TY - JOUR
AU - Moskowitz,, Alex
AB - Abstract This essay argues that throughout his oeuvre, Henry David Thoreau develops a theory of sensory perception that comes to its literary culmination in Cape Cod (1865). I argue that Thoreau’s thinking on the senses demonstrates that the senses are a product of historical development. In Cape Cod, Thoreau is particularly interested in how economic interest has trained the senses to become structurally incapable of sensing the death that is a necessary part of the commodity form and social life in general—similar to what Karl Marx in Capital (1867) would describe as “dead labor.” This essay explores how in Cape Cod, Thoreau offers his reader a method of reading that seeks to make legible through literary form—specifically through puns, metaphor, and juxtaposition—the point at which the senses fail. Thoreau’s method in Cape Cod therefore differs from his more well-known works such as Walden (1854), where he only explicitly tells his readers about that to which they are blind. Ultimately, I claim that Thoreau’s political message throughout his career remains much the same, but the way in which he mobilizes literary form to convey that message marks an important change in how we might make sense of—and make sensible—political economy. In October 1849, the Irish brig St. John ran aground off the coast of Cohasset, Massachusetts. Carrying a large complement of economic migrants fleeing the Great Famine, the ship was dashed against the rocks for hours and splintered into pieces in the heaving New England waters. The dozens of bloated and waterlogged corpses were still washing up on the beach when Henry David Thoreau showed up on the scene two days later. As the bodies were being recovered, however, his attention was captured by something else entirely: seaweed, and people “busily collecting the sea-weed which the storm had cast up.” While most on the shore worked steadily to identify the bodies of their lost loved ones, others paid curiously little attention to the wreck but “were often obliged to separate fragments of clothing” from the seaweed, and “might, at any moment, have found a human body under it.” Seaweed turns a profit, and “[d]rown who might, they did not forget that this weed was a valuable manure.” Even in the face of disaster, daily life must continue for those still working. Thoreau avers, “This shipwreck had not produced a visible vibration in the fabric of society” because society is structured in such a way that a catastrophe like this can only ever become of secondary importance to everyday economic concerns (Cape Cod 7).1 By positioning the image of the shipwreck alongside seaweed—of death juxtaposed with economic resources—this opening sequence of Thoreau’s Cape Cod (1865) articulates for us in literary form a very real social problem: Why is it that though we can physically sense even the most tragic events, they are nevertheless incapable of affecting the larger social sphere? Thoreau’s first chapter, “The Shipwreck,” makes legible this disjunction between the visible and the perceived, which is rooted in economics. Indeed, Thoreau’s focus on seaweed demonstrates how perception is conditioned and structured according to economic interest, which causes certain stimuli to register while others are obscured. I term this concurrent registering and nonregistering of stimuli economic imperception. This method of making economic imperception detectable offers us a crucial refinement and perhaps more literary mode of social analysis than we find elsewhere in Thoreau’s oeuvre. In works like Walden (1854), Thoreau employs a more prescriptive method in his diagnosis and treatment of social ills. Both texts’ social critiques rely on the use of metaphor, juxtaposition, and punning. In Cape Cod, however, Thoreau embeds the structure of such literary techniques at the level of the text. Put differently, Walden tells you what it is about, where Thoreau’s use of metaphor lines up with the book’s explicit theme. Cape Cod, in contrast, only ever shows you what it is about: Cape Cod depends upon the structure of metaphor itself for its political import. In short, I argue that the politics of Cape Cod depend more fundamentally upon literary form than what we find in Walden. In what follows, I track Thoreau’s punning on the “fabric of society” and his sustained interest in the images of fertilizer, boxes, and barrels in both Cape Cod and Walden to demonstrate how in Cape Cod, Thoreau mobilizes literary form and technique to place death alongside economics with the goal of demonstrating how it is impossible to sense both simultaneously. What Thoreau gets at here literarily, Karl Marx describes conceptually as “dead labor” in Capital (1867). For Marx, dead labor is the accumulated, congealed labor-time that has gone into the production of a commodity; it is dead both because it is inactive, needing to be activated by the vital force of the worker, or “living labor,” and because it is the residue of a once active process of production (288–90). For both Marx and Thoreau, the fabric of society is stitched together with a form of death that the commodity structure causes to become imperceived. And the world, for both thinkers, is littered with death. The problem is that even though death is everywhere, it somehow remains imperceptible. 1. Literary Form, Imperception, and Thoreau’s Reading Practice Making death discernable through a politically emancipatory hermeneutical practice of reading is, in an underappreciated sense, the work that Thoreau sets out to do in Cape Cod. Central to this practice of reading is a specifically literary pattern of juxtaposition, which forces death and economics to come into contact with one another. Yet, this stark juxtaposition in its opening scene has vexed audiences since Thoreau first shared the material during the 1849–1850 lyceum season. According to Laura Dassow Walls, the audience members for Thoreau’s first talk on the St. John “were puzzled by the eerie first lecture” (Henry 281). Popular critics have also been thrown by the scene; in her now infamous 2015 piece in The New Yorker, Kathryn Schulz lambasts Thoreau—the “cold-eyed man who saw in loss of life only aesthetic gain”—for identifying “not with the drowned” on the beaches of Cohasset, “but with the storm” (“Pond Scum”). What Schulz finds as evidence of Thoreau’s misanthropy, scholars have treated with more seriousness through affect theory, and, in so doing, have highlighted a fierce moral component to Thoreau’s critique of capitalism. Thoreau’s lack of affect, they argue, draws our attention to the malignant world system of global capital, which, through mimesis, Thoreau criticizes from a moral standpoint: just as global capital sheds no tear for its casualties, neither does Thoreau.2 By imitating the affect of capital, Thoreau calls attention to the immorality of a system that puts profit before human life.3 Affect theory is indeed useful, as it points us in the direction of Thoreau’s sophisticated consideration of political economy, which helps to link this more current work with an older line of scholarship focused on the influence of Adam Smith and classical economics more generally on Thoreau. Much of this scholarship, which deals primarily with Walden, seeks to pinpoint Thoreau’s relation to Smithian economics and its Marxist critique.4 Not nearly as much work, however, has been done on economics and Thoreau’s later or underexamined writings. While historicist readings of Cape Cod tend to cast Thoreau primarily as a social critic who sought to expose global injustice on the local level, I read Thoreau’s engagement with political economy as a literary writer, one whose most complex concerns with society appear most forcefully when we attend to his use of form and technique and their relation to the sensory apparatus.5 The opening scene of Cape Cod spells out for us the specifically literary method that I contend Thoreau is after, which is to reproduce the formal logic of economic imperception by making it legible and thus intelligible. The people carting the seaweed off the beach are not affected by the tragic death associated with the wreck of the St. John because they do not perceive death; rather, they imperceive it. Although they can certainly see death, it does not have an impact on them because of their economic interests. Here Thoreau transfers the visibility of the imperceived-yet-immediately-present clothing of the dead to the “fabric of society.” The clothing, seen but tossed aside and therefore not fully apprehended, becomes through a paronomastic relationship the fabric that clothes society, which equally does not register.6 The fragments of clothing, the various bonnets or jackets, thus become associated with death without revealing the bodies lurking just beneath the next plank of wood or tattered shirt. Death and the commodity cannot be disentangled in Thoreau’s prose, and neither can they be perceived simultaneously by those hunting for seaweed. Thoreau is pointing out that death is already there, already present, both within the clothing and felt as a presence. Like the rubbish strewn across the site of the shipwreck, our world is littered with death. Yet the perceptual mechanism of economic imperception causes that death to remain unintelligible. The clothing of the corpses is associated with a local tragedy; the fabric of society, on the other hand, is associated with a larger, even global, system that therefore also points toward a larger, more global type of death. Thoreau’s pun then suggests that the tragedy on the Cohasset beach is also at work on a global scale. Yet missing from this equation is the death that is found on the global level. Because Thoreau tells us that economic processes are at the heart of this issue, we are therefore on the lookout for a type of death that is bound up in everyday economic processes. This death, I propose, is the death contained in the commodity form, which, as part of the system of global capital, pervades society. By linking together the “fragments of clothing” associated with the absent dead and the “fabric of society” composed of a death haunting the world through the commodity form, Thoreau demonstrates how death is at the core of our society, even as we manage somehow not to see it, to toss it aside, to imperceive it. The fabric of society is cut from the very same cloth that once covered the corpses now subject to the endless beating of the waves. Cape Cod explores this process of economic imperception—to understand how what is so immediately apparent has failed and continues to fail to become intelligible to us. By linking together the “fragments of clothing” associated with the absent dead and the “fabric of society” composed of … the commodity form, Thoreau demonstrates how death is at the core of our society, even as we manage somehow … to imperceive it. It is first and foremost the issue of perception that concerns Thoreau, something we find throughout his oeuvre. In an exemplary meditation on perception, Thoreau writes in an 1851 passage from the Journal: “The question is not what you look at—but how you look & whether you see” (354–55). It is not a given for Thoreau that an object is perceived even if it falls within the field of vision. He separates the act of looking from seeing: to look is the mere physical action, while to see indicates a registering of the phenomenon looked at. Thoreau would take up a similar idea and employ much of the same language toward the end of his life in “Autumnal Tints.” Discussing the intensity of the color of the scarlet oak’s leaves scattered throughout the forest, he writes, “All this you surely will see, and much more, if you are prepared to see it,—if you look for it. Otherwise, regular and universal as this phenomenon is, whether you stand on the hilltop or in the hollow, you will think for threescore years and ten that all the wood is, at this season, sear and brown” (256). Objects, in this case, the colors of the leaves of the trees in the forest, remain undifferentiated if one is not attentive to their difference. Knowledge and interest prepare one to see a certain world, whether that world be fiery or mute. Thoreau’s concern with perception has long been reflected in the critical discourse. Scholars have turned increasingly to Thoreau’s late work to study how perception functions.7 For Kristen Case and Bradley Ray King, truth and perception are inherently tied together in Thoreau’s cognitive framework.8 Walls remarks that for Thoreau, “ideas are not ‘given’ to us” but are instead “actively produced by our perception,” which requires that “our minds participate actively in creating knowledge” (Seeing 18). Walls comes to call this relation between the mind and perception the “intentionality of the eye”—a concept that she finds at work throughout Thoreau’s writing. Interest and concern therefore direct the eye and the visual field, and therefore determine both what is seen and the contours of one’s world. The eye alone is helpless. Maurice S. Lee has also taken up Thoreau on perception, but mostly in relation to the natural world. Lee seeks to bridge Thoreau’s nature writings with his late-career interest in scientific observation and probabilistic thinking. But perhaps if we read “The Shipwreck” as an encounter with chance via the insurance industry, as James Patrick Brown directs us, then we see that for Thoreau, even the ecological and the natural—the storms off the Cape—are inextricable from his political–economic interests. Most thinkers of Thoreau on perception are focused on his perceptual relation to nature and science.9 Building off of this work, I argue that we can extend those lessons to think about the relation of perception to the social and political world as well.10 Thus, Thoreau observes in “Autumnal Tints,” “Objects are concealed from our view, not so much because they are out of the course of our visual ray as because we do not bring our minds and eyes to bear on them; for there is no power to see in the eye itself, any more than in any other jelly. . . . Here, too, as in political economy, the supply answers to the demand” (256). Thoreau’s economic analogy in a text devoted mostly to the natural world demonstrates that Thoreau himself understands that the laws of perception in nature also apply to the world of political economy. 2. Structure, Form, and Fertilizer in Cape Cod and Walden Importantly, economic imperception both prevents certain objects from registering and simultaneously makes others perceptible. Further along the beach of Cohasset, “within half a mile” of the main site of the shipwreck, Thoreau comes across “an old man and his son collecting, with their team, the sea-weed which that fatal storm had cast up, as serenely employed as if there had never been a wreck in the world, though they were within sight of the Grampus Rock on which the St. John had struck” (9). Thoreau here notes the interplay between sensuous access to the wreck and the lack of affect that the man and his son display. The tone of this passage suggests that Thoreau is rather mystified by their absence of emotion: are they cold-hearted opportunists to focus only on collecting seaweed? Yet Thoreau resists a moral criticism and instead gets at something else: it is possible for something to be clearly and physically present and available to the sensorium without it having an effect on us, even a nearby disaster. Nevertheless, something is causing this blockage in perception; something is producing an imperception. That something is seaweed, the commodity that, as we will see, links up with labor, private property, and death. But here the concern with seaweed does not merely occlude the eye and obscure certain objects through disruption or inhibition: it also is productive of a certain type of sight, perception, and worldview. As Thoreau writes of the man collecting seaweed, “It was the wrecked weed that concerned him most, rock-weed, kelp, and sea-weed as he named them, which he carted to his barn-yard; and those bodies were to him but other weeds which the tide cast up, but which were of no use to him” (9). The old man’s attention is fixed entirely on this “valuable manure” as Thoreau puts it, his senses conditioned by economics, sensitive only to that which will turn a profit (7). Insofar as the corpses have no economic value for him, they are not impressed upon the sensorium as something meaningful. While the shipwreck vanishes, multiple types of seaweed appear, and even the bodies themselves are transformed into weeds. Just as much as Thoreau demonstrates how economics forces us to be essentially economic beings with economic interests, he is also aware that we are indeed composed of compost. The old man’s perception of the seaweed and the corpses shows how what we are prepared or trained to see determines the world that appears for us. If preparation is necessary to train the sensorium, then it is also necessary for narrative structure as a whole. The introductory chapter of Cape Cod plays a key role in framing the narrative that follows. Cape Cod’s first chapter, “The Shipwreck,” is particularly puzzling: although the book is a travel narrative, documenting Thoreau’s and William Ellery Channing’s trip down the Cape, all the action of the first chapter takes place off of the Cape.11 The original plan was to go directly from Boston to Provincetown by steamer. They diverted, however, because of a newspaper headline they read while in Boston, stating: “Death! 145 lives lost at Cohasset!” (Cape Cod 4). They diverted, in other words, in order to see death and catastrophe firsthand. What is so strange about the first chapter, however, is that despite death being so clearly on their minds when they go to Cohasset, once they arrive they spend an awful amount of time looking at seaweed and commodities. Nevertheless, going “by way of Cohasset,” which lies about 20 miles south of Boston, means that their trip will be organized entirely differently and that the text that comes out of it will have a particular structure. Economic imperception, and its constituent elements of death and the commodity, thus frame, shape, and direct the form and progression of the entire book. After having seen the wreckage of the St. John, Thoreau closes the first chapter: “But to go on with our first excursion” (14). Properly speaking, the episode at Cohasset is not part of the travel narrative, but is nevertheless essential to it. This literary structure of a removed yet preparatory first chapter feels familiar because Thoreau had employed it 12 years earlier in Walden, where the first chapter also frames and directs the rest of the book. As H. Daniel Peck writes, “‘Economy’ prepares us for the book’s subsequent developments” (128). For Peck, Walden’s first chapter enacts a type of preparation essential for the reader to become sensitive to the perceptive mode that Thoreau is after at Walden. Like Cape Cod, Walden’s narrative proper does not begin until the second chapter when Thoreau officially takes up his residence at Walden Pond, marking the beginning of the temporal cycle around which the book is structured. “Economy” therefore stands apart from the rest of the text but nevertheless primes the reader to understand how to read everything that follows.12 It is therefore significant that both books begin with economic detours. And if in Cape Cod Thoreau presents us with stark economic realities in the face of death, perhaps Thoreau is telling us that the way to understand his work is through the lens of economy. Thus, when Thoreau writes of the “valuable manure” that washes up on the shores of Cohasset in Cape Cod, we should be sensitive to the economic and specifically capitalist market overtones that “value” implies. Given the curiously intertwined composition and publication histories of Cape Cod and Walden, we should not be surprised to find this formal overlap—something that leads Walls to call Cape Cod “Walden’s dark twin” (Henry 405). Though Cape Cod was only published in full in 1865—three years after Thoreau’s death—three chapters from the full text appeared in Putnam’s Monthly during Thoreau’s lifetime, beginning in June 1855 with “The Shipwreck,” later the first chapter of Cape Cod.13 Separated by only a year from the publication of Walden in 1854, the two texts were likely being composed and were certainly being worked on concurrently. We know, for example, that Thoreau read his Cape Cod lectures at the Concord Lyceum in January 1850, including his meditation on the shipwreck a mere three months after his excursion (Harding 273; Walls, Henry 281). During the same month, we also know that Thoreau was reading from his Walden lectures in Medford, Massachusetts (Harding 285), and had been in general hard at work on the second draft of the book during these years (330). It is therefore unsurprising to find that Walden and Cape Cod share much in common with one another. More than just sharing a common structure, Thoreau begins Walden by talking about much the same thing he began Cape Cod with: fertilizer, and the relation of labor to private property, commodity production, and death. In “Economy,” Thoreau contrasts people who inherit types of private property such as “farms, houses, barns” with those he calls the “portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances,” and who “find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh” (5). Thoreau’s comparison turns on labor, and those who inherit property “begin digging their graves as soon as they are born” (5). Thoreau thus links labor subsumed under private property to death. Instead of directly satisfying their corporeal needs by cultivating “a few cubic feet of flesh,” those who inherit private property are obliged to satisfy those needs indirectly through the market by exchanging equivalences. And it is this form of equivalence and labor that Thoreau is wary of in both texts. In Walden, Thoreau writes, “But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost” (5). Cultivating a farm for the market forces one to continually transform oneself into the “valuable manure” that also litters the beaches of Cohasset. The labor needed to maintain private property requires the plowing of life into the dirt and anticipates the death that Thoreau intimates with his remark that this plowing is also a digging of one’s own grave. Thoreau’s rejection of private property is therefore aimed primarily at the requirement that one must kill oneself to maintain it: one must transform one’s life into death—into dead labor, as Marx would call it, or, as Thoreau calls it here, into compost, in order to survive. For Thoreau, death and compost share a closeness that is best understood when we examine what holds them together: labor and the commodity form. In Walden, just as in Cape Cod, Thoreau is fundamentally interested in how we do not perceive this relation. This sowing of our lives into a market-bound involvement in agricultural production is precisely what Thoreau seeks to awaken his neighbors from in Walden. Having drawn a connection in Walden from fertilizer to death—where the unfortunate inheritors and owners of farms are obliged to plow their lives into the soil—when compost reappears in Cape Cod we are already primed to perceive the connection among labor, the commodity, and death. Thoreau is primarily critical of the circuitous route through which people are forced to pass in order to satisfy their most basic needs of food and shelter, and indeed much of both Cape Cod and Walden turns out to be about shelter as well. We find the old man and his son in the middle of the same indirect method that Thoreau condemns in Walden: the seaweed they collect will find its way to the system of capital eventually, by being brought to market directly or through inclusion in the process of agricultural production. Although the seaweed may wash up on the beach as a result of natural processes, the two collecting the seaweed are nevertheless engaged in a process of production that results in the incorporation of that commodity and their labor into a wider world of commodity exchange.14 3. Prescription and the Awakening of the Senses For all of the shared interests of Walden and Cape Cod, both texts diverge in important ways. On the one hand, Walden is explicit and prescriptive; it uses its key metaphors to summon readers to change their lives. In Cape Cod, on the other hand, these metaphors operate more implicitly such that literary form itself does the political work of the text. Because Cape Cod’s politics rely on literary form in a more fundamental way than does Walden, we have reason to reconsider the text’s marginal status in Thoreau’s oeuvre. As similar as the coordinates of Thoreau’s analysis are in these two first chapters, in “Economy,” Thoreau adopts a language of prescription that has contributed to critics' understanding of Thoreau as disapproving and condescending. As Thoreau writes, “men labor under a mistake,” and those who work their inherited farms live “a fool’s life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before” (5, emphasis added). “Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them” (6). Thoreau’s neighbors take a beating here for laboring under the mistake of market-oriented production, when they might instead spend their time cultivating life itself. We find no such language in Cape Cod; in Walden, we continually come across Thoreau criticizing his neighbors for living their lives of “quiet desperation,” which thus links Walden’s genre to the publicly oriented nature of such overtly political works as “Resistance to Civil Government” or “Slavery in Massachusetts.” To make sense of the more explicit commentary in which Thoreau engages in Walden, recall the express purpose of Thoreau’s experiment on the shores of Walden, inscribed across the title page of the first edition of the volume: “I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.” Thoreau’s purpose in Walden is to rattle the sensory apparatus of his neighbors—to wake them out of their impercipience. Thoreau’s work, as he sees it, is to announce to his neighbors that they are mindlessly working their lives away while waiting to live until it is too late. Imperceived in too many peoples’ lives, Thoreau says here, is the time spent in the production and maintenance of a life in which they are not really living. In Walden, Thoreau therefore invokes economic imperception by drawing explicit attention to the “mistake” under which people labor and thereby provides an explicit, prescriptive report of economic imperception. Yet if Walden is more prescriptive, what will shortly come to bear on our reading of Cape Cod is the concept of the morning and of waking up that he begins to develop more fully in the second chapter. To wake up, or to experience the morning, is to be sensuously awake, where we are “accompanied by the undulations of celestial music, instead of factory bells” (Walden 89). This awakening of the senses is made possible following “a partial cessation of [man’s] sensuous life” (89). For Thoreau, the morning is a state wherein the sensory apparatus is more attuned to the spiritual and the artistic, an attunement achieved through a temporary shutting down of the senses through sleep, or withdrawal.15 This suspension of sensory perception allows not for access to a truer state of things, but rather produces what is perhaps a better state. For to live in a “morning atmosphere” would be to swap out those “factory bells” for a “celestial music,” as Thoreau writes. In this way, to read Cape Cod correctly, we should be reading in just such a state of morning, an example of that which we should have learned to perceive and to which we are supposed to have awoken upon hearing Thoreau’s chanticleerian shout. 4. The Fabric that Clothes Society: Death and the Commodity Form In Walden Thoreau is quick to explicitly denounce those who suffer from economic imperception, but he refrains from employing that same type of critical language in Cape Cod. Instead, Thoreau’s stitching together of labor, commodities, and death through literary form is found implicitly at the level of the text itself. By reading death and the commodity form’s relation to death, Thoreau also reads capital, and tallies through literary form the dominating logic of the fabric of society. More than just form, death is indeed the overwhelming theme of Cape Cod.16Cape Cod may take place on the beach, but Thoreau’s interest in death leads him to call that beach “a vast morgue,” littered with “crabs, horse-shoes, and razor-clams, and whatever the sea casts up” (147). Smith would perhaps express no surprise were he to read the opening sequence of Cape Cod, for he too is interested in how death, perception, and sympathy get tied up with one another. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Smith demonstrates how the sympathetic faculties reach their limits at death, partially because “our sympathy can afford [the dead] no consolation,” but more properly because the imagination is incapable of placing “our own living souls in their inanimate bodies” (16). We cannot reproduce what we imagine to be the feelings of the dead in ourselves, which renders the experience of death “terrible,” though it “undoubtedly can give us no pain when we are dead” (16). But if the sympathies falter at the death of another, it is because Smith’s system of sympathies is necessarily built upon a return to the self: “As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel,” Smith writes, “we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation” (11). Although death becomes the limit case for Smith, he also acknowledges how the sympathetic faculties can remain unactivated if we find ourselves too much “employed about other things,” even when we come across someone with whom we would typically sympathize (22). This happens, he asserts, “without any defect of humanity on our part.” Smith and Thoreau might both therefore excuse the seaweed harvesters when their sympathetic faculties fail to fire, insofar as their attention is directed elsewhere. Beyond this agreement on appropriate affective responses, Thoreau and Smith diverge from one another significantly. If Smith’s sympathetic system falters at death’s door, Thoreau, through literary form, is developing a social mode of perception that would not need to eject death into the realm of the incomprehensible.17 Thoreau is not trying to improve the imaginative faculties to produce a more robust sympathetic sense; he is after a literary form that could also contain and acknowledge death’s essential role in economic and social life. We find just such a parallel structure in the work of the thinker who was perhaps the most voracious reader of Smith in the nineteenth century, Marx, specifically in his account of the commodity form. What Thoreau describes in Cape Cod literarily, Marx describes conceptually in Capital. Like Thoreau, Marx too is interested in that which is beyond sense—the “suprasensible [übersinnliche]” as he calls it (Capital 165). For Marx, the commodity always contains a suprasensible element, which is the labor that has gone into its production and which therefore is also its inherently social quality. This labor is the real life expended by living people during the process of production: labor-time, or, the “congealed mass of human labor” (142).18 Labor-time is what endows the commodity with value. Once this life force, or “living labour,” is lodged in the commodity, however, it becomes crystallized as death (289). This “dead labor” is locked away within the form of the commodity, in the realm of the suprasensible (322). For Marx, value “does not have its description branded on its forehead; it rather transforms every product of labour into a social hieroglyphic” (167). Here Marx is arguing that to understand the commodity form, we must first learn how to read it. The social world—the very fabric of society—depends upon a practice of reading. Thoreau intimates his own sense of the importance and difficulty of reading on the beaches of Cohasset, the Cape, and on the shores of Walden Pond. If Thoreau’s model of capitalist economics is not as systematic as Marx’s, he nevertheless offers a very similar, perhaps even more striking representation of the relation of the commodity to death. For Thoreau, the confluence of natural and economic forces that cause shipwrecks are the same forces that draw people to the beach to collect seaweed—and not only seaweed, but also the wreckage of the ship itself, which too can turn a profit. Just as the wreckers’ materials may be anything of potential value, the source of this debris is always the same: “After an easterly storm in the spring, this beach is sometimes strewn with eastern wood from one end to the other, which, as it belongs to him who saves it, and the Cape is nearly destitute of wood, is a God-send to the inhabitants” (Thoreau, Cape Cod 45). Thoreau here marks the interaction between ecology and social and economic life by making a jump from climatological processes directly to ownership. Moreover, these storms that scatter driftwood across the beach are the same storms that dash vessels and human lives against the rocks, making Thoreau’s use of juxtaposition through metaphor and the language of equivalence all the more pertinent. This connection between death and economics is deeply contradictory for Thoreau, however he is quick to point out that these storms and the wood they bring in are absolutely necessary for life on the Cape; they are, indeed, “a God-send.” There is an important relation therefore between ecology, subsistence, and economics: the storms that are the source of catastrophe are fundamental to the normal functioning of Cape Cod’s economy, which highlights how life processes get caught up in the mechanisms of political economy.19 Thoreau shows us here that on the beach, capital actually thrives on and necessarily depends upon death. More than just retained in the commodity form, death is the stuff that capital deals in. As Marx writes, “Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks” (Capital 342). Marx’s point is that living labor—real workers in the process of production—enlivens the stagnant, dead labor that is held within the commodity. For both Marx and Thoreau, death is more than just an element of capital. It shares a necessarily vampiric relation with the living and with the sustenance of life, even if sustaining life means, paradoxically, an ever-increasing dependence on death. It is an effect of capital’s relation to the senses that has rendered the functioning of the economy, with its orientation toward death, imperceptible. So when Thoreau pushes the forces that allow economic life on the Cape to function into the realm of God, he also pushes them into Marx’s realm of the suprasensible or the “misty realm of religion” (Capital 165). Thoreau, however, issues a corrective through literary form with economic imperception: the gears of the economy are plainly in view, even when it seems that they have been made invisible. Whereas Marx sees a social hieroglyph in need of decoding, Thoreau plainly sees and lays before his reader all the elements of that hieroglyph, one not exactly already decoded, but that never needs decoding in the first place. Thoreau’s crucial insight is that the immediately apparent casualties of the shipwrecks participate in the same sphere as the labor expended in work directed toward commodity exchange on the capitalist market. It is therefore not just death that clothes society, but the specific type of death that the commodity form engenders. Thoreau’s vision of this imperceptive relation resurfaces throughout the book. In “The Beach,” he introduces the other major wreck in the book, the Franklin, where he encounters a man salvaging some of the ship’s debris: “We soon after met a wrecker, with a grapple and a rope, who said that he was looking for tow cloth, which had made part of the cargo of the ship Franklin, which was wrecked here in the spring, at which time nine or ten lives were lost” (Cape Cod 56). In typical Thoreauvian fashion, the meandering quality of the line feels intentional, as Thoreau drags the sentence through three dependent clauses to include the number of lives lost on the ship, the cargo of which is now being picked apart some months later for any remaining salvageable commodities. Significantly, the cargo the man is after is tow cloth, the unwoven fiber typically of flax, intended and prepared for spinning into a more finished fabric. Thus, in the same sentence, Thoreau once again presents us with the dead in the very same breath as a commodity that is quite literally intended to clothe society. More to the point, this commodity shares a formal relation with the seaweed which previously captured Thoreau’s interest: both the tow cloth and the seaweed require additional labor before the final products of their respective processes of production can be sold on the market for profit. Even though the tow cloth already contains dead labor, both commodities necessitate the absorption of more life and time and therefore increase the ever-widening circle of death that capital and its imperceived forms have drawn around labor and our lives of quiet desperation. If in Cape Cod Thoreau brings together death and fabric through metaphor and juxtaposition, in Walden we find a more explicit connection to the world of commodities. In his extended consideration of clothing and fashion, Thoreau transposes the shipwrecks off Cape Cod and the wreckers on the beaches to the world of fashion: At present men make shift to wear what they can get. Like shipwrecked sailors, they put on what they can find on the beach, and at a little distance, whether of space or time, laugh at each other’s masquerade. Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new. (26) The hypocrisy of the cycle of fashion feeds directly into Thoreau’s larger point about the mindlessness with which we lead our lives, which is closely tied to commodity production: I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men may get clothing. The condition of the operatives is becoming every day more like that of the English; and it cannot be wondered at, since, as far as I have heard or observed, the principal object is, not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that the corporations may be enriched. (26–27) The factory system imparts the quick succession of styles to clothing that Thoreau lambasts, that is, the capitalist system of production in which clothing is caught up. In this way does Thoreau tie together the image of the shipwreck with this specific mode of production. These passages demonstrate that when Thoreau is thinking about clothing and shipwrecks, he is also thinking about the fabric of society; or, we may say, he is thinking about the social web across which is spread the death that is contained by the object par excellence of the capitalist mode of production—the commodity. And if Thoreau’s methods differ somewhat in Walden from those in Cape Cod, where the former is more prescriptive and explicit and the latter more implicitly dependent on literary form in the text’s very logic and structure, we nevertheless find a common metaphorical concern with the intertwining of fabric, death, compost, and the commodity. For these reasons, the political force of Cape Cod is best located in its formal, aesthetic properties. The accusatory tone may drop out when we get to Cape Cod, but the political implications remain much the same. 5. Kill the Commodity; Raise the Dead Throughout Cape Cod, Thoreau encounters shipping boxes and barrels, and the political focus shifts from death itself to places and objects seemingly distant and removed from the corpses strewn along the beaches of Cohasset. Compost gives way to various types of containers, which do much the same work of juxtaposing death and the commodity through a metaphorical relation. We see Thoreau working through this relation in “The Beach Again,” where he does some wrecking himself: “From time to time we saved a wreck ourselves, a box or barrel . . . and appropriated it with crossed sticks; and it will lie there perhaps, respected by brother wreckers, until some more violent storm shall take it, really lost to man until wrecked again” (91–2). Here Thoreau suggests that the commodity never experiences a final death. An object, while floating on the ocean, drifts out of the status of commodity, but, when wrecked back on the beach by a new storm, the object can regain its use-value and its potential to be sold. With the help of the storm, the wrecker executes the function of living labor, which, as we have seen, Marx tasks with awakening the commodity “from the dead” and changing it “from merely possible into real and effective” use-value by returning the commodity to market (Capital 289). An unclaimed object floating out at sea, then, is only a potential use-value, awaiting the electrifying touch of living labor to resurrect it from the dead. For Thoreau, the problem is that while the commodity gets to live this boundless social life—a life, indeed, that approaches something like an immortal life—human life always reaches a final state in death, from which it cannot be roused.20 This process of commodity-life and human-death, however, is precisely what Thoreau interrupts: he intervenes, through a metaphorical act of mourning, in the commodity’s immortality and in human finality. The “crossed sticks” with which he marks his wreckage—a common practice employed by wreckers to stake a salvage claim—signify a headstone in that he metaphorically kills the commodity by laying the commodity to rest. Arresting the wreckage between the storm and the market, Thoreau’s “appropriated” commodity in Cape Cod is afforded a crucial respite from the endless circulation that economic processes generate, thus encouraging study and reading. Removing the wreckage from the sphere of commodity circulation brings it into the realm of aesthetic value, so that the dead labor inhering in the commodity may finally be read.21 Thoreau’s focus on such wrecked boxes near the close recalls the box with which he begins the book, the coffin. Upon first arriving in Cohasset, Thoreau and his companion “passed the grave-yard [and] saw a large hole . . . and, just before reaching the shore . . . we met several hay-riggings and farm wagons coming away toward the meeting-house, each loaded with three large, rough deal boxes. We did not need to ask what was in them” (5). Later, Thoreau describes the process by which the bodies from the shipwreck are put into their coffins: There were eighteen or twenty of the same large boxes that I have mentioned… . The bodies which had been recovered, twenty-seven or eight in all, had been collected there. Some were rapidly nailing down the lids, others were carting the boxes away, and others were lifting the lids, which were yet loose, and peeping under the cloths—for each body, with such rags as still adhered to it, was covered loosely with a white sheet. (5) Cape Cod begins by setting the terms against which the other boxes that pervade the book will be compared. It is essential that in this passage, we again encounter a number of the same images we have already tracked through Thoreau’s writing: clothing, labor, and agricultural production (the wagons used to cart off the dead are borrowed from surrounding farms). And, although the dead here are actual bodies, when Thoreau returns to the image of the box-as-commodity at the close, we are primed to see these boxes as similarly associated with death because of the connection to death that Thoreau has already located in labor and the commodity form. Following his trip down the Cape, Thoreau concludes his journey by returning to Boston by sea, the reverse of what he had originally intended when he wished “to get a better view than I had yet had of the ocean” (3). Alighting at Long Wharf, and returning to the mainland of Massachusetts and the urban center of New England, Thoreau comments on what now appears to him as the essence of society: “Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, New Orleans, and the rest, are the names of wharves projecting into the sea (surrounded by the shops and dwellings of the merchants), good places to take in and to discharge a cargo” (211). Cargo and shipping now define Boston for Thoreau, and Boston indeed becomes a city of commodities: “The more barrels, the more Boston. The museums and scientific societies and libraries are accidental. They gather around the barrels to save carting” (211). Positioned at the end of the text, Thoreau returns to civilization as he does in other travel writings like A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and The Maine Woods (1864), with a profoundly altered view of the world.22 Upon reaching Boston, “I had a gill of Provincetown sand in my shoes . . . and I seemed to hear the sea roar, as if I lived in a shell, for a week afterward” (211). His experience on the Cape has awakened in him a perceptual sensitivity that resonates in both the realm of auditory perception and the intellect, for, now, Thoreau has read death on the shores of Cohasset and read the commodities that contain a type of death themselves. Here, by the end of the text, Thoreau calls upon us to see the commodities at Long Wharf and the world that has formed around those commodities as being absolutely pervaded by and infused with death. And just as Thoreau cannot shake the sound of the waves, we too should be unable to overlook and leave unread the death of which the world of commodities is composed. Thoreau’s morning work—the awakening of the senses that is the political work of literary form in Cape Cod—can here also be understood as a work of mourning. From the opening to its close, Thoreau has sought to render inoperative the mechanism of economic imperception by its reproduction in literary form. Making legible the death within the commodity form by transposing it into the world of aesthetic value allows for that death to be processed and to be worked through.23 We would do well, therefore, to connect the barrels on Long Wharf to the boxes in which the dead are carted off the beach at Cohasset, as well as to the “box or barrel” which Thoreau appropriates and for which he digs a grave; we would do well, therefore, to read death and to mourn the dead (92). In reading Cape Cod with these issues in mind, we read a specifically literary registering of a social problem that helps us restructure our perceptive apparatus to become sensitive to the death that economic processes have caused to become imperceived. While in Walden Thoreau might shout at us to wake up, in Cape Cod he offers us a method of reading and perceiving that seeks to awaken us from “our dullest perception” which too often is praised as “common sense” (Walden 325). “The commonest sense,” Thoreau writes at the end of Walden, “is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring” (325). But if we find the world asleep and the senses dulled, then to awaken us from our slumber it will take a new training of the senses, the development of which, Marx declares, has been “a labor of the whole previous history of the world” (“Economic” 309). Or, as Thoreau himself puts it in the closing pages of A Week, “We need pray for no higher heaven than the pure senses can furnish, a purely sensuous life. Our present senses are but the rudiments of what they are destined to become. . . . What is it, then, to educate but to develope [sic] these divine germs called the senses?” (382). If in Walden and elsewhere Thoreau realizes the importance of the senses to politics and economics, Cape Cod reveals that he has really begun to cultivate the senses through literary form by reproducing the perceptual mechanism of economic imperception as a feature of the text. Although Cape Cod in many ways seems less urgent than Walden or any number of Thoreau’s more explicitly political texts, its political message is perhaps just as crucial, if not more so. By reproducing economic imperception and making it legible, Thoreau in Cape Cod grants us the key and the training necessary to help us make sense of our imperceived social world. Footnotes 1 " I extend my deep gratitude to Matthew Gannon for his unwavering camaraderie; my thanks to Robert Lehman, Jennifer Greiman, and Allison Curseen for their comments on earlier versions of this essay. 2 " See Katie Simon, who argues that Thoreau’s lack of affect is intentionally supposed to draw a reaction of hatred or disgust from the reader, in “Affect and Cruelty in the Atlantic System: The Hauntological Argument of Henry David Thoreau’s Cape Cod,” ESQ, vol. 62, no. 2, 2016, pp. 245–82. 3 " See Ryan Schneider, whose argument details the way in which Thoreau makes visible the linkages between class, the Irish, and borders, in “Drowning the Irish: Natural Borders and Class Boundaries in Henry David Thoreau’s Cape Cod,” ATQ, vol. 22, no. 3, 2008, pp. 463–76. 4 " Thomas D. Birch and Fred Metting argue that Thoreau in Walden sets out not to reject Smith, but rather to “synthesize, modify, and develop” his claims (“The Economic Design of Walden,” The New England Quarterly, vol. 65, no. 4, 1992, pp. 587–602; p. 594); Leonard Neufeldt argues in The Economist: Henry Thoreau and Enterprise (1989) that Thoreau used popular economic language in order to undermine its assumptions; Susan Gallagher’s study puts Thoreau in conversation with Adam Smith to argue that Thoreau and Smith are in direct opposition; see also Richard Grusin, who argues that Thoreau’s economy of nature turns on an extravagance that does not fit neatly into an account of classical economics or its Marxist critique (“Thoreau, Extravagance, and the Economy of Nature,” American Literary History, vol. 5, no. 1, 1993, pp. 30–50). 5 " For a treatment of similar ideas in a more popular register, see Ariel Dorfman’s short but compelling piece in The New York Review of Books, “Walden on the Rocks,” 29 Nov. 2017, web. 6 " Although he bizarrely understands Cape Cod to be Thoreau’s “sunniest, happiest book,” Walter Harding gets something exactly right: Cape Cod, he writes, “bubbles over with jokes, puns, tall tales, and genial good humor” (361). Punning is essential to Thoreau, as indicated here. 7 " For a discussion of perception as relational in Thoreau, see Michael Jonik. 8 " Kristen Case argues that in the Kalendar, Thoreau is concerned more with perception than with scientific truth; Bradley Ray King argues that Thoreau separates perception from empirical truth in Cape Cod to undercut the teleological history of the development of the US. 9 " See Theo Davis, Ornamental Aesthetics: The Poetry of Attending in Thoreau, Dickinson, and Whitman (2016), who argues that perception is codetermined between subject and object in the Journal, where Thoreau is in a dialogue with nature. 10 " See James Finley, who connects slavery and ecology to argue that the natural and the ecological are always political for Thoreau, in “‘Justice in the Land’: Ecological Protest in Henry David Thoreau’s Antislavery Essays,” The Concord Saunterer, vol. 21, 2013, pp. 1–35. 11 " Laura Dassow Walls writes that “Thoreau might have skipped” the opening scene of Cape Cod entirely because “it had nothing to do with ‘Cape Cod’ proper” (278). 12 " Neufeldt writes that “Economy” was originally a lecture separate from Thoreau’s Walden material, which suggests that the two books’ openings are structurally very similar. See Neufeldt, “Thoreau’s Enterprise of Self-Culture in a Culture of Enterprise,” American Quarterly, vol. 39, no. 2, 1987, pp. 231–51, especially p. 242. 13 " The three chapters of Cape Cod published during Thoreau’s lifetime all appeared in Putnam’s Monthly: “The Shipwreck” in June 1855; “The Plains of Nauset” in July 1855; “The Beach” in August 1855. See Harding, pp. 359–61. 14 " Eduardo Cadava notes the increasing value of fertilizer and guano specifically while Thoreau worked on Cape Cod. Guano imports increased from 66,000 to over 400,000 tons per year, increasing from $49 to $55 per ton (Cadava 117). This surge affected Cape Cod directly: a fertilizer company was established in Woods Hole in the middle of the nineteenth century that imported guano from Pacific South America (Cumbler 94). While the wreckers that Thoreau encounters are not part of these types of imperial ambitions as such, by collecting fertilizer they nevertheless participate in a valuable global market. Additionally, John T. Cumbler shows how agricultural production on the Cape at this time was oriented toward the larger market, calling this period Cape Cod’s “golden age” precisely because of its booming fisheries and farms. See Cumbler, pp. 51–53. 15 " See Shannon Mariotti, Thoreau’s Democratic Withdrawal: Alienation, Participation, and Modernity (2010), for a discussion of Thoreau’s practice of withdrawal and its relation to a democratic politics that extends beyond mere social participation in a public sphere. 16 " See Mitchell Breitwieser, who reads death and fragmentation as Cape Cod’s guiding principles (“Thoreau and the Wrecks on Cape Cod,” Studies in Romanticism, vol. 20, no. 1, 1981, pp. 3–20); John Lowney similarly argues that the disjointed nature of Cape Cod constitutes its central concern (“Thoreau’s Cape Cod: The Unsettling Art of the Wrecker,” American Literature, vol. 64, no. 2, 1992, pp. 239–54); Philip F. Gura maintains that death so permeates Cape Cod that the incessant sound of the waves in the book should even smell of death (149). 17 " Herbert F. Smith writes that “Economy” must be understood within the context of classical economics. Smith argues that Thoreau accepts the basis of classical economic theory in order to subvert it. See Smith, “Thoreau among the Classical Economists,” ESQ, vol. 23, 1977, pp. 114–22, especially pp. 114–17. 18 " For Marx, value (exchange-value) is derived from this total amount of labor time. Value comes into being by the passing away of human life. 19 " James Patrick Brown has referred to the extreme frequency of shipwrecks caused by the storms as the “nineteenth-century shipwreck epidemic” (10). Brown argues that investors were incentivized to send out unsound ships, loaded with cargo and human lives, with the intent of collecting insurance money should the ship sink. See Brown, pp. 10–12. 20 " This in some ways is a classic case of commodity fetishism, where the commodity relates socially to other commodities and people only relate to each other as things. Thoreau however injects into Marx’s formulation the essential element of death, which remains related but external to commodity fetishism for Marx. 21 " Grusin’s Thoreau is more interested in aesthetic value than in economic value. For Grusin, the realm of aesthetic value is not reducible to the world of classical economics or its critique. My argument has sought to reconcile literary form with economic value, such that the aesthetic value of Cape Cod helps us to retrain the sensorium to become sensitive to imperceived economic value and the death upon which it depends. 22 " We might read this moment of Cape Cod as the inverse of the more well-known “Contact! Contact!” lines from “Ktaadn” (Thoreau, The Maine Woods, p. 71). 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Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Author notes " Alex Moskowitz is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at Boston College, where he is writing a dissertation titled “American Imperceptions: Literary Form, Sensory Perception, and Political Economy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature.” His work has appeared elsewhere in Polygraph: An International Journal of Culture and Politics. He also serves as Associate Editor of The Concord Saunterer: A Journal of Thoreau Studies. © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Economic Imperception; or, Reading Capital on the Beach with Thoreau
JF - American Literary History
DO - 10.1093/alh/ajaa008
DA - 2020-05-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/economic-imperception-or-reading-capital-on-the-beach-with-thoreau-YDsnbmoj2L
SP - 221
VL - 32
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -