Thoreauvian Modernities: Transatlantic Conversations on an American Icon

Thoreau’s Multiple Modernities

56 A paradox attends the very timeliness of Walden, for, in a certain sense, the question of Thoreau and modernity is nothing new. If only implicitly, critics of every era since Thoreau began to publish have addressed his relation to what he described as “this restless, nervous, bustling . . . Nineteenth Century” and to ours (W 329). If there has been little consensus, this is in part because in our equally restless era of professional literary and cultural criticism, “one generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels” (W 11). But another reason, of course, is that Thoreau’s own opinions on the subject were hardly settled or even uniform. Sometimes he seems to pose a simple choice. Employing the railroad, the agent of technological modernization, as a potent symbol of our socially “constructed . . . fate, an Atropos, that never turns aside,” he echoes the voice of a station manager, warning his readers “sincerely by any power to get off its track.” Yet a few sentences farther along in the same paragraph, he commends the instrumental rationality of “railroad time”: “We live the steadier for it.” By the paragraph’s end, this model has become the metaphorical template for readers to form parallel routes of their own: “Every path but your own is the path of fate. Keep on your own track, then” (W 118). Apparently , rejecting modernity tout court is not an option. Yet dwelling thus within modernity does not prevent Thoreau from taking up a position “in the angle of a leaden wall” (W 329) or on the shore of Walden Pond, nor from claiming conviction that “my genius dates from an older era than the agricultural” (Wk 54). He can be located in any one of several positions about what he liked to call our “present condition” precisely because he was both ambivalent about and preternaturally attentive to its unstable potential. William Rossi Thoreau’s Multiple Modernities Thoreau’s Multiple Modernities 57 The very multiplicity of his positions marks him as a self-conscious inhabitant of a nervous, bustling modernity, however much for the same reason he sometimes treasured a stance apart from it. Determined “to stand . . . precisely [in] the present moment; to toe that line” between past and future eternities, he was modern sometimes in spite of himself, both prophet and product of our modern condition (W 17). Despite these shifting positions, in Thoreau’s writing on the subject as well as in much critical commentary, the process of modernization is usually characterized monolithically. Exclusively Western in its origin and agency, in this version modernization is inevitable and uniform, a force, like the locomotive, that drives history and that disrupts while reconstituting social, environmental, even metaphysical relations. This monolithic conception of modernity is apparent in predictions of inevitable secularization and industrialization associated with Western influence and its forms of liberal democracy. In the Enlightenment version dominant in Thoreau’s day and still widely taken for granted, Western modernization is thus assumed to represent the sole model against which all other societies are measured and the only path to be taken toward their own modern futures. Yet just as the secularization hypothesis predicted a privatization and political impotence of religion that have dramatically failed to materialize, so the Enlightenment notion of modernization as “a single, cultureneutral model in which complexity and reflexivity replace simplicity and tradition ” has given way to one of “multiple” or “alternative modernities” (Jager 27; Eisenstadt). As the title of this book suggests, it is time to pluralize Thoreau’s relation to modernity as well. One way to do so is to follow closely Thoreau’s own strategies for negotiating modernity as both monolithic ideology and actual project. Accordingly, this essay will argue that Thoreau’s determination to dwell deeply and differently in the full modernity of his moment is expressed not only as a theme in his writing. For him it was also a discipline, a distinctive, self-conscious practice of writing that informed not only the Journal but especially the Kalendar and the late natural history writings produced from the Journal. Where Kristen Case recovers crucial dimensions of Thoreau’s science in the Kalendar, I hope to shed light on that project from another direction. After examining Thoreau’s efforts to acquire, translate, and represent natural knowledge in the Journal, I will then show how the seasonal narrative of “Autumnal Tints,” as 58 William Rossi informed by this practice, presents a complex...