Abstract
In this chapter, I focus on the provocative nature of Emerson’s prose. In the face of its fragmentary nature and its apparent inconsistency, the reader of Emerson seems to be left alone with the challenge of coming to a point for herself. But she is not utterly left alone. I examine Emerson’s scattered remarks about his style, I take a clue from F. O. Matthiessen, and then I argue that the problem of Emerson’s prose is the manifestation of a key problem in his philosophy of life: how to integrate the “knowledge of life by indirections” into a unified whole, or how to advance a rhetoric that would eventually bring about psychagogia.
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Notes
- 1.
In the same vein, Jonathan Bishop goes so far as to suggest that in reading Emerson one should “distinguish the excellent moments,” which hardly ever “exceed a page or two of sustained utterance” (Bishop 1964: 6).
- 2.
Compare it with Emerson’s allusion to the strategy of using the “mot juste,” where he writes in his journals, “All writing should be selection in order to drop every dead word. Why do you not save out of your speech or thinking only the vital things,—the spirited mot which amused or warmed you when you spoke it” (JMN, 16: 167).
- 3.
As Matthiessen writes, “The problem of Emerson’s prose was the same as that of his philosophy, how to reconcile the individual with society, how to join his sentences into a paragraph” (Matthiessen 1941: 66).
- 4.
For a commentary on the significance of this mode of life, see Hadot (1995), especially Chap. 7. Richard Gummere’s translation of Seneca’s phrase is slightly different from Chase’s translation of Hadot’s French translation of the phrase “toti se inserens mundo.” Gummere writes of a soul that “penetrates the whole world.”
- 5.
Quoted from Hadot 1995: 258.
- 6.
In William James’ words, “Truth has to be clad in the right verbal garment. The form of the garment was so vital with Emerson that it is impossible to separate it from the matter. They form a chemical combination—thoughts which would be trivial expressed otherwise, are important through the nouns and verbs to which he married them” (James 1962: 19).
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Hosseini, R. (2021). The Question of Style. In: Emerson's Literary Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54979-4_3
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