Environmental Awareness and the Design of Literature: Thoreau’s Art of Defamiliarization

François Specq, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, Université de Lyon – CNRS (IHRIM)

Whereas ecocriticism has increasingly been dominated by cultural studies, I will claim that literary approaches are just as important paths to fostering environmental awareness. Henry David Thoreau's Walden (1854) will serve as a touchstone for this view. I will explore Thoreau’s staging of competing modes of environmental consciousness in Walden’s final two chapters, and show how this provides the groundwork for his foundational call for nature preservation. Carefully organizing his narrative so as to question standard ways of appropriating the world (scientific inquiry and economic exploitation of natural resources), and propounding a poetics in which the dynamics of writing (trans)figures the processes of nature, Thoreau grounded his environmental advocacy in a broader regard for the indomitable power and enduring secrecy of the physical world. Accepting the existence of nature as exceeding human control and signifying processes shifts the human/nonhuman divide, thus laying the ground for a more complex and balanced environmental humanism.

While ecocriticism emerged as an approach seeking to explain how literary texts might impact our way of thinking and interacting with the environment, it has resolutely become interdisciplinary over the past two decades. Drawing not only upon literary history and theory, but on environmental history and philosophy, history of science, psychology, and sociology or anthropology, and ranging across a field that now extends beyond nature writing and landscape aesthetics to encompass a much wider variety of texts and documents, ecocriticism has tended to become a branch of cultural studies, and has produced a wide range of illuminating studies in the process.1 I will suggest, however, that more formal literary approaches remain important paths to fostering environmental awareness, and seek to demonstrate this through a close reading of some passages from Thoreau’s Walden.

Emphasizing the subtle design of literature, rather than the critical complexities of cultural studies, means exploring the potential of language and the literary experience to expand modes of awareness of the physical world—or, to use more ‘Romantic’ wording, to sharpen our senses and broaden our understanding. Such an approach examines the way some texts, despite their formal and rhetorical differences, explicitly or implicitly critique the ossifying or fossilizing of our conceptions of the relation between human beings and the physical world. Literary criticism, in this perspective, is decidedly an anthropology, in the sense that it interrogates—however obliquely—what it means to be human, and sheds light on the way literature can contribute to shaping our lives.

Such an emphasis resonates with the task of poetry as defined by French poet Jean Cocteau in the 1920s:

All of a sudden we see a dog, a carriage, a house, for the first time. We become overwhelmed by the way everything appears peculiar, or mad, or ridiculous, or beautiful. The next moment, habit, with its eraser, has rubbed out this vivid picture. We pet the dog, we hail the carriage, we live in the house. We do not see them anymore. This is the role that poetry performs. It unveils, in the fullest sense of the word. It shows in all of their nakedness, and in a light which shakes us out of our torpor, all the surprising things by which we are surrounded, and which our senses registered mechanically…

Cocteau’s pronouncement points to the crucial way literature enacts a process of ‘defamiliarization’: literature and the arts (‘poetry’ in the etymological or Emersonian sense, i.e. any form of creation) make ordinary things look ‘strange.’2 Art counters the set, automatic character of our ordinary relation to the world: it makes us see things rather than merely recognize (i.e. categorize) them, and, in so doing, gives renewed sharpness to our perception, and ultimately produces a heightened awareness of the surrounding world (not just ‘the environment’ in a narrower, technical sense). Literature thus understood allows an imaginative repossession of the world—a new or renewed connection to its complexity and density, to its intellectual and emotional pull. Thoreau’s Walden, long recognized as a 1 The scholarship on literature and environment is so vast that it is impossible to give even a brief overview. For an introduction to the field which gives a sense of its scope and evolution since Lawrence Buell’s foundational The Environmental Imagination, see Garrard, The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism.2 The notion of ‘defamiliarization’ is usually ascribed to the Russsian Formalist critic, Viktor Shklovsky, in a 1917 essay translated as “Art as Technique” in Literary Theory: An Anthology. Eds. Rivkin, Julie and Ryan, Michael. New York: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. 15-21.

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classic text of environmental literature, is a case in point, in ways that go beyond Thoreau’s sustained focus on the natural world and specific environmental advocacy, as I intend to make clear in the following discussion.

On the most simple descriptive level, Walden (1854) tells the story of Thoreau’s two years’ stay on the shores of Walden pond, near Boston, Massachusetts. But, even before Thoreau starts narrating his sojourn, the frontispiece concisely and effectively conveys what is at stake: the deceptively simple image of Thoreau’s cabin at Walden–drawn by his sister Sophia–points to the book’s raising the question of inhabitation, of dwelling in the world. Indeed, even as it becomes a focus of attention in its own right, the physical world is emphatically not taken for granted, but subjected to a powerful process of defamiliarization. Although this is achieved throughout Walden, I will more particularly focus on the book’s final two chapters, “The Pond in Winter” and “Spring.” As their titles suggest, these complete the seasonal narrative initiated by Thoreau’s settling by Walden Pond on July 4, 1845. I would like to suggest, however, that they actually offer more than mere seasonal narrative, but a sustained exploration of three competing modes of environmental awareness: by this, I mean ways of examining, if not bridging, the gap between matter and consciousness.3

These modes correspond to the three highlights of these chapters: Thoreau’s charting of Walden Pond, the ice-cutters’ harvest of the Walden ice, both from “The Pond in Winter,” and the famous flowing sandbank passage from the “Spring” chapter—which for convenience’s sake will be respectively referred to as sequences 1, 2, and 3 in this analysis . My contention is that these passages form a triptych in which antithetical options are balanced against each other, and should thus be read in conjunction—not as merely seasonal narrative, but as rhetorical argument substantiating what I will define as Thoreau’s environmental humanism. Put in a nutshell, they demonstrate a move from a denial of materiality in the name of commonly conceived humanism, through misguided, all-too-human materialism, to ‘true’ materialism. The latter, while it does not abdicate the human desire “to explore and learn all things” (317), 4 is premised on a double acknowledgment of the concreteness of one’s environment and of the materiality of language, thus amounting to a more fully realized—less ‘imperial’—form of humanism. If the first two sequences feature self-enclosed systems embodying a

3 This exploration of varieties of “awareness” in Walden extends Scott Slovic’s foundational discussion in Seeking Awareness, whose chapter on Thoreau is devoted to the Journal. My use of the notion of environmental awareness, however, is somewhat different from that adopted by Slovic, who defines it as “heightened attentiveness to our place in the natural world” (3): the various ways human beings relate to the physical world always embody a form of “awareness,” whether or not they involve specific “attentiveness.”4 Unless otherwise specified, all subsequent parenthetical references are to Thoreau 1971.

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conversion or translation of the real (respectively: the map and the ethical lesson which replicates it on a higher, more abstract intellectual level; the icestack, which merely displaces the body of water the better to translate it into monetary value), the third one (the sandbank passage) offers a much more open structure, one that enhances the idea of the ‘untranslatable’ character of the real, which serves as the rationale for the notion of “wildness” and the ensuing idea of nature preservation which concludes the chapter:

Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness,—to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of Nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and Titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander. (317-18)

Thoreau’s eloquent plea for wild nature anticipates his well-known call for nature preservation to be found in The Maine Woods (156), which has been a foundational reference for the environmental movement.5 But it takes on broader resonance, as it foregrounds the tensions between two antithetical aspects of human experience: one that seeks to comprehend (to explore, to survey, to fathom), and thus to convert or translate the real; the other that resists this desire and instead advocates the nurturing quality of the unexplorable and unfathomable, or untranslatable.

Charting space and the self

Fig. 1. Thoreau’s map of Walden Pond, manuscript survey, ink on paper, 1846. The Concord Free Public Library (http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_surveys/133a.htm)

Thoreau’s charting of the lake is not just a tale but something that really happened, as demonstrated by Thoreau’s original manuscript map of Walden. In January 1846, Thoreau, who was a professional surveyor, carried his surveyor's tools—“compass and chain and sounding line” (285)—to the ice-locked pond and drew a careful map of its shoreline, with more than a hundred soundings of its

5 On Thoreau’s environmental rhetoric in this passage, see François Specq (2003).

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depths, an experience he reported in Walden’s antepenultimate chapter, “The Pond in Winter,” which also includes a copy of the map itself (286).6

Fig. 2. Thoreau’s map of Walden Pond, inserted into Walden (286).

Thoreau’s extended passage on drawing a map of Walden Pond is fundamentally divided into two parts: the charting of the lake, on the one hand, and the translation of this process into an ethical lesson, on the other. This two-part structure reflects the tension between two contradictory approaches to transcendence: put briefly, mapmaking, as a classic humanistic form of knowledge, is meant to ‘de-transcendentalize,’ as Thoreau’s purpose is to disprove legends about the lake’s bottomlessness, whereas the ethical translation appears as a way of ‘re-transcendentalizing’ the physical world.

Mapmaking illustrates the demands of rational inquiry that characterize modern science—“It is remarkable how long men will believe in the bottomlessness of a pond without taking the trouble to sound it” (285)—and especially appears as an activity answering Alexander von Humboldt’s call for the “delineation of nature” (1850: I:79). As Laura Dassow Walls notes, “Thoreau’s local would always speak to the cosmic: Walden, like Eureka, was a response to Humboldt’s Cosmos” (264). Thoreau’s desire to write as if “from a distant land” (3), for instance, echoed Humboldt’s notion of the equivalence between experiment and the infinity of the world, which is itself a powerful defamiliarizing factor: “The study of a science that promises to lead us through the vast range of creation may be compared to a journey in a far-distant land” (1850: I:50). Within that tradition, the map represents the synthesizing power of knowledge. The essential aspect of the mapmaking process, in the rhetorical economy of Thoreau’s text, is that the lake is objectified: it becomes an object of rational knowledge, undergoing an ontological transformation by being experienced as a site of measurement rather than imagination, which is here dismissed as fancy: “The amount of it is, the imagination, give it the least license, dives deeper and soars higher than Nature goes,” the narrator proclaims (288). Through this process of imaging—as distinct from, and opposed to, imagining—the otherness of nature is denied, or rather reduced, as it is bent to our frames or to our reason (as advocated by Humboldt : “the traveler … is guided by reason in his researches” [1850: I:51]), if not to our will. Mapmaking relies on a disjunction between matter and consciousness, and on the simultaneous belief in the possibility of bridging the gap intellectually: although the mapmaking process is not entirely devoid of sensory perception, the otherness of nature is eventually subsumed.

While the strong humorous undercurrents running through this passage may invite us not to take the narrator’s statements too seriously, there is nonetheless no doubt that mapmaking, in the economy of Thoreau’s text, essentially enacts an idealizing of nature, which desubstantializes and produces a 6 The original map is kept at the Concord Free Public Library, Massachusetts (Thoreau 1846), among dozens of surveying charts produced by Thoreau.

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closure (or enclosure) of the real. This approach seems to be governed by a desire to escape contingence, thus heeding Humboldt’s call for “trac[ing] the stable amid the vacillating, ever-recurring alternation of physical metamorphoses” (1850: I:XII; emphasis in original). However playfully, mapmaking seems to deny or resolve the mutability of things, thus enforcing or supporting a rhetoric of the ideal, which in its turn can support a rhetoric of empire, as suggested by Humboldt:

…so ought we likewise, in our pursuit of science, to strive after a knowledge of the laws and the principles of unity that pervade the vital forces of the universe; and it is by such a course that physical studies may be made subservient to the progress of industry, which is a conquest of mind over matter. (1850: I: 53-54, my emphasis)

Although maps, as spatial constructs intent on communicating meaning in a linear fashion, drawing on such principles as rationality and progress, can be enrolled in the banner of expansion, the beautifully scalloped shape of the outlying, asymmetrical body of water called Walden Pond, may certainly be read as an oblique comment on the American passion for the conquest and dehumanization of space through geometry—a stance that reaches back to William Penn's gridiron plan for Philadelphia (1681), and, in an even more spectacular way, to the U.S. Congress's Land Ordinance of 1785, which divided the Northwest Territory (West and North of the Ohio River) into neat one-mile squares and enabled surveyors to impose a grid pattern on the landscape, thus offering crucial support for territorial expansion and the accompanying doctrine of Manifest Destiny. Thoreau’s map of Walden Pond—along with his emphasis on winding paths rather than straight lines—implicitly questioned such a way of relating to the land.

Fig. 3. Land Ordinance of 1785 and the control over the American land (http://www.lewishistoricalsociety.com/wiki/tiki-print_article.php?articleId=92)

In the rhetorical economy of Thoreau’s text, however, the map primarily assumes that it is possible for the perceiver to transpose the physical world into a different order of reality: it is, strictly speaking, a process of translation—not merely in the sense of a removal from one place to another, but of a transference from one condition to another, a process whose most visible sign is the reduction from three to two dimensions in the physical order. The associated claim is that it is thus logically possible to subject the physical world to another kind of translation (almost in the old religious sense of removal from earth to heaven), one which turns it into an allegory of man’s moral physiognomy:

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What I have observed of the pond is no less true in ethics. It is the law of average. Such a rule of the two diameters not only guides us toward the sun in the system and the heart in man, but draw lines through the length and breadth of the aggregate of man’s particular daily behaviors and waves of life into his coves and inlets, and where they intersect will be the height or depth of his character. (291)

In this version of environmental awareness, the material world is thus not just matter , but almost immediately endowed or imbued with allegorical meaning, if we agree on defining allegory in its broadest sense, as an illustration of the general by the particular—a particular which may be circumscribed. The allegorical mode is predicated on the idea that it is possible to apprehend the correspondences through rational thought—rather than through the imagination or the creative exuberance that is later at the heart of the sandbank passage in “Spring.” Allegory is imagination in the service of discursive meaning, as it is based on logical sequence rather than substitution or symbolic equivalence. Making sense of the world in this way thus involves not only delineating topographical limits, but erasing its material dimension through a process of translation.

In the end, Thoreau’s surveying of Walden Pond is a mock-serious endeavor which seems to be meant as a parodic version of the individual’s necessary contribution to socially accepted activities. Thoreau draws on, and half-ironically bows to, the figure of the Humboldtian explorer and his humanist focus on knowledge, the better to give it a subsequent twist. To the extent that it represents socially acceptable work, mapmaking, as a legitimate intellectual appropriation of the pond, anticipates and parodies the exploitation—i.e., the economic appropriation—of the Walden ice, which immediately follows.

Harnessing the landThe middle sequence is devoted to the harvesting of the Walden ice. This is also a real,

historical event: the winter following the pond survey, a crew of a hundred ice-cutters arrived at Walden to cut the ice for shipment to various places all over the world, including India or Brazil for instance—that was before the invention of the refrigerator, and an early example of globalization! The whole process was closely linked to the development of railroads, which is indeed another important theme in Walden. Ice-harvesting was then an ordinary event, which Thoreau defamiliarized through close description and mythologizing—that was certainly not a common thing for literature to include at the time.

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Fig. 4. Ice harvesting at Spy Pond, Arlington, Massachusetts (close to Thoreau’s Concord), 1852. (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ice_Harvesting,_Massachusetts,_early_1850s.jpg). In the background can be seen the regular grid pattern drawn in preparation for the logging of the ice.

The ice-cutting parallels the mapmaking sequence insofar as it is a socially acceptable undertaking—and a clear form of business, as opposed to the idleness of the wandering poet or of poetic vagrancy. The first two sequences should indeed be envisaged together, as aspiring to social approbation and intellectual or commercial gain. Mapmaking, however self-derisive, was still nodding to social recognition. This desire was certainly important to Thoreau (who was a sought-after land surveyor), even if he also often lamented the pressure and constraints associated with that professional activity.

The second sequence fundamentally differs from the first, however, because it does not correspond to any form of inquiry. In this middle sequence, matter is just matter: it is neither allegorical nor symbolical, but a mere resource to be exploited for practical purposes and material gain.

Fig. 5. Ice harvesters using a horse-drawn device to mark ice for cutting.

Indeed, the grid pattern implemented by the ice-harvesters sharply contrasts with Thoreau’s map of the lake because of its absolute regularity: geometry clearly embodies the human control over the land in a way which echoes the layout projected by the Land Ordinance of 1785. It is also meant to convey Thoreau’s critique of economic exploitation, as the physical world is not comprehended, and even less enjoyed, but merely displaced and converted into monetary value, and thus in effect subjected to a material translation.

What indeed matters, in the rhetorical economy of Thoreau’s text, is that this logging of the ice is not liable to any form of translation or conversion—except a monetary one, eventually—and even less amenable to a transcendentalizing process. Even more than mapmaking, ice-cutting is predicated on the power of sequence, linearity, and causality. Ice-cutting intrinsically negates any form of substitution, but instead favors repetition of the same—as indicated by the telling image of the contractor commissioning the exploitation of the Walden ice “in order to cover each one of his dollars with another” (294). This is a process of mere duplication and replication ad infinitum (the ice blocks “placed evenly side by side, and row upon row” [295]): instead of producing difference or expansion, it contracts and reduces the real. Exploitation is based on a principle of repetition and identity. The only substitution it operates is of stasis for process and energy (seasonal flux): the massive, monumental, static icestack is meant to substract matter from its normal life cycle, and to disrupt or blur the normal succession of seasons, by providing cold in the summer (thus, like mapmaking, also suppressing contingence, albeit in a different way). This is because ice-cutting is based on a capitalistic downplaying of the present in favor of future interest. On the contrary, Thoreau’s

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environmentally-friendly logging of the real and of its immediate flavor—which Walden celebrates and which his Journal, or ‘log,’ embodies—is primarily meant to enhance one’s relation to the present.

Each in its own way, the measuring of the pond and the harvesting of its ice are thus figures of ‘perfection’: mapmaking points to ideal or transcendentalizing wholes, and ice-cutting eventuates in a perfectly regular icestack that appears as a parodically reductive transposition (as distinct from translation) of wholeness. Like mapmaking, ice-harvesting enacts a suppression of the contingent. But, Thoreau suggests, the contingent and the particular cannot be suppressed without eliminating life itself, without draining life of its substance—hence Thoreau’s diametrically opposite desire to pay attention to the singular, “to individualize” (292). In the middle sequence, matter is simultaneously and paradoxically treasured and dematerialized, as it can only be subjected to a monetary conversion or translation. The ice-cutters embody, or are the driving belt of, a materialistic worldview, but this is a materialism of substraction—even though the lake will eventually be replenished, as Thoreau emphasizes (297)—as opposed to the one that is propounded in “Spring,” the third sequence in Thoreau’s carefully staged final part of Walden.

Rethinking HumanismThe third sequence focuses on the thawing bankside of the “Deep Cut” of the railroad skirting

Walden Pond (304-309). This passage, taken in isolation, is often regarded as Walden’s climax, and has generated a wide range of commentaries.7 My purpose here will be limited to showing how it is a crucial stage in Thoreau’s intellectual project or strategy in the final part of Walden, and how it conveys and advocates a complete reorientation of mankind’s relation to its environment.

Structurally, the sandbank passage may be seen as forming a kind of arch with the description of mapmaking, in the sense that they are both forms of inquiry of the real, whereas there is no inquiry whatsoever in the central ice-cutting passage. Inquiry here does not mean a metaphysical exploration of the origins and ends of the universe, but rather of its material dimension: the earthly configurations of water, ice, and sand. If the shadow of metaphysics still reverberated in the mapmaking passage—eventually leading to a containment or subsumption of matter—there is nothing metaphysical in the third sequence. This passage is a striking ode to the preeminence of matter and focuses upon a concrete, palpable reality, which sharply contrasts with the artificialized and almost derealized matter exploited by the ice-cutters. The richness of the earth’s surface, with its color, its mineral and organic profusion, as evoked in a phenomenological approach, and the pleasure of the sensible, are the focus of the writer’s attention. The observer remains fiercely earthbound, and he is eager to make the most of this apparent restriction. His purpose here is certainly quite different from Humboldt’s desire “to trace the stable”:

The whole bank, which is from twenty to forty feet high, is sometimes overlaid with a mass of this kind of foliage, or sandy rupture, for a quarter of mile on one or both sides, the produce of one spring day. What makes this sand foliage remarkable is its springing into existence thus suddenly. When I see on the one side the inert bank,—for the sun acts on one side first,—and on the other this luxuriant foliage, the creation of an hour, I am affected as if in a peculiar sense I stood in the laboratory of the Artist who made the world and me,—had come to where he was still at work, sorting on this bank, and with excess of energy strewing his fresh designs about. I feel as if I were nearer to the vitals of the globe, for this sandy overflow is something such a foliaceous mass as the vitals of the animal body. You find thus in the very sands an anticipation of the vegetable leaf. No wonder that the earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, it so labors with the idea inwardly. The atoms have already learned this law, and are pregnant by it. The overhanging leaf sees here its prototype. Internally whether in the globe or animal body, it is a moist thick lobe, a word especially applicable to the liver and lungs and the leaves of fat, (λείβω, labor, lapsus, to flow or slip downward, a lapsing; λοβος, globus, lobe, globe, also lap, flap, and many other words,) externally a dry thin leaf, even as the f and v are a pressed and dried b. The radicals of lobe are lb, the soft mass of the b (single lobed, or B, double lobed,) with a liquid l behind it pressing it forward. In globe, glb, the guttural g adds to the meaning the capacity of the throat. The feathers and wings of birds are still drier and thinner leaves. Thus, also, you pass from the lumpish grub in the earth to the airy and fluttering butterfly. The very globe continually transcends and translates itself, and becomes winged in its orbit. (306-307)

7 Offering even a brief overview of critical approaches to this passage is beyond the scope of this essay . Important starting points are Boudreau (1990: 105-134), which includes a useful bibliographical essay, Milder (1995: 151-160), and West (2000: 183-196).

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Whereas mapmaking and ice-harvesting were too forms of ‘business,’ Thoreau here asserts his idleness and claims the right not to be serious in an ordinary (social) sense. He appears as subverter of all productive systems, and as promoter of an art indifferent to any social approbation or economic gain—he was certainly eager “to transact some private business” (19)—and becomes a figure fiercely resisting social expectations and aesthetic integration. The writer decidedly refuses to offer a gentle, sentimental depiction of Spring (no gently twittering birds...), instead figuring Spring in its ‘raw,’ ‘untamed’ character—and, to be sure, it is impossible to illustrate this passage the way the first two sequences can be. But, more deeply, the passage points to the profoundly anti-institutional dimension of Thoreau’s prose, in agreement with his own belief that good books “make us dangerous to existing institutions” (Thoreau 1980: 96). It is hard to imagine today what the sandbank passage as literature represented at the time, in 1854: it amounted to nothing less than a rejection of literature itself as institution. In a widely tamed if not decorous literary world, Thoreau’s frantically open structure and famous etymological ramblings were, in some sense, analogous in their impact to Emily Dickinson’s use of language. In this passage, Thoreau seems to owe no obligations to society and almost to be oblivious of the very existence of society—forgetting all knowledge or literacy, all received ideas, in a powerful example of his desired poetic vagrancy or “extra-vagan[ce]” (324).

Another crucial difference between this passage and the earlier sections is the way the narrator depicts himself as resisting any desire for domination of physical nature, instead accepting and even celebrating the idea of losing control of the real. The reader is here confronted with a text which is too frenzied to submit itself to a straightforward obligation to communicate—be it truth, method, or value, as in the first two sequences—but is instead intent on circulating energy and diffusing the relations between mysterious, but supremely concrete, phenomena. Through a radical disruption of our ordinarymodes of seeing, Thoreau gives us a more substantial, literal form of the transaction between nature and consciousness, finally refusing to separate matter and spirit (a separation that is implied by all forms of translation of physical reality).8 Mankind is no longer master of matter vis-à-vis submissive or compliant nature, but mere witness to a reality that is autonomous if not rebellious, and that turns itself into the agent of its own translation: “The very globe continually transcends and translates itself…” (306, emphasis mine). The real’s self-translation precisely defines and warrants its untranslatability by human means, as Thoreau’s bewildered juxtaposition of words from different languages indicates.

Such radicality boldly sets this passage apart from the second sequence, but also from the first one, from which there are a number of crucial differences. In the thawing bankside passage, for instance, as in the mapmaking process, there is indeed some ordering, but one that has much more to do with a mystical—or is it proto-ecological?—sense of generalized relationality: “Thus it seemed that this one hillside illustrated the principle of all the operations of Nature. The Maker of this earth but patented a leaf” (308). Thoreau also confronts the possibility that the world is illegible or impossible to read rationally—that the fabled ‘Book of Nature’ is now so irremediably timeworn that it can only be apprehended through a somewhat chaotic sequence of words and syllables—a world more chaos than cosmos, but thereby “living earth” again (309).9

The third sequence also differs crucially from the first one through its focus on the unmeasured and unmeasurable—in praise of a real “unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable” (318)—that appear as the essence of poetry (as also suggested by Humboldt). If mapmaking meant delimiting or imposing limits—to the land as well as to our imagination—the sandbank passage, on the contrary, is predicated on the opposite notion of the value of having “our own limits transgressed” (318), as Thoreau sums up his thought at the end of the “Spring” chapter (317-18)—our own limits, i.e., also our own constructs (nature has now ceased to be “constantly and obediently answer[ing] to our conceptions” [97]). This notably involves transgressing the limits of language (the linguistic material), i.e., its mastery over the world—just as we are requested to acknowledge the uncontainable flowing or flowering of matter. What Thoreau propounds is an economy of excess and not one of 8 This may seem to suggest that Thoreau adopted an approach convergent with non-dualistic philosophies such as the ‘Oriental’ ones he was familiar with—he was an avid reader of mostly Hindu, but also Chinese and Persian, texts (see Hodder 2001: esp. 174-217). What I will suggest, however, is that Thoreau did not reject dualism, but strove for modes of perception that moved beyond the standard separation of matter and spirit enacted by appropriative modes of relation to the physical world.9 For an illuminating overview of the tradition of the “Book of Nature” in American literature , see Barton Levi St. Armand 1997.

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containment or substraction (see “excess of energy” [306]). The third sequence focuses on the power of the imagination as exceeding—though certainly not suppressing—knowledge derived from experience. It foregrounds signifying processes that question or challenge logical meaning and conceptual definition, giving free rein to the play of substitutions on the paradigmatic axis at the expense of sequential continuity, as ‘translation’ would request. Excess is fundamental: in Thoreau’s view, nature is what is in excess of all things human. In a way, whereas imagination, in the first sequence, was part of and support for a larger humanist project, Thoreau here accepts the idea of an imaginative process that is dissociated from imaging or representation (it is undeniably more difficult to picture the world evoked in the sandbank passage) and that is distinct from any easily definable or transparent meaning, yielding instead to the sway of an untranslatable reality. If mapmaking appeared to be a fundamentally humanist project, the sandbank passage sets forth a form of imagination that both recuperates matter and exceeds definition—but does certainly not negate meaning. Or, put slightly differently, it questions or suspends linguistic meaning, but not human significance, opening itself out to symbolic flowering. As the idea of the untranslatable character of the real points to the impossibility—and undesirability—of fully grasping (synthesizing or translating) our experience of the world, it ultimately serves as the rationale for the notion of “wildness” and Thoreau’s plea for nature preservation which concludes the chapter: “At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable” (317).

In this concluding sequence, which may also appear as the rationale for Thoreau’s Journal, nature retains its otherness or unstranslatability, as there is an acceptance of the gap between nature and consciousness. Nature has now been acknowledged as a force both within and outside the human, and, specifically, as that which exceeds and disorients, but also animates, human language. Language in its materiality is precisely what, in turn, prevents the assumption of nature into human consciousness. In his hard-fought attempt to break out of closure, Thoreau strove to attain the purity of a new beginning, of raw materials instead of prefabricated ideas and preconceived ideals. He seems to be eager to devour language itself raw—like the woodchuck he caught a glimpse of in the dark on his way home from fishing, and, “[feeling] a strange thrill of savage delight…was strongly tempted to seize and devour…raw” (210). His language here is irrational, even unfathomable, as opposed to the pond, which can be fathomed but also recuperated by reason and rationality, as indicated by the ‘ethical translation.’ Language is not just a tool, but seems to play an active role and to restrict the degree of control exercised by the perceiver. In that sense, in the sandbank passage Thoreau puts himself—i.e., the human—at risk. He accepts losing control of the real as being a part of the achievement of one’s own humanity, and the existence of nature as exceeding our control and our signifying processes (our ways of ‘translating’ it). “Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations” (171), the narrator had asserted earlier in a more literal reference to losing one’s bearings. The reader is not invited to mentally picture and acquiesce in realistic forms of mastery over the real (such as mapmaking or ice-cutting), but to engage in a process of figuring new, hitherto unimagined relations to the physical world and forms of awareness, in which the symbolic function proves to be liberating. He thus puts himself at risk, insofar as he chooses to ignore the safety devices that we construct in order to sidestep the dangers that are inherent in our being-in-the-world. The aim is not to convey an abstractly figurative meaning, but to create through the linguistic material a heightened awareness of our environment, where the reader can experience the imaginary dimension of perception. Far from threatening perception, this denial of transparency and linearity is precisely what enriches and enhances awareness, permitting us to capture the real in the process of its coming into being.

Thoreau’s deep interrogation of various modes of environmental awareness, far from articulating unchanging, imperial, or irenic visions of the natural world, thus reflects a sense of vulnerability or humbleness in the way human beings engage with their environment which fully faces and embraces the risk involved in the process. It thus contributes to a questioning of the conventions and standards by which human beings generally hope to attain reassuring normality. What Thoreau tells us about is not primarily a gentle story of humans feeling at home in the world (balance, oneness, abandon, appealing depictions of a wild paradise), as critics of ‘nature writing’ and ecocriticism are

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F. Specq – Environmental Awareness and the Design of Literature – ENANPOLL, July 1, 2016

sometimes prone to describe it. He rather means to consider the various ways in which literary texts can make us reflect about our situatedness in our physical environment, and thus enact Cocteau’s sense of literature as a destabilizing force which helps us escape the rigid frames of commonly assumed worldviews and modes of seeing.

Works cited

BOUDREAU, Gordon V. 1990. The Roots of Walden and the Tree of Life. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.BUELL, Lawrence. 1995. The Environmental Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.COCTEAU, Jean. Le Rappel à l’ordre [A Call to Order], Paris: Stock, 1926.GARRARD, Greg. The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.HODDER, Alan D. 2001. Thoreau’s Ecstatic Witness. New Haven: Yale University Press.HUMBOLDT, Alexander von. 1850. Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe (tr. Elise C. Otté). 2 vols.

New York: Harper.MILDER, Robert. 1995. Reimagining Thoreau. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.SLOVIC, Scott. 1992. Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.SPECQ, François. 2003. “Thoreau's ‘Chesuncook’ or Romantic Nature Imperiled: An American Jeremiad” in Bak, Hans and

Walter W. Hölbling (eds) Nature's Nation Reconsidered: American Concepts of Nature from Wonder to Ecological Crisis. Amsterdam: VU University Press: 126-134.

ST. ARMAND, Barton Levi. 1997. “The Book of Nature and American Nature Writing: Codex, Index, Contexts, Prospects” in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment 4(1): 29-42.

THOREAU, Henry David. 1971 [1854]. Walden (ed. J. Lyndon Shanley). Princeton: Princeton University Press.––––. 1972 [1864]. The Maine Woods (ed. Joseph J. Moldenhauer). Princeton: Princeton University Press.––––. 1980 [1849]. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (ed. Carl F. Hovde et al.). Princeton: Princeton University

Press.WALLS, Laura Dassow. 2009. The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America. Chicago: The

University of Chicago Press.WEST, Michael. 2000. Transcendental Wordplay : America's Romantic Punsters and the Search for the Language of Nature . Athens: Ohio University Press.

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