The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America

In writing this review I am attempting not to duplicate the excellent review by panopticonman below. Thus, I would refer all readers of this review to that review.Marx's thesis, roughly stated, is that: Americans applied idea's developed about landscape in the old world to the landscape they discovered in the new world. In doing so, the landscape became a "repository of value" (value meaning economic, spiritual, etc.). The main idea about the landscape that travelled with them from Europe was the idea of "pastoralism".Pastorialism, roughly expressed, represents the yearning by civilised man to occupy the space in between "art" and "nature". Marx does an excellent job of explaining the pre-modern understanding of "art" (which is different then our modern understanding of the word). Marx also distinguishes the a "simple" conception of pastoralism with a "complex" conception. Using the writings of Jefferson, Marx argues that Americans were more comfortable with the idea of a "complex" pastoralism that acknowledged the conflict inherent in the occupation of a "middle landscape" between art and nature.Marx then attaches the concept of pastoralism to the symbol of the "garden" as representing a mediating space between art and nature (apply "arts" to "nature" and produce a garden).After a further differentiation between the idea of the garden-as-continent vs. garden-as-garden, Marx moves on to the idea of the "machine".What Marx means by the "machine" of the title is a relationship between culture and industry that was irrevocably altered by the industrial revolution. He details the attempts by writers to deal with the looming conflict between pastoralism and industrialization. Perhaps the most interesting portion of the book comes when Marx discusses the period when many saw NO conflict between the "machine" and the "garden".However, the tour de force comes when Marx analyzes this conflict as it appears in the works of Emerson, Thoureau, Hawthorne, Melville and Fitzgerald.Personally, I thought the analysis of Hawthorne's "Ethan Brand" was first rate.Marx concludes by congratulating the authors he uses for "clarifying" the situation of Americans and noting that the ultimate resolution of the problem of the machine in the garden is not for writer's but for politicans.In this way, the book is significantly more political then one might expect. It really belongs to the genre of "American Studies", even though my 1970's edition refers to it as belonging to "Literature".Marx achieves greatness by tenaciously explpicating the troubled relationship between America and its technology. Although written in 1964, this book retains great relevance.I highly recommend "The Machine in the Garden".

Marx's book is roughly 50 years old now, but it still sparkles with insight into the myth and symbol discourse surrounding America's fulfillment of the 18th century idea of the "Garden of the World," a new Eden that would redeem mankind. Starting with "The Tempest" as reflective of the West's view of the geographic discovery of "primitive" and "unspoiled" lands, and moving through Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Twain, to Fitzgerald "The Great Gatsby" as an exemplification of how the simple"pastoralism" of the Enlightenment (based on the Virgillian pastoral form), Marx shows how the American artists and writers slowly came to grips with the penetration of the machine into the garden. He talks about the idea of the "middle landscape" a notion poised halfway between primitivism and progressivism, about the apparent perversity of "lazy" early settlers who, in the view of some commentators like Jefferson, never cultivated their own gardens, unlike the English aristocracy. The section on Melville's rewriting of the pastoral ideal in "Moby Dick" is a masterful excursion into the imagination and motives of Melville, as he questions the boosterism for industrialism which has infected even Emerson, who apostrophizes about how industry will forge a newer, better millenialist garden. At some point before the industrial "take-off" there was hope that technology would extend and even democratize the garden. Stunning inventions one after the other -- the railroad, the telegraph, the industrial weaving machies -- and their introduction so soon after the American revolution portended a great unemcubered American future. But still Emerson noticed the change when he wrote in the 1840s that "Things are in the saddle and ride mankind," and Thoreau pointed out that men had become tools of their tools -- focused on the means but not on the ends, and instrumentalist view without ideals.James in his notes on trip he took to America in his later career was struck by the "acquiesence to monotony" in the small New England towns. The railroad crossing had made them all the same. Thomas Carlyle had warned America about the insidious effects of industrialization on the spirit. So did Blake and Wordsworth and other Romantics. However, many Americans like Emerson, believed the degradation of the "dark satanic mills" would never happen in America. None could believe that the apple-cheeked farm-girls of New England working in the first mills would ever fall so low as the wretches in London. The "Garden" would not permit it to happen that way.Some other highlights: his keystone use of a Hawthorne essay in the Virgillian mode penetrated by a railroad whistle. The mixture of Thoreau's hard-headed "empirical" approach to pastoralism, Melville's skillful metaphors, particularly the skeleton of the whale on an island of natives which looks half like a hanging garden and half like an industrial loom. Twain's pastoral America in Huck Finn, Twain's recognition that t