Thoreauvian Modernities

Transatlantic Conversations on an American Icon

François Specq, Laura Walls, Michel Granger

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780820344782
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Does Thoreau belong to the past or to the future? Instead of canonizing him as a celebrant of "pure" nature apart from the corruption of civilization, the essays in Thoreauvian Modernities reveal edgier facets of his work—how Thoreau is able to unsettle as well as inspire and how he is able to focus on both the timeless and the timely. Contributors from the United States and Europe explore Thoreau's modernity and give a much-needed reassessment of his work in a global context.

The first of three sections, "Thoreau and (Non)Modernity," views Thoreau as a social thinker who set himself against the "modern" currents of his day even while contributing to the emergence of a new era. By questioning the place of humans in the social, economic, natural, and metaphysical order, he ushered in a rethinking of humanity's role in the natural world that nurtured the environmental movement. The second section, "Thoreau and Philosophy," examines Thoreau's writings in light of the philosophy of his time as well as current philosophical debates. Section three, "Thoreau, Language, and the Wild," centers on his relationship to wild nature in its philosophical, scientific, linguistic, and literary dimensions. Together, these sixteen essays reveal Thoreau's relevance to a number of fields, including science, philosophy, aesthetics, environmental ethics, political science, and animal studies.

Thoreauvian Modernities posits that it is the germinating power of Thoreau's thought—the challenge it poses to our own thinking and its capacity to address pressing issues in a new way—that defines his enduring relevance and his modernity.

Contributors: Kristen Case, Randall Conrad, David Dowling, Michel Granger, Michel Imbert, Michael Jonik, Christian Maul, Bruno Monfort, Henrik Otterberg, Tom Pughe, David M. Robinson, William Rossi, Dieter Schulz, François Specq, Joseph Urbas, Laura Dassow Walls.

Part One

THOREAU AND (NON)MODERNITY

LAURA DASSOW WALLS

Walking West, Gazing East

PLANETARITY ON THE SHORES OF CAPE COD

THOREAU’S ESSAY “WALKING” has become one of his most canonical texts, and its ringing declaration, “in Wildness is the preservation of the world” (Exc 202), is the founding motto of the American environmental movement. Cape Cod is much less well known, perhaps because where “Walking” rings with triumphal declarations, Cape Cod is uneasy and disquieting. One enters Thoreau’s last book through the scene of a shipwreck, and its pages are haunted by his morbid and graphic descriptions of dead bodies and living “wreckers” who see in corpses nothing beyond commodities. Yet these two works do not represent stages in a writer’s evolution; they are exact contemporaries, written during the 1850s and published shortly after Thoreau’s death. Nevertheless, taken together, they seem to inscribe, like pole and antipole, the antipodes of his thought. The same America that one erects and celebrates is in the other undermined and deconstructed, so thoroughly that the book’s final sentence becomes its culmination and justification: “A man may stand there and put all America behind him” (CC 215).

Putting these two texts in relationship with each other asks for a set of tools different from those usually available to the literary critic. They share an excursive shape; or, to be more precise, one, Cape Cod, is an excursion, literally a long walk, while the other, “Walking,” is a meditation that offers a theory of long walks and so seems to explain and justify the first. Their respective formats and topics suggest they be read not only together but in the “context” of travel literature or, more exactly, the literature of scientific exploration; that is, Thoreau modeled his travel repertoire not on the middle-class leisure activity of tourism but, putting on what he called his “bad-weather clothes” (Exc 101), on the rough-and-ready explorers who sought not self-cultivation but knowledge of the exterior unknown that, upon their returns from their various errands to various wildernesses, they could share with the world. Thoreau deliberately extends the genre of the scientific expedition to compel an inner exploration in tandem with the outer: as he asked in Walden (after reading the five large volumes narrating the Wilkes Expedition of 1838–42), “What does Africa,—what does the West stand for? Is not our own interior white on the chart?” (W 321). In the genre Thoreau is crafting, travel is a condition for thinking; that is, one must travel in the world in order to travel in the mind. In his classic study of Thoreau and travel writing, John Aldrich Christie noted that, for Thoreau, “geographic exploration became his most consistently used symbol for philosophic search” (265). True, except that for Thoreau exploration was more than just a “symbol,” even as he insisted all nature must be as well as mean: as Thoreau asked in his first book (also a travel narrative), “Is not nature, rightly read, that of which she is commonly taken to be the symbol merely?” (Wk 382). So one must actually, really move. And movement, mobility, does not merely give access to a tourist’s refined aesthetic sensibility. Thoreau means something risky, endangering, like the “sweet edge” of the scimitar when sun glimmers off both its sides (W 99), like the scimitar edge of a windswept beach, that sweet edge between life and death where one must face the fact of one’s own mortal body cast up by the waves and reigning over the shore.¹

The bulk of Thoreau’s work takes the form of the excursion, but the genre is not limited to Thoreau or even to writings generally bracketed as travel literature, such as Lewis and Clark’s westward adventures and Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of explorations through those other, more southern Americas. Melville is constantly inscribing excursions, for instance, to Typee or up the coast of Chile or down the Mississippi or around the world; Margaret Fuller’s breakthrough occurred during, and by way of, her excursion to the Great Lakes; Poe’s longest and greatest work, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, projects Thoreau’s “white” interiors from the blank charts of scientific explorers to an Antarctic landscape that literalizes the nightmares of imperial conquest. Much of Washington Irving’s writing is excursive, from “Rip van Winkle” (who travels in time as well as space) to Tour on the Prairies and Astoria, and Mark Twain took his readers down the Mississippi, through the Far West, and thence abroad. William Hickling Prescott wrote epic works of history tracing the military excursions of Spanish conquistadors across Mexico and Peru; Hawthorne’s eerie novel The Marble Faun could be set against Cape Cod as an excursion that puts all Europe behind him (and it’s worth remembering that Hawthorne lobbied to go along on the Wilkes Expedition as its official historian); Louisa May Alcott made a Thoreauvian river excursion the crux of her novel Moods; and so on. The tension between worlds outer and inner, nature and language, wild and convention, the mortal challenge of real exploration and the prepackaged satisfactions of tourism runs through all these works. Each in its way proposes that in this voyage something quite large is at stake: the self, to be sure, but also that collective called “America,” its shape and history and future, perhaps even the future (if there is to be one) of all humanity.

One could even venture that Thoreau’s era was defined by the expedition, starting with Columbus; accelerating with the Spanish conquests; continuing with the Spanish explorations up the Pacific Coast from Tierra del Fuego to Alaska, the French traders and missionaries across Canada and scientific explorers across the South Pacific and Egypt, the British measuring India, the journeys to North America to discover, and claim, a continent. In these voyages, nature, discourse, and nation were fused, and the resulting empires reached just as far as (and no farther than) the collections and archives of scientific explorers. Nation and transnation form another uneasy tension: as Paul Giles has recently observed, “Antebellum American authors do not so much ground their work upon native soil as situate it on a highly charged and fraught boundary between past and present, circumference and displacement, and the challenge each individual writer faces is in mapping out a discrete location, in finding a space from which to speak” (107). Adding the excursive dimension to American literature reminds us how writing indeed becomes mapping, a discursive cartography driven by the urgent need to establish some stance among vectors that keep shifting and sliding into new permutations. Complex interrelations among peoples and cultures, nations and natures were unfolding all around Thoreau, as he and his neighbors, like everyone everywhere, were being forced to scale up their lives from local to global on the emerging networks of commerce, and knowledge, and power.

Works in this large and restless genre respond to questions set in four dimensions: mobility, planetarity, vascularity, transjectivity. These four intertwined strands can be teased apart for analysis only with some violence. Yet doing so provides two benefits. First, such an analysis sidesteps the dead-end dualisms that arrest understanding, as, for instance, between text and context, or nature and culture, or subject and object. Second, such an analysis puts “nature” and the various modes of traversal across, and habitations in, nature not at the periphery of “culture,” as do virtually all other modes of literary analysis; instead, it works on the assumption that “nature” is no more separable from “culture” than oxygen is from life. This is a fundamentally ecological approach to reading that takes seriously the proposals made by philosophers, anthropologists, and cognitive scientists (starting with Humboldt in the early 1800s) that ideas as much as objects compose, or constitute, the material world and that objects as much as ideas manifest, or realize, thought.² Thus ideas are material and materiality is ideal, and the distinction between matter and idea is yet another dichotomy that must be recognized and bracketed. So, for instance, even as I struggle to articulate these “ideas,” I work on a computer keyboard made warm by electricity that comes from a coal-burning power station; I print them out on paper that once grew as trees. My very thoughts have a carbon footprint, and in articulating them, I hope they will justify the resources I use by affecting the intertwined worlds of thought and matter, changing how others think and therefore how they materialize their thoughts in this world whose fate we share in common. It’s all any writer hopes for, Thoreau included.

First, then, it must be mobile. In this literature, the narrator—and perhaps also the author herself—moves, and the world around the narrator/author also moves. Margaret Fuller, having removed herself to Niagara Falls, is there overwhelmed by “an incessant, an indefatigable motion,” a “weight of perpetual creation” so overbearing and so inescapable that her nerves suffer and fray (Summer 3). Mobility may be fast, like Thoreau on the train to Montreal or Chicago watching the landscape blur into unsuspected patterns of change, or slow, like an afternoon’s long saunter into a kairotic eternity. It may be global, like Hawthorne’s excursion to Rome, or local, like Thoreau’s excursion to Walden Pond. It may be physical, as when Thoreau shakes sand out of his shoes on the beach of Cape Cod, or mental, as when he reads the 170-plus books of travel documented by Christie—or when we read one book, Walden. It may be closed, held within the radius of a day’s walking or the political boundaries of that entity we may name America, or it may be open ended, as when Thoreau gets lost returning to Walden from town after dark—“not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations” (W 171)—or when Whitman imagines a passage to India that ends in the infinitude of boundless cosmic space.

Second, it must be planetary. Mobility takes the traveler from one local place to the next. As I write I hear the street traffic in Lyon, France, which sounds exactly as it did awhile before in Columbia, South Carolina, and as I remember it sounding longer ago from my apartment in urban Seattle. The global is always local at every point; there is nowhere that is not somewhere in particular. Travel across the globe means not moving “up” to some privileged vantage that transcends place but through, crossing many places, a movement across the solid breadth of the earth’s surface that is lost in the word “global.” As Gayatri Spivak observes, “The globe is on our computers. No one lives there.” By contrast, “the planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system; and yet we inhabit it, on loan” (72). Hence Spivak proposes the word “planetarity” to name this planetary other that we, strangely, inhabit.³ Movement that engages with such planet-thought induces the need for comparison: while in France, I am constantly comparing it with the United States, from the sounds of sirens (in one a bimodal song, in the other a wobbling wail), to the look of the houses, to birds familiar and unfamiliar, and to the sounds of languages. I grasp for navigational markers: even as my plane landed in Paris, it dropped through clouds that bore the very look of French impressionism.

For in such strangeness I easily get lost, and thus I must constantly face the problem of navigation, how to orient myself. To do so, I must scale up. To find my way around the neighborhood, I reach for a map of the city; to seek the lost cathedral of Cluny, I reach for a map of the region; to understand why twilight in Lyon lingers so late into the evening, I reach for a map of the planet. Alterity has forced me to become a planetary thinker, moving up and down across scale levels. If I make such reorienting gestures of comparison a habit of thought, soon every object in my field of vision accumulates its cognates all around the world, and nothing comes singly or simply. Everything comes bearing traces of something somewhere else, rather as Thoreau’s New England neighbors come to him bearing traces of the Brahmins in India who, according to British reports, inflict upon themselves unspeakable penances. By following this trajectory, Thoreau soon is scaling up from his one individual life, to his neighbors’ many lives, to the general dilemmas of an intellectual living and thinking in a capitalist economy, and finally to the abstracted entity of “Economy” (the title of the first chapter in Walden), the highest scale level of all. Even while Thoreau hoes his beans, he reminds himself that the star that lights his labor “illumines at once a system of earths like ours” (W 10)—planetary thinking gone stellar. As he leans out the window one night, he experiences “something invigorating in this air which I am peculiarly sensible is a real wind blowing from over the surface of a planet” (PJ 7: 309). Planetarity means never losing sight of the sometimes surprising extent of your relations.

Scale levels are temporal as well as spatial, and, indeed, one of the fascinations of nineteenth-century science was the way geology had learned to loop together space and time, such that natural objects assemble temporal layers. Things become legible as timescapes: as Humboldt said of mountains, “Their form is their history” (Cosmos 1: 72). Thoreau learns to read the form of the forest as a stratigraphic history extending back for hundreds of years; Humboldt moves at ease across temporal scale levels from the immediate lived instant, to the span of a lifetime, to the historical, to the geological, to the cosmic, jumping among them so as to destabilize linear flow and dizzy the uninitiated reader. With practice, Thoreau becomes equally adept: “Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in,” he says in Walden (98). At Walden, one can dip up here an Indian arrowhead, there a locomotive, elsewhere the cellar of a freed slave. Even so, a few miles from Lyon, one can stand by the chapel of the monks of Berzé-la-Ville, built in the twelfth century, and watch the high-speed TGV train to Paris arrow by: with one eye trace a delicate fresco manufactured here in this village a millennium ago, with the other track the sleek streak of railroad cars manufactured yesterday in the nearby town of Belfort. Time is laminar, it never displaces, it only adds more layers, more folds. In Canada, Thoreau discovered medieval feudalism alive and well; today we can fly to East Africa and admire the allegedly Paleolithic lifestyle of tribal Masai, then, should our car break down, borrow from one of those same young Masai a mobile phone. Planet-thought asks us never to reduce all levels to one level. There are great and important differences between the Romanesque chapel and the TGV train. One used to be an important supply station on the medieval network of European Catholicism, and from its enduring walls you can ponder the formation and maintenance of modern global networks of capital. The other will transmit you to the ends of the earth at a speed that makes connection almost instantaneous but that makes the chapel itself almost invisible: look fast!—and it’s already gone. New properties emerge across different speeds and scale levels, as Henry Adams recognized when he meditated on the Virgin and the Dynamo. Thoreau learned this too: he might have wanted the ocean to be nothing but a larger Walden, but when he put this notion to the test, he allowed the ocean to teach him difference.

Third, it must be vascular. It must, that is, find a means to connect across such distances in space and time, such differences in scale levels. The text we read, if we are to read it at all, let alone read it together in concert, must find a way to stay alive. It must generate and sustain a living network all along the lengths from its creation to our translation, or it will die. A canonized text such as Walden has thrived by creating, with a great deal of help across several generations, a strong and vital network in bookstores and universities and academic presses and conferences worldwide; at the heart of that vascular network is the book Thoreau wrote, beating life and energy into it.⁴ Curiously, because Thoreau succeeded so well in linking his book with his place, Walden Pond, the pond itself also functions as the heart of its own living vascular network, as a busy state park, as a pilgrimage site, as a symbolic center for a certain sort of cultural work. Its form is its history indeed: writing as cartography loops together temporal sequence and spatial simultaneity. The map Thor...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: The Manifold Modernity of Henry D. Thoreau
• Part One: Thoreau and (non)Modernity
• Part Two: Thoreau and Philosophy
• Part Three: Thoreau, Language, and the Wild
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index