[Last year, I
followed the Valentine’s series with a complementary
series analyzing some of the things that just don’t quite do it for me. It
was pretty popular, including my biggest
crowd-sourced post to date, so this year I’m repeating the series—and
repeating the request for your non-favorites for a crowd-sourced post in which
we’ll air some grievances!]
On my issue with
the Transcendentalists, their greatness notwithstanding.
When I did this
series last year and asked for those crowd-sourced contributions, a number of
people aired their grievances against those foundational 19th
century American authors and philosophers, Ralph
Waldo Emerson and Henry David
Thoreau. I certainly get that perspective: not only because the two tended
to write in that verbiose, long-winded, dense and demanding 19th
century style that doesn’t exactly jump off the page (although Thoreau is much
more readable than Emerson); but also because they’re both assigned and emphasized
so consistently in American literature courses in both high school and college
(including my own American Literature I survey, I’ll admit), and it’s hard not
to get a bit tired of authors whom we encounter so frequently and of whom we’re
told we have to think so highly. American Renaissance, yeah yeah, we’ve heard
it all before.
The thing is,
Emerson and Thoreau specifically, and the Transcendentalists
more broadly, were precisely as pioneering and significant as we teachers like
to go on about. We’ve recovered and remembered enough prior authors, artists,
and voices that we can no longer make the case that American literature or
culture started in their era; and we’ve similarly engaged with enough contemporaries
of theirs, whether under-read Transcendentalists like Margaret
Fuller and William Ellery Channing, much more popular writers like Fanny
Fern and Harriet
Beecher Stowe, or influential activists like Frederick
Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, to recognize that they were only one part of a
much broader and deeper cultural moment. But if America had a lot of literature
and culture, writing and authors, before and during the Transcendentalists’
era, what it didn’t yet have was a homegrown philosophical grounding for that
work, and a concurrent engagement with our national identity and community—and these
thinkers, Emerson and Thoreau above all, provided that perspective.
So why am I
including those two authors in my non-favorites series, you might ask? Because
in their advancing of those philosophies and engagements, both Emerson and
Thoreau tended to be a bit more preachy than I’d like. Of course arguing for
ideas is a kind of preaching no matter what, and Emerson started his professional
career as a preacher to boot. But I would argue that there’s a democratic form
of preaching that implicates the author as much as his audience, and a
contrasting hierarchical one in which the author has the answers and he’s
trying to bring his audience to his level; and I’d locate Emerson and Thoreau
in the latter category a good deal of the time. Take Thoreau’s stated
goal, on the title page of Walden
(1854), “to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his
roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.” It’s a great line, and I take his
point, but who says that the neighbors are necessarily more asleep than the
author, or any of us? Why can’t we see it as a collective awakening, something
that we all share? I’d say we can and should, and that if Emerson and Thoreau
had seen it that way a bit more often, they’d be even greater than they already
are.
Next
non-favorite tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other non-favorites you’d share for the weekend post?
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