Patrick Chura, in Thoreau the Land Surveyor (2010), identifies the triad of landowner, surveyor, and squatter crucial to the development and history of American property and land law in the mid-19th century. To secure and profit from his property, the American landowner relies on strong property rights of enclosure, exclusive use, and protection guaranteed by the state. At the same time the landowner profited from these guaranteed rights, the state worked through them to extend its authority westward into areas where it had yet to establish control. The surveyor was integral to making and marking the land into legible, abstract forms that could be subject to legal frameworks and property guarantees. The surveyor deployed trigonometric and measuring tools to create maps, boundaries, and territories that were necessary for the landowner to secure his land and for the state to extend its control. However, landownership and the surveying it required displaced inhabitants who occupied land but did not have title ownership to it. Although they inhabited and improved the land, they did not possess certain rights and legal guarantees afforded to a title holder. Squatters without title contested landownership by transgressing the same maps, boundaries, and territories that the surveyor, as an agent of the state and the landowner, charted out. They claim their rights through making improvements to land abandoned by the title holder, taking advantage of property law contradictory to the framework of which the landowner takes advantage.
According to the above triad, the relations between each of the three subjects—the landowner, the surveyor, and the squatter—appear straightforward: the landowner, with help from the surveyor’s instruments, imposes his rights at the expense of the squatter who resists displacement through counter-imposing his own rights. In this struggle, legal precedent is made as cases between squatter and landowner are decided, and boundaries are contested and reformed in response to the struggle.
However, Thoreau, as a squatter at Walden Pond (among other places) and as a commercial surveyor, complicates this triad. Chura describes Thoreau, in terms of this triad, as “an individualistic squatter and nascent literary figure” who was “surveying the Walden woods for conspicuously anti-materialistic motives, not wanting to get his ‘fingers burned by actual possession’” and “whose surveying cleansed rather than created land boundaries” (Chura 9). Although Chura goes on to argue in his book just how Thoreau as a land surveyor cleanses boundaries, he does not touch upon Thoreau as a squatter. I am interested not just in Thoreau’s anti-materialistic surveying but how he deploys it in the service not of the landowner but of the squatter. If Thoreau enlists a surveyor’s perspective to strengthen a squatter’s mode of possession, what new kinds of relationships with the land and ownership emerge from this peculiar alliance? How do these relationships fit into Thoreau’s political and transcendental project, if they do at all?
Thoreau’s essay, “Walking,” satirizes the alliance between landowner and surveyor and advocates for a radically new relationship with the land. Because the landowner is so eager to establish and secure the boundaries of his acquired property with the help of the surveyor, his place-sense is blinded so that he cannot see the paradise he has purchased and finds himself in. Thoreau satirizes the “worldly miser” slogging through a “boggy, stygian fen” with his surveyor just to find a stake that marks the boundary of his property. The miser’s surveyor is none other than “The Prince of Darkness” himself (Thoreau 230). In this scene, the surveyor’s staking off threatens to abstract place in such a way that diminishes the landowner’s capacity to see the place for what it is: a paradise dense with opportunity for encounters with Nature. Thoreau is arguing here that the traditional relationship between the surveyor and the landowner inhibits self-culture and is in fact dangerous to the moral health of civilization.
Thoreau reclaims the stygian swamp from the abstractions of land surveying and links the fertility of its muck and soil, merely a contour of limited use to the surveyor, to the moral growth and fortitude of civilization. Thoreau writes that “A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it than by the woods and swamps that surround it. A township where one primitive forest waves above, while another primitive forest rots below,--such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages” (242). Thoreau argues that the salvation of civilization depends on the preservation of swamps and undeveloped wildernesses because a town is a part of wilderness ecology and benefits from its processes of reproduction and renewal. By creating boundaries and drawing lines across the land, civilization is severed from wilderness and is no longer manured by its fertile moral soil.
However, Thoreau retools the instruments that create boundaries and draw lines to enlarge his place-sense. By widening his aperture of perception, with the help of his surveying ability, Thoreau is able to perceive exactly the ways in which “A man’s health requires as many acres of meadow to his prospects as his farm does loads of much” (242). He can gather an immense descriptive archive of sense data that includes botanical and meteorological details, various historical anecdotes, thousands of his own personal encounters with human and non-human inhabitants, technical descriptions about a particular trade. Thoreau situates and relates the material in the archive in such a way that enables him to make the moral abstraction necessary to argue that encounters with Nature and wilderness result in improved moral health.
There are many moving parts in my seminar paper, many different discourses that I insist intersect with each other in Thoreau’s writing. I’m working with a legal history of squatting and adverse possession, the literary history of Thoreau’s writing itself (one riven with contradiction and inconsistency), and the history of surveying, boundaries, and landownership, to say nothing of the botanical, scientific, historical, and personal material Thoreau includes in his writing. With so many histories running through my project, I’m struggling to organize them all in a meaningful way.
Joshua Kates’ critique of the period might illuminate a model of relating the moving parts of my paper to each other. First, I need to resist regarding the histories of squatting, Thoreau’s writing, surveying, et al as though they were temporally situated in a sort of homogeneous continuity. Kates explains that this notion conceives of time as an enclosed, homogeneous field of “Past, Present, Future” on which temporal segments can be isolated, arranged, and sequenced. I’m tempted to situate the 1840s-1860s as Thoreau’s historical “Present” and then draw on the “Past” to determine, for example, what case precedent informed land law during the 1840s-1860s and then parallel that past with the history of landownership in Concord. However, I’m assuming I’m free to arrange these two different histories as relational parallels to begin with. Althusser/Kates might object to that historiographical move.
Second, I should also resist regarding the histories operating in my paper as though they were simultaneous to Thoreau’s writing, as though just because a surveyor’s map of Walden Pond was drawn up the same time Thoreau squatted there doesn’t mean that simultaneity conveys a particular or automatic relation. Althusser/Kates warns against viewing history in terms of contemporaneity: an assumption that temporal contents that occupy the same slice of time in a given field exist simultaneously to each other and operate within the same “historical bandwith,” as though simultaneity were an automatic, given relation, as though no other temporal relation were possible (Kates 138). I could slice up time into an 1840-1860 portion and stack up each historical item and then relate them by virtue of their contemporaneity, but that would foreclose the possibility of different histories operating on different temporal scales. The history of squatter’s rights reaches back all the way to the Middle Ages, whereas the history of American landownership reaches back at most 200 years. The two different timescales may unfold differently and produce different “presents” because they are drawing on different fields of historical material.
Althusser offers a model for regarding multiple histories together that avoids the pitfalls of homogeneous continuity and contemporaneity. He imagines, Kates writes, “A proliferation of histories and temporalities […] each independent, even as each maintains the mark of its relation to the others within itself. Althusser thus conceives ‘of an economic history, a political history, a history of religions, of ideologies’ (Althusser and Balibar 100)” (Kates 141). According to this model of history, the theoretical work of my paper would primarily involve composing each history operating within my argument (even its temporal difference) and then tracing the relational mark that each history leaves on the other. My paper would point out the complexity and depth of these marks. I’m not sure what this would look like, but I imagine it might look like Foucault’s exploration of the gaps and discontinuities between colliding discourses. The marks on each history might take the form of a gap or discontinuity.
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