"Thoreau's Flute," Kathleen Coyne Kelly

Henry’s favorite instrument was the flute, which his father had played before him . . . the best place for hearing its pastoral note was on some hillside, or the edge of the wood or stream; and Emerson took pleasure in its strains upon those excursions to the Cliffs, or Walden.

Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, The Personality of Thoreau (1901)

Writers stamp themselves upon their possessions more indelibly than other people . . . they seem to possess . . . a faculty for housing themselves appropriately, for making the table, the chair, the curtain, the carpet into their own image.

Virginia Woolf, “Great Men’s Houses” (1931)

I began thinking about Henry David Thoreau’s flute, as I have been trained to do, by reading everything that I could about it. I learned about its parts and manufacture, and gathered together what Thoreau and his friends had to say about it. I looked at photographs of the flute, and visited it in the Concord Museum. I wondered how best to present Thoreau’s flute as one actant among many, as Bruno Latour says, in a complex assemblage of things. How might I approach the flute as lively and agential without reproducing it as a personification? How could I avoid sounding a little dotty as I attempted to attend to its autonomous materiality—to what Jane Bennett calls “thing-power”?

Nabokov inspired me to forget my training altogether. In Transparent Things, Nabokov makes a distinction between the experienced (perhaps the jaded, and surely the disenchanted) and the beginner:

When we concentrate on a material object, whatever its situation, the very act of attention may lead to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object. Novices must learn to skim over matter if they want matter to stay at the exact level of the moment. Transparent things, through which the past shines! (1)

Let us take Nabokov’s emphatic we to mean sophisticated professionals (academics, yes, but more broadly, most humans) who, despite the occasional lapse, learn to control the desire to immerse themselves in the material—to immerse themselves in the vibrating histories of things. For most of us, after rigorous re-education, matter turns opaque, loses its temporality, and is made an idea, becoming something merely to think through. But Nabokov says that novices (amateurs, in the most engaging sense as lovers of), not yet fully fixed in the now (an “exact level” puns on the idea of uniformity, an imaginary line, the surveyor’s device), fall through the surface, humming happily to themselves, and are soon reveling with childish abandon” in stories in things (1). Serendipitously for Thoreauvians, Nabokov’s hero Hugh Person (person!) contemplates the history of a pencil: “the entire little drama, from crystallized carbon and felled pine to this humble implement, to this transparent thing, unfolds in a twinkle. Alas, the solid pencil itself . . . still somehow eludes us!” (8)

             In what follows, mindful of the elusive nature of matter, I relate (with abandon) two narratives about Thoreau’s flute. (I have other stories to tell at the Annual Gathering.) Attending to the thing qua thing can be exhilarating, liberatingly defamiliarizing, and dangerous: every once in a while, when the sardine can looks back (as W. J. T. Mitchell puts it), one can feel the universe rearrange itself.

* * *

Tale one. That flute was once carried around by a very flesh-and-blood Henry David in his pack or in his pocket; it absorbed the oil from his fingers and was moistened by his breath and saliva. After Thoreau’s death—and perhaps at the very moment Louisa May Alcott’s poem, “Thoreau’s Flute,” was published in the Atlantic in 1863—the value of the flute changed quite radically, migrating from the personal to the public realm.

Since I am a medievalist, one of the ways that I experience the flute is as a relic, that something left behind, entombed in its case behind glass inside a museum with a highly sophisticated alarm system. It’s a small shift to then think about the flute as a totem or a fetish, perhaps quite literally in the anthropological and Marxist senses, but certainly figuratively. I would suggest that Alfred Winslow Hosmer’s famous photographic tableau fetishizes Thoreau’s flute; moreover, Hosmer’s manipulation of light and shadow seems to render quite vividly what Walter Benjamin calls the “aura” of a unique cultural artifact. Relics and fetishes, it should be noted, do not call us to contemplate objects; instead, we are asked to pay attention to subjects and their relations with and to objects. Moreover, our attempts to preserve relics and fetishes (in the locked cabinet in the study, in the museum) dramatize the temporality, or polytemporality, of matter: it is, as Nabokov recognizes, here and now, but also there and then.

Tale two. Alcott opens her elegiac poem this way: “We, sighing, said, “Our Pan is dead; / His pipe hangs mute beside the river” (1-2). She continues: “Then from the flute, untouched by hands, / There came a low, harmonious breath” (9-10). Annie Russell Marble, in Thoreau: His Home, Friends, and Books, says that these latter lines

refer to a strange incident told by the family, that, after Thoreau’s death, a passing breeze over his flute, as it hung upon the wall, brought forth a plaintive note, as if a message from its master. (315)

My concern is not with the “fact” of that breath; rather, I am more interested in that “as if” as a fine bit of exegesis. The bereaved family misreads, projecting their very understandable human desires upon a combination of wind and woodwind, both of which were just going about their own business. In this third narrative, Thoreau’s flute is deprived of its own bodiliness; it is re-embodied but de-materialized, troped as the sign of the poet, making Thoreau a Pan, an Orpheus, a Dionysus.

Personification illustrates even for the most literal-minded that words are multivalent, point elsewhere, off the page, into the wild. However, personification in nature writing is too often the result of a human need, and when that need distorts our perceptions of the natural world, it becomes an ethical matter—a point, perhaps, that we don’t make often enough. I just committed a pathetic fallacy (in its post-Ruskin sense) by saying that relics call and words point. Yet I want to resist the verb commit, regularly used in common collocation with crime. I would prefer to recuperate anthropomorphism, so often described as naïve, and to rehabilitate personification and prosopopoeia, so often dismissed as sentimental. Imagine instead personification as the discursive trace of the matterliness of things, a strategy by which the more-than-human world announces itself across the divide that we have constructed between culture and nature. In such a context, the flute in Alcott’s poem sounds quite different/ly. Left to its own devices, the flute tells its own story.

* * *

Telling tales about Thoreau’s flute has its pleasures, but there’s also more at stake. The history of literary theory demonstrates that taking a particular approach to a text (historicist, new critical, feminist, etc.) precludes alternative readings; at the same time, a given approach deploys (and often invents) a vocabulary that allows us to see what was hitherto occluded, even repressed. We hear quite often these days that the “materialist turn” is replacing the “linguistic turn”—and while for some, such “turns” have meant and will mean nothing to their practice, for others, it’s good riddance to poststructuralism. In my case, working through the often-conflicting—and combative—theories that underpin the new materialism and/or object-oriented ontology has convinced me to see a focus on representationalism at the expense of materialism as a problem. I do not reject representationalism (though some new materialists and OOO theorists do); rather, and along with Timothy Morton and Jane Bennett[1], I would argue that representations matter: they are phenomena with effects.

Bennett would like to negotiate a via media between those who argue for the sovereignty of autonomous objects and those who argue that the relations between and among objects are paramount; that is, between, on one side, thinkers like Harman and Morton, invested in the unapproachable, unknowable object, and, on the other, thinkers like Latour, and Karen Barad, who in Meeting the Universe Halfway argues that things (including persons) don’t have agency; agency arises out of relations, between and among: agency is (and extrapolating from Judith Butler) a performance. Persons and things are “intra-active”; they constitute each other, and it is in their intra-actions that agency resides. Bennett argues

Since everyday, earthly experience routinely identifies some effects as coming from individual objects and some from larger systems (or, better put, from individuations within material configurations and from the complex assemblages in which they participate), why not aim for a theory that toggles between both kinds of magnitudes of “unit”? (“Systems” 227)

For Bennett, as for Barad and others, to acknowledge the lively agency of the nonhuman is a pressing eco-ethical question—“to make room,” as Bennett says, “for the outlooks, rhythms, and trajectories of a greater number of actants” in order to “disrupt the political parsing that yields only active (American, manly) subjects and passive objects” (“Systems” 229).

Bennett and others engaged in questioning the traditional humanist split between nature and culture furnish opportunities for literary scholars to think beyond representationalism: that is, they offer various positions from which to attend to things on their own terms (whether withdrawn or assemblaged) rather than as part of a signifier/signified cultural loop in which a text is a mirror for some, a mediator for others, and all that we can know for still others. So, rather than approaching representationality and materiality as mutually exclusive or opposed, I would prefer to explore how we have historically disentangled representations and things, and then stand back and see what happens when they are re-entangled.

In longing for novel relations with objects, I by no means want to give up my previous affiliations; I want to explore new affinities that might not only yield new pleasures but new ethical relations with the world. It is indisputably true that scientific insights into anthropogenic effects on ecosystems worldwide are needed if we are to devise a principled, responsible, and effective response to such changes. However, the humanities, particularly the study of literature and the arts, have much to offer in this respect, but are too often shut out of the conversation in academia and the public sphere.[2] William Cronon says: “Nature alone cannot explain [a] landscape. You need history too.” And, I would add, imaginative literature. “Poetry,” says Bennett, “can help us feel more of the liveliness hidden in . . . things and reveal more of the threads of connection binding our fate to theirs” (“Systems” 232). Yes.

Notes

---

[1] Morton says: “A poem is not simply a representation, but rather a nonhuman agent . . . poetry tampers directly with causality” (“Defense” 215, 216), and Bennett, in response, extends this idea: “the effectivity of a text-body, including its ability to gesture toward a something more than itself, is a function of a distributive network of bodies: words on the page, words in the reader’s imagination . . . etc.” (“Systems” 232).

[2] See the recent cluster of essays in PMLA (2012) on “Sustainable Humanities,” as well as recent work on and with Thoreau, such as the essays that make up Thoreauvian Modernities, the reevaluation of Thoreau’s nature writing (see, for example, William Rossi’s Introduction to Wild Apples), and Richard Primack’s Walden Warming.

Works Cited

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).

Bennett, Jane. “Systems and Things: A Response to Graham Harman and Timothy Morton.” New Literary History 43 (2012): 225-233. Online.

Cronon, William. “The Riddle of the Apostle Islands.” Orion (May/June 2003). Online.

Morton, Timothy. “An Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry.” New Literary History 43.2 (2012): 205-224. Online.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Transparent Things. 1972. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Print.

Primack, Richard. Walden Warming: Climate Change Comes to Thoreau’s Woods. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2014. Print.

Rossi, William. Introduction. Wild Apples and Other Natural History Essays by Henry D. Thoreau. Athens and London: U of George P, 2002. vii-xxiv. Print.

Specq, François, Laura Dassow Walls, and Michel Granger, ed. Thoreauvian Modernities: Transatlantic Conversations on an American Icon. Athens and London: U of George P, 2013. Print.