Kathryn Schulz’s attack on Thoreau is not very convincing. She
quotes from Robert Louis Stevenson’s essay on Thoreau, and basically she simply
develops his line of attack. At the bottom, of course, Schultz’s problem is the
person, Thoreau. She thinks of him as a fanatic, a narcissist, a this and a
that. It is the moralizing approach. Bad Thoreau, wandering like Maldoror along
the beach at Cape Cod. And – implicitly – good us, who would weep decorously
over the bodies of children who are drowned. Schulz treats this passage as
though Thoreau had no idea that weeping decorously over the bodies of children
was to be expected – this, in the great era of sentimental literature about
same.
What is lost when one gets immersed in the moralizing
approach is, well, almost everything. For Schultz, for instance, Thoreau is an
absolutely humorless person. Thus, she reads Walden as an absolutely humorless
text. In the process, she seems to have ignored completely the long tradition
of American deadpan. But to read Thoreau’s account of how a man could drill
some holes in a crate by the side of a railroad and live there like a lord is
not the result of narcissism or fanaticism – Schulz takes Thoreau’s phrase that
he isn’t jesting as obvious, without raising the question of why he would feel
he had to offer it - but of the deadpan that informs the work.
Walden has a lot of boring patches, patches in which detail
or quotation simply don’t come to life. But mainly, its life comes out of the
portrayal of Thoreau at odds with the maxims he throws out, as well as with the
side observations he drops along the way. Walden’s nearest relatives are not
the naturalist’s books that came after, like Muir, but Buster Keaton’s movies. After
all, the book begins with an absurd question that is supposedly being posed by
the entire community – how Thoreau lived at Walden. Which is like supposing
that the entire community of Santa Monica is wondering how the clochard with
the cough that I hear at night is doing camping in the local park. Thoreau well
knew that his writing, into which he threw accounts of his life, was not
popular. He was not a seller.
And in fact this is where the Economy section in Walden is
interesting, and where the – to Schultz – inexplicable popularity of certain of
its phrases, for instance, that most men lead lives of quiet desperation, comes
from. Schulz doesn’t sound like she has ever had a single day in her life where
she didn’t have lunch money, but such was not the case for the Irish immigrants
that she begins with, or indeed, for most of the 80 percent in the US at the
moment who make below 75 thou a year.
It is here that Thoreau lands a lot of great punches – in as
much as a maxim is a line with a punch – related, as it is, to the punchline.
When Thoreau writes that the cost of a thing “is the amount of what I will call
life which is required to be exchanged for it”, he does a lot to explain the
central fact of the economy from the point of view of how we experience it – or
fail to. It is the stick man of the rational calculator who has forgotten what
rationality is that makes the chapter interesting, gives it a dialectical flow.
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