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3 PrivaciesofStorm Emerson set out to express the unity and integrity of the world, yet his essays include some of the most fragmented prose of the nineteenth century. That fragmentation is not simply a qualification of his famous bigness; it is essential to it. “The essence of rhetoric in the hands of the orator or the poet,” he wrote, “[is] to detach and to magnify by detaching” (“Art” II.211). This sentence, one of Emerson’s most forthrightly accurate descriptions of his style, names a surprising philosophy of representation for this advocate of wholeness. Emersonusuallyemphasizedtheworld ’sunityinhiswork,andassertedtheunityof work and world. How can it be that such a writer considers rhetoric, the very element of philosophy’s work, a mode of detachment rather than annealment? What might be the place of detachment in a project of magnification? To address these questions, this chapter examines the textual embodiments of Emerson’s characteristic category—size. As is suggested both by his own definition of rhetoric and by his typical deployments of it, he is obsessed with the relation between a small, detached object and the largeness it represents. Herein lies the fascination of the Emersonian sentence and, likewise, of the central objects in poems of Emersonian knowledge. The small sentence and the graspable piece of nature fascinate the Emersonian mind because somehow they express infinity—and in the right hands, they express it astonishingly well. These verbal objects, like the philosopher’s magnifying proposition, are not large objects: they loom large in the empty space that a writer creates around them. The paradox of self-containment within openness is at the heart of Emerson ’s artistic method in his essays—as he describes it in the quotation above, a method that correlates detachment with magnification. The method is philosophical as well as representational: it can therefore be described either in terms of the senses or in terms of verbal figures. In Emerson’s sophisticated 50 | privacies of storm philosophy, a great leap beyond the just-so stories of Swedenborgianism, every piece of the outer world is a human symbol for the entirety of nature. Any object therefore can represent the whole—and indeed, thereby, the idea of wholeness itself: “We unite all things by perceiving the law which pervades them.” But there are no shortcuts allowed, as Emerson goes on directly to insist: “Every mental act—this very perception of identity or oneness, recognizes the difference of things. It is impossible to speak, or to think without embracing both” (“Plato” IV.27–28). The essays’ sentences face the inevitability of this double challenge of detached signification. In isolating his chosen words from the vast context they represent, the Emersonian stylist (like the literary critic) must rely on the tenuous principle of synecdoche. The part stands in for the whole, failing to disguise—indeed, even flaunting—its own extreme smallness. Emersonians, who espouse the idea of the whole as a central premise of knowledge, feel this representational tension more intensely than any other set of modern writers. As they bind themselves to language’s smallness, they are also bound to be harshly disappointed when synecdoche fails—as it must. Synecdoche is a self-qualifying trope: in resorting to sampling the whole rather than claiming it, the user of synecdoche concedes that direct access to wholeness is impossible. Emerson performs this acknowledgment, and the resulting partiality activates his philosophy from within his writing (not as a debunking from elsewhere). Detachment is a key part of his method. Moreover , the self-conscious smallness of his written objects is the necessary obverse of his philosophy of wholeness. Literary study holds the failure of a writer’s tropes to be as interesting as their successes: from a literary perspective, then, the partiality of Emerson’s philosophy of nature appeals just as much as its universal reach.1 Moreover, its incapacity for success gives rise to a distinctive —even idiosyncratic—poetic tradition of shelter and confinement. The rhetoric of the essays is constituted by the arrangement of mutually repellent nuclei—each particle broken off from totality, in an act that is both a sampling of unity and a disruption of it. It is for other American writers to sustain synecdoche long enough to achieve things with it. For Thoreau the naturalist , by contrast to Emerson, the writer’s job is to delve into an integral world. The naturalist searches his surrounding for closed samples that open onto its meanings. On the other hand, Whitman took Emerson’s technique of...

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