Perennial Conflict
Santoni, Ronald E.
Perennial Conflict The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, by Leo Marx. Oxford University Press. 392 pp. $6.75. Reviewed by Ronald E. Santoni A t a time when few...
...on the other hand, a recognition of industrialization as a counterforce to the bucolic myth...
...He is awaiting "such little events as may happen...
...The machine has abruptly entered the garden...
...Marx sees Hawthorne's notes on the "Sleepy Hollow" incident of 1844 both as an example of this complex pastoralism and as a decisive adaptation of the conventional pastoral design to the changing conditions and idiosyncrasies of Nineteenth Century American life...
...And his special purpose is to indicate how this ideal has become involved in a "powerful metaphor of contradiction...
...Leo Marx is here preoccupied with the pastoral ideal...
...In its literary and cultural expression, it is the starting point for an infantile wishfulness and a simple-minded anarchic primi-tivism...
...he is conscientiously trying to associate words with natural facts...
...The pastoral ideal," he says, "has been used to define the meaning of America ever since the age of discovery, and it has not yet lost its hold upon the native imagination...
...Hawthrone is sitting in a tranquil pastoral retreat near Concord, Massachusetts...
...This misleadingly simple theme is both the starting place and focus of Marx's exciting educational venture...
...The immediate result is a conflict between two opposite states of mind: on the one hand a pronounced urge to accept the rural myth...
...This confrontation of idyllic myth with reality recurs frequently in the great literature of Western civilization...
...Withdrawal from society into an idealized bucolic setting is also a fundamental ingredient of what Marx calls "imaginative, complex" pastoralism...
...it is, to cite Henry James, the most definitive of all generalizations regarding America...
...Leo Marx's Machine in the Garden helps us to understand our historical and literary heritage, makes evident the roots of our national complacency, and evokes fundamental questions about our contemporary culture and existence...
...Marx distinguishes between two types of pastoralism—one which he calls "popular and sentimental," the other "imaginative and complex...
...Recall this "little event" of 1844...
...As he struggles to penetrate the subconscious, suddenly "there is the whistle of the locomotive...
...The harsh, shrieking, startling noise of the train forces Hawthorne to recognize a reality alien to the pastoral ideal...
...Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden is a compelling inducement to national self-understanding, reflective self-criticism, and existential concern...
...Reviewed by Ronald E. Santoni A t a time when few books are marked by significance, it is only short of exhilarating to come upon a book which combines a wealth of information, an abiding literary sensitivity, and a genius for historical, literary, cultural, and political synthesis...
...Although the former is hard to define, it manifests itself in a kind of nostalgic yearning for a more "natural" environment, in the contemporary "flight from the city," in the development of "wilderness cults" and their reverence for the great out-of-doors, in America's attraction to TV westerns and Norman Rockwell covers, in political provincialism and service to the kind of reactionary ideology which generates withdrawal from the basic problems of a complex industrial society...
...Indeed, wherever people refuse to face the hard social and technological facts of life, this vague feeling is likely to be present...
...The "Sleepy Hollow" incident is not only an enduring image of this conflict: it is a recurrence of the ancient contest between "the kingdom of love and the kingdom of power...
...The works of some American writers— like Thoreau, Melville, Faulkner—illustrate the fact that complex, imaginative pastoralism shares only a starting-point with sentimental pastoralism...
...Marx's intention is to delineate and assess the ways in which the pastoral ideal has been used to interpret the "American experience...
...It is a discerning and important book...
...But what distinguishes this variant of pastoralism from the former is an element of control, a checking of the romantic impulse by a "counterforce" of reality, an exposure of the idyllic vision to a kind of existential shock...
...these works invariably proceed "to qualify, or call into question, or bring irony to bear against the illusion of peace and harmony in a green pasture...
...Hawthorne's distinctive contribution is to expose the pastoral ideal to the pressure of Nineteenth Century industrial changes in America...
...It is mainly "a vestige of the once dominant image of an undefiled green republic . . . dedicated to the pursuit of happiness...
...it is a "metaphor of contradiction" between the forces of feeling and intellect, of religion and science, of the Virgin and the Dynamo...
Vol. 29 • April 1965 • No. 4
