Meehan and Metonymy

I came to this article ready to reject it out of hand as I usually find Emerson’s conception of nature as too anthrocentric: it is a blank canvas on which mankind can express itself and come to understand itself better through that expression. However, Meehan seeks to complicate this reading of Emerson and gives us a fuller picture of how the writer understood the interwoven relationship between humanity and the natural world. The article correctly sums up the widespread notion in criticism that Emerson was overly transcendental and metaphorical when compared to an observational and empirical Thoreau. Using metonymy, which Meehan defines as an association between two objects through “physical or temporal contiguity”, Emerson and Thoreau are both able to bridge the gap between the imaginary and the concrete, the lofty and the grounded.

In his discussion, Meehan raises some interesting points that I found especially relevant to A Week on the Concord and Merrimack and Nature even though they were not his primary texts. The larger trend of ecocritics to separate the literal and the literary in texts such as these creates a sort of binary where concrete representations of nature are privileged over the more expressive and imaginative depictions. Is it wise to separate the abstract from the concrete? Emerson and Thoreau seek to marry the two concepts together by using carefully constructed rhetoric to shape our perception of a material nature. Metonymy becomes a means of understanding that which we cannot conceive of empirically: the interconnected web of the natural world. Empirical knowledge can only take us so far before we come up short and must rely on literary expression. Yes, we can track the dispersion of seeds and catalogue the numerous species of plants and animals but nature will continue to hold a mystery just out of reach. When we find ourselves faced with the incomprehensible, metonymy and other forms of literary expression can offer us a way to articulate the inexpressible in readable ways we can understand. In Meehan’s reading, Emerson’s “poet” becomes a kind of middleman to form a “chain of relation among nature, writer, and reader” (Meehan 305). In this way, the poet is a filter or “organic agent” willing to forge a metonymic relationship between the reader and the natural world.

To bring Thoreau and Emerson together, is Thoreau going out on the river to pluck the ripe symbols waiting to be transcribed for his readers? Is he an “organic agent”? I think both Thoreau and Emerson understand the power that comes with mediation and use it to communicate their own messages. In A Week, Thoreau offers empirical observations of the fish living within the current of the Concord River together with historical insight into mankind’s relationship to the fish and the river itself. Expounding on his cataloguing of fish and plant life, Thoreau builds from descriptions of colors and behaviors to a full examination of the ecological impact man has stamped into the river with dams and factories. The structure of the book itself shows form blending into a higher function as Thoreau’s narrative flows between journalistic observations of the Concord and high-minded analogous sermonizing. If Thoreau’s style meanders and flows like a river, Emerson’s Nature delves right into an exploration of metonymy, most notably in the “Language” section. When describing the use of naturalistic terms inherent in our speech on page 18, Emerson combines the spiritual with the physical: “An enraged man is a lion, a cunning man is a fox, a firm man is a rock… A lamb is innocence; a snake is subtle spite”. Though he does not use the word metonymy, he describes these phrases as things that “can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture.” Here we see Emerson relying on metonymy to express things he would be unable to otherwise.