Political Economy.' The extant fragment of the uncompleted verse shows the heroic couplet pressed into the service of technological vision ('Canals careering climb your sunburnt hills,/ Vein the green slopes and strow their nurturing rills'). Barlow's narrative of American development is one in which 'new engines' will enable limitless moral and material progress.
Texts like Johnson's and Barlow's augured the deployment of technology in prose fiction of the United States because they reveal the presumption that there is a national American story to narrate, and that the national narrative is largely enabled by technological impetus for environmental and sociocultural change.
And the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson so sustained that position that he, too, must be a part of any discussion of technology and the American novel. 'Let every man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down -468- with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper, in the world which exists for him' — this in Emerson's Self-Reliance (1841).
Emerson's position ramifies directly into the human relation to technology. For of course the relation of the individual to place is of paramount importance when one considers the prerogatives to shape and reshape the world, and to exercise the authority to assign meaning to the acts of formation and reformation of the material environment. The authority to act and to interpret is predicated on possession of self and of place. Emerson identifies the 'man in the street [who] finding no worth in himself which corresponds to the force which built a tower…feels poor when he looks on [it],' and enjoins that man to 'take possession.'
In Emerson's view, the imagination in America is already fully participant in these very historical processes. In The Young American (1844), Emerson talks about 'improvements' in America, waxing warm about the new America of internal improvements (surveying, planting, building the railroad, farming, etc.). Emerson's America is asserting itself 'to the imagination of her children.' Some of the statements in this essay are most familiar in Emerson, for example, 'Railroad iron is a magician's rod' and 'The land is the appointed remedy for whatever is false and fantastic in our culture.' He writes, 'This rage of road building is beneficent for America…not only is distance annihilated, but when, as now, the locomotive and the steamboat, like enormous shuttles, shoot every day across the thousand various threads of national descent and employment, and bind them fast in one web, an hourly assimilation goes forward.'
Emerson, it is true, dismissed the Etzlers, as he called them, meaning the technocratic utopians like the German-born Johann A. Etzler, who in 1842 had published the first part of his The Paradise within the Reach of All Men, without Labour, by the Powers of Nature and Machinery, a text Henry David Thoreau criticized for its materialism and neglect of metaphysics. And yet, from the late twentieth-century vantage point, Emerson's position can be seen as that of the white imperialist, and self-evidently dangerous with its dual assurances of power and innocence. Technological modernization is open solely to white men as a birthright, virtually as a mandate insulated against error or any kind of transgressive act. 'Every line of history inspires -469- a confidence that we shall not go far wrong,' said Emerson, 'that things mend.' In affirming the progressive 'hourly assimilation,' Emerson does give credence to the intrinsic importance of the technological development of the North American continent in ways that ramify into the novel. He goes on, 'I hasten to speak of the utility of these improvements for creating an American sentiment….railroad iron is a magician's rod, in its power to evoke the sleeping energies of land and water,' and he praises engineering, architecture, and scientific agriculture.
Emerson thus continues and reaffirms American technology in the tradition established in the Colonial and Early Republican eras. Assuming the white American male to be the center of the universe, he celebrates the forces that would, in the twentieth century, become those of modernism. Emerson, in whom transcendentalism means the transcendence of history, nonetheless marks and legitimates the very civilizing processes that would appear in the two American novels most closely associated with technology, Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, 2000–1887 (1888). The railways and telegraph, telephone, bicycles, efficient factories, together with the versatility and resourcefulness and centrality of the engineer (whether Twain's Hank Morgan or Bellamy's unnamed research-and- development group) — these are put into place by Emerson precisely because he presumed that the young American possessed the continent. 'Nature is the noblest engineer,' he wrote, but the young American participates in nature, embodies it — and we remember Emerson's bitter lamentation about Henry David Thoreau, that he led a berry-picking party when he could have undertaken engineering for all America.
As for historical process, ' America is the country of the future,' proclaims Emerson, and the young (male) American participates in that destined future via democratizing trade, innovative governmental forms, and utilitarian reformation of the continental environment. The utilitarian reform is subsumed under the reassuring rubric of destiny. It is true that Emerson, as scholarship has shown, favors the pastoral ideal for American life. He complains that cities 'drain the country of the best part of its population,' and urges the formation of gardens over the entire North American continent. But the pastoralizing process is to be accomplished by ingenuity and the tech-470- nology it manifests. In Emerson, there is no fundamental antagonism between machine and garden. On the contrary, the machine is requisite to the garden. And the machine, which would become central to modernism, is privileged as an integral part of the vivified imagination.
This brief survey argues the need to reevaluate the ways in which technology has been understood in the literary tradition. The interpretation of the representation of machinery cannot confine itself to binary divisions for or against technology. Ideologically, it is the case that until the turn of the twentieth century, roughly the point at which Pound called the novel a machine, technology was deployed as a means by which to measure national aspirations and anxieties. Through the nineteenth century, machinery was present in the novel to test and measure sociocultural national status, especially in the realm of the ineffable, including such abstract ideals as liberty, justice, equality. Within the text, technology was the heuristic means by which to investigate the degree to which the nation was moving toward these ideals or regressing into such retrograde states as greed, violence, anarchy. Thus the Cooper who celebrated the hand ax as the tool of civilization also loathed the gun that was fired skyward, in Home as Found (1838), to decimate the pigeon flocks for a townspeople's momentary novelty. And the railroad in the corporatecapitalist era of Frank Norris's The Octopus (1901) becomes, not a transit system, but a plutocratic- oligarchic 'ironhearted monster…its entrails gorged with the lifeblood of an entire commonwealth,' while the mechanized meatpacking plant of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) proves so dangerous to its immigrant workers that it is represented as an industrial-age inferno. These pejorative representations of technology really indict the nation for heedlessness, squandering of resources, greed, indifference, and cruelty. They become quotidian symbols indicating sociocommunal failure.
It is the polar possibilities of technological utopianism and dystopianism, accordingly, that would recur virtually obsessively in nineteenth-century American novels. The social anxiety about human shortcomings haunts the novel of dystopia, while the potential for the attainment of social and national ideals proves irresistible to the utopian. At the former extreme lie such titles as P. W. Dooner's Last Days of the Republic (1880), The Fall of the Great Republic (1885), -471- by Sir Henry Standish Coverdale (a pseudonym), and Ignatius Donnelly's Caesar's Column (1889), a fascist technological nightmare of advanced weaponry turned against the American populace as a small band struggle for survival.
In this sense, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is also a dystopian text, and one worth review here precisely because it is the American novel most prominently associated with technology. Readers initially encounter the humor of anachronism as Mark Twain thrusts Hank Morgan, his practical, technologically sophisticated late nineteenth-century Yankee, into a twelfth-century Arthurian England mired in superstition (including that of the Church) and frozen in aristocratic hierarchy. We cheer as the Yankee engineers a new society based on technological efficiency and democratic values — then experience the anguish of the Church- State vendetta against Hank just at the point at which he is distracted, preoccupied, along with his wife, by the grave illness of his baby, Hello-Central (named, technologically, for a telephone exchange), whom, on doctors' advice, Hank and wife Sandy have taken to France, hoping that the better climate will 'coax her back to health and strength again.' But from the sickbed watch, the Morgans reenter the world only to find Hank's technocracy in shambles: the entire nation under a papal interdict, an ecclesiastical death sentence on his head. King Arthur is dead, the queen in a convent after a horrible internecine war. 'Our navy had suddenly and mysteriously disappeared! Also just as suddenly and as mysteriously, the railway and telegraph and telephone service ceased, the men all deserted, poles were cut down, the Church laid a ban upon the electric light!' Hank's protégé, Clarence, has recruited fiftytwo loyalist boys, and thereupon Hank and Clarence make their plans for the war of modern technology against the benighted, this the horrific, climactic Battle of the Sand-
