“The ominous sound of machines, like the sound of the steamboat bearing down on the raft or the train breaking in upon the idyll at Walden, reverberate endlessly in our literature…It is difficult to think of a major American writer upon whom the image of the machine’s sudden appearance in the landscape has not exercised its fascination” (Marx 16).
The concept of the machine, particularly one as powerful and “ominous” as a locomotive is potent in Faulkner’s The Bear. Isaac McCaslin’s repugnance and visual refusal of the new planning mill now occupying Major de Spain’s woods coincides with Leo Marx’s theory that the machine possesses the ability to bifurcate history into both the present and the imagined pastoral ideal. In this case, “the suddenness and finality of change” originating from the machine’s cut alienates the purlieus from a more industrialized modernity (31). Isaac’s rapidity in stabling his horse, and refusal to view deforestation at the hands of a compound of “stacked steel rails red with the light bright rust of newness and…piled crossties sharp with creosote, and wire corrals and feeding-troughs for two hundred mules” parallels his rejection of inheritance. The sylvan untamed becomes uxorious for Isaac, and his moral passion and commitment to the wilderness seems to supersede both his heritage and marriage.
But there is another, more comical account of ‘the Machine’ entering ‘the Garden’ in Go Down, Moses: Lucas Beauchamp, in his quest to unearth a supposed buried treasure, employs a divining machine to facilitate a bootless errand. While without the weight, both figuratively and literally, of a locomotive, the divining machine shares a few similarities with Marx’s machine. Both stem from a more industrialized, urban location, and intrude into the rustic—the salesman and divining machine hail from Memphis—and both exude a strange, preternatural mysticism that fascinates those introduced to it. The locomotive may carry a magnitude of virility, but the divining machine possesses a strange and enviable sagaciousness somewhere in its enigmatic shell. The machine itself is described as an “oblong metal box with a handle for carrying at each end, compact and solid, efficient and business-like, and complex with knobs and dials” that serves to stupefy Lucas in bemusement as he first encounters it (79 Emphasis Added). Its complexity of modern knobs and dials remain to the end, and, even as Lucas hands over the machine to Edmond, the “bright cryptic dials and gleaming knobs” proves unmasterable for both Lucas and Winston (125 Emphasis Added).
The machine is determined to withhold its knowledge. Its sentience is alluded to on more than one occasion, but apparently there must be some sort of arcane ritual to grant its compliance. “I just happen to think how rich I’d be if I just knowed what hit knows,” Lucas muses one night before embarking with the salesman and Winston to the mound (88 Emphasis Added). But, alas, its impervious and business-like valor prevails, and, like the chaste and virtuous field-maiden warding off the increasingly frustrated noble libertine, the machine “don’t seem to know how to say nothing but No” (89). We can’t all assume mastery over the machine, Lucas, but that is exactly its lure—without its mysticism and indomitable nature, it couldn’t possibly possess the categorical attraction strong enough to both symbolize the complexities of modernity while also demarcating temporal space into bucolic nostalgia and bewildering present.
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– Faulkner, William. Go Down, Moses. New York: Vintage, 1990. Print.
– Marx, Leo. Machine in the Garden. New York: Oxford UP, 1964. Print.
