Thoreaus Sense of Place: Essays in American Environmental Writing

Water-Signs: Place and Metaphor in Dillard and Thoreau

Water-Signs Place and Metaphor in Dillard and Thoreau j a m e s a . pa pa , j r .
Thoreau’s position at the center of American nature writing has been long established, and few writers in the genre escape his influence. Some, such as Joseph Wood Krutch, are quick to acknowledge the debt. Others, such as Edward Abbey, who referred to Thoreau as a ‘‘spinster-poet’’who ‘‘led an unnecessarily constrained existence,’’1 attempt for various reasons to distance themselves from Thoreau. Even Henry Beston, whose The Outermost House borrows much from Thoreau’s sojourn at Walden, felt Thoreau ‘‘had very little heart’’ and would not acknowledge much if any connection to him.2 But traces of Thoreau’s works appear not only in the written works but sometimes even in the lives of those writers who follow in his tradition. The line of descent is often so clear that Edward Abbey has called such writers ‘‘sons and daughters of Thoreau.’’3 Annie Dillard is one such daughter, and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,4 the work for which Dillard is best known and for which she won a Pulitzer Prize, is an especially appropriate choice to compare with Thoreau’s Walden in terms of how place and nature are observed and perceived.5 Both Dillard, in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and Thoreau, in Walden, inhabit transitional landscapes, in the sense that neither the woods around Walden Pond nor the environment surrounding Tinker Creek is either wilderness or town. Dillard’s choice of place is a semirural area in ‘‘a valley in Virginia ’s Blue Ridge’’ (PTC 2) at the beginning of the last quarter of the twentieth century; Thoreau’s narrative locus is a wooded area on the outskirts of the New England village of Concord in the first half of the nineteenth century. Despite the different historical periods, both landscapes contain or are not far removed from permanent dwellings; both support residential (even if, in the case of Walden, the sole residence is Thoreau’s) 70 or commercial activity, however limited; and both are crossed or bordered by public thoroughfares, such as roads or railroad tracks. Still, each landscape also provides, by way of daily rambles on foot, extensive contact with more or less unspoiled natural settings. In short, both landscapes allow for similar types of pastoral experience. Even more important , given the discussion to follow, is that each text takes as its metaphorical center a natural body of water to which each narrator makes nearly daily solitary excursions. These excursions then serve as both inspiration and stage for observation and revelation regarding the natural world. Given that Dillard and Thoreau live relatively solitary lives in close proximity to nature, they come into repeated contact with relatively ordinary and common natural phenomena such as sandbanks, ice, cedar trees, muskrats, and dead frogs. These things are then called upon to illustrate, and in the case of Thoreau to articulate through metaphor, deeper universal truths. In Pilgrim, such things are not, however, called up simply to suggest or represent higher transcendental truths, as they are in Walden. Dillard means us to see these things for truth itself, absolving us of the need to translate them into a new literary language. She comes finally to understand in Pilgrim that ‘‘what I have been after all along is not an explanation but a picture’’ (182). Things in the natural world do not need to be made to mean anything beyond what they are. The lesson in Pilgrim is that the primacy of experience, the moment of felt realization, is truth itself, and not merely a metaphor. Language is meant to reveal, not create, truth. Dillard means to teach herself only how to finally see what is actually in front of her, so that she might find the words to put it in front of the reader as well. Such a position is radically different from that taken by Thoreau in Walden, where the use of nature (or the material world) as metaphor is clearly illustrated in Thoreau’s comments about working in the ‘‘fields if only for the sake of tropes and expression, to serve a parable maker one day’’ (W 162). The use of the word ‘‘serve’’ is critical, since it suggests a hierarchical relationship and reinforces the notion that nature is simply raw material to be used for literary ends. Thoreau does not mean to see what is there in nature and tell us. He means instead to teach...