The Machine in the Garden
Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964).
365 pages, assigned by Ron Klien.
When I settled down to tackle Ron's book list, I began by sorting out the books I could get for $10 or less. I bought those: about half the list. Then I sorted those chronologically and began with the earliest. That is this book.
While I had certainly heard of The Machine in the Garden before I started, I had not realized that it is rooted in literary studies. Not a history book. Didn't know that. Once I brought myself to terms with the fact that I was reading about Thoreau, Shakespeare, Melville & Co., I began to really enjoy the text. The prose occasionally became thick enough to put me to sleep, but Marx's tone is congenial and engaging, and I was sorry to have to leave him after the last page.
The core question of the book asks how Americans manage to sustain the seemingly contradictory positions of being enchanted with the pastoral-- camping, gardening, cowboys, etc-- and in love with technology-- railroads, factories, steamboats, etc. He introduces the notion of a complex pastoral mode to describe a primary theme in esp. 19th C American literature. This complex pastoral mode recognizes but ultimately fails to diffuse the contridiction: while earlier authors seem to prefer a "middle path" between the primitive and the industrial, using technology to improve upon nature, later writers seem resigned to the permanace of the conflict between nature and machines. He is careful to distinguish this 'complex pastoral' from the 'simple pastoral'-- the sort of primitivist longing for the country that causes urban flight and makes cowboy images such powerful tools for marketing cigarettes, beer, and cars. The complex pastoral, on the other hand, explicitly recognises the impermanance or contradicion inherent in our love for such scenes-- recognizes the dilemma of the presence of the machine in the garden.
Marx's analysis begins with, and repeatedly references, a short essay by Nathaniel Hawthorn from his notebook-- eight pages written while sitting in the woods, in an area called "Sleepy Hollow." Marx calls our attention to the fact that although the essay is informal, it nontheless has a distinct narrative form. Hawthorn begins with small observations on his setting, the sights and especially sounds of nature that surround him. He then begins to notice the sounds of men: mowers sharpening scythes, the striking of the village clock, the tinkle of a cowbell. Then, his reverie is suddenly broken by the sharp shriek of the train whistle: "harsh, above all other harshness... [telling] the story of busy men, citizens, from the hot street... men of business... it brings the noisy world into the midst of our slumbrous peace." Marx sees varients of this episode throughout 19th century American literature: Thoreau hearing the train in Walden, Ishmael's wierd evocation of a textile mill in the midst of a primitive island in Moby-Dick, or the moment when Huck and Jim are torn from their idyllic raft journey by an approaching steamboat plowing through their small craft in Huckleberry Finn.
After introducing his themes through Hawthorne's essay, Marx begins his more meaty analysis with Shakespeare's The Tempest. While the action of The Tempest does not explicitly take place in America, Marx ties its content and themes to several accounts of travellers to the 'New World,' in particular, one from Virginia. These accounts combine admiration for the beauty and bounty of America, and horror at its brutal wildness. Similarly, Marx sees the core of Shakespeare's story as a conflict between Gonzalo's naive embrace of a simple pastoralism and Prospero's recognition that human art is necessary to create and preserve the ideal society. Marx uses The Tempest to illustrate that even before many Westerners arrived in America, the American wilderness was already heavily burdened with symbolic value. The pastoral ideal, developed so thoroughly in Western literature, seemed able to take concrete form in the New World-- and the ideas developed in this literary tradition became a part of the understandings and expectations that Americans had for their nation.
After treating Shakespere, he moves on through a staggering diversity of authors and works: Thomas Jefferson's Notes on Virginia, Robert Beverly's History and Present State of Virginia, Celadon's The Golden Age, Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer, Boswell's Life of Johnson, Tench Coxe's powerful and little-referenced speech An Enquiry into the principles, on which a commercial system for the United States of America should fe founded..., Hamilton's Report on Manufactures, Schiller's Letters upon the Aesthetical Education of Man, Thomas Carlyle's "Life of Schiller" and his "Signs of the Times" and Timothy Walker's attack on that essay in the North American Review, Emerson's "The Young American" and Nature, Henry James' The American, Thoreau's Walden, Hawthorne's "Ethan Brand," Melville's Moby-Dick, Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and finally Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. In each of these works, he finds elements of the struggle of complex pastoralism, emphasizing the fact that while each author presents the dilemma in a variety of ways, none of them satisfactorally reconcile the conflict.
to be continued...
365 pages, assigned by Ron Klien.
When I settled down to tackle Ron's book list, I began by sorting out the books I could get for $10 or less. I bought those: about half the list. Then I sorted those chronologically and began with the earliest. That is this book.
While I had certainly heard of The Machine in the Garden before I started, I had not realized that it is rooted in literary studies. Not a history book. Didn't know that. Once I brought myself to terms with the fact that I was reading about Thoreau, Shakespeare, Melville & Co., I began to really enjoy the text. The prose occasionally became thick enough to put me to sleep, but Marx's tone is congenial and engaging, and I was sorry to have to leave him after the last page.
The core question of the book asks how Americans manage to sustain the seemingly contradictory positions of being enchanted with the pastoral-- camping, gardening, cowboys, etc-- and in love with technology-- railroads, factories, steamboats, etc. He introduces the notion of a complex pastoral mode to describe a primary theme in esp. 19th C American literature. This complex pastoral mode recognizes but ultimately fails to diffuse the contridiction: while earlier authors seem to prefer a "middle path" between the primitive and the industrial, using technology to improve upon nature, later writers seem resigned to the permanace of the conflict between nature and machines. He is careful to distinguish this 'complex pastoral' from the 'simple pastoral'-- the sort of primitivist longing for the country that causes urban flight and makes cowboy images such powerful tools for marketing cigarettes, beer, and cars. The complex pastoral, on the other hand, explicitly recognises the impermanance or contradicion inherent in our love for such scenes-- recognizes the dilemma of the presence of the machine in the garden.
Marx's analysis begins with, and repeatedly references, a short essay by Nathaniel Hawthorn from his notebook-- eight pages written while sitting in the woods, in an area called "Sleepy Hollow." Marx calls our attention to the fact that although the essay is informal, it nontheless has a distinct narrative form. Hawthorn begins with small observations on his setting, the sights and especially sounds of nature that surround him. He then begins to notice the sounds of men: mowers sharpening scythes, the striking of the village clock, the tinkle of a cowbell. Then, his reverie is suddenly broken by the sharp shriek of the train whistle: "harsh, above all other harshness... [telling] the story of busy men, citizens, from the hot street... men of business... it brings the noisy world into the midst of our slumbrous peace." Marx sees varients of this episode throughout 19th century American literature: Thoreau hearing the train in Walden, Ishmael's wierd evocation of a textile mill in the midst of a primitive island in Moby-Dick, or the moment when Huck and Jim are torn from their idyllic raft journey by an approaching steamboat plowing through their small craft in Huckleberry Finn.
After introducing his themes through Hawthorne's essay, Marx begins his more meaty analysis with Shakespeare's The Tempest. While the action of The Tempest does not explicitly take place in America, Marx ties its content and themes to several accounts of travellers to the 'New World,' in particular, one from Virginia. These accounts combine admiration for the beauty and bounty of America, and horror at its brutal wildness. Similarly, Marx sees the core of Shakespeare's story as a conflict between Gonzalo's naive embrace of a simple pastoralism and Prospero's recognition that human art is necessary to create and preserve the ideal society. Marx uses The Tempest to illustrate that even before many Westerners arrived in America, the American wilderness was already heavily burdened with symbolic value. The pastoral ideal, developed so thoroughly in Western literature, seemed able to take concrete form in the New World-- and the ideas developed in this literary tradition became a part of the understandings and expectations that Americans had for their nation.
After treating Shakespere, he moves on through a staggering diversity of authors and works: Thomas Jefferson's Notes on Virginia, Robert Beverly's History and Present State of Virginia, Celadon's The Golden Age, Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer, Boswell's Life of Johnson, Tench Coxe's powerful and little-referenced speech An Enquiry into the principles, on which a commercial system for the United States of America should fe founded..., Hamilton's Report on Manufactures, Schiller's Letters upon the Aesthetical Education of Man, Thomas Carlyle's "Life of Schiller" and his "Signs of the Times" and Timothy Walker's attack on that essay in the North American Review, Emerson's "The Young American" and Nature, Henry James' The American, Thoreau's Walden, Hawthorne's "Ethan Brand," Melville's Moby-Dick, Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and finally Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. In each of these works, he finds elements of the struggle of complex pastoralism, emphasizing the fact that while each author presents the dilemma in a variety of ways, none of them satisfactorally reconcile the conflict.
to be continued...