Leo Marx

From 1850s

[edit] Leo Marx

[edit] from The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. Oxford University Press: 1964.

Walden...may be read as the report of an experiment in transcendental pastoralism. The organizing design is like that of many American fables: Walden begins with the hero’s withdrawal from society in the direction of nature. The main portion of the book is given over to a yearlong trial of Emerson’s prescription for achieving a new life. When Thoreau tells of his return to Concord, in the end, he seems to have satisfied himself about the efficacy of this method of redemption. It may be difficult to say exactly what is being claimed, but the triumphant tone of the concluding chapters leaves little doubt that he is announcing positive results. His most telling piece of evidence is Walden – the book itself. Recognizing the clarity, coherence, and power of the writing, we can only conclude – or so transcendental doctrine would have it – that the experiment has been a success. The vision of unity that had made the aesthetic order of Walden possible had in turn been made possible by the retreat to the pond. The pastoral impulse somehow had provided access to the order latent in the cosmos.

But the meaning of Walden is more complicated than this affirmation. Because Thoreau takes seriously what Emerson calls the “method of nature” – more seriously than the master himself – the book has a strong contrapuntal theme. Assuming that natural facts properly perceived and accurately transcribed must yield the truth, Thoreau adopts the tone of a hard-headed empiricist. At the outset he makes it clear that he will tell exactly what happened. He claims to have a craving for reality (be it life or death), and he would have us believe him capable of reporting the negative evidence. Again and again he allows the facts to play against his desire, so that his prose at its best acquires a distinctively firm, cross-grained texture. Though the dominant one is affirmative, the undertone is skeptical, and it qualifies the import of episode after episode. For this reason Walden belongs among the first in a long series of American books which, taken together, have had the effect of circumscribing the pastoral hope, much as Virgil circumscribes it in his eclogues. In form and feeling, indeed, Thoreau’s book has much in common with the classic Virgilian mode.