Transcendental Wordplay: America's Romantic Punsters and the Search for the Language of Nature (review)

Michael West argues in this magisterial yet delightful book that in the first half of the nineteenth century, even “grass-roots” Americans expressed a “naïve hunger for esoteric roots”—a hunger caused in part by early-national Anglophobia and manifested in political, religious, and fraternal movements and rituals, and in a passionate search for the origins of language (xiii). Philology and grammar were pursued not as mere academic subjects but as keys to unlock basic cultural anxieties and hopes. (Anglo-Saxon, for example, was tied to “free political institutions” [148]). The great writers of the era, sharing this philological passion, in various ways confronted the inadequacy of language to contain meaning, and thus they gave expression to “Romantic irony” (50). Even Emerson’s notion of “correspondence” posited fluid relationships among words, nature, and spirit.

West is—to use a term valued by Emerson and Thoreau—provocative (from the Latin provocare, to call forth). He explicates the theories of a host of important, obscure, and bizarre philologists and invites fresh readings not only of the transcendentalists but also of Irving, Cooper, Andrews Norton, Horace Bushnell, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson, and Whitman. Obsession with “origins” and “transcendental wordplay” among such a motley group complicates our very definitions of transcendentalism and romanticism. West considers Thoreau “a witty moralist, satirist, and social critic,” and he declares Walden “the main literary monument to the era’s eccentric etymological speculation” (xiv); indeed, four of the book’s fourteen chapters, and key parts of three others, are devoted to Thoreau, whom West finds, in various contexts, surprisingly earthy, decadent, and comic—even as he confronts death.

West can be provocative in a second sense: irritating. Wearing his immense learning lightly, he indulges constantly in his own puns (most of them entertaining, and many truly enlightening). Ideologically driven readers will be frustrated, for West’s readings can be frankly impressionistic (a virtue in nineteenth-century criticism, he maintains). Although the age was united in its fascination with puns, West shows that these writers use wordplay for distinctive (if not eccentric) purposes. They read different philologists, many of whom were, in an age of pseudosciences, inept amateurs or outright quacks. West rides no narrow thesis but follows the evidence where it leads.

Some will find West provocative in a third sense: enraging. He frequently clinches a point with a tart comment on the posturing and pretension that afflict today’s English departments—“employer of last resort for intellectuals out of touch with the mainstream of their culture” [109]), their would-be “philosopher kings” [125] “oinking their merry way to . . . their federal pork barrels” [266]). These are engaging editorial tonics (to use another word favored by Thoreau—from the Greek tonikos, of or for stretching—signifying vocal, muscular, aesthetic, or intellectual stimulation). One hirsute anachronism: Cleverly analyzing Thoreau’s “comic posturing” in Walden as he appropriates an iconic moment in American history, West suggests: “When he welcomes ‘honest pilgrims’ to the new world of Walden by wrapping himself in Samoset’s blanket, he conjures up the absurd image of a bearded brave offering visitors a fistful of cigars” (434). A witty passage—but Thoreau was beardless during his Walden years (1845–47) and did not sport whiskers until after Walden was published (1954). Even as West illuminates the relationships between philology and classic American texts, his own brilliant wordplay evokes alert, playful reading.