Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

 

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Volume 16 Number 1, April 2015

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"Dreaming Awake": Reading Walden as Phantasy

 

by

 

Justin Swink

University of North Texas

 

Abstract

 This article exams Henry David Thoreau's Walden from a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective. Taking up this perspective challenges conventional readings of Walden as a strictly Transcendental text and offers new insight into Thoreau's time at Walden Pond. In particular, this article focuses on how reality is represented in Walden and shows that what Thoreau believes to be transcendental experiences are in fact phantasy. Phantasy, as used in Lacanian psychoanalysis, as well as ideas of reality versus the Lacanian Real, are the main subjects of this article as they relate to Walden. Analyzing Walden in this way reveals how Thoreau's canonical work is not simply a treatise for returning to nature, but rather, how nature works within us, creating our human experience of the world.

 

 Critics of Walden have long tried to name or describe the “reality” that Henry David Thoreau attempts to move toward in his most famous work.^[1] While many of these scholars discuss the work by focusing on Walden's material characteristics, that is, the relationship between Thoreau and the material world, most conclude that the reality discovered in Thoreau's time at Walden Pond was the aim of his Transcendental practices.^[2] Yet there is another way to interpret Thoreau’s pilgrimage to the "real" and this alternative understanding begins with a close reading of Walden, revealing threads of meaning running throughout the work which center upon loss, anxiety, and desperation. It is my contention that following these threads yields a deeper insight into Walden, particularly if one considers Thoreau’s journey as a quest to get back to the embryonic Real proposed in Lacanian psychoanalysis; that is, a Real in which loss, anxiety, and desperation would (hypothetically) no longer plague Thoreau. While this may seem to be another argument for Thoreau’s Transcendental achievement, it is in fact an argument against the claim that Thoreau transcends reality. For it is the tendency of the Lacanian Subject within the Symbolic Order to attempt to reconnect with the Real despite the fact that reconnection (or in Thoreau's case “transcendence”) is impossible.^[3] Although little psychoanalytic interpretation of Walden exists, this paper will show how a Lacanian framework challenges traditional notions about what “real/ity” Thoreau is seeking (the supposed terminus of Transcendentalism), and ultimately brings to light another depth to Walden. In his introduction to The Parallax View, Slavoj Žižek asks if it “is not one of the most effective critical procedures to cross wires that do not normally touch: to take a major classic (text, author, notion), and read it in a short-circuiting way, through the lens of a 'minor' author, text, or conceptual apparatus” (Žižek, 2006, IX). Answering himself, Žižek concludes that what comes of such a reading is the “inherent decentering of the interpreted text, which brings to light its ‘unthought’, its disavowed presuppositions and consequences” (Žižek, 2006, IX). In the case of Walden, the "unthought" of other critical approaches is discoverable if one regards what Thoreau thinks of as real as, rather, phantasy.

 

 Early in the section entitled “Economy,” Thoreau famously laments the “mass of men [who] lead lives of quiet desperation” (Thoreau, 1986, 50). He finds that there is “a stereotyped but unconscious despair…concealed under what are called the games and amusements of mankind” (Thoreau, 1986, 50; emphasis added). This "unconscious despair" becomes for Thoreau the impetus to step into the role of both social critic as well as social psychoanalyst (1986, 50). For on the one hand he probes the material effects that "unconscious despair" has entailed upon modern society, while on the other hand he examines the cause of this despair and seeks a remedy in nature (Thoreau, 1986, 50). Thoreau observes that “the trouble and anxiety” in society stems from the attempt of modern man to counter his despair with material objects which have become “necessary of life” (Thoreau, 1986, 54). This is troubling for Thoreau because “to many creatures there is…but one necessary of life, Food,” yet the “necessary of life” for man has become “all that [he] obtains by his own exertions, [and] has been from the first, or from long use has become, so important to human life that few, if any...ever attempt to do without it” (Thoreau, 1986, 54). More pointedly, the necessaries of life are “most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life [which have become] not only indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind” (Thoreau, 1986, 56). In his article on Thoreau and "things" (or material goods), critic David Strong concludes that the crux of Thoreau's problem with modernity is that "the ease we pursue makes us feel uneasy, the comfort brings no comfort, the speed brings no rest...safety is pursued and yet we suffer profound injury, the novelty is all the same, and our mutual understanding has left us lonely"^[4] (Strong, 1992, 162). Reading Thoreau's words quoted above through a psychoanalytic lens, one may see that what concerns him is the sublimation or “fetishizing” (as D’Amore names it) of material goods by society so that those objects become a defense mechanism against despair (D’Amore, 2009, 75). The catch, Thoreau realizes, is that the things with which we try to appease ourselves always turn out to be a temporary solution, like empty calories when one's body craves nutrition.

 

 Though it could be argued that in Walden Thoreau speaks to all people, in every class, he draws particular attention to those “seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters” (Thoreau, 1986, 58-9). But to all he writes that "[n]ot till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world [material goods, social roles], do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations” (Thoreau, 1986, 217). Though Thoreau uses the inclusive "we" in the previous statement, this pronoun may only be read as a possibility when one considers a story he relates later in a build-up to his stated purpose for retreating into the woods (the “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For" chapter). There, as Thoreau tells an anecdote, he at once attempts to differentiate himself from the rest of the masses when it comes to material objects and his relation to them. The moment in which Thoreau describes having “lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtledove” which “many travelers…seem as anxious to recover...as if they had lost them themselves” is important, because nowhere in this moment does Thoreau implicate himself in the feelings of loss/anxiety that his fellow travelers feel: the text does not read "they seem as anxious as I" (Thoreau, 1986, 59). While Thoreau does not group himself with other members of society who are troubled by loss, Walden belies this notion, however subtly. For as a split-subject Thoreau is susceptible to all the same symptoms as others who have experienced “trauma (of the lost object, of the scene of some shattering jouissance, etc.)”^[5] (Žižek, 1997, 95).

 

 One such place in Walden in which Thoreau appears troubled occurs in the "Sounds" chapter. As Thoreau meditates on the call of the screech owl, he begins to attribute to the owl human qualities that do not seem in keeping with his idea(l) of Walden and its animal inhabitants (i.e., as though they are exempt from the world’s fallen state):

 

Their dismal scream is truly Ben Johnsian…the mutual consolations of suicide lovers remembering the pangs and the delights of supernal love in the infernal groves…They are the spirits, the low spirits and melancholy forebodings, of fallen souls…now expiating their sins with their wailing hymns…Oh-o-o-o-o that I never had been bor-r-r-r-n! sighs one (Thoreau, 1986, 170)

 

 Why does Thoreau project such Dantean qualities onto these beings? A consideration of Thoreau’s prelapsarian characterization of Walden may begin to answer the question:

 

Perhaps on that spring morning when Adam and Eve were driven out of Eden Walden Pond was already in existence, and even then breaking up in a gentle spring rain accompanied with the mist and a southerly wind, and covered with myriads of ducks and geese, which had not heard of the fall, when still such pure lakes sufficed them (Thoreau, 1986, 226)

 

If one is allowed to make the comparison between the world before the Fall and the world of the Subject before he has been split or barred, then perhaps it is easier to understand the inherent problem of Thoreau’s two conflicting thoughts. For if “ducks and geese…had not heard of the fall,” and are therefore exempt from sin, then why are the screech owls described in such humanesque tones, an implication that they are susceptible to the same despair as "sinful" humans? (Thoreau, 1986, 226) Simply put, it is because Thoreau is a split Subject and therefore comes with the baggage of coping with his primordial loss.^[6] His anthropromorphicization of the owls is his own projection of suffering; suffering from the disconnect with nature that Thoreau (a stand in for Man) was once in communion. Andrea Nightingale picks up on this thread in her article "Auto-Hagiography: Augustine and Thoreau”:

 

Thoreau claims that human and nonhuman beings live in a common ‘household’ - that there is a kinship between humans, animals, plants, and even the soil…And yet, humans are animals, though a distinct kind of animal. Thoreau makes two seemingly contrary claims in ‘Solitude’: ‘I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself’: and ‘We are not wholly involved in nature’ (Nightingale, 2008, 119)

 

Nightingale concludes that Thoreau’s contradictions are simply that: contradictions representative of “the paradox of human life” (Nightingale, 2008, 119). But as has been discussed, a much richer paradox arises when one considers Thoreau the split-Subject.

 

 In another episode which reveals Thoreau plagued by loss (during “The Ponds” chapter), one finds him detailing an idyllic episode he experienced on Walden pond as a child:

 

I have spent many an hour, when I was younger, floating over its surface as the zephyr willed, having paddled my boat to the middle, and lying on my back across the seats, in a summer forenoon, dreaming awake, until I was aroused by the boat touching the sand, and I arose to see what shore my fates had impelled me to…But since I have left those shores the woodchoppers have still further laid them waste, and now for many a year there will be no more rambling through aisles of the wood, with occasional vistas through which you see the water. My Muse must be excused if she is silent henceforth (Thoreau, 1986, 239)

 

While Thoreau's description of his childhood memory echoes his stated displeasure with society’s unquenchable thirst for material goods (“the woodchoppers” taking wood for consumer use), it also shows Thoreau’s own sense of loss, and perhaps a truer, less veiled idea of loss that every Subject feels (Thoreau, 1986, 239). For as a child, according to Lacanian theory, Thoreau would have been closer to the original, primordial state of the Real. But as an older man, Thoreau is further distanced from that childhood state. As he bemoans, “Here is Walden, the same woodland lake that I discovered so many years ago…the same thought that was welling up to its surface that was then; it is the same liquid joy and happiness to itself and its Maker, ay, and it may be to me” (Thoreau, 1986, 240; emphasis added). Though "may" in the previous statement can be read as either a possibility (he "might"), or as an ability (he may "be allowed to" or "able to"), both possibilities evoke Thoreau as the split-subject (Thoreau, 1986, 240). But whereas the latter reading seems to conform to a phantasy in which Thoreau believes the possibility is open to him, the former reading reveals Thoreau to be less optimistic, aware of his barred position in which he is unable to get back to that childlike state. Understood in this way, conventional arguments for Thoreau as transcendental seeker do not hold up.^[7] For in this moment Thoreau is expressing his inability to “transcend” reality as he once could. Knowing, however, that some people are in closer proximity to the Real than himself, Thoreau perceptively notes in the “Visitors” chapter that “I could not but notice some of the peculiarities of my visitors. Girls and boys and young women generally seemed glad to be in the woods” (Thoreau, 1986, 198). Observing the calm nature of the children and women, or those perhaps less oppressed by the materialism of modern society, one might imagine that they too are feeling what Thoreau felt as a child, in their close(r) connection to the Real. But the

 

 [m]en of business, even farmers, thought only of solitude and employment, and of the great distance at which I dwelt from something or other; and though they said that they loved a ramble in the woods occasionally, it was obvious that they did not. Restless committed men, whose time was all taken up in getting a living or keeping it (Thoreau, 1986, 198)

 

The rest of Walden, then, may be read as Thoreau’s attempt to get back to a state in which intimations of the Real present themselves and to reconstruct himself as whole, before the threat of castration (threat of losing connection to Nature). As well, the passage above makes clear that Thoreau is in the midst of a distinctly male narrative. "Girls" and "young women" are naturally at ease within nature, while the "boys" are foredoomed to become those "men of business" who are too preoccupied to bemoan their loss, much less recognize that such a loss has occurred (Thoreau, 1986, 198). Further, in turning to Thoreau’s descriptions of his own relationship with the pond, one may discover that Thoreau is in fact aligned with those same men and boys.

 

 When one considers how Thoreau has gendered the pond then his longing may be read as a desire to return to the mother/child dyad, or back to the womb of the Real. For Walden Pond’s qualities, its “lips,” the “shore…irregular,” “the gentle pulsing of its life, the heaving of its breast,” do not seem to describe an eye so much as the female anatomy (Thoreau, 1986, 231-5). The amorphousness of the pond and its immediate surroundings call to mind the idea of the lamella which, as Žižek explains the concept, shares similarities with the pond. The lamella, he writes, is

 

an organ that gives body to libido…a weird organ that is magically autonomous, surviving without body whose organ it should have been…The lamella is an entity of pure surface, without the density of substance, an infinitely plastic object that can incessantly change its form, and even transpose itself from on medium to another…A lamella is indivisible, indestructible, and immortal…the lamella…insists: it is unreal, an entity of pure semblance, a multiplicity of appearances that seem to enfold a central void (Žižek, 2007, 62)

 

Bearing Žižek’s definition(s) in mind, one soon discovers other moments in Walden in which the pond appears to embody this somewhat threatening, indestructible form, particularly when Thoreau describes the business of extracting ice from the pond in winter. While “a hundred men at work like busy husbandmen” attempt to break up Walden Pond into moveable chunks of ice to be carted back to the village, the men are “all gone” within a couple of weeks, the task too large and expensive (Thoreau, 1986, 345). Thoreau, unlike the workers, has a better idea of the power of the pond and thus takes comfort in the fact that what ice the workers managed to cull from the pond will shortly be “sending up its evaporations in solitude,” so that “no traces will appear that a man has ever stood there,” next to the pond (Thoreau, 1986, 345-6). Like the lamella, the pond “swallows everything, dissolving all identities,” or in this case, traces of identities (the footprints of the men) (Žižek , 2007, 64).

 

 Returning for a moment to the quote where the "I" has not been implicated (“many travelers…seem as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves”), shows the beginnings of Thoreau’s phantasy at work: a phantasy that builds in recuperative agency until he is able to function within society, but which also protects him from a true encounter with the Real (Thoreau, 1986, 59). At this time a brief turn to Lacan becomes necessary so that one can move forward in this discussion with an understanding of how phantasy is at work within Walden. Lacan writes,

 

The subject is an apparatus. This apparatus is something lacunary, and it is in this lacuna that the subject establishes the function of a certain object, qua lost object. It is the status of the objet a in so far as it is present in the drive. In the phantasy, the subject is frequently unperceived, but he is always there, whether in the dream or in any of the more or less developed forms of day-dreaming. The subject situates himself as determined by the phantasy. The phantasy is the support of desire; it is not the object that is the support of desire. The subject sustains himself as desiring in relation to an ever more complex signifying ensemble. This is apparent enough in the form of the scenario it assumes, in which the subject, more or less recognizable, is somewhere, split, divided, generally double, in his relation to the object, which usually does not show its true face either (Lacan, 1998, 185)

 

David Robinson offers the idea that “Thoreau’s ‘self’ was being ‘devoured,’” that it “merg[ed] with all that was around him and all that he was aware of” in Walden" (Robinson, 2004, 83). Yet the proof that Thoreau was never integrated into the Real (i.e., did not meet his Transcendental end) resides in the fact that Walden exists. That is, Thoreau’s use of language, the Symbolic substitute for castration, is evidence in itself that Thoreau is indeed still a part of, and functioning in, “reality”.^[8] In this reality (as opposed to the Real) Thoreau believes that Walden offers itself up to him when it is actually his own unconscious protecting himself from a traumatic experience with the Real. The “screen” of “reality...[which] protects us from being directly overwhelmed by the raw Real” (Žižek, 2007, 57). To elucidate this idea further, a closer look at the scene in which Thoreau tracks the elusive loon in the “Brute Neighbors” chapter is necessary.

 

 In a game reminiscent of hide-and-seek, Thoreau playfully (yet unsuccessfully) tracks a loon upon Walden pond. Moving in the direction where he last heard or saw the loon, Thoreau is surprised when he discovers that the loon has evaded him and moved to a different spot altogether. Never able to sneak up on the loon, but always the one sneaked up on, Thoreau “concluded that he [the loon] laughed in derision of my efforts” (Thoreau, 1986, 283). In his work, John Dolis writes at length about Thoreau's relationship to an elusive nature with special emphasis on the pond. “The pond stands," he writes, "for the displacement it inaugurates, stands (in) for what things are: phantasy transfixed by what it takes to be reality, ‘the real thing.’ Nature here supports the phantasy, protects reality as nature’s ‘own’” (Dolis, 2005, 125). Support for Dolis’s claim may be found just after the loon scene:

 

Though the woodchoppers have laid bare first this shore and then that, and the Irish have built their sties by it, and the railroad has infringed on its border, and the ice-men have skimmed it once, it is itself unchanged, the same water which my youthful eyes fell on; all change is in me (Thoreau, 1986, 240)

 

Working between this scene and the one in which Thoreau describes Walden pond as the “earth’s eye” earlier in the same chapter, Dolis draws attention to how crucial Thoreau’s admission of change in himself is to the idea of Nature/the Real “protecting” itself (Thoreau, 1986, 233).

 

There’s something primal at play [in and around] the pond…Walden is timeless as ever; here nothing’s new. It happens, nonetheless, within the space of this event, within the blink…of an eye, that nothing is, indeed, new. Nothing now appears: for the first time: in the first place. The subject is new to itSelf. Something has changed (‘all change is in me’). Nothing, in nature, is missing (from the scene). Missing nothing, the subject plugs the (w)hole, inserts itSelf…[T]he faceless eye…now returns the gaze of the voyeur (Dolis, 2005, 124)

 

Thoreau’s claim of change residing in himself is an admission that what he discovers in Walden Pond is perhaps nothing more than his own projections, reflecting back from the water. Reflections that imbue Thoreau with a sense of self. But to whom does this "eye" belong? (Dolis, 2005, 124) Again the answer may be found in Lacan.

 

 In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, Lacan explains that “the Other, latent or not, is, even beforehand, present in the subjective revelation. It is already there, when something has begun to yield itself from the unconscious” (Lacan, 1998, 130). Thoreau’s revelation that “all change is in me” is thus understood as stemming from his own unconscious (Thoreau, 1986, 240). Indeed, as he looks into earth’s eye, he in fact does not see the eye staring back at him: “looking into [it] the beholder measures the depth of his own nature” (Thoreau, 1986, 233; emphasis added). Remembering that “the unconscious is the discourse of the Other,” and if one recalls that dreams stem from the unconscious, that “it is in dreams that we encounter the traumatic Real,” then Thoreau’s revelation may be interpreted as in fact a kind of fiction (phantasy), protecting him from his unconscious (the Other’s discourse) (Lacan, 1998, 131; Žižek 2007, 57). The subject-Thoreau projects his phantasy of revelation onto reality because “in the opposition between dream and reality, fantasy is on the side of reality” ( Žižek, 2007, 57).

 Also at play within Dolis’s remarks is an echo of Thoreau from the “Spring” chapter. There, Thoreau hears a robin singing and bemoans that if “I could ever find the twig he sits upon! I mean he; I mean the twig” (Thoreau, 1986, 361). Thoreau cannot state any more clearly his desire to return to the point of origin (and yet, symptomatically, he is also stating it obliquely). Yet just a few pages later, one is told that “[a]t the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough nature" (Thoreau, 1986, 365). The tension between these two different thoughts, juxtaposed so closely, is representative of a tension that permeates Walden. For on the one hand Thoreau sounds Walden Pond, extracting and exacting its dimensions through science (the ultimate Symbolic language), while on the other hand Thoreau who longs to be lost within nature so that he can return to that youthful state when the pond carried him across its surface and deposited him on its shores. Thoreau complicates the matter further when he writes that

 

If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need only one fact, or the description of one actual phenomenon, to infer all the particular results at that point. Now we know only a few laws and our result is vitiated, not, of course, by any confusion or irregularity in Nature, but by our ignorance of essential elements in calculation. Our notions of law and harmony are commonly confined to those instances which we detect; but the harmony which results from a far greater number of seemingly conflicting, but really concurring, laws, which we have not detected, is still more wonderful (Thoreau, 1986, 338-9)

 

Enamored of nature’s mystery, its impenetrability, Thoreau possesses the scientific urge to know things in their entirety. Yet, at the same time, the mystery appears to be an attraction to Thoreau in and of itself. Keeping these two oppositions in mind, helps explain how Thoreau’s lament to “find the twig” is a complex longing to know, and not know, the code of nature in order to reach the Real. From a slightly different angle, critic Ulf Schulenberg argues that “the search for the solid bottom [of Walden/Walden] is not a search for the ontological certainty of/in Nature, but rather for the epistemological and metaphysical certainty of what is more than another human invention” (Schulenberg, 2006, 175). To most critics, this "epistemological and metaphysical certainty" is the omega point of Thoreau's Transcendentalist practices, but if Thoreau’s journey is read as phantasy, then certainty (for the reader as well as Thoreau) is always just out of reach (Schulenberg, 2006, 175).^[9]

 

 Common to both readings of Walden (as a Transcendentalist text or as a Lacanian subject’s journey towards the Real) is the stressed individuality of Thoreau’s journey. In some moments the idea is expressed philosophically: “God is alone, ¾but the devil, he is far from being alone; he sees a great deal of company; he is legion. I am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a humble-bee” (Thoreau, 1986, 182). At other times Thoreau is more forward:

 

I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account; for, beside that before he has fairly learned it I may have found out another for myself, I desire that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible; but I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father’s or his mother’s or his neighbor’s instead (Thoreau, 1986, 114)

 

Unbeknownst to Thoreau, he has identified a key concept in a subject’s relationship with the Real. As Dennis Foster reveals, “the crucial point…is that the Real is not a general or universal reality, the same everywhere for all people; rather, it is evoked by the particular qualities in the forms of symbolic representation at work for a given subject. This is why it can at times take the form of the sublime, at other times that of the abject” (Foster, 1997, 2). Foster approaches a closer approximation of the Real (as it appears in Walden) as he elaborates:

 

The Real names some stain, an obscurity in every representation that remains fascinating without ever rising to the level of becoming an object of desire. It is what can neither be understood nor ignored and therefore is never a source of satisfaction. Given sufficient scale, the Real might resemble traditional examples of the sublime: the mountain, the storm, the sea. In the midst of these magnitudes, you can never see everything, and those things that escape you suggest a power you cannot imagine. (Foster, 1997, 12)

 

Arguably one can include “the pond” alongside “the mountain, the storm, the sea” in Foster’s list of sublime examples found in nature (Foster, 1997, 12).

 

 Despite his scientific acumen, in “The Ponds” chapter Thoreau is at times at a loss to explain the how(s) and why(s) of the pond’s shape and history. Indeed, one characteristic of the ponds which fascinates him is the ability of the water to change colors depending on his vantage point: “All our Concord waters have two colors at least, one when viewed at a distance, and another, more proper, close at hand” (Thoreau, 1986, 223). As Thoreau continues, a sense that something inherent in nature is escaping him suggests he is in awe of “a power [he] cannot imagine” (Thoreau, 1986, 12), something which Malcolm Young discusses:

 

Whether observing and recording a snowflake, winter colors, the shape of a flower, or the habits of the blue heron, Thoreau takes great care to see the surfaces because he believes that these are the shapes of reality. Thoreau cares about the surface of nature out of his faith that these objects planted 'permanently within us' 'furnish...parts toward the soul.' For Thoreau, however, far more is at stake than mere self-improvement. Our connection to the world draws us closer to what is holy (Young, 2009, 153)

 

Though Young's comments are insightful, his interpretation of Thoreau is filtered through the

 

more traditional Transcendental point of view.^[10] Yet Young hits upon an important detail of Thoreau's writing when he notes that Thoreau's interaction with nature, and his contemplation of it, is the fulcrum point of his excursions. One such interaction arises as Thoreau is identifying the colors of the ponds, “blue…slate…green…yellowish…light green…blue mixed with yellow” (Thoreau, 1986, 223). A mystery of nature, Thoreau is at a loss to explain how the water retains particular colors when reason says it should be otherwise: “I have seen our river, when, the landscape being covered with snow, both water and ice were almost as green as grass” (Thoreau, 1986, 223-4). Later, after the winter snow has melted,

 

The water of our river is black or a very dark brown to one looking directly down on it, and, like that of most ponds, imparts to the body of one bathing in it a yellowish tinge; but this water is of such crystalline purity that the body of the bather appears of an alabaster whiteness, still more unnatural, which, as the limbs are magnified and distorted withal, produces a monstrous effect, making fit studies for a Michael Angelo (Thoreau,1986, 225)

 

It is also significant that the pages in which Thoreau attempts to describe the water are a build up to the moment in which he calls Walden “earth’s eye”(Thoreau, 1986, 233). As these descriptions above reveal, the eye is constantly changing, shifting its focus so as not to meet Thoreau’s gaze. Robinson posits that “[p]erception, as represented by Thoreau through the perfectly impressionable pond surface, is thus a process of merger and unification” (Robinson, 2004, 121). Yet this “merger and unification” is not possible because of the inherent shiftiness of the pond which, once again, protects Thoreau from being overwhelmed by the Real (Robinson, 2004, 121).

 

 Between the two moments discussed above, there is another moment that expresses a kind of (whimsical) jouissance which Thoreau feels. Crossing the pond in his boat, Thoreau becomes entranced: “In such transparent and seemingly bottomless water, reflecting the clouds, I seemed to be floating through the air as a balloon” (Thoreau, 1986, 237). He even imagines that the “myriads of small perch” are flying with him, “just beneath my level on the right or left” (Thoreau, 1986, 237). In this small moment, “the subject appears mesmerized: full of itSelf, and yet a mote in nature’s eye” (Dolis, 2005, 125). Between the Real and the Law of the Father, Thoreau “denies the laws of nature and culture that limit enjoyment…[and instead] [h]e finds a stage on which the drama of desire can be played out, [partaking of] enjoyment in spite of all boundaries” (Foster, 1997, 3). Yet jouissance is always fleeting, and “[f]or each of us there is a point at which satisfaction is impossible and not just forbidden” (Foster, 1997, 3). “Faced with these limits,” Thoreau continues his journey and “looks around for an escape, for some way to evade” the fate of loss (Foster, 1997, 3). Thus it is that when he meets his own gaze, as discussed above, Thoreau enters a (new) phantasy of reality in which he, as a “healthy” subject, “can still find…enjoyment, perverse or sublime, through the exercise of the law” (Foster, 1997, 3).

 

 At times it seems as though Thoreau has written episodes anticipating a Lacanian interpretation: the pond as earth’s eye gazing back at him; the pond as lamella, indestructible; the gendered/motherly quality of nature as described by Thoreau; the explicitness of describing a society plagued by anxiety and loss. And yet for all that Thoreau hoped to accomplish in Walden/Walden, there is no single passage identifiable as "Thoreau’s transcendent moment.” Instead, one encounters many moments in which Thoreau stands enamored of nature’s power. As I have argued, in these moments one may find Thoreau the subject at work creating a new phantasy of reality for himself. For had he been successful in “breaking through” nature’s protective reality, then one would be left with something indescribable: “if there is a notion of the real, it is extremely complex and, because of this, incomprehensible, it cannot be comprehended” ( Žižek, 2007, 65).

 

 All of this is not to say that Thoreau’s experience in Walden was of no consequence or benefit, to himself or his readers, but rather that Thoreau’s journey should be read as one of a subject moving from a state of discontent to one in which he becomes a healthy subject, ready to re-enter society. By the end of the narrative, no longer does the reader sense that Thoreau will “despair of getting anything quite simple and honest done in this world by the help of men” (Thoreau, 1986, 68). As Foster puts it, “[t]he healthy [subject]…can still find their enjoyment, perverse or sublime, through the exercise of law” (Foster, 1997, 3; emphasis added). Thoreau has thus found a way, in the phantasy he has created, to work within the symbolic law of society. Greater still, he wishes others to follow his example and alleviate their own troubled psyches. But like a psychoanalyst, Thoreau knows that each subject’s journey has to be their own experience: “I would not have anyone adopt my mode of living on any account” (Thoreau, 1986, 114). Knowingly, Thoreau intimates that the "cure" he found in Walden will have to be replayed over time in order to maintain the phantasy: “before [another] has fairly learned [my way] I may have found out another for myself” (Thoreau, 1986, 114).

 

Works Cited

D’Amore, Maura. 2009. Thoreau’s Unreal Estate: Playing House at Walden Pond. The New England Quarterly: A Historical Review of New England Life and Letters. LXXXII.1 (March): 56-79.

 

Dolis, John. 2005. Tracking Thoreau: Double-Crossing Nature and Technology. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

 

Foster, Dennis A. 1997. Sublime Enjoyment: On the Perverse Motive in American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 

Lacan, Jacques. 1998. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton.

 

Nightingale, Andrea. 2008. Auto-Hagiography: Augustine and Thoreau. Arion 16.2: 97- 135.

 

Poetzsch, Markus. 2008. Sounding Walden Pond: The Depths and 'Double Shadows' of Thoreau's Autobiographical Symbol. ATQ 22.2: 387-401.

 

Robinson, David M. 2004. Natural Life: Thoreau’s Worldly Transcendentalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

 

Schulenberg, Ulf. 2006. Books, Rocks, and Sentimental Education---Self-Culture and the Desire for the Really Real in Henry David Thoreau. Amerikastudien 51.2: 167-191.

 

Stowe, William W. 2010. Transcendental Vacations: Thoreau and Emerson in the Wilderness. The New England Quarterly: A Historical Review of New England Life and Letters. LXXXIII.3 (Sept.): 482-507.

 

Strong, David. 1992. The Significance of the Loss of Things: Walden Pond as 'Thing'. Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 75.1: 147-74.

 

Thoreau, Henry David. 1986. Walden and Civil Disobedience. New York: Penguin.

 

Young, Malcolm Clemens. 2009. The Spiritual Journal of Henry David Thoreau. Macon: Mercer University Press.

 

 Žižek, Slavoj. 2007. How to Read Lacan. New York: Norton.

---. The Plague of Fantasies. 1997. London: Verso.

---. The Parallax View. 2006. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.