Satirical Definition: An Example from Thoreau

George P. Landow

From Chapter Three. "The Word Restored: Definition, Redefinition, and Satiric Redefinition"

Forms of Definition

Introduction: an Example from Kingsley's Sermons

Preacher's Definitions: Carlyle

Simple Definition: Ruskin

Denying Someone Else's Definition

Corrective Definition: Arnold

Satirical Definition: An Example from Thoreau

Definition as Theme and Technique

Introduction

Mailer: A Twentieth-Century Example

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In definition, as in other techniques of this literary mode, theme and technique, form and content often inextricably intertwine. For example, the central role of definition in the works of nineteenth- and twentieth-century sages implies that only the speaker knows the true meaning of words, that the audience has lost knowledge both of the words its members use and of the reality to which these words refer, and that, finally, only the sage still retains the capacity for true speech. Just as Thoreau's destructive definition of governor inevitably blends definition, satire, elaborate emblems, interpretation, prophetic diagnosis of his society's essential problems, and prognosis of a coming spiritual disaster -- in short, virtually all the elements that make up the genre of the sage -- so too definition as technique naturally, inevitably, merges with definition as theme. The assumption implicit in the sage's more aggressive uses of definition -- namely, that as a society falls away from the ways of God and nature, its language degenerates -- frequently becomes an explicit theme, particularly in the works of twentieth-century practitioners of the genre.

Arnold, who begins Culture and Anarchy with a corrective definition, sees such degeneration as both cause and symptom of Victorian England's disastrous lack of mental cultivation. Part of the problem, he finds, lies in the fact that "candidates for political influence and leadership, who thus caress the self-love of those whose suffrages they desire, . . . are using a sort of conventional language, or what we call clap-trap" (5.152).

Whatever they diagnose as the ultimate cause, all nineteenth- and twentieth-century sages find such claptrap to be a Sign of the Times. As Joan Didion puts it in Slouching towards Bethlehem: "The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled" (84). Even the well-meaning hippies and radicals, she argues, have no command of language, no words to use: "Because they do not believe in words -- words are for 'typeheads' ... and a thought which needs words is just one more of those ego trips -- their only proficient vocabulary is in the society's platitudes. As it happens I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for oneself depends upon one's mastery of the language, and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from 'a broken home"' (123).

Print version published 1986;
web version last modified 28 March 2000, Karlskrona, Sweden

published 1986;
web version last modified 28 March 2000, Karlskrona, Sweden