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Leo Marx explores the national imagination as it reflects attitudes about a transformation so profound he says that it is "my belief that industrialization–the capitalist-driven process by which a predominantly rural and agricultural society became a predominantly urban and industrial–was the most important 'event' in American history." (p. 369)
- Sleepy Hollow
- Shakespeare's American Fable
- The Garden
- The Machine
- Two Kingdoms of Force
- Epilogue
- After word
George Inness, "The Lackawanna Valley" 1855. [National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. {gift of Mrs. Huttleston Rogers].
"Aided by the insights of Freud, Ortega, and the historians, we may begin to characterize the dominant motive back of this curious state of mind. Evidently it is generated by an urge to withdraw from civilizations growing power and complexity. What is attractive in pastoralism is the felicity represented by an image of a natural landscape, a terrain either unspoiled or, if cultivated, rural.
| One – the bucolic dream is interrupted; the simple confronted by the complex.
| Two – this fable of a brave new world is connected to our literary & ideological tradition.
| Three – the political transformation of a literary genre into a raw agrarian egalitarianism.
| Four – the emergence of machinery as the valued secular expression of spiritual progress.
| Five – the dialectic emerges as a form of reconciliation and reaffirmation of the middle landscape.
| Epilogue – so removed from the reality of the powers we have conjured into existence we are intoxicated with but not in control of the power.
- Sleepy
Hollow
"Soon
the dream of a retreat to an oasis of harmony and joy was removed from
its traditional literary context. . . Embodied in various utopian schemes...in
essence political-the ideal has figured in the American view of life..."
(p.3)
- the sentimental or simple pastoral retreat (5)
- "such little events as may happen." Nathaniel Hawthorne in "Sleepy Hollow" (11)
- commentary " the decisive part played by the machine image. . . .Now tension replaces repose:" (16)
- "By design I refer to the larger structure of thought and feeling of which the ideal is a part." (24)
- Shakespeare's American Fable The Tempest, 1611
"a highly civilized European who finds himself living in a prehistoric wilderness." (35)
- "visual images of a virgin land" (36)
- "the effort to reconcile conflicting attitudes toward the New World." (46-47)
- "we still must cope with what now seems a paradox:..[paradise away from MIlan] "how lush and lusty the grass looked" how green!"(57-59)
- Essentially a revival of the complex pastoral Arcadian trope to be used throughout the work, based on the Et in Arcadia ego from the 16th century leitmotif from the paintings of Nicolas Poussin .
3. The Garden "the idea that the American continent may become the site of a new golden age could be taken seriously in politics." (74)
- Robert Beverly's Virginia where "America as nature's garden, a new paradise of abundance." (75)
- by 1785 the transformation of pastoral retreat from literary trope to political ideal mixing the primitive with the "doctrines of perfectibility and progress." (88)
- "an American rural scheme....How could rural America possibly hold off the forces already transforming the economy of Europe?" (116-117)
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4. The Machine "technology somehow is a match for the power of intellect implies a progressive idea of history." (146)
- "Jefferson's passion for utilitarian improvement, gadgets, and labor saving devices of all kinds...." led him to say of the steam engine "it is 'simple, great, and likely to have extensive consequences.' . . . so as to supersede the use of water ponds.' . . . and in America fuel is abundant'." (146-47)
- "a capable spokesman of the nascent manufacturing interests" 1792 Report on Manufactures (150-51)Tench Coxe
- "it came out of Germany by way of England...Schiller's "degeneration of contemporary culture." (169)
- by 1829 "a profitable factory system was firmly established in New England; new roads canals and cities were transforming the landscape," thirteen miles of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad "were under construction." (180)
- "The
image of the machine had become a major symbol of value." between
1786 and 1831(190)
- As a sample of the rhetoric of progress (193) The machine and nature
- The machine and history -- more or less a record of continual progress (197)
- The machine and mind -- "steam power. . .will upset the moral economy of the world." (199)
- The machine and America -- telegraph lines "lands now traversed in perfect security by these frail wires." (203)
- Daniel Webster and Northern railroad dedication: "one way of neutralizing the conflict between the machine and the rural ideal." (209)
5. Two Kingdoms of Force "a regeneration in the New World. They become new, better, happier . . . " (228)
- Emerson's "The Young American, (2-7-1844) "sense of the land as an economic and political force with a transcendental theory of mind, he expounds . . . the philosophy of romantic American pastoralism." (229-230)
- "Walden begins with the hero's withdrawal from society in the direction of nature . . . . that the experiment has been a success. (242-43)
- "Hawthorne and Melville match the machine-in-garden motif to a darker view of life than Thoreau's. . . conveys a sense of the widening gap between the facts and ideals of American life, but the implications are more onerous." (265)
- "No book confirms the relevance of the pastoral design to American experience as vividly as the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). . . the sudden incursion of the new power has the effect of shattering childhood trauma. . . a pattern of contradiction so nearly absolute that the promised resolution of comedy is unconvincing." (319)
- "about
the contradictions said to embody what is most distinctive in American
thought."
"Culture . . .the form of its existence is struggle, or at least debate--it is nothing if not a dialectic." (341-42)
6. Epilogue The Garden of Ashes "Ours is an intricately organized, urban, industrial, nuclear-armed society."
"the contradiction between the rural myth and the technological fact." (354)
- "images of mankind in the grip of uncontrollable forces."
- "This curious state of mind is pictured by Charles Sheeler in his 'American Landscape'...here at first sight is an almost photographic image of our world." (355)
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"American Landscape," by Charles Sheeler: (1930): The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) NYC [gift of Mrs J. D. Rockefeller Jr.]
"No trace of untouched nature remains. Not a tree or a blade of grass is in view."
page 355.
"a fully articulated pastoral idea of America did not emerge until the end of the eighteenth. The story of its emergence illustrates the turning of an essentially literary device to ideological or (using the word in its extended sense) political uses."
- Sleepy Hollow
- Shakespeare's American Fable
- The Garden
- The Machine
- Two Kingdoms of Force
- Epilogue
- After word
One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Epilogue
"Soon the dream of a retreat to an oasis of harmony and joy was removed from its traditional literary context. . . Embodied in various utopian schemes...in essence political-the ideal has figured in the American view of life..." (p.3)
About Nathaniel Hawthorne's "trope" of disturbance. Leo Marx writes:
"He is describing a state of being in which there is no tension either within the self or between the self and the environment."
of Hawthorne in Sleepy Hollow, 1844, Marx.
"the delicate interlacing of sounds that seem to unify society, landscape and mind."
"citizens from the hot street."
"it brings the noisy world into the midst of our slumberous peace."
p. 13
Sleepy Hollow: "intruding- crude masculine aggressiveness vs. tender submissive feminine landscape."
p. 29.
Emerson makes the point this way: the serious artist,
he says, 'must employ the symbols in use in his day and nation to convey
his enlarged sense to his fellow-men." Ideas and emotions linked
to industrialization provide Hawthorne with just such an enlargement of
meaning."
..."an integral part of the metaphor."
p. 29.
"the symbolic power of the motif: it brings the political and the psychic dissonance associated with the onset of industrialism into a single pattern of meaning."
p. 30.
One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Epilogue
Fabled story based on a Bermuda shipwreck of 1609, The Tempest "a highly civilized European who finds himself living in a prehistoric wilderness." (35)
"on whose nature
Nurture can never stick."
65
Prospero
"His recognition of inherent and perhaps irremediable aggressiveness in man saves Prospero's utopian bent from sentimentality. But neither does he go to the opposite extreme. That he has reservations about the cultivated man, about power, intellect, and art, is implied by his final act of renunciation. In the end he abjures the potent art that distinguishes him from ordinary men. As if distrusting the uses of power, he vows to bury his staff and drown his book."
p.65.
The linkage between the play & American writers.
Marx on Shakespeare's ultimate vision
"Between the The Tempest and America. The first connection is genetic."
p. 66.
"the artificial is but a special human category of the natural (Polixenes here is a portrait of Greek-Aristotelian ideas)
"Mind and Nature are in essence one. Nature is all. This conviction underlies the seriousness with which Shakespeare, in The Tempest treats the pastoral ideal."
p. 67.
"The topography of The Tempest anticipates the the moral geography of the American imagination. What is most prophetic about the play, finally, is the singular degree of plausibility that it attaches to the notion of a pastoral retreat. By making the hope so believable, Shakespeare lends singular force to its denial. The Tempest may be read as a prologue to American literature."
p. 72.
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"Is the English tree in America almost dead?"
D. H. Lawrence, 1916.
"the unspoiled terrain of the New World as a possible setting for pastoral utopia, a fully articulated pastoral idea of America did not emerge until the end of the eighteenth century. The story of its emergence illustrates the turning of an essentially literary device to ideological or (using the word in its extended sense) political uses."
"By 1785,...the pastoral ideal had been...applied to reality."
pp. 73.
" the idea that the American continent may become the site of a new golden age could be taken seriously in politics." (74)
The "pastoral ideal" is distinguished from "the pastoral design."
pp. 73-75.
"In the record of Western culture there is nothing to compare with the vogue for landscape that arose in the period . . . .only during the Renaissance."
pp. 88-89.
"None of the obvious devices of the old pastoral could be detected in the farmer's plausible argument for an American rural scheme.
...manifested itself in the static, antihistorical quality of the whole conception...."
pp. 116-117.
"the intensity of his belief in the land, as a locus of both economic and moral value,..."
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"technology somehow is a match for the power of intellect implies a progressive idea of history." (146)
"There was not any effective opposition to industrialization."
p. 180.
"The official American ideology of industrialism."
181.
"To the proposition that the new industrial order defiles the soul, Walker in effect is asking: whose soul, whose moral nature will be defiled?"
p. 189.
Timothy Walker, attorney-at-law, 1831 Cincinnati, Ohio.
Defence of Mechanization
"He expounds the doctrine of unlimited economic development ...pervasive attitudes toward the new machine power."
pp. 181-182.
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"a regeneration
in the New World. They become new, better, happier . . . " (228)
"Although Emerson attaches more importance to the part played by the new technology, he adopts the Jeffersonian view that it will be redeemed by contact with the virgin land: a 'sanative and Americanizing influence, which promises to disclose new virtues for ages to come.' "
p. 238.
Henry Adams fear as expressed in a letter to his brother.
- The Garden
- The Machine
- Next is – Epilogue
- After word
One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Epilogue
Epilogue: The Garden of Ashes
"Ours is an intricately organized, urban, industrial, nuclear-armed society."
"the contradiction between the rural myth and the technological fact." (354)
James Gatz
"that strange compound of sentiment and criminal aggressiveness in Gatsby"
"Nick's vision discloses the past melting away into the inessential present."
"the curious state of modern American consciousness. It reveals Gatsby's uncommon 'gift for hope' was born in that transitory, enchanted moment when Europeans first came into the presence of the 'fresh, green breast of the New World.' "
"It was at that moment that Jay Gatsby sprang, like a son of God, from his Platonic conception of himself."
In service of "a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty."
pp. 360-361.
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After word,
He reveals the intellectual passage of his thinking as reflected in this work that began as a 1949 dissertation from a Harvard education in the late 1930s (1937-41) and a Naval enlistment during the 1941-45 war turned into a book in the1964.
He makes references to the impacts of the atomic bomb (1945), Rachel Carson (1962), the UC Berkeley "free speech movement" (1964) and the academic responses to Vietnam War.
p. 367.
machine, metaphor of the machine, mechanization - -Machine: a dynamic thing used to solve problems of fabrication, manufacture, or production. (artificial) An obsession of modernity.
• Force: a physical expression of power or change; in physics Mass times Velocity equals Force
• sentimental vs imaginative: two
ways to think about the pastoral image as a refuge and an inspiration
"mental domain of phantasy," Freud's subconscious part of the brain where wishes and magical thinking reside
George Inness, "The Lackawanna Valley" 1855
Charles Sheeler,"American Landscape" 1930
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