Thoreau's Aphoristic Form

To quote thoreau seems irresistible, as attested by the numerous occasional books that, extracting from his writing its pithy and toothsome phrases, anthologize him piecemeal, often by thematic rubric.¹ Equally irresistible is the urge to dismiss such anthologies, and the aphorisms they reproduce, as banal—misleading, in the way that they make representative moments in Thoreau's notoriously contradictory writing that may not in fact be representative, thus suggesting to the reader an immediate accessibility to the determinate meaning of the texts from which such anthologies draw their material. Representative of this stance is Richard Poirier who considers the aphorism as it appears in the writing of Emerson, and by extension Thoreau, Frost, Stevens, and Stein, to be symptomatic of these authors' desire to be both popular (that is, accessible to his or her culture) and critical of the commonplaces that define that culture. "Thus it is," he concludes, "that the 'Emerson' who is said to have had such enormous influence on American life and American thinking is the aphoristic Emerson, which is not Emerson at all as I am able to understand him" ("Why Do Pragmatists" 355). This characterization of the aphorism as antagonistic to "serious" reading is echoed, although not explicitly theorized, in many accounts of Thoreau's similarly aphoristic prose.² Indeed, Thoreau seems particularly susceptible to such a critique, in that the gravitational pull of his aphorisms—illocal and extrapersonal—seems incompatible with what is conventionally championed about his writing: its invigorating attentiveness to a particular locale, both temporally and spatially bounded by the formal demands of his preferred mode of composition, the "excursion."

At stake here, then, in these competing stances is a methodological question of how, very broadly, Thoreau's essays are to be read and/or what exactly it is we are to read for. Do we read past the aphoristic moments in order to get at the narrative's action—its mimetic representation of experience—such that the extractable becomes the expendable? Or do we take the aphorism to be the place at which Thoreau speaks most clearly, resolving or overriding the narrative's local, and frequently contradictory, propositions? (In either case, the aphorism as a form of expression is assumed to be hard and determinate—either a block to comprehension, as in the first instance, or a resting place, as in the second.) While the asymmetry of these two claims—the academic versus the nonacademic or, as Poirier imagines it, the serious versus the superficial—might suggest that the debate I've staged is so one-sided as to be moot, the popularity of the occasional book nevertheless highlights a conspicuous feature of Thoreau's writing that is as yet undigested in critical accounts of his prose. To this end, I examine Thoreau's early essay "A Walk to Wachusett"—his first fully characteristic "excursion"—to ask what Thoreau imagines the text's aphorisms do, bring about, or effect. How are we to account for the insistent gravitational pull the form exerts, drawing the reader out of the text's mimetic representation of the New England landscape, and what might this tense or frictive imbrication of representational strategies reveal about Thoreau's understanding of the relation between local perception (the material facts that confront the hikers) and the forms of expression we habitually use to order it (for example, the quest motif onto which the narrator maps these "facts")?

My claim is that Thoreau's aphorisms, in spite of their compactness, are not in fact hard and determinate but open, and as such offer Thoreau a means of speculating on the natural world that holds the relation between particular facts and universal law in suspension, thereby cultivating a readerly disposition attentive to the nature's contingency to the human mind. Accordingly, I afford a "seriousness" to Thoreau's aphoristic practice, on the premise that his use of the form is essential to his experimentation with different formal means of arranging natural facts, and is consequently integral to his well-noted interest in, and eventual practice of, natural history. This essay thus views the formal experimentation in "A Walk...