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Preface
- University of Iowa Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Preface If writing can be practical without being pragmatic, the most extreme instances of Emersonian poetic sight are the best places to find out how. What kind of writing can showcase the capacities of the senses, without representing any action? Henry David Thoreau tries his hand at answering this question, in an especially Emersonian mood: no pragmatic reader is ready for the challenge that results. In the epigraph on the facing page, Thoreau’s vision neither complements nor comments upon his work as a delver. He looks into his well, he says, not just as an occasion to think about watery places, but to see, as a matter of routine sensory fact, that the well-water somehow surrounds the very land from which he dug it. There is no suggestion that anything will be accomplished in this way—and yet clearly this sentence is a recommendation. Thoreau is saying, in the most practical tone imaginable: You try it. Reader, you want to know what’s important in the world: so, practice seeing the least obvious thing. You see that? Draw the wrong conclusion. Do not imagine, but simply make an effort and notice how, in your eyes, the object and its context swap roles—foreground becoming background and vice versa. Look, look how useless insight can be. To the true practitioner of vision, Thoreau claims, a tiny body of water found with a shovel can transform the land—not into a homestead, but into an island. The liquidity we would cup in our hands in an instant surrounds us instead. This is a neglected element of the Emersonian agenda: the way it trains us to practice treating such useless insights as predominant; to know ourselves engulfed and uncontained; to believe that the feeding of the vision is as important as the pragmatic sustaining of the body. Even when stocking his domestic larder with butter, Thoreau derives that kind of import from the world abroad. Eyes can turn the world inside out. On this continent, the Emersonian believes, even delving or consuming should be an invocation of vastness. To think in an American literary mode is to think big. Thoreau’s brinkmanship in the remark about the well—bizarrely equating in importance the oceanic surround and a homesteader’s handling of dairy—is an extreme version of the size contrast that makes American literature so edgy. If the lexicon of size were to disappear, the idea of a distinctive U.S. literary sensibility, with roots in the age of Emerson, would fade and shrivel. Largeness—of terrain , of spirit, of deed, and even of form—prominently marks the texts called typically American, from the enhanced visibility and expanded vision that John Winthrop claimed for his “city on a hill,” to Walt Whitman’s personal containment of “multitudes,” to the frontier horizon an American archetype finds to be “commensurate with his capacity for wonder” in a key passage of The Great Gatsby. Without the peculiarly valenced metaphors of space that proliferate both within and around its canonical texts, American literature of the modern era would be nearly unrecognizable. It has other earmarks: experimentalism; a loose association with individualist egalitarianism; and the unique sensibility W. E. B. DuBois called double-consciousness. But if it could not speak of largeness, it would lack its most characteristic metaphors for versatility, for comprehension, and for artistic vision. The language of size invigorates the rhetoric of “American possibility” and provides terminology to almost every other aspect of the tradition. The celebration of bigness, almost irresistibly, becomes an element of the American writer’s encounter with the world, and an image of what writing should do to its readers. Robert Frost, for example, maintained that “[m]y poems are all set to trip the reader head foremost into the boundless” (Selected Letters 344). IndealingwithAmericanbigness,thewritermustchooseeithertoembrace vastness, or self-consciously to stave vastness off, or, somehow, both at once. Reconciliation of this choice, through patient negotiation, is the task of many U.S. novels: in literary practice, as opposed to transactional writing, none of the three options is as simple as it seems. The novelist hopes to create relations between the expansive self-sufficiency involved in the idea of “the American continent,” on the one hand, and, on the other, the troubling insularity of the perceiving self. Hence U.S. protagonists strive to surmount, even as they are encompassed by, their social and material surroundings. A novel ranges over the space between small and large, the representative individual and...