THE STORY OF CLUES, THE GRAMMAR OF SEMIOTIC HISTORY
What makes us think that time has lapsed is that we have relapsed.
Thoreau, September 28, 1843, Journal 1, 1981, p. 468
A Week is highly symbolic. Its structure in time (a week's journey), its use of a narrative vehicle (the river), its juxtaposition of present and past, its use of singular symbols, all fit together in a complex semiotic interplay of signifier and signified. The reader is constantly challenged to see through layers of meaning, finding associations that point to each of these symbolic dimensions and thereby relate the symbol to its various grammars. One of
In Thoreau's discussion of time alluded to above, an important theme pertains to the brevity of our human past. The remote in fact is near; and while “wearisome,” “the age of the world” might be spanned by “the lives of sixty old women … strung together … to reach over the whole ground” (A Week, 1980a, p. 325). Thoreau here poetically refers to a Bible's chronology, which designated the age of world as approximately six thousand years. Indeed, so compressed is history that “it will not take a very great granddaughter of [Eve] to be in at the death of Time” (ibid.). This cryptic reference to “the death of Time” may be seen as redemptive (and thus foreshadowing the last historical episode of A Week, the meditation on Elisha's apple tree [Johnson 1986, p. 160]). In Christian mythology, the millennial “week” ends in the year 6000 since the foundation of the world, with Christ's Second Coming. Perhaps, too, Thoreau's allusion refers to a redemption, independent of any Christian eschatology. In his case redemption is a vision of time itself, to the degree that time can be grasped or captured. If time is characterized by passing, by leaving the past in the wake of the ever preceding present and receding future, then to bring the past into the present cuts against that flux. Thus from my reading, Elisha's apple tree not only is a prophetic testament but serves as the essential clue for us, in a particular time and place, to recover a heretofore lost history. What then are the implications of “the death of Time,” and what might it signify for Thoreau's vision of temporality?
Overarching the particular veracity of the Elisha tree story is Thoreau's intent to explicitly show the power of obscurity and the use of the few crucial clues available to us to poetically reconstruct the significance of the history. The source of Thoreau's information is vague, even mysterious, as he begins this section by recalling a story told him by “an old inhabitant of Tyngsboro” (A Week, 1980a, p. 355) who is not identified; no other source is available to verify the account (Johnson 1986, p. 160). Thoreau might well have fabricated it—which would be consistent with his own view of history as “poetic.” Thoreau's expanded vision of history affords the latitude by means of which he arrives at a deeper truth. We understand his motive as the history of Elisha's tree unravels.
Ceaselessly peering at the relation of nature and civilization—in this case between the river's endless flow and man's brief life on its banks—Thoreau
He was conducted to the appletree, and as the nail was not then visible, the lady of the house placed her hand on the trunk where she said that she remembered the nail to have been from her childhood. In the meanwhile the old man put his arm inside the tree, which was hollow, and felt the point of the nail sticking through, and it was exactly opposite to her hand. The spot is now plainly marked by a notch in the bark. But as no one else remembered the river to have risen so high as this, the engineer disregarded this statement, and I learn that there has since been a freshet which rose within nine inches of the rails at Biscuit Brook, and such a freshet as that of 1785 would have covered the railroad two feet deep. (Ibid.)
Thoreau in this short passage dramatically illustrates the validity of personal remembrance, the significance of a sign or symbol for a historical event, and the unwanted skepticism of a “scientific” historical attitude toward such “flimsy” data. A singlefamily account is, in this case, more accurate than the collective, albeit incomplete, record of the community. It is the significance of the personal memoir, the solitary memory that establishes the facts of the case. That the engineer chose to ignore the testimony reveals his own limited understanding of history, for as Thoreau goes on to comment, the river will indeed rise again as part of nature's inevitable cycle.[10]
We have already considered Thoreau's vision of time's cycle, so here I will direct our attention to what I have referred to as the mode of history Thoreau is writing in this passage, specifically the use of signs by which we might situate ourselves in time. As Thoreau goes on to discuss the river's natural history, he builds on the significance of an ancient grave site:
This appletree, which stands within a few rods of the river, is called “Elisha's appletree,” from a friendly Indian, who was anciently in the service of Jonathan Tyng, and, with one other man, was killed here by his own race in one of the Indian wars,—the particulars of which affair were told us on the spot. He was buried close by, no one knew exactly where, but in the flood of 1785, so great a weight of water standing over the grave, caused the earth to settle where it had once been disturbed, and when the flood went down, a sunken spot, exactly of the form and size of the grave, revealed its locality; but this was now lost
To be sure, we see themes here of resurrection (the apple tree, the site of a baby's death in the Duston story, becomes a mark of friendly Indiansettler relations) and of natural history (nature's cycling which the apple tree marks). But, restricting ourselves to the question of historiography proper, the narrative hinges upon two historical clues, whose significance and meaning must be carefully scrutinized.
The hidden nail and the elusive grave site each represent complex past events that must be linked and interpolated to cohere and signify a complex weave of social history pertinent to the current era, whether Thoreau's or our own. The nail marks the witnessing of the precarious balance between homesteader and the river's perilous waters that might yet again overflow its banks and drown a farm. The past holds information we must decipher. (In this case, we do well to know the limits imposed on our own expectations regarding nature's boundaries.) The apple tree is also prophetic: after all, it is Elisha's tree. Prophets also warn: Be wary; guard against hubris; note the lessons of the past. The grave may similarly be decoded. It is a mark of relation (violence, fragile peace), telling a heretofore forgotten story of lost opportunity and lingering possibility. In this sense it is redemptive and serves as an important symbol of Thoreau's preoccupation with European-Indian history. But it is also the mark of an individual life, whose memory has its own virtue, but whose remembrance hangs on by the thinnest of threads in a now allbutforgotten story, told by serendipity and recounted by Thoreau with the barest of narrative detail. The nail in the tree and the vanishing grave each highlight the precariousness of historical record and its necessary dependence on happenstantial human memory. By enlisting them into his history, Thoreau captures the merest glimmer of a vanishing past whose irredeemable effervescence may only be glanced at by reading clues encoded by such obscure records. This is recounting through signs, or more formally, in a semiotic mode.
Another example, perhaps better known, and certainly more transparent in design, is the “Former Inhabitants” chapter of Walden. Clues of former dwellings in the Walden woods are there for those with eyes to see. Old cellar holes fringed by newgrown pines and covered with sumac and goldenrod testify to the homes of freed negroes—Cato Ingraham, Zilpha, Brister Freeman and his wife Fenda—and other modest white homesteads—the Strattons, Nutting, LeGrosse, Wyman, Quoil, and the Breeds. “These cellar
He gazed into the cellar from all sides and points of view by turns … as if there was some treasure, which he remembered, concealed between the stones, where there was absolutely nothing but a heap of bricks and ashes. The house being gone, he looked at what there was left. He was soothed by the sympathy which my mere presence implied, and showed me, as well as the darkness permitted, where the well was covered up; which, thank Heaven, could never be burned; and he groped long about the wall to find the wellsweep which his father had cut and mounted, feeling for the iron hook or staple …,–all that he could now cling to,–to convince me that it was no common “rider” [top rail of a fence]. I felt it, and still remark it almost daily in my walks, for by it hangs the history of a family. (Ibid., pp. 260–61)
There is a profound poignancy in these short lines. The entire history of a family hangs from a single hook, and as Thoreau comments shortly after this passage, “What a sorrowful act that must be,–the covering up of wells! coincident with the opening of wells of tears” (ibid., p. 263). Not only are the wellsprings of life covered, their very memory is almost lost. Who, if not Thoreau, would write a census of the former inhabitants of his neighborhood? Who would care? Even he must admit that his own knowledge of their lives and thoughts is trivial (ibid.). Nevertheless, their memory must be preserved, even if it is only in his own narrative. Why? To answer that question requires an examination of Thoreau's moral philosophy as it informs his philosophy of history, a topic I will reserve for the last section of this chapter. But suffice it to note here that in the active pursuit of memory, time does come to an end, for if memory is preserved, the past is present in the present and the march of temporality is arrested.
Thoreau brought history into the everpresent present by the same stratagem by which he searched for evidence to unlock the integration of nature in all her details. Thoreau honed his naturalist and historical skills on the whetstone of patient attention to detail and the free use of an extraordinary imagination. Much as a hunter might follow an obscure track, or a fisherman survey the surface of pond for hatching insects, or a farmer peer at the leaves of a sapling for signs of disease, Thoreau studied his surroundings looking for clues that beckoned to insight—sometimes relevant to his naturalist project, sometimes to the historical. The intellectual and
Thoreau's semiotic practice, what Carlo Ginzburg has called “an evidential paradigm,” became widely accepted by the late nineteenth century. “Though reality may seem to be opaque, there are privileged zones—signs, clues—which allow us to penetrate it” (Ginzburg 1989, p. 123). Searching for faint and obscure clues to detect hidden meanings and verify truth was variously applied by such diverse figures as Freud in searching the unconscious, Sherlock Holmes in apprehending criminals, and Giovanni Morelli in detecting art forgeries. Each was able to detect infinitesimally small or inconspicuous keys in order to decode a deeper, otherwise unattainable reality. This historical art of reading discreet signs Ginzburg has characterized as “semiotic.” Semiotics certainly has a more venerable history than its formalization in the nineteenth century, and can be traced back through Augustine and the Greco-Roman grammarians through Mesopotamian divination to the primordial practice of hunters following their prey. What characterizes “semiotics” in this context, and gives it its definitional power for history, is not its scientific character but rather the qualitative nature of the interpretative inquiry: “the historian is like the physician who uses nosological tables to analyze the specific sickness in a patient. As with the physician's, historical knowledge is indirect, presumptive, conjectural” (ibid., p. 106).[11] Thoreau practiced a cognitive exercise that was fundamentally interpretative and thus “personal.” His unique individuality and confidence in his ability to decipher those marks characterize his methodology. But he must have proceeded being aware that his approach was suspect, which explains many of his defensive, if not polemical, justifications. Thoreau had, at best, an ambivalent attitude toward history, deeply distrusting the historian removed from an immediate and original relationship to experience: “There
Given the growing positivism of nineteenth-century natural sciences, the specific designation of “scientist” for practitioners of what was previously called natural philosophy in the 1840s,[12] and the application of this appellation to the social sciences at about the same time, Thoreau was well aware that he was sailing against a prescriptive tide of scientism. New standards called for “objective” evidence for the natural philosophy of living forms—now called biology[13]—and for the record of human history as well. Thoreau attempted to meet such standards, but he was loath to leave the facts in abeyance without an interpretation whereby their significance and meaning would emerge within his personal context. Indeed, Thoreau approaches history as would an artist, whose creative reconstruction of the past must synthesize elements of memory, artifact, historical record, oral tradition, and moral purpose. In this last respect, Thoreau recognized history written in the “objective” mode as a conceit: history was hardly unbiased, impartial, or aperspectival.[14] His efforts may be seen as part of a Romantic reaction against the positivist attitude, which he justifiedly regarded with suspicion. He was not alone. At the same time that this positivist fervor was emerging in mid-nineteenth-century sciences and social sciences, a growing sensitivity to the interpretative character of the human sciences was also appreciated. This battle, whose lines were already clearly drawn by mid-century, framed the evolution of these disciplines into our own time and will serve as a central theme of chapter 4.