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THOREAU’S AXE:
Distraction and Discipline in American Culture
Caleb Smith
ISBN 978-0-691-21477-1
Using short extracts from nearly thirty writers, amongst them
Melville , Poe, William James, Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Toni
Morrison, and less retrievable names such as James Dana, Austin
Reed, Lydia Maria Child, Smith reflects on the tension between
distraction and attention across more than two centuries of American
culture. There is no easy way through the thicket. Opposition to
distraction and insistence on the improving nature of attention have
been employed by reactionaries, reformers and revolutionaries. Smith
doesn’t try to impose consistency. He attends to each piece
diligently and works as an insightful critic. The result is a
condensed overview of the pattern of an important feature of
American life. It’s an ingenious conception very well accomplished.
Thoreau borrowed an axe in March 1845 to cut timber for his house at
Walden Pond. When the head came off, he fitted a new wedge and put
the tool to soak. As he did, he spotted a snake which slithered down
a bank and into the water, where it lay quite for quarter of an hour
while he watched it. Thoreau turned the snake into a metaphor for
his fellow-countrymen: they were lying low, dormant, unawakened. If
the spring could run through them, they might come to life. Thoreau
believed he had identified a spiritual absence in American life, a
lack of character. They should rise to a “higher” and “more
ethereal” condition. What had Thoreau discerned? He was an
abolitionist of course, at a time when white supremacy
was taken for granted by the majority. He opposed war. He
went to prison, if only for a night thanks to his aunt, who he
didn’t thank for it, rather than contribute to what he opposed. Much
has been written about his version of individualism, his
Transcendentalism, his creation of the doctrine of Civil
Disobedience; but wasn’t what he knew, emotionally for want of a
better way of putting it, that the economic system exported from
Europe and made the basis of American life, was an insult to human
nature?
Thoreau was a major influence on D.H.Lawrence (H.D.T. and D.H.L.)
whose work is characterised by a visceral dislike of the pursuit of
material gain. In Thoreau he found an echo of his mother’s
non-conformism as well as his father’s uncomplicated love of nature
and the American helped him elaborate a way of being at odds with
his culture. It’s as impossible to imagine Lawrence putting on a
dinner jacket and dickie bow to attend a swanky dinner for the award
of a literary prize as it is to think of a contemporary writer who
doesn’t fantasise about such flummery. Lawrence picked up from
Thoreau that humanity had taken a wrong turn: making the contest for
lucre the defining aim of life has dehumanised us. Like the snake in
the water, we are drowsy, unaware, unable to rise to life because of
our hibernation n in the cold world of profit-and-loss calculation.
“I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by attending to
trivial things”, Thoreau wrote. The defenders of the bustle and
business he despised, might argue their occupations aren’t trivial
but he recognised that what we’ve created are “pretty toys”.
Distraction is a form of suffering, but attention can inflict pain
too. There are references to asceticism in Walden (Nye Bevan
commented that it warps the mind) but self-flagellation is not
Thoreau’s intent. What he’s after is a more intensive way of living,
but not the intensity of cocaine-fuelled commodity traders, because
they offend human nature. Thoreau is pushing to answer probably the
hardest question we face: what is our nature?
Early on, Smith picks up on the irony that the kind of attention
Thoreau seeks, has been used for purposes he didn’t intend: he
quotes a Massachusetts state legislature report on a New England
site for a youth reformatory. The description has in common with
Thoreau a belief in the healing power of the peace and slowness of
nature. Yet what is going on here is not the setting free of the
inviolable individual, but confinement and manipulation to achieve
the aims of the ruling ideology.
The second extract is from Jarena Lee, born in 1783 she was a slave
who found salvation in religion. Her attention is to a force outside
herself. She experiences her faults as the work of the devil and her
virtues as the inspiration of god. Oddly, then, attention in this
case reinforces heteronomy. Perhaps she would have been better off
engaging in a bit of daydreaming, in so far as it is at least an
escape from control.
J.H. McIlvaine disdains debased reading material. Writing in 1849,
he sees it as the corrupter of minds. The debate is still alive.
McIlvaine fears popular literature because, he thinks, it includes
such things as the work of Thomas Paine. Perhaps he would be
surprised at how few people read Paine today. His high-mindedness is
melded with a low desire for control. He is more moralistic than
moral. Smith points out his implicit racism: the tradition he
defends is white. Her has no praise for non-white culture (most of
the world’s). Smith comments on McIlvaine’s diagnosis of the source:
the sensationalist press, the dominant mass medium in the period
before the Civil War. On the one hand, McIlvaine is arguing against
a manipulative press and for self-mastery, and who be opposed to
that? On the other, he is too wedded to control. Karl Marx was no
intellectual slouch, but he had a taste for cheap fiction. Popular
culture isn’t necessarily incompatible with self-mastery and
seriousness. What matters is where the fulcrum lies.
In part two, Smith moves from the devil and distraction to reform.
The reformers of the early nineteenth century focussed on the
straightening out of individuals to the neglect of the social
questions. William Watkins writing in 1836 believed children should
be “indoctrinated” in the “practices of our holy religion”. Curious
but widespread the idea that autonomy might be achieved through
indoctrination. William Kelley, judge and reformer saw Philadelphia
fall under the malevolent influence of what Smith calls “racial
capitalism”. He was an adcoate of rehabilitation, but he was intent
of reforming the individual by bringing him or her home to god. No
doubt beneficent in his intentions, Kelley absorbed the conventions
of his time. What was hardly available was a recognition that the
nature of American society was generating the problems he was so
exercised by.
Part three is Revival and part four Devotion. Whether
the snippet under discussion is from Whitman, Dickinson or Henry
Clay Fish, Smith is teasing out the contradictions and ironies. The
Afterword contains an interesting discussion of Poe’s The
Man of the Crowd and Walter Benjamin’s response to it and the
existence of crowds and mass culture in general. Benjamin favoured
the cinema, the mass form, over literature, because he believed it
was a bulwark against the herding power of fascism, a belief which
seems somewhat naïve, as Smith suggests, in a world where
authoritarian populists make use of the media the masses rally to.
What seems clear is that distraction isn’t necessarily negative, nor
discipline (or attention) necessarily beneficial. A little more
distraction among the clerks at Drancy could have saved a lot of
lives; a little less attention among Trump’s followers might have
avoided the regrettable spectacle of 6th January 2021.
The virtue of this book lies in leaving many questions open, in
proposing that much of what we try to understand puzzles us. Trying
to answer hard questions is a good way to spend your time, but
believing you’ve got the answers is almost certainly a questionable
destination. All the writers featured were, one way or another,
trying to assist moral progress. It’s a project worth paying
attention to and Smith’s book is a thoughtful and well-written
contribution.
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