Thoreauvian Modernities: Transatlantic Conversations on an American Icon

Brute Neighbors: The Modernity of a Metaphor

249 The aim of this essay is to study the implications of Thoreau’s metaphor of neighborhood with animals in Walden. What does this anthropomorphic trope tell us about Thoreau’s views on animality and on human-animal relations? Does the choice of “brute” rather than “animal” in “Brute Neighbors” express Thoreau’s sense of human superiority or, on the contrary, his awareness that he, too, is animal? Though “brute” can simply be read as a synonym for “animal,” it does bring out, by contrast, the anthropomorphism of “neighbors”—as if Thoreau wanted to make sure the reader would not miss the trope. It is indeed far from innocent. The concept of the “neighbor” is at the very heart of Christian morality. Implicitly, Thoreau seems to be extending the respectful and charitable treatment reserved for human neighbors to the animal world (“Love your nonhuman neighbor as yourself”). Is this trope, then, an expression of Thoreau’s spiritualized concept of nature in Walden? Or does “neighborhood” suggest a sense of that continuity of life that Darwin was in the process of developing into a revolutionary theory? Clearly both. As Lawrence Buell has suggested, for Emerson, Thoreau, and their circle, “the rise of formal science did not so much discredit the notion of ‘an occult relation between man and the vegetable,’ in Emerson’s quaint phrase, as translate it. Indeed, the evolutionary hypothesis intensified the claim of kinship by blurring the boundary between Homo sapiens and other species” (Environmental Imagination 188). The neighborhood trope, then, has roots both in natural theology and in naturalism. Traditionally, anthropomorphic tropes have frequently been a way of “policing ” the dividing line between human and animal (Soper 86). They are a symbolic burden we lay on animals, both in criticism and in praise, to help us describe human qualities and thereby to singularize the supposedly supeThomas Pughe Brute Neighbors The Modernity of a Metaphor 250 Thomas Pughe rior element of the human-animal opposition. “If man had not been his own classifier,” Darwin dryly points out, “he would never have thought of founding a separate order for his own reception” (Descent 885). That separate order is frequently associated with what Derrida calls “pouvoir-avoir le logos” (“L’animal” 278), that is, the power that comes with naming and classifying: in Derrida’s words, “[L]ogocentrism is first and foremost a thesis about animality ” (278, my translation). Yet anthropomorphism, as the tradition of the beast fables attests, has always been a potentially subversive trope that blurs the dividing line between human and nonhuman animals at the same time as it tries to affirm it. Such blurring is particularly noticeable from the romantic revolution onward. The primitivist current in poetry, for example, flows strong throughout the twentieth century (D. H. Lawrence and Robinson Jeffers, Gary Snyder and Ted Hughes come to mind). Of course, in much modern science, in Thoreau’s time as still today, anthropomorphic tropes have been considered as a logical fallacy. They are also treated with suspicion by environmentalists and ecocritics, who tend to interpret them as symbolic exploitations of nonhuman nature (cf. Garrard 136–59). And yet, to many contemporary ethologists, sociobiologists , and anthropologists as well as to poets, such tropes suggest ways of representing human-animal relations beyond the traditional boundaries. In other words, rather than rejecting anthropomorphic tropes as epistemologically incorrect (Buell, Environmental Imagination 181), they can also be read as tension-filled semiotic fields suspended between exploitation and exploration, between dead and living metaphor, between the making and the unmaking of figurative language. My argument in what follows will be that Thoreau was aware of such tensions and ambiguities and made use of them in his own rhetoric. More generally, the neighborhood metaphor in Walden (it also occurs in his other writings, e.g., the Journal) stands for his distinctive way of thinking about the ethical, scientific, and poetic consequences of a move from an anthropocentric to a biocentric idea of the world. In that respect, it is highly significant to contemporary ecocriticism and animal studies. “Brute Neighbor” or “Beast of Burden”? At the beginning of the “Brute Neighbors” chapter in Walden, Thoreau uses the neighborhood metaphor to separate two different kinds of relationship between Brute Neighbors 251 animals and humans: “Why do precisely these objects which we behold make a world? Why has man just these species of animals for neighbors; as if nothing but a mouse could have...