I" in "Content", the "I" who sees the shepherd, participates without belonging to the Pastoral world. And the fragment where Iolo propounds the "lyric pastoral" participates in our reading of the two poems with that label, without belonging to them.

 This fragment (and the labels) helps make the two poems in question readable: is a mark, or a re-mark, of the distinctive trait within the texts themselves, itself a mark or a potential re-mark. Derrida makes quite clear[15] that an explicit "mention" such as the fragment represents may be in conflict with the trait as potentially present in the text itself:

Ce n'est pas forcément une "mention" du type de celles qu'on lit sous le titre de certains livres: roman, récit, théâtre. La remarque d'appartenance ne passe pas forcément par la conscience de l'auteur ou du lecteur, bien qu'elle le fasse souvent. Elle peut aussi contredire cette conscience ou faire mentir la "mention" explicite, la rendre fausse, inadéquate ou ironique selon toutes sortes de figures surdéterminantes.

Il rassemble le corpus et du même coup, du même clin d'oeil il l'empêche de se fermer, de s'identifier à lui-même.

 The term "lyric pastoral" is itself part of the genre of genres. Genre is the generation of literature; and the genre of genres is the generation of genres. Genre itself folds in on itself - and is changed. The "lyric pastoral" quotes two genres (a citation served by Iolo before the Law - of Nature), and partakes in them at the same time. Its strange purity (say compared to the classical pastoral) is a bet placed by Iolo that nobody will divide the term into two, that "lyric" and "pastoral" will not be subject to their traces. Paradoxically, this is the romantic bet, that literature will become purer the more genres are mixed.

Footnotes which are now endnotes

² London: J. Nichols, 1794: I 190-191. Thanks to Richard Crowe and Andrew Hawke of the Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru (the University of Wales dictionary) for providing me with a fax of these and other pages of Iolo's book in the early stages of writing this article.

³ For this and other details of Iolo's life, see Prys Morgan's Iolo Morganwg (Writers of Wales), Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1975.

⁴ in Iolo Morganwg a Chywyddau'r Ychwanegiad. Llundain: Cymdeithas yr Eisteddfod Genedlaethol, 1926.

⁵ in Poétique (32 [Novembre] 1977): 389-421. Later revised as Introduction à l'architexte, Éditions du Seuil, Paris 1979. In English as The Architexte: An introduction. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Quantum, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

⁶ "whose definitions already inevitably include thematic elements" (Lewin translation, p.62).

⁷ Kris version p.12, Parages p.259 / "something that has in itself constituted a certain Romantic motif, namely, the teleological ordering of history. Romanticism simultaneously obeys naturalising and historicising logic." Critical Inquiry version p.61; Derrida's discussion of Genette (pp.59-63) has been left out of the Acts of Literature version by the editor (though several of Derrida's additions to the article are not to be found in Critical Inquiry).

⁸ see my next footnote.

⁹ "Je peux prendre chacun des mots de la série (genre, type, mode, forme) et décider qu'il vaudra pour tous les autres (tous les genres de genres, types, modes, formes ; tous les types de types, genres, modes, formes, tous les modes de modes, genres, types ou formes ; toutes les formes de formes, etc.)." Kris version p.16, see also Parages p.262. / "I can take each word of the series (genre, type, mode, form) and decide that it hold for all the others (all genres of genres, types, modes, forms; all types of types, genres, modes, forms; all forms of forms, etc.)." Acts of Literature version p.228; a slight discrepancy here from the French text.

¹⁰ Kris p.38, Parages p.286; Acts of Literature p.251.

¹¹ for publishing history, see the introduction to the reprint in Acts of Literature (ed. Derek Attridge. New York/London: Routledge, 1992: 181-220).

¹² Kris p.10 (no italics), Parages p.256 / "It is precisely a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy. In the code of set theories, if I may use it at least figuratively, I would speak of a sort of participation without belonging - a taking part in without being part of, without having membership in a set. The trait that marks membership inevitably divides, the boundary of the set comes to form, by invagination, an internal pocket larger than the whole; and the consequences of this division and of this overflowing remain as singular as they are limitless." Acts of Literature p.227-228.

¹³ Much of the same play is retained in the Norwegian word trekk.

¹⁴ Thanks to Anne Birgitte Rønning for pointing out to me the medical use of the term, for a disease of the guts.

¹⁵ Kris p.16 (uses brackets instead of a colon), Parages p.263-264 / "It need not be a "mention" of the type found beneath the title of certain books (novel, récit, drama). The remark of belonging need not pass through the conscience of the author or the reader, although it often does so. It can also refute this consciousness or render the explicit "mention" mendacious, false, inadequate or ironic according to all sorts of overdetermined figures." Acts of Literature p.229-230.

¹⁶ also in the sense of a calling before the law.

¹⁷ Kris p.18, Parages p.265 / "It gathers together the corpus and, at the same time, in the same blinking of an eye, keeps it from closing, from identifying itself with itself." Acts of Literature p.231.