Thomas Chandler Haliburton’s ‘Machine in the Garden’: Applying Leo Marx’s Criticism of America to Haliburton’s Clockmaker

THOMAS CHANDLER HALIBURTON'S 'MACHINE IN THE GARDEN': APPL YING LEO MARX'S CRITICISM OF AMERICA TO HALIBURTON'S CLOCKMAKER R.D. MacDonald In a recent symposium, Robert L. McDougall has puzzled overT.C. Haliburton's bemg a reactionary tory and yet an advocate of technological progress: "How come ... we find this [early nineteenth-century Nova Scotian writer] whose notion of utopia seems to be an agrarian economy, stable to the point of inertia and supported by an industrious yeomanry benevolently watched over by country squires-how come such a man takes such an interest in building railways and moving things around?''' McDougall believes that Leo Marx's Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America may point the way to an answer: and so with Marx in mind, McDougall decides that Haliburton was "not more American but more North American than I had thought him to be,'' for he takes Haliburton' s preoccupation with "technology and communications" to be '·American'' or ''North American.'' Thus in Haliburton 's opening sketch of The Season's Ticket (I 860), McDougall sees an American's faith that technology, railways, shipping lanes and harbours can bind the Eastern and Western provinces of British North America together and further (shades of Whitman's '' Passage to India") can join them beyond to the East, '"China, Japan, the Sandwich Islands, Australia and Hong Kong" (156). But McDougall also points beyond this to the "big" side of Haliburton's toryism: "The vision is of course suffused with Haliburton' s imperial ardour: these will be British routes, made safe for commerce by a great navy" (156). My only quarrel with McDougall is that he makes too much of American technology and not enough of Haliburton's being British North American. 166 R.D. MacDonald Certainly, Haliburton ant1c1pates Stephen Leacock's early twentieth-century imperialist ardour, Leacock's loyalist dream of a larger Canadian citizenship within an enlarged and accommodating British Empire-and, incidentally, Haliburton also anticipates Marshall McLuhan's science-fiction prophecy of Canada (in the electronic/post-national age) plugged into a much larger Global Village. But, surely, in his own time, Haliburton was closer to the sober progressivism of his British contemporary William Wordsworth, the Wordsworth of "Steamboats, Viaducts and Railways" than he was to the intoxication of an Emerson--or to the later despair (or hangover?) of a Leo Marx. Wordsworth's sonnet concludes: In spite of all that beauty may disown In your harsh features, Nature doth embrace Her lawful offspring in Man's art; and Time, Pleased with your triumphs o'er his brother Space, Accepts from your bold hands the proffered crown Of hope, and smiles on you with cheer sublime. In this unifying myth of progress, Wordsworth imagines Nature "embrac[ing]" her own "lawful offspring" (or natural consequence) in Man's "art" (which includes the sense of' 'technology'') and Time taking up hope from man's limited triumph over Space. At the advent of the steam age, Wordsworth (and as shall be seen later, Haliburton) assign civilization a triumphant but still dependant part within the unfolding natural cosmos. I find Leo Marx's 1960s view of technology more despairing, less complexand more narrow-than that of Haliburton. Marx's Machine in the Garden poses a "metaphor of contradiction" in the American "pastoral fable," i.e., the opposites of a raw wilderness and a decadent civilization. 2 While Marx's metaphor of a.green garden might seem to promise a mediating image, some larger middle ground between nature and civilization, his garden finally becomes no more than an ironic measure of a failed and dying culture. Thus Marx's' 'Epilogue: The Garden of Ashes'' dwells upon Scott Fitzgerald's romantic disillusionment and concludes that America's "inherited symbols of order and beauty have been divested of meaning," that those hopes before ''represented by the symbol of an ideal landscape have not, and probably cannot be embodied in our traditional institutions." Thus Marx's typical American hero ends "alienated from society, alone and powerless, like the evicted shepherd of Virgil'secologue" (364). This estranged "point of vision" typifies, however, not only the helpless drift of the American hero in modem fiction...