There are, too, the matters of the pagan and the pantheistic, of Bacchus and the Void, of the peculiar biographies and choreography of the occupants ( The Children grab and hold the streamers and begin to dance around the Maypole. This failure mirrored, of course, the original fall of Adam and Eve, itself a continuous theme of Hejduk's drawing. And yet it is just this kind of ambiguity, the ambiguity of national identity and, above all, of place, that Miller suggests was produced by America's early failure to adhere to the divine mission. The new urban population of Hejduk's work - those who are concerned above all with their formal, architectural relation to the world and are even named in terms of that relation - is, similarly, without a body politic or even a nationality. 5 Most of Hejduk's work is not situated within the American city and it would be hard to determine how American urbanism specifically, if there is such a thing, registers itself in his work. There can be no simple answer to this question since Hejduk is, and seems to have always been, both the figure of the father, who maintains the original mission, and the son, who wanders from the path. What happened was that the children yielded to the seductions of the land and, in so doing, lost the sense of the errand and "launched themselves upon the process of Americanization."įorced back, as we are, by Hejduk's subjects and objects into an earlier phase of American history (nostalgically or otherwise, it doesn't matter for the moment), we might ask how his urbanistic proposals - the villages and gameboard of the Masques - exhibit the failed errand to settle a wilderness territory with a set of divine principles intact, the anxiety of that failure, and, at the same time, the exhilaration of the clean slate that this wilderness (erroneously, it turns out) represented. The list of afflictions should this errand fail included "crop failures, epidemics, grasshoppers, caterpillars, torrid summers, arctic winters.and (most grievous of all,) unsatisfactory children." 3 The errand, then, was not to build a new foundation, but to build upon the divine foundation already in place in England (and in the garden of Eden). John Winthrop, who was head of that company, characterized this errand as a divinely inspired social solidarity in the face 9f great adversity, the "possession of a land without being possessed by it," the fulfillment of divine will and manifest destiny. These children were in "grave doubt" about what the great errand had been that drove the Massachusetts Bay Company to settle New England. Miller's main point is that the second and third generation of settlers (the descendants of Thomas Hooker and John Cotton) had somehow lost their nerve. I am referring to what Perry Miller, that historian of seventeenth-century American consciousness, called the "errand into the wilderness," itself a phrase that came from Samuel Danforth's election sermon in 1670.
I am not referring to the various neo-classical homages that postmodernism pays to Williamsburg and the University of Virginia, nor, in a curiously related way, the modernist homages not to classical or colonial architecture but to a colonial culture that valued industry, work, and functionality above all (Calvinism). I was surprised not because these names, these subjects in this Masque, are different from the cast of subjects and objects in other Masques (they are both different and the same), but because it suddenly seemed clear to me that at least some of Hejduk's work emanated from an entirely different place than I had ever imagined emanated, that is, from colonial America. The objects : Farm Barns, Animal Hospitals, Clothes Wagon, are descriptive and functionalist in the same sense. It was a surprise to me to read, in Lancaster / Hanover Masque, the prefatory and descriptive texts organized under the headings "subject" and "object." 1 The subjects named by Hejduk are The Sower, The Reaper, The Butterwoman, The Trapper, etc., in other words, the subjects are named for what they do, for their craft.