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July 24, 2008 Author's |
Book DisplayThoreau's Vision of Insects & the Origins of American Entomology
 by David Spooner | Availability |
Description | |
Thoreau`s Vision of Insects and the Origins of American Entomology is, as the title suggests, an account of Thoreau`s observations of insects in America and the place of insects in his creative work. It is the first full interpretation of insects in his writing.To identify many of the insects in Thoreau, I draw on my entomological background in lepidopteral conservation, and experience as adviser to a number of agencies promoting habitats including the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, as well as membership of the National Bio-diversity Committee for Scotland. The book also contains a comprehensive list of insects indispensable to all students of Thoreau. As Rachel Carson wrote: “the insect world is nature`s most astonishing phenomenon. Nothing is impossible to it; the most improbable things occur there.” The insects inhabited the planet millennia before ourselves, and are uniquely adapted to it. Thoreau quotes Coleridge in his Literary Notebook to the effect that “the insect world, taken at large, appears as an intenser life that has struggled itself loose & become emancipated from vegetation." The key word is intenser, and as the winged creature at the end of Walden may suggest, the dramatic intensity suggested by metamorphosis - and a writer is continually transforming elements from real life -is the source of a great wonder about life on earth. My other theoretical and critical books also explore this theme in other contexts. They are The Metaphysics of Insect Life (1995) and The Poem and the Insect: Aspects of Twentieth Century Hispanic Culture (1999), both obtainable from the University Press of America. Here now is a section of my new book, Thoreau`s Vision of Insects and the Origins of American Entomology: “THE METAMORPHOSES OF WALDEN In 1848 Thoreau transcribed sections of Coleridge`s Hints towards the Formation of a More Comprehensive Theory of Life which had just been published. At the same time he made a copy of Spenser`s Muiopotmos or the Fate of the Butterflie, where the life of the insects is viewed by the reader from as great a distance as the Olympians look down upon humanity, akin to that doublet Thoreau identified in his own character watching his active self (134-35). Coleridge`s Hints is “a treatise on the use of natural history as means to the discovery of underlying laws of creation” and was an essential literary starting-point for Thoreau`s more technical exploration of what is today cladistics. Walls argues in opposition to Robert Sattelmeyer and Richard A. Hocks that at this point Coleridge merely offered Thoreau “the solace of the familiar,” and offered him “nothing new,” but as she admits the extracts he made from her preferred influence, Humboldt, “are far more perfunctory.” As already mentioned, for Coleridge, had nature progressed no further than the flora and fauna, “the whole vegetable, together with the whole insect creation, would have formed within themselves an entire and independent system of life.” He draws on Heinrich Steffens (1773-1845) for the adage “THE INSECT WORLD IS THE EXPONENT OF IRRITABILITY, AS THE VEGETABLE IS OF REPRODUCTION.” What Coleridge crucially provided Thoreau with was the encouragement, even perhaps in terms of authorial authority, the right, to merge a scientific approach to nature with his kaleidoscopic imaginative sweep over the living ecology of Walden. William Ellery Channing, poet and a walking companion, gives an indication of the day-to-day life of the writer in his Concord habitat: “Insects were fascinating [to Thoreau], from the first gray little moth, the perla, born in February`s deceitful glare, and the `fuzzy gnats` that people the gay sunbeams, to the luxuriating Vanessa antiopa, that gorgeous purple-velvet butterfly somewhat wrecked amid November`s champaign breakers. He sought for and had honey-bees in the close spathe of marsh-cabbage, when the eye could detect no opening of the same; water-bugs, skaters, carrion beetles, devil`s needles (`the French call them demoiselles, the artist loves to paint them, and paint must be cheap`); the sap-green, glittering, iridescent cicindelas, those lively darlings of Newbury sandbanks and Professor Peck, he lingered over as heaven`s never-to-be repainted Golconda. Hornets, wasps, bees and spiders, and their several nests, he carefully attended. The worms and caterpillars, washed in the spring-freshets from the meadow-grass, filled his soul with hope at the profuse vermicular expansion of Nature.” Thoreau took on his identity, in one sense, from the systole and diastole of his natural surroundings. The fluidity of that identity was his principal trait, because through this he could, almost immediately via his Journal, transfer to the pulse of his writing the transitoriness of nature and its progressions. Like the bees he recorded which had arrived at the spring plants with unerring instinct prior to his own observations, he sought out nature in its formative metamorphoses, so that he could “make a chart of our life — know how its shores trend — that butterflies reappear and when — know why just this circle of creatures completes the world. Can I not by expectation affect the revolutions of nature — make a day to bring forth something new?”(PJ4:468). The rhetorical overstatement is part of Thoreau`s strategy for diminishing the human species, perhaps even for questioning the ideological aspirations of the American Revolution, and certainly for ironically deflating the ego. But it is also part of his strategy for defining human life, taking as his material his fellow Concord inhabitants and, above all of course, himself. Almost at the very inception of Walden, Thoreau sketches the main theme on which there will be multiple variations, suggesting the citizens of Concord are more puzzling than appears at first sight for they have “appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways. What I have heard of Brahmins sitting exposed to four fires and looking in the face of the sun; or hanging suspended, with their heads downward, over flames;...or measuring with their bodies, like caterpillars, the breadth of vast empires; or standing on one leg on the tops of pillars - even these forms of conscious penance are hardly more incredible and astonishing than the scenes which I daily witness” (4). In modern literature, the “hanging suspended” brings to mind the pupal stage of Kafka`s Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis. More directly, it recalls Thoreau`s reflection in A Week that “When I go into a museum, and see the mummies wrapped in their linen bandages, I see that the lives of men began to need reform as long ago as when they walked the earth” (Week, 124). The act of mummification is a ritualistic interpretation of the chrysalis stage of an insect, as Nabokov ironically projected in Invitation to a Beheading. The Brahmins distinguish themselves from the domesticated house-dwellers of the Western world who are like “My gay butterfly entangled in a web” (66). England represents this form of atrophy par excellence, “an old gentleman who is travelling with a great deal of baggage, trumpery which has accumulated from long housekeeping, which he has not the courage to burn; great trunk, little trunk, bandbox and bundle” (66). The pioneering and revolutionary American character is, like Melville`s Queequeg, “a creature in the transition state - neither caterpillar nor butterfly.” Joyce Carol Oates has evoked the shifting, even shiftiness, of Thoreau`s persona in his perception of external nature. Projecting him as “the supreme poet of doubleness, of evasion and mystery”(ix), she argues that “if there is a self it must be this very shifting of perspective, this ceaseless transformation and metamorphosis”(xi). At root is a duality of vision that the Italian writer, Cesare Pavese, noted in the American outlook - “a sort of double vision through which from the single object of the senses, avidly absorbed and possessed, there radiates a sort of halo of unlooked-for spirituality.” Perry Miller had defined the ambiguity, which at times spills over into confusion, in an address to the Thoreau Society in 1960. He argues that the author at times demands a scientific view of nature, but at others acknowledges “a wise purveyor [who] has been there before me:” “If at one and the same time Nature is closely inspected in microscopic detail and yet through the ancient system of typology makes experience intelligible, then Thoreau will have solved the Romantic riddle, have mastered the Romantic [today`s Postmodern] Irony.” Likewise R.W.B. Lewis located both Emerson`s and Thoreau`s sense of irony as deriving from the double consciousness of Plato and Coleridge, so that the American writers “searched, in their separate ways, for the spiritual analogies which completed the doubleness of nature.” Ultimately this derives from the seventeenth century disuption of the direct relation between word and thing, signifier and signified, the visible and the unseen. On a larger scale, the whole of modernism and postmodernism stem from these rifts, running from Don Quixote to Richard II, from Nabokov to Fowles and Alastair Gray. For the author, doubleness has its tactical equivalent in duplicity, allowing Loren Eiseley to classify him as “a double agent” in his approach to nature, and Foucault to define this riven individuality as “a strange empirico-transcendental doublet.” All this is not as remote from his Reform Papers as may appear at first, for at basis Thoreau is attacking the legal concept of `person,` inextricably associated with the definition of `property` in the judicial code, and also with fixed, established perception. Early on he makes this quite evident: “I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what they were called to labor in” (5). This is part and parcel of his thoroughly ambiguous attitude to human social roles, somewhat on the lines of Emerson`s “people seem sheathed in their tough organization.” He is a harbinger of those arguing the bankruptcy of person-oriented thought, though Benjamin Constant - whom he read and in whom Orestes Brownson, an early mentor of Thoreau`s and perhaps the only one beside Emerson, was especially interested - had anticipated this phase of literary-philosophical criticism.
Here is a later segment "THOREAU, DARWIN, AND A.R. WALLACE Darwin leaves little scope for a place of significance for the human species in the scheme of things, and small leeway for the creative arts. At best the species is an alienated observer of a system where the primary constants have given rise to the chemistry that enabled life to emerge. Emerson had understood this with radiant clarity almost a century and a half ago when clearly referring to the Darwinian revolution he wrote that "Natural Science is the point of interest now, &, I think, is dimming & extinguishing a good deal that was called poetry. These sublime & all-reconciling revelations of nature will exact of poetry a corresponding height & scope, or put an end to it." After Comte and Darwin, the possibility opened up, even the likelihood in the long term, that "the spectre of creation" would be exorcized altogether. Thoreau himself lived through the moment of transition when just as the earth was displaced from the center of the universe by Galileo, humanity was removed from its position as justified exploiter or, more benignly, steward of nature by Darwin`s Origin and the books that followed. Thoreau`s beliefs flucuated, and "although Thoreau never ceased to call himself a `transcendentalist,` experience soon forced him to lower his expectations for analogical `truth,` and thus dilute his transcendentalism into an ever more nebulous creed he could profess while practically following other paths." The differences in method and conception between Walden and the Journal are an integral part of Thoreau`s experience of the growing chasm between literature and science, the amateur and the professional, and perhaps above all between the remnants of an idea of a Creator, benevolent or otherwise, and a universal system of nature that is unanswerable to God or humans. Even Humboldt`s comprehensive holistic ecology is being surpassed by a man who pays him the greatest homage - Darwin - but who is inexorably rendering him obsolete in modern scientific terms. I hope you will want to read on! And for an extended exposition of the author`s ideas in other books, click on - | |
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