![]() ![]() “A better way of arranging the text might be to print the various versions in parallel columns if it were not for the great length of the manuscript,” Clapper wrote in 1967 (4). It also recasts that scholarship in a more accessible form. Walden: A Fluid-Text Edition makes Clapper’s scholarship available, for the first time, to anyone with an internet connection and a web browser. Milder’s disconstruction follows two earlier efforts to provide a comprehensive view of Walden‘s evolution: Robert Sattelmeyer’s essay “The Remaking of Walden,” which uses Clapper’s genetic text to argue that across seven drafts Thoreau “became increasingly concerned with his own awakening and less obsessed with waking up his neighbors” (68) and a book-length study by Stephen Adams and Donald Ross, Jr., Revising Mythologies: The Composition of Thoreau’s Major Works, which relies heavily on Clapper’s dissertation to propose that Walden “changed radically over the seven years of its development,” with the second half of the narrative growing “from an appendix to ‘Economy’ into a quest for unity in the world” (177). the narrated story of discovery and renewal that Thoreau bids us attend to (and nearly all of his commentators have attended to) and the enacted story of the writer’s efforts to adapt himself to the world that shows itself in his changing commitments of theme and authorial stance and in shifting centers of textual gravity” (54). Robert Milder draws on it extensively in his Reimagining Thoreau to “disconstruct” Walden and find in it “two stories. ![]() Daniel Peck, are among those who do not (Harding, 50 Moldenhauer, 287-88 Richardson, 429-30 Buell, 472 Rossi, 97 Boudreau, 104 Tauber, 232 Peck, 182). Richardson, Laurence Buell, William Rossi, Gordon V. “No serious student of Walden can afford to ignore it,” writes Thoreau biographer Walter Harding, and Joseph J. Teachers, students, and general readers have lacked easy access to the evidence they need to judge, engage with, and build on scholars’ use of it. That it has served a significant minority of scholars as an invaluable aid to understanding Thoreau’s most famous text only underscores the misfortune of its relative invisibility. In the most literal sense, it has not been that which the public - or, for that matter, the majority of scholars - read. His dissertation, “The Development of Walden: A Genetic Text” (1967), was an attempt to offer readers something like a “true” Walden.īut Clapper’s dissertation never found its way into print. candidate at the University of California Los Angeles, set out to provide a complete account of Thoreau’s revisions to the manuscript across these drafts. ![]() Since the 1950s, scholars have recognized that the manuscript of Walden left behind by Thoreau, held at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, contains no fewer than seven draft versions. In that case, one would say that the “true” work, insofar as that adjective makes sense at all, must comprise the full record of this mutual influence, for such glimpses of personal evolution as the record affords will inevitably affect how we understand the published words that resulted from it. But some writers do leave behind manuscripts, and often a manuscript bears evidence of the feedback loop through which writer and text influenced one another’s growth. Granted, nothing that the writer writes can adequately represent a life revised moment to moment by, among other things, the act of writing, and thus no writer may leave behind a verbal text of the “true poem,” the life itself. It has been known for many years that Thoreau’s Walden is “not that which the public read.” This is so for reasons far more mundane than - though just as important as - the Heisenberg-like proposition about literature offered in A Week. “Are we not revising ourselves, always, to find the flow of ourselves, and then too the mixing and revisions of our culture?” (Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 343) My life has been the poem I would have writ, ![]()
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