Popular Culture Review Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1991 | Page 91
The Astro-Turf Garden
83
A pessimistic attitude won favor among many of the politically
and culturally disaffected radicals of the sixties. A profoundly
negative view of the possibility of nature forms a sharp contrast to
earlier artists, writers, and radicals who wholeheartedly affirmed
the organic. In his influential book The Machine in the Carden
(1964), a study of the pastoral myth in American literature, Leo Marx
described the significance of pastoralism in American culture. The
root of this pastoralism, Marx suggested, was the impulse, in the face
of society's increasing complexity and oppressiveness, to withdraw to
a simpler environment "closer to nature." It found desirable
characteristics and values in simple country pleasures. "Pastoral
ism," Marx (1980, p. 53) held, had "won the favor~or the serious
consideration of Western culture's most gifted artists, writers, and
intellectuals." The subjects of Marx's study experienced the freedom
to not only reject technology, but to find some hope in the affirmation
of the pastoral.
However, for radical dissidents of the sixties the possibility of
an escape to nature became increasingly problematic. They rejected
both the organic pastoralism of the Old Left and the escapist
pastoralism of romantic writers and artists. What is involved is a
revision of an attitude that embraced nature in the face of
technological advance. The metaphoric conception of the machine as
the destroyer of an unspoiled landscape gives way to the fatalistic
notion of the landscape as completely defiled. For these dissidents
the very idea of nature, and its iconological embodiment, notably
"the garden” is transfigured. They describe an inverted, or post
industrial form of the pastorial—an Astro-Turf garden.
For many of the dissident voices of the sixties, the natural, the
primitive, and unrefined is held to be overwhelmed by the fraudulent
surface of American life. Not only is modernity made to seem
antagonistic to the integrity and concerns of the self, it is the
embodiment of social forces, which, if unopposed, may be expected to
defile and desecrate the natural environment, the ground on which
the pastoral hope has always rested. These responses evidence a
highly fatalistic conception of the recent past: the alien, abstract,
largely external character of the intervening force, the sense of
tyrannous circumstances closing in all at once upon a landscape of
eroded possibilities.