Abstract

Cape Cod is Thoreau's strangest and probably least-read major work. In its design and rhetorical methods, its thematic emphasis on death and the destructive hostility of nature, and in its author's departure from his familiar role of poet/oracle of Walden Pond, it remains strikingly different from his other work. ;Thoreau wanted, he says, to write a book on "Human Culture." The first step in the building of a civilization, he thought, lies in the individual's ability to "read" the symbolic correspondences between nature and the human mind. In his earlier work Thoreau thought that physical proximity and intuitive "sympathy" with nature held the key to individual and societal development. The hostile natural environment of Cape Cod, and its inhabitants' daily struggle for survival, however, precluded the development of transcendental "sympathy." Indeed, the only "messages" nature sent them consisted in the wreckage washed up by the ocean. ;Thoreau's experiment consisted in his attempt to come to literary terms with the inhuman chaos of nature. How might a person establish a nourishing and spiritually fulfilling relationship to a natural environment dominated by the death-dealing, inhuman ocean? Adopting as his model the popular literary travelogue, Thoreau deliberately opted for a factual, quasi-journalistic, "objective" mode of expression that eschewed overt transcendentalizing. He wished to confront the Wild without any sort of mental preconception, and, if he could draw no conclusive inferences regarding the ultimate significance of nature, he wanted at least to define clearly the line of demarcation between his conscious, personal identity and that Other represented by nature. ;The tension created by the personal concerns which underlie and occasionally intrude into the journalistic mode is one of Cape Cod's most arresting features. The self, the literary persona that emerges from Thoreau's "journalistic" prose, anticipates in many ways the great act of self-creation that is the substance and essential meaning of Walden, but here, as nowhere else, he shows himself confronting a vast and pervasive nihilism and what seems to be the decline into madness of a civilization determined to conquer rather than understand nature