I'm Already Weaving Webs of Meaning

Even before this week’s assigned reading (LeFevre), I had already found myself analyzing texts in my 19^th century lit course, inspired by on our previous week’s readings (LaTour, Gaonker, Trimbur, Gee, LeFevre). While poring over Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The American Scholar” and “Self-Reliance,” I was struck by the degree to which Emerson consistently and repeatedly denies society. For instance, in “The American Scholar,” Emerson writes, “He [the scholar] and he only knows the world. The world of any moment is the merest appearance. Some great decorum, some fetish of government, some ephemeral trade, or war, or man, is cried up by half mankind [. . .] as if all depended on this [. . .] The odds are that the whole question is not worth the poorest thought which the scholar has lost in listening to the controversy.”

In “Self Reliance,” Emerson writes, “The poise of a planet, the bended tree recovering itself from the strong wind, the vital resources of every vegetable and animal, are [. . .] demonstrations of the self-sufficing, and therefore self-relying soul.”

Of course, Emerson was wrong (to be fair, Emerson did have a notion of the social, but it was a notion rooted in the divine, the ideal (the Over-Soul)). Emerson was a brilliant and radical thinker, but his texts are filled with contradictions, and most of these contradictions stem from his uneasy stance with the social. On the one hand, he implored people to distance themselves from the petty world around them: to shun society, to embrace isolation, to resist idolizing past thinkers and their ideas. On the other hand, Emerson participated (as all people do, whether they want to or not) in society: he lectured, he wrote, he sought to lead by example (even though he encouraged people to ignore the examples of great thinkers).

Thus, I had some strange fun reading Emerson in light of our readings in 8040. I was also pleased to see LeFevre mention Emerson: “Emerson exhorts the poet who hopes for genius; ‘Say ‘It is in me, and shall out.’’ One of the epigraphs to ‘Self-Reliance’ is the Latin saying, Net e quaesiveris extra, meaning ‘Do not search outside yourself’” (12). LeFevre’s right (even though her text is twenty years old): Much of American thought, and much of what goes on in the composition classroom (despite the best efforts of forward thinking composition directors), still values the vaulted idea of the self. I wonder, in some ways, if Emerson’s texts have survived all these years because they validate ideals that are still close to our hearts.