Extra-vagant, "Natural" Writing

In wrestling with the formal difficulties of Walden together in class, we came upon some significant roadblocks to defining its overall structure, or characterizing it in any one, comprehending formula. On returning to Thoreau's own words, however, I find that he would probably at least claim to be pleased by our lack of comprehension.

"It is a ridiculous demand which England and America make, that you shall speak so that they can understand you [isn't this a demand common to most language-users, not only the English and Americans?]. [...] As if Nature could support but one order of understandings, could not sustain birds as well as quadrupeds, flying as well as creeping things, and hush and who, which Bright [an ox] can understand, were the best English. As if there were safety in stupidity alone. I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extra- vagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced" (from the "Conclusion," p. 216 in my edition).

Thoreau's sense of multiple "orders of understandings" in Nature seems to reflect our sense of formal dis-order in Walden, which creates the possibility for multiple forms of writing inhabiting the same literary space, from the practical and scientific, to the reflective, philosophical and moral, to the biographical and historical.

But then, Thoreau had already hinted at this penchant for formal spaciousness earlier, in his description of his ideal house. He dreams of "a larger and more populous house, [...] which shall still consist of only one room, a vast, rude, substantial, primitive hall, without ceiling or plastering, with bare rafters and purlins supporting a sort of lower heaven over one's head" ("House-Warming," p. 162). Thoreau wants a house where "you can see all the treasures of the house at one view, and everything hangs upon its peg that a man should use." His house is open to all visitors, and its host is not, as most "nowadays," concerned with "the art of keeping you at the greatest distance," and in "solitary confinement," but rather allows the guest the "freedom of the house" (p. 163).

Curiously enough, the lack of hospitality "nowadays" is a symptom for Thoreau of a degradation in language. "It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its nerve and degenerate into parlaver [i.e. empty talk (according to the Norton footnote)] wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far fetched, through slides and dumb-waiters, as it were; in other words, the parlor is so far from the kitchen and workshop" (p. 163). The alienation and exclusion, the separation of guests from host and cooks and servants and "seven eighths" of the house is enforced by strict formality and the careful compartmentalization of modern architecture. And this alienation in architecture is linked to an alienation in language, in the parlor-talk that has become detached from realities. Thoreau dreams of a more "primitive" house and language, "as if only the savage dwelt near enough to Nature and Truth to borrow a trope from them" (p. 163).

Still earlier, I find Thoreau had hinted at his distaste for empty formality, in his digression on architecture in "Economy": "A great proportion of architectural ornaments are literally hollow, and a September gale would strip them off, like borrowed plumes, without injury to the substantials." "What if an equal ado were made about the ornaments of style in literature," Thoreau wonders, finding that, indeed, hollow ornaments do exist literally, for "so are made the belles-lettres and the beaux-arts and their professors" (p. 32).

It seems that Thoreau wants his language and literary style to mirror simple and "primitive" Nature, in all its openness and multivalence, its ability to "sustain" multiple "orders of understanding," and in its radical hospitality. So we should not be surprised to find a certain looseness in the shape of Walden, or a certain cavernous quality and lack of clear structure or organization. As he tells us, Thoreau celebrates a more "vagant" (i.e. "wandering," "having no settled home or abiding place" [from the OED]) concept of language over the "stupidity" of settled and civilized expression, confined by formality. Thoreau's guests at Walden are invited, rather, to the "freedom of the house;" so long, I suppose, as they do not burn down the place.