My Review of Lawrence Buell's "Emerson"

          What makes Harvard professor Lawrence Buell’s tome-ish but breezy biography, Emerson, so unique is its eschewal of the traditional narrative framework of biography in favor of a comprehensive genealogy of critical perspectives. Buell’s approach attempts to focus almost solely on the ideas that make for the corpus of Emerson studies, peppering narrative detail along the way. Ultimately, Buell's note is rapacious and measured; he is intent upon taking the good with the bad when it comes to Emerson's reception but Buell takes great pains to wrest Emerson away from the clutches of what Buell calls the “dismissal tradition” (292). In this way, much of the book reads as both an acknowledgment of and resistance to Emerson’s more recent lapses in critical favorability. In the final chapter of the book, “Emerson As Anti-Mentor,” Buell notes that “the experts proved wrong”: “F.O. Matthiessen’s groundbreaking American Renaissance (1941) deemed Emerson a writer more of historical than intrinsic interest. Stephen Whicher wrote the most influential biography of the century, Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1953), in acute postwar self-consciousness of the quaintness of Emersonian optimism about human nature that he feared might well be terminal” (291). But, according to Buell, Emerson is way more complex and richly textured than these critics ever allowed. Buell traces resistances to Emerson during the twentieth century, seeing them as the inevitable backlash against American centrism. As Buell himself remarks towards the end of the book, there was nowhere for him to go but down.

However, Emerson has experience, as Buell chronicles, critical revivals since the 1980s. For example, as Buell investigates the connection between Emerson and Nietzsche (Nietzsche was a major admirer of Emerson and Buell provides handsome primary evidence to demonstrate this) he shows how Emerson’s fragmentary, romantic aesthetic anticipates Nietzsche’s ideas concerning the creative will.   

While for the most part Buell remains the impartial gatherer of positive and negative readings of Emerson’s canonicity, it is in his final chapter where he takes his most polemical stance. He mentions a speech by Ralph Ellison, serendipitously delivered to Harvard in 1974, in which he, like Emerson in his Divinity School address, sensed himself on the precipice of delivering an axe-like blow to the American literary establishment. Buell quotes Ellison as charging Emerson with “that convenient posture of ‘American innocence’” (324). (It is important here to note that Buell’s previous chapter, “Social Thought and Reform,” deals primarily with Emerson’s problematic optimism in relation to abolitionism. While Emerson was eventually a strong supporter of the abolitionist cause, he still propagated the myth that the Anglo-Saxon race had liberty in its very DNA and that it would bring democratic freedom and prosperity to the world.)  According to Buell, Ellison was wearing the “Emerson mask for the Harvard occasion” because it “fit increasingly well” (325). Here Buell compares Ellison to Emerson, saying that the negative political response to Ellison in the 1960s forced him to retreat more into his own sense of individualism, and that this reality only goes to demonstrate “the persistence of Emersonianism as a sustaining force even within the careers and writings of outspoken critics of Emerson’s narrowness” (325).

The crescendo to Buell’s Emerson defense comes with the statement: “…Emerson is likely to continue to outlast the dismissal tradition as he always has [because] More than any other writer, Emerson invites you to kill him off if you don’t find him useful. This makes him one of the most unusual authority figures in the history of western culture, the sage as anti-mentor” (292). Buell, like all biographers, has an inalienable love for his subject. But the delivery of his assertion that Emerson’s importance will endure is, by the close of the book, quite well earned.

Buell’s first chapter, “The Making Of A Public Intellectual,” is his most explicit foray into biographical narrative. The first major action of Emerson illustrates him as a rather sexy rebel against Unitarian ritual, the now famous (or infamous) scene of Emerson’s unwillingness to perform the Eucharist. Here is what Emerson had said in his speech explaining why he could perform no such Sunday morning humdrum: “…this mode of commemorating Christ is not suitable to me. That is the reason why I should abandon it.” Then this juicy tidbit: “I am not engaged to Christianity by decent forms […] What I revere and obey in it is…its deep interior life” (qtd. in Buell 16). This episode is a good place to start; it shows that Emerson was no ordinary Harvard educated New Englander, which Buell aptly points out. Buell, in the same chapter, describes, with detail, the nature of the lyceum circuit, a public lecture series that gained popularity in America as a traveling debate and lecture series. It is where Emerson gets his start as a speaker. This is important to foreground, for what eventually came to be Emerson’s published essays were the result of a mixture of speeches given over the period of a several years in the lyceum circuit and many journal entry revisions. (One interesting insight to be gleaned here is about Emerson’s craft: that he began in oratory both as a minister and as a public speaker, thus knowing how to woo and scandalize a crowd. Though his sense of brevity receded in the published essays, as Buell points out, his knack for the aphorism, cutting like lightening through his self-corrective prose, perhaps finds its genealogy and germination in this induction to the powers of language vis-à-vis oratory as spectacle.) From here Buell quickly transitions out of biography proper and into the labyrinthine territory of ideas—both Emerson’s and others’.

I
n what is perhaps the most crucial chapter in the book, “Emersonian Self-Reliance in Theory and Practice,” Buell takes a look at the doctrine of Self-Reliance—that one should live according to oneself and one’s own principles and perceptions. Such an edict easily induces skepticism because one immediately wonders: what is the difference between Self-Reliance as sturdy formation of the self and Self-Reliance as the id run wild? The answer, according to Buell, is a kind of Emersonian superego: “The first way Self-Reliance protects itself against the extremes of willfulness or passivity is by its austerity. Self-Reliance never comes naturally to adults,” says Buell’s paraphrasing Emerson’s essay, “because they have been so conditioned to think nonauthentically that it feels wrenching to do otherwise” (70).

This is an interesting (and important) reading of Self-Reliance: that Emerson never lets Self-Reliance off easily. This reading nicely solves what is a puzzling contradiction in Self-Reliance: that man is supposedly sycophantic and craven in character yet nonetheless must be the source of the godhead. Buell’s reading makes clear this ambiguously contradictory line in Self-Reliance: “Great men have always…confided themselves childlike to the genius of the age” and then this part right after “…betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart.” So we must betray ourselves to trust ourselves? In a way, yes. Buell’s strength in this chapter, besides addressing the practicality and impracticality of living a life based on Self-Reliance, is his treatment of it as something Emerson himself believed nearly impossible. Frankly put, hearts that vibrate to iron strings don’t come without a great deal of discipline and stoicism.  

In the next chapter entitled “Emersonian Poetics” Buell investigates Emerson’s aesthetic as an extension of Romanticism’s idea of art as “social prophecy” (108) Here Buell focuses on the book Nature and locates Emerson’s thought in his symbolic mapping of nature—the concept, according to Buell, of the world (or nature) being inherently symbolic. The examples he gives for this includes a fox naturally representing craftiness or a lamb representing innocence. This notion collides with Emerson’s other conception of Nature as that which prompts language creation. Buell argues that that Emerson’s nature is an “American-democratic twist” on the Wordsworthian elevation of peasant speech in the Lyrical Ballads (110). He thus concludes that “…the underlying idea of nature-nurtured genius is not simply a Yankee notion but broadly Eurocentric” (111). Viewing the book Nature as a whole, Buell asserts that its main argument lies in its vision of nature as a force which can jar the individual mind into new and startling forms of consciousness.

Buell devotes a large section in the same chapter to his reading of what he and other Emersonians feel is Emerson’s most accomplished essay, “Experience.” He describes “Experience” as “a series of interconnected mini-reflections on the seven facets or phases of mental life that struggle to fight free” (125). Taking up its characteristically depressive tone, he notes that it is often thought to be an essay that “refuses” to grieve over the death of Emerson’s son, but remarks that “Something more than repression seems to be at play here” (126). What Buell fleshes out is a reading of “Experience” that sees it as Emerson’s confrontation with the unreality of being—that no matter how much we try to connect to others, and perhaps even to the material world itself, it is ever phantasmal and out of reach: “Nothing is left us now but death. We look to that with a grim satisfaction, saying, there at least is reality that will not dodge us.” According to Buell “The genius of ‘Experience,’ and what makes it his most representative work (in the Emersonian sense of that term), is its masterfully self-conscious struggle against the haunting sense of ‘Reality’’s usual absence” (128). Buell then moves into a structural analysis of “Experience” and how its epigraph functions as an ordering principle. He also holds it up to his “manic” essay “Circles” to show how both hold the notion that the self is fragmented and incomplete, and that creative energy is the product of “flow” and it does not freeze. However, while Emerson’s “Circles” harnesses this flowing power as the source of creative energy, “Experience” is more about limitations—of the self and of the artist.

Buell crams a lot of perspective into one reading of Experience. However, what he is driving at, beyond the structural analysis, which almost seems to be entirely separate from his analysis of the essay’s ontological explorations, is that Emerson believed the material world to be illusory, to a large extent, though he did not wholly reject it. While this provided him with the deep inwardness that characterizes the Emersonian pivot toward aphoristic affirmation of the self and self-generative wisdom, the price of this was what Emerson so poignantly expresses in “Experience” which is that the soul does not touch anything. Buell’s reading is in-depth, multilayered and convincing, if a bit jumpy.

One of Buell’s most absorbing chapters is “Social Thought and Reform” where Buell makes a convincing case for hindsight favorability of Emerson’s positioning (and self-positioning) in terms of the political issues of the day. He does not disagree with the common line on Emerson, which is that he was both progressive for his time as well as reluctant to rush to any political commitments. For the longest time, though Emerson despised slavery in private, in public he often thought of abolitionists as “self-righteous, canting, unmannerly boors” (248). What galvanized Emerson to take a position on slavery when slavery started to penetrate the New England sphere, as well as the railroad which “quickened for Emerson, as it did Thoreau, t sense of linkage to wider publics” (249). Buell notes that 1844 was a major turning point for Emerson, away from private dislike of slavery to public commitment to abolitionism. What is interesting about Buell’s portrait of these events is how illustrative it is of Emerson’s notion of the proper role of the American scholar—namely that he or she should not be politically engaged, so as not to degrade him or herself with the trifles of the day. However, the social climate was such that Emerson could not come out against slavery in a public, though once he did, he did so with vehemence. Buell also mentions, in the chapter that follows, the relationship between Thoreau and Emerson in a way that is both humorous in its detail, showing how Emerson entrusted Thoreau’s skill of being a handyman—“having Thoreau arrange his mother’s funeral and fetch his retarded younger brother from a farm twenty miles away to attend the service” (301). Buell looks with considerable sensitivity at the competing narratives of the Thoreau-Emerson pupil-mentor relationship. One narrative is that Thoreau was wholly indebted to Emerson. The other is that Emerson was overbearing and Thoreau was, in the final score, able to wrest himself from Emerson’s paternal clutches. Both, according to Buell, downplay the significance of their relationship’s reciprocity and mutual influence. Buell does both of them justice while highlighting how different in temperament they were, if similar in literary style and, to some degree, philosophic concern, though Thoreau’s engagement with nature is decidedly more direct and actual rather than theoretical.

One of the crucial things Buell does, beside provide absorbing analysis and comprehensive tour-guiding through the many complex and multifaceted areas of Emersonian criticism, is make the case that Emerson was not just a legislator of cultural nationalism. Indeed, because his ideas of the creative and visionary potential of the individual trump nation, they have the capacity to inspire and activate the private individual transhistorically and pan-nationally. Buell reinforces this through his transatlantic reconstructions of the historical relationship between Emerson and other writers across the Atlantic, through his exploration of Emerson’s fascination with Hinduism and Sufi mysticism, as well others who have been equally taken by him from across the Atlantic. All of this adds up to a complex picture of Emerson as being a late romantic explorer of the mind and liberal individualism. For these reasons, Emerson cannot be easily dismissed.