Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau by Branka Arsić (review)

Branka Arsić's latest book, Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau, illuminates Thoreau's theory of life and death, yoking together his two most pressing activities—mourning the death of his brother, John, and engaging in near-constant empirical observation. Arsić's monograph reaches beyond Thoreau studies to offer rich insight into nineteenth-century geology, zoology, and philosophical vitalism. For Thoreau, death was not cessation, but rather a metamorphic process embodied by the immortality of bird species. Because their hollow bones left no fossil record, nineteenth-century geologists believed that bird species never went extinct, but rather gradually evolved as they migrated to different parts of the globe. Thoreau took this one step farther, conceiving that individual birds underwent a literal metamorphosis that rendered them avatars of the infinite. He saw birds as living relics, the embodiment of "life that commemorates itself" (p. 26). Tracking the birds that fly through Thoreau's oeuvre, Arsić illuminates the vitalism that grounds both his naturalism and his grief.

Arsić's interdisciplinary work outlines a uniquely Thoreauvian approach to vitalism that views life as emergent within all material on earth, rather than life as an ideal that precedes and acts upon inanimate materiality, as philosophers like Aristotle have argued. Arsić contributes to a growing body of Thoreau scholars who attend to Thoreau's unusual materialist philosophy that includes such "careful readers" as Stanley Cavell, Lawrence Buell, Sharon Cameron, and H. Daniel Peck. Building on Jane Bennett's work on Thoreau's heterogeneous self-formation and Laura Dassow Walls's work on Thoreau's Humboldtian influence, Arsić recovers Thoreau's vitalist theory of nature. She compiles a long list of the scientific, Eastern, and classical ideas that influenced him—from nineteenth-century Swiss geologist Arnold Guyot's living earth, to ancient Greek philosopher Thales's principle of unceasing life. Arsić's approach stands in sharp contrast to a long tradition among Thoreau scholars to locate in him a quest for spiritual transcendence (Donald Worster and Walter Benn Michaels, among others). Arsić's Thoreau is a materialist, not an idealist. But simply uncovering Thoreau's archive cannot make sense of this self-proclaimed empirical mystic. By refusing to interpret self-contradiction as spiritual metaphor, Arsić holds fast to Thoreau's conviction that understanding what something means is no different from experiencing what it is.

Arsić frames her analysis within the problem of self-contradiction that has long plagued Thoreau scholars. Her method is deceptively simple: "to take Thoreau's utterances—even when they seem most fanciful—as serious, nontrivial, and literal" (p. 14). Thoreau was a careful editor of his own words, so by taking his bizarre and contradictory statements as intentional, Arsić is free to imagine what Thoreau had in mind without denouncing him or distancing herself from his strangeness. She sees Thoreau's contradictions as descriptions of a material metamorphosis she calls "literalization." According to this Thoreauvian literalization, a change of heart is also a change of body, and vice versa. Thoreau forces his reader to obey the slow pace of literalization, during which bodies molt into other bodies and all matter is always in flux.

Arsić writes that Thoreau is not for impatient readers, and the same could be said of her eloquent and insightful prose. Across thirty-four chapters, she draws from Thoreau's journals, essays, books, poems, translations, and letters sent and received, and pairs them with authors as wide-ranging as Hesiod, Walter Benjamin, Herman Melville, Aeschylus, and Charles Darwin. The book traces the gradual formation of Thoreau's vitalism, which begins with John's death and culminates in Thoreau's own burial next to his brother, "interred in the midst of the life that he helped create" (p. 387). Yet this biographical arc is not strictly chronological. Thematically organized into four sections—mythology, science, epistemology, and memory—Arsić's argument forms a syncopated rhythm whereby some chapters read like microcosms for the argument as a whole, while others are vignettes...