Walden’s Cosmic Vision and the Paradoxes of American Transnationalism

Abstract

This essay critically intervenes in the ‘transnational’ reading of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, and by extension, the post-national and post-exceptionalist paradigms in American literary studies. I suspect that the transnational perspective as conceived in American Studies often amounts to a reinforcement of American Exceptionalism, demonstrating how the envisioned transnational and planetary space in Walden ultimately serves to reify the national boundary of America. The intervention necessitates a nuanced reading of Thoreau’s work, wherein the author celebrates the local particularities of New England, at once translated into the pure American soil and a global space that encompasses ‘all humanity.’ Thoreau’s repeated reference to Nature justifies the universal applicability of the lessons of Walden Pond to every part of the world. However, the naturalized image of the cosmos conceals the intricate relations of world economy and politics that define and limit the networked flow of culture. Thoreau’s engagement with the Bhagavad Gita, for instance, testifies to how the seemingly disinterested pursuit of philosophical knowledge is permeated by the hegemonic world order, particularly involving the British Empire. Additionally, Thoreau’s transcendental gesture envisions a global civil society where he is the ‘citizen of the world,’ at the expense of certain ethnic and national groups—such as the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego and the New Hollanders—as necessary tropes of ‘savages’ to be transcended. Thoreau’s expanded community relies on the logic of divisions, indicating that the imagined wholeness of America in Walden operates on the principle of spatial multiplicity joined together under a single teleological temporality that does not tolerate divergence.