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Thoreau, Extravagance, and the Economy of Nature

Author(s): Richard Grusin


Source: American Literary History, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Spring, 1993), pp. 30-50
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/489759
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Thoreau, Extravagance,
and the Economy of
Nature
Richard Grusin

Nature is, above all, profligate. Don't believe them when


they tell you how economical and thrifty nature is, whose
leaves return to the soil. Wouldn't it be cheaper to leave
them on the tree in the first place? This deciduous business
alone is a radical scheme, the brainchild of a deranged
manic-depressive with limitless capital. Extravagance!
Nature will try anything once. This is what the sign of the
insects says. No form is too gruesome, no behavior too
grotesque. Ifyou're dealing with organic compounds, then
let them combine. If it works, if it quickens, set it clacking
in the grass; there's always room for one more; you ain't
so handsome yourself. This is a spendthrift economy;
though nothing is lost, all is spent.
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

In considering the economic dimension of Thoreau's


thought, recent interpretershave set aside an earlier genera-
tion's characterizationof the writer as an "AmericanAdam"
and of Waldenas the "social gospel" of "an organic society"
(see Lewis; Paul). Inspired largely by Marxist and post-
structuralist demystifications of nature, revisionist critics
have challenged the traditionalconsensus that Thoreauwent
to live at Walden Pond in search of an organic and spiritual
economy of nature with which to supplant the arbitraryand
profane marketplace economy imposed by antebellum capi-
talism. Instead, they have suggested that the economy
Thoreaupracticed at Walden was not independent of the ide-
ology of American capitalism but made in its image. Sacvan
Bercovitch, for example, describes Walden as an embodi-
AmericanLiteraryHistory 31

ment of "the myth of American laissez-faire individualism"


in "a conversion narrativethat fuses the laws of nature, rea-
son, and economics with the spirit of America" (187, 185),
while Michael Gilmore notes "Thoreau's unwitting kinship
with social behavior he deplores," evident in Walden's con-
cluding self-portrait of "the laissez-faire individualist pur-
suing his private economic interest at the expense of the
public welfare" (44). Against the truism that Thoreau rejects
the marketplace economy of capitalism in the name of an
economy derived from nature, such readings contend that
the "fusion of nature, economy, and the divine" (Bercovitch
189) which motivates Thoreau's critique of capitalism
"replicates a basic feature of reified consciousness": natu-
ralization, "the conflation of history with nature" (Gilmore
44).
A central aim of revisionist readings of the American
Renaissance has been to develop a more complicated ac-
count of symbolic exchange, of how the symbolic realm of
culture is permeated by and inseparable from the material
realm of economic exchange. The difficulty in developing
this account, however, is that much revisionist criticism op-
erates within what Jacques Derrida describes as a "restrict-
ed" account of economy that depends upon a separation be-
tween the economic and the symbolic. So despite its
derogation of Walden'scapitalist naturaleconomy, this revi-
sionist model does not contest the economic model on which
Thoreau's economy of nature is based. Whether likened to
primitive barter economies, Jeffersonian agrarianism, civic
humanism, or "the celebrated Homo Economicus of mid-
nineteenth-century [Jacksonian] America" (Bercovitch
188), the natural economy that Waldensets forth has invari-
ably been understood in terms of the paradigms of classical
economics, most notably its utilitarian calculus of necessi-
ty.1
In this essay I offer an alternative to both traditional
and revisionist accounts of Thoreau's economy of nature.
First, I attempt to place Thoreau's understanding of the
economy of nature in the context of the history of scientific
discourse. Tracking the course of the concept from its eigh-
teenth-century origins in naturalhistory to its role in the be-
ginnings of the science of ecology, I argue that although the
idea of an economy of nature was being transformedduring
Thoreau's lifetime, this transformationdid not challenge the
paradigms of classical economy on which nature was mod-
32 Thoreau,Extravagance,and Nature

eled. Next, I look at Thoreau's late natural history essays,


arguing that Thoreau sees nature as practicing a symbolic
economy of expenditure that differs radically from classi-
cal, utilitarian-based accounts of nature's economy. Finally,
I argue that the economy Thoreau practiced at Walden Pond
constituted an economy not of simplicity but of extrava-
gance, an economy based not, as Gilmore argues, on Tho-
reau's antipathy toward exchange but rather on his enthusi-
asm for it.

The phrase "the economy of nature" was first used in


Sir Kenelm Digby's 1658 lecture on curing wounds by the
powder of sympathy. The concept did not, however, come
into prominence in Europe until the middle of the eighteenth
century, following Linnaeus's influential treatise Oecono-
mia Naturae (1749).2 By "the economy of nature," Linnaeus
means "the all-wise disposition of the Creator in relation to
natural things, by which they are fitted to produce general
ends, and reciprocal uses" (qtd. in Worster37-38). For Lin-
naeus nature is a divinely ordered system in which no new
species can be created and no existing species can be al-
lowed to become extinct. Nature's economy is one where
nothing is wasted and the expenditure of energy is minimal.
Thomas Jefferson expresses a classically Linnaean perspec-
tive in Notes on the State of Virginia, where, in support of
his belief that the mammoth could not be extinct but must be
living in North America, he explains: "Such is the economy
of naturethat no instance can be produced of her having per-
mitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her
having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be
broken" (qtd. in Boorstin 37; see Werge).
In Linnaeus's utilitarian cycle of nature, God provides
three mechanisms to maintain nature's economy: propaga-
tion, preservation, and destruction. "To perpetuate the es-
tablished course of nature in a continued series, the divine
wisdom has thought fit, that all living creatures should con-
stantly be employed in producing individuals, that all natu-
ral things should contribute and lend a helping hand towards
preserving every species, and lastly that the death and de-
struction of one thing should always be subservient to the
restitution of another" (qtd. in Egerton, "Changing" 336).
This concept is undoubtedly at work in James Hutton's
AmericanLiteraryHistory 33

"Theory of the Earth"(1788), a work that historians of sci-


ence traditionally credit with paving the way (via Charles
Lyell's Principles of Geology) for Darwin's theory of evolu-
tion. Stephen Jay Gould has pointed out, however, that Hut-
ton's portrayal of nature's economy as cyclical rather than
progressive links him more closely to Linnaeus than to Dar-
win. Indeed, the hold of Linnaeus's economy is so strong
that Darwin himself never completely shakes it off. As late
as The Origin of Species (1859), Darwin describes nature's
economy in terms of conservation and utility in his chapter
on "Laws of Variation,"where he proposed the "more gen-
eral principle ... that natural selection is continually trying
to economise in every part of the organization" (186). Yet
what makes natural selection a revolutionary paradigm in
natural history is Darwin's more fully articulated descrip-
tion of an economy of nature in which new species adapt to
opportunities in a competitive, even capitalistic market-
what Darwin, following Lyell, describes as filling available
"places" in the economy of nature (Stauffer 237).
Darwin expressed this idea in reference to the Galapa-
gos Islands as early as 1841 in The Zoology of the Voyage of
H.M.S. Beagle, and again in the second edition (1845) of
The Voyage of the Beagle. This Galapagos-inspired discov-
ery of the entrepreneurialcharacter of natural selection lies
near the heart of The Origin of Species, where Darwin rou-
tinely models the economy of natureon the market economy
of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism. Natural selec-
tion develops what Darwin describes as "new and improved
varieties" to "supplant and exterminate the older, less im-
proved and intermediate varieties," ultimately creating new
species with which to capitalize on any and all available op-
portunities in the ecological market (444).3
An American version of Darwin's coupling of capital-
ist economy with the laws of nature can be found in George
Perkins Marsh's conservation classic, Man and Nature
(1864). Although (like Darwin) Marsh maintains a Lin-
naean idea of the balance of nature, his concern that this bal-
ance has been disrupted by "man's ignorant disregard of the
laws of nature"(11) anticipates the development of the more
highly articulated analogy between natural and capitalist
economy that motivates the American conservation move-
ment later in the century. Throughout his work, Marsh char-
acterizes in economic terms both man's disturbance of the
"harmonies of nature" and his obligation to restore those
harmonies. In discussing the value of microorganisms, for
34 Thoreau,Extravagance,and Nature

example, Marsh laments civilization's failure to avail itself


"of the agency of these wonderful architects and manufac-
turers,"criticizing the economy of nineteenth-century capi-
talism for speculating on nature rather than cooperating
with it (110). Marsh himself was scandalized by the way the
powers of nature were treated as objects of speculation.
Nonetheless, his representationof the laws of nature's econ-
omy in terms of the laws of capitalist economy anticipates a
fundamental assumption of ecological science from its late-
nineteenth-century beginnings, evident in the ease with
which Stephen A. Forbes could employ this model in "The
Lake as a Microcosm" (1887), a pioneering American study
in lake limnology: "Just as certainly as the thrifty business
man who lives within his income will finally dispossess his
shiftless competitor who can never pay his debts, the well-
adjusted aquatic animal will in time crowd out its poorly-ad-
justed competitors for food and for the various goods of
life" (qtd. in Kingsland 16).
The idea that nature's economy can best be understood
on the analogy of the capitalist marketplace still persists in
contemporary ecological science, as manifest in the influ-
ence of economic science on both descriptive and mathe-
matical models of population ecology and ecosystemic en-
ergy exchange.4 Nevertheless, the belief that nature's
economy was frugal and efficient had begun to be called
into question before the end of the century. In The Psychic
Factors of Civilization (1893), for example, American soci-
ologist Lester Ward dramatically reverses the traditional
eighteenth-century representationof the economy of nature,
claiming that "[n]aturehas no economy."5
Nature's way of sowing seed is to leave it to the wind,
the water, the birds and animals. The greater part falls
in a mass close to the parent plant and is shaded out or
choked to death by its own abundance.... To meet this
enormous waste correspondingly enormous quantities
of seed are produced. Such is nature's economy. How
different the economy of a rational being! He prepares
the ground, clearing it of its vegetable competitors,
then he carefully plants the seeds at the properintervals
so that they shall not crowd one another, and after they
have sprouted he keeps off their enemies, whether veg-
etable or animal, supplies water if needed, even sup-
plies the lacking chemical constituents of the soil, if he
AmericanLiteraryHistory 35

knows what they are, and thus secures, as nearly as pos-


sible, the vigorous growth and fruition of every seed
planted. This is the economy of mind. (256-57)
Ward's description of nature as wasteful or careless chal-
lenges the contentions of Marsh and Forbes that the econo-
my of nature is frugal and efficient. But in distinguishing
between the extravagant economy of nature and the rational
economy of mind, Warddoes not do away with the utilitari-
an assumptions of classical economy that motivated earlier
understandings of nature's economy. Rather he reinscribes
these assumptions from the natural to the human.6 I cite
Ward's account of nature's extravagant economy at some
length because his description of "nature's way of sowing
seed" contrasts with Thoreau's discussion of the dispersion
of seeds in his 1860 address, "The Succession of Forest
Trees." As his extravagant economy of nature reveals,
Thoreau offers an account of nature's economy that dispens-
es with the basic utilitarian premises of both classical econ-
omy and its Marxist critique.

Like Ward, Thoreau is convinced that nature's econo-


my is extravagant and that human economy is not. But un-
like Ward,Thoreau sees nature's extravagance as worth em-
ulating. So in "The Succession of Forest Trees," read before
the Middlesex Agricultural Society in Concord, Thoreau
marvels at "the agency of the wind, water, and animals" in
sowing seeds (Excursions 228), citing with approval
William Bartram's observation that "the jay is one of the
most useful agents in the economy of nature, for disseminat-
ing forest trees and other nuciferous and hard-seeded veg-
etables on which they feed" (Excursions 244). While ac-
knowledging the wastefulness of this sowing, noting
elsewhere in the lecture "that the animals consume a great
part of the seeds of trees, and so, at least, effectually prevent
their becoming trees," Thoreau sees this extravagance as
part of an overall economy in which "the consumer is com-
pelled to be at the same time the disperser and planter, and
this is the tax which he pays to nature"(Excursions 248). In
fact, he concludes his address with the more than half-seri-
ous sentiment that nature's tax is well worth paying; after
36 Thoreau, Extravagance, and Nature

planting six small seeds he received from the Patent Office,


he harvested 310 pounds of large yellow squash from his
garden (Excursions 249).
The economy of nature described in "The Succession
of Forest Trees," the most conventionally scientific of
Thoreau's naturalhistory essays, epitomizes the economy of
expenditure set forth (with only minor variations) through-
out his career. Thus by using pine trees as "nurses"for oaks
(cutting down the pines when the young oaks had securely
established themselves), English experimental foresters
were "merely adopting the method of Nature, which she
long ago made patent to all" (Excursions 237-38). Thoreau
had commented on nature's extravagant methods as early as
the journal entry for 3 April 1842: "How rich and lavish
must be the system which can afford to let so many moons
burn all the day as well as the night-though no man stands
in need of their light-There is none of that kind of economy
in nature that husbands its stock-but she supplies inex-
haustible means to the most frugal methods" (401). While
Ward criticizes nature for supplying "inexhaustible means
to the most frugal methods," Thoreau applauds such extrav-
agance. Thus, in the journal for 11 August 1853, he notes:
"Thereare berries which men do not use, like choke-berries,
which here in Hubbard's Swamp grow in great profusion
and blacken the bushes. How much richer we feel for this
unused abundance and superfluity! Nature would not appear
so rich, the profusion so rich, if we knew a use for every-
thing" (5: 368). And in the journal for 28 March 1859,
Thoreau contrasts unfavorably our domestic economy with
nature's: "In many arrangements there is a wearisome mo-
notony. We know too well what [we] shall have for our Sat-
urday's dinner, but each day's feast in Nature's year is a sur-
prise to us and adapted to our appetite and spirits. She has
arrangedsuch an order of feasts as never tires. Her motive is
not economy but satisfaction" (12: 96).7 Thoreau's vision of
nature's economy differs from both Linnaeus's ideas of sys-
tematic efficiency and Ward's notion of extravagant waste.
Rather than a middle ground between these two accounts,
Thoreau's account constitutes a different economic ground
entirely. In spite of their conflicting evaluations of nature's
economy, both eighteenth- and nineteenth-century accounts
measure that economy according to standards of utility;
both insist that extravagance makes bad economic sense.
Thoreau, however, thinks otherwise. His conviction
that "nature's motive is not economy but satisfaction," that
AmericanLiteraryHistory 37

some things exist simply as "unused abundance and super-


fluity," underlies both Walden and the late natural history
essays.8 The strategy of these works resembles "the institu-
tionally organized and guaranteed misrecognition" that
Pierre Bourdieu sees as "the basis of gift exchange" in ar-
chaic economies of expenditure (171). In his analysis of
symbolic exchange, Bourdieu accuses Marxist anthropolo-
gists of falling into ethnocentrism by accepting "a restricted
definition of economic interest" (177). He argues instead
that "practice never ceases to conform to economic calcula-
tion even when it gives every appearance of disinterested-
ness by departing from the logic of interested calculation (in
the narrow sense) and playing for stakes that are non-mate-
rial and not easily quantified" (177). The only way to escape
"the ethnocentric naiveties of economism," he concludes, is
"to extend economic calculation to all the goods, material
and symbolic, without distinction, that present themselves
as rare and worthy of being sought after in a particular so-
cial formation" (177-78).
Bourdieu's critique of the restricted economism of Bourdieu's critique of
Marxist anthropologists also addresses the limitations of the restricted eco-
currentrevisionist accounts of Thoreau's economic practice nomism of Marxist
at Walden, limitations revealed most plainly in "The Bean- anthropologists also
addresses the limita-
Field" chapter. Thoreau denies the strictly economic aspect tions of current revi-
of his raising beans, insisting instead that as a "field not in sionist accounts of
Mr. Colman's report," his bean field has largely symbolic Thoreau'seconomic
value: "And, by the way, who estimates the value of the crop practice at Walden,
which Nature yields in the still wilder fields unimproved by limitations revealed
most plainly in "The
man? The crop of English hay is carefully weighed, the Bean-Field" chapter.
moisture calculated, the silicates and the potash; but in all
dells and pond holes in the woods and pastures and swamps
grows a rich and various crop only unreapedby man" (158).
"The Bean-Field" calls for an exchange that keeps its eco-
nomic basis implicit. In paradoxically claiming that the
beans he "cultivated" were "cheerfully returning to their
wild and primitive state" (158), Thoreau acknowledges the
symbolic value of spiritual capital in a society where the
monetary value of materialcapital is all. Both traditionaland
revisionist readers of Thoreau take chapters such as "The
Bean-Field" as evidence of his commitment to a fundamen-
tal opposition between a kind of (monetary, market, or eco-
nomic) value that is produced by exchange and a kind of
(spiritual, moral, or natural)value that is independent of, in-
deed threatenedby, exchange. This opposition depends upon
the belief that economic exchange is humiliating and alienat-
38 Thoreau, Extravagance, and Nature

ing both for the individuals involved in the exchange and for
the object exchanged, especially when that object is human
labor. Thoreau's "quarrel with the marketplace is in large
measure ontological," Gilmore explains: "Thoreaubelieves
that along with the degradation of the physical object in ex-
change there occurs a shriveling of the individual" (38).
I argue, however, that Thoreau sees nature's symbolic
value (like its monetary value) to be the product of exchange
(whether expenditure, destruction, gift, sacrifice, or loan)
and that an importantdifference between these two values is
that market value makes the calculation of economic value
explicit, while symbolic value conceals or postpones it. This
difference is set forth in two late natural history essays,
"Wild Apples" and "Autumnal Tints," both of which ob-
scure the economic basis of Thoreau's relationship to na-
ture. Each essay takes as its subject naturalobjects that soci-
ety thinks of as useless and valueless (wild apples and
autumn leaves) and proceeds to show that both are invalu-
able. Thoreau aims to point out that his contemporaries mis-
value naturenot because they insist on seeing it in economic
terms but because they insist on understandingits economy
in terms of market exchange rather than symbolic expendi-
ture.
Gilmore finds the paradigmatic expression of Tho-
reau's antipathy to exchange in the indictment of the mar-
keting of huckleberries in "The Ponds" chapter of Walden,
where Thoreau asserts that because "the ambrosial and es-
sential part of the fruit is lost with the bloom which is
rubbed off in the market cart," huckleberries "do not yield
their true flavor to the purchaser of them, nor to him who
raises them for the market,"but only to those who pluck the
fruit for themselves (173). In "Wild Apples," however, it is
clear that his quarrel is not with exchange itself but with
market exchange. Like the huckleberries passage, "Wild
Apples" criticizes the "particularly mean man" who is so
foolish as to think that he can transportthe "evanescent and
celestial qualities" of his "fair and fragrant early apples to
market" (Excursions 363). In representing huckleberries
and apples as having spiritual qualities, Thoreau is not sim-
ply ascribing to them an organic value independent of ex-
change; instead he articulates a symbolic economy in which
the "volatile and ethereal quality which represents [the]
highest value" of "naturalproducts" is made available only
when the fruit is plucked, that is, only when it enters into a
AmericanLiteraryHistory 39

symbolic exchange, when it is removed from nature (Excur-


sions 362).
Like Bourdieu, Thoreau would "extend economic cal-
culation to all the goods, material and symbolic, . . . that
present themselves as rare and worthy of being sought after
in a particular social formation." For Thoreau, the very un-
marketability of wild apples makes them more valuable than
cultivated ones: "Those which the farmer leaves out as un-
salable and unpalatable to those who frequent the markets
are choicest fruit to the walker" (Excursions 382). Because
farmers equate economy with marketability, they have no
standardswith which to measure the value of wild apples. "I
make a great account of these fruits, which the farmers do
not think it worth the while to gather,"Thoreau boasts. "The
farmer thinks that he has better in his barrels, but he is mis-
taken, unless he has a walker's appetite and imagination,
neither of which he can have" (Excursions 378). Thus
Thoreau aims to extend the realm of economic value, not to
escape it. As in his earlier representation of the "celestial
qualities" of "natural products," Thoreau deliberately
adopts the language of economics ("I make a great account
of these fruits") in describing his own appreciation of wild
apples.
Like "Wild Apples," "Autumnal Tints" at once con-
ceals the economic basis of Thoreau's relation to nature and
employs the language of economics to argue for a more gen-
eral conception of economic value. Thoreau begins the
essay by contending "thatthe change to some higher color in
a leaf is an evidence that it has arrived at a late and perfect
maturity, answering to the maturity of fruits" (Excursions
306). Yet his contemporaries do not value autumn leaves as
they do fruits: "Our appetites have commonly confined our
views of ripeness and its phenomena, color, mellowness,
and perfectness, to the fruits which we eat, and we are wont
to forget that an immense harvest which we do not eat, hard-
ly use at all, is annually ripened by Nature" (Excursions
307). In emphasizing the aesthetic value of autumnal tints, In emphasizing the
Thoreau initiates the rhetorical contrast between market and aesthetic value of au-
tumnal tints, Thoreau
symbolic economies that informs the essay. Confined large- initiates the rhetori-
ly by appetite, the judgments of "our annual Cattle Shows cal contrast between
and Horticultural Exhibitions" are not (in Kantian terms) market and symbolic
aesthetic judgments at all, since they are unable to value economies that in-
those "fruits which address our taste for beauty alone" (Ex- forms the essay.
cursions 307).
40 Thoreau,Extravagance,and Nature

Thoreau's invocation of cattle shows and horticultural


exhibitions is meant to denounce the narrowness of his con-
temporaries' economism as well as their scientism. Before
embarking upon his critique of autumnaljudgment, Thoreau
introduces the "scientific account" of the color change in
leaves and fruits ("The physiologist says it is 'due to an in-
creased absorption of oxygen' ") only to dismiss it as merely
"a reassertion of the fact" (Excursions 306). Indeed, Tho-
reau fashions his rhetorical strategy in "Autumnal Tints"
precisely as a rejection of his own initially limited scientific
conception of value:
I formerly thought that it would be worth the while to
get a specimen leaf from each changing tree, shrub, and
herbaceous plant, when it had acquired its brightest
characteristic color, in its transition from the green to
the brown state, outline it, and copy its color exactly,
with paint, in a book.... What a memento such a book
would be! You would need only to turn over its leaves
to take a ramble through the autumn woods whenever
you pleased. Or if I could preserve the leaves them-
selves, unfaded, it would be better still. (Excursions
307-08)
Thoreau's imagination of a book in which turning over the
leaves would be equivalent to taking a ramble through the
autumn woods embodies a desire for an economy of repre-
sentation that could be exceeded only by preserving the
leaves themselves. Although Thoreau claims to have made
"little progress toward such a book," his decision to write an
autumnal almanac by describing "all these bright tints in the
order in which they present themselves" is not a compro-
mise on his original plan but a rejection of its scientistic
premises (Excursions 308). His initial conception for a book
of autumnal tints depended upon a limited economy of rep-
resentation that (despite its goal of copying autumnalleaves
at their "brightest characteristic color") is capable of pro-
ducing only a pale, formal imitation of the book of nature.
Because the ideal of this representational economy would
be an exact equivalence between his representation of au-
tumnal tints and the tints themselves, Thoreau recognizes
that it would be "better still" to "preserve the leaves them-
selves, unfaded." But, like sending huckleberries or apples
to market, preserving leaves in a specimen book would not
AmericanLiteraryHistory 41

capture their "volatile and ethereal" qualities. Like the sci-


entific explanation of color change in ripeness, the repre-
sentational economy of such a book cannot account for the
symbolic value of autumnal tints but can only provide a lit-
eral "reassertion of the fact." Unable to account for the cen-
trality of loss in a symbolic economy, neither the scientism
nor the economism of his contemporaries can calculate the
full value of autumnaltints.
Thoreau responds to this narrowly mimetic conception
by representing the aesthetic value of autumnal tints sym-
bolically, that is, extravagantly. "I fear chiefly lest my ex-
pression may not be extra-vagant enough, may not wander
far enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily experi-
ence, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I am con-
vinced. ... The volatile truthof our words should continual-
ly betray the inadequacy of the residual statement. Their
truth is instantly translated; its literal monument alone re-
mains" (Walden324-25). Ratherthan risk losing the volatil-
ity of autumnal tints by the literalness of a "residual state-
ment," Thoreau calls for an extravagance of expression in
which the volatility of his speech depends on its instant
(and, presumably, repeated) translation. As if to demon-
strate this economy of representation in action, he fashions
"Autumnal Tints" as an extravagant critique of autumnal
judgment in which figurative and metaphorical representa-
tions exceed the limits of his daily experience.
This autumnal critique of judgment begins with "The
Purple Grasses," the earliest of the autumnaltints. Contrast-
ing the mowing of meadow hay with the "fine purple mist"
that the "greedy mower" leaves for "the walker's harvest,"
Thoreau speculates that the "greedy mower" may not notice
the purple grass "because it is so beautiful" (Excursions
310). The mower's perceptual failure leads Thoreau to the
Kantian conclusion that "[n]aturethus keeps use and beauty
distinct" (Excursions 310)-or that "[b]eauty and true
wealth are always thus cheap and despised" (Excursions
315). Central to this taxonomy of purple grasses is the poke-
weed, which Thoreau reminds us "has been called by some
the American Grape, and . . . [whose] juices are used in
some foreign countries to improve the color of the wine"
(Excursions 312). Punning on the contradictorymeanings of
"taste" as both an appetitive and an aesthetic faculty, Tho-
reau rejoices: "To walk amid these upright, branching casks
of purple wine, which retain and diffuse a sunset glow, tast-
42 Thoreau, Extravagance, and Nature

ing each one with your eye, instead of counting the pipes on
a London dock, what a privilege!" (Excursions 312). And to
reiterate his conviction that the symbolic value of aesthetic
judgment cannot be accounted for by the limited economism
of the market, Thoreau concludes his discussion of purple
grasses by asking rhetorically: "Who can doubt that these
grasses, which the farmer says are of no account to him, find
some compensation in your appreciation of them?" (Excur-
sions 315).
Thoreau takes up the nature of this aesthetic "compen-
sation" with respect to the season's "principalleaf-harvest"
in "Fallen Leaves" (324). The philosophical center of his
essay, this section is an extravagantriot of metaphorical lan-
guage in which Thoreau uses fallen leaves to conceal the
ground both literally and figuratively. Again, in an extended
series of metaphors, he describes sailing down the Concord
and Assabet rivers "the day after the principal fall of leaves"
(Excursions 326-27).
Arriving at the river, Thoreau begins his extravagant
account: "I find my boat all covered, bottom and seats, with
the leaves of the Golden Willow under which it is moored,
and I set sail with a cargo of them rustling under my feet....
I do not regard them as litter, to be swept out, but accept
them as suitable straw or matting for the bottom of my car-
riage" (Excursions 327). Having transformed his cargo of
fallen willow leaves from litter to matting, Thoreau pro-
ceeds to convert them into fellow boats, a metaphor for
imagining a pantheistic voyage:

Perchance, in the afternoon of such a day, when the


water is perfectly calm and full of reflections, I paddle
gently down the main stream, and, turning up the Assa-
bet, reach a quiet cove, where I unexpectedly find my-
self surroundedby myriads of leaves, like fellow-voy-
agers, which seem to have the same purpose, or want of
purpose, with myself. See this great fleet of scattered
leaf-boats which we paddle amid, in this smooth river-
bay, each one curled up on every side by the sun's skill,
each nerve a stiff spruce-knee,-like boats of hide, and
of all patterns, Charon's boat probably among the rest,
and some with lofty prows and poops, like the stately
vessels of the ancients, scarcely moving in the sluggish
current,-like the great fleets, the dense Chinese cities
of boats, with which you mingle on entering some great
AmericanLiteraryHistory 43

mart, some New York or Canton, which we are all


steadily approaching together. (Excursions 328)
From pantheism to mercantilism, from Charon's death ferry
to Chinese junks, "Fallen Leaves" multiplies similes in an
enactment of the mode of symbolic exchange that Thoreau
ascribes to nature. Although trees may appear to lose their
leaves for no economic reason at all, Thoreau has little trou-
ble supplying them (at least metaphorically) with an eco-
nomic purpose. Nor does he have trouble exchanging one
economic metaphor for another. Picking up on the refer-
ences to Canton and to "dense Chinese cities of boats,"
Thoreau translates the decaying fallen leaves into "Oriental
teas"-"green, black, brown, and yellow teas, of all degrees
of strength, enough to set all Nature a-gossiping" (Excur-
sions 329). Just as nature converts the decaying leaves into
tea, which will in turn be exchanged for gossip, so Thoreau
synecdochically transforms his Cantonese "leaf-boats" into
imported "herb-drinks"and "Orientalteas," symbolic com-
modities which are valuable, he insists, "[w]hether we drink
them or not" (Excursions 329).
Thoreau's extravagant metaphorical exchange does not
stop at teatime but shifts to an extended harvesttime
metaphor: "Consider what a vast crop is thus annually shed
on the earth! This, more than any mere grain or seed, is the
great harvest of the year. The trees are now repaying the
earth with interest what they have taken from it. They are
discounting. They are about to add a leaf's thickness to the
depth of the soil" (Excursions 329). Like seeds, which are
both consumed and planted by the animals that disperse
them, the harvest of autumn leaves is both extravagant and
productive. Trees do not keep their leaves (as Annie Dillard
suggests would be cheaper). Instead, following the extrava-
gant logic of gift exchange, they give them back to the soil,
"repaying the earth with interest what they have taken from
it" and obligating it to continue the cycle of exchange.
"They stoop to rise, to mount higher in coming years, by
subtle chemistry, climbing by the sap in the trees, and the
sapling's first fruits thus shed, transmutedat last, may adorn
its crown, when, in after-years, it has become the monarch
of the forest" (Excursions 330). Thoreau considers nature "a
perfect husbandman"not because it husbands but because it
discounts its crop (329-30). "There is none of that kind of
economy in nature that husbands its stock," he had noted in
44 Thoreau,Extravagance,and Nature

the journal, "but she supplies inexhaustible means to the


most frugal methods."9
The economic cycle that Thoreau describes throughout
the naturalhistory essays appears in some ways to resemble
the Linnaean cycle of propagation, preservation, and de-
struction. But where Linnaeus believed that "the death and
destruction of one thing should always be subservient to the
restitution of another," in Thoreau's economy of nature,
propagation and preservation are always subservient to de-
struction. This symbolic economy of expenditure works like
a primitive gift economy, in which nature's crops are treated
as gifts to be passed on or reciprocated. Such reciprocation
is not, as in a market economy, to balance the ledger but to
pass on the obligation to give through an extravagant expen-
diture. In "The Notion of Expenditure,"Georges Bataille re-
marks that in the potlatch (and in symbolic exchange gener-
ally) "[i]t is the constitution of a positive propertyof loss ...
that gives the institution its significant value. The gift must
be considered as a loss and thus as a partial destruction,
since the desire to destroy is in part transferredonto the re-
cipient" (122). What Bataille calls a "positive property of
loss" Thoreau describes as the volatile or essential qualities
that constitute the medium of exchange in nature's symbolic
economy. Because it incorporates the logic of symbolic ex-
change, Thoreau's account of nature's "subtle chemistry"
represents a more comprehensive scientism than that with
which "Autumnal Tints" begins. The subtlety of nature's
chemistry derives not only from its ability to transmute or-
ganic compounds but from its ability to circulate the desire
to lose and destroy. This same subtle chemistry is also at
work in both the naturaland human economies that Thoreau
sets forth in Walden.

There is nothing especially new in the claim that


Walden represents nature's economy as extravagant. Revi-
sionist and traditional critics alike have remarkeda discrep-
ancy between "Economy"'s detailed explanation of Tho-
reau's attempt to live simply and deliberately and the
extravagant economy of nature he advocates in the book's
last two chapters. One reason Thoreau's critics perceive
such a discrepancy is that they conceive of economy strictly
from the utilitarian perspective of classical economics, in
AmericanLiteraryHistory 45

which all economies are governed by self-regulating natural


laws of universal value. This perspective does not account
for economies that function according to sacrifice and loss,
economies uninterested in efficient systems of accumula-
tion and production-like the economy sketched out in
Walden's "Spring" chapter, where Thoreau's call for "the
tonic of wildness" culminates in a sacrificial vision of na-
ture's extravagance:

I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads


can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on
one another;that tender organizations can be so serene-
ly squashed out of existence like pulp,-tadpoles
which herons gobble up, and tortoises and toads run
over in the road; and that sometimes it has rained flesh
and blood! With the liability to accident, we must see
how little account is to be made of it. (318)

The law of nature's economy is sacrifice-not of "the


greater to the less" but of the less to the greater (321). Be-
cause nature is "rife"both "with life" and "with the liability
to accident," it makes "little account" of the tadpoles sacri-
ficed for herons or the tortoises and toads "run over in the
road" for no reason at all. It is not production and acquisi-
tion but destruction and loss that keep this natural economy
in motion.
A similar economy is at work in Walden's opening
chapter, where Thoreau repeatedly suggests that the way to
simplify is to get rid of what you always and already pos-
sess. In the first 20 paragraphsof "Economy" alone, we find
the following allusions to expenditure: "young men ...
whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses,
barns, cattle, and farming tools," only to discover that
"these are more easily acquired than got rid of' (5); the ad-
monition that "it is never too late to give up our prejudices"
(8); the claim that each "generation abandons the enterpris-
es of another like strandedvessels" (11); and "thatseeming-
ly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who
have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get
rid of it" (16).
These are not the chapter's only instances of Thoreau's
commitment to an economy of extravagance, for the empha-
sis throughout "Economy"'s discussion of necessities is as
much on getting rid of possessions as on preventing their ac-
quisition. In discussing the four necessities of life, Thoreau
46 Thoreau,Extravagance,and Nature

notes how even those things that appearto be necessities can


be gotten rid of: "Our moulting season, like that of the
fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. The loon retires to soli-
tary ponds to spend it. Thus also the snake casts its slough,
and the caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal industry
and expansion; for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and
mortal coil" (24). While clothes can fairly easily be stripped
off, it is more difficult to get rid of one's house. Thus Tho-
reau writes of knowing "one or two families, at least, in this
town, who, for nearly a generation, have been wishing to
sell their houses in the outskirts and move into the village,
but have not been able to accomplish it, and only death will
set them free" (34).
But in "Economy" it is furniture,even more than cloth-
ing and shelter, from which Thoreau wishes to be set free.
Writing of people who move from house to house dragging
their furniture behind them in carts, he contends that "the
more you have of such things the poorer you are. Each load
looks as if it contained the contents of a dozen shanties; and
if one shanty is poor, this is a dozen times as poor. Pray, for
what do we move ever but to get rid of our furniture,our exu-
viae; at last to go from this world to another newly fur-
nished, and leave this to be burned?" (65-66). But as he
notes in decrying "the auction of a deacon's effects," some-
times even death will not set us free, for when we leave this
world our possessions remain: "[I]nstead of a bonfire, or pu-
rifying destruction of them, there was an auction, or increas-
ing of them" (67). Thoreau obsessively insists on relin-
quishing and repudiating one's possessions. In contrast to
the capitalistic economy of acquisition that the auctioning
of the deacon's effects typifies, he advises that "[t]he cus-
toms of some savage nations might, perchance, be prof-
itably imitated by us, for they at least go through the sem-
blance of casting their slough annually" (68).
Some 35 years ago, R. W. B. Lewis characterized
Thoreau's advocacy of a symbolic economy of expenditure
as his "announcement of a spiritual moulting season" in
which "[e]verything associated with the past should be
burned away. The past should be cast off like dead skin"
(20-21). But where Lewis sees Thoreau as prescribing "the
total renunciation of the traditional, the conventional, [and]
the socially acceptable" as the necessary precondition for a
"total immersion in nature"(21), I have been suggesting that
renunciation is itself constitutive of the natural. Thoreau
AmericanLiteraryHistory 47

does not cast off the capitalist economy of the marketplace


in order to make way for an economy of nature. Nor, as
Bercovitch and Gilmore suggest, does he "fuse the laws of
nature, reason, and economics with the spirit of America" in
a replication of reified consciousness. Rather the acts of re-
linquishment that he practices in living at Walden and
throughout his career are acts that are constitutive of and
constituted by an extravagant economy of nature. Although
obviously informed by the capitalist ideology of antebellum
America, Thoreau's understanding of nature's economy op-
erates according to a logic antithetical both to the classical
economic tradition of capitalism and to its Marxist critique.

Notes
1. Herbert Smith provides a fuller discussion of Thoreau's economic
thought in relation to the classical economic tradition of Adam Smith,
Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo. Although Smith sees Thoreau,
like Marx, as creating "a viable and certainly'no less revolutionary alter-
native to the economic theories of the classical economists" (114), this
alternative, like Marx's own, does not challenge the assumptions of
classical economics in which production and acquisition, not destruc-
tion and loss, are seen as the fundamental aims of all economies.

2. For analyses of the concept of a balance or economy of nature, see


Egerton, "Changing"and "Ecological"; Kingsland; McIntosh; Stauffer;
and Worster.

3. Although the term ecology was not coined until after the publication
of The Origin of Species, it was Darwin's portrayal of the economy of
nature that helped motivate Ernest Haeckel to introduce the neologism
in 1866. Defining ecology as "the body of knowledge concerning the
economy of nature,"Haeckel made his debt to Darwin explicit when he
further described ecology as "the study of all those complex interrela-
tionships referred to by Darwin as the conditions of the struggle for exis-
tence" (qtd. in Stauffer 235; Worster 192).

4. Ecological models of energy exchange import the categories of


human economy wholesale, reading into nature such concepts as pro-
ducers, consumers, and middlemen. In particularthere is a nearly centu-
ry-long history of relations between statistical modeling of human
economies and population ecologies. See Kingsland; and Saarinen.

5. For Ward, a paleobotanist in the US Geological Survey from 1880


to 1893 and a founder of the discipline of sociology, the extravagance of
nature's economy was among the most important lessons to be drawn
from Darwin's theory of natural selection. Ward imagines nature as in-
terested in usefulness but not practicality, sparing no expense to bring
48 Thoreau,Extravagance,and Nature

about even the slightest improvement. While he sees every change


brought about by natural selection as advantageous for the organism, he
is convinced that the energy expended to bring about such changes is
often incommensurate with the resultant gain.

6. In the Popular Science Monthly in 1874, writing on the centennial


of the discovery of oxygen, E. L. Youmans offered a similar account of
nature's extravagant economy. But where Ward sees nature's economy
as truly wasteful and the economy of mind as frugal and efficient,
Youmans sees the economies of both nature and mind as superficially
wasteful but ultimately possessing a grand economy.

7. In this passage, as throughout his work, Thoreau participates in the


nineteenth-century gendering of nature as feminine. In a recent discus-
sion of the feminization of nature in Thoreau as it relates to nature, gen-
der, and science in seventeenth- through nineteenth-century New Eng-
land, Carolyn Merchant sees Thoreau as representing a romantic and
feminine, as opposed to a utilitarian and masculine, perspective toward
nature. Merchant does not relate these perspectives to Thoreau's extrav-
agant economy, arguing that they are "two sides of the coin of capitalist
culture" (258).

8. Traditionally, Thoreau's literary career has been perceived as de-


clining after Walden,when critics see Thoreau as committing himself to
the minute study of nature recorded privately in the Journal and ex-
pressed publicly in lectures and essays. John Hildebidle has challenged
this consensus, contending that Thoreau devoted his ratherconsiderable
post-Walden "intellectual energies ... to natural history as method and
as genre" (69). More recently Sharon Cameron has suggested that the
Journal is best understood neither as preparatoryto Thoreau's natural
history writing nor as a private document but as Thoreau's "centralliter-
ary enterprise" (3). I would speculate here that the value of the Journal
for Thoreau might lie precisely in the fact that it is extravagant, that it
has no use. Thus rather than ascribe a value or use to the Journal, I
would see it, like the unused berries in Hubbard'sswamp, as furtherevi-
dence of the lavishness and profusion of nature's economy.

9. "Fallen Leaves" concludes with an extended metaphor in which


Thoreau further elaborates the centrality of loss in nature's economy of
expenditure. As with all of his economic metaphors, he criticizes the
limited economism of his contemporaries by playfully representing a
naturalphenomenon in economic terms. Here his quarrelis that his con-
temporaries treat death like any other aspect of life, not as an occasion of
loss but as an opportunity to accumulate more property. Thoreau ends
his extended conceit of fallen leaves as corpses with an indictment of the
narrow economism of the rural cemeteries movement in antebellum
America. Citing Mount Auburn and Greenwood Cemetery, two of "the
grand triumvirate of America's first and most influential rural cemeter-
ies," he pokes fun at the increasing tendency for the antebellum "rural
cemetery" to function "as a kind of suburbanpark"in which the visitor
could combine an aesthetic appreciation of picturesque landscapes with
the moral contemplation of mortality (Schuyler 45, 54). In adopting the
AmericanLiteraryHistory 49

terminology of antebellum burial practices to depict the true rural


"cemetery of the leaves," Thoreau criticizes thinking of death only in
the utilitarian terms of a market economy, in which both the commemo-
ration of death and the appreciation of nature are commodified within
the confined space of a rural cemetery (Excursions 332).

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