What Walden Is

Walden is a very singular book. I mixes abstruse philosophical musings with very minute observations of woodchucks, pond water, ants, and other details of nature. It has a narrative structure of sorts, but it is a very minimal one. I is also a narrative in which the author's own self is obsessively prominent and other characters almost entirely absent. No other literary classic much resembles it. Is there a literary genre in which it could be placed? It may be that the most accurate answer to this question is: "None, unless it constitutes, with its subsequent imitations, a genre of its own." In spite of that, it can be illuminating to ask, and try hard to answer, which genre Thoreau might be seen as adopting and adapting (perhaps stretching and breaking in the process) to his own ends. Perhaps it is a self-help manual, a confession, a satire, or a Bildungsroman. It is possible, with varying degrees of ease, to see it as each one of these, or as something else altogether.⁽¹⁾

Perhaps it is an instance of the literary genre that he admits, with a show of guilt that may or may not be real, provides him with some of his favorite recreational reading: "I read one or two shallow books of travel in the intervals of my work, till that employment made me ashamed of myself, and I asked where it was then that I lived" (402.32-35). There are one or two obvious obstacles standing in the way of our seeing Walden as an example of travel writing. For one, he seems to express in this passage some sort of disapproval of this sort of writing. On closer examination, however, he may only be disapproving of "shallow" books of this sort. Perhaps his is not a shallow book of travel, but a deep one. A more serious obstacle lies in the fact that Walden seems to lack a characteristic that is essential to travel books: it is a book in which the protagonist never goes anywhere. It would seem safe to assume that the idea of travel includes the notion of a person moving from one place on the map to another, typically to one at some distance from the first. This assumption may not be so safe as applied to Thoreau, however, who said: "I have travelled a good deal in Concord" (326.6). Concord is, of course, a single place. He speaks of the sort of activity he recounts in his book as a kind of travel, though he presents it as moving in a direction different from that followed by the protagonist of the typical travel book. The movement in this book does not skim from one location to another across the surface of this earth (a characteristic that would literally qualify an activity as "shallow") but downward:

"Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through Church and State, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake." (400.7-15)

This metaphor is one that Thoreau seems to find deeply congenial as a description of what he does. He declares, for instance, that his "head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore-paws" (400.38-39). Such metaphors Such metaphors suggest that one can indeed travel without literally moving about in space. In fact, Thoreau does consistently speak this way, his most memorable treatment of this theme being the first two or three pages of the last chapter, where he tells us that stationary travel is the best sort, the kind that is truly needed: "Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought" (578.6-8).

To the extent that Walden shows Thoreau in the act of using his head, his organ for burrowing, he would view it as an account of a journey, though of a rather peculiar sort of journey. In fact, he views a considerably wider range of works in the same way. At the beginning of the book, as he is explaining why there is so much in it about himself, he tells us that he requires "of every writer ... some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me" (325.30-33). If every writer were to comply with Thoreau's requirement, all books would be travel books, in that they would have the same function in the reader's life as that served by accounts of travel: they would give their readers an opportunity to be carried out of their present environments and into circumstances far from the ordinary and the familiar. The value they have will consist, at least in part, in whatever value one might find in vicariously encountering places distant from oneself.

The travelogue is Walden's point of contact with the world of cheap literature, with reading as pure entertainment. It promises - beginning with the title page, where the reader finds a sketch of a curious little house with an inviting footpath that wanders toward us from the doorway - to be an opportunity to meet an amusingly eccentric hermit and the other denizens of his charming forest. This surely is part of the book's value: it is a small but strategically placed part, like the bait on a hook.⁽²⁾

Another literary genre into which Walden can be fit bears mentioning here, if only because the works that belong to it typically are written as if they were books of travel, as accounts of an imaginary journeys: namely, the genre of utopian writing. Of course, Thoreau is an unusual visitor to utopia in that, aside from the fact that he that he goes nowhere, he does not seem to visit a utopian society or state, as visitors to utopia generally do. His utopia, if that is what it is, seems to consist of one person. And one of his aims is identical to the primary aim that utopian authors have always pursued: to give us a convincingly detailed desciption of perfect goodness.

At least as important, perhaps, is the fact that he also shares what might be called the negative aim of utopian authors. It is their purpose, not merely to depict the good, but to give such a dense and complete representation of it that their readers feel that they now occupy a vantage outside their own society and superior to it.⁽³⁾ From it, they feel they can see their world from outside, and see it whole, so that they can judge its value as they never have before. Putting the book down at last, we return to our reality with some of the disaffection with which Lemuel Gulliver returns from the hyper-rational world of the Houyhnhnms, or the male protagonists of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland come back to their non-feminist world.

Of course, a book whose world contains only one inhabitant can be called a utopia only if one stretches the genre to the breaking point or beyond. Indeed, it may be part of Thoreau's intention to question one of the constitutive assumptions of utopian writing: that it is only in society that we can find perfect goodness. Closely analogous things can be said about forcing Walden into the category of travel writing, which seems to be based on the assumption that we acquire important knowledge when we pass from one point on the map to another. However, I can find one genre in which it can be said to fit much more straightforwardly than in these two cases.

In the chapter called "Conclusion," at a point in the chapter at which it would be appropriate to pause and take stock of the whole enterprise now concluding, he says: "I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the live which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours" (580.1-4). He is speaking here, to an audience for whom his experiment in living is a story they have just read, precisely as if he were pointing a moral to be drawn from this story. That is, he is presenting Walden, at least for the moment, as a fable.

Of course, if it is a fable, it is a very long one. It is also a rather top-heavy one, in that a far greater portion of is consists of abstract discourse than is the case in the fables of Aesop. It is also potentially very complex, as Thoreau indicates when he suggests ("this, at least") that other things might be learned from his tale. Yet neither length, complexity nor even top-heaviness count against a narrative's being a fable as I have used that word. The important factor is the relation between the concrete narrative details and the abstractions play the role of the "moral." In this case I think we will find that the relation is often just what the genre of the fable requires. {.........consistent with revisions in Ch. I?..........} I propose in the sections 3 through 5 of this chapter to try the experiment of reading Walden as a long, complex, top-heavy fable, and observing the results. The experiment might go best if we have some notion about precisely how the concrete details are related to the abstractions. We can find some guidance of this sort in the affinity that the book has to yet another genre, this one more startling and less exact than the last.

To guess what genre I have in mind, one need only consider some of the most salient features of the tale that Thoreau tells. He tells it, speaking in the first person, about himself alone. Fundamentally, it is the story of the author's apparently successful attempts to change, not the world, but his view of the world. It is not the things in his environment that he seeks to manipulate, but the things that are in his mind. In particular, it has come to worry him that some of these things do not belong in his mind at all, and that they are all mixed up with the things that do, so that it is hard to distinguish those that belong from those that do not. The method by which he solves the problem thus presented is (explicitly in the long first chapter, but less obviously throughout the book) to proceed (while still in solitude) to empty his mind of these things and put them back only as dictated by necessity. Once the method has been followed, he will be able to carry out his normal activities on a solid foundation.

It will be obvious to any student of the history of philosophy that what I have just described is a cartesian meditation. Yet, just as we can only view this book as a book of travel by violating the requirement that it describe movement from one place to another, so we can only regard it as a Cartesian meditation by doing violence to what alert students know about Descartes' Meditations. One deep difference between Thoreau's book and that of Descartes lies in the simple fact that the mental contents that Descartes was rearranging were beliefs about how the world is, while in Thoreau's case the contents are more practical. Thoreau is concerned about commitments, attachments, and above all practices: things that he does. Accordingly, the method he uses does not consist merely in thinking, as Descartes' method does, but in doing as well. He goes to the woods, he tells us, to try an experiment, and this is no mere thought experiment. He is trying out certain ideas and expects to learn something from what actually happens. He also expects us to learn something from his narration of these events.

Another difference between Thoreau's meditation and that of Descartes is the sharply opposed treatment of the idea of dreaming in the two works. In Descartes' narrative, as the same alert students will know, the author's motive for developing and carrying out his distinctive method is to forestall a horrifying possibility which is symbolized, for him, by the thought that, for all he knows for certain, the experiences he seems to be having might all be a dream. It is to prove that this possibility - the possibility that he might be trapped, alone, inside his mind - that he builds the rigid structure of proofs that comprise most of his book.

If the attitude toward dreaming reflected in Descartes' book is one of aversion, that in Thoreau's is one of attraction: he advises you, in the stated moral of his story, to go "in the direction of" your dreams. Nor, notoriously, does he find the aloneness represented by dreaming to be anything terrible. He invites us at one point to pity the inmates of crowded cities with the comment: "Consider the girls in a factory, - never alone, hardly in their dreams" (430.38-39). This suggests that there must be some more basic philosophical difference, underlying the contrast in the treatment of dreaming, between Thoreau on the one hand and Descartes and the sort of philosophy he engendered on the other. As I will try to show in sections 3 and 4 of this chapter, it is closely related to the contrast between the Thoreauvian focus on action and the Cartesian focus on thought. It is also related to another contrast, which I will also explore in the section 3: the sharp difference between two different positions on the significance and value of necessity.

As this theme is developed, we will be able to see how Walden not only follows but denies and violates the requirements of the Cartesian meditation. We will also see something about how these functions are connected with its working as a stationary travelogue, a deviant utopia, and a gigantic fable.⁽⁴⁾

1. Stanley Cavell suggests that we try seeing it as an instance of two, starkly different genres: epic and prophetic writing. The Senses of Walden (New York: Viking Press, 1974), pp. 3-5 and 19-20.

2. One hazard of travel writing is that the place to which it transports its readers may not be one that some of them want to visit. If it is not, they may fail to enjoy the book as sheer vulgar entertainment. This might explain Stanley Cavell's comments, which seem as obvious to him as they are baffling to me, that Walden sometimes seems "boring" and "enormously long." The Senses of Walden, p. 20. He has a deep appreciation of the ideas he finds in the book, and of the mastery of its style, but the corner of the world to which it transports him do not seem to be a place he especially wants to be. Of course, there is nothing wrong with Cavell's periodically being bored by the book, but he seems to see this as a fact about the book and not about his reaction to it, and he bases part of his interpretation on this supposed feature of the text. I will return to this point in fn. 9 below.

3. Current society is represented throughout Walden by the village of Concord. It is significant that, when Thoreau tells us the precise location of his cabin, he says it was a mile and a half south of Concord and "somewhat higher than it" (390.39-40), and that he could see it "by standing on tiptoe" on "a hill top near by" (391.23-31). Notice also he describes the people of Concord, in the chapter called "The Village," with the same objective style he has used to depict the creatures of the forest. They appear to be simply another species of social mammal, like the muskrats and prairie dogs with whom he seems to suggest we compare them (456.14-20). Life in the forest has evidently had a certain Entfremdungseffekt on his perceptions of contemporary social arrangements, which he wishes the reader to share.

4. Cavell's suggestion that we try placing Walden in the context of epic poetry is consistent with what I am saying here, but the same cannot be said of his suggestion that we see it as an instance of prophetic writing. This idea is based in part on his notion, upon which I have already briefly commented, that this book is very repetitive and sometimes boring: Prophets believe they have a moral license to inflict suffering on their audiences. For the most part, the rest of the basis of this idea consists in his notion that Walden shares with the words of the Hebrew prophets "the periodic confusions of their authors' identities with God's." The Senses of Walden, pp. 19-20. This last notion would seem to mean that Thoreau sees some of his words as actually being the words of God and not of an individual human being at all. This, however, is profoundly at variance with the ideas - epistemological, moral, and political - that I will be attributing to Thoreau here.