Bennett Kravitz
Reinventing the
Self and Privileging the Future in Emerson, Whitman, and Who Moved my
Cheese?
When critics, newspaper reviewers, and ordinary
people discuss the phenomenon Who Moved My Cheese?—or as the Japanese
version would literally have it—“Where did the Butter Melt away to?” — no one
seems to recognize or mention the pervading influence of a somewhat earlier
pair of popular cultural figures, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. As of
this writing, five million copies of the book have been sold and Cheese has
been printed in eleven other languages, as, for example, Chi si e preso il
mio formaggio? (Atlanta Journal-Constitution 8/19/2001). Even
Harvard Professor John Kotter, perhaps the foremost expert on change in the
business world–and change is the name of the game in Cheese–describes
the success of Spencer Johnson, author of Cheese, as follows. “Spencer
has a gift that most of us who write can only envy–an ability to reach millions
of people in a deep way” (Business 2.0 August 2000). I suspect the
explanation is more complex than that. Usually overlooked is the fact that an
earlier version of American popular culture, which has also reached people in a
“deep way,” might be part of the explanation of the book’s success. Cheese,
I would argue, presents “familiar” Nineteenth-Century American ideology
in an easily accessible manner to Twentieth- and Twenty-first-Century readers.
What, then, do dead white Christian males–such as
Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman–have in common with the best selling Who
Moved my Cheese? A lot more than appears obvious at first glance. One of
the all time greatest triumphs in the literature of self-help, Who Moved my
Cheese? is a poignant example of the ways in which a loop is created
between high and popular culture, each borrowing from the other in the
postmodern world. In the present case, however, it is Dr. Spencer Johnson,
author of this fable of self-help, who plays on profound American themes
that emanate from the works of Emerson and Whitman, so that a vulgar version of
their thought can be clearly identified in Cheese, this most privileged
icon of popular culture. I have chosen to limit this paper to the influence of
Emerson and Whitman although it is certainly possible to argue that earlier
versions of American elite and popular culture seem to resonate in modern
American popular culture, specifically in the self-help literature. Benjamin
Franklin’s aphorisms of “Poor Richard” and the McGuffy Reader are just two
examples of many.
Of course, the notion that Spencer Johnson creates
a vulgar imitation becomes redundant, if you happen to believe that Emerson and
Whitman are sometimes vulgar themselves. In any case, Johnson manipulates the
themes of privileging the future and changing/reinventing the self, themes that
are such an important part of Emersonian thought and Whitmanian poetry. Yet in
the case of Cheese this manipulation is performed so that we might feel
more at home with late capitalist reality. Whitman and Emerson sought ways to
make to make the Nineteenth-Century American experience palatable for
Americans, while Johnson/Cheese do the same for Americans and their
experience in the late Twentieth and Twenty-first centuries. As Yogi Berra
might put it, Cheese is “deja vu all over again.” Although
praised for its originality, the book is familiar precisely because
Nineteenth-Century American ideology– which is still with us today – is
reaffirmed in Twentieth-Century American “corporate” reality.
But before exploring the book’s themes, let us now
examine the basic contentions of Who Moved my Cheese? and then locate
their origins in the works of Emerson and Whitman. Cheese is the story
of four characters, Sniff and Scurry and Hem and Haw. The former are mice and
the latter are “littlepeople.” In the beginning of the story, each character is
willing to go out into the maze of life and search enthusiastically for his
cheese, which the text describes as anything that brings satisfaction and
fulfillment in life, be it spiritual or material. Yet once each one finds his
cheese, with a capital C, the “littlepeople” become complacent while the mice
are more cautious and careful about their piles of cheese. When the cheese at
Cheese Station C eventually runs out, the mice are prepared and move on quickly
to discover new sources of cheese. But the “littlepeople” are overwhelmed by
fear of the unknown and spend most of their time pondering the injustice of
someone or something having moved their cheese. Finally, Haw is unwilling to
continue his passive acceptance of a cheeseless state, and decides to move on
to unknown parts of the maze to search for new cheese. Hem, however, is
reluctant to join him and remains behind. Haw goes through the process of
crossing boundaries and exploring virgin territory–physical and material–and
concludes his quest for new cheese successfully, thereby reinventing himself.
He hopes that Hem will eventually follow his path, but the story ends with
Haw’s hearing footsteps approaching from around a corner. The optimistic ending
implies that those footsteps could well be Hem’s, who might have finally seen
the light and accepted a liminal, Emersonian existence. These “littlepeople,”
or at least one of them, may escape the fate of the herd and go on to become
Emersonian “great men,” those who understand that “society is conspiring
against the manhood of every one of its members.” To put it in Nitzschean
terms, as Emersonian exaggeration sometimes does, “great men make great
mistakes,” regardless of the consequences (Will To Power), so that
finding the cheese whatever the outcome is imperative.
Who Moved my Cheese? then, presents an allegory in which central
American themes are both implied and presented outright. What all these themes
have in common is that they can be traced to the works of both Emerson and
Whitman, an phenomenon that opens the door to a number of interesting
questions, questions that may only be raised at the present time, rather than
answered. The first one might be to ask whether the similarities to classical
American letters are intentional or rather unconscious cultural by-products. To
put it another way, are the themes of Emerson and Whitman truly part of the
American cultural fabric? And if so, is it because of their contributions to
American culture, their mimicry of it, their invention of it, or for some other
reason? In opposition to these elite, white, high culture icons, are the
creators/manipulators of the so-called new American mythologies of popular
culture (such as those that appear in Cheese) conscious of their choices
or do they blindly follow their own tired old cheese? Do they realize that they
are borrowing Nineteenth-Century American formulas for success from the elite
American literary tradition or are these values–if I may expand on Fredric
Jameson’s “political unconscious”–transmitted via a cultural unconscious? Is
there an inherent collusion or symbiosis between the thought of Emerson and
Whitman and the ideology of late capitalism? (So many questions, but fortunately
so little space to address them!)
Whatever the answers to these queries, this article
will undertake a narrower task and limit its scope to tracing the loop that
exists between the themes of Emerson and Whitman and the dictums and dilemmas
of Cheese. To reiterate, the materials of Nineteenth-Century high
culture are simplified if not vulgarized as they make their appearance in the
self-help and self-realization literature so extraordinarily popular at the end
of the Twentieth Century in America. Cheese makes use of easily
recognizable Nineteenth-Century American themes, and by doing so insures its
Twenty-first-Century popularity.
Perhaps the first lesson we learn from the mice and
“littlepeople” in our tale of self-help is the danger of routine, most especially
one that does not involve rigorous pursuit of one’s goals, and is completely
devoid of self-reinvention. While the mice, Sniff and Scurry, continue to rise
early each day in pursuit of their cheese, always expanding their avenues of
exploration, Hem and Haw become complacent. They “awoke each day a little
later, dressed a little slower, and walked to Cheese Station C. After all, they
knew where the Cheese was now and how to get there. They had no idea where the
Cheese came from, or who put it there. They just assumed it would be there
[forever?]” (Cheese 29). Thus Hem and Haw become lazy and overconfident,
in effect assuming a negative rags to riches theme, that is, that the
intervention of divine providence brings good luck to people who do not necessarily
deserve it and who certainly have not invested hard work to achieve it. Or, as
John Rockefeller once put it, “God gave me my money.” If he were with us today
I suppose he would say that God gave him his cheese. And for the “littlepeople”
it seems very much the same. They have their cheese and would like to eat it
too; they are contented because such is the way the world should be, and the
way the world is. Anything else, for Americans in the second American Century,
would be intolerable.
And Emerson and Whitman warn of the very same
dangers of excessive satisfaction and self-absorption as part of the central
themes of their works. In “Self-Reliance,” Emerson describes consistency or,
for our purposes routine, as follows: “The other terror that scares us from
self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word…” (33).
Consistency, he believes, prevents a “great soul” from going on about its
divine business, which is most often to become a great man. And, as is the case
with Hem and Haw, any man who is incapable of striking out on his own to find
new cheese on a consistent basis cannot be considered to have lived in
Emersonian terms. “A foolish consistency,” he tells us, “is the hobgoblin of
little minds” (33).
In much the same way, Whitman also strikes out to
shatter the boundaries of routine. He does so by celebrating the notion of
consistently changing, rather than attacking the idea of routine outright. In
the poem “Eido`lons,” for example, the speaker praises new beginnings on a “routine”
basis:
Ever the dim beginning,
Ever the growth, the rounding of the
circle,
Ever the summit and the merge at last,
(to surely start again,)
Eido‘lons! Eido‘lons!
Ever the mutable,
Ever materials, changing, crumbling,
re-cohering,
Ever the ateliers, the factories
divine,
Issuing eido‘lons! (Leaves of Grass 8)
In this poem the speaker may be more concerned with
America as a consistently changing poem rather than with the development of any
individual, but the latter is always an important concern of Whitman. America
is ever changing because it does not fall into the pattern of routine; to
insure that such will always be the case, the individual must live his/her life
the very same way. And part of America’s mutability concerns economic activity,
as we learn from the speaker’s praise for “ateliers” and “factories divine.”
Whitman and Emerson, then, insist that we embrace
the inconsistent ever-changing nature of life, which is, after all the primary
message of Cheese. In light of the volatility of the postindustrial
economy, this is the most likely strategy–in mythological terms–to keep late
capitalist production at its zenith by preserving the optimism of those
subsumed by the system. Thus anyone who continues to search for new cheese
through hard work will not have to suffer the consequences of an uncertain
economic reality. In the end, privileging the future, perseverance and
reinvention will triumph over the oddities of the so-called new economy. Thus Cheese
seems primarily intended for businessmen and techno-geeks who must learn to
embrace late capitalist uncertainty as a way of life. These are people who,
partly because of the turbulence of the technological revolution, will continue
to change their jobs every few years, voluntarily or otherwise. Rather than be
upset over the constant change in employment and lack of loyalty on both sides,
that is, of employer and employee, one must learn to celebrate the search for
and acquisition of new cheese in order to have an easier time engaging the
unsettled reality of the postmodern workplace. And this is true for both
workers and managers.
Paradoxically, or perhaps not, Emerson and Whitman
also contributed ideologically to bolstering their industrial capitalist
system. In “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” for example, Whitman celebrates the
ethics of immigration and manual labor. As the speaker puts it in the first
verse of “Brooklyn Ferry,”
Flood-tide below me! I see you face to
face!
Clouds of the west – sun there half an
hour high – I see you also face
to face.
Crowds of men and women attired in the
usual costumes, how curious
you are to me.
On the ferry-boats the hundreds and
hundreds that cross, returning
are more curious to me than you
suppose.
And you that shall cross from shore to
shore years hence are more to
me, and more in my meditations, than
you might suppose.
What appears in the margins of this verse but
cannot or will not be presented outright is the fact that people use the ferry
as a means of transportation to and from work. For Whitman, the marvel of
immigration, among other factors, is that people in his era, as is still the
case, come to America to work hard and perpetuate the American capitalist
dream. The “usual costumes,” it seems, are the clothes that people wear to and
from work. But Whitman also performs an important manipulation in this verse,
one that sets the scene for America’s perpetual privileging of the future.
The speaker of the poem executes a number of
interesting linguistic manipulations so that the present and future become
interchangeable. Therefore, Whitman is able to converse directly with future
generations at the very moment that his speaker addresses his contemporary
reader. Initially, the speaker claims–addressing his remarks to his reader–that
these hundreds and hundreds of people are “more curious than you might
suppose.” This seems to imply that there is something beyond the mere fact that
Whitman is describing the masses as they are going about the mundane business
of life. They are part and parcel of a system, economic and social, that
Whitman seeks to eternalize both in poetry and in social reality. But at this
point Whitman presents his audacious version of privileging the future. His
speaker addresses a future generation–those “that shall cross from shore to
shore years hence”–and includes them in his vision of America as an artistic
work in perpetual progress and addresses them directly in the second person.
Not only does he meditate upon this future generation, but he also speaks to
them via the vehicle of the ambiguous phrase, “you might suppose.” In effect,
then, Whitman is able to speak to a generation that has not yet been born, with
the confidence of one who has already taken part in the never-ending American
poem. The tone of the poem portrays absolute confidence in the notion that
America was, is, and always will be: that people will flock to her in the
future to relive dreams of a previous generation and reify fledgling American
dreams of their own. Those dreams, as they appear in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,”
focus on the idea that the future is infinitely more relevant to what America
and its inhabitants can accomplish than the present. Whitman clarifies this
point in the second and third verses, so that it is all but impossible to
overlook his peculiar notion of privileging the future, as the speaker engages
in his vision of the “future perfect.”
. . . The others that are to follow me,
the ties between me and them,
The certainty of others, the life,
love, sight, and hearing of others,
Others will enter the gates of the
ferry and cross from shore to shore,
Others will watch the run of the
flood-tide,
Others will see the shipping of
Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east,
Others will see the islands, large and
small;
Fifty years hence, others will see them
as they cross, the sun half an hour high,
A hundred years hence, or ever so many
hundreds of years hence, others will see them,
Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in
of the flood-tide, the falling-back to the sea of the ebb-tide.
The speaker of this verse enjoys a connection to
and communication with a generation that has yet to be born. These others, who
are certain to come, will continue to view the economic might of Manhattan
develop, although, as we now know, not quite as a result of its shipping
potential.
The future perfect I refer to is that
of the grammatical tense, one that allows people to make plans and then to
discuss the future as if it already had a known outcome and were already part
of the past
The so-called others will find their own places
within this eternal ebb and flow so that they might benefit as individuals and
contribute to the idea of America as a work of art in progress. Whitman’s
American optimism about a future without end is boundless.
Yet it is only in the third and fourth verses that
Whitman not only privileges the future but also makes himself an integral part
of it. He transcends the limits of time, space and grammar and reinvents
himself as part of America’s vibrant future.
It avails not, time nor place –
distance avails not,
I am with you, you men and women of a
generation, or ever so many
generations hence,
Just as you feel when you look on the
river and sky, so I felt,
Just as any one of you is one of a
living crowd, I was one of a crowd,
Just as you are refresh’d by the
gladness of the river and the bright
flow, I was refresh’d,…
These and all else were to me the same
as they are to you,
I loved well those cities, loved well
the stately and rapid river,
The men and women I saw were all near
to me,
Others the same–others who look back on
me because I look’d forward to them.
The speaker’s ego explodes in an outburst of
Whitmanian optimism. The end result of his privileging the future, it now
seems, is to ensure his own part in it. In a sense, he invented America’s
future and insured its continuity because as he claims, “Others the same–others
who look back on me because I look’d forward to them.” Had Whitman not bothered
to invent America’s future he would not now be part of America’s glorious past.
And perhaps, in his own mind, America could not have become what it did without
Whitman’s insistence on planning and privileging its future and that of the
generations to come. Insufferable as this might sound, it i difficult to argue
with success because, as
To return, then, to our contemporary American
popular culture, a cheesy business after all, and having presented the theme of
privileging the future in both popular and high culture, we will now examine
the role of self-reinvention, and its intricate connection to privileging the
future. Indeed, the theme of self-reinvention plays a prominent part in the
didactic message of Cheese. Haw, the active member of the “littlepeople”
team, learns that the only way to confront successfully his fear in and of life
is to do so by welcoming the uncertainty of self-reinvention. Initially, when
Hem and Haw discover that there is no more cheese, they are almost overcome by
fear of the unknown and Hem is paralyzed by uncertainty.
“What! No Cheese?” Hem yelled. He
continued yelling, “No Cheese? No Cheese?” as though if he shouted loud enough
someone would put it back.
“Who moved my Cheese?” he hollered.
Finally, he put his hands on his hips,
his face turned red, and he screamed at the top of his voice, “It’s not fair.”
(Cheese 33)
The “littlepeople” are overwhelmed by their
discovery and quite reasonably complain that it “isn’t fair.” Emerson, at his
most pessimistic, would most probably agree. In his essay “Experience,” the
most pessimistic of all his works, Emerson, in effect, complains that life is
not fair when he notes that “Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to
illusion. . . . We animate what we can, and we see only what we animate” (Essays
251). At his lowest point, he even complains about the very state of
existence: “It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we
have made, that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man. Ever
afterwards, we suspect our instruments. We have learned that we do not see directly,
but mediately” (261). In other words, we see what we prefer to see because our
existence, by definition, is a flawed sensory state. Emerson is concerned with
the fundamental unreliability of language to represent reality, thus making him
a tad more philosophical and intellectual than Haw, but Emerson does offer a
solution to this problem and, in effect, it is the very conclusion that Haw
reaches himself. Emerson claims that the only value of individual genius is its
“transformation . . . into practical power.” Only an active person can survive
the illusions of this world. Haw is willing to give up his illusion of a
never-ending supply of cheese in one place and go out to find other cheese and
his individual genius. Therefore, for all practical purposes, he has agreed,
even before embarking upon his journey, to the process of self-reinvention, or
discovering his genius.
After a certain period of mourning for his old
cheese, Haw accepts the fact that it will never return and he must go out into
the Virgin Land—yet another powerful American myth—to find new cheese. The
self-help manual supplies us with a “Cheesy” dictum that seems to follow the
Emersonian idea that imitation is death. Dr. Johnson of “Cheese” fame, puts it
like this: “If You Do Not Change, You Can Become Extinct” (46).
So Haw decides to become self-reliant and take
control of his life, despite his great fear of the unknown. He resolves to
privilege the future and reinvent himself when he declares, “Movement In A New
Direction Helps You Find Cheese” (54). The Emersonian process of becoming
rather than merely being is no less important than the end result of finding
new cheese. Or, as Haw put it, “Imagining Myself Enjoying New Cheese Even
Before I Find It, Leads Me To It” (58). Having reinvented himself as a bold
explorer who has embarked upon the cheese-finding journey insures the success
of his mission before it takes place. Like Whitman before him, Haw manipulates
time to perpetuate his newly found optimism.
Haw’s journey into the maze is successful because
he has applied a number of maxims to solve his troubles that owe a debt to
Emerson and Whitman. In Dr. Johnson’s terms, Haw was able to “let go of the
past and was adapting to the future” (69). He had come to welcome the
uncertainty of Whitman’s “open road,” so to speak, and moved through the maze
of life in search of new cheese with confidence and optimism. And as happens at
the end of most fairy tales, he finally arrives at Cheese Station N and is
greeted by an abundant supply of new cheese. Interestingly enough, he had
embarked upon his journey because of the influence of his two mouse buddies,
who had instinctively known how to keep “life simple. They didn’t overanalyze
or overcomplicate things. When the situation changed and the Cheese had been
moved, they changed and moved with the Cheese” (71). There is always a limit to
today’s cheese, but there is always a new supply to find if we are able to
undertake the journey. Aside from their American faith in perpetual virgin
opportunities, these mice were able to follow Emerson’s advice to abandon the
knowledge available from books and to trust in experience. They are creatures
of instinct rather than creatures of intellect, one reason, I suppose that men
have much to learn from mice in this fable. However, some intellectual activity
seems legitimate in both Emerson’s and Johnson’s eyes as both never suggest
that we ignore their books.
To return to our initial questions, then, about the
complex nature of the relationship between Emerson, Whitman, and Who Moved
My Cheese?, I believe it is fair to say that some aspects of that
relationship have been clarified. First, and foremost, there is a definite
affinity between the high culture American optimism of Whitman and Emerson and
the Twentieth-Century exemplar of self-help popular literature. What remains
uncertain is the extent to which Emerson and Whitman are consciously mimicked
and vulgarized, if such is the case at all. Equally uncertain is the extent to
which Emerson and Whitman are part of America’s collective cultural
unconscious, something developed and transmitted in ways that have yet to be
defined. Personally, as someone who is at ease with the notion that we can
successfully identify the Puritan origins of the modern American self, I find
it quite reasonable to discover that the same may well hold true for the
Whitmanian and Emersonian parts of that self. And if that contradicts anyone’s
individual idea of logic, or even my own, very well then, I contradict myself,
as both Emerson and Whitman would say. Whatever the explanation, it is
comforting for me as an Americanist to identify the influence of American high
culture on the so-called real world, even if the influence is, on occasion,
somewhat vulgar.
I would like to offer a final suggestion from Haw,
so that we should all be more capable of dealing with the unexpected in life,
written in the form of biblical commandments on a large piece of cheese:
THE HANDWRITING ON THE WALL
Change Happens
They keep moving the cheese
Anticipate Change
Get Ready for the Cheese to Move
Monitor Change
Smell the Cheese Often So You Know When
it is Getting Old
Adopt to Change Quickly
The Quicker You Let Go of Old Cheese,
The Sooner You can Enjoy New Cheese
Change
Move with the Cheese
Enjoy Change!
Savor the Adventure and Enjoy the Taste
of New Cheese
Be Ready to Change Quickly and Enjoy it
Again [they keep moving the cheese [74].
Bennett Kravitz
University of Haifa
Haifa, Israel
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Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious. Ithaca,
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Johnson, Spencer Dr. Who Moved My Cheese? London:
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