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

Style, Spring, 1997 by Eric Wilson

Emerson suggests these complex relationships through his arabesque imagery, a pattern woven with the many-textured threads of metaleptic troping. Rendering abstract relationships in concrete imagery contributes, Longinus observes, to the sublime (85). In placing paradox, irony, liminality before the eyes of readers, Emerson's vivid descriptions work to enthrall them, carrying them along on his trek through the slush, transporting them, with the Visionary, from the liminal to the sublime.

Diachronic echoes further charge Emerson's language. He metaleptically revises the Biblical notion of innocence by comparing the return to innocence to a snake casting off its slough. In Genesis 3:1, the serpent is associated with subtlety and is the cause of the fall of man from innocence to experience, from perfection to imperfection. Emerson reverses the Biblical imagery; the snake is part of nature and therefore innocent. To eat from the tree of knowledge is to understand Being, not to offend God. Emerson writes in a journal entry in 1840, "I dreamed that I floated at will in the great Ether, and I saw this world floating also not far off, but diminished to the size of an apple. Then the angel took it in his hand & brought it to me and said 'This must thou eat.' And I ate the world" (JMN 7:525). Among the many readings of this provocative dream,(11) one is that Emerson revises Genesis in light of his celebration of nature, not scripture, as the locus for revelation. Knowledge does not lead to imperfection, but to perfection, to power, to vision. Indeed, the world is not fallen out of grace, but is the site of grace, redemption. "Nothing" can "befal" the speaker, no "disgrace" that nature itself cannot "repair" or redeem.

Emerson questions this great confidence in the grace of nature, however, in the parenthetical "leaving me my eyes." He writes that "nothing can befal me in life, - no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair." The Visionary feels that nature can mend any disgrace or calamity as long as he has eyes. This aside reinforces the physical nature of vision in the passage. Unlike John, whose vision struck the inner eye of dream, this Visionary's revelation is dependent on physical sight. Still, another reading of the parenthesis undercuts the necessity of physical sight. "Leaving me my eyes" could indeed be a calamity that nature can repair. The disgrace or calamity could well be "my eyes" "leaving me," the loss of sight. In this case, nature could repair the problem, inspiring even the blind man with exhilaration.

This parenthetical aside is a chiasmus, crossing the necessity and superfluity of sight. As such, it is a proleptic version of the core of the passage in which the Visionary becomes the transparent eyeball, a site that crosses nothing and all, full sight and the annihilation of sight. This paradox points to a Blakean act of seeing, in which the Visionary sees not with the eye, but through it. Physical sight is necessary for closely observing nature, as the Visionary does in cataloging the details of the scene in minute detail, noticing the landscape, the weather, the time. This close observation leads to an insight to the invisible energy generating and animating the visible, an insight that makes sight superfluous. Insight is the goal of sight; sight, the catalyst of insight. Inductive observation leads to vision. Emerson is closer to Francis Bacon than he is to St. John.