ROCHELLE L. J OHNSON
“This Enchantment Is No Delusion”:
Henry David Thoreau, the New
Materialisms, and Ineffable
Materiality
[A]ll things, from bacteria to ourselves, are closely related at
the biochemical level.
—Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis (1994)
All material things are in some sense man's kindred, and
subject to the same laws with him.
—Henry David Thoreau, Journal (1846)
In the inaugural issue of the recently established journal J19: The
Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon
calls for literary scholars to foreground in their work “the relations
between and among people and things that make life meaningful.”
Invoking the New Materialisms and particularly Jane Bennett's work
on enchantment, Dillon proposes that such scholarship in the humanities might function as “acts of reassemblage” and provoke “enchantment.” Dillon then clarifies that enchantment “is a form of ethical
engagement rather than delusion” (177, my emphasis). Dillon's distinction between enchantment and delusion undoubtedly is motivated by
the scholarly tendency of recent decades to regard the pursuit of such
topics as enchantment as unproductive and unsophisticated.1 Indeed,
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 21.3 (Summer 2014)
Advance Access publication August 19, 2014 doi:10.1093/isle/isu078
© The Author(s) 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the
Study of Literature and Environment. All rights reserved.
For Permissions, please email: [email protected]
Thoreau and the New Materialisms
607
those of us working in the environmental humanities have been especially sensitive to accusations of practicing a naïve romanticism or
engaging in what Stacy Alaimo has called “fantasies of transcendence”
(“States” 477). However, even in the nineteenth century, America's nowquintessential practitioner of transcendence, Henry David Thoreau
(1817–62), apparently felt a similar need to distinguish enchantment
from delusion. He had made precisely this same claim—that “enchantment is no delusion” (5: 272).2
We find these words amid Thoreau's journal entry for August 3, 1852,
in which he seeks to explain a moment of profound engagement with his
surroundings. He describes how he had been overcome by a sensory experience that heightened his sense of himself (“my being”) amid the
material world (“the universe”). Thoreau then describes himself as
“affected” and, a few lines later, as “enchanted.” Enchantment, he then
asserts, “is no delusion”; rather, it is “fact”—as much a part of “reality”
as the ground on which he stands (5: 271–72).
While Dillon's and Thoreau's uses of this distinction between enchantment and delusion differ in significant ways, they also share a
surprising amount. Both writers suggest enchantment as a result of
connection, and, more specifically, as a result of mindful commitment
to something beyond the self. Both posit enchantment as a means of
heightening the experience of life—in Dillon's words, a way to “make
life meaningful” (177); and both assert enchantment as a valued outgrowth of increased consciousness of the inter- and intra-relations of
all life forms. Thoreau in fact has much to offer New Materialist efforts
to theorize the complex “relations between and among people and
things” (177). Both his decades of private writings and his published
works reveal persistent, career-long attempts to understand his own
inextricability from the nonhuman material realm that both surrounds
and informs his being.
In the pages that follow, I pursue Thoreau's pursuit of matter
through his journals and other works in order to suggest that his writings might deepen the ambitious New Materialist attempt to more
fully understand the matter that comprises both life and meaning. He
does so in at least three significant ways. First, Thoreau asserts that
“enchantment” is inextricable from the presence of “spirit” in the material world. That is, he specifies that the experience of enchantment is
the experience of spirit—a term that he largely understands in a
secular sense that even today's scholars are likely to find tolerable:
spirit as a vital force permeating all matter (including human beings).
New Materialist pursuits of both enchantment and the complexity of
matter have tended thus far to neglect the matter of spirit, but to
608
I S L E
Thoreau, such neglect would signal a reductionist understanding of
matter, as I will explain.3
Second, Thoreau's work can inform New Materialist attempts to
theorize the complexity of matter by offering a comprehensive model
of what Stacy Alaimo has termed “trans-corporeality”—an understanding of the human body as ultimately inseparable from the material phenomena comprising the world. Far from engaging in mere
“fantasies of transcendence,” much of Thoreau's corpus serves as a
sustained exploration of how to re-think the self as part and parcel
of matter (Alaimo, “States” 477). Thoreau's writings suggest how to
“trac[e] substantial interchanges” between the human body and the
material world, “render[ing] the human permeable” and “dissolving
stable outlines” between human and nonhuman matter, to borrow
Alaimo's words describing the goals of trans-corporeality (477).4
Third, Thoreau's understanding of his place in the material realm
addresses a crucial question recently posed by Alaimo to New
Materialist scholars—namely, “How can we rethink matter as activity
rather than passive substance?” (“Trans-Corporeal” 245). When we
consider Thoreau's explorations of his place in the material realm, we
find an understanding of matter as activity. His writings consistently
demonstrate his participation with—and formation through—matter's
agential vitality. Put differently, his works explore how a human being
senses, experiences, and knows the vibrancy of matter and then is
moved in his own becoming in relation to that agency-that-is-being;
or, put differently still, Thoreau reveals how nonhuman material
agency can make itself felt by/through/within human corporeality (although separating these forms of matter is problematic, as evidenced
below).
As suggested by my grasping for terms in the previous sentence,
we do not yet have words for such things; and like Dillon (and Bennett
before her), I am using terms (“enchantment,” “spirit,” and even, for
some scholars, “Thoreau”) considered suspect by some high theorists.
However, the New Materialist interest in enchantment suggests a
desire on the part of scholars to move beyond emotional and ethical
registers and toward the mystical. “Enchantment,” after all, denotes a
state of wonder, entrancement in mystery, even bewitchment—being
captured by a spell. Certainly, much New Materialist scholarship
already employs language that assumes an ineffable quality to existence: consider, for instance, Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann's
description of the New Materialist paradigm as theorizing matter
through “ontology, epistemology, and ethics” “in terms of a radical immanence” (450, my emphasis). Such phrasing assumes a numinous
aspect of materiality. Or consider Dillon's suggestion that scholars
Thoreau and the New Materialisms
609
pursue connectivity in order to “make life meaningful” through their
theoretical models (177). This is clearly work aimed at engaging
emotion, and, as Dillon argues, values (ethics); but finding meaning in
life also moves beyond emotion and ethics. The search for meaning
has long been associated with the deepest and most mysterious
sources of fulfillment in human life—and certainly one of these, which
has undoubtedly taken many forms throughout history, is the experience of spirit, typically defined today as a vital principle or animating
force of all life. Thoreau's works can help us deepen the nascent New
Materialist engagement with ineffable aspects of our experience of
(and as) the material world.5
Thoreauvian Enchantment
Thoreau's August 1852 journal passage can serve to introduce both
his sense that spirit is integral to enchantment and his trans-corporeal
experience of ineffable materiality. Notably, his description begins
with the corporeal. He references his body and its sensory experience
on this “temperate noon”: from the “E[ast] window,” he hears both a
cricket and some distant notes played on a piano. His words suggest
both that he is not in control of this experience and that the sounds
serve as a material force entering his body: they “reach me,” and “the
melody steals into my being” (my emphasis). At first passive to these
sensory experiences (“I know not when it [the melody] began to
occupy me”), he then becomes conscious of being occupied. Thoreau
is thus a subject made, in part, by the sounds of crickets and piano,
even as he is an object that these sounds permeate. The boundaries of
self and nonself blur. Thoreau is transformed—“affected,” “enchanted,” and “attuned to the universe” (5: 271–72).
So far, this is a tentative moment of transcendence, as traditional
readings would have it—a moment when Thoreau rises above his own
corporeality (as well as that of the material world from which the
sounds emerge) and into the realms of egoism, mysticism, and philosophy. But Thoreau is careful to explain here that he does not see his experience in just this way: he writes, “But what I am impressed by is the
fact that this enchantment is no delusion” (my emphasis). He goes on to
parse this assertion, taking care to describe the way in which enchantment occurs not as a result of an escape from the material world but
from the meeting of his sensory experience as a body, the material
world, and the matter that is his mind. He puts it this way: “So far as
truth is concerned it [enchantment] is a fact such as what we call our
actual existence.” Enchantment, that is, is as true (and as “fact[ual]”)
as physical-material forms: “It is its [enchantment's] truth & reality that
610
I S L E
affect me” (emphasis added). Thoreau refuses to distinguish “enchantment” from “our actual existence,” just as he dismisses distinctions
between the “higher” or “more glorious” experience of enchantment
and a routine moment on what is typically considered “the dull earth.”
While enchantment may seem to offer “a far higher and glorious”
experience than most moments that humans experience, it, too, is
“reality”—“and no delusion” (5: 272). Thoreau thus claims enchantment as factual (or legitimate) and as an integral, significant part of
human existence in (and as part of ) the world. His experience is corporeal, material, and intellectual-philosophical (or metaphysical).6
Thoreau then references both “soul” and “spirit,” attributing to each
term a secular, rather than a religious, connotation. First, he claims that
an individual experiencing enchantment possesses “a soul in health”
and that “the aspirant soul” will seek to be “expanded” by the
“draught” of nature, which is “wholesomer” than “wine.” Here, the
“soul in health” is “attuned to the universe,” rather than to the deferred
promise of paradise and redemption through sacral wine. Spirit, that is,
happens here on earth, through the material world rather than by
means of a deity. Thoreau also notes that maintaining an experience of
enchantment requires “courage”; remaining passive is easier than remaining engaged, but enchantment yields the benefit of the “perpetual
flow of spirit.” That is, enchantment makes one aware of the flow of
spirit, a term which, given all that precedes this statement, must be understood as the vital force connecting the corporeal human body, the
body's material surroundings, and the realm of intellect (“thoughts”
and “imagination”). In other words, spirit pervades both matter and
mind, and enchantment alerts us to this “perpetual flow” (5: 272).
When today's readers encounter the term “spirit,” most assume the
word's religious application—spirit as divinely inspired or representative of providential purpose. However, following Thoreau's August
1852 journal entry, I use the word throughout this essay not in the
sense of a divine power or presence inscribed by humanity on matter
(or understood to be emanating forth from matter) but, rather, in other
senses in which that word has been used throughout history:7 to indicate “soul” and “mind” (both of which originate in the matter that is
the human brain), “vital power,” and particularly, given how Thoreau
pursues this notion throughout his writings, “a subtle or intangible
element or principle in material things,” including the matter that is
the human mind (OED). Tellingly, the OED identifies as obsolete this
last definition, which defines “spirit” as a secular yet elusive matterenergy. Indeed, as physicist Karen Barad remarks, one of the most
trenchant aspects of the last century is the problematic but “common
belief that there is an inherent boundary between the ‘physical’ and
Thoreau and the New Materialisms
611
the ‘metaphysical’” (“Posthumanist” 812 n.14). This problematic belief
would compel a dismissal of a definition of spirit as inherent in materiality itself, yet as his August 1852 journal entry reveals, for Thoreau
such boundaries between spirit and matter were not clear.
This, then, is Thoreauvian trans-corporeality as it emerges in this
1852 journal passage: a recognition of matter wherein “matter” is understood to include not only physical manifestations and phenomena
but also the ineffable. As I will demonstrate below, an examination of
Thoreau's pursuit of trans-corporeality throughout his corpus reveals
a similar conception and experience of bodies, natures, and an elusive
but significant spirit as themselves intertwined and comprising both
self and the rest of matter. In other words, Thoreau pursued an understanding of matter as trans-corporeal, and he understood the transcorporeal as also trans-spiritual; that is, to his experience, these are one
and the same.
If, as Iovino recently suggests, “[w]hat is at stake in the ‘material
turn’ is the search for new conceptual models apt to theorize the connections between matter and agency on the one side, and the intertwining of bodies, natures, and meanings on the other side” (Iovino
and Oppermann 450), then we do well to look to Thoreau, whose
works can productively deepen the New Materialist model of connectivity and trans-corporeality by urging attention to ineffable materiality.
Situating Spirit amid the New Materialisms
Particularly in the last decade, scholars of various disciplines have
endeavored to develop a theoretical approach that might facilitate the
integration of scientific findings that are now divisive and frequently
misunderstood, particularly among political leaders and the general
public, into dominant ways of understanding the human place in
nature. Some scholars argue that scientific knowledge has come to
seem monolithic and impenetrable—a situation preventing its meaningful integration into both political decision-making and habits of
living. Bruno Latour's analyses of science and culture provide one catalyst for much of this thinking; Latour believes that Science (with a
capital “s”) represents “the imbroglio of politics, nature, and knowledge that we must learn to disentangle” (10). In other words, the findings of science now affect and are affected by politics, and this
reciprocal politicization harms democracies and scientists by, on the
one hand, rendering scientific knowledge inaccessible (and, therefore,
largely inapplicable) to the public and, on the other, stymying efforts
on behalf of the scientists to have their findings meaningfully integrated into cultural practice. Such unraveling demands that nonhuman
612
I S L E
nature be understood more precisely, rather than as what Latour sardonically describes as “that blend of Greek politics, French Cartesianism,
and American parks” (5). Many scholars are inspired by Latour's determination to discover—as announced in the subtitle to his Politics of
Nature—“how to bring the sciences into democracy,” and as a result of
work by Latour and others (including Adorno, Deleuze, and Guattari),
critics are turning attention to scientific findings and their potential contributions to critical, political, and social transformation.
Following Latour, environmentally oriented theorists (both humanists and social-scientists) have coalesced under the rubric of the New
Materialisms; they also seek to de-politicize “nature,” particularly by
re-politicizing discourse, the nonhuman world, and the human body.8
This work has emphasized the illogical nature of assumptions that
have structured (and circumscribed) “modern” and “postmodern”
thought by demonstrating the chemical and physical inseparability, to
scientific understanding, of the various elements comprising the material world. That is, the New Materialist notion of materiality “tends to
horizontalize the relations between humans, biota, and abiota”
(Bennett, Vibrant 112), rendering dichotomies such as nature/culture
problematic and inoperative. This grand equalizing of forms of matter
reveals many additional persistent ideological dichotomies (including
language/reality, human/animal, and organic/inorganic) that, following
the “subjective” or “linguistic” turn in theory, have enabled an ideological separation of humanity from the rest of the material world.9
In dismantling such dualistic thinking, scholars seek to establish
revised understandings of matter that emphasize equivalently humanity's materiality and matter's vitality. Bennett, for example, theorizes
“a vital materiality” (Vibrant i); and Barad posits “the universe” as
“agential intra-activity in its becoming,” using the prefix “intra-” to
signal “the mutual constitution of entangled agencies” (“Posthumanist”
818; Meeting 33). That is, these scholars emphasize the necessity of attending to nonhuman nature not as a vague conglomeration of “things”
or even as a varied set of “phenomena” but, instead, as a compendium
of inter-related and interactive “actants,” a term from Latour that
Bennett defines as “a source of action that can be either human or nonhuman” (Vibrant viii). New Materialists thus grant matter agency and,
more, argue that “[a]gency is not an attribute whatsoever—it is ‘doing’/
‘being’ in its intra-activity” (Barad, “Posthumanist” 827). To this understanding, vitality, vibrancy, and agency are states of existence; all matter
exists as life force in an integrated (but certainly varied) material universe, and all matter shapes and is shaped by (indeed, comes into being
through) all other matter, particularly at the local level. These discussions
of matter emphasize biological, chemical, and ecological insight into the
Thoreau and the New Materialisms
613
enmeshedness of (and vast permeability and inter-/intra-actions among/
between) molecular structures—including, of course, those comprising
human beings. Critics working in this vein have focused on topics
ranging from dirt to Omega-3s and from ocean ecology to shit—all
forms of matter, the agency of which affects (and is) ecosystems—including, it should go without saying, human beings.10
The New Materialism has reinvigorated the environmental humanities. Literary scholars in particular seek to re-conceptualize matter by
establishing “the many ways material realities are enmeshed with
meanings and narratives,” revealing the material connections between
matter, thought, and story (Iovino and Oppermann 448). Such explorations see discourse as shaping and shaped by materiality, even as the
material world reflects, embodies, even is discourse. To this understanding, forms of matter—say, a city dump or a weed in an agricultural field—convey a story even as they enact one, even as they are one,
and their story and meanings obtain in the world that is all matter. To
this understanding, too, human meanings are components of matter,
no more so and no less so than nonhuman matter, since the human/
nonhuman dichotomy fails to hold. Human meanings are matter, and
all matter bears and exists as meaning.
Nonetheless, largely missing from New Materialist discussions is
an analysis of the ways in which the persistent mind/matter dichotomy continues to limit understandings of material agency.11 That such
discussions tend to circumvent spirit as a component of matter likely
stems from the assumption that spirit is an emotional product of
humanity—that human thought and feeling craft spirit and then
impose that “feeling” or “belief” upon the world. Spirit therefore seems
tangential to theoretically-minded discussions of the more tangible
“matter.” Such an assumption, however, reinscribes the very dichotomies with which the New Materialisms seek to contend—especially the
nature/culture dichotomy, which asserts humanity as outside of nature,
an intelligence that knows the world as other. However, as a component
of human experience and, therefore, of the intra-activity of all matter,
spirit exists as matter even as matter exists as spirit.
Scientists help assuage any remaining pangs that scholars may feel
at considering spirit as matter (or matter as spirit). Research among
scientists in several fields (and in neuroscience, in particular) posits
that what we might call the essence of the self—in Francis Crick's language, the “soul” or “spirit”—is “in fact no more than the behavior of
a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules” (4). As
Crick explains, “The scientific belief is that our minds—the behavior of
our brains—can be explained by the interactions of nerve cells (and
other cells) and the molecules associated with them” (7).12 In more
614
I S L E
recent years, neuroscience has pursued the material nature of mind,
and eco-psychology posits the mind as formed (and informed) by the
rest of matter. The notion that the human mind can exist in isolation
from the physical (and chemical) environment no longer holds: matter
makes and shapes mind, and mind is shaped by—and is—matter.13
While this claim may seem both obvious and irrefutable, its implications could transform the field of New Materialism, forcing scholars
to accept as agentic matter the many ways in which human beings experience their material intra-activity: in manners sensory, emotional,
and spiritual (even transcendent). Rather than dismissing such forms of
the agentic intra-activity of matter as naïve, hopelessly romantic, or
completely culturally constructed, we would benefit from exploring
them as products of complex agential materiality (including the matter
of culture).
Recognizing spirit as matter entails accepting the full force of dissolving the nature/culture dichotomy. It may be readily apparent that
when we trace the exchange of toxins across bodies—be they human,
water, or microbial—or theorize intra-relations among human bodies
and trash heaps, we delve into (even as we exist in and amid—indeed,
even as we are) this biochemical realm. Less obvious is that when we
consider spirit, we also venture in the material. Following the notion
of matter as itself meaningful and participating in the narrativity that
is the world, and accepting spirit as matter, also entails accepting
matter as spirit—that is, spirit not as originating from humanity/
culture but as part of the being that is the world. As Barad reminds us,
“the ‘knower’ does not stand in a relation of absolute externality to the
natural world being investigated—there is no such exterior observational point. . . . ‘We’ are not outside observers of the world. Nor are
we simply located at particular places in the world; rather, we are part
of the world in its ongoing intra-activity” (“Posthumanist” 828).
Finally, a recognition of spirit-matter involves accepting the brain (and
its thoughts or feelings) as material.
As Thoreau asked rhetorically in his Journal in 1840, “Do not
thoughts and men's lives enrich the earth and change the aspect of
things as much as a new growth of wood?” (1: 147). Human thoughts
and lives—even the human experience of enchantment—inform and
help constitute the matter that is all being.
Thoreauvian Trans-corporeality
In many of his journal passages, Thoreau explores ineffable materiality as an integral component of his trans-corporeality. On January 23,
1841, for example, he records three intriguing (and seemingly
Thoreau and the New Materialisms
615
unrelated) ideas that he will revisit with striking persistence in his
later writings as he continues to pursue the interconnectedness of
himself and the rest of matter. These three ideas are: sound and silence
as complementary (and even similar) presences in the world; routine
as necessary to the well-being of both human and nonhuman life
forms; and the nocturnal growth of corn as an elusive but compelling
phenomenon. Perhaps most significant amid his pursuit of these three
themes is the emergence of Thoreau's capacious experience of self: he
recognized his own being as informed by—and even as inclusive of—
phenomena not typically thought of as physical or material. That is,
his sense of his own trans-corporeality included physical aspects of
matter and incorporeal aspects of matter, such as sounds and silence,
routine, and the growth of corn (each of which might more precisely
be called an immaterial—yet physical—phenomenon). On January 23,
he writes:
A day is lapsing. I hear cockrils crowing in the yard, and
see them stalking among the chips in the sun. I hear
busy feet on the floors—and the whole house jars with
industry. Surely the day is well spent—and the time is
full to overflowing. Mankind is as busy as the flowers in
summer—which make haste to unfold themselves in the
forenoon, and close their petals in the afternoon.
The momentous topics of human life are always of secondary importance to the business in hand, just as carpenters discuss politics between the strokes of the
hammer, while they are shingling a roof.
The squeaking of the pump sounds as necessary as the
music of the spheres.
The solidity and apparent necessity of this routine—insensibly recommend it to me. It is like a cane or a
cushion for the infirm, and in view of it all are infirm. If
there were but one erect and solid standing tree in the
woods, all creatures would go to rub against it, and
make sure of their footing. Routine is a ground to stand
on, a wall to retreat to; we cannot draw on our boots
without bracing ourselves against it. . . .
Our health requires that we should recline on it [routine]
from time to time. When we are in it, the hand stands
still on the face of the clock, and we grow like corn in the
genial dankness and silence of the night. Our weakness
616
I S L E
wants it, but our strength uses it. Good for the body is
the work of the body, and good for the soul the work of
the soul, and good for either the work of the other—let
them not call hard names, nor know a divided interest.
(1: 229–30)
In several respects, this passage records Thoreau's sense of transcorporeality and the ultimate unity of material variety. First, the
passage collapses distinctions between “nature” and “culture,” in part
by aligning the activities and daily cycles of man, rooster, and flower
petal, but also by equating the significance of sounds produced by
human beings with those made by nonhuman animals. Creatures may
seem distinct but they—as well as the sounds they produce—comprise
one integrated realm.
In addition, this passage from the Journal complicates the traditional
dichotomy of inorganic and organic by figuring something inorganic
(an intangible expression of energy—“routine”) in terms of the decidedly organic and tangible: “cane,” “cushion,” “wall,” “ground,” and
“tree.” Routine is as much a part of the material realm as a tree. While
these various metaphors for routine may seem divisible into those
evoking domestication (canes and cushions) and, by contrast, those
representing the wild (a “solid standing tree”), Thoreau further
challenges the conventional hierarchies of human and nonhuman by
suggesting that all life forms, domesticated (human) and wild (nonhuman) alike, seek—and need—routine (“all creatures”; “all are infirm”).
Bodies of all kinds share the same needs. He similarly describes the
“business” of human life as like that of roosters feeding in a yard, and
he likewise figures human growth and health as akin to—even aspiring to—the nocturnal growth of corn.14
This January 1841 entry further challenges conventional conceptions of materiality by asserting the inseparability of “body” and
“soul” (“let them not know . . . a divided interest”). The mind (“soul”)
recognizes its own corporeality (“body”) but also its intimate relation
to other aspects of the material world (cockrils in the yard, flowers
petals closing at the end of day, corn rising in the night). Moreover,
Thoreau declares the audible sounds of physical matter, such as the
“squeaking of the pump,” as playing as essential a role in the universe
as the inaudible, immaterial, and mythical “music of the spheres.”
Indeed, Thoreau's account references phenomena usually assumed to
have no material basis at all: the elusive “soul” and the enigmatic,
celestial music of the spheres, which is a “sound” paradoxically experienced as “silence.” Thoreau includes myth and mystery, and even
the irrational, in his consideration of an experience he accepts as
Thoreau and the New Materialisms
617
having a material quality (“solidity”): he accepts “routine,” given its
“solidity and apparent necessity,” an admittedly “insensible” (nonsensible) rationale. Insensible though it may appear even to Thoreau, he
nonetheless finds the universal need for routine—on the part of both
body and soul—as integral to the material universe, as much so as the
cockrils in the yard.
In these paragraphs, Thoreau communicates that each of these elements informs his being in the world: the human and the nonhuman,
sound and silence, body and soul, the concrete and the evanescent.
And at every turn, he blurs the boundaries of these conventionally distinct categories, offering what Kristen Case has described as “a new
epistemology in which the self is finally inseparable from its surroundings, part of the processes of nature it describes” (97). As Thoreau
would later write in his journal, “All material things are in some sense
man's kindred, and subject to the same laws with him” (2: 354). But as
the January 1841 passage and later writings insist, “material things”
must be understood to include everything from the music of the
spheres to a rooster's call, and from the body to the soul.
Below, I outline Thoreau's persistent return to these three ideas
throughout his corpus, arguing that their recurrence helps signal
Thoreau's continual goal of conveying the thorough interrelatedness
and interdependencies of matter comprising what I will call the
human/more-than-human continuum. Following Thoreau's sense of the
ultimate imbrication of the human and nonhuman, I use this admittedly unwieldy phrase to acknowledge that while nonhuman matter
carries much significance that has traditionally been neglected (thus
theorists emphasize the more-than human), much of matter—that is, its
forms as well as its potency—remains beyond human comprehension
and, therefore, resists discourse, as recent attempts at naming the full
complexity and potency of matter attest. (Consider, for example, terms
such as “agentic force,” “dynamism,” and “vibrancy.”)15 The construction of the phrase human/more-than-human continuum signals the continuous and contiguous materiality of the human with that which is
beyond the human. This is not to say that nonhuman “nature” is essentialized—that “it” exists as an elusive, ahistorical, apolitical, somehow
“pure” realm awaiting the inscription of (some privileged members
of ) humanity. Rather, this is to include in the theorization of matter all
manners in which matter “makes itself felt” and “interven[es] in the
world's becoming” (Barad, “Posthumanist” 810, 824). That is, the
phrase human/more-than-human continuum insists upon what Manuel
De Landa calls “a single matter-energy” and captures the idea that
“[b]eing is various and unitary all at once” (De Landa 21; Bogost 19).
The phrase thereby captures Thoreau's sense of humanity as merely
618
I S L E
co-being within and co-constitutive of the enmeshedness (in space and
throughout all time) that is all being.
Thoreau's Matrix of Trans-corporeality: Sounds,
Routine, Corn
Tracing these three topics as they emerge and reemerge in
Thoreau's corpus can be dizzying, but doing so illustrates both their
importance to Thoreau and his own capacious sense of materiality. In
the pages that follow, I examine the recurrences in his writings of each
of these topics, concluding with the “Sounds” chapter of Walden, in
which Thoreau treats these three topics together again.
Particularly in terms of his treatment of these three topics, Thoreau's
writing method—recording in his journal, re-visiting and revising, and,
often, later revising again for inclusion in lectures and/or publication—
results in a virtual labyrinth of recurring language. For example, sometime between 1842 and 1844 Thoreau recasts the January 23, 1841 entry
quoted above, likely as he contemplated using some of its phrasing in A
Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, in which appears a section
that similarly contemplates routine, sounds, and corn.16 When the language appears in A Week, however, the phrasing defines routine more
clearly as a phenomenon that pervades the human/more-than-human
continuum (see A Week 217–18). Just before this passage in question,
Thoreau describes human labor—that is, the work of some men he sees
on the shore of the river—as “the industry of nature, like the work of
hornets and mud-wasps,” and he characterizes the “haze, the sun's dust
of travel” as among “the inappreciable tides of nature”—inappreciable,
that is, to “all creatures,” who “[resign] themselves to float upon” such
tides (A Week 217). Both human and nonhuman life forms engage in
and benefit from nature's routines and industry (its haze and sunshine).
What remains of the original 1841 journal passage is Thoreau's melding
of the human and nonhuman, his attempted leveling of any distinction
between human and nonhuman creatures in terms of their participation
in the “industry” that is all life—man, bee, haze. Thoreau depicts a
unity amid variety here, recognizing distinct forms of matter while embracing them as equal parts of the human/more-than-human continuum. In this iteration of the original journal passage, Thoreau again
acknowledges the marvelous phenomenon of corn growing in the night
alongside the industriousness of human and nonhuman nature: there is
a flourishing amid trans-corporeality, for all the routines of nature unite
the assemblage.17
Thoreau will return to the topic of routines in Walden, which I
discuss at some length below; his references to corn growing in the
Thoreau and the New Materialisms
619
night, however, appear many times before Walden, truly unifying his
oeuvre, as James R. Guthrie has argued.18 Thoreau first records the
phenomenon of nocturnal corn growth in February 1840 (1: 113), then
re-visits it in January 1841 (1: 229), and writes about it again sometime
between 1842 and 44 (as discussed above). It also appears in July 1850
(3: 92), in early 1851 (3: 180), and also in A Week (217), Walden (111),
and “Walking” (202). As Guthrie establishes, the image “eventually . . .
acquired an emblematic or talismanic significance for” Thoreau,
“connot[ing] intense unconscious, as opposed to conscious, activity”
and “physical, mental, and spiritual revitalization” (156, 158). In its
final incarnation (in “Walking”), Thoreau acknowledges the deep spiritual significance that he grants the phenomenon by including it as
part of what appears to be a revised, secular trinity: “I believe in the
forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows”
(202). Thoreau's inclusion here of corn growing in the night indicates
his appreciative recognition of the elusive, mysterious, and vital
nature of matter. We might see Thoreau's trinity as his acknowledgment of what De Landa terms the “inherent creativity” of matter (16)
or of what Bennett calls “thing-power,” an expression that “seeks to acknowledge that which refuses to dissolve completely into the milieu of
human knowledge” (Vibrant 3). That is, Thoreau's “alternative” trinity
embraces both the ineffable and more corporeal aspects of matter
(Guthrie 151).19
Importantly, Thoreau's trinity does not present spiritualized matter
in the sense of divinity being essentialized as matter, or matter essentialized as the divine. This is not matter as God, or even matter as spiritual incarnation or evidence of some specific divinity. Thoreau's forest,
meadow, and growing corn are not sacred matter in a religious sense.
Rather, Thoreau understands matter as spirit and spirit as matter, with
both terms remaining in this world. (“One world at a time,” he is said
to have uttered on his deathbed [Richardson 389].) Through his trope
of corn growing in the night, Thoreau credits matter as “an actively
formative and productive agent that shapes discursive practices,
which in turn shape the way we interact with the world” (Iovino and
Oppermann 467). The elusive growth of corn in the dark comes to
signal precisely the formative, productive agency of matter in shaping
Thoreau's experience of the human/more-than-human continuum.20
Whereas Thoreau's discussions of routine and corn are relatively easy
to point to, his references to sound and its complement, silence, are
nearly ubiquitous and, therefore, dispersed (like sound itself, perhaps).21
Yet the early Journal reveals Thoreau frequently employing the trope
of sound to gesture toward what Bennett has called “the energetic
onto-matter of the world” (Enchantment 167). Throughout his early
620
I S L E
writings, Thoreau seeks to give expression to this aspect of the human/
more-than-human continuum that he variously terms “sound,” “infinite din” (1: 63), “this thrilling sphere music” (1: 96), and, vexingly,
“Silence” (1: 62).
While referencing sound as din or music seems logical enough, figuring sound as silence does not. To Thoreau, however, they were
nearly one and the same.22 In A Week, he asserts this complementarity
that he perceives between sound and silence: “Silence is audible to all
men, at all times, and in all places. She is when we hear inwardly,
sound when we hear outwardly. Creation has not displaced her, but is
her visible frame-work and foil” (391). Here Thoreau describes the
material world—“creation”—as the physical manifestation, as it were,
of silence, as its contrasting yet fundamental structure (its “foil”; its
“frame-work”). In the Journal on March 3, 1841, he had suggested that
sound-matter remains constant, even though we do not always heed
it—even though, that is, it may seem silent: “Nature always possesses
a certain sonorousness, as in the hum of insects—the booming of ice—
the crowing of cocks in the morning and the barking of dogs in the
night—which indicates her sound state” (1: 277). He would rework
this passage later for A Week, likening the constancy of “All these
sounds” to “the never failing beauty and accuracy of language, the
most perfect art in the world” (41, 42). The world of sounds becomes
here a language, nature's expression of vitality—an idea that he will
revisit in Walden, as I discuss below.
Thoreau also indicates his own unsound state when he fails to heed
sound: that is, his own soundness, like that of nature, depends on
sound. On February 21, 1842, he writes:
I was always conscious of sounds in nature which my
ears could never hear—that I caught but the prelude to a
strain—She always retreats as I advance—Away behind
and behind is she and her meaning—Will not this faith
and expectation make to itself ears at length.
I never saw to the end nor heard to the end—but the
best part was unseen—and unheard. (1: 365)
This phrase—“sounds in nature which my ears could never hear”—
helps explain why Thoreau will treat silence as he does sound:
nature's sound is silence, an expression of matter that comprises “the
best part” of “meaning” and, hence, of his “faith,” that ineffable spiritual aspect of human being.23 That is, sounds, silence, and the mystery
of both help constitute himself amid his world.
Thoreau and the New Materialisms
621
In a journal passage transcribed sometime in 1842, Thoreau overtly
pursues the interconnection of sound and soul: “What is all nature and
human life at this moment—what the scenery and vicinity of one
human soul—but the song of an early sparrow from yonder fence—
and the cackling of hens in a distant barn[.] So for one while my
destiny loiters within ear shot of these sounds” (1: 415). Here, Thoreau
distinguishes even as he conjoins these elements in the grand assemblage: all of nonhuman nature, human life, his destiny, his soul, and
the sounds of birds. The entirety of the human/more-than-human continuum might be expressed through the song of a sparrow or the cluck
of a chicken.
In December 1839, Thoreau had indicated a close relationship
between soul and sound: “To the sensitive soul, [t]he universe has its
own fixed measure, which is its measure also, and as a regular pulse is
inseparable from a healthy body, so is its healthiness dependent on the
regularity of its rhythm” (1: 96). This is “this thrilling sphere music”
(1: 96), inaudible as conventional sound but constant in the universe
and in Thoreau's own body.
In his early Journals, Thoreau re-visits this complex material
sound/silence many times, often in fruitless pursuit of its significance.
He claims repeatedly that capturing this aspect of the human/
more-than-human continuum in language is impossible, in spite of the
fact that he refers to it as earth's “language.” These passages might be
said to reveal Thoreau's efforts to record what Barad describes as “part
of the universe making itself intelligible to another part in its ongoing
differentiating intelligibility and materialization” (“Posthumanist”
824). In one journal entry, he writes, “It were vain for me to interpret
the Silence” (1: 64). Elsewhere he attributes a type of meaning to this
silence, which he claims “is the universal refuge” (1: 62) and “Truth's
speaking trumpet. . . . She is the sole oracle. . . . Through her have all
revelations been made” (1: 63). Sometime after April 18, 1846, he similarly notes the centrality of sound to experience, evident across cultures, traditions, and mythologies: “I seem to hear a faint music from
all the horizon—When our senses are clear and purified we always
may hear the notes of music in the air—This is the tradition under
various forms of all nations—the statue of Memnon—the music of the
spheres—of the sun flower in its circular motion—with the sun &c.
&c.” (2: 241–42). For Thoreau, sound represents the health of the material world, the vibrancy of all matter, and the spirit of matter sensed by
cultures throughout time.
When in the Journal,Thoreau contemplated moving to Walden
Pond for his grand experiment, he claimed his motivation as a desire
to experience sound: “I wish to go away and live by the pond, and
622
I S L E
when my friends inquire I have no better reason to give—than that I
shall hear the wind whispering among the reeds” (2: 37). In the
“Sounds” chapter of Walden, Thoreau re-visits not only the topic of
sound but also the topics of routine and corn, and he ties all three to
spirit. In the first two paragraphs of “Sounds,” Thoreau refers to
“routine,” to himself as growing amid routine “like corn in the night,”
and, through the chapter title, to sounds, which emerge as a “language
which all things and events speak” (111). What he ultimately describes
here is, in Guthrie's words, a “mystical reverie,” and, indeed, he
conveys a heightened sense of his own experience (150). Yet Thoreau's
experience centers on the continuity of self, silence, spirit, and matter.
In his use of the term “language” at the start of the chapter, Thoreau
calls attention to this continuity as a sort of expression of all being.24
Thoreau's 1846–47 version of Walden, which is reproduced in
J. Lyndon Shanley's The Making of Walden, is more specific in its
naming of this “language.” There Thoreau refers to this “language” as
an “expression” of all being and events, one that includes “silence”:
[W]e are apt to forget the language, or rather the expression, which all things every where, morning and
evening and all events speak—which only is copious,
for the tongue is only an accidental organ of speech
serving equally the palate, and speech itself is partial, uttering but a small part of the meaning with which the
silence is fraught.—I mean the language which things
speak originally and without metaphor—such as the life
of a man hears & his instincts speak—and at length
through all his actions he learns to mutter. (qtd. in
Shanley 151)
We find here a complex merging of seemingly nonsensical phases:
“things” and “actions”—even “silence”—“speak” a “language”; “instincts speak”; “meaning” inheres; and the material realm (its events
and times of day) gain “expression” through silence. Thoreau also
evokes the spiritual aspects of sound-silence: of his morning reveries
in his sunny doorway, for example, he writes in this first version of
Walden, “every sound [was] key to unheard harmonies” or to another
realm of matter-event pervading his experience yet unavailable to him
as sound (qtd. in Shanley 152). Sound is “an asignifying material flux”
(Cox 157)—a language (or expression) resistant to simple translation.25
Thoreau notes in this first version of Walden that these moments of
reverie “were little intervals during which I journeyed, and anticipated
other states of existence” (qtd. in Shanley 152). Such states are of
course spiritual, which Thoreau indicates through his references (in
Thoreau and the New Materialisms
623
both this first and the final, published versions of Walden) to wellknown spiritual practices in other cultures, such as the “contemplation” and “forsaking of works” of “oriental philosophers” (qtd. in
Shanley 152; Walden 112). His meditative state of mind inspires spiritual contemplation and the sense of escaping the confines of time.
In “Sounds,” then, Thoreau demonstrates his fluency in expressions
of matter—a “language” that moves and informs his body and soul—
thereby demonstrating what Alaimo describes as a key element of transcorporeality: a “profound sense of entanglement, intra-activity, and perceptual emergence” with, in, and through matter (Bodily 158). We might
even go so far as to say that Thoreau models the “post-human,” as
Alaimo defines that term: “a stance that insists upon our immersion
within worldly material agencies” (158). Clearly, Thoreau's sense of self
is hardly distinct; even in his “solitude,” he merges both body and consciousness with the material world around him—with rays of sunlight,
“pines and hickories and sumachs,” singing birds, and “the noise of
some traveller's wagon.” His reverie is the routine of the human/
more-than-human continuum, and amid this materiality, he claims in
Walden, “I grew in those seasons like corn in the night” (111). This reference to corn in a chapter contemplating sounds helps us further realize
the connection in Thoreau's understanding between the spiritual dimension and the sonic one: corn growing at night, which does apparently produce a sound, affects and indicates spirit—and perhaps,
following the unity of the human/more-than/human continuum, is
spirit. This conflation of the material with the ethereal is significant to
Thoreau's radical understanding of nature, because it indicates his endorsement of the agentic force—the vitality—of the human/more-thanhuman continuum.
Thoreau's mingling of sound, routine, and corn in “Sounds” represents not a quirky moment of ill-matched signifiers; rather, this
chapter of Walden features a constellation of images that occupied him
for decades and conveyed, perhaps as best as he knew how, his sense
of the agentic, spiritual, force of matter. For Thoreau, agency does not
belong solely to humanity, or even solely to beings who clearly act
upon the world; rather, humanity exists in emergent symbiosis with
nonhuman nature, both in embodied and ineffable forms, and agency
pervades the human/more-than-human continuum. In other words,
the body recognizes its simultaneity and intra-being with the soul, the
soul with the body, and both to the fullness of the nonhuman material
realm.26
Clearly, Thoreau hoped—to borrow philosopher Keith Gunderson's
phrasing from another context—to break down “the seeming duality of
624
I S L E
the phenomenal and the physical” (116). That is, he sought to understand spirit as matter and matter as spirit.
Conclusions
There are two clear results of this inquiry into Thoreau's work: the
first is the recognition that Thoreau theorized his own relation to
matter in a manner similar to that encouraged by New Materialists
today.27 (One could say he anticipated the New Materialism or, more
precisely, that the New Materialism provides a convenient vocabulary
for discussing his work.) The more profound result, however, is the realization that Thoreau experienced an integration between the human
mind, the matter of spirit, and the realm of nonhuman matter that informed—even constituted—his being. Clearly, if we have come to think
of Thoreau as embracing an essentialized vision of landscape, then we
have not read him well—or, and this is more likely, we have brought to
our readings a set of assumptions that his worldview does not include.28
Thoreau's integration of body, mind, ineffable materiality, and
other (physical) matter, especially when considered alongside recent
neuroscientific understandings of this relationship, enables the identification of a fundamental paradox within the New Materialist framework, which insists upon the falsity of a mind/matter dichotomy but
has not yet come to terms with its full dissolution. Particularly if “[t]he
main feature of the ‘material turn’ is the refusal to talk of matter in reductionist and essentialist terms” (Iovino and Oppermann 450), then
we will benefit from exploring throughout literary and cultural history
how the matter of mind is part and parcel of the matter that is the nonhuman world—that is, how ultimately physical forces such as sound
and its absence, physical expressions of energy such as animal routines, and physical phenomena such as corn growing in the night
might shape a self in its intra-activity with the many continuous and
contiguous material agencies that comprise both life and meaning.
What the New Materialism has done well—perhaps its largest
success—has been to turn the attention of the academy to the pressing
need for a profoundly revised cultural understanding of the human in
relation to the nonhuman. However, as Latour reminds us, “every
epistemological question is also unmistakably a political question”
(33). If we employ a New Materialist framework that subtly upholds
the mind/matter or nature/culture dichotomies, then we implicitly
advocate an epistemology and, hence, a politics of matter that isolates
humanity from “nature” and excludes an elusive but nonetheless
most potent expression of matter: spirit. More, if we elide spirit
from discussions of matter, we ignore a constituent element of the
Thoreau and the New Materialisms
625
human/more-than-human continuum and inadvertently—and most
ironically—participate in what Oppermann derides as the “old conception
of matter as stable, inert, and passive physical substance, and of the
human agent as a separate observer always in control” (Iovino and
Oppermann 465, my emphasis). We also risk believing that matter
could ever be experienced outside of the body, as if enchantment could
occur without corporeality, as if the human participation in the intraactivity of matter could be aspiritual, as if mind were distinguishable
from matter, as if the workings of neurology were distinct from those
of biology, as if human and nonhuman were ever utterly discrete—as
if the “old conception” is the only conception.
Acknowledgments
My work here benefitted from my participation in a preconference
seminar called “Material Ecocriticism” held at the 2013 Biennial
Conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and
Environment (ASLE) in May 2013. I wish to express my thanks to the
co-leaders of that seminar, Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann.
My thanks also go to Edward Fiske Mooney for early inspiration, to
Lance Newman, Daniel J. Philippon, and William Rossi for helpful
and insightful comments on earlier versions of this essay, and to
Samantha C. Harvey for productive and most enjoyable ongoing discussions concerning nature, humanity, and spirit.
NOTES
1. In her The Enchantment of Modern Life, Bennett had also developed a substantial argument on behalf of enchantment as more than “a homesick variant
of romanticism” (32). Bennett offers “enchanted materialism” as a theoretical
model for addressing modern disengagement with the material world and
with material sources of meaning. Building on the work of Thomas Moore and
Morris Berman, she describes enchantment as “a condition of exhilaration or
acute sensory activity” through which “one's default sensory–psychic–intellectual disposition” might exercise wonder as a sort of “ethical magic” that is “an
essential component of an ethical, ecologically aware life” (12, 5, 30, 99).
My references to New Materialisms (in the plural) seeks to acknowledge the
different emphases and avatars of various efforts to re-theorize materiality.
Names for these related efforts include material feminism, material ecocriticism (or eco-materialism), postmodern materialism, vital materialism, green
materialism, enchanted materialism and, in more radical forms, speculative
realism, object-oriented ontology (“OOO”), and alien phenomenology (see
626
I S L E
Bogost). Iovino and Oppermann offer a relatively thorough discussion of the
forms and concerns of this scholarly/theoretical effort.
2. Parenthetical citations to Thoreau's Journal refer to volume and page
number in the Princeton edition.
3. I do not offer here a discussion of the highly complex notions of spirit
that pervaded nineteenth-century culture; nor do I seek to explain Thoreau's
relationship to religious feeling, as other scholars have written substantial and
important studies on these topics. Rather, I argue for “spirit”—in the sense
that Thoreau uses that term in August 1852—as a requisite component of contemporary discussions of materiality. On Thoreau's religious feeling, see
Hodder, whose Thoreau's Ecstatic Witness offers a most helpful analysis of
Thoreau's spiritual sensibilities. Bennett similarly argues that Thoreau's is “a
world understood as neither divine creation nor docile matter” (Thoreau's
Nature xxii), a world neither providentially created nor divinely imbued:
“Thoreau does not close off the possibility of a benevolent creator or a higher
purpose to creation, but he does not press these themes either” (57). Robinson
similarly notes Thoreau's “almost instinctive skepticism toward churches, sacraments, creeds, and conventional theologies” (Natural Life 11). In a provocative essay on Thoreau's productive use of metaphorical language to inspire
perception, Spratt offers a slightly divergent reading of Thoreau's religious
sensibility, attributing to Thoreau a more traditional Christian understanding
of “truth embodied,” “radiat[ing] outward as the material manifestation of
God in nature” (159). On “spirit” as a component of transatlantic transcendentalism more generally, see Harvey.
4. Alaimo's Bodily Natures most fully demonstrates her sense of the richness
of “[i]magining human corporeality as trans-corporeality, in which the human
is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world” by focusing on “the
often unpredictable and unwanted actions of human bodies, nonhuman creatures, ecological systems, chemical agents, and other actors” (2; see also
“Trans-corporeal” 238). She also explains that her concept of trans-corporeality
“underlines the extent to which the corporeal substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from ‘the environment’” (“Trans-corporeal” 238).
5. As of this writing, there exist three substantial discussions of Thoreau in
relation to materialism: Bennett's consideration of his contributions to political
philosophy in Thoreau's Nature (she also references Thoreau more briefly in
sections of Enchantment and Vibrant Matter); Newman's Our Common Dwelling,
which provides an extensive consideration of Thoreau's corpus in relation to
cultural materialism; and Walls's historically informed analysis of Thoreau's
nineteenth-century encounters with and adaptations of materialism (especially that of Alexander Von Humboldt), Seeing New Worlds. By far, the scholar
most productive in terms of this aspect of Thoreau's work, Walls has argued
that especially in the last decade of his life, Thoreau increasingly explored a
version of materialism that posited meaning as intrinsic to the material world
itself: for Thoreau, “matter does not embody spirit; it is, in itself” (Seeing 86).
My work here is indebted to Walls' revolutionary work in Thoreau studies.
Other scholars interested in the New Materialism discuss Thoreau in shorter
works: in “Thoreau's Materialism,” Newman offers a more concise overview
Thoreau and the New Materialisms
627
of “competing theories of Thoreau's ideas on the relations between mind and
matter” (94); in his exploration of “the culture of enchantment,” Gibson notes
Thoreau's early recognition of the problematic split between nature and
culture (10; see also 18–19); and in an essay that appeared in an issue of ISLE
dedicated to exploring the emergent Material Ecocriticism, Phillips notes,
“Thoreau's language . . . deserves fresh scrutiny and reveals surprising things
about its author's attitudes towards nature” (535). Phillips, like Bennett in
Vibrant Matter, primarily considers Thoreau's materialism in terms of his writings about food. Finally, Rossi productively explores Thoreau's engagement in
material temporality through Latour.
While not directly engaged with New Materialist theory, Robinson's significant Natural Life provides a crucial historical context for Thoreau's pursuit of
spirit-as-matter: Thoreau's early relationship with Orestes Brownson, whose
philosophy sought “a reconciliation of the spiritual and the material” and
“allowed Thoreau to see the natural world as the potential embodiment of
both” the “material” and the “spiritual” (13, 15).
Alaimo implicitly gestures toward Thoreau's work, insofar as he stands as a
major proponent of “the wild” in the cultural imagination, when she writes:
“one of the most fundamental values of environmental ethics—the value of
the ‘wild’—can be understood as a kind of material agency. Wildness may
well be defined as nature's ongoing, material-semiotic intra-actions—actions
that may well surprise, annoy, terrify, or baffle humans, but that nonetheless
are valued by environmentalists as the very stuff of life itself”
(“Trans-corporeal” 249). Alaimo goes on to argue, “An environmental ethic of
wildness . . . may not provide a suitable habitat for the material agency of the
human body,” because “one's own body baffles, annoys, disappoints, or falls
ill [and] such actions are rarely valued” (249). However, Engell's recent analysis of Thoreau's acceptance—and even celebration—of disease and his own illnesses suggests that Thoreau may provide a model for overcoming these
limitations, as well; Thoreau embraced in his recognition of nature's healing
properties even the inevitable failings of the human body.
6. In this way, Thoreau may be said to anticipate the work of recent scholars
of religion, who assert the material basis of transcendence (see Morgan 8). To
employ such a notion of transcendence when discussing Thoreau is not anachronistic: as Engell notes, Thoreau would have found in his contemporaries this
same belief that even transcendence must be rooted in empirical reality: “[F]or
Schelling, for Coleridge, and for Thoreau, transcendental thought is legitimated only when rescued from an abstract play of concepts, words, and forms by
the tangible, empirical world of living nature, of berries, slime moulds, and
sunsets” (92). Ferri's work on nineteenth-century Italian philosopher Giacomo
Leopardi illustrates broader European interest in similar ideas.
7. Theorists operating in several different strands of New Materialism hope
to imbue their efforts with secular versions of concepts conventionally understood to have religious connotations. For example, Bennett secularizes the
notion of enchantment: “A world capable of enchanting need not be designed,
or predisposed toward human happiness, or expressive of intrinsic purpose or
meaning” (Enchantment 11). Describing hers as a “quasi-pagan model of
628
I S L E
enchantment,” Bennett points to similar expressions of the vibrancy of matter
through history, particularly in the writings of Lucretius and the Epicureans,
for whom “matter is wondrous, even without purpose” (13). In evoking “an
Epicurean picture of the world as a lively and endless flow of molecular
events, where matter is animate without necessarily being animated by divine
will or intent,” Bennett makes enchantment a palpable concept to today's theorists without having to tackle the thorny problem of a deity (14). Bennett's discussions of enchantment echo the work of scholars of religion and the social
sciences who similarly propose models of matter as enspirited and sacralized
but not sacred in the traditional religious sense (see Gibson, for instance).
Other theorists working in the New Materialist paradigm similarly secularize
concepts conventionally associated with religion in the western imagination:
in advocating his “alien phenomenology,” Bogost seeks to theorize “wonder”
in a secular fashion (123), removed from its potential religious contexts. On
behalf of reclaiming wonder in this way, he writes, “wonder has been all but
eviscerated in modern thought, left behind as a naïve delusion”—like spirit, I
would argue (124).
8. Some scholars pursuing the New/Green Materialisms work within the
sciences—most notably for my purposes here, physicist Karen Barad, whose
impressive Meeting the Universe Halfway pursues the work of Niels Bohr in
order to propose a highly persuasive argument for the agency of all matter.
9. Alaimo and Hekman offer an overview of some of these dichotomies (2)
and argue, “[A]ttending to materiality erases the commonsensical boundaries
between human and nature, body and environment, mind and matter. In
short, taking matter seriously entails nothing less than a thorough rethinking
of the fundamental categories of Western culture” (17).
10. This list of topics largely follows the subjects of articles comprising a
recent issue of ISLE devoted to material ecocriticism, 19.3; Summer 2012.
11. The mind/matter debate has deep roots in philosophical materialism.
For an overview of the historically vexed question of the mind in relation to
matter, see Rosenthal and Feibleman. Bernstein and Gunderson provide somewhat dated but nonetheless helpful considerations of why this debate continues to grip theorists.
Undoubtedly, some New Materialist critics reference the mind as matter, and
several also gesture toward the importance of spirit, which is my focus here. For
example, Alaimo notes that New Materialist theory “renders rigid distinctions
between ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ impossibly simplistic” (“Trans-corporeal” 257) and
evokes “wonder” as informing her efforts to complicate traditional notions of
corporeality (Bodily 2); and Oppermann begins to take this notion of mindas-matter to its logical conclusion, bringing the mind's work—the making of
meaning—into the New Materialist picture of matter: “meaning and matter are
intertwined in the very structure of cells, molecules, and atoms that comprise
our bodily natures, which are always materially interconnected with environmental systems and biological forces” (Iovino and Oppermann 466).
Oppermann also notes David Bohm's work on thought as an example of “basic
material process since it is inseparable from the brain's electrical and chemical
activities, the nervous system, and the movement of muscles” (465–66).
Thoreau and the New Materialisms
629
Similarly, Bennett indicates the importance of spirit to her work by concluding
two of her books with prayer-like passages; she calls one “A kind of Nicene
Creed” (Vibrant 122; see also the concluding passage of Enchantment). There also
exist theoretical efforts to “re-enchant” nature—often with a focus directly on
spirit: Gibson calls “the culture of enchantment” “nothing less than the reinvestment of nature with spirit” (11). Nonetheless, extended analyses of how writers
have sought to understand spirit as matter remain scant.
12. Crick credits Horace Barlow for having explained this most lucidly in
“Single Units and Sensation: A Neuron Doctrine for Perceptual Psychology”
(Perception 1 [1972]: 371–94). Crick directly addresses the concept of a soul
when he asserts, “the main object of scientific research on the brain is not
merely to understand and cure various medical conditions, important though
this task may be, but to grasp the true nature of the human soul” (7).
13. As Bennett writes, “Anything we know . . . is the result of perception,”
and perception originates in the matter that is human corporeality (Enchantment
83). That is, the agency of nonhuman (material) nature informs human (material) being. The work of biologist Sandra Steingraber, ecopsychologist Peter
H. Kahn (“Children's Affiliations with Nature”), and social ecologist Stephen
Kellert (“Experiencing Nature” and The Value of Life) provides a sense of the richness of research being done on mind as integrated with matter. Heerwagen and
Orians argue that physical surroundings influence emotions such as “creativity,
stress reduction, and self-esteem” (55). Louv has popularized these ideas
through his Last Child in the Woods and The Nature Principle, which have inspired
initiatives such as Leave No Child Inside, the Children and Nature Network,
and the New Nature Movement.
I do not mean to simplify neuroscience, which, while accepting as a given
“that the consciousness is a product of the brain,” also admits that this given is
not well understood. As Koch explains, “The nature of the relationship between
the nervous system and consciousness remains elusive and the subject of heated
and interminable debates” (23). I also do not claim that “[n]euroscience will
replace psychology and other fields as the way to understand action”; nor am I
arguing that neuroscience will provide all answers to consciousness, a stance
that David Brooks calls, in a recent New York Times essay, “neurocentrism”—or
“an effort to take the indeterminacy of life and reduce it to measurable, scientific
categories.” What I am arguing is that neuroscience has established that the
human brain consists of matter and that the workings of the mind, while extraordinarily complex and perhaps never to be fully comprehended by humanity, do rely in large part on the matter that is human brain and body and, further,
are informed (if not determined) by the nonhuman material environment.
Scholars in many fields now imbue their work with an understanding of
the corporeal basis of the mind; scholar of religion David Morgan, for instance,
explains,” all consciousness is grounded in the body” (11).
14. I use the term “health” in full awareness of the ongoing, semiotic concern
over the complexities of attributing “health” to nature or humanity; see Garrard
for one such discussion.
630
I S L E
15. These terms are now in wide use; for examples of the first two, see
Barad (“Posthumanist” 818), and of the third, see Bennett (most notably,
throughout Vibrant Matter).
16. See Linck C. Johnson's “Historical Introduction” for an overview of
Thoreau's strategies of writing and revising toward A Week; see also Johnson's
Thoreau's Complex Weave for an analysis of the result.
17. I use the term “assemblage” following Latour, who employs it to indicate “the representation of multiplicity as opposed to unification” (29, 30), although the term is in wide use among New Materialists (following Deleuze
and Guattari).
18. Guthrie provides a thorough analysis of Thoreau's uses of this corn
imagery to explore temporality (150–60). My reading, like Guthrie's, disagrees
with an early interpretation of this phenomenon by Theodore Baird, who
argues that Thoreau's references to the growth of corn are “simply cryptic”
and unrelated to the actual “natural phenomenon” of corn growing at night
(Baird 99). The physical growth of corn is precisely what Thoreau addresses,
even as he addresses his own meaning-making that follows his knowledge of
the phenomenon.
19. Guthrie notes Robert Richardson's reference to the revised trinity as a
“parody” but argues for its ultimate seriousness, given Thoreau's repeated references in more quiet contexts (159–60). Indeed, Thoreau clearly found great
significance in the phenomenon.
20. Robinson similarly notes Thoreau's sense of “the perpetual energy and
dynamism of nature” (“Thoreau” 78). In Natural Life, Robinson characterizes
Thoreau's lifelong “intellectual task” as a writer-naturalist “as the delineation
of the processes and seasonal cycles that governed the flow of natural energy”
and argues that Thoreau increasingly sought to “recognize both the cohesion
and dynamic energy of the material universe” (4, 184).
21. Several scholars have treated Thoreau's extensive writings on sound.
Sherman Paul offered an early exploration of sounds and silence in Thoreau's
work, arguing that “soundness” is “the spiritual wholeness of the universe”
(513). More recently, Hodder explores Thoreau's references to sound (and
silence), as well as his “frequent experiences of acoustic rapture” as central
components of Thoreau's “ecstatic” vision (77; see especially 76–81). See also
Lambdin. Bennett's Enchantment, which features a short section on Thoreau,
alludes to sound by reminding us that “the word enchant is linked to the
French verb to sing: chanter. To ‘en-chant’: to surround with song or incantation; hence, to cast a spell with sounds, to make fall under the sway of a
magical refrain, to carry away on a sonorous stream” (6).
22. Hodder similarly notes, “To Thoreau's way of thinking, sound and
silence were alternative sides of a single coin” (87).
23. Following Deleuze and Guattari, who argue that sounds “provide
sensory access into the cosmological dimension of things,” Bennett writes,
“Through sound . . . we receive news of the cosmic energies to which we
humans are always in close, molecular proximity” (Enchantment 166, 168).
24. Other scholars also explore Thoreau's understanding of nature as a language: for example, Walls notes that for Thoreau, “Nature is an expressive
Thoreau and the New Materialisms
631
artist with its own voice, and all elements of nature speak” (Seeing 86), and
Robinson describes Thoreau's sense of “the natural environment as a vast and
complex web of signals that could be best understood as analogous to a language or a variety of languages. Each element of the natural environment,
each interaction and process of nature, was some form of expression” (Natural
Life 26).
25. Perhaps Thoreau experienced sound as Cox suggests today's materialist
critics might: as “complexes of forces materially inflected by other forces and
force-complexes” (157). Cox makes a case for a “sonic materialism,” arguing
that because sound is “firmly rooted in the material world and the powers,
forces, intensities, and becomings of which it is composed,” analyses of sound
resist discourse of representation and signification. On Thoreau, sound, and
silence in relation to music (particularly that of John Cage), see Bock and
Mehring. My thanks to Bock for pointing me toward Thoreau's August 3,
1852, journal entry, which she examines for its references to sound and music.
26. Thoreau conveys his understanding of the deep interdependencies of
body and environment when he writes in 1840, “No man has imagined what
private discourse his members have with surrounding nature, or how much
the tenor of that intercourse affects his own health and sickness” (I: 181). See
Branch and Pierce for a consideration of Thoreau's thoughts on health as they
might help us revise our current approach to health care. Engell offers a comprehensive analysis of Thoreau's thoughts on health and nature.
27. I have chosen to focus here on just a few recurring tropes in Thoreau's
corpus, but its entirety is rich for New Materialist inquiry. In Walden alone,
several passages invite attention: his loon encounter, for example, could be
seen to demonstrate what Alaimo terms “the unpredictable becomings of
other creatures and the limits of human knowledge” (“Trans-corporeality”
262), as well as the humble place of humanity amid its vibrant materiality.
(Indeed, Walls's recent “Walking West, Gazing East” reads the loon passage as
illustrative of Thoreau's rising above Cartesian dualities in order to create a
“space between” the “objective” and the “subjective” [30].) In addition, when
Thoreau reads the landscape around Walden Pond as including “former inhabitants,” and then his stories of those people reveal racial, economic, and political inequities, he signals the intra-activity of the matter that is dirt, politics,
and privilege. (Schneider provides an insightful reading of “Former
Inhabitants” that takes a slightly different emphasis, pursuing Thoreau's
studies in ethnology and the progress of human civilization [56–58].) As a final
example, when, in Walden, Thoreau conveys the complex matrix of commerce,
geography, and class relations signaled by a block of ice being removed from
the frozen pond, he arguably invites readers to “reimagine human corporeality,
and materiality itself, not as a utopian or romantic substance existing prior
to social inscription, but as something that always bears the trace of
history, social position, region, and the uneven distribution of risk” (Alaimo,
“Trans-corporeal” 261). In many ways, then, Thoreau can be seen to explore
the vibrancy of matter.
28. Walls also makes this argument throughout Seeing New Worlds.
632
I S L E
WORKS CITED
Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self.
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2010. Print.
———. “States of Suspension: Trans-corporeality at Sea.” Interdisciplinary
Studies in Literature and Environment 19.3 (2012): 476–93. Print.
———. “Trans-Corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature.” Material
Feminisms. Ed. Alaimo and Hekman. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2008.
237–64. Print.
Alaimo, Stacy and Susan Hekman. “Introduction: Emerging Models of
Materiality in Feminist Theory.” Material Feminisms. Ed. Alaimo and
Hekman. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2008. 1–19. Print.
Baird, Theodore. “Corn Grows in the Night.” Massachusetts Review 4.1 (1962):
93–103. Print.
Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the
Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. Print.
———. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How
Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28.3
(2003): 801–31. Print.
Bennett, Jane. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and
Ethics. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001. Print.
———. Thoreau's Nature: Ethics, Politics, and the Wild. Thousand Oaks: Sage,
1994. Print.
———. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke UP, 2010.
Print.
Bernstein, Richard J. “The Challenge of Scientific Materialism.” Materialism
and the Mind–Body Problem. Ed. David M. Rosenthal. Englewood Cliffs:
Prentice-Hall, 1971. 200–22. Print.
Bock, Jannika. “‘There Is Music in Every Sound’: Thoreau's Modernist
Understanding of Music.” Current Objectives of Postgraduate American
Studies 7 (2006): n. pag. Web. 22 Jun. 2013.
Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology, Or What It's Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis:
U of Minnesota P, 2012. Print.
Branch, Michael P. and Jessica Pierce. “‘Another Name for Health’: Thoreau
and Modern Medicine.” Literature and Medicine 15.1 (1996): 129–45. Print.
Brooks, David. “Beyond the Brain.” The New York Times Online, 17 Jun. 2013.
24 Jun. 2013.
Case, Kristen. American Pragmatism and Poetic Practice: Crosscurrents from
Emerson to Susan Howe. New York: Camden, 2011.
Cox, Christoph. “Beyond Representation and Signification: Toward a Sonic
Materialism.” Journal of Visual Culture 10.2 (2011): 145–61. Print.
Crick, Francis. The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul.
New York: Scribner's, 1994. Print.
De Landa, Manuel. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. New York: Swerve,
2000. Print.
Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock. “Obi, Assemblage, Enchantment.” The Journal of
Nineteenth-Century Americanists 1.1 (2013): 172–78. Print.
Thoreau and the New Materialisms
633
Engell, James. “Thoreau and Health: Physician, Naturalist, Metaphysician.”
The Eudaimonic Turn: Well-Being in Literary Studies. Ed. James O. Pawelski
and D. J. Moores. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2013. 81–96. Print.
Feibleman, James K. The New Materialism. Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970.
Print.
Ferri, Sabrina. “Giacomo Leopardi's Poetic Materialism: A New Perspective on
the Nature of Things.” ASLE Biennial Conference. University of Kansas,
Lawrence. 28 May 2013. Conference presentation.
Garrard, Greg. “Nature Cures? Or How to Police Analogies of Personal and
Ecological Health.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
19.3 (2012): 494–514. Print.
Gibson, James William. A Reenchanted World: The Quest for a New Kinship with
Nature. New York: Holt, 2009. Print.
Gunderson, Keith. “Asymmetries and Mind–Body Perceptions.” Materialism
and the Mind–Body Problem. Ed. David M. Rosenthal. Englewood Cliffs:
Prentice-Hall, 1971. 112–27. Print.
Guthrie, James R. Above Time: Emerson's and Thoreau's Temporal Revolutions.
Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2001.
Harvey, Samantha C. Transatlantic Transcendentalism: Coleridge, Emerson, and
Nature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2013.
Heerwagen, Judith H. and Gordon H. Orians. “The Ecological World of
Children.” Children and Nature: Psychological, Sociocultural, and Evolutionary
Investigations. Ed. Peter H. Kahn and Stephen R. Kellert. Cambridge: MIT P,
2002. 29–63. Print.
Hodder, Alan D. Thoreau's Ecstatic Witness. New Haven: Yale UP, 2001. Print.
Iovino, Serenella and Serpil Oppermann. “Theorizing Material Ecocriticism: A
Diptych.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19.3 (2012):
448–75. Print.
Johnson, Linck C. Historical Introduction. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack
Rivers. By Henry D. Thoreau. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980, 433–500. Print.
———. Thoreau's Complex Weave: The Writing of a Week on the Concord and
Merrimack Rivers. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1986. Print.
Kahn, Peter H., Jr. “Children's Affiliations with Nature: Structure,
Development, and the Problem of Environmental Generational Amnesia.”
Children and Nature: Psychological, Sociocultural, and Evolutionary
Investigations. Ed. Peter H. Kahn and Stephen R. Kellert. Cambridge: MIT P,
2002. 93–116. Print.
Kellert, Stephen R. “Experiencing Nature: Affective, Cognitive, and Evaluative
Development in Children.” Children and Nature: Psychological, Sociocultural,
and Evolutionary Investigations. Ed. Peter H. Kahn and Stephen R. Kellert.
Cambridge: MIT P, 2002. 117–51. Print.
———. The Value of Life: Biological Diversity and Human Society. Washington, DC:
Island, 1996. Print.
Koch, Christoph. Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist.
Cambridge: MIT P, 2012. Print.
Lambdin, William. “Sounds in Walden.” Colorado Quarterly 18 (1969): 59–64.
Print.
634
I S L E
Latour, Bruno. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Trans.
Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004. Print.
Louv, Richard. Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit
Disorder. Chapel Hill: Algonquin, 2005. Print.
———. The Nature Principle: Reconnecting with Life in a Virtual Age. Chapel Hill:
Algonquin, 2012. Print.
Mehring, Frank. “‘Unpremeditated Music’: Thoreaus avantgardistische
Vorstöße in eine Neudefinition von Musik.” Amerikastudien/American
Studies 47.1 (2002): 39–54. Print.
Morgan, David. “Introduction: The Matter of Belief.” Religion and Material
Culture: The Matter of Belief. Ed. Morgan. New York: Routledge, 2010. 1–17.
Print.
Newman, Lance. Our Common Dwelling: Henry Thoreau, Transcendentalism, and
the Class Politics of Nature. New York: Palgrave, 2005. Print.
———. “Thoreau's Materialism: From Walden to Wild Fruits.” NineteenthCentury Prose 31.2 (2004): 93–121. Print.
Paul, Sherman. “The Wise Silence: Sound as the Agency of Correspondence in
Thoreau.” New England Quarterly 22.4 (1949): 511–27. Print.
Phillips, Dana. “‘Slimy Beastly Life”: Thoreau on Food and Farming.”
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19.3 (2012): 532–47.
Print.
Richardson, Robert. Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind. Berkeley: U of California
P, 1986. Print.
Robinson, David M. Natural Life: Thoreau's Worldly Transcendentalism. Ithaca:
Cornell UP, 2004.
———. “Thoreau, Modernity, and Nature's Seasons.” Thoreauvian Modernities:
Transatlantic Conversations on an American Icon. Ed. Francois Specq, Laura
Walls, and Michel Granger. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2013. 69–81. Print.
Rosenthal, David M. “Introduction.” Materialism and the Mind–Body Problem.
Ed. Rosenthal. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1971: 1–17. Print.
Rossi, William. “Thoreau's Multiple Modernities.” Thoreauvian Modernities:
Transatlantic Conversations on an American Icon. Ed. Francois Specq, Laura
Walls, and Michel Granger. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2013. 56–68. Print.
Schneider, Richard J. “Thoreau's Human Ecology.” Nineteenth-Century Prose
35.2 (2008): 1–74. Print.
Shanley, J. Lyndon. The Making of Walden. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1957.
Print.
Spratt, Stephen. “‘To Find God in Nature’: Thoreau's Poetics of Natural
History.” Mosaic 45.1 (2012): 155–69. Print.
Steingraber, Sandra. Raising Elijah: Protecting Children in an Age of
Environmental Crisis. Cambridge: Perseus/Da Capo, 2013.
Thoreau, Henry David. Journal, Vol. 1:1837–1844. Ed. Elizabeth Hall Witherell,
William L. Howarth, Robert Sattelmeyer, and Thomas Blanding. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1981. Print.
———. Journal, Vol. 2: 1842–1848. Ed. Robert Sattelmeyer. Princeton: Princeton
UP, 1984. Print.
Thoreau and the New Materialisms
635
———. Journal, Vol. 3: 1848–1851. Ed. Robert Sattelmeyer, Mark R. Patterson,
and William Rossi. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990. Print.
———. Journal, Vol. 5: 1852–1853. Ed. Patrick F. O'Connell. Princeton: Princeton
UP, 1997. Print.
———. Walden. 1854. Ed. J. Lyndon Shanley. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971.
Print.
———. “Walking.” Excursions. Ed. Joseph J. Moldenhauer. Princeton: Princeton
UP, 2007. 185–222. 1862 Print.
———. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. 1849. Ed. Carl F. Hovde,
William L. Howarth, and Elizabeth Hall Witherell. Princeton: Princeton
UP, 1980. Print.
Walls, Laura Dassow. Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and
Nineteenth-Century Natural Science. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1995. Print.
———. “Walking West, Gazing East: Planetarity on the Shores of Cape Cod.”
Thoreauvian Modernities: Transatlantic Conversations on an American Icon. Ed.
Francois Specq, Laura Walls, and Michel Granger. Athens: U of Georgia P,
2013. 1–42. Print.