The Scattered Body: Thoreau’s Satiric Vision

Abstract

THE SCATTERED BODY: TH OREAU ’S SATIRIC VISION JOSEPH ADAMSON McMaster University O n two occasions in “Life without Principle,” Thoreau uses the word “satire” to describe the society of mid-nineteenth century America. The hypocrisy and greed of his society are exposed by the diggers for gold in California who reveal their true identities when they make up the names of the places where they mine: “ ‘Jackass Flat,’ — ‘Sheep’s Head Gully,’ — ‘Murderer’s Bar,’ etc. Is there not satire in these names? Let them carry their ill-gotten wealth where they will, I am thinking it will still be ‘Jackass Flat,’ if not ‘Murderer’s Bar,’ where they live” (Papers 165-66). In Thoreau’s opinion, “The philosophy and poetry and religion of such a mankind are not worth the dust of a puff-ball” (Papers 162). Such a society declares itself to be a parody of serious human endeavour: “What a comment, what a satire on our institutions! The conclusion will be, that mankind will hang itself upon a tree” (Papers 163). Thoreau’s use of the word is indicative, for the sort of society that he presupposes throughout his writings is the one described by Northrop Frye as being the target of the extreme phases of irony and satire, one pervaded by “the sense that heroism and effective action are absent, disorganized or foredoomed to defeat, and that confusion and anarchy reign over the world” (Anatomy 192). The mythos of winter tells the story of “the dis­ appearance of the hero, a theme which often takes the form of sparagmos or tearing to pieces.” Thoreau’s picture of his society is precisely that: the crucifying and tearing to pieces, the sparagmos of a universal man. It is the very charge made in “Resistance to Civil Government” when Thoreau attacks the state for always crucifying Christ, excommunicating Coperni­ cus, and accusing Franklin and Jefferson of being rebels, or when he speaks just as eloquently of human conscience as being wounded and bleeding: “Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded? Through this wound a man’s real manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting death. I see this blood flowing now” (Papers 77). This national crucifixion is, ultimately, the illustration of a universal tragedy: in­ stead of supplying the conditions for a complete individual, mankind keeps tearing itself apart, and society can distinguish its heroes, men like John Brown, only by sentencing them to death. When a man comes along, he is E n g l is h S t u d i e s in C a n a d a , x v i , i , M a rch 1 9 9 0 hung on a tree. In such a perspective, history becomes a cycle of trials, of testing moments when the larger, more complete, and therefore prophetic individual is invariably made a scapegoat and expelled from his society, ei­ ther exiled, excommunicated, or crucified. Twice in “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” Thoreau cries out in exasperation against a society that can­ not stop this terrible cycle, denouncing the hypocrisy of “A church that can never have done with excommunicating Christ while it exists!” (Pa­ pers 120) and the duplicitous cruelty of “A government that pretends to be Christian and crucifies a million Christs every day!” (Papers 129-30). Given the pervasiveness in Thoreau — in however displaced a form — of this myth of a universal god-man who is torn apart and scattered, it is not surprising that throughout his work we should keep coming across so much of its characteristic imagery: that of an agonized human body in a state of distortion, disease, and decay, the same crippled body that the author of Walden dreams of curing through the therapy of a regenerative life away from his society. For a good example of such “anatomical” imagery we might begin by looking beyond Thoreau for a moment to a passage from a writer with whom he shows, in certain respects, such a surprisingly profound affinity: Friedrich Nietzsche.1 The sparagmos or dismemberment of Dionysus is the heroic foundation of tragic affirmation in The Birth of Tragedy, while...