Reading Leo Marx

Leo Marx's 35th Anniversary edition of his book "The Machine in the Garden" includes an Afterword that gives some context for the writing of the book: his early Socialist politics which influence the text's argument, the way he added nonliterary texts to his body of evidence, the complex relationship between literary articulations of a sophisticated pastoral and the more popular and primitivist/nostalgic pastorals, the way the root metaphors of machine and garden produce a third and contradictory even bipolar metaphor of a garden with a Machine in it. I loved the moment when he quoted Thoreau hearing the shrill whistle of a locomotive at Walden, "We have constructed a fate, an Atropos, that never turns aside." It reminded me completely of the Terminator, and the speech that Kyle Reese makes to Sarah Connor: "Listen, and understand. That terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead." This is why the Terminator is the Cyborg in the Garden; it recapitulates much of what Marx argues the locomotive (and steamships, large mills, etc) stood for in imaginative fiction.

He also includes Silent Spring (written in 1961, three years before his own book was published), and mentions the moment when the new machine, Strontium-90, enters the garden and silences it. This is important since it updates what counts as the "machine" that interrupts the idyll of the modern dweller.

One interesting question about the current status of pastoral visions of America: what is the "garden" now, into which Strontium-90, nuclear breeder reactors, the BP catastrophe, etc., intrude? Can you have a Garden image in say 1985, or has Polyani's Great Transformation of the landscape by ever wider reaches of the Industrial Revolution rendered the garden an obsolete metaphor? (Hint - I don't think so. But what counts as garden now, as pastoral, as the so called "middle landscape," is only rarely identified with the nation as a whole.)

And - what is the current image of the machine that intrudes? Is it the personal computer? Genetic engineering? How would you characterize this postmodern Machine in the industrial Garden?

And - is the so called "middle landscape" now what I want to call cyborg competencies, the ability to use science and technology to continue to shape the landscape, but also the ability to not shape the landscape the way we have in the past, leaving behind blighted environments.

I'm impressed by the book despite its shortcomings (which he acknowledges in his Afterword) and am also amazed at how accurately his convention-driven analysis of the pastoral and its effects describes my current experience of cohousing (the pastoral community I live in), the tree-lined trail through the arroyo I run in, the increasingly parallel experience of love for people and love for the natural world (with its attendant ecstasies and vulnerabilities and black moments - BP being only a particularly horrific one).

My "authentic" life is run by conventions, and this is something we all sense but perhaps back away from. I like this bit of Marx's analysis (though he borrows his notion of the conventional from Harry Levin) a lot, and there is a funny vice versa here: the container of the conventional help us contain and name and thus re-member and hold patterns of emotion and experience.

OK that is enough for now; Kelsey and Rhiannon came in from a late night jaunt, and it is time to walk the dog. Next: a brief summary of Marx's main pastoral points.