Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
The International Institute of Social and Economic Sciences, Buenos Aires, Arjantin, 3 - 06 Şubat 2013, ss.110-111
Dilek Caliskan
The Spirit of Rebellion:Ecotage, The War Against the Machines and
Automatons in Edward Abbey's novel The Monkey Wrench Gang
Abstract:
The Spirit of Rebellion: Ecotage, The War Against Machines and Automatons in Edward
Abbeys The Monkey Wrench Gang Edward Abbey as an environmentalist and a life writer
uses crime and madness, in his novel The Monkey Wrench Gang in order to show the
condition of the individual trapped in the hegemonistic capitalist American society, which has
become schizophrenic. This violent patriarchal society does not only consume itself and its
individuals, but also consumes nature both human and inhuman, so Abbey explains the
necessity for sabotage which has nothing to do with terrorism. Terrorism he says means
deadly violence for a political and/or economic purpose carried out against people and other
things. He draws parallels to the government persecuting their own people, to bulldozers
tearing up an area of trees and plants. Wilderness can only be defended through sabotage
which , says Abbey, is an act of force or violence against material objects, machinery, in
which life is endangered. Nature, as the sole treasure of the human beings is used and abused
with the created myths and success stories about growth. Nature , the life giving source turns
out to be monstreous and becomes the fountain of pain and trauma. With its focus on
industrialism, the society with all of its institutions is like an evergrowing mega machine
consisting of smaller political units controlled by the authorities and each unit controlling and
dismembering the other. There is the necessity of opposition to the gigantic and fantastically
complex social machine that modern nations have become. It is the American Dream that
turned into a nightmare with people like Bishop Love, who is controlling the desert, the maze
, ironically, the only place where the gang members felt themselves free. The aim of this
study is to analyze the novel in the light of existentialist psychiatrist R.D. Laings definition of
madness in order to understand the psychology of the gang members Seldom Seen Smith ,
Doc Sarvis, Bonnie and George Washington Hayduke, who refuse to become automatons.
Abbey was a man in perpetual rebellion against himself, against the status quo, and against
the mediocrity of the past that crushed the human spirit. It is the spirit what can be learned
from Abbey and Hayduke the mad leader of The Monkey Wrench Gang. Wilderness is an
important part of Civilization and must be preserved. The landscape made America uniqely
American. The essential America has been for writers and critics exurban , green, pastoral,
even wild. In American literature, nature was americanized and idealized and heroes were
created to inhabit it. Hayduke, Smith and as well as Abbey are the animal like figures who
inhabit the American ladscapes. They are like the indegenous people of North America, who
learned how to survive in the wild American landscape by observing the living styles and
techniques of the animals peculiar to that scene. Hayduke and Seldom seen Smith are heroic
figures, like Edward Abbey himself. As, some of the heroes created themselves, calling on
nature as a referent for their autobiographical self-definition. Sometimes the relationship
between nature and narrator was harmonous. So, in Abbeys ecobiographical style ,the nature
becomes an identfiying canvas on which to write a self. Abbeys desert, his solitude ,(his
carefully constructed self). The desert must remain wild, indifferent, isolated, unpaved: closed to tourists, although he himself hopes to return to it. Metaphorically, the mad Hayduke as the
mountain lion, Seldom Seen Smith as the monkey and Abbey an antromorphic figure in an
animal body in his self-portrait experience themselves as automata.