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reau not only for Walden and his honorably vigorous essays but for
his achieving what Buell calls the end point in [his] epic of the
autonomous self imagining with fascination yet hesitancy the pos-
sibility of relinquishing that autonomy to nature. 9 No such imag-
ining ever occurred to Emerson, but it was Thoreau s direction,
as it appears to Buell, in the Journal after the summer of 1851,
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when he paid increasing attention to the natural world and less to
the nature of his own mind. Sharon Cameron s interests don t co-
incide with Buell s at every point, but I assume that she, too, sub-
scribes to a version of ecocentrism. Cameron is primarily con-
cerned to show how the Journal differs from Walden, though her
reading of both differs from Buell s. She writes: Walden would
produce an account of nature visible for others. The Journal turns
its back on others in order to maintain: There is no interpreter
between us and our consciousness ( January 5, 1850 [2:84]). It
would not be surprising to find an ideological difference between
Walden and the Journal. Walden was written in several versions over
seven years before its publication in August 1854. The Journal was
written over twenty-four years (from 1837 to 1861) with no evident
intention that it should be published. Posterity would decide. The
question for an ecocentrist for any reader, in fact is why did
Thoreau, in the Journal, turn his back, if Cameron is right, on
the relation between the social and the natural to explore the re-
lation between the natural and the human a relation inhos-
pitable to the values and conventions of critical discourse, social
by definition? 10 I think an ecocentrist would have to start farther
back by putting all of these putative relations in question. If you
want to establish them as relations, you have to work from the
ground up, whatever you deem the ground to be, where all the talk
begins. Of course no ecocentrist pushes the ideology of green to
its theoretical conclusion: you couldn t live if you worried about
the feelings of the water you boiled for your coffee or even
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though this is more conceivable the flowers you cut for the vase
on your dinner table.
Anthropocentrists oppose ecocentrists because they regard
them as ethically pretentious: no improvement in the ordinary de-
cencies is good enough for them. Anthropocentrists believe that
the world was providentially made for man, man being the high-
est entity in the scale of being, at least thus far, so we are geneti-
cally privileged. It would be silly not to enjoy the boon. If you
want to live on vegetables or herbs, go ahead, but don t make a
metaphysics out of it. Again, it s unlikely that anyone would push
his anthropocentrism or homocentrism, as his opponents call
it to its quasi-logical extreme: at some point you would have to
wonder how and why you were deemed superior enough to get
away with murder. Those who don t believe that Thoreau was an
ecocentrist want to keep him on the anthropocentric side, despite
much evidence to the contrary. They do this by maintaining with
Leo Marx that Walden is a pastoral or a pastoral romance. Marx
holds that Walden is not what Buell wants it to be:
Its subject is not the representation of nature for its
own sake ; nor is it primarily a work of nature writing.
It is a pastoral, and despite their superficial similarities
the two kinds of writing are quite different, in some
ways antipathetic. For some two millennia, beginning
with the work of two poets of antiquity, Theocritus
(third century bc) and Virgil (first century bc), the
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pastoral in literature had portrayed the idealized lives of
shepherds, its one constant feature being the contrast,
explicit or implied, between their simple ways and the
complex worldly lives led by courtiers and city dwellers.
Although herdsmen lived in particularly close relations
with nature, the literal representation of the nonhuman
world rarely if ever had been a part of pastoral.
It follows that Thoreau was no less interested in society than in
nature. Marx makes the point that almost everything Thoreau
wrote between 1845 and 1849, when he conducted his experi-
ment at the pond and spent his night in jail, was informed by an
intense awareness of the social and cultural costs of the transition
to industrial capitalism. 11
But interested, in the sentence I ve quoted from Marx
about society and nature, darkens the issue. What counts is not
the degree of Thoreau s interest but the quality of it. It would be
hard to show that Thoreau gave his neighbors in Concord the
quality of appreciation, theoretical and practical, he brought to
hawk, loon, and water. Marx wants to retain Thoreau for society
and politics. He is bound to regard Thoreau s later turn toward
quasi-scientific description of the natural world as regrettable, a
sign of his loss of nerve and hope, given the damage that indus-
trial capitalism had already done and the further damage it was
bent on doing. Marx thinks that Buell and other ecocentrists are
misleading about Thoreau; their talk of science and nature writ-
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Walden
ing diverts attention from the only issues that matter, the political
conflicts of Thoreau s time and our own. In that respect Marx s
best companion could have been William Empson, because Emp-
son s terms of value in Some Versions of Pastoral (1935) were politi-
cal, even though they pointed to a different conclusion. Marx em-
phasizes in pastoral the contrast between two ways of life, each
grounded in a distinct set of relations with nature. 12 Empson was
sensitive to the contrast, and to its origin in different relations with
nature, but he found in pastoral a desire to reconcile the rival
classes in the end, not to leave them shouting at each other across
the fences. The essential trick of the old pastoral, he says, was
to imply a beautiful relation between rich and poor. 13 Pastoral
does not ask us to be blind to social conflicts but to allow ourselves
to be brought to a high-minded mood in which they don t seem
to matter. As in Gray s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard :
Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
What this means, as Empson says, is that England in the eigh-
teenth century didn t have a scholarship system and therefore
wasted the talents of promising boys and girls:
This is stated as pathetic, but the reader is put into a
mood in which one would not try to alter it. (It is true
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Walden
that Gray s society, unlike a possible machine society,
was necessarily based on manual labour, but it might
have used a man of special ability wherever he was
born.) By comparing the social arrangement to Nature
he makes it seem inevitable, which it was not, and gives
it a dignity which was undeserved. Furthermore, a gem
does not mind being in a cave and a flower prefers not
to be picked; we feel that the man is like the flower, as
short-lived, natural, and valuable, and this tricks us into
feeling that he is better off without opportunities.14
Marx lets the conflicts stand, and thinks only of deploring them:
he doesn t remark as Empson does how surreptitiously the
language of pastoral can appear to take the harm out of them.
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