In the Afterword to the 2000 edition of his seminal literary product, Leo Marx starts to explain the genesis and the metamorphosis of his work by saying: ”The Machine in the Garden began as a doctoral dissertation I wrote in the 1949, some fifteen years before it became a book. It was an exploratory study of literary responses to the onset of industrialism in America.” The final product of his original thoughts, the book itself, is far more than a simple exploratory study. It is a carefully crafted vision of a literary scientist who dives into his nation’s most memorable dreams, exploiting their innate origins and various manifestations (mostly in the domain of the literary and the socio-political reveries), looking within and without the discreet and/or vibrant voices of their makers, thus developing his own ideas within the subject matter (technology and the pastoral ideal in America), that may help, in turn, explain why these two seemingly irreconcilable segments of the American experience happen or perhaps are “true”. Therefore, he deserves to be called a theorist, and his little study an exemplar in early American Studies theoretical scholarship. All the signs are there on the pages of this easily readable “cultural criticism”.
The structure of the study reads almost as a flawlessly designed plot figure of a typical story. (By using the adjective typical, I am referring to the notion of a “best representative”, i.e., a story that would best embody the six part structure of a story (exposition, conflict, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution), one that compilers of materials most suitable for high school teaching resources would choose.)The “mottos” to every part (chapter) come from literary/historical sources that might shed some light on the contents of the respective chapter, or provide a starting point within the textual discussion. And in the great tradition of the 1950s literary scholarship, the ideas expressed at the “onset”, those relating to the exhilarating difference between “sentimental” and “complex” pastoralism, come full circle, with the help of Nick Carraway’s (his narrating voice’s) observations about the “great green breast” of the New World shore, in the concluding chapter, the eloquently titled epilogue.
However, there is more than meets the eye in trying to read Marx’s attempt at non-fictional representation of ideas that have sprung partly due to the great fictional (narrative) traditions of the past (including the inevitable ancient past). All thorough out his in-depth analyses of the “pastoral ideal” and its emergence on the American scene(ry), or better, the emergence of the American scene(ry) on the “pastoral ideal”, the between-the-lines reader is able to sense a certain urge on the part of the “theorist” “to think” of a possible explanation for this American event. And it is right there, waiting for us in the embodying forth chapter of the book, appropriately titled “The Machine”. Beginning with the chapter’s motto (provided via D. H. Lawrence’s astute remarks on the American Man, in 'Studies in Classic American Literature'), we are given a panoramic view of the changing nature of American society and social thought due to the emergence of machine technology. While discussing the verbal practices of Tench Coxe, first to grasp the imminent importance of this “new technology”, Marx is setting the scene for his scholarly rational, i.e., why the image of the machine is so important. On page 190, an answer is given: political implications. The rest of the chapter sees this importance diffused through the comparative efforts of “confronting” the image of the machine with that of nature, history, mind and last but not least, America. He does go on to mention the role that Daniel Webster played within the “milieu” of the railroad scenario, but also leaves enough room for the “queer intellectuals” as represented by John Orvis, who did not really see “the railroad as the chosen vehicle for bringing America into its own as a pastoral utopia.” Thus, on this account, we may render Marx as a scholar who “theorizes” about society of the middle landscape, a child of the “ill-fated” marriage of nature and art. And once again, we would give the study a dutiful critical overview, which this time receives strong support by Marx’s choice to bring the “two kingdoms of force” together, juxtaposing their (dis)appearance in the works of those authors whose art he labels as “serious” (Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Adams).
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