Cold Pastoral: Werner Herzogs Version of Empson

Oleg Gelikman
Quoi donc? Faut-il dtruire les socits, anantir le tien et le mien, et retourner vivre dans les forts avec les ours?

Rousseau1
Lhomme ordinaire est dj ddoubl et se sent une me; mais il nest pas maitre de lui-mme. Marcel Mauss2

The origin of the documentary genre is an accursed question of film theory. Insofar as the answer exists, it usually involves a reference to Robert Flahertys Nanook of the North.3 It is easy enough to undermine this response on historical grounds: after all, was not the entirety of early cinema documentary in its approach? Wasnt regular or fictional film, built as it was out of vaudeville, sideshows and theater, a later phenomenon? True as these objections may be, they still do not warrant dismissing Nanook as an arbitrary fabrication. On the contrary, they raise an additional question: why, out of the tremendous range of documentary material accumulated over the first three decades of cinema, was it Nanook, a primal drama about an Inuit hunter that came to define the genre of the documentary? What expectations did Flahertys Nanook fulfill that other films did not? What imaginary satisfactions did it discover? What desires did it capture or conjure for cinematic use? And what reasons, if any, may one still have for
MLN 123 (2008): 11411162 2009 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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continuing to refer to Nanook as a definitive documentary in the face of all the evidence to the contrary? The key to answering these questions, I believe, lies in recognizing Flahertys choice of the pastoral as his fundamental convention. Robert Flaherty was not a filmmaker by trade but a prospector for Sir William Mackenzie, a Canadian railroad baron. It was Mackenzie who suggested that Flaherty take a camera on his third expedition in 1913, thereby changing Flahertys life and, eventually, the course of world cinema. Flaherty made no secret of the fact that his film had undergone long gestation before its triumphant release in 1922. On the contrary, he was proud of the artistic choices he made over the nine years he spent working on the Nanook idea. From the standpoint of documentary representation, these choices are consequential: the early version of Nanook was a travelogue replicating a newsreel structure conventional to the films distributed by the Lumire company. The 30,000 feet of original footage was lost in a fire in 1916. Flaherty had barely escaped the flames himself. Having secured the sponsorship of the Rvillon Frres, a fur-trading group, Flaherty returned to the northeast coast of Hudson Bay in 1920. The film he shot at this point was quite different from the first one. It recounts two dramatic days from the life of Nanook, whose real name was a considerably less catchy Alakariallak. Flaherty exercised his Adamic privilege and rebaptised his subject the bear, derived from the indigenous nanaq.4 Over the course of the film, the legendary hunter and his family canoe to the trading post, build an igloo, traverse icy expanses of the Arctic, and participate in a climactic seal hunt. The cult of simplicity dominates the film: it appears in the emphasis on Nanooks stoicism in the face of harsh conditions; his childishness; his endless cheerfulness, for a smile appears on his face whenever he is in the frame. The joy Nanook derives from satisfying his basic needs represents a truth so primal and secure as to make explanation superfluous. In a revealing comment on the evolution of the film, Flaherty elevates Nanook into a judge of the destruction which the West had already inflicted upon pure life:
I am not going to make the films about what the white man has made of primitive people. ... What I want to show is the former majesty and character of these people, while it is still possiblebefore the white man has destroyed not only their character, but the people as well.5

Through these isolated remarks, we can see Flaherty discovering the ideological framework within which cinematic narrative can appear

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incontestable. Suppression of criticism ennobles the filmic discourse by placing it beyond dispute, encouraging the fiction of the camera as an instrument exempt from the vagaries of rhetoric and contingencies of knowledge. Capturing exotic location distracts from the real sources of films pathos; in truth, the film stages the return of the hero as the simplest and obscurest of men and plunges the audience into the stream of mythic time which has grown nearly inaccessible.6 Thereby, Nanook transfigures humanity arbitrarily differentiated according to climates into a single community of loss; it insinuates that we are defined by the irreversible attrition of the heroic as much as the Eskimos. By suppressing explicit criticism, the film acquires the power to reconcile to the inevitable harshness of life, figured by Arctic weather, and the inevitable harshness of history, which one feels more acutely in the moment of obscure empathy with the pastoral hero. The alchemic fusion of fatalism and criticism nearly extinguishes the heroic impulse which the film revives. As spectators, we are meant to derive dignity from the idea of survival and to be consoled by the fact that we have it better than Nanook. To make self-sufficient existence into a moral value and a rallying point of cultural critique is a tell-tale conceit of the pastoral process. This is where the significance of Nanook for criticism lies. In endorsing Nanook as the first documentary, we accept the pastoral identification of stoic simplicity and cultural critique as the basis for the documentary pretense to truth-telling. When in front of Nanook, we are not revisiting a history of film; we are endorsing Flahertys choice of truth-convention. That truth, William Empson would say, is a version of pastoral. Empson on Film: Documentary Versions of Pastoral Empson catches on to the connection between the documentary and the pastoral in the first essay of Some Versions of Pastoral. In Proletarian Literature, Empson singles out John Griersons The Drifters (1929), a film about British herring fishermen, for having delivered an authentic revival of a pastoral feeling and declares it to be the only successful instance of proletarian art by an Englishman:
[A] man dislikes proletarian art because he feels that it is like pastoral, and that that is either patronising or romantic. The Englishman who seems to me nearest to a proletarian artist (of those I know anything about) is Grierson the film producer; Drifters gave very vividly the feeling of actually

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living on a herring trawler and (by the beauty of shapes of water and net and fish, and subtleties of timing and so forth) what I should call a pastoral feeling about the dignity of that form of labour.7

This is a remarkable statement of Empsons belief that, the formal possibilities of camerawork are capable of retrieving the aesthetic capabilities of the pastoral, and, more importantly, that the pastoral form, while remaining fundamental to documentary film, is sufficiently complex to operate beyond its perceived ideological limits (viz. the tendency either to patronize or to romanticize its subject matter). Given that exhibiting what Empson calls the tricks of pastoral is the task of Some Versions of Pastoral, one is led to suspect that the connections between the book and cinema run deeper than the passing reference to Drifters suggests.8 Empson first sketched the key elements of his theory of the pastoral process in film reviews he published in Cambridge student magazines, such as Granta and The Cambridge Review. Among those elements were the critical function of double plot; mediation of complex as simple through reference to nature as what does not develop; portrayal of beautiful relationship between socially antagonistic groups such as rich and poor, noble and common; theological weight carried by ostensibly mundane plots. For instance, reviewing Walter Ruttmans Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, Empson attributes the success of the film to the resurgence of pastoral imagination as structuring device: [The producers] wanted to lay bare the works, the economics, the whole order of a great city; to show it opening like a flower and going through a composed cycle, to show you its functions, its explanation, its organism, to make you fall down and worship a power and glory of the world.9 The life cycle of the flower yields a temporal form enabling an elegant containment of urban disorder. But even while praising this formal triumph, Empson cannot help reacting to disturbing ambiguities it brings forth. In saying that Berlin wants the audience to fall on its knees, he registers the ideological pressure lurking behind the admiration of appearances. Idyllic pastoral is an inspiring genre, to be sure, but there is a catchit insists that you kneel and worship the power and the glory of the world as it is without you knowing it; Berlin, a foreign city, is a perfect foil for encouraging such devotions.10 A striking anticipation of Empsons theory of pastoral occurs in his review of Cecil B. De Milles King of Kings (1927) when he points to the dog-like quality of Christs face: The Christ in films ... is always

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dog-like; you can read anything into the faces of dogs; they are reverent yet non-denominational (Haffenden 1: 139). In Some Versions of Pastoral, the critic will argue that the pastoral hero is universal because he always stands for the whole, either the whole of nature or the whole of society (127, 198201). In addition to bolstering the universality of Christs persona, the dog-like expression of the actors face substantiates humility as its dominant trait. This is why Empson finds this dog-like appearance less convincing in the violent episodes from the New Testament: a spaniel running amok in a temple does not convey moral grandeur.11 It is quite clear, then, that in preparing Some Versions of Pastoral for publication in 1935, Empson was not breaking new ground. Rather, he was consolidating the lines of thought pursued over the years and complicating them with explicit political and theological accents that made only casual appearance the first time around. The unexpected demise of his academic career, the subsequent transplantation to Japan, and his experience of the effects of military dictatorship there in 1932 no doubt sharpened his sensitivity to the political ideas latent in the genre concerned with the representation of a proper or beautiful relation between parties to social antagonism, or, as Empson puts it with deceptive simplicity, between the rich and the poor (196).12 There is nothing simple about putting complex into simple, noble into common, power into powerlessness. To work as narrative, such condensation needs support from an implicit web of arguments, metaphors, plots, and other tricks of thought. Versions of pastoral do not and cannot stand on their own; they appear as statements within a system of statements that readers are meant to recognize, apprehend, and employ as inevitable points of comparison rooted in their pre-aesthetic experience of social antagonism. These pre-aesthetic roots of pastoral serve as guarantors of meaning, assuring and even overriding the limits of specifically dramatic credibility. (Thus, the pastoral voyage, like the one in The Tempest, can compel even when it involves spirits and miracles because it evokes a deeper truth: not an imitation of social appearances, but of the essential conflict they mask. The audience senses this and accepts the incredible as valid.) From the standpoint of criticism, then, virtual scaffolding around the plot matters more than any particular narrative point: pastoral owes its vitality to its ability to establish complementary relations with affective terms (equality, simplicity, truth) located in the political imaginary. The task of Empsons book, then, is to reconstruct this pastoral system

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both as an aesthetic artifact and ideological force. Among other things, this means: to show that pastoral is not a thematic convention but a principle of representation rich in metaphysical subtleties; to map the development of pastoral from the Elizabethans to Restoration; to examine the rise and fall in its credibility thereafter, and especially in Romanticism; and to discern a use which contemporary literature proletarian or modernistmay still have for this capacious poetic form. Because the ambition of this program is theoretical, Empson does not refer to pastoral as a genre, but calls it a process or machinery.13 After Barthes, Althusser, and others, one may be tempted to say that Empsons definition of pastoral as putting complex into simple in the interest of representing or imposing an image of beautiful relations between rich and poor is one of the most prescient attempts to schematize ideological subject-formation. This is a truth, but a partial one. Naturalization of the antagonism is a version of pastoral, namely, the one in which the idyllic mode dominates the heroic, and demystification is the proper response to it, as Empsons own trenchant analysis of Grays Elegy Written in A Country Church Yard demonstrates (45). But demystification itself is a version of irony, and detecting ironies is part of reading pastoral. Does that mean that all pastoral plots satisfy themselves with irony at the expense of the rich or of readers who fall under the spell of the idyllic? Leo Marx thinks they do: The pastoral design, as always, circumscribes the pastoral ideal.14 Raymond Williams implies as much: [Pastoral is an] idealisation, based on a temporary situation and on a deep desire for stability, served to cover and to evade the actual and bitter contradictions of the time.15 Empson, for one, distrusts irony because it mirrors the omniscience the ironist takes as his target; because irony is irreducibly hierarchical and conjures into being distinctions as rigid as the ones it annihilates; because the consciousness it posits is liable to overestimate the impact of its intervention and, when all is said and done, leave things as they are. In the last case, irony promotes reconciliation in the guise of asserting a conflict. For these and other reasons, irony, for Empson, is not ambiguous enough a concept to exhaust the task of reading pastoral. Ideology is a version of pastoral. Pastoral recognizes its own hyperbole and authorizes irony as the proper response when the heroic shades into mock.16 But the system of pastoral is larger than ideology and irony put together. Pastoral has designs more ambitious than duping others or duping oneself, and so probes deeper than the audi-

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ences nave susceptibility to manipulation or the authors willingness to deceive. Throughout Some Versions of Pastoral, Empson hints at the limitations of the Romantic cult of irony and promotes device prior to irony as fundamental to pastoral.17 A version of ambiguity, this device prior to irony is a parallelism that can be established through an oxymoronic duality of the pastoral hero (criminal as judge, noble simpleton, mature child, doglike human, etc.), through a double plot (tragic/comic; idyllic/heroic), or even by means of something as elementary as a semantic disjunction between the couplet and the gay irrelevant refrain: She leaned her back against the thorn (Fine flowers in the valley) (86). Mapping irony back onto device prior to irony, Empson substantiates his claim that the pastoral process is coherent and that ideology critique may be a reproduction of the simple, rather than its decisive demystification. This limitation of irony may explain why Empson consistently refuses to be satisfied with demonstrating that the aesthetic coalescence of the simple and the complex serves a class interest or normalizes power relations. Stopping the analysis there would presume that elimination of class difference or pathological power relations is the ultimate horizon of pastoral form. Condemning antagonism as arbitrary, however, courts the sense of omnipotence which pastoral criticizes as facile and self-blinding (when it becomes mock). It is an instance of the magical idea of the pastoral, that is, the elimination of antagonism through a redemptive journey into the wilderness; through recovery of the primordial ground of social coherence which such journey inadvertently permits; or, even more directly, through Orphic control over the universe via omnipotent modes of thought. Empson was a more skeptical reader of Marx than most of his contemporaries, perhaps as a result of taking two trips across Russia and keeping his eyes open.18 Unlike Marx, he believed that social antagonism would persist even into the realm of freedom, and that Grays Elegy was bound to remain vital even under communism: When communists say that an author under modern capitalism feels cut off from most of the life of the country, and would not under communism, the remark has a great deal of truth, though he might only exchange a sense of isolation for a sense of the waste of his powers; it is certainly not so completely true as to make the verse from Gray pointless to a man living under communism (18).19 Here Empson recalls the reference to the waste even in fortunate life (5, italics mine) in his analysis of Grays elegy and anticipates the following remark on unemployment in MarvellUnemployment is too painful and normal even in the

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fullest life for such a theme to be trivial (123, italics mine). Pastoral can never be trivial inasmuch as it revives a claim to full existence which is an ineradicable condition of the human and the source of its incompletion, ambiguity, waste, unemployment, or pain. Pastoral achieves its deepest resonance when it engages social antagonism as an irreducible, mythic element of the political; when it intuits and exploits the ambiguous relations we forge with its promises and evasions; when, instead of urging the imminence or pastness of the idyllic state, it reconciles us to the fact that desire for such a state can neither be fulfilled nor obliterated. The waste remains, the waste remains and kills, writes Empson in Missing Dates, and I.A. Richards (wisely) calls this deep humor.20 The poem places remains and kills in a complex juxtapositionthe waste kills, but incompletely; and so one lives impersonated by its persistence. Waste, in short, is Empsons distinctive mode of acknowledging cosmic incoherence as an animating force. Empson attributes to pastoral an ability to connect social antagonism to the domain that Marcel Mauss called integral phenomena, that is, modes of thought and actionsuch as magic, ritual, mass mania, etc.which neutralize the distinction between individual and collective, psychic and ideological, and thereby achieve extreme symbolic efficacy.21 By rationalizing integral phenomena, institutional forms of life overwhelm individuals with a sense of unemployment and waste. Counteracting this suppression, pastoral machinery developed as the sophisticated means to evoke, exploit, mask and otherwise control its effectan acute sense of incommensurability between what one is and what is allowed to be, between what one feels to be independent of all becoming and what one becomes. Pastoral evokes this primordial political ground as the need to connect to what is different. The glory and misery of Empsons idea of literature is to recognize that, unless connected to another version of the human, one is not even human; unless connected to the infinite, one is not even finite; unless connected to the undying, one is not even mortal.22 This exposure to the non-human remains uncontainable even when contained: establishing reciprocity between the opposing terms is an ideal but never an outcome of the pastoral process in literature. Exorbitant empathy with the non-human cannot be eradicated; one can only enact the contradictions and promises inherent in its persistence, and literature, as far as Empson is concerned, is the only coherent way of doing so.

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The Ambiguity of the Orphic: Marvells Garden and Treadwells Kingdom

How could such sweet and wholesome Hours Be reckond but with herbs and flowrs! Marvell, The Garden

Empsons stress on the meta-politics of pastoral becomes explicit in his analysis of Marvells The Garden. Pointing to the lines closing stanza six, Annihilating all thats made / To a green thought in a green shade, Empson speaks of the vehemence of the couplet, and this hint of physical power in thought itself ... may hint at an idea that one would like to feel was present, as otherwise it is the only main idea about Nature that the poem leaves out; ... the Orpheus idea, that by delight in Nature when terrible man gains strength to control it (120).23 The Orphic idea asserts that mind depends on nature for the knowledge of its power, but it makes the use of this power conditional upon how nature is accessed. As Pierre Hadot has shown in The Veil of Isis, that idea encompasses both the empowerment of the mind by the spectacle of terrible nature and the pacification of the terrible, rude society by the spectacle of the peaceful, tranquil nature.24 The trick of thought remains the same in both scenarios, namely, recovering the preternatural, primordial dependence of mind upon nature as the only ground on which the social antagonism can be adjudicated. In the first case, this happens because the recognition of powerlessness empowers the spectator; and in the second, by the production of the middle termthe middle landscapewhich assures the spectator that upon his return to the world he will possess the secure ground enabling the healing of the conflict that precipitated his exile. Empsons reservations about the presence of the Orpheus idea in the Garden do not stop him from referring to it, but, paradoxically, prompt him to return to its unsuccessful exclusion. Thus, later in the essay Empson remarks: Nature when terrible is no theme of Marvells, and he gets this note of triumph rather from using nature when peaceful to control the world of man (122). Rude nature may not be a theme in Marvell, but Empsons theory of pastoral is not thematic. Complementary themes tend to imply each other. Quite regularly, they communicate in spite and because of the separations put up in their textual exposition. Besides, Annihilating all thats made is a formulation sufficiently strong to vindicate more than a hint of attributing destructive powers to thought.25 Even the note

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of triumph echoes the absence of terror and drags in the possibility of its return. As a structural complement to the pacification scenario, the rude nature idea impinges upon it as a threat does upon a promise and thereby lends conviction and depth to the promise of pacification. When debating the presence of the Orphic idea in Marvell, Empson points to contemporary reincarnations of empathy with the terrible side of Nature and remarks that it is still strong, one would think, among mountain climbers and often the scientists (120). Timothy Treadwell, the protagonist of Werner Herzogs 2005 film Grizzly Man, fits well into Empsons categories, for he was something of a hybrid between the two typesa survivalist and a bear expert, a bear scientist in the mountains. A man who understands bears appears impressive to himself and, more importantly, to others: by incarnating rude nature as subdued, his quiet rhetoric of empathy glows with the threat of suppressed violence and a promise that this suppression can be extended to the social terrain as well. The pastoral process places two Orphic scenarios in a relationship of cause and effect. Via the pastoral hero, empathy with primal substance of creation becomes transfigured into the energy of pacification of the rude society. It is with moments of such exorbitant empathy that Herzog opens his venture into the Alaskan wilderness, and takes the documentary genre along with him. In the opening sequence of the film, Herzog constructs a monument to his protagonista speaking tombstone. Timothy Treadwell, aka the Grizzly Man, has barely begun to promulgate his royal status as the Lord of the Bear Country when a caption appears, Timothy Treadwell (19572003), thereby suggesting a disturbing connection between the idyllic setting and the ending of a human life. Floating into the frame, Treadwell emanates out of the monumental surroundings, materializing the natural world and its creatures and speaking a primary language inaccessible to those who had not partaken of his journey. After delivering the monologue, Treadwell falls silent and freezes in the kind warrior attitude. For a brief moment, his profile mirrors that of the bear in the background, and this spontaneous likeness reads like a miraculous yet necessary confirmation of his rhetoric. This gesture fuses Treadwell with his kingdom and consecrates the pastoral order he has already established in discourseTreadwell as the equal and the Lord of the creature: his rival, his superior, his representative and, perhaps, redeemer. Grizzly Man starts out as a testimony and a tribute to the vitality of pastoral as a mode of restoration of the authentic relations between the unequals.

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

Despite the crudeness of Treadwells theatrics, we cannot help but be impressed by the distance his understanding seems to have traversed. We feel guilty and amazed at our own unwillingness to imagine such capacious modes of empathy. We are awed by the dignity he is capable of bestowing on the world around him and wounded by our habitual refusal to do the same. The Orphic encounters rely on the collapse of distancesimultaneously in a spatial and in a symbolic senseas their basic device. By dwelling too close to the creatures, Treadwells images violate the sense of distance required for perceiving them as animals and thus make them into more uncanny presences located between the animal and the human. Showing the creatures up close does not bring them nearer; on the contrary, optical proximity distances the creatures, and so they appear less accessible than before. Thereby, the manipulations of cinematic space reveal mimesis and distance as collaborators in the minutely-orchestrated game, the game whose rules Treadwell is deliberately violating. The merging of the animals into such uncanny presences cannot but tinge these images with terror and encourage assimilating this terror to Treadwells evident mastery and assurance; Herzogs editinghe had a hundred hours of footage to chose fromcapitalizes on the collapse of distance as a trope of the Orphic. In Grizzly Man, Herzog redoubles his protagonist and thus

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Figure 2. Visual rhyme as identity of substance. After delivering the opening monologue, Treadwell assumes the kind warrior attitude. His earth-bound posture mirrors that of the bear in the background. This spontaneous likeness reads like a miraculous, yet necessary confirmation of his Orphic rhetoric.

gives an Orphic performance of his own, although not quite in the same spirit as Treadwells. These imagesa new kind of wildlife film, Herzog calls them retrieve the horror of mimesis that we have almost unlearned, the

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Figure 3. Visual rhyme as dramatic value. The bears posture echoes Treadwells drooping arms. Herzog introduces the Orphic visual rhyme into the dramatic infrastructure of his narrative. In this scene, the rhyme precedes a confrontation between the creature and the lorda mock spectacle of rebellion and reconciliation. The Orphic visual rhyme establishes the primordial affinity as a starting point of the episode, and anticipates Treadwells assertion of 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 this game of mimetic substitution, he absorbs the bears magical substancea compound of power and innocence, terror and playfulness, independence and humility.

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Figure 5. The Orphic communion: It [the bears excrement] is still warm. The disappearance of the taboo is now an actuality in Treadwells middle landscape. By means of contact with mystical substance, he has become an Adamic man who exists outside of differences between the permissible and the forbidden, the pure and the impure. This de-differentiation signals the fulfillment of the claim to absolute existence thwarted in Treadwells profane vocations as an athlete and an actor.

horror that speaks to us only through dislike of being mimicked, unease in front of oversize mirrors or this comment of Goethes on tableaux vivants :
The attitudes were so right, the colors so harmoniously distributed, the lighting so cleverly arranged, that one truly thought oneself to be in another world, except for the fact that the presence of the real, substituted for appearance, produced a kind of impression of anguish.26

The collapse of distance in Orphic encounters leads to the same substitution of the real for the appearance that Goethe evokes. Herzogs editing remakes Treadwells footage into the gallery of tableaux vivants that accumulate such an excess of the real over appearance. To the extent that these super-mimetic images revive the ambiguity immanent to imitation, Treadwells reduction of this ambiguity through appropriation seems all the more impressive. And so, thanks to Herzog, we are fated to perceive the rituals devised by Treadwell as heroic efforts at mastery and pacificationindications of humanitys grandeur which are all the more impressive and pure for being misdirected.

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By means of recurrent visual rhyming and collapsing the distance between Treadwell and the creatures, Herzog reinforces the credibility of 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 of ritual behavior based on the magic idea of control. Moreover, Herzogs editing specifies the terms of Treadwells Orphic pact: by entering into hermeneutic communion with creatures, the pastoral hero is able to purge nature of its contamination by the terrible and thereby to stabilize the ambiguity of the Orphic construct as a whole. Treadwell takes evident delight in having cheated death repeatedly. Avoidance of death, in turn, confirms his self-perception as an exceptional character, thereby validating the missionary return to the civilization and cementing his role as both its critic and scapegoat, a duality central to Empsons idea of the pastoral hero. Even when Herzog limits himself to reconstructing Treadwells wilderness, he reveals the camera as an accomplice indispensable to staging 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 do function as members of the community he has constructed by means of Adamic naming (he calls bears Chocolate, Rowdy, etc.), and that the mission that Treadwell extracted from the pastoral interplay of fear, delight and pacification is valid. Herzog pays an impressive homage to the persuasiveness of cinematic rhetoric, but only in order to make it more vulnerable to subsequent critique. Treadwell is no bear expert, and his claims to knowledge are Orphic: they rest on ritual, not research. His expertise feeds off the energies of pastoral machinery, making his wild success with educational institutions and the media a testimony to the entrenchment of the ideological versions of pastoral. Far from exhibiting Treadwells footage as a simple record of contact with Nature, Herzog shows Treadwell engaging in the game of re-appropriation and recovery of the claims which the world had denied him. Like any true adventurer, the pastoral hero plots his triumphant return to the terra infirma of social antagonism and will vigorously maintain his claim to being an outsider, even in the face of enthusiastic acceptance by the world. Treadwell does just this when he rants against the park rangers and the government, who are supposedly interfering with his mission. It is this exorbitant claim to the role of an outsider-as-judge which leads him to ruin.

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Double Plots: Herzogs Bifurcations

This power of suggestion is the strength of the double plot; once you take the two parts to correspond, any character may take on mana because he seems to cause what he corresponds to or be Logos of what he symbolizes. Empson (34)

Herzog begins his film by reconstructing Treadwells fictional world as a primal drama defined by the fundamental polarities between the Enemy and the Friend, the God above and Creatures below (see Diagram 1). The diagram encapsulates the fabula of the auto-diegetic narrative level of the film where Treadwell narrates and Herzog edits. Sjuet, or narration, begins at the center and then proceeds in a centrifugal spiral pattern. In the first part of the film, the camera circulates between the terms of Treadwells universe: it moves from Creature to Friend, from Enemy to God, barely seeming to disturb

The World

State of Nature

God

Prayer

Judge Internal
(Spirit the Fox)

Scapegoat
(Park Service, government)

External

Friend

peace

the kind warrior

Lord
Communication

war

Enemy

External

(Grizzly People, Children, Supporters)

Internal
(poachers, rangers)

Creature

State of Nature

The World

Diagram 1. Treadwells Wilderness: The Primal Drama

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or question the reality of the universe it is exploring. Even though the Grizzly Man never made his film, Herzog pays Treadwell the filmmaker a handsome compliment and contrasts his footage with the ordinary wildlife documentary. Interviews with friends, supporters, or girlfriends are presented at face value. Their objections to the world outside Treadwells fourfold maintain the veneer of reasoning. Soon enough, however, Herzogs camera begins to brush up against the limits of Treadwells universemarked by dotted lines on the diagramand, eventually, to transgress them. In the guise of verifying the claims of Treadwells primal drama, Herzog constructs a series of plots redoubling Treadwells own. (Double plot is a standard device in pastoral, and the parallelism it establishes falls in the range of Empsons device prior to irony.) Two of these supplementary plots matter most to the problem of pastoral: Treadwells devolution to being an accomplice in the death of his girlfriend and Herzogs reassertion of the difference between his version of pastoral and Treadwells. Though he maintains the pretense of piety, Herzog criticizes the pastoral modes of reasoning from the start. In one of the earliest barbs in Treadwells direction, a helicopter pilot wearing dark, police shades, himself a straight talking, no-nonsense mock pastoral figure, declares that [Treadwell thought] he was dealing with men in bear costumes. The other side of this equation, however, is that Treadwell was a bear wearing mans body as a costume. The film narrates a legitimate pastoral transformation of the scapegoat into critic, an outcast into king, of the man who, because he includes his environment, can represent and control both nature and society. Herzog chronicles the transformation of Treadwell into a sacrificial Christ-figure and a scapegoat as performed and recorded by Treadwell himself. However, by letting Treadwell prattle on, Herzog collapses the integrity of the fictional space of his drama and superimposes an additional plot upon Treadwells. This one follows the logic of Aristotelian tragedy that prescribes that the protagonist fall prey to a flaw in his character. At the end of what was to be his last summer, Treadwell refused to board a plane back to California following an altercation with an airline agent. Then, he did what he had never done before, namely, return to the bear territory in the fall, the season when his bears go into hibernation and cede the territory to the old, sick, desperately undernourished members of their species. The return from the airport signifies Treadwells loss of the power to mediate between the extremes of his world. Pastoral machinery breaks down, leaving the man prey to his hubris. Following the logic that seems all the more

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implacable for appearing unstaged, Treadwell loses his life as soon as he completely merges with his setting. The figure that matters most in the tragic plot, however, is not Treadwell but Amie Huguenard, his girlfriend. By stressing that Treadwell omitted any reference to her existence from his footage, Herzog makes the violence of her needless death seem an extension of the violence of Treadwells pastoral designs. Why was Amie excluded from Treadwells tapes? Nature and solitude go together in Marvells Garden and Treadwells delusion. The presence of a woman would compromise his devotion to the creatures, disturb the illusion of his primordial belonging, undermine his claim that communion with the wilderness is fulfilling and restorative, and ultimately undercut his claim to martyrdom. Even if Amie was there by his side, Treadwell believed that he was alone with the bears, since she was absent from the scene of the pastoral, except, perhaps, as a trace of the world he had already annihilated. In the garden, a woman is not a being but a shameful afterthought. Restoring this disturbing omission concentrates the tragic energy of the film, for if one could discern a crude divine justice in Treadwells death, Amie Huguenard upstages him as a more authentic martyr. Her end exposes Treadwells survivalist narrative as too well-crafted to be crediblerather a self-fulfilling prophecy which, in the final piece of grim dramatic irony, worked out only too well. Out of Thought: Herzog in the Wild
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! Keats27

Placing a mad hero-king at the center, the main plot of Grizzly Man stages the triumph of the tragic tendency within the pastoral mode. But Herzogs second plot, built around a simple dramatic irony of the man rendered inhuman and murderous by communion with beasts, undoes the first. The critical violence of Herzogs re-appropriation of Treadwell does not rest in irony, however. It reaches its peak when, his voice hovering over the footage of Amie Huguenards unintentional intrusion into the frame and a close shot of a grizzly staring down the camera, he utters words that strike at the heart of Treadwells pastoral design: and what haunts me is that, in all the faces of all the bears Treadwell ever

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filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as the secret world of the bears, and this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food. Overwhelming is Herzogs most revealing word, for nature does overwhelm, not only through splendor, but also through persistence of life, hunger, pain, unemployment and waste. The vehemence of Herzogs rebuttal bespeaks an identification with his protagonist, for the indifference of nature overwhelms only as part of the pastoral scheme. The sentiment of indifference presupposes an irreducible demand for empathy. Thus, if Herzog rejects a sentimental view of the story and refuses to be teased out of thought, he does so precisely because he falls under its power, not because he evades it. We do the same: the conventions of Herzogs film make it impossible to experience pastoral without ambiguity. In demanding a confrontation with our vulnerability to mimetic modes of reasoning, pastoral recovers the dignity that Herzogs meticulous exposition appears to have taken away from it. Rather than placing us in contact with nature, Herzogs film stages an interpretative encounter with the claim to proper relations that no poetic form, not even pastoral, can fulfill or contain. In the end, even as Treadwells version of pastoral leaves Herzog cold, it also makes him more engaged with the energy of documentary as an unsentimental, sober venture into the domain of antagonistic relations between simple and complex, fact and fiction, power and powerlessness. This ongoing dependence of the documentary upon pastoral convention justifies recognizing Herzogs filmmaking as another chapter in the Empsonian analysis of the archaic form.
Soka University

Notes
1 Discours sur lorigine et les fondements de lingalit parmis les hommes; Discours sur les sciences et les arts (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1992) 188. 2 Questions poses la psychologie, Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris: PUF, 1989 [1950]) 306. 3 See, for instance, Eric Barnow, Documentary: A History of Non-Fiction Film, 2nd Revised Edition (New York: Oxford, 1993); Barsam, Richard, Nonfiction Film: A Critical History (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992); Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001); Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski, Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video, Contemporary Film and Television Series (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1998); Patricia Aufderheide, Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford

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5 6

7 8 9

10

11

12

13

UP, 2007); Jack C. Ellis and Betsy A. McLane, A New History of Documentary Film (New York: Continuum, 2005). Alan Marcus cites these details in his Nanook of the North as Primal Drama Visual Anthropology 19.3 (2006): 205. This essay contains a close discussion of Nanooks production history and cultural legacy. Robert J. Christopher offers the first fullfledged account of Flahertys path to Nanook in his Robert and Frances Flaherty: A Documentary Life, 18831922 (Montreal: McGill-Queens UP, 2005). Cited in Barnow 45. Thoreau defines the hero as the simplest and obscurest of men in Walking, an ambitious venture into pastoral representation in its own right; see Collected Essays and Poems (New York: Library of America, 2001) 239. Some Versions of Pastoral (New York: New Directions, 1974 [1935]) 8. Further references will be given in the text. Flaherty will later make a Grierson-style fisherman film, Man of Aran (1934). Cited in John Haffenden, William Empson, Vol. 1: Among the Mandarins (New York: Oxford UP, 2005) 141. Book and film reviews Empson wrote as a Cambridge undergraduate were collected as Empson in Granta (Tunbridge Wells: Foundling Press, 1993). Empson sticks to his insistence on the idyllic pathos of the urban pastoral even when challenged with an alternative view of Berlin as criticism of dehumanization. The critical side of pastoral, for Empson, cannot be presumed to be active by definition; its pertinence to a particular instance needs to be argued; cf. Haffenden1: 142. Empson had an extraordinary sensitivity to faces and read widely in the physiognomic tradition. He wrote a book about Buddha faces which was lost in 1947 and recovered fifty years later (Haffenden 1: 31819). For a close reading of Empson on Buddha faces, see Sharon Cameron, Impersonality (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2007) 120. Toward the end of the Proletarian Literature, Empson admits to an uncontrollable tendency to read political literature as pastoral and pastoral as political literature (20); cf. also his remark on the political circumstances in Japan: one feels the popular jingoism and official militarism like a weight on the back of the neck (Haffenden 1: 320). Antagonism fits Empsons conception of pastoral better than conflict or struggle to the extent that this concept invokes the idea of an irreducible conflict as the structuring force in any society regardless of its mode of production. Empson comes close to this usage whenever he speaks of a clash. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe develop the concept of antagonism in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985). The difference between the orthodox struggle and the revisionist antagonism was further elaborated under the rubric of the loss of the loss by Slavoj iek in For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London: Verso, 1991) 16870. For a useful synthesis of the debate, cf. George Hartley, The Abyss of Representation: Marxism and the Postmodern Sublime (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003). Even if Empson goes about fulfilling his theoretical ambition in an anti-systematic fashion, opting to convince by the range of examples and strength of isolated analyses, he throws out some essential considerations along the way. For instance, he argues that the question of power is inherent in pastoral setting since the shepherds were the rulers of the sheep (12). Pastoral becomes explicitly political when it comments on the possibilities open to social groups located at the opposite ends of the continuum of power. Because Grays Elegy naturalizes this continuum,

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Empson reserves harsh words for it. He argues that in placing the powerless in the same ontological category as pearls and flowers, Gray had acquiesced with the utter impossibility of a different social order (45). Thus, pastoral represents a relationship between rich and poor, powerful and powerless, while aiming to remedy or neutralize this inequality through a resurgence of mythic past, symbolic present or utopian future. Empsons pastoral is a discourse of inequality. In addition, Empson suggests that as the class differences got progressively more complex, the appeal of the pastoral increased (199). Walter Benjamin registers the same process in his discussion of baroque drama (The Origin of German Tragic Drama [London: Verso, 1977] 93), in which the representation of nature begins to intrude upon the political intrigue. In terms of the history of dramatic form, it appears as if nature comes into play whenever the representation of political conflict can no longer be handled through representation of action. Hence, the awareness of the tricks and turns of pastoral should be developed in tandem with a theory of action, especially because the pastoral principle arrogates the right to critique as it makes the civilizing process its target. A theory of pastoral, on the other hand, distinguishes between pastoral process as such and a version of pastoral which contains critique by means of fatalistic resignation in the face of historical change. For an in-depth discussion of Empsons conception of pastoral, see Paul Alpers, Empson on Pastoral New Literary History 10.1 (1978): 10123; Christopher Norris, For Truth in Criticism: William Empson and the Claims of Theory, The Truth about Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993); John Haffenden, Among the Mandarins, 37699; Matthew Beavis, Introduction: Empson in the Round, Hugh Haughton, Alice and Ulyssess Bough: Nonsense in Empson, and Seamus Perry, Coleridge, Christ and Contradiction in Empson collected in Some Versions of Empson (New York: Oxford UP, 2007); and Paul H. Fry, William Empson: Prophet Against Sacrifice (London: Routledge, 1991). 14 The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford UP, 1967) 72; also 74. 15 The Country and the City (London: Chatto &Windus, 1973) 45. 16 For a recent reexamination of the poetics of mock, cf. Simon Jarvis, Mock as screen and optic, Critical Quarterly 46.3 (2004): 119. 17 Revision of the concept of irony is the second overriding concern of Empsons second book, and requires a separate discussion. Three out of seven essays collected in Some VersionsDouble Plots, They That Have Power and The Beggars Operamake irony into a turning point of their overall critical argument. Section Two of Double Plots discusses device prior to irony in detail; see also 86, 212. 18 Thus, in Empsons dispatch from the Trans-Siberian trip in 1937, his second: Nobody with any sense of history is going to be surprised at the orgy of killing bureaucrats in modern Russia. ... I think them a tremendous people; and even this awful present day despair is only a thing lanced and let to the surface. But goodness me, tell a Durham miner that Marx has something to tell him, and so he may, but dont pretend Stalin has (cited in Haffenden 1: 435). 19 In a well-known passage from Volume Three of Capital, Marx argues that, while the division of labor will still be present in the post-capitalist society of the associated producers, it will no longer engender an antagonistic relationship between social groups; cf. On the Realm of Necessity and the Realm of Freedom, The Marx-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 element of 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 included in Collected Poems (London: Chatto & Windus, 1959) 60. 21 Marcel Mausss studies in total phenomenamagic, gift, thanatomania, fanaticism, vendetta, to cite just a fewoffer a suggestive t model for theorizing symbolic efficacy of poetic forms: Venons maintenant ce foisonnement gigantesque de la vie sociale elle-mme, de ce monde de rapport symbolique que nous avons avec nos voisins. Ne peuvent-ils pas tre compars directement limage mythique et, comme elle, ne se rverbrent-ils pas linfini? ... Car cest l quest un des points fondamentaux la fois de la vie sociale et de la vie de la conscience individuelle: le symbolegnie voqua sa vie propre; il agit et se reproduit indfiniment (300). 22 The same pattern of reading resurfaces in Empsons reactions to Freud, Otto Rank, Coleridge, T. E. Hulme and Wyndham Lewis. Death is the liminal figure of such grounding difference, and hence any consistent pastoral must expose its hero to death. Pastoral necrophilia, however, is a ploy, for it anticipates resurrection and return; Ovids Orpheus story both glorifies and criticizes the notion of return from Hades (cf. Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture [Iowa City: University of Iowa P, 1987] 555, n.3 and the whole of Death and Its Desires [53455]). Pain, waste and unemployment result from the failures to sustain such grounding difference, but they also name the renewal of the attempts to re-establish such difference, not least because the acts and events thus named cannot simply be failures or successes. 23 Empson is commenting on lines 4148 of the poem, The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, vol. I, ed. H. M. Margoliouth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927) 49. The full text of the stanza runs:
Mean while the Mind, for pleasure less Withdraws into its happiness: The Mind, that Ocean where each kind Does straight its own resemblance find; Yet it creates, transcending these, Far other Worlds, and other Seas; Annihilating all thats made To a green Thought in a green Shade.

24 For instance, in the following summary: nature is both a spectacle that fascinates us, even if terrifies us, and a process that surrounds us. The Orphic attitude, which respects it, seeks the preserve a living perception of mature; at the opposite extreme from the Promethean attitude, however, it often professes a primitivism that is not without danger either (The Veil of Isis, trans. Michael Chase [Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 2006] 98). Hadot makes the contrast between the Orphic and the Promethean tendency in Occidental thinking about phusis a recurrent theme of his encyclopedic volume. 25 Empsons diffidence comes as a surprise to any reader of Seven Types of Ambiguity. It is unusual to see Empson vacillate like this, arguing for the inclusion by omission, unless we assume that it is done to force the point on his reader, not as an interpretation, but as an inevitability built into the logic of The Garden. 26 Goethe, Elective Affinities, 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: Oxford UP, 1970) 210.