ABSTRACT
1850s New England in the United States of America provided a habitat for post-Puritan dietary trends and utopian farming schemes, and also for a now-recognized ‘American Renaissance’ of homegrown verse, fiction, essays, and orations. These two concerns – the moral significance of food and the social importance of a public, ‘native’ literature – are blended into one in the figure of Henry David Thoreau, who also serves as a vital precursor to several current food-and-literature concerns. Thoreau presages Paulette Singley’s work on the “functional doubling” of our speaking and masticating mouth (2004, 339), and Margaret Dickie’s ideas on an “oral impressionism” (1991, 133) that associates certain emotional affects with the sonic contours of particular phonemes. Recent terms like ‘biopoetic’, ‘neuropoetic’ and ‘somapoetic’ suggest a medium foregrounding its own material transmission and a literature self-alert to its oral, bodily origins, and Thoreau is clearly a pioneer in this terrain. He also extends Cratylism (a classical, Platonic term referring to a correspondence between a word’s kinetic, oral form and its semantic substance) into more modern territory. This chapter will demonstrate how Thoreau revels in a procedure eventually referred to as ‘lexical gustation’ by neurologists, in which a word’s ‘flavour’ is formed by its graphic, acoustic, and syllabic contours in a cross-wiring of vision, speech and taste.
