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Overview
Utopias fail. Utopias of one do not. They are perfect worlds. Yet their success comes at a cost. They are radically singular—and thus exclusive and inimitable.
Utopias of One is a major new account of utopian writing. Joshua Kotin examines how eight writers—Henry David Thoreau, W. E. B. Du Bois, Osip and Nadezhda Mandel’shtam, Anna Akhmatova, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and J. H. Prynne—construct utopias of one within and against modernity’s two large-scale attempts to harmonize individual and collective interests: liberalism and communism. The book begins in the United States between the buildup to the Civil War and the end of Jim Crow; continues in the Soviet Union between Stalinism and the late Soviet period; and concludes in England and the United States between World War I and the end of the Cold War. The book, in this way, captures how writers from disparate geopolitical contexts resist state and normative power to construct perfect worlds—for themselves alone.
Utopias of One makes a vital contribution to debates about literature and politics, presenting innovative arguments about aesthetic difficulty, personal autonomy, and complicity and dissent. The book also models a new approach to transnational and comparative scholarship, combining original research in English and Russian to illuminate more than a century and a half of literary and political history.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781400887866 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/28/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 216 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Learning from Walden
1
"Walden is a work that sets about offering specific advice about ways in which the individual can achieve both microcosmic and macrocosmic fulfillment." This is a strong version of a claim that informs most readings of the book. Walden is a "guide," a model of "moral prose," a "tract of political education," an "effort to educate [its] audience in the 'deep' art of living," and a "framework for developing virtue ethics." Yet despite this near-consensus, there is much confusion about what, specifically, the book teaches.
The confusion predates the publication of Walden by six years. On April 2, 1849, the New-York Daily Tribune published an anonymous review of Thoreau's lecture "Economy." The reviewer summarized Thoreau's experiment and offered an account of its pedagogical value: "Mr. Thoreau," he wrote, "is a young student, who has imbibed (or rather refused to stifle), the idea that a man's soul is better worth living for than his body. ... If all our young men would but hear this lecture, we think some among them would feel less strongly impelled either to come to New-York or go to California." For the anonymous reviewer, the lecture taught its auditors how to prioritize self-cultivation over material gain.
Five days later, the Tribune published a letter from a puzzled reader, along with a response from Horace Greeley, the newspaper's editor. The reader questioned whether Thoreau's lecture could teach its auditors anything at all. "Having always found in The Tribune a friend of sociability and neighborly helping-each-other-along," the reader wrote, "I felt a little surprise at seeing such a performance held up as an example for the young men of this country. ... [N]obody has a right to live for himself alone." Greeley, in response, defended the reviewer's original position. "Nobody," he explained, "has proposed or suggested that it becomes everybody to go off into the woods, each build himself a hut and live hermit-like, on the vegetable products of his very moderate labor." The point, instead, is more general: Thoreau has "set all his brother aspirants to self-culture, a very wholesome example, and shown them how, by chastening their physical appetites, they may preserve their proper independence without starving their souls."
The exchange in the Tribune captures the complexity of Thoreau's exemplarity — and Walden's pedagogy, more generally. How, we might ask, has Thoreau taught us to chasten our appetites? If we purge Walden of its detail — of its specific means of "self-culture" — what is left but platitudes? As Leo Marx has noted, "For centuries writers [have suggested] that men might enrich their contemplative experience by simplifying their housekeeping." How is Walden special or especially compelling? How can we learn from Thoreau's example if we cannot follow his example? What, in other words, does his utopia of one have to do with us, his readers? This, ultimately, is the subject of this chapter: our relation to Thoreau's utopia of one, and its relation to us.
2
What Would Thoreau Do?
— MOTTO ON T-SHIRT
Walden teems with advice. Thoreau tells readers what to eat and wear, what to read and how. Yet as many readers recognize, this advice is inconsistent. "[T]rade curses everything it handles," Thoreau writes in "Economy." In "Sounds," he remarks, "What recommends commerce to me is its enterprise and bravery" (118). In "Higher Laws," he condemns eating meat, including fish. In the next chapter, "Brute Neighbors," he prepares for a fishing trip. In "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For," he denounces the railway that cuts across the southwestern edge of Walden Pond. In "Sounds" he celebrates the railway's grandeur, comparing "the passage of the morning cars" to "the rising of the sun" (116). As Robert D. Richardson Jr. writes, the book "can be cited on both sides of many issues, and rather easily."
But inconsistency is not the only obstacle to identifying (or following) Walden's advice. Thoreau deploys an array of parables and aphorisms — many of which are intractably ambiguous. "Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors," he advises in "Spring" (314). But as he knows, to discern innocence is to lose it: "What is chastity?" he asks in "Higher Laws," "How shall a man know if he is chaste? He shall not know it" (220). In "Reading," he counsels that "Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written" (101). But how does one know how "deliberately" a book was written? What does it mean to read "reservedly"? Should we reserve judgment or read skeptically, standing in constant judgment of a book's claims? In "Economy," he declares, "We might try our lives by a-thousand simple tests; as, for instance, that the same sun which ripens my beans illumines at once a system of earths like ours" (10). How is this a test? What does this sentence even mean? As Barbara Johnson notes, "It is paradoxical that a writer who constantly exhorts us to 'Simplify, simplify' should also be the author of some of the most complex and difficult passages in the English language." "The perverse complexity of Walden's rhetoric," she adds, "is intimately related to the fact that it is never possible to be sure what the rhetorical status of any given image is."
When Thoreau's advice is consistent and unambiguous, it often is clichéd or empty. "Explore thyself," he recommends (322). "It is never too late to give up our prejudices" (8). "Set about being good" (73). This is not advice but the outline of advice — maxims that require readers to supply their content and justify their relevance. "But I would say to my fellows, once for all, As long as possible live free and uncommitted" (84). Thoreau, here, follows his own advice by tentatively withholding it from readers: the conditional mood marks his refusal to commit to his aphorism.
But this line of inquiry, one could argue, is misguided. Indeed, Walden's inconsistencies, ambiguities, and clichés might not be meant as advice at all. They are provocations. The book, from this perspective, does not follow a "'banking' concept of education" — to cite a phrase from Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968). Knowledge is not "a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing." Thoreau is not an exemplary figure — a model for readers to emulate. Instead, Walden is an occasion for readers to think for themselves. "I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account," he writes. "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" (71). "Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?" (10).
When read in this way, Walden asks us to take responsibility for how we live — by asking us, first, to take responsibility for what we read. Contradictions are opportunities to assume opposing points of view. Ambiguous sentences invite us to adapt the book to fit our individual lives. Clichés motivate us to question social norms. Thoreau cultivates critical readers — not disciples.
One could push this argument even further. To encourage critical thinking, Thoreau relies on an array of literary and nonliterary techniques — irony, puns, monotony, aggression. Consider his use of "relish" in the following passage from "The Bean-Field." The historical context is the buildup to the Mexican-American War. Thoreau describes the influence of hearing "some waifs of martial music" emanating from Concord on "gala days":
But sometimes it was a really noble and inspiring strain that reached these woods, and the trumpet that sings of fame, and I felt as if I could spit a Mexican with a good relish, — for why should we always stand for trifles? — and looked round for a woodchuck or a skunk to exercise my chivalry upon. (160–61)
The passage warns readers about art's influence: the "noble and inspiring strain" inspires a fantasy of killing a Mexican soldier. But the pun on "relish" undermines the warning by emphasizing Thoreau's control and self-awareness. ("Relish" is at once a description of pleasure and a garnish. Thoreau is joking about roasting and eating the soldier.) The passage, in this way, catches readers in a web of contradictory effects — we are repulsed by Thoreau's joke, impressed by his verbal dexterity, confused by his warning.
This line of inquiry suggests that Thoreau's aim in Walden is to teach self-reliance. What is self-reliance? For Emerson, it is a practice of perspectivism and receptivity. The "self," in his view, is not an individual's discrete nature but a relationship to an impersonal "common nature." As Sharon Cameron writes, "what self-reliance turns out to mean for Emerson is a strong recognitional understanding of the inadequacy of any person: other persons or this person. And what the preacher and the American Scholar know how to do is to break out of the tyranny of egotistical self-enclosure." To be self-reliant, in other words, is to constantly defy one's own point of view while developing a connection to what Emerson calls, in the "The Over-Soul" (1841), "that Unity, that Over-soul, within which every man's particular being is contained and made one with all other."
Emerson attempts to teach self-reliance in two seemingly contradictory ways. First, he helps readers "break out of the tyranny of egotistical self-enclosure" by packing his essays with incompatible ideas and points of view. To read his work is to adopt and abandon a series of disparate subject positions. Second, he invites readers to identify with his point of view. By accepting this invitation, we participate in his practice of perspectivism and receptivity, and, in the process, learn to see the world anew, from a common subject position. His world becomes our world — or, more accurately, our worlds become one.
Does Emerson's version of self-reliance illuminate Walden's pedagogy? Yes and no. Thoreau also encourages us to adopt and abandon a series of disparate subject positions. But he does not present a world we can hold in common. As I noted in the introduction, Walden is an artificially circumscribed environment, tailored to reduce and reveal the needs of a single individual. As a result, it cannot easily serve as a site of collective action. (Indeed, I think Walden presents an implicit critique of Emerson's pedagogy. For Thoreau, Emerson's practice of perspectivism and receptivity is rarely sustainable over long periods of time. One cannot live in the world and remain radically vulnerable to the world. Walden and Walden are Thoreau's attempt to change that — to construct an artificial world that would support a genuine and durable practice of self-reliance.)
Perhaps Thoreau's own concept of "awakening" better captures the book's pedagogical aims. (Variations of "to wake" appear thirty-four times in the book; "self-reliance" does not appear at all.) "Walden's great achievement," argues Johnson, "is to wake us up to our own lost losses." "Walden makes up for the absent cock-crow," notes Walter Benn Michaels. "I do not propose to write an ode to dejection," Thoreau himself declares, "but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up" (84).
But what does it mean, in Walden, to be awake? In "Solitude," Thoreau describes a "doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another" (135). "However intense my experience," he explains, "I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it; and that is no more I than it is you" (135). To be awake, in this account, is to regard one's life from first- and third-person perspectives. "This doubleness may easily make us poor neighbors and friends sometimes," he concludes (135). Elsewhere in Walden, to awake is to lose perspective entirely. In "The Village," he writes, "Every man has to learn the points of the compass again as often as he awakes whether from sleep or any abstraction" (171).
Wakefulness, in this way, is yet another ambiguous concept in the book. "Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep," Thoreau writes in "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For" (90). Yet later in the chapter, he ridicules men who wake every half hour to hear the news. "We have the Saint Vitus' dance, and cannot possibly keep our heads still" (93). Stanley Cavell asks, "How do we replace anxious wakefulness by a constant awakening?" But first, we should ask: What is the difference? To further complicate matters, recall who does the waking in Walden: Chanticleer. In the Chanticleer and the Fox story (famously adapted by Chaucer in the "Nun's Priest's Tale"), Chanticleer dreams about being captured by a fox. Against his better judgment, he disregards the dream and is captured midsong — literally as he brags lustily to his neighbors. To be awake, in this case, is to sleep — dreaming, for Chanticleer, is a way to see the future and safeguard the present.
"Literary anarchy" — this is how Michaels describes Walden's ultimate effect. Thoreau refuses to model a coherent practice of right action or self-reliance or wakefulness. Indeed, he refuses all forms of authority. Reading Walden, we confront a series of crises — concerning capitalism, animal rights, environmental degradation, erotic desire, reading, patriotism, religious experience — but we do not receive any guidance about how to respond to them.
This refusal of authority can itself be turned into a lesson. Laura Dassow Walls, for example, argues that Walden devises a radical, nonhierarchical communitarianism:
By dissociating himself from a determinative "law" or logos as the cohering center, Thoreau devised an alternative, decentered, and relational world constructed on the ethic of interaction rather than dominance, knowledge not through control but through "sympathy" and the intimacy of sensual contact, action not alone but through the cooperation of the community's individual members.
This is an attractive way to understand the book's anarchy. But it is also problematic. Thoreau may reject a "determinative 'law' or logos," but he does not represent a decentered world: his experience anchors the book. Moreover, he does not offer a happy portrait of intimacy. Consider his relationships with Alek Therien (the Canadian woodchopper and post-maker), John Field, and William Ellery Channing — his three most prominent interlocutors in the book. These relationships do not present a portrait of "cooperation" — a fact I discuss in section 3 of this chapter.
But even if we ignore these facts, we should ask: Is Walls's account an ideal or yet another cliché? A "world constructed on the ethic of interaction rather than dominance" is an easy fantasy. (It is a fantasy common to the community at Brook Farm and many humanities departments today.) In "Economy," Thoreau critiques such fantasies, telling a story of two travelers, one with means, one without: "It was easy to see that they could not long be companions or coöperate, since one would not operate at all. They would part at the first interesting crisis in their adventures" (72). The story highlights the importance of class, revealing the economic barriers to cooperation. But the story does not show us how to address them — or even suggest that we should. Thoreau simply notes, "the man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready, and it may be a long time before they get off" (72).
Thoreau's life at Walden is meant to spur us to find our own Waldens. This seems to be the only way to describe the book's charge to readers. But even this extremely weak account is not satisfactory. Cavell asks but does not answer a vital question: "Does the writer of Walden really believe [that] one could find one's Walden behind a bank counter, or driving a taxi, or guiding a trip hammer, or selling insurance, or teaching school?" The answer, one presumes, is no. Walden seems to require more than a shift in attitude or understanding. The book asks us to take responsibility for our lives, but it does not give us the tools or the authority to evaluate our success.
Ultimately, a weak account of what Walden teaches readers is unsatisfying, while a strong account is incoherent. The book pressures us to become new men and women, yet refuses to tell us how. In the context of Walden, the question "What Would Thoreau Do?" is unanswerable and wrongheaded, yet omnipresent. We know that the book has something important and specific to teach us about how to live, but we cannot articulate it. Is there a way to escape this impasse — to make sense of the book's power and emptiness?
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Introduction Utopias of One 1I THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
1 Learning from Walden 17
2 W.E.B. Du Bois’s Hermeticism 33
II THE SOVIET UNION
3 Osip and Nadezhda Mandel’shtam’s Utopian Anti-Utopianism 51
4 Anna Akhmatova’s Complicity 71
III THE WORLD
5 Wallace Stevens’s Point of View 91
6 Reading Ezra Pound and J. H. Prynne in Chinese 109
Conclusion Utopias of Two 130
Acknowledgments 139
Note on Transliteration & Translation 141
Notes 143
Bibliography 179
Index 197
What People are Saying About This
"This beautifully written book convincingly redefines the progressive potential of utopian thinking, locating it in a refusal to formulate totalizing programs for the future as well as in an attention to the present and the minute, the fragile and the precarious. Provocatively, Kotin does not spend a lot of time on the standard dismissal of utopianism as apolitical snobbism or aesthetic idealism, and instead detects in poetry forces intense enough to enact utopian successes."—Branka Arsić, Columbia University"Joshua Kotin identifies an aim—autonomy—common to writers across centuries and continents. His analysis of aesthetic success combines sensitivity to formal dynamics with an acute sense of the social dilemmas form is tasked with resolving. In its broad conceptual architecture, Utopias of One finds a way to integrate the universal, existential dimensions of literature with a sophisticated account of all the forces that constrain it."—Michael W. Clune, author of Writing Against Time"In elegant and sinewy prose, Kotin presents not so much a cross-national study but something better, a non-national study. Despite the different languages and periods of his iconoclastic authors, Kotin illuminates the work of each and, against all odds, their connection to one another and to us."—Charles Bernstein, author of Pitch of Poetry"It's a delight to encounter American and Russian poets juxtaposed in this way. Creative, original, and with clear and lively prose, Utopias of One is thoroughly enjoyable."—Brian M. Reed, University of Washington