Thoreau, Emerson’s neighbor, provides some words to think about metonymy (the figure of naming by reducing and displacing, but by way of intimate association). Here is a paragraph from the “House-Warming” chapter of Walden that offers an example of metonymy in the act of thinking. Let me quote the passage before thinking through it.
It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its nerve and degenerate into parlaver wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far-fetched, through slides and dumb-waiters, as it were; in other words, the parlor is so far from the kitchen and workshop. The dinner even is only the parable of a dinner, commonly. As if only the savage dwelt near enough to Nature and Truth to borrow a trope from them. How can the scholar, who dwells away in the North West Territory or the Isle of Man, tell what is parliamentary in the kitchen?
These thoughts catch my attention as I am reading Walden and thinking about Thoreau and his own interest in a kind of living learning that Emerson finds in him (recall Emerson’s model from back in 1839, for learning by one’s hands). Metonymy speaks to this in several ways.
- First, the focus on language. The way Thoreau works here is familiar: the pun on palaver. But we see here that language is not just the problem, but also a solution, since the problem is really a degradation or distancing from where our language originates. The tension here is not between nature and a symbolic use of language, but a dynamic within the language of nature; between, in other words, metaphor and metonymy.
- The metaphoric: tropes, as he names them, that become far-fetched, remote. In this version, metaphors are symbols that become too remote from their origins–which, like Emerson’s view in Nature, suggest that language originates in the metonymic, in proximity–in dwelling “near” to use.
- Thoreau’s trope in this passage tropes upon this issue of distance: when the parlor gets too far from the original center of the house, the kitchen and the workshop, we get palaver. In other words, we get dead metaphor (parlor, cut off from its original meaning) when we forget the metonymies or our language: where we make and cook our symbols.
- This remoteness from symbol, in addition to Emerson, brings John Dewey to mind: where the necessity of symbols in learning also becomes a problem when those symbols become palaverized (we can now say, reading Thoreau into Dewey); a means made into an end. Does not Dewey want to move the classroom back closer to the workshop?
- The kitchen and workshop also bring Kenneth Burke to mind: perhaps a Thoreauvian version of his interest in the alchemy and transformation of thought through language. Burke’s Emersonian alembic or machinery and transcendence here more earthly and homely: the kitchen. And Emerson’s notion of passing, of condition of passing in our language for our genius (think how Cavell draws on this) is here figured in terms of the home. The problem, once again, of metonymy degenerating into metaphor–passing far from symbols as we move into passages distant from the hearth. Dwelling is another key term that evokes the metonymy at hand (think how Garber focuses this in terms of inscription–dwelling nearest the earth)
This passage offers a view onto the complexity of metonymy (passing for and into metaphor). But also a view onto a critical approach Thoreau uses to re-metonymize or de-metaphorize our thinnking. In its reduction (Burke), metonymy is about the near–and potentially, about the near becoming remote (when forgotten). Thoreau’s scholar (note this word here) needs to re-learn (or un-learn) the remoteness and nearness of his language. Thus pedagogy and place. The emergence of ecological literacy, in its emphasis on place and working with one’s hands, its comfortable associations with Thoreau–comfortable in seeing Thoreau as a pedagogical forebear–seems a useful way to explore metonymy in Emerson’s sense. Perhaps, in this way, Thoreau is closer to us in our understanding of metonymy (figured as: hand or workshop); and Emerson suffers in how we have made him pass at too great a remoteness, too far a fetching, from his own interest in this symbol. Thoreau works in Emerson’s kitchen.
Reader, what do you need and want to know about metonymy?
