Matter and Objects in "The Maine Woods"

For my contribution to the roundtable, I will examine the famous “Contact!” passage from The Maine Woods. After hostile conditions turn him around from the alpine region on Katahdin, just shy of Pamola Peak, Thoreau reunites with his companions and begins his descent. Finding the alpine zone a hostile environment, Thoreau describes the path he takes as the most treacherous he has experienced due to the hostile, elemental forces around him (64). During his descent, Thoreau experiences what has been deemed a moment of crisis:

“Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there, the form and fashion and material of their work. This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man's garden, but the unhandselled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste-land. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made for ever and ever, — to be the dwelling of man, we say, — so Nature made it, and man may use it if he can. Man was not to be associated with it. It was Matter, vast, terrific, — not his Mother Earth that we have heard of, not for him to tread on, or be buried in, — no, it were being too familiar even to let his bones lie there, — the home, this, of Necessity and Fate. There was there felt the presence of a force not bound to be kind to man. It was a place for heathenism and superstitious rites, — to be inhabited by men nearer of kin to the rocks and to wild animals than we. We walked over it with a certain awe, stopping, from time to time, to pick the blueberries which grew there, and had a smart and spicy taste. Perchance where our wild pines stand, and leaves lie on their forest floor, in Concord, there were once reapers, and husbandmen planted grain; but here not even the surface had been scarred by man, but it was a specimen of what God saw fit to make this world. What is it to be admitted to a museum, to see a myriad of particular things, compared with being shown some star's surface, some hard matter in its home! I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one, — that my body might, — but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries! — Think of our life in nature, — daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, — rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?” (70-71).

In this passage, Thoreau effectively screams out that matter matters. What has not been sufficiently addressed in the prodigious scholarship on this passage—which has, for the most part, privileged Thoreau’s distinction from the environment and has attended primarily to his epistemological condition—is that Thoreau’s account of this event is dominated by the material objects around him: the rocks, trees, and wind, objects whose materiality he underscores with his emphatically punctuated noun clause, the solid and actual world.

Rather than provide an in-depth analysis of this passage, however, I will focus on Timothy Morton’s surprising fascination with this passage, surprising insofar as Morton is not a Thoreauvian and in fact has dedicated much of his recent work to critiquing the normative nature writing tradition associated with Thoreau.

Morton’s first reference to The Maine Woods comes in his 2007 book Ecology Without Nature, where he argues that Thoreau’s emphatic tone serves to distort nature. Morton thus holds the passage as an example of the sort of ecological writing that he celebrates for its attempts to “undo habitual distinctions between nature and ourselves” (63). In The Ecological Thought (2010), wherein Morton challenges dominant forms of environmental epistemology, he again cites the “Contact!” passage, suggesting that as we know more about the nonhuman world we simultaneously experience increasing alienation from nature so that “we may all now be experiencing what Thoreau wrote concerning the ascent of Mount Katahdin” (33). And just a couple of pages into Hyperobjects (2013), Morton returns once more to the “Contact!” passage in referencing the concept of the anthropocene, or the era in which humans have shaped the world on a geological scale (4).

The material turn, and for the purposes of this position paper I use Morton as a metonym for that scholarship, encourages us to not to privilege Thoreau’s crisis of subjectivity at the expense of the material objects and nonhuman world. More specifically, OOO’s emphasis on the autonomy and inherently withdrawn nature of objects brings into relief the process of defamiliarization that Thoreau experiences as he oscillates from traversing this landscape “familiarly” to looking with “awe” at the materials surrounding him (70). The New Materialist concern with radically reconsidering relationships among matter, and its “insistence that humans, including theorists themselves, be recognized as thoroughly immersed within materiality’s productive contingencies” (Coole and Frost 7), dovetail almost seamlessly with Thoreau’s newfound consideration of his own body’s materiality and his unsettling “contact” with the “solid earth! the actual world” (71).

Both New Materialism and OOO contend that matter and objects exist equally, without affording humans or other forms of matter ontological primacy. This is a radical suggestion for anyone, much less the Transcendentalist Thoreau whose ideological investment in correlationism habituated him to think that the “being” of nonhuman objects mattered insofar as it could be represented anthropocentrically. What Thoreau must do is take the hermeneutical leap to “conceive of a region uninhabited by man” (70). Otherwise familiar objects, such as the ground, poplars, stones, and blueberries, in this case become unfamiliar. Thoreau provides no details of how he perceives these objects, and there is little sense of correlation or correspondence. Whatever meaning these objects might have, it seems, is not immediately accessible to Thoreau. Instead, in recognizing both unfamiliar relations between objects and the inherent autonomy of objects, Thoreau rejects the sort of anthropocentric ontology that both New Materialism and OOO critique.

As David Robinson has illuminated, the difficulty in interpreting this passage stems from Thoreau’s contradictory position: alienated from, while simultaneously brought into contact with, the nonhuman world (137). That contradiction extends to the difficulty of a materialist consideration of the passage: whether to privilege autonomy or relationality. The question, then, is whether the passage lends itself to an OOO or New Materialist interpretation. Does it privilege the inherent withdrawnness of objects or does it describe a complex assemblage of agential matter? Following Jane Bennett’s suggestion that “there is no need to choose between objects or their relations,” and that OOO and New Materialism have more in common than some polemicists might admit (“Systems” 227), I will posit that the “Contact!” passage lends itself just as easily to OOO as New Materialist interpretations. This may be why Morton consistently cites this passage throughout the trilogy of books that mark his theoretical transition from New Materialism to OOO. It seems, then, that Morton’s refusal to jettison the “Contact!” passage, despite his transition from New Materialism to OOO, thus serves as a valuable example for Bennett’s attempt at theoretical détente.

Works Cited

Bennett, Jane. “Systems and Things: A Response to Graham Harman and Timothy Morton.” New Literary History 43.2 (2012): 225-33. Project Muse. Web. 10 Sep. 2013.

Coole, Diana and Samantha Frost. “Introducing the New Materialisms.” New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, Politics. Ed. Diana Coole and Samatha Frost. Durham: Duke UP, 2010. 1-43.

Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2010. Print.

—. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2005. Print.

—. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2013. Print.

Robinson, David. Natural Life: Thoreau’s Worldly Transcendentalism. Ithaca: Cornell Up, 2004. Print.

Thoreau, Henry David. The Maine Woods. Ed. Joseph J. Moldenhauer. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972. Print.