1) NATURALIST (?) PRECURSORS: TRANSCENDENTALISTS2) MODERNIST PRECURSORS: FUTURISTS

Hewitt, Andrew. Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Avant-Garde. Stanford: Stanford UP. 1993.

Introduction: Why Fascist Modernism? (1) “The aim of this study is to understand just what in fascism proved so attractive and

exciting to large sections of a literary generation—a generation broadly coextensive with the historical avant-garde. Rather than reading the political exploits of Ezra Pound, Gottfried Benn, or Filippo Tommaso Marinetti as unfortunate aberrations of purely biographical interest, I wish to examine the points of contiguity between a ‘progressive’ aesthetic practice and a ‘reactionary’ political ideology.” (1)

“It is not and cannot be a question of stigmatizing ‘aesthetics’ or championing ‘politics’.” (1)

focus on Marinetti (2) modernism v. avant garde: “It is as an exemplar of the avant-garde rather than of

modernism that I will treat Marinetti.” (2) “In speaking of Fascist Modernism, then, I aim to suggest that this ideological rupture

made practicable a fascistic ideology consistent with an avant-garde aesthetic.” (2) “If we accept that attempts to identify fascism with modernism, or to differentiate them in

a radical sense, lead only to an oversimplification of both, then what we must attempt to uncover are the strategies by which modernists could make a home or niche for themselves within fascism.” (4)

“If anything, the experience of Marinetti’s feverish, fervent protofascism should serve to remind us that our own repudiation of fascism (if I may assume this) is itself often grounded in a specifically modernist aesthetic judgment.” (4)

“fascists were not only evil, it would seem—they also had no taste.” (4) In Burger’s [umlaut over u] genealogy, the Aestheticists and Symbolists, isolated from

the political realm, experience the aesthetic as an alternative; an alternative, that is, to the mundane concern with politics. Subsequently, however, this alternative begins to present itself as a political alternative and a politics emerges that draws its strength directly from a lack of concern for traditional political pragmatics.” (6)

Discussion of teleological history, avant garde suggestions (nee Burger) that other aesthetics are alternatives to the present (6-8)

“The political emergence of the petty bourgeoisies, in other words, runs counter to its economic impoverishment and consists less in an arrogation of socioeconomic power than in an assertion of a specific ‘character structure.’” (8)

“No longer the prize of economic power, no longer simply a tool for the entrenchment of economic interests, aesthetic ideology now functions as a relatively autonomous locus of resistance and class ressentiment.” (8)

Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Idea in America. London: Oxford UP. 1964.

“two kinds of pastoralism—one that is popular and sentimentl, the other imaginative and complex” (5)

“Hawthorne is using natural facts metaphorically to convey something about a human situation.” (12)

Of Wordsworth: “By placing the machine in opposition to the tranquility and order located in the landscape, he makes it an emblem of the artificial, of the unfeeling utilitarian spirit, and of the fragmented, industrial style of life that allegedly follows from the premises of the empirical philosophy.” (18)

“This pattern, moreover, can be traced back to the beginnings of industrialization.” (18) “If we regard the [Romantic] movement (to use Whitehead’s acute phrase) as ‘a protest

on behalf of the organic view of nature,’ then the contrast between the machine and the landscape would seem to embody its very essence.” (19)

Virgil and Arcadia (19) “the first American railroad had begun operations in 1829” (24) “The train stands for a more sophisticated, complex style of life than the one represented

by Sleepy Hollow” (24) counterforce term introduced 23-24 “The anti-pastoral forces at work in our literature seem indeed to become increasingly

violent as we approach our own time. For it is industrialization, represented by images of machine technology, that provides the counterforce in the American archetype of the pastoral design.” (26)

Rostow’s “take-off”: 1844 in America “The locomotive, associated with fire, smoke, speed, iron, and noise, is the leading

symbol of the new industrial power.” (27) “In the popular culture of the period the railroad was a favorite emblem of progress—not

merely technilogical progress, but the overall progress of the race.” (27) “Most important is the sense of the machine as a sudden, shocking intruder upon a

fantasy of idyllic satisfaction. It invariably is associated with crude, masculine aggressiveness in contrast with the tender, feminine, and submissive attitudes traditionally attached to the landscape.” (29)

“True, it may be said that agents of urban power had been ravaging the countryside throughout recorded history. After they had withdrawn, however, the character of rural life had remained essentially unchanged. But here the case is different: the distinctive attribute of the new order is its technological power, a power that does not remain confined to the traditional boundaries of the city. It is a centrifugal force that threatens to break down, once and for all, the conventional contrast between these two styles of life.” (32)

II: Shakespeare’s American Fable III: The Garden “…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.” (73)

“The great revolution in science and technology we associate with Sir Isaac Newton was followed by a massive shift in prevailing ideas about man’s relations to nature. An effort was made to rescue the pastoral—the formal literary mode—from the confines of a decadent convention, but it failed. At the time that the old pastoral was dying, however, Europe was swept by a wave of enthusiasm for rural landscape and rural life.” (74-75)

“The existence of the garden-as-metaphor, nature’s garden, has hindered the appearance of gardens-in-fact. Or to put it another way, by closing pages of the History Beverly is uncovering an ambiguity beneath the image of Virginia as a garden. In fact he is using the word in two distinct ways. When Beverly calls Virginia one of the “Gardens of the World,” he is speaking the language of myth. Here the garden stands for the original unity, the all-sufficing beauty and abundance of the creation. Virginia is an Edenic land of primitive splendor inhabited by noble savages. The garden, in this usage, joins Beverley’s own feelings with that ‘yearning for paradise’ which makes itself felt in virtually all mythology. But when Beverly says that there are too few gardens in Virginia, he is speaking about actual, man-made, cultivated pieces of ground. This image also is an emblem of abundance, but it refers to abundance produced by work or, in Berverly’s idiom, improvement. The contradiction between the two meanings of ‘garden’ is a perfect index of the larger difference between the primitive and the pastoral ideals.” (84-85).

“To Pope, or, for that matter, to Philips, pastoral was a name for a fixed body of poetic conventions, and they had presided over its death. But if we take the vital element in pastoral to be the design, the ordering of meaning and value around the contrast between two styles of life, one identified with a rural and the other with an urban setting, then the pastoral was by no means dead. On the contrary, Thomson was helping to save the mode by fashioning a new idiom….” (94)

Thomson’s pastoral arises out of contrast betw. Town and country (95) “For now a well-composed landscape, whether depicted in words or paint, might arouse

some of the feelings that men had when they contemplated the grand design of the Newtonian universe.” (96)

“It was not enough to call this newly discovered world beautiful; it was sublime (96). But the conventions of the old pastoral provided a totally inadequate vehicle for such ideas and emotions. The pastoral, said Dr. Johnson, is an ‘easy, vulgar, … disgusting; mode; whatever images it supplied were ‘long ago exhausted.’ Meanqhile, a large audience was being instructed in the appreciation of the landscape as a great religious metaphor, an expositor (in Emerson’s fine phrase) of the divine mind.” (97)

“The stock literary contrast between the happiness and innocence of a bucolic golden age and the corrupt, self-seeking, and disorderly life of the city (or court) had been a ruling motif of Elizabethan literature.” (97)

18th c: “Political economists and agricultural reformers now dwelled as never before upon the primacy of agriculture in creating the wealth of nations.” (98)

“the taste for the bucolic rose to an extraordinary pitch of faddish excitement” (98) which “peak[ed]” around 1770 (99) in response to “what we would call industrialism” (99)

Oliver Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village,” 1770: “Here again the idyllic mood is intensified by the hostile policies of the state” (in instituting the Enclosure Acts) (99)

“What is important about the rural world, in any event, is not merely the agricultural economy but its alleged moral, aesthetic, and, in a asense, metaphysical superiority to the urban, commercial forces that threaten it.” (99)

“A belief in the superiority of rural life was a sociological corollary, for Goldsmith’s generation, to the widely accepted ethical doctrine that the ‘middle state’ was the best of all possible human conditions.” (100) “It is a moral position perfectly represented by the image of a rural order, neither wild nor urban, as the setting of man’s best hope.” (101)

“’middle state’ theory” 18th c. (101) “progressivists” v. “primitivists” (101) Rousseau and Blair find middle ground (102-103) “Attractive as it was, the idea of a society of the middle landscape was becoming less

easy ot believe in during the 1780’s. In England the process of ‘improvement,’ or what we should call economic development, already seemed to have gone too far. By then the enclosures were destroying the vestiges of the old, rural culture, and the countryside was cluttered with semi-industrial cities and dark, satanic mills.” (103-104): America appeared to be an answer

The Golden Age (105-107) Crevecoeur (107- “Anyone who knows American writing, incidentally, will be reminded of all the later

fictional narrators who begin in the same way, impulsively dissociating themselves from the world of sophistication, Europe, ideas, learning, in a word, the world, and speaking in accents of rural ignorance.” (109)

“static, anti-historical quality of the whole conception” of pastoralism (117) “Jefferson’s syntax, in other words, is aimed at a pastoral, not a primitivist, affirmation.”

(121) conditional statements (121) Jefferson: pastoral v. agrarian (125- “In developing the contrast between the American farmer and the European workman,

Jefferson also follows the Virgilian pattern. He sets the joy of independence against the misery of dependence. As in the first eclogue, the crux here is the relation that each man enjoys with the natural environment—the land.” (128)

old v. new pastoralism: Wm. Empson’s idea that “old pastoral” “served as a mask of political purposes” (129)

Constance Rourke’s “fable of the contrast” (132) Jefferson’s “profound ambivalence” (136) “Beginning in Jefferson’s time, the cardinal image of American aspirations was a rural

landscape, a well-ordered green garden magnified to continental size.” (141) of HN Smith: “He is saying that Americans, so far as they shared an idea of what they

were doing as a people, actually saw themselves creating a society in the image of a garden.” (143)

“Looking to America’s future, Jefferson anticipates the tragic ambivalence that is the hallmark of our most resonant pastoral fables. ‘Our enemy,’ he writes during the War of 1812, ‘has indeed the consolation of Satan on removing our first parents from Paradise: from a peaceable and agricultural nation, he makes us a military and manufacturing one.’” (144)

IV: The Machine

“As Boswell tells the story, there is no trace in it of that contempt for the machine later to become a stock literary attitude. In many ways, in fact, he anticipates the dominant American response. He finds the spectacle exhilarating, and his notion that the gorwing power of technology somehow is a ‘match’ for the power of intellect implies a progressive idea of history. At the time most Americans no doubt shared his view.” (146)

“…workshops, to Jefferson, are one thing and machines another.” (149) J’s “failure” to predict industrialism in America

word “technology” “coined” in 1829 by Jacob Bigelow “a Harvard professor” (149) “From Jefferson’s perspective, the machine is a token of that liberation of the human

spirit to be realized by the young American Republic; the factory system, on the other hand, is but feudal oppression in a slightly modified form. Once the machine is removed from the dark, crowded, grimy cities of Europe, he assumes that it will blend harmoniously into the open countryside of his native land. He envisages it turning millwheels, moving ships up rivers, and, all in all, helping to transform a wilderness into a society of the middle landscape. At bottom it is the intensity of his belief that the land, as a locus of both economic and moral value, which prevents him from seeing what the machine portends for America.” (150)

Tench Cox (150- “Not only the abundance of resources but the breadth of the ocean supports his case for

developing native manufactures. In fact, America is better suited to the purpose than Europe. With the aplobb of a public relations expert, he turns the standard symbols of the pastoral myth to his own uses. The ‘clear air and powerful sun of America’ will give producers of linens and cottons a distinct advantage over their overseas competitors…” (158)

“the Coxean formula—the notion that machines merely bring out powers latent in the environment” (158)

“At this point Coxe anticipates what was to become a central theme in the ideology of American industrialism: the capacity of the New World environment to ‘purify’ the system.” (158)

“Ironically, the sentiment [attached to ‘pure, apple-cheeked farm girls in American mills’] rests at bottom upon the idea that the factory system, when transferred to America, is redeemed by contact with ‘nature’ and the rural way of life it is destined to supplant.” (159)

“Coxe has no difficulty blending factories and machines into the rural scene. Combining the best of art with the best of nature, the picture matches the pastoral idea of the middle landscape.” (160)

“There are few words whose shifting connotations register the revolution in thought and feeling we call the ‘romantic movement’ more clearly than ‘mechanism.’” ( 162)

“[Coxe’s] entire argument rests on the assumption that celestial mechanics, the orrery, the new engines of production, even the factory system—all embody the same ultimate laws of nature. What is more, and this is perhaps the most difficult attitude to grasp in retrospect, it is the same ‘mechanism’ to which we respond, aesthetically, in the presence of the natural landscape. The identification of visual nature with the celestial ‘machine’ is difficult to grasp because of our own feeling, learned from the romantics, that ‘organic’ nature is the opposite of things ‘mechanical.’ But it is impossible to appreciate the

dominant American attitute toward technology if we project this sense of contradiction too far back into the past. In other words, Coxe, who anticipates the popular view, is writing in the tradition of James Thomson, whose feeling for the beauty of the countryside was inseparable from his reverence for the Newtonian world machine.” (162)

“The speeches of Tench Coxe in the summer of 1787 prefigure the emergence of the machine as an American cultural symbol, that is, a token of meaning and value recognized by a large part of the population.” (163)

“The garden image brings together a universal Edenic myth and a particular set of American goals and aspirations. So with the machine.” (164)

“The universe is a ‘mechanism’ At the abstract end of the spectrum, then, the symbol of the machine incorporates a whole metaphysical system. It often has been noted that the dominant structural metaphor of the Constitution is that of a self-regulating machine, like the orrery or the steam engine; it establishes a system of ‘checks and balances’ among three distinct, yet delicately synchronized, branches of government.” (165)

Coxe understood what Hamilton did not: “[his writing] took into account, as [Hamilton’s] Report does not, the hold of the pastoral ideal upon the national consciousness.” (167)

Carlyle’s attack on mechanics (169- “In its transactions with the world outside, a mind so conceived responds like one cogged

wheel turned by another. Used in this way the image of the machine connotes loss of inner freedom even as it provides outward power.” (173) (Carlyle’s philosophy in “Signs of the Times” 1829) (date: 170)

“The machine represents a change in our whole way of life, Carlyle argues, because ‘the same habit regulates not our modes of action alone, but our modes of thought and feeling. Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand.’” (174)

“To speak of coordinating the mechanical and dynamical provinces of human behavior is, after all, but another way of describing the desire for a proper balance of man’s outer and inner, material and psychic, selves. Carlyle is affirming an ideal akin to the ‘ethic of the middle link’ and to the norm implicit in the pastoral image of America.” (176)

links carlyle’s ideas to “alienation” “When Carlyle speaks of men having grown ‘mechanical in head and heart,’ he means that heir behavior is increasingly determined externally, which is to say, by invisible, abstract, social forces unrelated (or alien) to their inward impulses.” (176)

Karl Marx’s idea of alienation: “Lahtou it is morally neutral, the machine in a capitalist setting helps to transform the worker into a commodity for sale on the labor market. His work takes on a amechanical, meaningless character. It bears little or no relation to his own purposes. The result is the typical psychic set of industrial man which Marx calls alienation” (177).

“In a recent book (Eros and Civilization), Herbert Marcuse attributes this state of psychic powerlessness to the increasing repression of instinctual drives made necessary by a more and more complicated technological order. To satisfy the imperatives of the mechanized society, men are called upon to endure an interolerable curbing of their spontaneous, erotic, and passional selves.” (178)

“But it [Timothy Walker’s pastoral response to Carlyle’s argument] allows Wlaker to inject a cherished American image into the record: the machine as a ‘supplier’ of rivers, a ‘rolelr’ smooting over what is ‘uncomfortably rough’ in nature. The machine, in short, is

an instrument for making what the age calls ‘improvements.’ With its help, a waste land can be transformed into a garden.” (183)

“…the most important value that Walker attaches to the image of the machine is political. He regards the new technology as the instrument appointed to fulfill the egalitarian aims of the American people. He expounds the same explosive idea implicit in the irrepressible epithet ‘industrial revolution’” (187). Origin of this phrase described

“Unlike Carlyle, the young American recognizes that mechanization will hardly seem a menace to those upon whom society confers little dignity of soul (or status) in the first place. To them the alternative is a life of drudgery or tedious, repetitive labor.” (189)

“By 1844 the machine had captured the public imagination. The invention of the steamboat had been exciting, but it was nothing compared to the railroad.” (191)

On John Stuart Mill’s “brilliant comments (1840) on Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, he argues that machine technology inculcates its message directly, imagistically, wordlessly. A locomotive is a perfect symbol because its meaning need not be attached to it by a poet; it is inherent in its physical attributes.” (192)

“1. The machine and nature” (194-196) “2. The machine and history” (197-198) “3. The machine and the mind” (198-203) “Raymond Williams has noted that the words ‘art’ and ‘culture,’ as we use them, were in

large measure formed in reaction against industrialism, and they still carry a strong negative bias. But not all literary intellectuals adopted the snobbish attitude.” (201) Emerson’s Art not in this vein

“By the 1850’s the celebrants of the machine take the offensive. Parity is not enough.” (202)

“4. The machine and America” (203-206) “To the citizen of a democracy inventions are vehicles for the pursuit of happiness.”

(204-205) “The result is that Americans have seized upon the machine as their birthright.” Although

“the best of fine arts” belong to Europe (205) “By now the image of the American machine has become a transcendent symbol: a

physical object invested with political and metaphysical ideality. It rolls across Europe and Asia, liberating the oppressed people of the Old World—a signal, in fact, for the salvation of mankind.” (206)

“The stock response to the panorama of progress, as Mill observed, by-passes ideas; it is essentially a buoyant feeling generated without words or thought.” (207)

Daniel Webster’s speeches: “Taken together, these ceremonial speeches exhibit one way of neutralizing the conflict between the machine and the rural ideal.” (209)

Webster: “In any case, he is saying that it is foolish to deplore the cutting and slashing.” (212)

In Webster’s speech: “The rhetoric of the technological sublime heightens it, bringing in a sense of cosmic harmony, suggesting an obscure kinship between Webster, the spirit of the Republic, the machine power, and the progressive forces of history. Everything, it says, is working out according to a divine plan.” (214)

In John Orvis: “Mechanization, both literally and metaphorically, means disharmony. It seaparates the people from the lovely green landscape which has, or ought to have, a

primary place in their thought and feeling. Between man and nature it threatens to impose an ugly, depressing, and inhumane community.” (216)

“What needs emphasis here is that Orvis is insisting upon precisely the metaphor Webster casually dismisses; he uses the image of the machine in the native landscape to figure a dangerous contradiction of social value and purpose. But Webster, knowing his audience, brings in the technological sublime to neutralize the dissonance generated by industrialization.” (217)

George Innes, “The Lackawanna Valley” : “It is a striking representation that machine technology is a proper part of the landscape” (220). Commissioned by Lackawanna Railroad Company (1855)

“…Inness’s painting seems to say that ‘there is nothing inorganic.’ Instead of causing disharmony, the train is a unifying device. The hills in the background and the threes in the middle distance gently envelop the industrial buildings and artifacts. No sharp lines set off the man-made from the natural terrain.” (221) curves rather than cuts; animals undisturbed by train (221) figure “in the foreground, who finally establishes the quiet, relaxed mood.” (221)

“Of American writers with authentic gifts, Emerson and Whitman pay the most direct, wholehearted tribute to this industrialized version of the pastoral ideal.” (222)

“In ‘Passage to India’ the machine power is a precursor of a higher, spiritual power.” (224)

one business mag writer differentiates industrialism in Am from that in Engl: “There it is ‘a continuous business for life,’ but here the young men and women enter factories ‘not as a main object of pursuit, but as a stepping-stone to a future settlement….’” (225)

“It is technology, indeed, that is creating the new garden of the world.” Mississippi valley said to be “’the creation of the steam engine’” by one DeBow’s Review writer in 1850 (225)

“In this sentimental guise the pastoral ideal remained of service long after the machine’s appearance in the landscape. It enabled the nation to continue defining its purpose as the pursuit of rural happiness while devoting itself to productivity, wealth, and power.” (226)

V: Two Kingdoms of Force “The sudden appearance of the machine in the garden is an arresting, endlessly evocative

image. It causes the instantaneous clash of opposed states of mind: a strong urge to believe in the rural myth along with an awareness of industrialization as counterforce ot the myth.” (229)

3 “more or less distinct uses, or interpretations, of the Sleepy Hollow motif. For convenience they may be labeled transcendental, tragic, and vernacular. Taken together they exemplify a view of life which dominates much of our literature. It is a complex, distinctively American form of romantic pastoralism.” (229)

Emerson (229-o “philosophy of romantic American pastoralism” (230)o “In the decade before 1844 Emerson repeatedly draws upon the facts of

technological progress to illustrate his exultant sense of human possibilities. For him, new inventions are evidence of a man’s power to impose his will upon the world.” (230)

o technological metaphors in Nature (230-231)

o “What perpelexes us here is Emerson’s ability to join enthusiasm for technological progress with a ‘romantic’ love of nature and contempt for cities.” (232)

o Emerson’s Kantian influences “This dualistic theory of mind provides a firm base for romantic pastoralism. Although the prudent, sensible Understanding may be trained in schools and cities, the far-ranging, visionary Reason requires wild or rural scenes for its proper nurture.” (233)

o “The Young American”: “At long last a distinctive national culture, a unique conception of life, is

emerging. He attributes this welcome fact to the combined influence of two forces: technology and geography—the transportation revolution and the unspoiled terrain of the new world.” (234)

“Like Tomas Jefferson, Emerson is confident that under native conditions science and technology can be made to serve a rural ideal.” (236)

land as remedy to threats of new machines (236) “The industrial revolution is a railway journey in the direction of nature.”

(238) “But there is nothing inherently ugly about factories and railroads;p what

is ugly is the dislocation and detachment from ‘the Whole’ which they represent when seen only from the limited persepective of the Understanding.” (241): problem solved by poetry

o Thoreau, Walden Crisis of Concord: “He locates it, above all, in their economy—a system

within which they work endlessly, not to reach oa goal of their own choosing but to satisfy the demands of the market mechanism. The moral, in short, is that here ‘men have become the tools of their tools.’” (247)

“Like Carlyle, Thoreau uses technological imagery to represent more than industrialization in the narrow, economic sense. It accompanies a mode of perception, an emergent system of meaning and value—a culture.” (247)

“Thoreau feels no simple-minded Luddite hostility toward the new inventions; they are, he says, ‘but improved means to an unimproved end….’” (247-248)

“If the advent of power technology is alarming, it is because of it occurs within this cultural context. When Thoreau depicts the machine as it functions within the Concord environment, accordingly, it is an instrument of oppression: ‘We do not ride upon the railroad; it rides upon us.’ But later, when seen from the Walden perspective, the railroad’s significance becomes quite different.” (248-249)

Fitchburg Railroad: “First it is like a partridge, then a hawk; frist it blends inot the landscape like the industrial images in the Inness painting, but then, a moment later, it becomes the discordant machine of the Sleepy Hollow notes. What does the railroad signify here? On inspection the passage proves to be a sustained evocation of the ambiguous meaning of the machine and its relation to nature. Every significant image is yoked to an alternative….” (251)

Ambivalence and “ambiguity” (250-251)

“Compared to popular, sentimental pastoralism, or to Emerson’s well-turned evasions, there is a pleasing freshness about Thoreau’s cool clarity. He says that the pastoral way of life—pastoralism in the literal, agrarian sense—is being whirled past and away. It is doomed. And he has no use for the illusion that the Atropos can be stopped. The first thing to do, then, the only sensible thing to do, is get off the track.” (254)

“So far from representing a ‘pastoral life,’ a desirable alternative to the ways of Concord and the market economy, the typical farmer in Walden is narrow-minded and greedy.” (257)

“Spring”: “Out of winter’s frost comes spring; out of an excrementous flow, newborn creatures; out of the landscape eroded by men and machines, these forms of the molten earth. ‘There is nothing inorganic.’ The sight inspires Thoreau with a sense of infinite possibility.” (261-262)

“Thoreau’s study of the melting bank is a figurative restoration of the form and unity severed by the mechanized forces of history. Out of the ugly ‘cut’ in the landscape he fashions an image of a new beginning.” (262)

“It assumes a form that looks like leopards’ paws, but the form exists only so far as it is perceived. The same may be said of his alternative to the Concord way.” (262)

“In the end Thoreau restores the pastoral hope to its traditional location. He removes it from history, where it is manifestly unrealizable, and relocates it in literature, which is to say, in his own consciousness, in his craft, in Walden.” (265)

o Hawthorne and Melville “In their work, the design also conveys a sense of the widening gap

between the facts and the ideals of American life, bu the implications are more ominous.” (265)

Hawthorne’s “Ethan Brand” and its origins in Berkshires industrial revolution (267)

“As the Berkshire notes suggest, moreover, the introduction of industrial power in the American setting imparts a peculiar intensity to the dialectic of art versus nature.” (271)

“Although the striking sight of factories in the wilderness does not appear in the tale, Hawthorne’s feelings about it do.” (276)

“Having observed the illusoriness of the middle landscape ideal in reality (the wilderness is to be supplanted by factories, not gardens), Hawthorne now accomplishes its restoration in fiction. Needless to say, the restoration is ironic. As the hollow rhetoric indicates, this stock eighteenth-century tableau serves as an oblique comment upon the fate of the Yankee hero. It says that the dream of pastoral harmony will be easy to realize as soon as the Faustian drive of mankind—the Brand element—has been extirpated.” (277)

“To fulfill the pastoral hope, in other words, nothing less is required than a reversal of history.” (277)

Moby Dick Going to sea as “substitute for suicide” (281)

“In Moby-Dick he uses the image of an implacable machine to express Ahab’s pride in dominating the Pequod’s crew.” (286) like Carlyle

“His initial scorn of romantic pastoralism as a ludicrously feeble defense against despair is embodied in Ahab.” (288)

“The sea change that Ishamel suffers, played against the opposite change in Ahab, is the narrative key to the pastoral design in Moby-Dick. Telling his story in retrospect, Melville’s narrator speaks as one who has avoided the trap of sentimental pastoralism.” (289)

“In Melville’s hero the thrust of Western man for ultimate knowledge and power is sinewed with hatred.” (293)

“In a whaling world, Ishamel discovers, man’s primary relation to nature is technological.” (295)

Huck Finn (319) “By adopting the point of view of the boy, for whom the conflict described

in ‘Old Times’ does not exist, Clemens achieves a unified mode of perception.” (335)

Parrington’s current v. Trilling’s dialectic (341-342) The Education of Henry Adams (345) “The apocalyptic image of the Dynamo and the Virgin is the ultimate

expression of the tragic doubleness that Adams locates at the center of modern history.” (349)

“The contrast between the machine and the pastoral ideal dramatizes the great issue of our culture.” (353)

VI: Epilogue: The Garden of Ashes “For more than a century our most gifted writers have dwelt upon the contradiction

between rural myth and technological fact.” (354) Sheeler’s “American Landscape” (355-356) Gatsby (357- “But in Fitzgerald’s book, as in many American fables, there is another turn to the story.

Somehow, in spite of the counterforce, the old dream retains its power to stir the imagination.” (358-359)

“Nick’s vision….also represents the curious state of the modern American consciousness. It reveals that Gatsby’s uncommon “gift for home” was born in that transitory, enchanted moment when Europeans first came into the presence of the “fresh, green breast of the new world.” “ (360)

“The difference between Gatsby’s point of view and Nick’s illustrates the distinction, with which I began, between sentimental and complex pastoralism. Fitzgerald, through Nick, expresses a point of view typical of a great many twentieth-century American writers. The word of Faulkner, Frost, Hemingway and West comes to mind. Again and again they invoke the image of a green landscape—a terrain wild or, if cultivated, rural—as a symbolic repository of meaning and value. But at the same time they acknowledge the power of a counterforce, a machine or some other symbol of the forces which have stripped the old ideal of most, if not all, of its meaning. Complex pastoralism, to put it another way, acknowledges the reality of history.” (362-363)

“The machines sudden entrance into the garden presents a problem that ultimately belongs not to art but to politics.” (365) (concluding sentence)

Ellis, Jack C. The Documentary Idea: A Critical History of English-Language Documentary Film and Video. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. 1989.

One: What is Documentary?o “Documentary is one of three basic creative modes in film, the other two being

narrative fiction and experimental avant-garde.” (1)o “At any rate, the purpose or approach of the makers of most documentary films is

to record and interpret the actuality in front of the camera and microphone in order to inform and/or persuade us to hold some attitude or take some action in relation to their subjects.” (2)

o “One basic requirement of documentary is the use of nonactors (‘real people’ who ‘play themselves’) rather than actors (who are cast, costumed, and made up to play ‘roles’).” (3) some exceptions to this (3)

o “Finally, the audience experience documentary filmmakers seek to provide is generally twofold: an aesthetic experience of some sort, on the one hand, and an effect on attitudes, possibly leading to action, on the other.” (3)

o 1st doc: Robert Flaherty, Nanook of the North (3)o sources of word “documentary” (4)o Grierson v. Flaherty: editor v. cameraman (5)o Basil Wright called doc “’a method of approach to public information’” (5)o “Willard Van Dyke…once observed in informal conversation that he thought

defining documentary a simple matter. In his view documentary is film intended to bring about change in the audience—change in their understanding, their attitudes, and possibly their actions. To the objection that Flaherty’s films didn’t seem designed to bring about social change, Van Dyke replied that Flaherty’s consistent subject selection of people living in simpler, earlier ways implied a belief.” (6)

o Ramond Spottiswoode: “’The documentary film is in subject and approach a dramatized presentation of man’s relation to his institutional life, whether industrial, social or political; and in technique a subordination of form to content.’” (6)

o “This purposiveness [of documentary] is reflected in the four traditions Paul Rotha identified in his seminal book of theory and history, Documentary Film (1935), as feeding inot the documentary: naturalist (romantic), newsreel, propagandist, realist (continental).” (7)

Two: Beginnings: The Americans and Popular Anthropology, 1922-1929o Flaherty: “romantic”? Ellis says no. (25)o Frances Flaherty: “’What he is saying in Nanook, Moana and Man of Aran is that

the spirit by which tehse peoples came to terms with Nature is the same spirit by which we shall come to terms with our machines—that the continuity of history throughout its changes is written in the human spirit, and we lose sight of that continuity at our peril.’” (26)

o John Grierson influcnced by Flaherty? (26-27)m Three: Beginnings: The Soviets and Political Indoctrination, 1922-1929

o Russian epic film as precursor to “The River” (Act I of Turksib) (39)o “The basic fact setting all Soviet cinema apart from that of the rest of the world

was its state support. Filmmakers had to answer not to bankers and the profit motive but to government administrators and the presumed needs of the citizens. This difference, if basic, may not be as great as it appears. Capitalist as well as communist films embody ideology.” (41) (under Fiction heading, following discussion of hybrids)

o on Eisenstein’s play Gas Masks: “Instead of replacing ‘art’ with ‘life,’ as he had intended, Eisenstein found that the industrial setting and the performances of nonactors showed up the artificiality of conventions that would have seemed perfectly at home in the theater.” (42)

o one way in which E’s films were documentary: “They are all about people in relation to their institutions.” (42)

o “The appeals of these films are perhaps first to a general humanism and then to a national pride.” (43)

o “The aesthetic experience and social effects offered by Eisenstein’s films finally move them outside the realm of documentary.” (43)

o Eisenstein’s “typage” casting (43)o “The relationship between government and documentary established in the USSR

would be picked up later not only by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany but in the English speaking democracies of Great Britain, the United States, and Canada, as will be seen.” (44)

Four: Beginnings: European Avant-Gardists and Artistic Experimentation, 1922-1929o “Documentary and avant-garde both emerged out of rebellion against the fiction

film, which had become the predominant artistic as well as commercial form.” (46)

o “For the documentarists, conventional fiction fi\lms were not realistic enough; for the avant-gardists, they were too realistic. The former wanted external (objective) patterns and inner (subjective) truths presented poetically.” (47)

o documentary from photography; avant garde from painting (47)o “In the traditional arts the interrelationship of space and time was already being

explored.” (47)o “Nude Descending a Staircase” (47)o futurism and cubism as influences (48)o Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s Manhatta: “…might be thought of as an

embryonic beginning of th “city symphony” films that link avant-garde with documentary and are the main subject of this chapter.” (48)

o Surrealism and psychoanalysis (48)o Abstractionism: Joris Ivens’s The Bridge (1928) “converts machinery into art”

(49)o “Camera composition and movement, and edited relationships of shots are

designed to b ring out the functional and also aesthetic essence of an enormous railway bridge in Rotterdam. There are few people in the film—a workman climbing a ladder and a bridge tender answering a phone and strating machinery that raises and lowers the bridge….” (49)

o surrealism & swimmers, runners (49)o impressionism (50)o Rien que les heures : day in the life of lower classes type; experimental editing

(51)o “temporal” “organization” of Berlin (52)

“The criteria for selection and arrangement of material within these acts rests heavily on visual similarities and contrasts.” (52)

“patter” of “activity starting, increasing in tempo, then coming to a halt.” (52)

“The people are treated much as the objects; both are subjects for visual examination.” (52)

machines “not shown to have social utility” (53) “The film’s opening proceeds from abstractions of water to what look like

polarized images of fast-moving locomotive wheels and railroad tracks beginning a protracted, elaborately cut evocation of a train’s early morning approach to a Berlin terminus, which climaxes in a huge closeup on one of the engine’s stationary piston wheels after its arrival.” (53)

o Ivens’ Rain: “Throughout Ivens seems to be asking us to examine images in everyday life—rain on windshields, puddles in streets, umbrellas, reflections—to see the ‘artistic’ in the actual.” (55)

o Arts emphasis of 20s (avant garde films); social responsibility focus of 30s (documentary)

Five: Institutionalization: Great Britain, 1929-1939o