LEVIATHAN AND AUTOMATON: TECHNOLOGY AND TELEOLOGY IN AMERICAN LITERATURE by John Adam Johns BA, Allegheny College, 1997 MFA, University of Pittsburgh, 2000 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2006 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by John Adam Johns It was defended on April 7, 2006 and approved by Paul Bové, Professor, Department of English Ronald Judy, Professor, Department of English Kirk Savage, Associate Professor, Department of the History of Art and Architecture Dissertation Director: Philip Smith, Associate Professor, Department of English ii Copyright © by J. Adam Johns 2006 iii LEVIATHAN AND AUTOMATON: TECHNOLOGY AND TELEOLOGY IN AMERICAN LITERATURE J. Adam Johns, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2006 This dissertation examines the relationship between time and technology in American literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It focuses principally on the work of Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, William Faulkner and Ralph Ellison, in the context of various historical and philosophical accounts of technology. It begins with the Leo Marx’s analysis of American literature as being always concerned with the moment when the machine violently enters into the garden. The dominant American concept of technology asserts that technology is progress (which is not the same as endorsing technological progress); in Richard Heilbroner’s classic formulation, “machines make history.” This teleological drive within technology is ultimately eschatological: the world and the very self stand in peril of being turned into automatons. Whether or not the eschatos ends with the automation or liberation of the self, the internal teleological drive of technology threatens to end time, that is, the continuation of meaningful events, something which the mainstream of American literary criticism has failed to grasp, by focusing on technology as a contemporary crisis, rather than analyzing it as being constitutive of life itself. That is, attempts to resist technological eschatologies typically end up becoming technological eschatologies themselves, with Leo Marx serving as the perfect example. An important tradition within American literature, however, has articulated an anti-teleological, anti-eschatological account of technology, one which denies the reality of progress in favor of change. This tradition includes the works of Herman Melville (including Moby Dick, Typee, Omoo, the Confidence Man and Clarel) and Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man and the essays, collected and uncollected), with William Faulkner’s works (especially Light in August, the Snopes books, Absalom, Absalom and Pylon) being more ambiguously included in this tradition. Lewis Mumford, in opposition to the mainstream of literary criticism, which has always endorsed an eschatological vision iv of technology, eventually approached Melville and Ellison’s anti-eschatological position. These works present a vision which is a viable alternative to both “progressive” ideologies which advance the mechanization of humanity and reactionary anti-technological ideologies. The dissertation argues that the Ellisonian-Melvillean anti-eschatological vision of technology precedes and is related to the critiques of progress advanced by certain contemporary theorists of biology and historians of technology, including George Basilla, Arnold Pacey, Richard Lewontin and Stephen Gould, and that this unified rejection of the very idea of progress is intellectually necessary and politically desirable. The dissertation identifies and participates in a critique not of the desirability of American progress so much as of the reality of American progress, and of the complicity of American ideologies of progress with racist traditions. v TABLE OF CONTENTS I. THE GARDEN IN THE MACHINE........................................................... 1 A. THE MACHINE ARRIVES ......................................................... 1 B. THE MACHINE BEFORE “INDUSTRIALISM” ....................................... 11 C. THE MACHINE IN THE “INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION” . 24 D. THE PENDULUM’S SWAY........................................................ 37 E. THE QUESTION CONCERNING TIME AND TECHNOLOGY . 46 F. TIME AND TECHNOLOGY........................................................ 50 G. THE PROJECT .................................................................. 86 II. “PYRAMIDS STILL LOOM BEFORE ME”: HERMAN MELVILLE, THE PYRAMID AND THE MACHINE .................................................................................. 91 A. QUEEQUEG’S WAR ............................................................. 93 B. SHEKINAH INTOLERABLY BRIGHT! ............................................. 105 C. MELVILLE’S AUTOMATA....................................................... 122 III. LEWIS MUMFORD, HERMAN MELVILLE, AND MEGATECHNICS . 149 A. THE MEGAMACHINE........................................................... 149 B. THE NECROPOLIS ............................................................. 164 C. THE TRAITOR ................................................................. 180 D. APPROACHING BYZANTIUM.................................................... 188 E. QUEEQUEG’S OBSTETRICS ..................................................... 198 IV. DEAD TIME AND THE SOUTHERN MACHINE ............................................ 209 A. MODERNITY AND MODERNISM ................................................. 209 B. CONSTRUCTING FAULKNER’S MODERNITY...................................... 215 C. FAULKNER’S BERGSON, BERGSON’S FAULKNER . 221 D. LIGHT IN AUGUST AS SHATTERED PASTORAL ................................... 228 E. THE SOUTHERN CYBORG: ABSALOM, ABSALOM! AND PYLON . 241 F. SNOPES PASTORAL, SNOPES MODERNISM ....................................... 259 G. FAULKNER’S TELOS, FAULKNER’S FUTURE...................................... 269 V. “OUR TECHNOLOGY WAS VERNACULAR”: RALPH ELLISON AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL HERO ................................................................................. 273 A. RACE, TECHNOLOGY, AND ELLISON ............................................ 273 B. THE LIGHTS OF TUSKEGEE ..................................................... 277 C. THE HERO AND THE NEGRO QUARTERLY ....................................... 289 D. ELLISON’S RAGLAN ........................................................... 295 E. ELLISON’S MUMFORD ......................................................... 317 F. AUTOMATISM AND TIME ....................................................... 332 G. THE HERO IN THE MACHINE AGE ............................................... 346 H. THE MECHANICAL LEADER .................................................... 358 vi I. CONCLUSIONS ................................................................. 368 VI. TELOS, BIOS, TECHNE ................................................................ 372 BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................................................................... 400 vii I. THE GARDEN IN THE MACHINE A. THE MACHINE ARRIVES In Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden, American culture, literature and history all bear the marks of a traumatic event: the sudden entrance of the machine, or industrialism, into the garden, which is largely to be understood as the “middle state” of agricultural, tended nature.1 What begins as a conventional tribute to the pleasures of withdrawal from the world – a simple pleasure fantasy – is transformed by the interruption of the machine into a far more complex state of mind.... More often than not in these episodes, the machine is made to appear with startling suddenness. (15) 1 Marx, Machine 88. Marx argues, for instance, that Jeffersonian pastoralism advocated the middle state as the “best attainable” human condition – certainly better than industrialism. But we must not make the error of thinking that Marx’s “middle state” is only Jefferson’s original formulation of his goals for America: “The controlling principal of Jefferson’s politics is ... dialectical. It lies in his recognition of the constant need to redefine the ‘middle landscape’ ideal, pushing it ahead... into an unknown future to adjust it to ever-changing circumstances” (139). The politics of the “middle state,” although seemingly designed to counter industrialism and “over-civilization,” seem to assume an industrial notion of progress. 1 Marx argues that nearly all major American writers have been deeply influenced by the “machine’s sudden appearance in the landscape” (16). He traces a pattern of various authors who place the machine in contrast to an ordered rural landscape in order to emphasize the artificiality of the machine, beginning with such romantics as Blake and Wordsworth (18). Writing about Nathaniel Hawthorne, Marx says that the machine comes upon him as a “sudden, shocking intruder upon a fantasy of idyllic satisfaction” (29). In time, the machine’s sudden appearance even becomes a cliché, as in the novels of Frank Norris, but a cliché rooted in the fact of America’s “unbelievably rapid industrialization” (343). Marx’s book ends with the assertion that artistic attempts to create a middle landscape have failed, and that the “machine’s sudden entrance into the garden presents a problem that ultimately belongs not to art but to politics” (365). Throughout the book Marx insists on the suddenness of the machine’s arrival. It doesn’t develop slowly, it isn’t imported piecemeal, nor does it evolve.2 It appears