Abstract
The death of his little boy Waldo, who succumbed to scarlet fever in January of 1842, unmoored Emerson. Suddenly, his familiar world—the village of Concord, his comfortable house, his wife and friends—appeared cryptic, and alien. As Emerson painfully recorded in his journal a day after his son’s death, “Sorrow makes us all children again …. The wisest knows nothing” (JMN 8:165). His hospitable nooks had metamorphosed into Dante’s dark wood, Spenser’s cave of despair, Hamlet’s “stale, flat and unprofitable” terrain. Lost, he groped for his old Platonic temples of wisdom—all is well sub specie aeternitatis—but found only the labyrinths of time. Nothing made sense.
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Notes
M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (London and New York: Norton, 1971), 97–117; Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of the Transcendent (London and Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), 1–33; Raimonda Modiano, Coleridge and the Concept of Nature (London: Macmillan, 1985), 113–16; Albert O. Wlecke, Wordsworth and the Sublime (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1973), 1–19.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952), 90–2; Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. and intro. Adam Phillips (Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990), 36, 53, 113–4, 121–2.
Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984), xxiii–xxv; 77–82.
Harold Bloom, Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1976), 235–48; Rob Wilson, The American Sublime: The Genealogy of a Poetic Genre (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 5; Joanne Feit Diehl, “In the Twilight of the Gods: Woman Poets and the American Sublime,” The American Sublime, ed. Mary Arensberg (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1986), 174.
As I have shown in a recent review essay (“From Metaphysical Poverty to Practical Power: Emerson’s Embrace of the Physical World,” ESQ 43:1–4 [1997], 295–322), several scholars during the last decade have worked to shatter the image of the optimistic, overly idealistic Emerson. The major texts of this revisionary trend are Lee Rust Brown, The Emerson Museum: Practical Romanticism and the Pursuit of the Whole (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard Univ. Press, 1997); Michael Lopez, Emerson and Power: Creative Antagonism in the Nineteenth Century (Dekalb: Northern Illinios Univ. Press, 1996); Stanley Cavell, Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 12–41, 91–103; David Jacobson, Emerson’s Pragmatic Vision (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1993); Richard Poirier, Poetry and Pragmatism (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard Univ. Press, 1992); George J. Stack, Emerson and Nietzsche: An Elective Affinity (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1992). I hope this chapter on Emerson deepens and extends this prior work.
James B. Twitchell, Romantic Horizons: Aspects of the Sublime in English Poetry and Painting, 1770–1850 (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1983), 198.
Bloom, Agon: Towards a Theory of Revision (Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), 158.
Eric Wilson, Emerson’s Sublime Science (London and New York: Macmillan/St. Martin’s, 1999), 40–4.
For an excellent meditation on Emerson’s “poetic” scientific method, see Laura Dassow Walls, “The Anatomy of Truth: Emerson’s Poetic Science,” Configurations 5:3 (Fall 1997), 425–462.
Wilson, Emerson’s Sublime Science, 77–81; Eric Wilson, “Emerson and Electromagnetism,” ESQ 42:2 (1996), 93–124.
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Michael Faraday, Experimental Researches in Electricity, vol. 45, Great Books of the Western World, eds. Robert Maynard Hutchins, et al. (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952), 269; Barbara Giusti Doran, “Origins and Consolidation of Field Theory in Nineteenth-Century Britain: From the Mechanical to the Electromagnetic View of Nature,” vol. 6, Historical Studies in Physical Sciences, ed. Russell McCormmach, (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975), 134; Mary B. Hesse, Forces and Fields: The Concept of Action at a Distance in the History of Physics (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1961), 218.
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There have been other studies that have developed Emerson’s disruptive style from other angles. See B. L. Packer, Emerson’s Fall: A New Interpretation of the Major Essays (New York: Continuum, 1982); Alan Hodder, Emerson’s Rhetoric of Revelation: Nature, the Readers, and the Apocalypse Within (University Park and London: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1989); Julie Ellison, Emerson’s Romantic Style (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1984); Eric Cheyfitz, The Transparent: Sexual Politics in the Language of Emerson (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1981).
Wilson, Emerson’s Sublime Science, 160–2; Eric Wilson, “Weaving: Breathing: Thinking: The Poetics of Emerson’s Nature,” ATQ 10:1 (March 1996), 5–24.
Michel Serres, Feux et signaux de brume, Zola (Paris: Grasset, 1975), 17–8.
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William Paulson, “Literature, Complexity, Interdisciplinarity,” Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science, ed. Katherine Hayles (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991), 38–40.
Serres, “The Origin of Language: Biology, Information Theory, and Thermodynamics,” Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, eds. Josue V. Harari and David F. Bell (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1982), 74.
Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979), 11.
David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London and New York: Ark Paperbacks, 1983), 11; xii.
James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Penguin, 1987), 8.
Philip Kuberski, Chaosmos: Literature, Science, and Theory (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1994), 3. For a brilliant and germane discussion of the “chaosmic” possibilities of the shell, as object and trope, see also Kuberski’s “The Metaphor of the Shell,” The Persistence of Memory: Organism, Myth, Text (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1992, S-93.
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© 2000 Eric Wilson
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Wilson, E. (2000). Emerson’s Paralogical Currents. In: Romantic Turbulence. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-62679-3_2
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