Three Versions of Life: the pastoral, tragic and melodramatic

Extract

Pastoral, tragedy and melodrama are three literary forms which reflect three distinct interpretations of human life. This essay examines what these literary forms have to tell us about human experience.

In his article ‘American Pastoral’ (Thought 27/102,1952, pp. 365—380), John P. Sisk explains how a particular literary form reflects a basic human aspiration and its liabilities. Sisk’s examination of the relationship between literature and life in American pastoral is relevant to the human problematic reflected in both the tragic and melodramatic interpretations of human experience. An overview of Sisk’s study of American pastoral allows insights to emerge about the interrelationship of these three versions of human experience.

Pastoral poetry idealized shepherds and shepherdesses in idealized rustic surroundings. The pastoral form is artificial and unnatural. However, if we turn from the subject matter conventionally associated with pastoral to the attitude that is at work in this subject matter, we discover that the essential thing in pastoral, according to Sisk, is a certain critical vision of simplicity. It is basically critical because it is an argument. Its argument is that a certain simple state of affairs is more desirable than a certain complex state of affairs. To state its case effectively, it must use the tools of argument, among them abstraction and hyperbole. Abstracting from life only what will not hurt its cause, it too often exaggerates unscrupulously in the interest of the cause. Ironically, then, in the very act of opposing truth to falsehood what truth the pastoralizer possesses is distorted into falsehood.