Thoreauvian Modernities: Transatlantic Conversations on an American Icon

Fraught Ecstasy: Contemporary Encounters with Thoreau’s Postpristine Nature

234 Contemporary Canadian graphic design artist and experimental novelist Douglas Coupland shares grave concerns with Henry Thoreau for the devastating collision between the environment and the development of industrial capitalism—but not without an abundance of satirical irony exposing the dizzying contradictions within the culture that caused it. The ripple effects of this collision Coupland traces include social behaviors, consumption patterns, and attitudes toward nature in our postmodern culture, all of which he laments with arch irony and Thoreauvian skepticism, calling attention to the wasteful absurdities of the empty rituals that have become fixtures of daily life. In particular , Coupland sharply criticizes the way in which consumer culture and the pursuit of surplus capital and commodities have replaced authentic spirituality , especially as derived from nature. Thoreau’s protopostmodern sensibility adumbrates Coupland’s reverence for the redeeming power of nature as a balm for the rampant materialism and solipsistic individualism dominating contemporary culture. In response to the postmodern madness, a condition as defined by Satya Mohanty in which “all knowledge is seen as tied to the necessary miscognition of human subjects caught in a network of forces they cannot comprehend ” (11), Coupland’s characters, like Thoreau, flee to forests, deserts, and high mountain lakes to doff their professional identities and attempt to “drive life into a corner” to discover its true essence. While they do achieve transcendence in these sylvan settings, their epiphanies invariably bring deeper, more disturbing knowledge of industrial impact on the environment. I am not arguing that Thoreau was somehow transhistorically an antebellum postmodernist; instead, I detail his anticipation of Coupland’s response to nature, which epitomizes one David Dowling Fraught Ecstasy Contemporary Encounters with Thoreau’s Postpristine Nature Fraught Ecstasy 235 type of postmodern ecological perspective. My objective is not to reconstruct either writer historically nor to advance a new understanding of theoretical periodicity. Rather, Thoreau functions in my argument as an invisible “line of force” (a concept Richard Poirier has used to explain Matthew Arnold’s influence on Robert Frost [44]) prefiguring Coupland’s environmentalist aesthetics. Much of the inspiration for this essay comes from Laura Dassow Walls’s moving observation that Thoreau believed the divine can indeed be accessed in nature however mitigated by the encroachments of civilization and despite how twentieth-century institutions assumed that nature was most valuable in its purest forms, and sadly devalued the environments in which ordinary human beings live and work. . . . [Thoreau] lived not in a pristine wilderness but on the outskirts of Boston, on land that had been cut over, farmed, and abused for generations. His ability to see beauty in that land—to make it stand, symbolically, for the principle of wild nature—can help twenty-first century generations to recover the desperately abused land they will inherit from us, and to see in it beauty, hope, regeneration . (“Thoreau’s Walden” 16) Seeing “such beauty in the everyday environment of a Boston suburb,” according to Walls, transforms the Thoreauvian aesthetic encounter of nature from mere escape into a “call for social justice” (“Thoreau’s Walden” 16). Developing this insight, I argue that finding such beauty in postpristine nature necessitates both a powerful romantic imagination and a realist’s apprehension of industrial blight on the environment. Alternating between rapture and disgust, this tension Thoreau repeatedly identified pits the observer in an obtuse predicament common to postmodern literary landscapes such as those found in Coupland’s novels. Further, a deep and full appreciation of nature’s beauty as it stands in close proximity to industrial devastation ironically makes that postmodern experience more moving, both politically and aesthetically. On Thoreau’s “Realometer,” Coupland would rank high, especially in novels such as Shampoo Planet, Generation X, and Life after God, where his characters fight through what he calls “Me-ism”—hodgepodge homemade spirituality inspired by consumer culture—and escape the prison of professional identity in the market in order to discover a deeper sense of self in nature. In a formulation that equally applies to Thoreau, Andrew Tate observed of Coupland that “for his postmodern cynicism and acute satires of the consumerist zeitgeist,” he has confessed in his fiction and in interviews that “‘I need God’” (Douglas 236 David Dowling Coupland 326). Tate has usefully traced the epiphanic religious moments in Coupland and even parenthetically linked them to Thoreau. Coupland himself does not make his debts to Thoreau explicit, but they are readily evident, especially in “the desire to...