Early in Gain Laura Bodey goes grocery shopping.  Whether Richard Powers intends the possible allusion or not, Laura’s trip to  “the Bounty Mart” echoes the opening of Hesiod’s Works and Days.  Hesiod’s concern is that his brother has foolishly overinvolved himself in the market:  “A person hasn’t any business / Wasting time at the market unless he’s got a year’s supply / Of food put by . . . ”  (Stanley Lombardo’s translation). A concern about how farming relates to the market has been with georgic poets since they started writing about how to raise crops properly.

While still in the check-out line,  Laura finds herself behind two men  who “must be farmers.”  Her thoughts about the two men show that Laura’s thinking is informed by the georgic mode.  She reads them—in contrast to herself—as noble.  The irony of the brief passage (26-28) is that we overhear the farmers’ conversation, which shows them to be embroiled in the market.

As a gardener, Laura sees herself as a lesser being than the farmers:  “She, an amateur gardener, a dabbler in drippy slipperworts and lilies, a potterer whose useful crop is chives.”  From her point of view—a point of view that the georgic mode tends to share—the farmers are “the only people on earth whose work is indispensable.”

She wonders—brining up a central question of the georgic mode—“How do they live?”  Laura is a real estate agent so her own response to the question is informed by her knowledge of changes in property values.  “Irreplaceable” homesteads have become attractive to the faculty who teach at a local college.  The farmers themselves tend to be “selling out to inevitable Agribiz.”

Feeling she could not talk to these men, Laura focuses on the how the marketing of food products has established a distance between her consumption and the work of the men who are standing so close to her:  “All she can do is take from them.  These boxes of multigrain cereal. The corndog that [her son] Tim eats unheated, right out of the pouch.  [Her daughter] Ellen’s tubes of fat-free whole wheat chips.  The nonstick polyunsaturated  maize oil spray. . . .  The endangered-species animal  crackers.  Everything in her cart, however enhanced and entangled its way here.”

Three central questions of the georgic mode inform Laura’s thinking—that farming is somehow more noble than other activities, that how farmers live is significant to the rest of the culture, and that the famer-consumer relationship is distorted—both “enhanced and entangled”—by the market.

The narrator shifts his focus from Laura’s thinking to relating the conversation between the two farmers—who prove not to be as ideal as Laura imagines them.  Their entanglement in the market is signaled by their wearing caps with corporate names.  Their jocular quips display “The usual, resigned abiding that people who make their own way reserve for the weather, collective idiocy, and other things beyond their control.”  But, if these farmers “make their own way,” they do so with an informed involvement in marketing trends.   One plants grains for “gasohol”; the other shows he’s influenced by “the big gluten push.”  They leave the store, “chatting about futures pricing.”

So we can add another worry that is a focus of the georgic mode—the worry about how much the market influences what farmers produce.  Will they grow food or fuel?  Will they grow the indispensable or the fashionable?

At present, the georgic mode (along with the Jeffersonian agrarian ideal, which will need addressing in a future post) may seem to have a questionable relevance to the world we now live in.  In his book on the natural history of New York City, Mannahatta, Eric W. Sanderson imagines that in 2409  the agriculture will have returned to agrarian perfection, the areas around the city  flourishing as “[b]right patchworks of small farms” producing “a diversity of crops year-round” (242).  But historians of agriculture* suggest that, since farming began, the tendency has been for those with wealth to out-produce smaller land holders and to buy up their land.   More food gets produced, but fewer people farm.  In many places pasture and farm land has become the “used-to-be-country” (the phrase is Anne Stevenson’s).  To be successful as a farmer one seems to need to adopt industrial methods, go corporate and make the farm an agribusiness.    As a result, poems (and prose passages) in the georgic mode now often feel as nostalgic as pastoral poems.

Nevertheless, somehow georgic thinking tends to produce, as it does in Laura, a sense of “shame”—a feeling that food production needs to be carried out in a way different from current practices.  And one impetus that prompts these posts on this blog is to explore the contradictory feelings that those who choose to write in the georgic  often seem correct in their criticisms of current agricultural practices but that the often good advice such writers give seems inadequate for solving the identified problems.  The georgic mode establishes standards that clarify how things keep going wrong but “collective idiocy” has left us in a world where georgic standards fare not as helpful as they might be in correcting what has gone wrong.

*  I have read the following histories of agriculture:

Marcel Mazoyer and Laurence Roudart, A History of World Agriculture (translated by

James H. Membrez, 2006)

Paul K. Conkin, A Revolution Down on the Farm: The Transformation of American

Agriculture since 1929 (2008)

Tom Standage, An Edible History of Humanity (2009)

Mark B. Tauger, Agriculture in World Hisotry (2011)

–Bill