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Rediscovering Hawthorne
By Kenneth Dauber PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1977 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06323-2
CHAPTER 1
"Where the Meanings Are"
An ideal of exploration informs American letters. The "rediscovery" of our literature in the 1920's established a dynamic model of literary activity; as a result, a sense of ourselves as discoverers, of writing as a pioneering process, has seemed the dominating influence on our literary life. The great American project recounted in the poems and novels of the nineteenth century, to search out a rich virgin territory, is continued in the work of critics of the twentieth, uncovering a native literature neglected and undervalued. From Melville, unwrapping layer after layer of the "mummy" of truth, to Parrington, "exhuming" "buried reputations," we have considered literary inquiry a process of burrowing, exposing. Lawrence finds a new American literature by looking for it "under the American bushes" of the "old American literature." Williams unearths the "true character" of the country that "lies hid" beneath a chaos of false names and appearances. The frontier of American letters has been opened, and, as it once seemed with the territorial frontier, every achievement in mapping it but points to another area that remains to be mapped. "The emotional discovery of America," as Stuart P. Sherman wrote, "will go on after we are all dead and forgotten ... and with just as much room for discovery as it offered thirty years ago or as it offers today."
There is a certain innocence in such an attitude, a stubborn, as it were an almost militant, naïveté. In characteristically American fashion, we have refused to acknowledge that an end is ever in sight. Our horizon is illimitable, we insist, and though the scholarship of the past years has carried us far along towards its outer boundaries, we continue to maintain that every further step is an adventure begun as if afresh. A certain, perhaps legitimate, defensiveness is at work here. Our modern criticism originates against the background of a closed set of standards defining literary possibility. The classical orientation of the academic establishment into this century affirmed a relatively fixed canon that allowed little place for an upstart American literature. The thinness of America's institutional life, so the argument ran — "no Oxford, nor Eton ... no Epsom nor Ascot," as Henry James formulated it — made, inevitably, for a thin and traditionless writing.
Accordingly, nativists like Van Wyck Brooks, cleverly avoiding a confrontation with Europe on its own ground, sought not to deny but to convert what on one level they admitted were our deficiencies into the source of unexpected interest on another. If we lacked institutions, it was our business to create them. Though the absence of tradition was, of course, a handicap, yet each writer could discover a tradition of his own. There was a terrible vacancy in American life, as Brooks frequently lamented. Without a properly developed context, individuality was forced into mere eccentricity, culture into a sterile hypocrisy. But it was creativity, not history, that would fill the gap, the free play of the independent mind. The effect of Brooks's argument was to value in our literature the moments of its greatest daring. A wonderful newness, an original perception, was advanced, which, for all its problematical nature, became established as our official genius and which even our historians have never really challenged. Long after American literature has become a familiar subject, indeed, as its position in the very academies that had rejected it was secured, the premise of originality remains. The most conservative of Americanists who succeeded Brooks — those chroniclers of our literature who, in opposition' to him, have insisted on the sufficiency of American life and who have applied themselves to tracing American history in detail — have yet never been content simply to draw lines of development or to delineate influences. Inverting typical historical practice, they have not demonstrated a source for the present in the past, but recreated the past as present, made even the seemingly old new. Here is history turned back on itself to cancel itself. The historians would revive our interest in works that time has worn out. Opening the obscure origins of now conventional arguments, pursuing the long forgotten springs of tired controversies, they would offer the stalest ideas in the freshness of a sort of eternal beginning. There is a sense of wonder in even the wisest of our historians, an amazement persisting long after our literature should have ceased to amaze. And, increasingly, as an almost inevitable consequence, there is an insistence in our more contemporary criticism that even the most commonplace ideas are novel and new."
Interestingly enough, in this light, New Criticism, which has long seemed a rejection of the main current of nativist thinking that we have been outlining here, appears equally implicated in the matter. Despite the extremes of their theoretical premises, after all, the methods of the New Critics and the historians have often been integrated in typical American practice. Indeed, New Criticism, from our point of view, but reorders the research of the historians on an axis of interpretation. The literary work absorbs into its own uniqueness the religious, political, and social currents discovered through historical analysis in American culture as a whole. As the historian burrows into the past, the New Critic burrows into the work in isolation. He, too, reveals new and exciting meanings. The work is far more complex than anyone might imagine on first glance. A childish, sentimental fiction — too immature for serious reading, as it was long regarded — reveals, when probed, a profound and often unsettling depth. The simple surface is penetrated, and beneath it lies a dense network of symbols representing the work in the most challenging, the most ambiguous, light. Here is a structuralization of the process of exploration, a formalization of the act of discovery in the order of the text itself. New Criticism hypostasizes the Americanists' pioneering impulse. It makes discovery possible on a more intensive and thoroughgoing level. Even more than historicism, however, it has worked to deny any consolidation of its own otherwise impressive achievements. Procedure replaces substance. To describe is automatically and always to uncover. Originality is taken to its limit because everything is by definition original, and a necessary awareness that we must try a different tack, that we have reached, once and for all, the end of the pioneering era, has been endlessly postponed.
We began by quoting a passage to the effect that the frontier of American letters has appeared, for most of this century, to expand continuously before us. But increasingly doubts have been raised. Harry Levin quips that the study of Moby-Dick has replaced whaling among the industries of New England. Robert Spiller, a principal organizer of the major work of American scholarship, The Literary History of the United States, remarks that there is now general agreement about the contours of our writing, which in the 1940's, when the LHUS was being planned, was not yet possible. The "large dark areas of unexplored fact," as Norman Foerster called them, no longer seem large or unexplored. Extending the project of the LHUS, we are beginning to realize, has meant not continuing a vital American criticism, but engaging in an activity yielding fewer and fewer results. We have reached the point of diminishing returns. Uncovering what we should already know, revealing what the work of the past decades has already revealed, we destroy, in our very attempt to recapture it, that excitement which the first Americanists made possible. As our own inability to continue it now makes clear, the real achievement of the early criticism was the liberation of a suppressed enthusiasm; unearthing new information was simply the particular historical form the liberation took. The material the Americanists brought to light was the result of their searching out their own situation. It was a product of finding in themselves a point from which to proceed. So we must look to our own changed circumstances. Our age is filled with discoveries, not in need of them. If we would continue to be explorers in earnest, it must be by taking as the point of any fresh departure our present burdened position, rather than a moment in the critical past more open, perhaps, but unrecoverable.
Such work is already under way. A sense of our current saturation, I think, lies directly behind some of the most interesting of recent criticism. For example, in the so-called New Historicism so much in the air, the turn from history to historiography is surely more than a turn to one more area of American experience in need of analysis; it is a response to the very weight of historical material already accumulated. The New Historians have begun to investigate man not as events express him, but, as overwhelmed by events, he struggles to express them. Similarly, in criticism proper, a recent deflection in interest from the text to what we might call textuality at one level simply extends formalism's technical concerns to the boundaries of literature as a whole. More importantly, however, it constitutes a shift from concern with the words a novelist writes to the demands that existing words make upon him. Of course, the artist whom such lines of analysis reveal, no more than ourselves seems a pioneer. But the pioneering artist, we know, was in large measure the product of a view no longer viable. As the experience of our criticism teaches, to write is to confront a body of what has already been written and that, if we attempt to ignore it, we must only repeat. So, for our poets and novelists: it is not that we must alter our belief in their originality, that we must challenge what defines their accomplishment for us still. But the originality of the American writer that remains for us to discover will lie rather in his ability to cope than to create. My subject is Nathaniel Hawthorne, and I would wish to be as technical in the matter as necessary.
In the Preface to the third edition of Twice-told Tales Hawthorne describes "what the sketches truly are. They are not the talk of a secluded man with his own mind and heart ... but his attempts, and very imperfectly successful ones, to open an intercourse with the world" (IX, 6). The stories are "attempts," a means toward an end. They depend for their vitality on energy directed toward a certain goal. Hawthorne thus defines his art in purposive terms. His work is never an end in itself but a vehicle to effect intimacy. At the same time, however, the work offers resistance. It is "imperfectly successful." It fails to implement the author's desire fully. It never quite reflects him. Hawthorne cautions us from reading the works as though they were expressions of his psyche. He locates himself at a remove from his own creation, as a member of the community in which the work operates. The stories "are not the talk of a secluded man with his own mind and heart." They are social discourse, bound to society's habits of speaking. The forms of fiction impose themselves. The characteristics of the medium, the conventions of a culture embodied in literature as what we may call generic pressure, define the conditions in which Hawthorne's purpose may be realized. The attempt to open an intercourse, that is, is an attempt at art as well. Hawthorne aims to be a writer, and to achieve intimacy he must align himself with a mode of speech, a literature constituted before he begins to speak it. In a preliminary way, we may say that purpose is the work's final and genre its formal cause.
This study is not, however, a generic study in the traditional sense. It runs crosswise to genre analysis, considering not the messages convention, or Hawthorne's adaptation of it, conveys, but the action he undertakes in employing convention altogether. I use "purpose," that is, deliberately, to distinguish it from the "intention" of hermeneutics. Our concern is not with what the writer meant to say or, in a broader sense, with what the work in the structure of its rhetoric insists it says. Ultimately, indeed, our study is not hermeneutical at all. Its interest is frankly non-thematic. It is an investigation of the use of Hawthorne's art beyond communication of a message. The referential quality of literature, we shall be arguing, in Hawthorne, is but a necessary condition of literature as a tool of action. Hawthorne never offers information; he acknowledges it as the inevitable language through which his purpose may be worked out. Communication is a condition of communion, a circumstance enabling but limiting, which the author cannot transcend but may employ. The work is no object; it is an action — a "performative," in J. L. Austin's sense." We do not rule out the possibility that the action the work performs may, in fact, be the stating of a message. But we will need to establish this in particular cases. We will not assume the secondary quality of literature, attribute to it the strictly subordinate function of symbolizing what is prior to it, though, obviously, it does that, too. We would investigate Hawthorne's writing, rather, as a primary process, referential, or symbolic, even semiotic but as a matter of course.
Any attempt at what criticism calls "interpretation," the paraphrase of poetic expression in expository terms, is accordingly offered but as a starting point for further study. Another way of saying this is that allegorization, "an attaching of ideas to the structure of poetic imagery," as one critic defines it, merely elaborates for us a work we wish to see as it functions in the world. The work is regarded as a code signifying the various levels of a complex culture. The interpreter uncovers those levels to which he has particular access. Perhaps under the pressure of his own peculiar circumstances, he may even expose a latency his own age makes manifest. Decoding the work, translating it into more modern terms, he makes it continuous with himself. Such interpretation comprises the bulk of criticism of Hawthorne we now have. In fact, the four levels of medieval allegorical theory are an impressively complete index to it. Heirs of the New Criticism, for example — demythologizers like Richard Harter Fogle or Hyatt Waggoner — address themselves to the work's literal aspects. A broad humanism replaces religion. The work, unlike the Bible to medieval commentators, is admittedly fiction, and the only events that remain factual are linguistic. Thus Fogle analyzes a variety of light-dark polarities, or Waggoner traces fire imagery. Usage is substituted for history, the former domain of literal interpretation, but it is the usage of a community even more extensive than Christianity's, as when Fogle draws upon a Western association of light with "clarity of design" and dark with "tragic complexity," or when Waggoner sees fire as related to human warmth and veils as human separateness. At the second, the moral, level of interpretation we have critics such as Yvor Winters and Randall Stewart. As exegetes did with the Song of Solomon, as Hawthorne himself did with the Greek myths in A Wonder Book, they locate the work in a tradition of moral inquiry that Western literature may be seen as constituting and that, as exponents of the tradition, they elaborate as their own. Similarly, Christian typologists Austin Warren, Roy Male, and Darrel Abel see the Christian concerns of their era as a renaissance of the theological principles of Hawthorne's modified Puritanism. In this group, too, the Marxists and neo-transcendentalists who dominated the periodical literature in the Sixties may be included as the opposite number of the neo-Christians. Psychologists Rudolph Von Abele and Frederick Crews, substituting id, ego, and super-ego for the devil, man, and God, modernize anagogy. With Freud they see psychology as the fulfillment of Romanticism. The psyche, religion's true heaven and hell, is the elemental self Romantics sought to uncover and the new science an eschatology of the inner man.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Rediscovering Hawthorne by Kenneth Dauber. Copyright © 1977 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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