Spring in the Central Valley. Just northeast of Los Banos, the Coast Ranges not far distant to the west, fragile looking cotton seedlings push through grayish brown soil, their fibrous product eventually to be harvested in fall. Between this place and the range, busy Highway 152 bisects the town, but here traffic consists mostly of farm trucks or the occasional massive tractor.
It’s windy. A cooling trend and high winds have struck the Valley, and it feels much colder than it is. But the seedlings seem healthy enough to shrug it off.
Nearby, protected by an open-air metal shed, an imposing John Deere cotton picker waits for the autumn harvest, its squat shape, ironically, suggesting a massive—say about 5,000 pounds—green and yellow boll weevil with truncated body and a stunted snout just waiting to devour some savory cotton buds. The machine recalls to me a poem by two-time National Book Award finalist Sherley Anne Williams. A justifiably admiring portrait of Williams in the Los Angeles Times notes that “during her adolescence, she picked cotton and fruit in the same vast, dusty fields in which her parents had worked, because it was the only way she could afford college.”
In “The Green-Eyed Monsters of the Valley Dusk,” time constantly folds back on itself and ends with a vision of a machine come to life:
sunset knocks the edge from the
day’s heat, filling the Valley
with shadows: Time for coming
in getting on; lapping fields
lapping orchards like greyhounds
racing darkness to mountain
rims, land’s last meeting with still
lighted sky.
This is a car
I watched in childhood, streaking
The straightaway through the dusk
I look for the ghost of that
girl in the mid-summer fields
whipping past but what ghosts lurk
in this silence are feelings
not spirit but sounds.
Bulbous
lights approach in the gloom
hovering briefly between
memory and fear, dissolve
into fog lamps mounted high
on the ungainly bodies
of reaping machines: Time
coming in. Time getting on.
“Green-eyed monster” conjures Shakespeare’s Othello, the phrase used by the odious Iago, falsely suggesting to his superior Othello that his wife Desdemona was unfaithful. While I’m not certain how jealousy figures into a depiction of a machine, I notice one surprising effect: William’s use of the allusion seems to transmogrify an inert machine into something organic, tinged with menace. It’s an unusual motif for California writing about farm and ranch land, even if that writing often foregrounds the industrial scale of mechanized agriculture here. While much of this work seems equivocal about the consequences of the development of Big Ag, it’s surely suggestive that the traditional agrarian myth embedded in American values has been overwhelmed by something more modern and powerful. That power drives the astonishing productivity of agriculture here, of course, benefiting consumers across the world. But some writers see in California’s mechanized landscape something more disturbing.
The presence of the machine in California writing contrasts with the stubborn persistence of the Jeffersonian agrarian dream, with its valorization of the pastoral. We see that perspective in one of California literature’s more famous nineteenth century novels, Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1884 novel Ramona, set just after the 1848 American conquest and designed to alert Americans to the continuing injustices suffered by California Indians. In her book, Jackson depicts the doomed romance between Ramona, a half-native young woman growing up in the prominent Californio household of her guardian the imperious Senora Moreno, and Allesandro, the handsome son of Temecula Indian Chief Pablo, who recognizes the inherent value of the land as site for a fulfilling pastoral life: “He had set his people the example of constant industry, working steadily in his fields and caring well for his herds” (84-85).
The passage describes an ordered, mid-nineteenth century agrarian landscape that takes its form from Spanish and Mexican colonialism. Jackson’s audience, though, are late nineteenth century Americans who presumably might be open to improving conditions for indigenous people. Thus the depiction is less about history and more about triggering in Ramona’s readers sympathy for California Indians through a shared pastoral myth. In Ramona that way of life remains just out of reach for the main characters thanks to the incursion of Americans who have strayed from pastoral ideals and display indifference to the quality of rural life, indifference reinforced by stubborn acquisitiveness for land and an intolerance for indigenous people.
At the end of the novel, Allesandro has died and Ramona, newly wedded to Felipe, son of Senora Moreno, moves to Mexico; Felipe is especially bitter about American attitudes, “The methods, aims, standards of the fast incoming Americans were to him odious. Their bloated successes, the crowding of colonies, schemes of settlement and development,— all were disagreeable and irritating” (368-69). Whatever Felipe’s feelings, it’s notable that “schemes of settlement and development” loom large in his complaint, for it is these that provide the incentive for the technical innovations that foster efficient and profitable production.
Another example is found in Joaquin Miller’s slightly older 1873 work, Life Amongst the Modocs: Unwritten History. Like Jackson, Miller was writing a social critique of American attitudes, especially as they were fueled by racist intolerance. At one point, the first person narrator—as seen in an earlier post, Miller likes to create facsimiles of himself—is reconnoitering a white settlement in the Shasta region in order to plan for an attack by the Modocs, with whom the narrator has allied himself out of sympathy for their plight. Despite his purpose, he is struck by the beauty and peace stemming from the realization of American pastoral values even as he is desolated by comparison to the state of the native people:
As I rode back, the farmers were gathering in their grain. On the low marshy plains of Shasta river they were mowing and making hay. I heard the mowers whetting their scythes and the clear ringing melody came to me full of memories and stories of my childhood. I passed close to some of these broad-shouldered merry men, as they sat on the grass at lunch, and they called to me kindly to stop and rest and share their meal. It was like merry hay-making of the Old World. All peace, merriment and prosperity here; out yonder, burning camps, starving children, and mourning mothers; and only a hundred miles away. (359)
Miller, like his contemporary social gadfly Jackson, is careful not to critique the pastoral myth itself, cherished as part of the American story and loudly espoused by those who would also cynically mantle themselves with its apparent goodness in order to cloak the “schemes of settlement and development” that so sickened Felipe.
Depictions like Miller’s, of course, blend the non-human and human worlds into a healthy, harmonious whole, not unlike the world inhabited by California’s native people before the American conquest, at least in Miller’s telling. The blurring of the boundary between the non-human and human anticipates the breaking through of another boundary, that between the organic and non-organic, as in William’s poem. The cotton harvester won’t take long to arrive.
Leo Marx compellingly explores the pressures that industrial technology exerted on the American pastoral idea nostalgically presented by writers like Jackson and Miller. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, among other discussions, examines the work of another California writer, Frank Norris, who in the 1901 novel The Octopus, scrutinizes the then rapid emergence of the power of the railroad trusts and their influence on commerce and development in the Golden State. Norris draws upon the 1880 Mussel Slough gunfight between members of a supposedly traditional, agrarian community and agents of the faceless, amoral railroad trusts that exploited them. The power of the trust is symbolized by the locomotive. Marx writes,
Within the lifetime of a single generation, a rustic and in large part wild landscape was transformed into the site of the world’s most productive industrial machine. It would be difficult to imagine more profound contradictions of value or meaning than those made manifest by this circumstance. Its influence upon our literature is suggested by the recurrent image of the machine’s sudden entrance into the landscape. (343)
Marx quotes a passage from Norris’ novel wherein a locomotive “thunders down the track and smashes into a herd of sheep” (344). It’s hard to imagine a starker confrontation between the pastoral and the industrial, their organic and the inorganic avatars. Here’s part of the quote that draws Marx’s attention: “Under foot it was terrible. The black blood, winking in the starlight seeped down into the clinkers between the ties with a prolonged sucking murmur” (Marx 344, Norris 50). Norris, in the voice of his alter ego, the young poet Presley, transforms the machine into something more terrifying:
Again and again, at rapid intervals in its flying course, it whistled for road crossings, for sharp curves, for trestles; ominous notes, hoarse, bellowing, ringing with the accents of menace and defiance; and abruptly Presley saw again, in his imagination, the galloping monster, the terror of steel and steam, with its single eye, cyclopean, red, shooting from horizon to horizon; but saw it now as the symbol of a vast power, huge, terrible, flinging the echo of its thunder over all the reaches of the valley, leaving blood and destruction in its path; the leviathan with tentacles of steel clutching into the soil, the soulless Force, the iron-hearted Power, the monster, the Colossus, the Octopus. (51)
The metaphor of the octopus for the railroad trusts—tentacles strangling farmers, shippers, manufactures, probably widows and orphans, too—was not invented by Norris. It was a common trope at the time, one particularly memorable example is an 1882 drawing by George Frederick Keller depicting the Southern Pacific Railroad as a devilfish, or octopus. But Norris made the image a central symbol not just of the railroad, but of all schemes meant to exploit people and land for profit. And to the extent the machine—and its attendant industrial infrastructure—comes to life, its menace becomes more palpable.
The railroad locomotive, however, is not the only sentient machine in The Octopus. Not long into the book, the young ranch owner Annixter—like other major landowners in the area—prepares his vast acreage for growing wheat. In an extraordinary passage, Norris gives readers a portrait of thirty-five ploughs, each drawn by a team of ten horses, all resembling “a great column of field artillery” (128). And like artillery, the ploughs, no longer inanimate, commence a great assault, soon to be joined with the forces of other landowners throughout the San Joaquin Valley:
Everywhere throughout the great San Joaquin, unseen and unheard, a thousand ploughs up-stirred the land, tens of thousands of shears clutched deep into the warm, moist soil.
It was the long stroking caress, vigorous, male, powerful, for which the Earth seemed panting. The heroic embrace of a multitude of iron hands, gripping deep into the brown, warm flesh of the land that quivered responsive and passionate under this rude advance, so robust as to be almost an assault, so violent as to be veritably brutal. There, under the sun and under the speckless sheen of the sky, the wooing of the Titan began, the vast primal passion, the two world-forces, the elemental Male and Female, locked in a colossal embrace, at grapples in the throes of an infinite desire, at once terrible and divine, knowing no law, untamed, savage, natural, sublime. (130-31)
This is a remarkable passage, not just for conveying the growing industrial scale of California agriculture, already robust 150 years ago, but also for the way the passage erases the distinction between the human and what Marx termed “wild landscape.” It’s tempting to recall an observation by the contemporary travel writer Bill Bryson, who in his 1998 book, A Walk in the Woods, quipped, “In America, alas, beauty has become something you drive to. . .” (200), an observation which sort of captures the endgame of the industrial assault that nurtured Marx’s imagination. In the pastoral myth as depicted by Jackson and Miller, through labor and devotion to the land, human beings were arguably capable of improving the natural world without dominating it. In the world of the sentient machine—here depicted as an author of sexualized military assault—the human and non-human distinction is elided even more, and the sentient machine mimics human intent and aggression. In Norris’ novel, the inorganic has become organic, a literary precursor of Williams’ green-eyed monster.
We’ve gotten used to the integration of the non-human and human elements in our landscapes. As we’ve seen, this perspective was evident—though in a mild, pastoral way—in the description of the agrarian life that Miller and Jackson once celebrated. Now, in what’s increasingly becoming known as the Anthropocene, it’s almost impossible to find a landscape untouched by human industry of some type, and, I hasten to add, much of that industry is not malign. Architecture professor Ignacio San Martin elaborates:
The tensions between the ideal cultural landscape and the real landscape resulting from the technological production of space have been with us in America for the past two hundred years. What is interesting here is the dual role that technology has played both as an ideologically convergent force freeing individuals and bringing them closer to nature and as a divisive force between these spheres.(240)
Thus it would seem that California writers like Williams and Norris—through allusion and metaphor—have found other ways to express that “convergent force” through creative language that figures inorganic machines as lifeforms, lifeforms that symbolically become the vehicles of large scale industry that, if we let it, could bring menace to our world.
AI, anyone? You can get it in a cotton picker now.
Sources:
Bryson, Bill. A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering Nature on the Appalachian Trail. Broadway, 1998.
Cheung, Lance. 20200823-NRCS-1366. U. S. Department of Agriculture Photo. 23 August 2020. https://www.flickr.com/photos/usdagov/50360566653/in/photolist-2jJfCsh2jJc43e-2jJc4VX-2jJguV2-2jJc3HM-2jJc5X1-2jJfCPj-2jJgsP3-2jJfEG2. Public Domain Mark 1. Universal. Accessed 15 May 2024.
Gable, Mona. “Understanding the Impossible: Poet and Professor Sherley Anne Williams, Who Once Picked Cotton in Fresno, Has Become a Surprise Best-Selling Novelist.” Los Angeles Times. 7 December 1986. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-12-07-tm-950-story.html. Accessed 12 May 2024.
Hamblen, Matt. “John Deere Automates Cotton Picking, on Display at CES2024.” Fierce Electronics. 13 January 2024. https://www.fierceelectronics.com/iot-wireless/john-deere-automates-cotton-pickin-display-ces2024. Accessed 21 May 2024.
Jackson, Helen Hunt. Ramona. 1884. Broadview Editions, 2008.
Keller, George Frederick. “The Curse of California.” The Wasp. Vol. 9, No. 316. 9 August 1882. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Frederick_Keller#/media/File:The_Curse_of_California.jpg. Accessed 21 May 2024.
Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Idea in America. Oxford U P, 1964.
Miller, Joaquin. Life Amongst the Modocs: Unwritten History. 1873. Heyday Books, 1996.
Norris, Frank. The Octopus: A Story of California. Intro. Kevin Starr. 1901. Penguin, 1986.
San Martin, Ignacio. “Reflections on the Cultural Landscape: Conflicting Results in the American Production of Space. Journal of the Southwest 45 (2003): 233-48. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40170257. Accessed 19 January 2024.
“Honoring Sherley Anne Williams.” Wesleyan U P. 17 June 2022. https://www.weslpress.org/blog/2022/06/17/honoring-sherley-anne-williams. Accessed 12 May 2024.
Williams, Sherley Anne. “The Green-Eyed Monsters of the Valley Dusk.” Some One Sweet Angel Chile. William Morrow and Company, 1982, p. 92.
