"Terrible simplicity": Emerson's metaleptic style - 19th-century poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson

Style, Spring, 1997 by Eric Wilson

"Crossing a bare common" immediately alerts us to the liminal quality of the passage. "Crossing" serves as a metaleptic trope, the first link in a complex chain of signification moving us from one image to remoter ones and connoting a range of liminal meanings. "Crossing," first of all, is an instance of syllepsis, a figure in which one word is a pun for two different senses. Not only is the "Visionary" (the character in the essay, as distinguished from the historical Emerson) literally moving from one place to another, but he is also at a crossroads, a crux. Cross, deriving from the Latin crux, means not only a physical cross, but a fateful juncture. Among Christians, "crossing" (making a cross sign in the air) is an act of blessing, being as it is a symbol of Christianity. Because Jesus died on the cross in the Gospels, bearing a cross metaphorically suggests the proper Christian life (Matt. 10:38). This complex syllepsis suggests that "crossing" indicates an act of great importance that involves relation to the sacred. The Visionary echoes and revises the Christian act of "crossing" and "bearing a cross," blessing nature in winter, not the altar of a church in spring. He is not burdened by life in an imperfect, fallen world, but enjoys instead perfect exhilaration. Moreover, his act of crossing does not acknowledge the Judeo-Christian God, but moves across a threshold toward an idea of God who circulates through nature as the Universal Being. Emerson does not deny this world to find a greater one, as Jesus teaches, but affirms this world because there is nothing else we can know.

Moreover, "crossing" suggests chiasmus, "placing crosswise" in Greek. Chiasmus describes "any structure in which elements are repeated in reverse, so giving the pattern ABBA" (New Princeton Encyclopedia). Emerson's diachronic metalepses mimic this structure. As he repeats the Bible in alluding to it, he reverses its meaning in revising it to fit his intuitions of nature. Likewise, his sylleptic puns are chiastic. As Philip Kuberski suggests in his study of Joyce, puns are sometimes instances of chiasmus in that they are sites that cross opposing meanings (71-72). The pun on "crossing" crosses a spiritual act and symbol in Christianity with the act of making way toward a vision in nature. Several other puns throughout this passage also embody this chiastic structure. Indeed, the entire structure of Nature could be characterized as chiastic, as Emerson crosses nature and scripture, words and things, mind and matter throughout the essay.

The entire first sentence figuratively reinforces liminality. As the Visionary crosses the common, the universal threshold between matter and the spirit of Universal Being, he catalogues several transitional events. He walks through "snow puddles," a synecdoche for the state of both the speaker and nature. Like the Visionary - who is between fear and gladness, adulthood and childhood - and like the natural environment - which is in "twilight," a border between day and night and covered with a "clouded sky," a sky in a transitional state between gas and liquid - the snow puddles are also liminal, as they are ice on the verge of becoming water. This synecdoche is also an oxymoronic figure, for it yokes together water and ice, fluidity and stasis. As readers move through such elided terms as "ice" and "water," they are not only moved to more remote images of solidity and liquidity, but also prepared for the Visionary's impending transition from solid to liquid, as it were, when he is transformed from a person to a conduit through which Being flows. Moreover, "twilight" and "clouded sky" can be read metaleptically; they are versions of the synecdochal "snow puddles," parts standing for an entire liminal scene. "Twilight" is not only the liminal point between day and night, dark and light, but also metaphorically signals a move from the life of the sun to the moon's deathly glow, anticipating the Visionary's annihilation into "nothing." "Twilight" also establishes an irony that pervades the remainder of the passage: in darkness, the Visionary sees all. Clouds are, again, both gas and liquid, moving toward liquid, but also, by virtue of the elided term "obscure," suggesting "gloom," thereby also reinforcing the irony of this ecstatic passage that celebrates transparency. The first sentence, then, institutes the structure of the passage, not only by delineating the poles between which the Visionary moves and establishing chiastic reversals of scripture and nature, but also by setting a metaleptic precedent that will reach a vertiginous pitch at the core of the passage.