The pastoral mode in selected works of Gabriel Miró

Abstract

This article illustrates recurrent themes and practices in the writing of nature in Gabriel Miró. It focusses on selected images and modes of the Pastoral myth that evolve from his early fictions to his autobiographical works, to constitute a poetics of the landscape that is both idiosyncratic and encoded (in traditions such as the Biblical, Neo-platonic, Cervantine, post-Romantic, and Decadent versions of the pastoral). In Las cerezas del cementerio (1910), the idyll mode that sustains the sentimental plot against a non-Arcadian and realistic order does not undermine the idyll but reconstitutes it. Its epilogue embraces the poetic truth of the pastoral based on the restoration of the immanence of time —in the form of eternal return— and in accordance to the subjective distortions allowed by the lyrical novel. La novela de mi amigo illustrates the encounter of the pictorial landscape, as an exercise of abstraction and distance, with nature as a life-force personified by the protagonist’s Pantheistic ethos and agonizing search for the lost family idyll. Ultimately, Del vivir manifests the author’s gradual departure from the conventional pastoral symbolism toward the use of landscape as an open theme. He creates an idiosyncratic bucolic that is made of ironic self-reflection. He also exploits and debunks the pathetic fallacies of the Nature-as-illness metaphor personified by the native lepers. With this hybrid novel (of travel and spiritual quest) he introduces the post-pastoral view that will culminate in Años y leguas (1928), where the landscape becomes a central motif of literary, existential, ecocritic and linguistic reflection and of his mature readjustment to the world.