What Thoreau Said: Walden and the Unsayable by William C. Johnson, Jr. (review)

236Rocky Mountain Review WILLIAM C. JOHNSON, JR.. What Thoreau Said: Waiden and the Unsayable. Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1991. 172 p. Unlike Waiden itself, What Thoreau Said is not a book you want to pack along on your rafting trip down the Green River nor tuck into your rucksack on your next ascent of Mount Monadnock. This is not an outdoor book. Reserve it for your idle hours, as Emerson might suggest, or introduce it into your seminar, and you will get good use from it. But don't take it fishing. Cerebral at its best, cranked tight with quotations in some weak moments , William Johnson's study of Waiden is a fulfillment of Robert Sattelmeyer's prediction in his 1985 article in ESQ, "Study Nature and Know Thyself," that the study of Thoreau would move from biographical revelations to "textual, contextual, historical, linguistic" perspectives on his writings. That this is the case is made plain in Johnson's invitation to the reader in his preface to "undertake a hermeneutic approach to Waiden" (xiv), and he advises the reader that Thoreau's writing "incorporates the problem of interpretation into its very method and fabric" (xii). Johnson's own methods of interpreting Waiden are deconstructive and reader-centered , because textual and existential interpretations are bound together, inseparable. The analysis of the opening chapter of Waiden defines the kind of dialectic that orders Johnson's commentary. His careful working out of the concepts of husbandry, as exemplified in Xenophon's Oeconomicus, and economy, epitomized by Franklin's Autobiography, directs the reader's application to "the subtle interplay" of the reader's self and Thoreau's text. Johnson queries: "Who is it that writes and who that reads?" (15). To perceive the answer to that question, the reader of What Thoreau Said must stay close to the Professor's pen as Johnson follows up on the invitation of Waiden to deconstruct "the conventional American self," accompanied by a similar deconstruction of the text, and concluding with a hoped-for resurrection of both entities. Strategy for the all-important reader in staying within range of Johnson's pathway of argumentation through the several chapters of Waiden, which he indicates will require a serious and patient follower, is revealed in his gloss on Thoreau's own idea of "the fronting view" needed to read introspectively: Closing the gap between subjective expression and objective reference demands "godlike insight—a fronting view." And this view applies not only to the study and interpretation of natural fact, but to the reading of a text. We are surrounded by mysteries , both natural and textual, and thus require a fronting view, one sensitive to "two sides to every sentence" and every fact. Only such a stubbornly patient reading will deliver vital truth. (36) Book Reviews237 The philosopher's method of turning every "fact" two ways is, of course, demanded by Thoreau's views on "polarity." No less is it demanded by the proper appreciation of Thoreau's sense of any fact's potential. "Thoreau adjusts Kantian epistemology," says Johnson, "suggesting that the thing-initself can be experienced not only as noumenal representation but, given the proper discipline, as a living relation in a participative phenomenological dialogue " (38). Thoreau knew that everything had to be turned around more than once. Johnson cites Thoreau's famous image of chanticleer, the rowdy crowing fowl of legend, to demonstrate the epitomies of doubleness. He says, "The cock holds the two spheres of Walden's mindscape, the wild and the cultivated , in polar tension. Just as the beanfield is 'the connecting link between wild and cultivated fields,' ... so the dominant voice in Waiden [sic] is halfwild , half-cultivated, its polar power creating a system of opposition and generative resolution that creates new and ever-deepening meaning" (5455 ). It is essentially on this note of polarity, though played in varied meters, that What Thoreau Said is composed. This being the case, I recommend chapters four ("Reading Waiden as Self-Interpretation") and five ("Fishing for Men: The Waiden Dialogues") for both the reader who is only becoming acquainted with the reader-centered approach to criticism and the student of Waiden who wishes to explore new approaches...