Category: Emerson

Emerson on History and Reform

Posted on by marklong

“Language has lost all its meaning in the universal cant. Representative government is really misrepresentative. . . . Manifest Destiny, Democracy, Freedom, fine names for an ugly thing. They call it otto [attar] or rose and lavender––I call it bilge-water.”

–Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Speech on Affairs in Kansas”

“There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time” (113), Emerson remarks in the inaugural essay in the First Series, “History.” His argument that we need to learn the art of reading history “actively and not passively” is the germinal idea behind Emerson’s understanding of history and social reform.

The proposition that most of what we know is not fixed but fluid was unsettling in Emerson’s time––as well as in our own. “I unsettle all things,” Emerson writes. “No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back.” And in Circles, “Nothing is secure,” writes Emerson, “but life, transition, the energizing spirit. People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.”

What it really means to “live amid hallucinations,” to use Emersonian phrase, is to live a life in transition––to know that our knowledge is incomplete and that one of the joys of life is to pursue the incompleteness at the core of Emerson’s proposition. When he says at the end of “History” that a person is “a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world,” he means precisely what he says. The active and dynamic relation of self and world implies an understanding of what we know as provisional––constructed and reconstructed by the mind in perpetual interaction with itself and the world.

For Emerson, we read history to know our selves. To read sympathetically, and to read morally, is Emerson’s way of reminding his readers of the obligations of history. But to know our selves is to understand that any mediation on freedom or justice, any affirmation of a liberal democracy, must begin in the soil and with the roots. Here is a passage from the essay Fate in which he is thinking through the consequences of Manifest Destiny, and in particular the question of race:

The population of the world is a conditional population not the best, but the best that could live now; and the scale of tribes, and the steadiness with which victory adheres to one tribe, and defeat to another, is as uniform as the superposition of strata. We know in history what weight belongs to race. We see the English, French, and Germans planting themselves on every shore and market of America and Australia, and monopolizing the commerce of these countries. We like the nervous and victorious habit of our own branch of the family. We follow the step of the Jew, of the Indian, of the Negro. We see how much will has been expended to extinguish the Jew, in vain. Look at the unpalatable conclusions of Knox, in his “Fragment of Races,” — a rash and unsatisfactory writer, but charged with pungent and unforgettable truths. “Nature respects race, and not hybrids.” “Every race has its own habitat.” “Detach a colony from the race, and it deteriorates to the crab.” See the shades of the picture. The German and Irish millions, like the Negro, have a great deal of guano in their destiny. They are ferried over the Atlantic, and carted over America, to ditch and to drudge, to make corn cheap, and then to lie down prematurely to make a spot of green grass on the prairie.

The race question was central in Emerson’s time. He had read Robert Knox’s The Races of Men and was familiar with other nineteenth-century accounts of the idea of race. When these lines cited above are fully contextualized in the history of Emerson’s time, as one of Emerson’s readers, Eduardo Cadava writes, it is difficult not to read them as referring to the violent history of American colonization and imperialism. “For they put before us the violence, the inequality, the economic oppression, and colonialist and racist exclusions that affected, and continue to affect, so many human beings in the history of not only America but the earth” (The Other Emerson 106).

The question that Emerson raises in the first passages of Fate is “how shall I live?” might be answered, then, by acknowledging that we might choose to become more aware of the of the “illusions” or the “hallucinations” that insulate us from what Emerson calls the “guano” in the history and destiny of human beings. This is the central argument of a book by the writer Barry Lopez, The Rediscovery of North America, I am reading with another group of students this semester. Lopez speaks to the need to develop a recognition, much like what Emerson is calling for, of a historical and material and spiritual and psychological dimension of geography—of the place where we find ourselves, as Emerson might say. It follows that any (Emersonian) meditation on freedom and justice, or any endorsement or affirmation of the ideals of liberal democracy, must begin with the (violent) history of colonization.

What emerged late in the nineteenth-century, and persisted through the middle of the twentieth century, was an understanding of Emerson’s life and work as disengaged from the social and political and moral questions of his time. What we now know, and can now read in his writing, is the nature of Emerson’s engagement. In An Address on the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies (348–59 in Norton) and Address to the citizens of Concord on the Fugitive Slave Law (359–72 in Norton) Emerson makes the case for what he calls in the Concord address a “Higher Law.” His belief in a moral universe that transcends existing laws begins in the idea that there are unjust laws. In other words, as he says at the opening of his essay Politics,

In dealing with the State, we ought to remember that its institutions are not aboriginal, though they existed before we were born: that they are not superior to the citizen: that every one of them was once the act of a single man: every law and usage was a man’s expedient to meet a particular case: that they all are imitable, all alterable; we may make as good; we may make better.

Emerson believes in the fluidity of institutions based on the conviction that they are constructed or made. The expediencies of laws led Emerson’s quarrel with Daniel Webster, for example, who supported the Fugitive Slave Law to preserve the Union. What Emerson sees and is willing to make visible is that the law is a product of the materialism Emerson abhorred. The institution of slavery was perpetuated (both in the South and in the North) by the expediency of sustaining economy; and material prosperity and individual comforts are valued more than social justice. Emerson’s dissent is clear: morality is not subordinate but primary. As he says of institutions (including slavery): “all are imitable, all alterable; we may make as good; we may make better.” As Emerson wrote elsewhere, “If resistance to this law is not right, there is no right.”

Photo credit: Mark C. Long

Writing With Sources

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“We are as much informed of a writer’s genius by what he selects as by what he originates. We read the quotation with his eyes, and find a new and fervent sense; as a passage from one of the poets, well recited, borrows new interest from the rendering.”

––Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Quotation and Originality“

“The alert reader can discover, and take much pleasure in discovering remarkable verbal strategies, metaphoric patterns, repetitions and developments of sound, sense, and image throughout Emerson’s writing.”

—Joel Porte, “The Problem of Emerson”

Literary analysis involves discovering, selecting, summarizing, paraphrasing and quoting primary and secondary sources. In the coming weeks, as we read Emerson–and think and talk and write about his words–we will be working on the art of quotation. Here are some simple protocols to begin a larger conversation about writing conventions:

  • Quote only to provide evidence to demonstrate a claim or to develop the argument
  • Introduce the quotation so that a reader understands your reason for quoting

The most succinct summary of Emerson’s philosophy of education appears in a journal entry dated September 13, 1831. “Education is the drawing out of the soul” (490).

Or, use signal phrases is an introductory clause to signal to the reader a shift from your point of view.

In a journal entry dated September 13, 1831, Emerson defined education as “the drawing out of the soul” (490).

  • Follow the quotation with a discussion of what you want the reader to take away from the quotation.

Calling explicit attention to the root of the Latin word Educare, to draw out or forth, Emerson once again locates learning in a continuum. “Because the soul is progressive,” Emerson begins his essay “Art,” “it never quite repeats itself, but in every act attempts the production of a new and fairer whole.”

  • When you introduce a quotation with a signal phrase, the quotation becomes part of your sentence. Make sure that the sentence is grammatically correct. If you are having difficulty, you can use brackets or ellipsis
  • The choice of verb in a signal phrase will help you indicate to your reader information about the disposition of the source. Here is an example from an essay about Emerson’s writing by the literary critic Barbara Packer:

“In the late essay ‘Poetry and Imagination,’ published in Letters and Social Aims, he argues that all symbols were meant to hold only for a moment, and that it is the poet’s capacity to transfer significance endlessly from one symbol to another that makes [the poet] the emblem of human thought. ‘All thinking is analogizing, and it is the business of life to learn metonymy’” (732).

  • Continue to read as a writer. Pay attention to how critics use signal phrases. The models will provide you with examples of the conventions for citation in English studies.

Signal phrases need not all be the same. This injunction is a matter of structure and style. Rather than repeat “Emerson says. . .” or “Emerson writes. . .” use words that indicate what you take to the be the tone of the essay. (Emerson “insists,” or “suggest to the contrary,” or “notes that.” Consider “argues,” “adds,” “contends,” “points out,” “admits,” “comments,” “insists.”) Or, consider the use of a transitional phrase:

“In an apparent contradiction, Carlyle goes on to argue that. . . .”

  • Embed a quotation as a complete sentence in your essay. Or begin a sentence with Emerson’s prose and then add the signal at the end:

Emerson even goes so far as to say that the poetry we once admired “has long since come to be a sound of tin pans” (317).

Emerson is firm about the need to reinvigorate poetic form. “What we once admired as poetry has long since come to be a sound of tin pans” (317).

“What we once admired as poetry has long since come to be a sound of tin pans,” Emerson submits, for “many of our later books we have outgrown” (317).

  • Enclose short quotations (fewer than four lines) in quotation marks. An embedded quotation (that is, a quotation embedded into a sentence of your own) must fit grammatically into the sentence of which it is a part.

A simple formulation of this argument in favor of comparative thinking is provided by Arthur Kleinman, a psychiatrist and medical anthropologist at Harvard University. Kleinman’s “Eight Questions” do more than merely guide the medical practitioner toward the step of gathering information about cultural background. The questions prompt a reevaluation of one’s own cultural perspective as one that is not universal. As Kleinman explains, “If you can’t see that your own culture has its own set of interests, emotions, and biases, how can you expect to deal successfully with someone else’s culture?” (Qtd. In Fadiman 261). This position requires a radical reorientation from simply considering “the other” as outside the norm to understanding one’s own normative cultural conventions.

  • Set off long quotations (more than four lines) in what is called a “block quotation.” To set off a long quotation, begin a new line, indent ten spaces from the left margin, and double space throughout. Do not use quotation marks. Block quotations need adequate introduction and are most often immediately preceded by a full sentence ending in a colon. Too often the reader will get lost as you transition from your own writing into a long quotation. It’s better to use a short introductory tag (as described above) and then follow the quotation with your discussion.

Whitman Ah Sing’s resistance to a “hyphenated identity” is further illustrated near the opening of the final chapter in the novel, One-Man Show”:

There is no East here. West is meeting West. This was all West. All you saw was West. This is The Journey In the West. I am so fucking offended. Why aren’t you offended? Let me help you get offended. Always be careful to take offense. These sinophiles dig us so much, they’re drooling over us. That kind of favorableness I can do without. They think they know us—the wide range of us from sweet to sour—because they eat in Chinese restaurants. . . .  I’ve read my Aristotle and Agee, I’ve been to college; they have ways to criticize the theater besides for sweet and sourness. They could do laundry reviews, clean or dirty. Come on. What’s so ‘exotic’? (308)

Here Whitman is offended by the “sinophiles” who consider themselves knowledgeable about the experiences of the “Chinese.” Of course as the language of this passage suggests, Whitman is performing—he is on stage, speaking to the audience, waving the reviews in his hand. His veiled reference to Wu’s The Journey to the West reminds his audience, as he puts it elsewhere, that “we all the same Americans” (282). His rambling monologue therefore has a very particular rhetorical end” to challenge his audience to see how easily they construct a binary opposition that forces him (“I’m common ordinary”) to be either American or Chinese.

  • Check your quotation for accuracy at least twice. If you intend to add or substitute a word in the quotation, enclose the words in square brackets. Indicate omissions of material with ellipses (three periods, with a space between each). If you omit words at the end of sentence, indicate the omission with three periods (an ellipses) and end punctuation (a period)
  • MLA Persnickities: Commas and periods go inside quotation marks. Semicolons and colons go outside quotation marks. Question marks, exclamation points and dashes go inside if they are part of the quotation, outside if they are your additions.

Photo credit: Mark. C. Long

Reading Emerson: Criticism and Theory

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In the first few weeks of this class we talked about the English department’s four program objectives:

Production and Reception: The program teaches how historical, social, and cultural contexts shape literary works-including those works produced by cultures whose humanity and identity have been devalued, denied, or dismissed;

Language and Poetics: The program introduces students to the major genres of literature, rhetorical and literary strategies, and the ways in which literary works relate intertextually.

Criticism and Theory: The program introduces students to historical contexts and critical theories that shape literary analysis and inform scholarly debates in the field of literary studies.

Reading and Writing: The program teaches careful reading, the use of literary vocabulary, an orderly critical approach, and the use of writing for a range of purposes.

All of these program outcomes are in play in English courses all of the time––at least to some degree. But at this point in the course, our case study of Emerson is moving in the domain of literary production and reception. On the one hand, reading (and studying) Emerson’s writing is our primary work. On the other hand, your study of Emerson’s writing can become more as you learn more about Emerson and his milieu, gifting you with a more capacious appreciation for his contributions to literary and cultural history; that is, as you join other readers in the study of Emerson, you will find that your reading will become more informed and your writing about (and with) Emerson more productive.

I recommend that you think about our work in the coming weeks in two ways. First, you are continuing to read in the primary work:  Emerson’s journals and letters, as well as his lectures and essays and poems. There is an argument to be made that Emerson’s essays are examples of literary criticism and theory, too, and we can talk about this idea. Second, you will be reading in the history of commentary on Emerson’s writings, what we call the secondary materials. The goal is for these two areas of reading and study to come together in your thinking and writing.

The Norton Critical Edition gives you a glimpse of the vast corpus of materials in the vast archive of secondary writing on Emerson’s works. We will be sampling Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Reviews and Impressions––by practicing poets and essayists; people trained in history and historiography or literary and cultural studies; and philosophers, theologians, literary critics, sociologists and political scientists.

Last week, for example, the literary historian Perry Miller’s “New England Transcendentalism: Native or Imported?” asked you to think about the “ism” in its title. Miller’s question helps us to understand Emerson’s “heresy” in the mind of his mentor in the Harvard Divinity School, Andrews Norton—that is, his pupil’s “trust in intuition, in direct perception of truth” (668). One suggestion Miller makes is Emerson’s 1842 lecture, “The Transcendentalist,” in which he exclaims in the opening to his audience at Boston’s Masonic Temple, “What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us, is Idealism; Idealism as it appears in 1842” (93). Another recommendation was to return to Emerson’s essay “Nature.” The “Contexts” section in the Norton (573–83) lists four additional resources, comments by Madame de Stael, William Wordsworth, Frederic Henry Hedge, and Sampson Reed. Have a look at Russell Goodman’s entry Transcendentalism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The Table of Contents of this Encyclopedia will also lead you to other entries if you become interested in the philosophical context for reading Emerson, such as “Idealism” and “Materialism.”

The Reviews and Impressions from Emerson’s contemporaries will be useful fas well. So will the reception of these ideas in the next generation of American writers and thinkers. Perry Miller, along with Steven Whicher, Joel Porte, and F. O. Matthiessen reset the terms of the critical discussion of Emerson; and excerpts from this body of commentary is included in the “Criticism” section of the Norton––from the 1930s (Firkins) to Hyatt H. Waggoner’s assessment of Emerson as a poet in the 1970s. These writers make up the historical contexts and critical theories that shape literary analysis and inform scholarly debates in the field of literary studies that we describe as criticism and theory.

In the coming weeks, reading the primary and secondary work offers you the opportunity to place your own experiences and assessment of Emerson’s writing into the arc of commentary by other readers. The pleasures of reading may even become the pleasures of reading about reading. From words to words about words. Then comes the important questions that arise in any course of reading and reflection in a community of readers, the pursuit of which some people call theory, or what might be described as words about words about words.

As you continue your writing about Emerson, consider developing your first thoughts (or first impressions) into second thoughts (more developed thinking). One way to do this is to follow the strategy Emerson himself used in the essay Quotation and Originality: make a case and then argue the opposite of the case. That is, Emerson may offer in one sentence or section of an essay what you think is a position or case; but then, and this happens again and again, the position becomes less reliable, more uncertain, even difficult to hang on to. “I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition,” Emerson says in his essay Experience.

Photo credit: Aurora Borealis, Sarkijarvi, Finland. Mark C. Long

Intertextuality

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Reading Michel Foucault’s “What is an Author?” is an opportunity to consider the ways texts are made out of other texts. The range of references in his essay are a good reminder of how we think with others––how, metaphorically speaking, we are in thought rather than thought being in us.

Intertextuality is a useful term to describe this fact, in part, because it unsettles commonplace assumptions about authorship and originality. Remarkably these ideas about texts and other texts were circulating in the nineteenth century. Here is how Ralph Waldo Emerson, who we will be reading together in a few weeks, approaches this idea in his late essay “Quotation and Originality”:

Our debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive, our protest or private addition so rare and insignificant, — and this commonly on the ground of other reading or hearing, — that, in a large sense, one would say there is no pure originality. All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. We quote not only books and proverbs, but arts, sciences, religion, customs, and laws; nay, we quote temples and houses, tables and chairs by imitation.

At about the same time Emerson was writing his literary essays the natural historian Charles Darwin’s writing was proposing that the essences of things were by definition relational. Darwin’s research led people to become more aware of how things are connected with other things, whether animal, vegetable, or mineral. John Muir makes a comparable comment in his journals during his first summer in the mountains of California. “When we try to pick out anything by itself,” he writes, “we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe” (My First Summer in the Sierra 110). Whether it is Emerson writing about quotation, or Darwin or Muir reflecting on the natural world, the study of relationships between things—and of things as sets of relationships—offers a useful analogy for the study of language and literature.

The Latin term intertexto means to intermingle while weaving. The French semiotician Julia Kristeva uses the term(1) in the essay “Word, Dialogue, and Novel” to describe the constitutive process. Working with ideas from the writer Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895-1975), she argues that any text “is constructed of a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another” (66). Here is how another literary theorist, Roland Barthes, puts the case:

Any text is a new tissue of past citations. Bits of code, formulae, rhythmic models, fragments of social languages, etc., pass into the text and are redistributed within it, for there is always language before and around the text. Intertextuality, the condition of any text whatsoever, cannot, of course, be reduced to a problem of sources or influences; the intertext is a general field of anonymous formulae whose origin can scarcely ever be located; of unconscious or automatic quotations, given without quotation marks. (“Theory of the Text” 39)

As Emerson suggests, the very existence of a text implies coexistence with other texts. Film adaptations of books, cultural references in television and film, remix and sampling in music—all of these practices are intertextual.

Endnote

1. Literary and cultural theorists that discuss the concept of intertextuality include Vladimir Volosinov, Mikhail Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, and Gerard Gennete. Volosinov’s Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1986) is a study of the relationship between language and society. Genette’s The Architext (1992), Palimpsests (1997), and Paratexts (1997) elaborate 1) the ways a text relates to other texts (transtextuality); 2) explicit quotation or allusion (intertextuality); 3) prefaces, interviews, publicity, reviews (paratextuality), commentary (metatextuality); 4) the play of one text off another (hypertextuality), and 5) generic expectations (architextuality).