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Skirting Lowell The Exceptional Work of Nature in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers s t e p h e n g e r m i c  According to Emerson, visions of nature are privileges of the poet. ‘‘To speak truly,’’ he submits in the first chapter of Nature, ‘‘few adult persons can see nature.’’1 Emerson goes so far as to name those, his neighbors, who see and own nature’s parts, but not nature itself: ‘‘Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape’’ (23). Emerson implies, in fact, that their ownership of nature’s parts forecloses the possibility of ‘‘seeing’’ nature. Thus Emerson’s punning declaration that ‘‘There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet’’ (23, emphasis added). Even as the vision of the poet unifies, or transforms, the woodcutter’s ‘‘stick of timber’’ (23) into a forest that is itself an element of an always exalted landscape, the poet, analogously, is transformed. Emerson famously testifies: ‘‘I become a transparent eyeball ; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the universal being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God’’ (24). Approaching divinity is, no doubt, an extraordinarily affirmative experience , and most critics who have discussed the latter passage rightly acknowledge its expression of the ‘‘optative mood,’’ and even its penultimate status in the metaphorics of transcendentalism. Yet the sentences that immediately follow the ‘‘transparent eyeball’’ passage — sentences far less frequently quoted and glossed — relate, curiously, the negative effects of Emerson’s transformation. In his transformed and transforming condition — where nature is landscape and the poet a parcel of God — Emerson, or the poet, loses the capacity to distinguish human relations: ‘‘The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and ac244 cidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance’’ (24). The vision of nature Emerson pronounces is exceptionally privileged, and, as an exceptional privilege, it obscures and even represses the vision and understanding of the woodcutter and the farmer. To the degree that the relation of master and servant becomes ‘‘a trifle,’’ the poet’s vision of those who labor, and, I submit, the vision of labor itself, becomes marginalized and discredited. The voyage Thoreau represents in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers is distinctly Emersonian so far as it demonstrates a practical realization and literary extension of Emerson’s transcendental effusions. Thoreau’s engagements with ‘‘Nature,’’ in other words, advance exceptional (ist) transformations, where ‘‘exceptional’’ refers to a kind of hyperbolic interaction with nature, and, as I will explain further below, to an obfuscation of labor and class. Yet furthermore, Thoreau cannily reiterates the productions of voyages — particularly those of Columbus and John Winthrop — principally responsible for the rhetorical and, in one case, social elaboration of American exceptionalism. In A Week Thoreau at once rediscovers America, revises and reaffirms the nation’s ‘‘errand ,’’ and, inseparably, marginalizes or ‘‘skirts’’ the sites of labor that offer a source of representational alternative to the cultural production of exceptionalism. The debate between those who admit exceptionalism as a fact of American social and labor history and those ‘‘against exceptionalism’’ suffers from disciplinarity. For labor historians, American exceptionalism refers to the absence of class consciousness and attendant absence of revolutionary social and political movements that challenge the interests of producers, employers, and the state. Such movements have appeared in other first-order capitalist nations: Germany, France, Britain. The United States disproves the Marxist dictum that capitalist wage relations directly produce a self-conscious proletariat — the class consciousness that manifests capitalism’s most threatening contradiction.2 In 1984, Sean Wilentz articulated a rising opinion derived from the sound research of many ‘‘new’’ labor historians that suggested European ‘‘working-class’’ movements were compromised by a capitulation to dominant social and economic interests to a degree that made them quite similar to liberal and progressive politics in the United States during capitalism’s formative postbellum years.3 The working class, that is, or at the very least the leadership to which the working class largely conformed , accepted the interests of capital as their own. Thus, there was The Exceptional Work of Nature 245 nothing ‘‘exceptional’’ about the American case. Wilentz’s own primary research presumed to deliver another blow to exceptionalismbyasserting, ‘‘There is a history of...

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