Emerson, Thoreau, and the Nature of Metonymy

             I suspect this is the case since metonymy remains a figure of rhetoric. Metonymy is figurative and linguistic, like metaphor, and not an "independent reality of the nonlinguistic material world." This suggests a further problem with the empirical Thoreau/rhetorical Emerson dichotomy that I complicate in the second half of this essay, doing so from the reverse angle. Reading Thoreau's empirical or ecological relation to the natural world in his writing, defined in stark opposition to Emerson's take on nature, critics lose sight of Thoreau's own considerable interest in perceiving the natural world not as "irreducibly material" or "literal," but as imaginatively real--useful, as Emerson would put it, "as raw material of tropes and symbols." That very sentence from Emerson's notebook, in fact, is a direct quotation from Thoreau's journal from 1853, copied amongst several pages that include other quotations from his reading of Thoreau and that reiterate a familiar theme in Emerson's writing: the relation between matter and mind. (16) Such evidence of mutual relation complicates the conventional wisdom that Thoreau in the 1850s must reject Emerson's rhetorical vision in order to reach the achievement of his later, more ecological work. Like Emerson, Thoreau carries into his work an interest in the analogical potential of nature for the writer. Whereas Emerson has a poetic interest in the science of Michael Faraday and the lessons of electromagnetism for the matter of mind, Thoreau at a contemporaneous point in his reading and writing, in some cases borrowing texts from Emerson, pursues a scientific interest in the poetics of language and etymology. As we will see in both cases, however, this empirical interest in a language and rhetoric of nature does not indicate the correspondence of organic metaphor conventional to Emersonian transcendentalism, as it is often named. Rather, this empiricism marks a more material and medial correspondence based in contiguity, a key principle in metonymy, in the natural philosophies Emerson and Thoreau are reading and in the writing that we can think of as their rhetorically experimental or empirical response.