Where the Summit Bears: Narrative Logic in Thoreau's "Ktaadn"

RANDALL ROORDA Where the Summit Bears: Narrative Logic in Thoreau's "Ktaadn" THE NATURE OF NATURE WRITING 'hat is nature writing, anyway? A reading public seems content with the term, publishers have dignified it with suitcasesized anthologies, and yet the perimeters of the genre, if genre it be, remain diffuse. Does any work dealing with nature qualify as "nature writing," whether framed as nonfiction, fiction, or poetry? Is the term synonymous with "natural history," or is it an offshoot thereof, or a more broadly encompassing category? Should such an entity as "nature writing " be recognized at all, or do the term itself and works so designated tend rather to reinforce a nature-culture split that writers and critics should seek to dissolve? Such questions exist less to be settled, I think, than to be used. As Adena Rosmarin holds, genre is the critic's equivalent of what "schemata " or "premises" or "models" are to the literary or graphic artist (21): something the practitioner must always "choose or define" and actively shape to his or her purposes (8). The critic's material is not some realm of ideal forms but the actions and expectations of actual writers and readers; since genre is a primary tool by which these are explained, "there are precisely as many genres as we need, genres whose conceptual shape is precisely determined by that need" (25). Proliferating versions of nature writing's generic makeup provide an index of needs the explanations arise to address. Arizona Quarterly Volume 53, Number 3, Autumn 1997 Copyright © 1997 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-16 10 Randall Roorda A sensitive and thorough response to such needs is found in Lawrence Buell's The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Signaled in its title are propositions that the book substantiates: that while there are grounds to question the label "nature writing" and to prefer, as Buell does, "environmental writing," still the former term tends to prevail; and that whatever the term entitles, Thoreau is at its core. Thoreau is originary of the genre not only in the character of the literary responses he devised to conditions in which the genre arises; he is originary also in the ways his literary effects have been narrativized and popularized in a life story, the basis for what Buell describes as the "Thoreauvian pilgrimage" in all its manifestations. "Thoreau" refers to a model text and a model experience , in both of which nature writing is generically constituted. The text and the experience are both called "Waiden," of course. Yet the two were not coeval. The text Waiden did not emerge until years and drafts after the Waiden experience was concluded. The book that Thoreau did produce during his stay at the pond (A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers) reported a much earlier excursion and drew heavily on journal entries from the earlier period. Just one fully-realized text was undertaken and completed by Thoreau during his Waiden years: "Ktaadn," first of the three travel accounts ultimately published as The Maine Woods. Quite apart from the fact that it neglects the experience of the pond proper, "Ktaadn" is in some ways an anomoly, potentially even an embarrassment to the tale of Thoreau as popularly scripted: an apparent threat to the Waiden author's model status, in ways that we will remark. In this essay, I will employ "Ktaadn" to reflect on how nature writing is constituted as a genre and how aspects of the genre may be more particularly so constituted. In turn, what I have to say on nature writing as genre will come to bear on an understanding of "Ktaadn." I will claim that for all the diffuseness at its boundaries, nature writing is underlain by a narrative logic of a relatively distinct sort, one derived from the "nature-culture" distinction its title assumes. Considering narrative logic helps illuminate longstanding issues of composition in "Ktaadn," in senses both synchronic (how the text as an entity is constructed) and diachronic (how it came into being over time). And it informs the ways in which "Ktaadn" has figured as an element in the Thoreau stories 'Narrative Logic in Thoreau...