Fredy Perlman the Machine Against the Garden

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Fredy Perlman

e MachineAgainst e GardenTwo essays on American

literature and culture

1985


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Contents

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3e Machine Against e Garden: Two essays on American

literature and culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7Prefatory Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7To Te New York Review of B . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7On Te Machine in the Garden . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16


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IntroductionOne can only approach with trepidation the task of writing an introduction to

a text tha t takes as one o f its themes the ways in wh ich f orewords domes ticate

or recuperate the works they introduce. To forestall accusations of proving thisthes is, the introduc tory remarks tha t f ollow will theref ore a emp t to open updeba te rather than limit it through impos ing a supposed ly denitive read ing o f the two essays published in this volume.

ese essays are important rst and f oremost because they are the last worksof Fredy Perlman. 1 Wri en during February and March 1985, and subsequentlytypeset by the author, they were published in the October 1985 issue of the radicalprimitivist Detroit periodical, the F i h Es t a t e . But this was a posthumous act of pub lication , f or Perlman had tragically died wh ile unde rgoing hea rt surgery in June 1985. Aside from h is un nished ep ic e Strait, theref ore, these essa ys are,nolens volens , Perlmans last will and testament.

e two essays, To e New York Review of B and On e Machine in the G arden , are concerned with American literature and culture, or more preciselyAmerican literature and culture of the nineteenth century. According to LorrainePerlman, the aim of the former essay remains one of reclaiming Hawthorne as afellowcritic, not a celebrator of the Invaders takeover of thecontinent. For severalyears, Fredy had been studying the many resisters to the progress imposed by thearrogan t Europeans , and he recogn ized tha t Melville, Haw thorne and oreauhad he lped h im eno rmous ly to distingu ish the fraudu lent from the au then tic.2

ese comments echo Perlmans own prefatory remarks to his two essays, whichno te tha t man y of North Americas best-known 19th cen tury writers, amongthem Melville, Hawthorne and oreau, were prof oundcritics of the technologicalsociety. But the way in which Perlman chooses to undertake the reclamation of these authors remains equally signicant.

As ind icated above, Perlman s concern cen tres on the domes tication o r recu-peration what he calls the conquering and pacifying of literary texts by criticsf or the status quo . e f ocus of his critique , howe ver, rema ins one man : LeoMarx as reviewer/ introduce r in the rst essay, as author in the second essa y.

i s choice is sign ican t. Marx may, as Perlman no tes, have been a Prof essorat Amhe rst College in 1959, when he w rote the Foreword to the Signe t Classicedition of Hawthornes e Scarlet Le er which Perlman so aptly dissects. But bythe time Perlman composed his two essays in 1985, Marx had become Professor

1 ey are also important because they constitute the only sustained pieces of literary criticism inPerlmans corpus .

2 Lorraine Perlman, Having Li le, Being Much: A Chronicle of Fredy Perlmans Fi y Years (Detroit:Black and Red, 1989), p.122.


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of American Cultural History at the Massachuse s Institute of Technology andauthor of Te Machine in the Garden , a standard and much celebrated text in theeld of American Studies. In criticizing Marx, therefore, Perlman challenges theen tire na ture of academ ic constructions of American cu lture. Marx emerges as

the representative man of academia, and as a disillusioned ex-academic, Perlmanthe engaged social critic knows from bi er experience the character of his enemy.

In To e New York Review of B, Perlman censu res Marx f or acting as a lit-erary broker, whe ther in h is role of pub licizing s lurs on Haw thornes characteror in his role of providing reactionary misinterpretations of Hawthornes work.Perlman s exposu re of Marxs ideological motives rema ins pe rtinen t, but hisalternative readings of Hawthornes texts are not entirely unproblematic. In ideo-logical terms, Perlmans readings are thorough ly sound , but in terms of literaryhermeneu tics they are less satisf actory. Marxs interpretations of Haw thornestexts are characterized as distorting, bigoted, reductionist and above all as provid-ing a reactionary textual closure. ese accusations are true, but one cannot help

wonde ring whe ther Perlman s anarchic readings do no t enac t a compa rable, if ideologically contrary, process of textual closure. e subversive potential of e Scarlet Le er (f or examp le) could be said to reside precisely in its resistance totextual closure and its polysemic openness to multiple hermeneutics, gured inthe plethora of meanings available to the symbol of the scarlet le er itself. To poseany reading ana rchic or reactiona ry as denitive could be seen as limitingthe texts radical hermeneu tic heterogene ity. In terms of an ana rchic reading ,this could be construed as an unw i ing totalization which risks undermining theliberatory purpose of the textual interrogation.

At the level of Hawthornes narratives, textual heterogeneity is represented bygures such as the revellers in e Maypole of Merry Moun t and the merrycompany in the forest of witches, Indians, outlaws and dissenters in Te Scarlet Le er. ese he terogeneous assemb lages , primary examp les of Bakhtins car-nivalesque f orces of insu rrection , are celebrated by Perlman when he g leef ullyrecounts how the critically sanitized saints of American le ers were returnedto their true home among ma lcon tents, insu rgents, mirth make rs and w itchesduring the 1960s. And yet despite this celebration of polymorphousness, Perlmanins ists upon con ning the textua l play of f orces in e Scarlet Le er within amanichean framework of binary oppositions.

Hawthornes text takes place on the interface between the town and the forest,the city and the coun try, civilization and the wilderness , culture and na ture,repression and liberation . Hester Prynne , the novels protagon ist, lives on thebounda ry between the two spheres persecuted by the f orces of control and yetdeclining the off er to join the f orces of resistance made b y the witch MistressHibbens . In part this f ailure on Hes ters part to commit herself derives from


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the allegorical schema of the text. If Hesters husband Chillingworth representsScience, and Hes ters lover Dimmesda le represen ts Religion, then Hes ter herself represents Art. And Hawthorne conceives of the artist as a trangressive, if ratherproblema tic gure. r ough he r need lecra Hester, the rst American artist,

ornamen ts the pa triarchal state tha t persecu tes her. And yet the isolation he rposition entails leaves her free to develop a radical programme for psychosocialtransformation:

As a rst step, the who le system of society is to be torn down , and bu ilt upanew. en, the very nature of the opposite sex, or its long hereditary habit,which has become like nature, is to be essentially modied, before womancan be allowed to assume wha t seems a f air and su itable position . Fina lly,all other difficulties being obviated, woman cannot take advantage of thesepreliminary reforms, until she herself shall have undergone a still mightierchange.

But Hester is no activist: her theoretical med itations are never embod ied inpractice. e activism of the merry company in the forest and the theorizing of the intellectua l ou tcast are never synthes ised into a visiona ry r esistance p raxis.

i s f ailure may cons titute a working denition of the Ame rican tragedy. Hes-ter can transg ress the borderline be tween the areas of con trol and resistance ,but canno t align he rself with the la er because o f her ref usa l to be trapped inthose binary oppositions that characterise Western thought. In a sense this typ-ically an tinom ian resistance to hierarchical structures rema ins pos itive. But inHawthornes narrative of America it becomes paralyzing due to the fact that thecon trast between the f orces of con trol and the f orces of resistance in the textis ultimately a f alse oppos ition . e two oppos ing f orces are no t homogeneous

un its. e Puritan State may be regimen ted and un if orm, but its oppos ition re-mains multiform, proliferant and aberrant but above all protean, impossible topinpoint and constellate.

Hester does not seem to realize how this play of f orces qualies this particularbinary opposition, making the incorporation of the elusive resistance into sucha structure extreme ly difficult, and thus rende ring he r ref usa l of dicho tomiesinapplicable in this instance. Unfortunately, however, Perlman appears to makethe same mistake. He seems to want to simplify the text, especially by collapsingHes ter into the resistance , and thus p rovide a textual closure by reclaiming itssupposedly real or original meaning as one antithetical to power.

Perlman is on surer ground in On e Mach i ne i n t he G a r den, where he adeptly

ana lyzes Leo Marxs apologetics f or the Faustian u rges of the Wes t. But evenhere there are problematic elements, and ones not unrelated to issues that arise in


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To e New York Review of B. Perlman states that the knowledge that theres abefore as well as an outside to the control complex (or Leviathan, as he calls it)and its linear his -story, remains crucial to his thought. He then rightly reprehendsMarx for denying the authenticity of this primitivist impulse and trying to explain

away its discursive encodements as merely examples of the literary conventionof the pastoral.

Perlman, however, seems to assume that pastoral forms of literary discourse,stripped o f excrescences in the shape o f domes ticating critical interpretations ,can provide direct access to the ou tside. He uses the image of an electricallycharged barbed wire fence to characterize the strict limits placed around life in theconcen tration camp wo rld of the con trol comp lex. He correctly criticizes Marxf or reductively asserting that the problems of civilization can be resolved throughpolitical processes : Politics, the science of powe r/ t he art of the poss ible istha t a breach in the f ence or the f ence itself? But the ques tion ap tly asked o f political discourse could also be directed at its literary counterpart.

On one level, literary discourse like any other semiotic system can be seenas a self-reexive, closed system and one whose origins lie within the terrain of civilization . In this respec t at least, it rema ins deba table whe ther language ingeneral and literary discourse in particular are breaches in the f ence or the f enceitself. At another level, however, semiotic systems maintain dialogic relationships,no t on ly with one ano ther, but with socio-material processes . And w ithin suchnego tiations can be d iscerned those intimations of the outside tha t pas toraldiscourse provides. It is he re tha t the subversive po tential of literary discoursebecomes appa ren t: in the ab ility of a text to act out revolution rather thanmerely speak of revolution, and in the process possibly inhibit the developmentof revolutiona ry discourse. And in this respec t, Perlman s heterodox insigh tsare crucial, no t merely in app rehend ing a bef ore and an outside, but also abeyond.

Shortly a er compos ing these essa ys Perlman app rehended a beyond of cosmic dimensions. But it cannot be coincidental that these last works are both ingly wri en in the form of le ers. In itself this remains indicative that untilthe end he , like Haw thorne, continued the a empt (in the words of the la er) toopen an intercourse with the world.

John Moo re


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e Machine Against e Garden: Twoessays on American literature and

culture

Prefatory NoteCritiques of economic development, materialprogress, technology and industry

are not a discovery of the F i h Es t a t e . Human be ings resisted the incu rsionsfrom the earliest days, and man y of North Americas best-known 19th centurywriters, among them Melville, Haw thorne and oreau , were prof ound c riticsof the techno logical society. Since these w riters became classics of Americanliterature, and therefore available to all interested readers, defenders of officialviews have had to carry on a cold war against them. e most powerful weaponhas been the classroom assignment; most students a acked by this weapon neveragain cracked a book by a classic. Other ways of conque ring and pac ifyingthe classics have been more subtle: the authors were maligned, the works weremisinterpreted, the critiques were diverted and at times inverted.

e two essays below are descriptions of some of the methods used in the coldwar. e rst was submi ed (but not published in) the official organ of the coldwarriors, e New York Review of B. e second , origina lly a le er, a emp ts tounravel and expose the diversions and inversions of one of the more inuentialcold warriors.

To The New York Review of B Wh ile skimm ing through a recen t issue of your magaz ine , I came ac ross a

caricature of a man ba ring h is chest and exposing a le er stamped o r brandedon it. I supposed tha t the ma rk was intended to be a scarlet le er, even thoughthe cartoon was black and white. I learned that the branded man in the cartoonwas supposed to be Nathan iel Haw thorne , author of an un f orge able exposu reof bigots who branded human beings with scarlet le ers.

What can this mean, I wondered. My curiosity being aroused, I plunged intothe article accompanying the cartoon.3 e article was by a Leo Marx; I did not atrst remember that I had encountered this name before. e subject of the article

3 Leo Marx, All in the Family (a review of Philip Young, Hawthornes Secret: An Untold Tale ; Boston:D. R. Godine, 1984),Te New York Review of Books , February 14, 1985, pp. 2932.


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was a book on Hawthornes Secret by a Philip Young who , a f ootno te told me,relied on Freud to do his probing. My wonder was not dispelled by my reading of the article. On the contrary, my wonder grew.

While reading the article, I thought of Hawthornes e Scarlet Le er . You may

remember the story. In case youve forgo en, Ill remind you. e se ing is theNew England of the earliest Founding Fathers of American Democracy. e storybegins in the chapter titled e Market Place, on the grass plot before the jail, inPrison Lane . On a certain summe r morning, the grim rigidity that petried thebearded physiognomies of these good people . . . could have betokened nothingshort of the anticipated execution of some noted culprit, on whom the sentenceof a legal tribunal had but conrmed the verdict of public sentiment. e culpritmigh t be a slugg ish bond se rvan t, or an undu tif ul child, an idle and vagran tIndian, or it might be, too, that a witch. . . was to die upon the gallows. 4

On this particular morning , the culprit was a young woman who had g ivenbirth to a child, a baby girl whose father was not the young womans long-absent

husband . For this crime, no t agains t na ture but against the laws of legislatorsdemoc ratically elected in a renowned New Eng land town counc il, Hester, theculprit, is not only imprisoned; she is condemned to wear a brand on her breast, ascarlet le er A, as a lifelong reminderand visible sign of her sin. She was furthercondemned , on eme rging from prison , to climb a scaff old wh ich cons tituted aportion of the penal machine, the platform of the pillory, where she was to exposeherself and he r brand to the stings and venomous s tabs of pub lic contume ly,wreak ing itself in every variety of insu lt. Above her were the Governor andseveral of his counsellors, a judge, a general, and the minister of the town; all of whom sa t or stood in a balcony of the mee ting house , looking down upon theplatform . . . ey were, doubtless, good men, just and sage. But out of the wholehuman f amily, it would not have been easy to select the same numbe r of wise andvirtuous persons who should be less capable of si ing in judgment on an erringwomans heart. . . 5

e repression of an individual by the iron mach inery of the State has rarelybeen so powerfully depicted. Yet this is only the beginning of the story. e sequelis an unrelenting exposure of the Bigotry, in its various guises, of the founders of the American Way of Life.

One of the ministers on the balcony overlooking the platform is the ReverendMaster Dimmesdale, her godly pastor, of whom one of the spectators says thathe takes it very grievously to heart that such a scandal should have come uponhis congregation.

4 Nathaniel Hawthorne, e Sca rl e t Le e r (New York: Signet Classics; New American Library, 1959).5 Ibid.


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And one of the spectators is the long-absent husband, turning up just in timeto see his branded w if e, clutching ano ther man s child, on the platf orm of thepillory. is man changes his name to Chillingworth and undertakes to nd thefather of his wifes child. His researches quickly lead him to the Reverend Master

Dimmesdale, her godly pastor.New England bigotry is compounded with hypocrisy. e self-righteousness

of the Chosen People rests on lies. e lies, furthermore, have intercourse withone another and give birth to broods of new lies. e guilty Reverend confessesto his congregation, he exposes himself as a greater sinner than the condemnedculprit, he bares the scarlet le er branded on h is own ches t. And the more heconf esses , the mo re saintly he becomes in the eyes of his admiring ock. Hisconfessions conrm and justify the iron laws and chains needed to keep sinnersless saintly than the Reverend on the straight and narrow path.

With thecharacterof Chillingworth, thebetrayed husband, Hawthorneaddedano ther dimens ion to the story. Chillingwo rth is not a narrow Puritan bu t a

man o f learning and intelligence . . . extens ively acqua inted with the med icalscience of the day. He is a dispassionate scientic researcher, a successor of themed ieval Inqu isitor and f orerunne r of the mode rn Psychiatrist. Chillingwo rthquickly discovers that the preacher is his man, but he does not expose the saintlyReverend to the cong regation , he does no t hand the cu lprit over to the secu lararm. Such informing would have no scientic interest. Chillingworth moves inwith the gu ilty man and e xperimen ts with the gu ilt in the privacy of his ownclinic, alone with his patient. He nds the sore, sticks a knif e into it, slowly turnsthe kn if e, and goes on turning, f ascina ted by the eff ects. Wha tever motive of revenge he might have had at the start is soon f orgo en, replaced by f ascination,by scientic interest in his squirming victims behavior. Chillingworth completesthe picture of a society that confronts nature and human ity with lies, instrumentsof torture and lethal weapons.

As an allegory of the branding of this continent with the scarlet le er A, asan allegory of America young , middle-aged and o ld Haw thornes story isoverwhelming. Melvilles e Condence Man is neither as all-embracing nor asclear. e exposure of every official American virtue is as fresh today as when itwas wri en, and it continues to be a festering sore on the image of America.

In the USSR, such f estering sores are liquidated; the au thors names a reremoved from encyclopedias and library catalogues, the stories are removed frombookstores; the State sees to it that the story and the author never existed.

American methods are much subtler. Here it is not forgo en that the CatholicChurch gained in stature by turning heretics into Catholic saints. Here hereticalauthors were turned into American classics while the anti-American purport of their work was handed over to the secular arm. Here the secular arm saw to it that


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readers read the exposures the same way Reverend Dimmesdales congregationheard his confessions, as yet another proof of the virtue of the authorities si ingor standing on the balcony overlooking the platform of the pillory.

With these thoughts and recollections passing through my mind while I read

the review of Hawthornes Secret in e New York Review of B, I suddenly remem-bered where I had previously seen the name of the reviewer. I found my old copyof e Scarlet Le er , a 1959 Signet Classic, and there, on the title page, below theauthor and title, I saw the words: With a Foreword by Leo Marx. A prof essor atAmherst College. e very man who reviewed em>Hawthornes Secret. Iremembered that my Signet Classic contained different works by different authors,the sho rter a po lemic agains t the longe r. I re-read the Foreword and con rmedmy memo ry. Sure enough , the Foreword is like a nea rly- opaque lens intendedto help studen ts stay on the straigh t and na rrow pa th wh ile wande ring in thef orest; it is a crutch, a map, a How to read this book withou t ge ing lost guide;it removes the sting and makes the great American classic safe for wholesome

American students.In this Foreword, Professor Marx warns that entering the world of e Sca rl e t Le er is like wa lking in a large, man y-sided ha ll of mirrors. He, the Prof essor,possesses the key to this labyrinth. e key is the Professors view of the wilder-ness. e landscape, the geography is no mere backdrop; it is inseparable frompolicy and action and meaning. To Professor Leo Marx, the wilderness is grim.Its grimness can even be felt in the grim mood of the crowd waiting at the prisondoor. e Prof essor grudg ing ly adm its tha t some of the grimness can be e x-plained in other ways, but he promptly disposes of the other ways; he insiststha t it is neither the Puritan colony nor its Bigotry, but rather the Wildernesstha t is grim. And he drives h is point home . Here is a tiny ou tpos t of Englishsociety cut off from civilization by the ocean on one s ide and a vast, unexploredreach of wild nature on the other. What this may portend is quietly suggested bythe appea rance o f a savage at the edge o f the crowd .6 i s statemen t does no tcome from a racist Indian-killer of the Jacksonian era of mass exterminations;it comes from our con tempo rary, Amhe rst Prof essor Leo Marx, a century a erthe holocaust perpetrated on this continents original inhabitants was officiallytermina ted. e war is still going on .7 e Wilderness is still a place tha t hasto be extirpated, enclosed , pacied and p rocessed . e wild f orest is a place of tempting licence, a place where people elude the rules of the commun ity, . . .aplace where no laws obtain; in short a moral wilderness. 8

6 Leo Marx, Foreword to Ibid., pp. vii-xii.7 See Frederick Turner, Beyond G eography: e Western Spirit Against the Wilderness (New York:

Viking Press, 1980).


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e w ilderness is red, like Hes ters le er. And the Prof essor, like the saintlyReverend, is commi ed to the iron side, with all that implies about mans weak-ness and his inescapable need for restraint, order and institutional control. Fromthat side, the iron side, Professor Marx declares war on Hawthorne, who deliber-

ately enlists us all on Hesters side, on the wild side, for, in the Professors words,Hester is perf ectly willing to disregard all that men (sic ) have inherited from thepas t religion , tradition , law and soc iety. She believes in the new beg inn ing .Prof essor Marx does no t, and he turns some rsau lts in order to pull the greatAmerican author away from the sentimental side over to his side. Hawthornecalls f orth our warmest impu lses our sympa thy f or the lone ly, our solidaritywith the persecu ted, our ana rchic urge f or f ullmen t now ; and then , when ou rgentlest selves have been exposed, he forces us to recognize their fallibility. 9

Nowhere in e Scarlet Le er did Hawthorne force us to recognize the fallibilityof our ana rchic urge, but Prof essor Marx wishes he had ; his wish becomes f actand nally it becomes the moral of e Sca rl e t Le e r : Hawthorne nally would

have us see that as a principle the wild rose is no more adequate than iron. eproblem is that, having we ighted the argumen t so heavily on the sen timen talside, it is no easy task to restore the balance .10 I readily adm it tha t it is no easytask f or me to imag ine a balance between a w ild rose and iron ; I picture theower rmly held in a vise; in human terms, I imagine an individual, gi ed withlife and thought, encased in armor.

Of course the Prof essor does no t, f or he canno t, quo te the mo ral withHaw thornes words. He tells us tha t Haw thorne placed this moral in the -na l chap ter whe re he spe lls out the lesson , whe re the language is so simple,the author so outspoken, and the meaning so plain that we scarcely recognize themoral much less its profundity. 11

I glanced at Chapter 24 of Hawthornes story, titled Conclusion, and I admitthat I could scarcely recognize anything like Professor Marxs moral, much lessits prof und ity. But then I no ticed tha t my Signe t Classic contained yet ano thernal chap ter a er the storys nal chap ter, a short story wri en by Hawthorneat a different time and in a different spirit, a story with the title Endico and theRed Cross. I realized that Professor Marx had commi ed a sleight of hand, thathe had set a trap for his students, by appending this story to Te Scarlet Le er .

e story of Endico and the Red Cross, jarring as a conclusion to the tale itf ollows , seems to show its author as a def ende r of iron Puritans and an enem y

8 Leo Marx, Foreword to Ibid., pp. vii-xii.9 Ibid .

10 Ibid .11 Ibid.


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of the scarlet and the wild; it seems to contain Prof essor Marxs lesson . Herethe f amous Pu ritan governor Endico , in h is polished breastplate, confron tedthe bearers of Englands banner of the Red Cross. In close vicinity to Endicostood the sacred edice as well as that important engine of Puritanic authority,

the whipping post. Nearby, at one corner of the meeting house was the pillory,and at the other the stocks; the head of an Episcopalian was incased in the one,the f eet of a f ellow crimina l in the other. A woman wo re a cle stick in he rtongue, in appropriate retribution f or having wagged that unruly member againstthe elders of the chu rch. Among the crowd we re several whose pun ishmen twould be lifelong; some, whose ears had been cropped . . .; others, whose cheekshad been branded with the initials of their misdemeanors; one, with his nostrilsslit and sea red; and ano ther, withaha lter about his neck . . . e Kingsmenwe realso on hand , with their banne r, threatening to curb the powe rs of the Puritanauthorities. Endico ordered the English banner lowered and, brandishing hissword, Endico thrust it through the c loth, and w ith h is le hand ren t the Red

Cross completely out of the banner. e story ends with a moral, a lesson. Witha cry of triumph , the peop le gave their sanc tion to one of the boldest exploitswhich our history records. And forever honored the name of Endico ! We lookback through the mist of ages , and recogn ize in the rend ing of the Red Crossfrom New Englands banner the rst omen of that deliverance which our fathersconsummated a er the bones of the stern Puritan had lain more than a centuryin the dust. 12

We recognize in Endico the forerunner of the Jacksons and the Reagans. Wesee the glorious origins of the American Wa y of Lif e. e language is so simple,the author so outspoken, and the meaning so plain that we scarcely recognize themoral . . . A lazy student could simply leap from the Foreword to the books lastparagraph to learn what it all meant. e moral, the prof ound lesson, is patriotic;it can be summarized as Stars and Stripes Forever!

e last paragraph of the Signet Classic edition of e Scarlet Le er annihilatesall tha t precedes it. Hemmed in between P rof essor Marxs Foreword and thepatriotic last paragraph, Hawthornes tale lost its sting and, like Joan of Arc, couldsafely be placed among the angels.

Yet on ly a person steeped in the me taphysics of emp ire-building cou ld readthis last paragraph without suspecting that its author had his tongue in his cheek.Even a student who allowed the last paragraph to annihilate all that preceded itcould have disabused herself by simply reading yet another of Hawthornes shortstories, a story with the title e Maypole of Merry Moun t. If this story had

12 Nathaniel Hawthorne, Endico and the Red Cross, appended to e Scarlet Le er (New York:Signet Classics; New American Library, 1959), pp. 247254.


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also been appended to the Signet Classic edition, no reader could have missed theirony of the seemingly patriotic last paragraph, nor could any reader have readthat paragraph as a celebration of the feats of Endico and his imperial successors.

In the story of the Maypole, Hawthorne made his view of Endico s America

amp ly clear. If Europeans had to land on this continen ts shores, they need no thave brought their repressive State machinery, their prisons, pillories and stocks,their genoc idal militarism and their Bigotry with them . Another alterna tiveexisted. ere were initially two diff erent groups o f se lers on New England sshores: Endico and his Puritans were in Salem; altogether different people werein Mount Wollaston (which they renamed Merry Mount).

ose at Merry Moun t were everyt hing the Puritans we re not. Jollity andgloom were contending for an empire. 13 At Merry Mount, the Maypole was thebanner staff . . . ey who reared it, should their banner be triumphant, were topour sunshine over New Englands rugged hills, and sca er ower seeds through-out the soil. ese people laughed, danced in masks, caroused and fornicated, and

they invited their neighbors, the people of the woodlands, the original inhabitants,to join them in their festivals.But a band of Puritans, who watched the scene, invisible themselves, compared

themasques to those devils andruinedsouls with whom their superstition peopledthe black wilderness. Sensing the invisible threat, the dancers and carousers sadlyreected tha t no thing o f f uturity will be brighter than the mere rememb ranceof wha t is now pass ing . It was an epoch when mirth make rs of every sort . . .began to be discountenanced by the rapid growth of Puritanism. . . 14

Not f ar from Merry Moun t was a se lemen t of Puritans , mos t disma lwretches , who sa id their prayers bef ore dayligh t, and then w rough t in theforest or the corneld till evening made it prayer time again . . . A party of these grim Puritans, toiling through the difficult woods, each with a horse-load of iron armor to burden h is f ootsteps, wou ld sometimes draw nea r thesunny precincts of Merry Mount . . . e men of iron shook their heads andfrowned so darkly that the revellers looked up imagining that a momentarycloud had overcast the sunshine . . . Should the grizzly saints establish their jurisdiction over the gay sinne rs, then wou ld their spirits darken a ll theclime, and make it a land o f clouded visages , of hard toil, of sermon andpsa lm f orever . . . the leade r of the hos tile pa rty stood in the cen tre . . . Sostern was the ene rgy of his aspec t, tha t the who le man , visage , frame andsou l, seemed w rough t of iron , gi ed with lif e and though t, yet all of one

13 Nathaniel Hawthorne, e Maypole of Merry Mount in Selected Tales and Sketches (New York:Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967), pp. 138149.

14 Ibid.


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substance with his headpiece and breastplate. It was the Puritan of Puritans;it was Endico himself! . . . And with his keen sword Endico assaulted thehallowed Maypole. Nor long did it resist his arm. It groaned with a dismalsound; it showered leaves and rose buds upon the remorseless enthusiast . . .

ere, cried Endico , looking triumphantly on his work, ere lies the onlyMaypole in New England. e thought is strong within me that, by its fall, isshadowed forth the fate of light and idle mirth makers, amongst us and ourposterity . . . Wheref ore, bind the heathen crew, and bestow on them a smallma er of stripes ap iece, as earnes t of our f urther justice. Set some of therogues in the stocks . . . Further penalties, such as branding and cropping of ears, shall be thought of herea er . . . And shall not the youths hair be cut?asked Peter Palfrey, looking with abhorrence at the lovelock and long glossycurls of the young man . Crop it f orthw ith, and tha t in the true pumpk inshe ll f ash ion , answe red the cap tain. en bring them a long . . . there bequa lities in the youth, wh ich may make h im valian t to ght, and sobe r to

toil, and p ious to pray; and in the ma iden , that may t her to become amother in our Israel . . . ose not exterminated would be reduced to wage-workers and housekeepe rs; love and laugh ter wou ld give way to indus try,playf ulness to Bigotry and owers to shears of iron. As the moral gloom of the world overpowers all systematic gayety, even so was their home of wildmirth made desolate amid the sad forest. 15

e author of the story of the Maypole cannot easily be made to carry ProfessorLeo Marxs moral; he cannot easily be visualised standing alongside bold andhonoredEndico ; he canmore easilybe visualised in Endico spillory, alongsidehis friends Eme rson , Melville and oreau , one in the stocks, the second w ithhis ears cropped, the third with his nostrils slit and seared. Despite his place of birth and his illustrious ancestry, the great American writer can be considereda forerunner of all the Unamericans, a beacon to anarchistic and seditious alienswho longed for the imminent overthrow of American government.

Prof essor Marx hemmed in e Scarlet Le er , but to no avail. Only a f ewshort years a er the publication of his Signet Classic, his students began to sca erower seeds throughout the soil, to laugh, dance, carouse and fornicate, to identifywith all that was dark, wild, and savage to the Professor. Rebels repelled bythe metaphysics of Indian-hating and empire-building turned their backs on theentire iron edice of violent Americanism with all its Bigotry and Racism. Andsome of the rebels saw the au thor of e May Pole of Merry Moun t, and a lsothe author of Te Condence Man , as precursors of the rebellion. 16

15 Ibid.


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It appea red as if the saints of American le ers were abou t to f all among ma l-con ten ts, insu rgen ts, mirth make rs and w itches . Something had to be done . Anew me thod of exorcising the subversive purport of anc ien t stories had to befound.

Ano ther compa rison w ith the USSR can be ins tructive. ere an ind ividua lwho pub licly rebels against the pa tho logical behavior of the State is promp tlyarrested and inca rcerated in a psychiatric hospital. e ind ividua ls critique isinverted; it is turned aga inst him. All tortures, all crimes are permi ed to theState; they are its no rm; the State can even b rand an ind ividua l with a le er I(Insane) if the individual refuses to take part in the States crimes. It becomes thetask of the States torturers, in this case psychiatrists, to remake the ind ividua linto a normal participant in officially sanctioned insanity, namely to break theindividuals spirit.

Here the same result is obtained with somewhat different methods. e lessonsof the early Pioneers have not been forgo en. Here critics are not incarcerated in

the overcrowded prisons and psychiatric hospitals, to be fed and lodged at publicexpense . Here critics are branded on the platf orm of the pillory; here the tortureis not inicted inside the connes of the penal institution, but in public view. Andthanks to the progress of information technology, even long-dead critics can bebranded and displayed on the modern platforms.

In 1959 Professor Leo Marx hemmed in Hawthornes e Scarlet Le er but failedto remove its sting. Twenty-six years later, the Professor turned on the author. Hediscovered the dossier published as Haw t ho r ne s Sec r e t: An Unt o l d T a l e , by PhilipYoung , a biograph ical critic with some thing o f a repu tation as a gi ed literarydetective.17 I was tempted to refer to the detective as a modern Chillingworth butI remembe red tha t, in his earlier Foreword, the Prof essor had wa rned that thischaracter was no t lif elike; this cold-blooded man is a stock character, a villainout of the Faust myth who anticipates the heartless psychiatrist of current lore. 18Since Chillingworth was only a stock character out of myth, and since even theheartless psychiatrist exists only in current lore, Iwill refrain from comparingthe literary inquisitor to anyone else; Ill stick to the facts.

Professor Marx says that Young has altered the way we think about a majorau thor and h is work. He has le us with a Haw thorne who in one impo rtan trespect bears a striking resemblance to his own creation, Arthur Dimmesdale: inthe relationship between his secret guilt and his public discourse. 19

16 Richard Drinnon , Facing West: e Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (New York:Meridian; New American Library, 1980).

17 Leo Marx, All in the Family,Ibid., . 3, pp. 2932.18 Leo Marx, Foreword to Ibid., pp. vii-xii.19 Leo Marx, All in the Family,Ibid., . 3, pp. 2932.


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Haw thornes secret, as the branded gure in the cartoon already told us, isIncest, sexual relations with his sister.

Yet the wonder of it all and Professor Marx admits this is that Young has noevidence whatever of an actual relationship between Hawthorne and his sister! 20

e entire case rests on insinuation. e only proven fact is that Hawthornehad a sister. e only other inf ormation in the doss ier is tha t two sisters of Haw thornes rst American ances tor were f ound gu ilty of inces t by a Puritancourt. i s inf ormation is appa rently no t off ered as a joke. e reade r is askedto believe that the Puritan cou rt reached its verdict on the bas is of evidencemore substantial than Philip Youngs. e reader is also asked to believe that thepropensity to incest is hereditary.

A la er-day apologist f or the ironPuritansm ight still believe in the f air-minded-ness of a Puritan trial; others will only wonder what the two women had actuallydone , if anything at all. A la er-day believer in the racial transm ission of cul-tural traits might be disposed to believe that the propens ity to incest is similarly

transmi ed; others will be as repelled by the genealogical as by the racist Bigotry.A quarter of a century ago, the Professor tried to remove the grimness fromthe Founding Fathers and transfer it to the Wilderness. Now he is trying to removethe guilt from the State and transfer it to the critic.

Now my wonde r is dispelled. I think I nally unde rstand wha t all this means.Weve returned to the now-grassless plot before the jail, in Prison Lane. We, thereaders, are spectators looking up at a scaffold which is called e New York Review of B. On this scaffold or platform stands the author of e Scarlet Le er and eMaypole of Merry Mount, baring his chest to display a scarlet I. Above him arethe Governor and several of his counsellors, a judge, a general, a prof essor and aliterary detective, all of them si ing or standing in a balcony, looking down uponthe platf orm. ese good peop le are dressed in a ll their nery, but in the placewhe re their f aces shou ld be, no thing is visible bu t a capital le er B, its colorsred, white and blue, its pa ern of stars and stripes varying from one personageto the next.

February 1985

On The Machine in the Garden Your comments as well as the urgings of other friends stimulated me to read

Leo Marxs book, e Mach i ne i n t he Ga r den?21 I quickly recognized the reviewer

20 Ibid.


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of Hawthornes Secret and a lso the au thor of the Foreword to my Signe t Clas-sic edition of Haw thornes superb novel. But I do no t regret reading the book .

e central themes o f Leo Marxs book have f or several years been among m yma in conce rns , and the book s range as we ll as the prof und ity of man y of its

observations impressed, provoked and disturbed me.You may be right in your assessmen t of Leo Marx (in this book) as more

historical observer than ad vocate. He does let his characters speak f or them -selves, and he does no t make h is own views obtrusive. But his own views docome through ; by the end o f the book he unob trusively expresses a cohe rentoutlook on nature, humanity and technology; to a reader with different and o endiame trically opposed views , Leo Marx does no t seem a me re observer, but anadvocate.

A barbed wire fence can be described in many ways. To one observer it maylook like a device for the protection of good people from criminals and predatorybeas ts; to ano ther it may look like a device created by crimina ls and predatory

beasts to repress good people. e side from which the observer sees the fence isimportant, but not determining; imagination enables an outsider to see with theeyes of an ins ider, or an insider with the eyes of an ou tsider. e van tage po intmay (or may not) provide insights, but it does no t make one an au thority. I, f orexample, have never been incarcerated in a concentration camp, yet Ive tendedto see barbed wire fences with the eyes of the victims imprisoned in them. Otherpeople Ive known, who were no closer to (and no further from) the fences than I,have tended to see all such f ences, except the specic one behind which their kinperished, with the eyes of those who bene ed from fences. Naturally we argued.We hu rled reality into each others f aces. Leo Marxs book is a continua tion of that argument. Leo Marx hurls reality into my face, a reality Ive chosen not toaccept, his reality.

For me the knowledge that there is an outside, the knowledge (and not merelythe belief) tha t the rest of the wo rld does no t cons ist of concen tric circles of barbed wire, has been c ritical. Leo Marx qua lies such know ledge as na ive,ana rchic primitivism (p. 11) and d ismisses it as an escape from the RealityPrinciple (p. 9), a recoil from the pa in and respons ibility of lif e in a comp lexcivilization . . . (p. 22). I ref er to the ou tside with terms like Commun ity,Freedom , and some times Nature, and I realize tha t others have used the terms,concepts and literary conventions that were available in other times and places;Ancient Greeks , espec ially during the days of Hellen istic despo tism, ref erredto the outside with poetic images o f a pastoral Arcadia, and some Wes tern

21 Leo Marx, e Machine in the G arden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York:Oxford University Press, 1964).


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Europeans , during their Renaissance , borrowed this language . e statemen tsbecame stilted, and they admi edly conveyed less and less. But Leo Marx assertstha t these s tatemen ts never conveyed anything a t all, tha t they had ne ver beenanything mo re than literary pa erns (p. 18), poe tic gimm icks. He goes on to

claim tha t such s tatemen ts express the oppos ite of wha t they claim to express,that they reveal the inadequacy of the Arcadian situation as an image of humanexperience (p. 23), tha t they call into question . . . the illusion of peace andharmon y in a green pas ture . . . (p. 25). For this man , war and d isharmon y arethe realities, even in green pastures.

A er I had read twenty-ve pages, my main thought was: Ill be damned if Imgoing to read this whole book. As someone who considered Kropotkins Mutual Aid more inf ormative about species survival than all of Darwins words about thestruggle for survival, I was repelled by Leo Marxs crude la er-day Darwinism.But you (and other friends of mine) had recommended Marxs book, so I read on.

e themes he was tackling we re dear to me; I could see tha t he was head ing

towa rd a confron tation w ith prof ound c ritics of his reality; I wonde red howhe wou ld wiggle out of the corners in wh ich the critics le him. I though t hewas ben t on repea ting the f eat of rhetorician Dan iel Webs ter, a f eat Leo Marxdescribes as follows: his trick is reduction in the technical literary sense of givingin to a f eeling or idea in order, eventually, to take it back (p. 213). Webs ter, afriend of Industry, pretended to be dismayed by the devastation only in order toneutralize the dissonance generated by industrialization. e rhetoric forms anemotional bond between the orator and the public. It puts him in touch with themass su rge toward comf ort, status, wea lth and powe r tha t rules the society . . .Webster understands the practical political truth the facts of power (p. 217).

So does Leo Marx. His f acts of powe r begin in the Ame rica of the 1840s,with what W. W. Rostow called the take-off into industrialism (p. 29). At thatmomen t, escap ists from the reality principle have a sense o f the mach ine as asudden, shocking intruder upon a fantasy of idyllic satisfaction (p. 26). Realistsare euphoric. e middleman, the entrepreneur, the man who undertakes to cutup the environmen t into processed , saleable commod ities, becomes the mode lrealist. e type was already envisioned by William Shakespeare in the characterof Prospe ro, the au tocrat who w ielded h is empires inhab itan ts as hands andeven concocted a tempest to shipwreck his f oes. Prosperos reality is a symbolicmiddle landscapecreated by themediation between art andnature (p. 71), namelyby what orstein Veblen called Business Enterprise.

i s great revolution in science and techno logy, this mass ive shi in pre-vailing ideas about mans relation to nature (p. 74), this mingling of mind w ithbrute ma er (p. 93) becomes Ame ricas all-embracing ideology (p. 88). Pagea er page describes this euphoria for that irreversible and accelerating process


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of change now regarded as the very powerhouse of history. e raped landscape,ref erred to as a well-ordered garden is magn ied to continen tal size (p. 141);the rape requires a stronger, more centralized government with power to enforceuniform economic policies (p. 152). With such a government and with machin-

ery, Prospe ros heirs conque r na ture, remake a was te land into a syntheticgarden, abolish space and time by imprisoning surviving human beings in en-closed spaces and clock time, set out toward the liberation of the whole world(pp. 183206 passim ) and use the language o f pas toralism to advertise the realestate and the merchandise of their processed world.

Leo Marx is not himself an advertiser of the improved real estate. He doesnot pre ify Americas industrialization. But he expresses a certain nostalgia forthe period when intellectuals were urged to conquer the new territory openedup by industrialization (p. 241), the period when there was nothing inherentlyugly about factories and railroads ( ibid.). And he expresses something close tocontempt toward early critics of that conquest of new territory.

He dismisses Mon taignes critique of the European e xpropriators, On Can -nibalism, as one of the f oun tainheads o f mode rn p rimitivism (p. 49) (and f orLeo Marx, the wo rd primitive is ne ither pos itive no r neu tral). He expects thereader to chuckle when he says that What nally enables us to take the idea of asuccessful return to nature seriously is its temporariness (p. 69).

He bland ly claims tha t it was no t easy f or intelligen t men to maintain aprimitivist position , and he proves this claim in the oddes t manne r: Jean Jacques Rousseau was drawn to the spontaneity and freedom he associated withprimitive life; but he too had to face the undeniable fact that natural man was,by European s tanda rds, amoral, unc reative and m ind less (pp. 101102). ef act (of European supe riority) is so unden iable to Leo Marx that T. Jeff ersonsoccasional claim to the contrary strikes him as a charming absurdity (p. 120).

He nds tha t oreau s Walden goes to the verge of ana rchic primitivism(p. 245), but he, Leo Marx, rescues oreau from f alling into the abyss. Hecons iders oreau s ind ictmen t of the Conco rd econom y to be overdrawn ,but he assures the reader that oreau feels no simple-minded Luddite hostilitytoward the new inventions (p. 247). oreau said, I will not have my eyes putout and my ears spoiled by its (the railroads) smoke and steam and hissing. InLeo Marxs translation, oreau says that the pastoral way of life . . . is doomed(p. 254), and a er a f ew more such trans lations , he demons trates tha t oreauredeems machine power (p. 261).

His trans lation of Haw thornes story Ethan Brand is even mo re sangu ine .Hawthornes character separated himself from the whispering f orest, from the lif egiving sun, and set out on a quest for the re that fuelled Blakes Satanic Mills, there of the Enlightenment, as knowledge as an end in itself, of Science and Industry,


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of the Wes tern Spirits domina tion over the wilderness . e man s intellectbecame severed from his heart and, at the end of his quest, burdened by a senseof loss, anxiety and d islocation , he threw h imself into the re. And when theSatanic re was at last extinguished, nature recovered her former grandeur. Leo

Marx points out that Hawthorne is ironic in his description of natures recovery(presumab ly more iron ic than in his description of the Satan ic re), theref orethe story is a parody of its appa ren t message and its real message is su rely theopposite of its apparent message (pp. 269275 passim ).

In addition to deecting the critical content of stories, Leo Marx refers to theold argumen t tha t techno logy f urthers democracy (p.174), but writing h is ownbook in the age of technocratic totalitarianisms, he does not offer this argument ashis own. He also wants to make sure the reader knows that there was no eff ectiveopposition to industrialization (p. 180) (although he does not tell what renderedthe oppos ition ineff ective), tha t overwhe lming ma jorities were enamo red w ithsteam and rails but he knows that overwhelming majorities were also enamored

with Hitler, with Nixon, with Reagan, and he doesnt make much of this argumenteither. He off ers yet ano ther argumen t, a bizarre one in a book whose sub jectis the opposition between nature and artice: the machine, the artice, is also apart of na ture, as everyt hing else is. But he qu ickly drops this argumen t since ,with no opposition, theres no book.

Leo Marx is not shy or secretive about revealing the purpose of all his debunk-ing, his ridicule, his translations and revisions. His aim is to rub our noses in whathe cons iders the stink ing reality behind the fragrant pastoralism. Today . . . wecan easily see what was wrong with the pastoral theory (p. 114),he condentlyannounces. at theory was blind or indifferent to the fact that the savages, thelimitless spaces, and the violent climate of the country did threaten to engulf thenew civilization (p. 44).

Dealing w ith an au thor (Beverley) who comes ou t with an a lmos t entirelyf avorable impression of the na tives (p. 79), Leo Marx makes has te to tell ustha t this author does no t shy away from the unp leasan t truth (sic ) abou t theIndians. He describes the massacre of the colonists . . . ( ibid.). Leo Marx admitsthat Beverley invariably puts the ultimate blame on the aloof, superior English(ibid.). ( e English may have been a loof; they though t themse lves supe rior;they also possessed the add itiona l a ribute of being invaders, an a ribute tha tis not men tioned once in Leo Marxs book abou t America.) Leo Marx does no tlet Beverley get away with blaming the English. He does not call Beverley a liar no t qu ite. He say, Beverleys Ind ians a re an adm irable peop le. ey are gay,gen tle, loving , gene rous and f aithf ul. And f or him the reason is not f ar to seek.It is imp licit in his controlling image , the garden landscape . . . (p. 80). Such


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people are nothing but gments of Beverleys ruling metaphor, they are ctionalinhabitants of pastoral myths.

Leo Marx knows who those peop le really were, and he uses Me lvilles novelTypee as a vehicle for conveying his knowledge to us. In Typee, as in e Tempest ,

the movement toward nature is checked by Caliban by a Melvillian counterpart,that is, to Shakespeares thing of darkness (p. 284). For Leo Marx, ShakespearesProspero symbolizes the invading civilization; Shakespeares Caliban symbolizesthe exterminated savages. Caliban is an anagram for Cannibal; it is a mindless,cruel thing that threatens to engulf the new civilization; . . .the Typees are infact cannibals. In a series of quiet but sinister episodes Melville leads his hero tothe edge of primitive horror ( ibid.).

Leo Marx disregards Melvilles words about racist historian Francis Parkman,words that Melville wrote a er his extended stay with South Sea Islanders, a erhe wrote Typee : When we are informed that it is difficult for any white man, a era domes tication among the Ind ians , to hold them much be er than b rutes . . .

we beg leave to dissen t . . . Why shou ld we con temn them? Because we a rebe er than they? Assuredly not . . . We are all of us Anglo-Saxons, Dyaks, andInd ians sprung from one head , and made in one image . And if we regret thisbrotherhood now, we shall be f orced to join hands he rea er. A misf ortune is nota fault; and good luck is not meritorious (Melville, On Parkmans Indians in W.Washburn, Te Indian and the White Man , 1964).

For Leo Marx, the misf ortune o f being expropriated and extermina ted is af ault; it is this tha t makes the victims Calibans . His book is not a compa rativestudy of the eating practices of Romans, Englishmen and Sou th Sea Islanders; itsauthor does not ask whether the crime is in the killing or in the eating; nor is heconcerned to determine who engulfed whom.

Charges of Cann ibalism and human sac rice have been recruiting calls f orFinal Solutions and justications for mass exterminations. If the Nazis had carriedtheir Final Solution through as completely as American se lers did theirs, I myself would now be a skeleton of an anonymous four year old European Cannibal.

Leo Marx does no t heed Me lvilles warning to Parkman ; he carelessly playswith the term Cannibal as if it were a toy; he ends up applying it to the wildernessas such, to all of nature, again us ing a work of Melville, this time the one on thewha le,22 as his vehicle. e reality beh ind the pas toral design , he tells us, is aprimitive mind lessness (p. 289), a hideous , menac ing w ilderness , hab itat of cannibals and sharks located beyond (or hidden beneath the surface of) the blandgreen pastures (p. 285). Starbuck, one of the novels characters, is a fool for his

22 i.e., Moby Dick .


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habitual tendency to deny the cann ibal unde rside of reality (p. 314). So now weknow what was wrong with the pastoral theory.

Genoc ide? Devastation? Not in Leo Marxs book. Cann ibals are not humanbeings ; their extermina tion doesn t coun t. A hideous w ilderness is already

deso late; it canno t be devastated; it is a waste land , and a was te land can betrans f ormed into a garden (p. 183); . . . the raw landscape is an ideal se ingf or techno logical progress (p. 203); the techno logy is ano ther ou tcrop of tha tinternational upsurge of energy . . . supplanting obsolete forms in every possiblesphere of human behavior (p. 231).

e pacication (terrorization and e xtermina tion) of the ind igenous popu la-tion and its various obsolete cultures and communities, the devastation of theraw f orests, valleys and prairies, are carried through w ith unma tched ene rgy.But the promise of the machine in the garden is not realized; the actual achieve-ments do not warrant the condence . . . that rises above all possible doubts, thecondence of a Whitman who sings the achievement of engineers (p. 222).

Leo Marx tells us that the premonition of mankinds improving capacity forself-destruction was not wholly fanciful (p. 184). He lets Carlyle, Emerson andKarl Marx speak of alienation (pp. 176179 passim ) and of the use of the outerworld as a commodity (p. 230) without translating or debunking them.

In the last third of the book,he not only gives in to critiques, likeDanielWebster;he immerses himself in the darker view of life; he becomes Job wrestling withhis soul.

e separation of intellect from hea rt does no t on ly lead to a sense of loss,anxiety and d islocation . Leo Marx tells us it leads (in Melvilles words) to asystem of cruel cogs and whee ls, systema tically grind ing up in one commonhoppe r all tha t migh t minister to the we ll-being of the crew (p. 286). InMelvilles hero the thrust of Wes tern man f or ultima te know ledge is sinewedwith hatred (p. 293). Melville uses machine imagery to relate the undisguisedkilling and butchery of whaling to the concealed violence of civilized Westernsociety (p. 296). e Age of Machinery tr ans f orms men into ob jects (p. 298). e means a re sane , the mo tive and ob ject mad (p. 300). Ahab , the seque l toProspe ro, dedicated to an unb ridled assau lt upon ph ysical na ture, selects andawa rds men who adap t to the demand f or extreme repression (p. 315). And a tlast, Leo Marx refers to the pilots quest as the psychic equivalent of the shark-like cannibalism of the sea (p. 316).

Now Leo Marx raises the alarm. How come ? e reason is not f ar to seek.Earlier on ly a h ideous w ilderness and sha rk-like cann ibals were a acked . NowProspero himself is threatened by the products of his arts. Now the beneciariesof the fences nd themselves fenced-in.


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Now Leo Marx himself becomes a critic, alongside the grandson of President John Qincy Adams, 23 Prosperos direct heir. Now Leo Marx accepts a contrast,no t between primitive ana rchy and a well-ordered garden , but between theVirgin and the Dynamo , between two kingdoms o f f orce, between Ca tho lic

Church and Capitalist State, mother and son . But the Virgin Mother, the Church,f orerunne r and initiator of the Dynamo tha t established its dominion over theworlds continents, is not as meaningful to Leo Marx as it was to Henry Adams,so Marx is le with only one kingdom of force. And in this kingdom, whateveris still anarchic and primitive, in fact whatever still lives, is already doomed bythe waiting bulldozers, by the chemical wastes, by the stockpiles of bombs.

Now Leo Marx is no longe r as sangu ine abou t his willingness to accept theworld as he nds it (p. 319). Now a man who accepts the facts of history, whotakes technology for granted, who regards the automobile as a spontaneous fruitof an Edenic tree, is called a manufactured man and even a modern primitiveby Leo Marx (p. 363). Nevertheless, he says, until we confront the unalterable . . .

there can be no redemption from a system that makes men the tools of their tools(p. 355).But the unalterable, the real, the fact of history is that we ourselves, the

living, the very biosphere that sustains life, are now mere illusions, mere gmentsof a poets imag ina tion , in the f ace of the nuc lear and chem ical realities of Pentagon and Kremlin. What redemption is still available to us?

Leo Marx con tinues to disparage the belated ritualistic withdrawa l in thedirection of nature (p. 364); he bemoans the inability of our writers to create asurrogate for the ideal of the middle landscape (pp. 364365); he concludes thatthe machines sudden entrance into the garden presents a problem that ultimatelybelongs no t to art but to politics (p. 365). Wha t politics? e politics of theBureau of Indian Aff airs, of Disarmament Conf erences, of a Prospero-like Fuehrer,of a seizure of power by e Party?

Politics, the science of power, the art of the possible is that a breach in thefence or the fence itself? Can it provide ways to leave the camp, or only ways toadminister the camp? Leo Marx, it seems to me, has reached the ultimate impasse.To reach this impasse , the mode rn Job had to stack the evidence ; he had to bewha t C. W. Mills called a crackpo t realist; he had to pro ject Cann ibalism, thestruggle f or survival, to the beginning of the world and to all its corners; he hadto approach the Biosphere and its inhabitants with a philosophy sinewed withhatred.

He himself told us that the New England Puritans favored the hideous wilder-ness image of the American landscape because colonies established in the desert

23 i.e., Henry Adams.


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requ ire aggressive, intellectual, con trolled and we ll disciplined peop le (p. 43).He did not tell us that the aggressiveness was required because the invaders werese ing out to engulf the previous inhabitants of the desert. Like the Puritans,he transferred the cannibalism from the aggressors onto the victims.

But as Melville said of an earlier, similar transference: We beg to dissent. eterm Cannibal, a er all, refers to human beings who devour other human beings;at mos t it ref ers to an imals who devour their own k ind . Leo Marx en larges theterm to embrace the wilderness , the ocean , and even the hun ted wha le. If hisenlarged term can be applied to the ocean, it can also be applied to another entity the Industrial System.

In a curious passage in the middle of his book, Leo Marx had summarized KarlMarxs observation that within capitalist relations of production, accompan yingthe division of labor and mass manu f acturing, the wo rkingman s produc t maywell become h is enem y (p. 177). Leo Marx had unde rstood this to mean tha tthe more he produces, . . .the more danger there is that the market will be glu ed

and that he w ill lose his job (ibid.); he reduced the problem to one that politicscan deal with.But the earlier Marxs observation su rely also means that the wo rkingman s

produc t may be the barbed wire tha t imprisons h im, tha t the wo rkingman p ro-duces the integument that encases him, that the workingman is a devoured humanbeing who labors within the belly of a beast which could aptly be named Cannibal.

e enlarged term ts the Industrial System much more snugly than it ts theentities to which LeoMarx applies it. Oceans, winds, whales and sha rkshave, a erall, existed for eons without devouring the countless species of plants and animalsnor the innume rable human commun ities and cu ltures, whe reas the Indus trialSystem has existed for a bare few centuries and it has already consumed numerousspec ies of plan ts and an imals, mas ticated most commun ities and d issolved thevaried human cultures with its lethal acids.

By removing the term Cannibal from the entities to which Leo Marx appliedit, and by app lying it to the en tity it t s so well, we can immed iately see tha tLeviathan or Cannibal or survival of the est is not all there is, is not reality;we can see that the articial beast has devoured much, but not yet all; we can seethat theres a before as well as an outside.

As long as we s till live and s ing, were not doomed , we rema in at least asreal as It; freedom rema ins mo re than a m yth, gmen t or literary ourish; theextermina ted live on in us as ou r dream sp irits and gu ides. Even if we canno tyet see the breaches in the electrically charged barbed wire, we already knowthat inmates found their way out of the entrails of earlier mechanical monsters,camped outside the hulks that had seemed so real, and saw the abandoned articialcarcasses collapse and decompose.


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e Anarchist LibraryAnti-Copyright

March 29, 2013

Fredy Perlmane Machine Against e Garden

Two essays on American literature and culture1985

To e New York Review of B and On e Machine in the Garden originally appea red in theF i h Es t a t e , Vol. 20, No. 2 (October 1985), under the title e Machine Against the Garden.

e editor and publishers wish to thank Lorraine Perlman for her support of thisreprint. Aporia Press 1992. ISBN 0 948518 92 8. is edition copyright Aporia Press &

John Moore Introduction copyright John Moore. Cover, paste-up, design &c: EdBaxter. Typese ing: Ed Baxter; Cecilia Boggis (to whom man y thanks ). Distributed in

Britain by Counter Productions, PO Box 556, London SE5 ORL UK. Write for ourmail-order catalogue of unusual titles. (Text from the original booklet, 1992)

e Machine Against the G arden , Edited and withan introduction by John Moore, Aporia Press, 1992

Fredy Perlman the Machine Against the Garden

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Transcript of Fredy Perlman the Machine Against the Garden