Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Search for the No Man's Land

Uncle Tom’s Cabin—which I managed to go 27 years without reading—is really a remarkable book, particularly its first half, before Harriet Beecher Stowe completely devolves into sentimental pulp. (I spent at least one hundred pages wishing Little Eva would just go ahead and die already.) The most effective and interesting parts of the book are the ones in which Stowe leaves behind her plot and the conventions of sentimental fiction in order to rage against the reader and present her (really quite radical for the time) views on the race question. For example:

I know the feeling among some of you northerners well enough. Not that there is a particle of virtue in our not having [slavery]; but custom with us does what Christianity ought to do,—obliterates the feeling of personal prejudice. I have often noticed, in my travels north how much stronger this was with you than with us. You loathe [African Americans] as you would a snake or a toad, yet you are indignant at their wrongs. You would not have them abused; but you don’t want to have anything to do with them yourselves. You would send them to Africa, out of your sight and smell, and then send a missionary or two to do up all the self-denial of elevating them compendiously. Isn’t that it?

Well, Randy Newman agrees, anyway. Uncle Tom is at its best in passages like these, in which Stowe loads up an ideological shotgun and hits absolutely everyone she can with its debris—no one in her world is safe from her indictment, which is what makes her most famous novel something beyond self-righteous; it’s what makes it a good novel rather than a merely important one. (I can’t bring myself to say great—not when the last third of the book is so weak and bound to convention.)

But I’m not writing to talk about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Instead, I want to say a few words about her much less known 1859 novel The Minister’s Wooing, another sentimental novel of protest—only in this case she’s protesting the hard Calvinism of her lineage rather than slavery (at which she nevertheless gets a few shots off).

Let’s define our terms first. The sentimental novel—however much American critics want to pretend it’s not so—has been the dominant form of the novel for most of the genre’s existence, beginning with Samuel Richardson and moving on through Sister Carrie and up to—I don’t know, Twilight. There is a formula: boy tries to seduce girl; girl resists; girl undergoes incredible feeling; then, depending on whether the novel is a comedy or a tragedy, she either marries the right boy or is left ruined by the wrong one.

The best writing I’ve read on sentimental fiction is Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel. Fiedler tells us that the sentimental novel, arising as it does at the end of the Puritan era, replaces Protestantism with something called the “Sentimental Love Religion,” a nebulous faith with limited dogma that posits “love between the sexes as the fountainhead of virtue and joy.” On a more primeval level, it posits emotion as a higher path to truth than reason and thus stands as a precursor to Byronian Romanticism.

This is why it’s safe to call both Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Minister’s Wooing “sentimental novels of protest”; Stowe may use logic in her attacks on slavery and Calvinism, but her indictment of her readers is an indictment of a failure to feel, not to think, properly. And that’s her indictment of Calvinism, as well: at its worst, it is a cold, unfeeling dogmatic system rather than a religion meant for real human beings. It has its high points, of course,

But it is to be conceded, that these systems, so admirable in relation to the energy, earnestness, and acuteness of their authors, when received as absolute truth, and as a basis of actual life, had, on minds of a certain class, the effect of a slow poison, producing life-habits of morbid action very different from any which ever followed the simple reading of the Bible.

Thus Stowe proffers a new religion to replace it—only the new religion she proffers is the same old sentimental love religion with a thin veneer of Christianity over it. At times, her faith sounds downright blasphemous, as when she notes that

Of old, it was thought that one who administered poison in the sacramental bread and wine had touched the very height of impious sacrilege; but this crime is white, by the side of his who poisons God’s eternal sacrament of love and destroys a woman’s soul through her noblest and purest affections.

It’s rare to find such a concise and blatant statement of the changes sentimentalism makes to Christianity, but there it is. The one sacrament for the sentimentalist is love, and not the agape of the New Testament. Romance is king, eros by another name. The rampant piety of The Minister’s Wooing and other novels like it only masks the fact that sexuality is at its center, only imperfectly disguises the sexual longing at its core.

The plot is thus. (Spoilers follow.) Mary Scudder is a pious young woman of feeling in late eighteenth-century Newport. She’s halfway in love with her cousin James, an unbelieving sailor, whom she wants to marry but cannot because of her faith. Meanwhile, she is passively courted by her middle-aged minister, Dr. Hopkins, a staunch Calvinist and abolitionist. James goes off to sea for two years, and after a short time word comes back that his ship has sunk and he’s dead. Mary and other members of the community have a crisis of faith. Dr. Hopkins proposes, and Mary says yes, even though she doesn’t love him the way she loves James. Just before the wedding, James shows up and announces that he’s become a Christian, at which point Hopkins lets Mary off the hook. Everyone lives happily ever after.

(There’s also a standard “seduction” subplot, starring Aaron Burr, of “Got Milk?” fame, in the role of the seducer, but this part of the novel seems uncomfortably attached to the main plot.)

The Minister’s Wooing is most interesting in its philosophical conversation (as is Uncle Tom’s Cabin, leading me to conclude that Stowe must have been privy to some wonderful conversations among the famous members of her family). Its plot is mostly sentimental convention, but for a time I thought it was going to go in a more satisfying direction. There is a brief moment (“brief” being a relative term in a novel of nearly 600 pages) in which it appears that, even though James has returned from death and the sea a Christian, Mary will fulfill her vow to Dr. Hopkins anyway. As she tells a friend who has told her she will be miserable in a marriage without eros,

I believe, that, if you go on patiently in the way of duty, and pray daily to God, He will at last take out of your heart this painful love, and give you a true and healthy one. As you say, such feelings are very sweet and noble; but they are not the only ones we have to live by—we can find happiness in duty, in self-sacrifice, in calm, sincere, honest friendship.

What a revolution it would have been in the history of the sentimental novel if our heroine had become Mary Hopkins and lived a happy life devoid of eros! The novel would have grown and adapted; it would have been a critique not just of cold Calvinism but of the warm (and for some reason, I want to say moist) sentimental love religion. Instead, Hopkins appears, a deux ex machina, and allows Mary to renege on her promises and marry her true love.

No one would blame her in real life, of course, but the plot of a sentimental novel bears so little resemblance to life as it was ever lived that I can’t help wishing that Stowe had been braver in her attacks—as brave, in fact, as she is in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, where no ideology escapes her penetrating stare. As it is, she takes a look at the battle between Calvinism and the sentimental love religion, nods at the no-man’s land in the center, and sanguinely takes her place in the sewing circle.

The Whiteness of the Whale

If you ever read Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick for a class and want to make your teacher very, very angry, try to steer every conversation around to the “meaning” of the white whale itself. Your teacher won’t appreciate it, but you’ll just be following the early trends of Melville critics, for whom the whale absolutely must have represented some huge secret to the meaning of life. Is it God? Evil? Purity? Humanity? Sin? Sexuality? You name it, and someone’s proffered it as the secret meaning of the novel.

The best thing I’ve ever read on this front comes from R.P. Blackmur’s The Lion and the Honeycomb. Blackmur is pretty tough on Melville as a writer. The author’s problem, he says, is that “he did not write of characters in action; he employed the shells of stock characters, heightened or resounding only by the eloquence of the author’s voice, to witness, illustrate, decorate, and often as it happened to impede and stultify an idea in motion.” The truth of Blackmur’s assertion should be obvious to anyone who has spent any time attempting to decode the myriad symbols in Moby-Dick. Melville attempts to write an allegory here, but he fails:

Successful allegory—La Vita Nuova and Pilgrim’s Progress—requires the preliminary possession of a complete and stable body of belief appropriate to the theme in hand. Melville was not so equipped; neither was Hawthorne; neither was anyone in nineteenth century America or since. That is why Melville’s allegorical devices and patterns had to act as if they were agents in a novel; and that is why we are compelled to judge Melville at his most allegorical yet formally as a novelist.

Putting aside the question as to whether there is something intrinsic in the American character—then or now—that keeps us from having that “complete and stable body of belief,” I think that Blackmur has it absolutely right here. Moby-Dick is an allegory without a key to decoding, a mass of signifiers without steady signifieds behind them; it is, perhaps, the first poststructuralist novel.

I am generally suspicious of the type of reading—enormously popular in the 1970s and ‘80s, the tragic heyday of Critical Theory—that would claim that a given text is not about what it appears to be about at all but is instead all about the act of literary production and the attempt to interpret it. This is typically lazy reading, in my opinion, a refusal to engage with the author and a violent overlay of fashionable criticism over his or her work.

But there’s no way around it here. The author’s intention in writing Moby-Dick was clearly to demonstrate that the author’s intention doesn’t matter. Moby-Dick is such a glorious, sprawling mess, covering dozens of genres and hastily thrown together, that any attempt to map it out based on Melville’s autobiography or personal philosophy is bound to fail. It contains too much for such an approach to be at all effective. The novel deals with so many subjects and yet is “about” none of them that it can reasonably be said that what it is “about” is the concept of being “about.”

And we’re clued in on this from the very beginning. Moby-Dick does not begin at sea or even in New Bedford but rather in a library, in a series of other books. We’re given eleven pages or so of quotations about whales, presented to us by a “sub-sub librarian” —a person lost in the depths of the library, lost in a vast series of words and pages, just as the reader will shortly be. He gives us a variety of sources on whales: symbolic, literal, mythic, and so forth. But he can’t pin down the whale; nor can the reader of Moby-Dick, who could spend a lifetime concocting various signifieds for the signifier of the white whale and never get any closer.

When our actual narrator, the enigmatically named “Ishmael,” shows up, he, too, presents us with a catalogue, though in his case it is not about the whale but about the various types of people who are drawn to the ocean. His catalogue, however, has the effect of simplifying rather than complicating our interpretation—he’s making a universal case for the importance of the ocean, a universalizing moral point.

This should provide comfort and a structure for interpretation, but it doesn’t—Ishmael’s overarching point about the power of the ocean is quickly lost in the maze of genres and narratives that follow it. He doesn’t even make it to sea until ten chapters later, demonstrating that land is in fact just as important as the sea. His point has been overthrown, and Ishmael moves from being an infallible guide of the sort to which readers are used to being a voice among voices, no more important than Father Mapple or Captain Ahab or Queequeg.

And even when he does try to act as our guide, Ishmael can’t resist teasing us with the knowledge to which he is privy and we are not. For example, he refers to “an old writer—of whose works I possess the only copy extant.” He advocates a sort of Gnosticism, a secret knowledge that only he can access; the reader cannot look for real guidance to an unfriendly speaker like him.

But the early image that best serves as an emblem for the novel itself is the painting at The Spouter-Inn. Ishmael is taken in by it, is fascinated by it, but he cannot for the life of him figure out what it’s a picture of. Then he figures it out—it’s a whale destroying a whaling-boat (a rather grim image for an inn for whalers). The painting retains its mystery, however, and in this it mirrors the novel itself.

Ishmael’s attempt to make sense of it resembles the task that critics have faced in reading Moby-Dick for decades, and Ishmael’s statement about interpretation—“at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the picture’s midst. That once found out, and all the rest were plain.” But because Melville’s allegory is at the very best slippery, that thing in the middle, the meaning of the white whale, will never be truly found out, and the rest of the picture/novel will never be plain.

This is the power and the frustration of Moby-Dick, perhaps America’s first great novel and a production wholly singular in the history of literature. But to be fair, Melville tips the reader off from the very first page that this novel will not be a sign to be interpreted but rather a series of words and images, thrust together violently until they make your head spin.

Addendum: Poe and the Patristics

I misspoke a bit on the podcast yesterday—if you haven’t listened to it yet, what are you waiting for?—when I said that the Church Fathers play virtually no role in American literature. (If you didn’t notice, I had actually forgotten about Updike’s Roger’s Version until the second before I brought it up.) In fact, there’s at least one other major American author who leans on them from time to time: Edgar Allan Poe.

Poe was not a religious man. The quote you see on atheist websites from time to time (“No man who ever lived knows any more about the hereafter than you and I; and all religion is simply evolved out of chicanery, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry”) seems to be more or less an accurate statement of his views. But the man was something close to obsessed with subjective experience, which leaves a space open not only for semi-traditional mysticism but for Kierkegaard-style religious existentialism. (My first paper in my PhD program was on this topic.)

So when Poe brings up the Church Fathers, which happens only very rarely, it’s generally to serve a higher purpose—to demonstrate a character’s intense subjectivity. The most famous instance is in the short story “Berenice,” one of his very best. Our narrator is one of Poe’s typical hyper-sensitive artist types, this time named Ægeus. He’s a half-cousin to Roderick Usher, sickly and gloomy. Indeed, his entire existence seems bound up in his family’s enormous library, in which his mother died giving birth to him.

His cousin Berenice, on the other hand, is “agile, graceful, and overflowing with energy . . . roaming carelessly through life with no thought of the shadows in her path.” It takes a paranoid and neurotic subjectivist like Ægeus to see the shadows, of course, and he watches as his cousin develops an illness that strips her of her personality and identity. His own illness, at this point, “grew rapidly upon me, and assumed finally a monomaniac character of a novel and extraordinary form . . . This monomania, if I must so term it, consisted in a morbid irritability of those properties of the mind in metaphysical science termed the attentive.” He has become a hysteric—or a mystic.

His monomania is fed by his choice of reading material, which consists primarily of “St. Austin’s great work, the ‘City of God;’ and Tertullian ‘de Carne Christi.’ ” The operative sentence in the latter, of course, is the famous “Mortuus est Dei filius; credibile est quia ineptum est; et sepultus resurrexit; certum est quia impossibile est”: “The Son of God died; it is wholly credible because it is unsound. And, buried, he rose again; it is certain because it is impossible.” Ægeus’ hypersensitive mind takes this paradoxical statement to heart, and when Berenice dies and is buried, he unconsciously slinks out to the grave, exhumes the corpse, and uses dental equipment to pull out his cousin’s teeth.

That’s when we learn that Berenice hadn’t died after all; she was merely in a swoon, and this act of amateur dentistry has brought her out of it. (Biblical scholars: When did the “swoon theory” against the resurrection first enter theological conversation?) Her cousin’s monomania, fueled by the absurdist writings of the most unpleasant of the Church Fathers, has saved her, albeit in a horrifying way.

(I have the vague sense that the Patristics pop up in another of Poe’s tales, but I can’t place which one. I had assumed it was “The Colloquy of Monos and Una,” a heavily philosophical conversation between two corpses buried in the same grave, but I was wrong. So this may be Poe’s lone reference to the Church Fathers.)

What this demonstrates is that the attitude we described in the podcast as typical of Evangelicals is by no means exclusive to Evangelicals. If the Church Fathers are our crazy uncles to whom we are related but to whom no one wishes to speak at the family reunion, we’re in good artistic company in thinking so. Poe asserts here that they have something valuable, perhaps even life-saving, to say—but in saying it they threaten our souls and our sanity.

'The Birth-Mark' Takes on Enlightenment Scientism

In his excellent and highly recommended essay “Contemporary Southern Literature,” Richard M. Weaver posits the South as the only American region—and probably the only region in the world—capable of saving literature from two deep anthropological errors. In one corner, we have the Emersons and Thoreaus who spend their lives denying humanity’s capacity for wickedness; in the other, we have the later naturalistic school (Dresier, Crane, et al) who claim that human beings are mere symptoms of their environment. (If these two schools sound familiar, it’s because they largely survive today.) “One school of writing,” says Weaver

tried to present man as all glory. A later school tried to present him as all jest—for that is what he must be if he is considered merely the pawn of circumstances. Only the contemporary Southern school has combined the glory and the jest and remained faithful to the riddle of man which may never be answered.Weaver, like many of the South’s most strident advocates, is prone to overstatement. It’s true, of course, that the two movements he discusses—both of them peddling what is in the end a destructive philosophy of humankind, although I don’t think Emerson is as bad as he says he is—began north of the Mason-Dixon line. And it’s true that in 1959, at the time of his writing, the Southern Renaissance was presenting us with numerous writers who did justice to the terrible mystery of humanity.

But it’s not that simple; the South has always had its share of novelists who lean too far to one side or the other (Faulkner, who is fatalistic to a startling degree, is the most obvious kinsman to Crane and Dreiser; the post-Civil War writers who would have given everything they own to return to the era of happy slaves and virginal young women fit, in their way, in with the Transcendentalists.) And besides, you can always find counterexamples from other parts of the country. It’s patronizing for Weaver to claim the South as the spiritual center of American literature, even if he does so chiefly because as a region it has been undervalued through the years.

How he could read Hawthorne, for example, and not see a philosophical kinsman is beyond me. Hawthorne famously descends from the Puritans of Salem, Massachusetts, a name now synonymous with spiritual oppression and persecution, and he does not shy away from telling the story of that oppression in stark and disturbing terms. But he does not have a knee-jerk reaction to his Puritan ancestors the way Emerson and Thoreau do; in terms of his literature, at least, he pretty much remains a Puritan his entire career, whatever he actually believed.

Weaver should have been able to get behind “The Birth-Mark,” in particular, a story that anticipates Walker Percy’s skepticism of science’s reign over the popular mind and which, in the end, could have been written by Harry Crews if not for the absence of obscenity. Hawthorne seems to have written it for the sole purpose of taking all the air out of Enlightenment optimism of the variety that created Emerson. (The Transcendentalists were not, strictly speaking, Enlightenment men; they were instead Romantics in the Byronian/Keatsian mold. But the Enlightenment lead to Romanticism, which borrowed from the movement it deposed an overwhelming optimism as to the nature and destiny of humankind.)

Our protagonist is Aylmer, a scientist hell-bent on progressing his discipline until human beings conquer the world around them. In his world, “Nature seemed to open paths into the region of miracle.” Indeed, his scientific experiments are “of a spiritual affinity more . . . than any chemical one.” Aylmer’s philosophy is one in which the categories of physical and spiritual have collapsed into one. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as it was true of the Middle Ages, as well, and largely true of Hawthorne’s own work. But Hawthorne reads the physical through the spiritual, whereas Aylmer wishes to read the spiritual through the physical.

Enlightenment-style scientism, then, is a reversal of the natural order of things, an attempt to reduce the complicated spiritual world to the easy world of appearances. Aylmer is sinister not because he is a misanthrope but because he loves humanity so much, and so blindly. The central plot of the story involves his relationship with his wife, who is nearly perfect but who has a small, hand-shaped birthmark on her cheek. This will not stand with her husband, who can’t look at it without turning it into “the visible mark of earthly imperfection.” He therefore elects to use his knowledge of chemistry to remove it and to create the perfect human being.

These, then, are the two marks of the Enlightenment’s abuse of science: Humanity is seen as ultimately perfectable, and it is humanity itself that can perfect it. Hawthorne is clear that what Aylmer and his real-life counterparts practice is not science but rather a sort of base superstition; we know this is true because of Aylmer’s appeal to the alchemists, who he really believes were onto something even if “a philosopher who should go deep enough to acquire the power would attain too lofty a wisdom to stoop to the exercise of it.” (Again, there’s the innate goodness of man on full display in a sort of free-market scientism. We must never ask if we should do something; we need only know that we can, and we must trust that we’re wise enough not to screw things up too badly.)

The problem with scientism’s obsession with the perfectability of humanity is that it completely ignores what it means to be human. Aylmer’s wife, Georgiana, has lived with this birthmark for her entire life, and no one has ever told her that it is a blemish. Her husband’s obsession over it leads her to a strong and irrational self-hatred, leading her to submit to Aylmer’s bizarre tests, which will eventually kill her.

The reason, of course, is that to be human means to be blemished. Once we attempt to remove all of the problems from a person—once we explain them away, for example, as the trend seems to be in modern psychiatry, or once we put to death that tricky old word, sin—we also remove something at the very core of their humanity. Aylmer kills his wife and grants to “the veriest clod of earth . . . a soul”; the two moves are not unconnected. What separates humanity from the matter around them is not just the ability to have faults but the inability not to.

In God's Country

Of the many aggravating buzzwords that cropped up around the administration of George W. Bush, perhaps the most aggravating was “the ‘blame America first’ crowd,” an epithet directed at anyone who dared to suggest that perhaps the events of September 11, 2001, were not undertaken merely because the terrorists “hated our freedom.” To say that America had any culpability was, for a time, tantamount to saying that we deserved it and that any nuclear weapon exploded over Chicago or New York or Los Angeles would also be well-deserved.

I suspect the general attitude that informed the use of this phrase springs from the notion of American Exceptionalism, which began long before the colonies became a country, continued on through Manifest Destiny, and got firmly attached to the Republican party about the time Ronald Reagan called the country a “city on a hill.” Exceptionalism sets up a false binary: Either America is the greatest country in the world—God’s country, in fact, created to be a shining example of democracy and Christianity, which are, in the eyes of some people, the same thing—or else it is the worst country in the world, a cesspool of intolerance that’s far inferior to anything in Europe. Republicans, in the eyes of some Democrats, say the former; Democrats, in the eyes of some Republicans, say the latter.

I am neither a Republican nor a Democrat, and so I suppose I’m somewhere in between the poles. I believe in American Exceptionalism to a limited extent in that I believe in the “mission” of the country and that I believe that democracy is a good system of government that beats out a lot of other options, but I don’t believe America holds a special religious status or (God forbid) that Christianity is somehow summed up in democracy. (In fact, I suspect God moves more freely in more oppressive countries, but I’m no church historian.)

Further, I believe that one thing that makes America great is its capacity for self-doubt. I think it means something important and good that one reaction to September 11 was for some citizens to ask what we did to deserve it. The proper attitude for both the individual and the nation is constant self-scrutiny, constant self-improvement, and, if you’re of a religious mindset, constant repentance. So maybe blaming America first isn’t such a bad thing.

That being said, I think the term is misapplied largely because the people in question often aren’t blaming America qua America first; rather, they’re blaming their political enemies first. Thus, anything negative that happened to America from 2002 to 2008 was, naturally enough, George W. Bush’s fault (including Hurricane Katrina, you’ll remember); and, for Glenn Beck, et al, anything that’s happening bad right now is Barack Obama’s fault. The correct position is instead an inward stare. When the economy hits the skids, the first question we should ask ourselves is, “What did I do to make this happen or to keep it from not happening?” That’s the right way to blame America first; as Langston Hughes says, “I, too, am America.” Starting with self-doubt is a very good way to save yourself from self-righteousness when you actually start looking around at other causes.

That’s one reason I like Nathaniel Hawthorne. I hated The Scarlet Letter for a long time until I finally came around last summer. I’m rereading the novel yet again, and I’m noticing more and more the degree to which Hawthorne suspends judgment before enacting judgment. A popular 20^th-/21^st-century reading of the novel, for example, is to say that those awful Puritans were wrong to treat Hester Prynne as if she’d done something sinful. (See, for example, the truly execrable 1995 film version starring Demi Moore.)

But Hawthorne doesn’t allow for that reading. Hester Prynne does the wrong thing when she sleeps with Dimmesdale, however understandable her loneliness and their connection is. She even admits her wrongdoing to herself and undertakes her sewing career with “an element of penance” in it. Nor is the scarlet A an unequivocally cruel punishment; it alienates her from her fellow colonists, it’s true, but by the end of the novel it’s come to signify something else entirely.

So Hawthorne’s problem with the Puritans is not that they blame Hester Prynne for doing something wrong—indeed, he goes along with that blame to a certain extent. His problem with them is that they enact this condemnation on someone outside of themselves, ignoring the sin that most certainly dwells in their own hearts, thereby using Hester as a scapegoat for the wrongdoing of the entire community. It’s the same thing we see in politics when we blame an entire financial crisis on one political administration—things just aren’t that simple.

Ah, you might say, but when Hawthorne points a finger at the Puritans, he’s got three pointing back at himself. Isn’t he just using Puritan sins as a way to cast the reader’s eyes away from his own sins or the sins of his society? Well, no, he’s not, as is evidenced by the (at times boring but overall worthwhile) introduction to The Scarlet Letter, titled “The Custom-House.” Here he comes clean about his own ancestry. If you’ve read Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, you’ll no doubt remember Judge Hawthorn of the witch trials, who was an ancestor of Hawthorne’s and who put dozens of presumably innocent people to death:

I know not whether these ancestors of mine bethought themselves to repent, and ask pardon of Heaven for their cruelties; or whether they are now groaning under the heavy consequences of them, in another state of being. At all events, I, the present writer, as their representative, hereby take shame upon myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred by them—as I have heard, and as the dreary and unprosperous condition of the race, for many a long year back, would argue to exist—may be now and henceforth removed.

The only way, in other words, that Hawthorne can even get down to telling the condemnatory tale of Hester Prynne, is by implicating himself, via his ancestry, right away, and asking forgiveness from God and the reader for his own culpability, however unlikely or small.

It’s a remarkably humble move, one that greatly enriches the subtext of the novel, and one that could teach today’s political commentators (yes, including myself) quite a bit.

Killing the Father

Poor Bronson Alcott. All but forgotten today, eclipsed by his much more famous daughter, Louisa May, he nevertheless practically invented the modern educational system and introduced veganism to American culture for the first time. And yet we know him, for the most part, secondhand, whether it’s from Mr. March in his daughter’s Little Women or from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s brutal portrait of “Hollingsworth” in The Blithedale Romance. He’s a pathetic or sinister footnote to much more substantial texts.

But it’s not for lack of trying on his fault. Alcott desperately wanted to do something important, whether it was his two unconventional schools (the Temple School in Boston and the Concord School of Philosophy and Literature), his utopian community, Fruitlands, or his Transcendental philosophy, never formulated particularly cohesively and eclipsed in a major way by that of his friends Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Even Margaret Fuller, a name known mostly only to students of the American Renaissance, has a better reputation than Alcott.

Alcott lived a long life, however, long enough to see his daughter become a popular success. (In fact, he died only two days before her, and she never learned of his death.) I am not aware of his reaction to her books, although we’re given a clue in Good Wives, the second volume of Little Women, in which Mr. March, upon seeing Jo’s literary success, tells her that “You have had the bitter, now comes the sweet. Do your best and grow as happy as we are in your success.” But if Bronson Alcott said something similar to his own daughter, it must have been through clenched teeth.

Little Women is famously autobiographical, telling the story of the Alcott sisters (Anna, Louisa May, Elizabeth, and May) without changing very many details at all. Other than Jo’s popular opinion-forced marriage at the end of the second volume, the only major change from life to novel comes in the person of Mr. March. The Alcotts were as poor as the Marches, by all accounts, but Louisa was too ashamed or proud to present the reader of Little Women with the real reason for their poverty. Bronson Alcott, unlike Mr. March, never served in the Civil War, and the family was destitute because of his utter failure at everything he tried.

So Mr. March figures in the first volume of the novel only as an absence, whereas Bronson Alcott was apparently there in his family’s life the entire time, presumably playing a role in his daughters’ various adventures. Louisa’s sending Mr. March off to war strikes her father from her published memory, simultaneously making him unimportant to literary history; it’s cruel, from a certain perspective, even if it’s probably more interesting for the narrative.

Mr. March returns from the front at the end of the first novel and is thus present in the second. But he is only present in the most technical of senses and in fact has less influence in the second volume than he did in absentia in the first. In the writing of her most famous novel, Alcott emasculates her father; instead of being a noble failure, Mr. March is a pleasant inconsequentiality. Some critics, it is true, would argue that this move had to be made, since the March household is a feminine bower, a seat of female power against the harshness of the masculine world outside. This may be true, but it’s also true that the novel is based very directly on real people, and so there can be no purely artful decision for Alcott—changing Mr. March changes forever the public’s perception of her father.

(On the other hand, it may be better for Bronson Alcott that his daughter mostly left him out of the novel; when Elizabeth Alcott died in 1858, it may have been because her father’s strict vegan diet left her malnourished and weak. As things stand, if the reader of Little Women wishes to cast blame on anyone for Beth’s death, it likely falls on Mrs. March, for insisting she take care of the baby from whom she catches scarlet fever.)

These sins of omission are enough to make one feel sorry for Bronson Alcott; however, they are not the only violence his daughter perpetrates on him. The entire structure and focus of Little Women can easily be read as a rebellion against her father’s concerns and methods. As Nina Auerbach points out, whereas the Platonist Bronson cared mostly for the invisible and eternal world, Louisa “stubbornly clings throughout her novels to the primary reality of physical things.” There is almost no Transcendentalism to be found in Little Women; the novel’s style belongs much more clearly to the burgeoning Realism movement, and its philosophy is decidedly pragmatic: Here is how a young lady should act.

In fact, when Transcendentalism finally does briefly enter the novel, it does so only so Alcott can dismiss it. Jo finds herself at a dinner party of illuminati, no doubt similar to the meetings of the Transcendentalist Club that Louisa May Alcott must have witnessed:

The conversation was miles beyond Jo’s comprehension, but she enjoyed it, though Kant and Hegel were unknown gods, the Subjective and Objective unintelligible terms; and the only thing “evolved from her inner consciousness” was a bad headache after it was all over. It dawned upon her gradually that the world was being picked to pieces, and put together on new and, according to the talkers, on infinitely better principles than before; that religion was in a fair way to be reasoned into nothingness, and intellect was to be the only God.

Jo ends up rejecting this philosophy, and part of the reason, one suspects, she marries Professor Bhaer is that “Somehow, as he talked, the world got right again to Jo; the old beliefs, that had lasted so long, seemed better than the new; God was not a blind force, and immortality was not a pretty fable, but a blessed fact.” Alcott creates the character of Professor Bhaer so that she may marry her alter-ego off to him, leaving her father’s oppressive house for good. The invention, it is true, was dictated by popular opinion, but it has the unintended consequence of breaking her from her father’s failures and philosophies once and for all.

With this in mind, perhaps it’s time for a rediscovery of Bronson Alcott’s work. I’ve not read him myself (what a hypocrite!), but apparently his work has much to say to the modern age, with its emphasis on animal rights, sustainability in agriculture, and a humane diet. Perhaps it’s time we released Alcott from the grip of the venomous and unfair fictional representations of him that have colored our understandings for more than a century now.

Deep Calls to Deep; Or, How Karl Jaspers Solved My Problems with Milton and Emerson

By Book IV of Paradise Lost, Satan has formulated and begun to enact his plan for revenge on the God who cast him from heaven, but he enters the Garden of Eden in a deep existential funk:

Be then his Love accurst, since love or hate,
To me alike, it deals eternal woe.
Nay curs’d be thou; since against his thy will
Chose freely what it now so justly rues.
Me miserable! which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath, and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep
Still threat’ning to devour me opens wide,
To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heav’n. (IV.69-78)

Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing two centuries later and across the Atlantic, somehow manages to turn Satan on his head:

Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning;
that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens. (“Circles”)

Emerson is not always the sunny optimist popular thought holds him to be—he can moan and groan with the best of poets—but “Circles” is not a particularly pessimistic essay. Just a paragraph later, he refers to God, who sees the world as “a transparent law, not a mass of facts.” So why on earth would Emerson take what may be the deepest despair in a book full of despair and turn it into a paean to openness and freedom? I spent much of last spring trying to answer this question to my satisfaction.

I’ve had Karl Jasper’s seminal Philosophy of Existence sitting on my shelf for months, waiting until I had time enough to start reading for my comprehensive exams. If only I’d looked at it earlier; Jaspers, it seems, could have solved my dilemma.

Human beings, he says, operate from a perspective that is always already limited, inside what Jaspers calls “a horizon of our knowledge.” There’s always something over and beyond that horizon, and we are always already called to cross the horizon into what he calls the “encompassing.” The encompassing is not the horizon, and in fact once we cross one horizon a new one opens up. I was instantly reminded of Satan’s telescoping deeps and Emerson’s ever-widening circles.

The encompassing is a realm of pure possibility, similar to what Heidegger takes fifteen pages of Being and Time to call Dasein’s living ahead of itself. It is something that by its very nature cannot be grasped. To grasp pure possibility, after all, would immediately make it no longer pure possibility. Instead, we live our lives in immanence, forever drawn toward the transcendence that would take us beyond the horizon—to, of course, another horizon. It’s in this constant transcending that we receive our freedom.

That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t answer the question. Why is Satan dizzy over the gulfs while Emerson is exhilarated watching the circles to expand? Jaspers answers with one very unexpected word: authority:

At first, authority taken on faith is the only source of genuine education affecting man’s nature itself . . . As he grows up within authority, the arena in which he everywhere encounters being opens up to him. If he grows up without authority, he will indeed come to possess knowledge, he will master speaking and thinking, but he will remain at the mercy of the empty possibilities of the realm where Nothingness stares him in the face.

It’s a paradox, of course—in order to transcend the immanent and confining world, in order to receive freedom, one must first surrender one’s freedom to a higher authority. Satan’s sin, of course, is one of refusing to recognize his place in the universe; he rebels against God, attempts to throw off the chains of perceived oppression, and so he’s locked into his position in the universe. And yet he still transcends. He literally moves through spiritual realms, from heaven to hell to earth (and, if the Book of Job is to believed, back to heaven occasionally).

So his transcendence offers him freedom and possibilities. But the encompassing is a threat to Satan because all beneficent possibilities have been exhausted for him; all that’s left beyond that horizon is a new defeat, a new suffering, a new punishment. Existential possibility is horrific in his eyes. There’s been some hand-wringing in theological circles as to why human beings are offered forgiveness but Satan and the fallen angels are presumably not. Milton and Jaspers seem to offer an answer: Human beings have never truly thrown off God’s authority, or at least they haven’t rebelled in such a violent and obvious way. They’ve never literally tried to toss God off His throne.

It’s worth noting that this fact does not necessarily make our possible future any brighter. Emerson recognizes this when he says, in “Experience,” that

Life is a series of surprises, and would not be worth taking or keeping, if it were not. God delights to isolate us every day, and hide from us the past and the future. We would look about us, but with grand politeness he draws down before us an impenetrable screen of purest sky, and another behind us of purest sky. “You will not remember,” he seems to say, “and you will not expect.”

We don’t get to know what’s over that horizon, and while the circle could expand and let us climb higher, the deep could also open up and suck us in Nothingness. Jaspers sounds almost like a Calvinist here: “I can force neither of these two.” Of course, to do so would be to fail to submit to authority.

One point worth noting here is that Jaspers does not use the term authority the way someone like Milton would. That is, authority and God are not coterminous. When the circles widen, the authority disappears, and “the destructive exception becomes source of new authority.” This puts Jaspers much more in Emerson’s camp than in Milton’s—but he’s nevertheless the best way I’ve found to bring the two together.

Emerson's Active Resignation

As the year slows down and gradually dies, I usually suffer periodic dips and falls in my mood. (Granted, these dips are less severe now that I live in a place where the sun stays up later than 5 p.m.--but they're still there.) And this year promises to be even sadder, even bleaker, what with the economy slowing down too--although hopefully not dying.

I'm revising a paper for publication today. The paper reads T.S. Eliot's Ash Wednesday through the lens of Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays. I won't post the whole thing here, but my analysis of Emerson seems apropros today--perhaps it gives us a model of how to approach this increasingly bleak year.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson was a sometimes uncomfortable combination of poet and philosopher; Emerson, not to put too fine a point on it, was a Buddhist/Christian mystic who was nevertheless one of the greatest intellectual minds in the history of American thought. Indeed, John Dewey claims him “as the one citizen of the New World fit to have his name uttered in the same breath with that of Plato"--and he gives as his reason that both Plato and Emerson “set poet and philosopher over against one another."

Emerson does not lay his philosophy out in a systematic fashion, and he oftentimes makes what seem like contradictory statements, but he nevertheless sets forth a more-or-less cohesive philosophy. Like other philosophers (and I am thinking specifically of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche here, although there are many other examples), his work must be taken as a whole to be comprehended; the reader cannot examine one isolated essay--as so many American literature survey courses do--and proclaim even its own meaning, let alone the meaning of Emerson’s thought as a whole.

Emerson reads like one of Bach’s concertos: He states his theme outright, and the volume and frequency of its repetitions can sometimes make it difficult to hear the countermelodies behind it. Emerson’s main theme is indeed self-reliance, but it is a peculiar kind of self-reliance. Because he believes in an Oversoul, because he believes that all beings consist of essentially the same thing, it is not as easy as saying “trust yourself.” Trusting oneself ultimately means submitting oneself to spiritual laws and to fate, and even self-expression ultimately expresses every self in the entire universe; Emerson refers to our failure to express ourselves as our being “ashamed of that divine idea which each one of us represents." Ultimately, no contradiction exists for Emerson between following one’s best light and resigning oneself to fate and to the laws of the universe. To trust oneself is the same thing as to believe in fate.

Authors often use fate as a negative trope, but Emerson approaches this system of trust and resignation joyfully. In “Circles,” for example, he declares that every improvement, every assertion we make stands in need of another one. He paraphrases Milton here: “Me miserably!” says Satan in Paradise Lost,

Which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath, and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep
Still threat’ning to devour me opens wide,
To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heav’n. (4.73-78)

Compare this, however, with Emerson’s paraphrase: “Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.” He does not sound like Milton’s Satan here; he has no fear of divine retribution, and he certainly does not view life as a hell. His use of the “lower deep” ultimately affirms life; if the ground opens up, he seems to say, it is cut from the same cloth as the sunrise, just something new to experience.

Fate decrees that no accomplishment is ever enough, but Emerson does not seem melancholy about this state of affairs; nothing lasts forever, but when he loses a friend, he says, “he gains a better.” The universe ultimately acts justly, and he trusts that he will receive what he deserves and that each day will be followed by another, for better or for worse.

Or perhaps not. The world is constantly in flux, according to “Circles,” and Emerson’s mood changes with the fluxes. At times, this changefulness becomes almost unbearable:

To-day I am full of thoughts, and can write what I please. I see no reason why I should not have the same thought, the same power of expression, to-morrow. What I write, whilst I write it, seems the most natural thing in the world; but yesterday I saw a dreary vacuity in this direction in which now I see so much; and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who he was that wrote so many continuous pages. Alas for this infirm faith, this will not strenuous, this vast ebb of a vast flow! I am God in nature; I am a weed by the wall.

If Emerson sounds upbeat when he describes the world’s constant replacing of itself in “Circles,” it is because he writes when he feels like “God in nature”; for the flip side of the equation, for Emerson as “a weed by the wall,” we must turn to “Experience.”

“Experience” finds Emerson in despair over existence itself, which has clearly become a chore for him—a curse, really, since “It is very unhappy . . . the discovery we have made, that we exist.” Life may not be meaningless, but its meaning is certainly unknowable, and Emerson says that “All our days are so unprofitable while they pass, that ‘tis wonderful where or when we ever got anything of this which we call wisdom, poetry, virtue.” Human relationships become impossible, “oblique and casual,” and even the Divine, usually present in all things, seem distant:

God delights to isolate us every day, and hide from us the past and the future. We would look about us, but with grand politeness he draws down before us an impenetrable screen of purest sky, and another behind us of purest sky. “You will not remember,” he seems to say, “and you will not expect.”

Much of the tone of “Experience” depends on Emerson’s attitude toward God here; does he bitterly say that “God delights to isolate us,” or is the passage a sincere acknowledgement of the necessity of submitting to the divine? If the former, then Emerson has become Beethoven (or Melville’s Pierre), deaf but still screaming at heaven’ if the latter, then he more closely resembles Kierkegaard’s Abraham, a knight of faith who trusts that God has a reason for our lack of knowledge of the future (and indeed, for our alienation).

For the first half of the essay, Emerson seems made of despair and anger, alienated from the nature that used to offer so much comfort, from the men who were manifestations of God, and from the God who manifested Himself in all these things. But shortly after this ambiguous outburst heavenward, his tone changes, however slightly:

Man lives by pulses; our organic movements are such; and the chemical and ethereal agents are undulatory and alternate; and the mind goes antagonizing on, and never prospers but by fits. We thrive by casualties. Our chief experiences have been casual.

Emerson plays with the double meaning of “casualty” here--on the one hand, individuals prosper only by chance, chance which by its very nature happens only occasionally. On the other hand, humankind propers through casualties--deaths, disasters--that somehow make us stronger. And indeed, Emerson seems to prosper through the writing of “Experience.” He finds a way to reconcile the unspeakable darkness of the world with his pan(en)theistic theological and anthropological vision. But he cannot name the agent of reconciliation:

I am not the novice I was when I was fourteen, nor yet seven years ago. Let who will ask, where is the fruit? I find a private fruit sufficient This is a fruit,—that I should not ask for a rash effect from meditations, counsels, and the hiving of truths. I should feel it pitiful to demand a result on this town and country, an overt effect on the instant month and year. The effect is deep and secular [far-reaching] as the cause. It works on periods in which mortal lifetime is lost.

Emerson’s “private fruit” nearly has to be unsatisfying for the reader; we rely on Emerson for intellectual answers, among other things, but none come here. Instead, he gives us a mystical solution, an individualistic acceptance of Fate that can be described but never named.

Emerson fleshes this concept out further in one of his final essays, “Fate,” from The Conduct of Life. Early in the essay, he posits mankind as the fool of nature, subject to “strokes . . . not to be parried by us.” Chief among these strokes is the fact that we are who we are and that we can do little to change that fact. His theme in “Fate” has striking echoes with “Experience”--humankind is isolated and helpless, and life is hard—but he adopts a more scientific language, as he tosses out references to biology and phrenology. Fate somehow seems harder, more set in stone, in the later essay, but it is still not all-powerful; it always serves something, and it always accompanies free will:

To hazard the contradiction,—freedom is necessary. If you please to plant yourself on the side of Fate, and say, Fate is all; then we say, a part of Fate is the freedom of man. Forever wells up the impulse of choosing and acting in the soul. Intellect annuls Fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free.

Fate, then, is not altogether a bad thing; like the casualties in “Experience,” humankind can prosper from it. Fate hedges about us but it hems us in only “to bring up our conduct to the loftiness of nature. Rude and invincible except by themselves are the elements. So let man be. Let him empty his breast of his windy conceits, and show his lordship by manners and deeds on the scale of nature.” Fate, rightly used, simultaneously humbles and aggrandizes individuals--it shows people their correct place in the universe, neither weed by the wall or God in nature but both, “for a little while lower than the angels,” as Hebrews 2:9 puts it (NAS).

The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet: Plato and the American Renaissance (Pt. 1)

James Kibler, who teaches my Southern Literature course, has assigned William Gilmore Simms' Poetry and the Practical, a forgotten treatise by a nearly forgotten poet. When Simms is remembered at all, it's as a rabidly pro-slavery ideologue and the author of The Sword and the Distaff, one of the first novels written in response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Yet Simms was a true antebellum Renaissance man, a trial lawyer and state congressman who wrote more than two thousand poems in the W.C. Bryant mode and many now-forgotten novels that echo Edgar Allan Poe (who once called Simms America's greatest novelist). I have not read these novels, so I can't agree or disagree with Poe, but Poetry and the Practical is at the very least an interesting and original argument.

Kibler himself wrote the introduction to the book, and in it and in class he spends a good deal of time arguing for Simms' philosophical affinities with Poe. He overstates his case, in my opinion. Poe, after all, famously says in "The Philosophy of Composition" that "Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem," rejecting moral readings and anticipating Oscar Wilde, the decadents, and their off-quoted "art for art's sake." But Simms wrests Poe's work away from its author's intentions: "Their [poets'] instincts . . . peculiar to their gifts, have always made them, more or less willingly, so many moral teachers." No, Simms sounds less like Poe and more like another "P"--Plato, whom I've written about so often that even I am sick of him. (Maybe this will be the last time he comes up. Probably not.)

I've been kicking around the subject of this post for a good long time, and Simms merely provides me with an excuse to finally write it up. The bulk of Poetry and the Practical is a Sidney-esque defense of art--he actually takes the difficult position that the poet is the most practical of all men. Plato, of course, is at the very best ambivalent about art; his theory of forms will not allow him to praise mimetic art, that copy of a copy of a copy, and poetry, built as it is on emotion rather than logic, disturbs him. He excludes the poet from his Republic on the grounds that he

can use words and phrases as a medium to paint a picture of any craftsman, though he knows nothing except how to represent him, and the metre and rhythm and music will persuade people who are as ignorant as he is . . . Strip [poetry] of its poetic colouring, reduce it to plain prose, and I think you know how little it amounts to. (Republic 601A-B)

And so it baffled me for a long time as to why Simms' fellow Romantics so revere Plato. Emerson is typical in his praise: "Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato,--at once the glory and the shame of mankind, since neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to add any idea to his categories." Emerson (and the other Romantics) classes Plato as a philosopher rather than a poet, but he also calls him "almost literature" and a "great artist," and he clearly believes the Greek to be on his side. But Emerson, Coleridge, and the rest would be left shivering outside the gates of the Republic. What gives?

Well, for one thing, Plato isn't as consistent in his critique/rejection of art as we might assume him to be. Socrates loves Homer--who for Greeks of the era was not only the composer of the national epic but also a religious figure. He quotes the blind sage more than he quotes anyone else, and when he does so, it's so he can appeal to his authority. Further, Plato dedicates an entire dialogue to something resembling literary criticism. In the dialogue bearing his name, we meet Ion, a rhapsode. Trevor J. Saunders explains in his introduction to the Penguin edition:

What did rhapsodes do? Gorgeously attired, they recited the works of Homer and other poets, apparently in some sort of chant, and usually without the musical accompaniment employed by earlier Homeric singers. Their performances were dramatic: they threw themselves into the part of whatever character Homer was depicting, and acted his scenes.

Additionally, their acting has an interpretative/critical element to it. Socrates classes the rhapsode with the artist, and here, at least, that's a compliment; after all, the rhapsode ends up as an intermediary between the Author and the Reader, and as such he operates by a "divine power" (533D).

Now: Saunders claims a dialogic consistency here--that is, he says that Plato uses the rhapsode to criticize the poet, rather than using the poet to define the rhapsode:

The question it poses is: "Do poets know what they are talking about?" Socrates, clearly thinks, the answer is "no"; indeed, he believes that poets are ignorant fellows who can write poetry only in a state of madness.

Strictly speaking, Saunders is correct. Socrates says that poetic inspiration can come only when the poet goes out of his head. But Saunders' tone is all wrong. I know nothing about him, but I suspect from his error that he approaches this subject through the Enlightenment, the period in which the fool stopped being holy and started being insane. (There's more to it than that, of course, and you can get it all from Foucault's seminal Madness and Civilization.) As late as the Renaissance, madness was all right; as Shakespeare says, "Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, / Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend / More than cool reason ever comprehends" (A Midsummer Night's Dream V.i.4-6).

Shakespeare, I'll allege, is of one mind with Plato, at least in the Ion. The evidence too difficult to explain away, try as Trevor Saunders might:

All good epic poets recite all that splendid poetry not by virtue of a skill, but in a state of inspiration and possession. The same is true of good lyric poets as well: just as Corybantic worshippers dance without being in control of their senses, so too it's when they are not in control of their senses that the lyric poets compose those fine lyric poems. But once launched into their rhythm and musical mode, they catch a Bacchic frenzy: they are possessed, just like Bacchic women, who when possessed and out of their senses draw milk and honey from rivers--exactly what the souls of the lyric poets do, as they say themselves . . . A poet, you see, is a light thing, and winged and holy, and cannot compose before he gets inspiration and loses control of his senses and his reason has deserted him. No man, so long as he keeps that, can prophesy or compose . . . the god relieves them of their reason, and uses them as his ministers, just as he uses soothsayers and divine prophets--so that we who listen to them may realize that it is not they who say such supremely valuable things as they do, who have not reason in them, but that it is the god himself who speaks, and addresses us through them. (533E-534D)

So it's not poetry that Plato objects to; it's uninspired poetry, poetry written by man instead of by the gods.

With this in mind, the Romantic affection for Plato comes shining through, in ways I will explain in the next edition.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love 'The Scarlet Letter'

Well, I've come around, but it's not because of any identification with Hester Prynne or Reverend Dimmesdale--it's because of a dizziness of meaning, a multiplicity of interpretation, that Hawthorne sews into the fiber of his novel.

The most interesting and difficult scene in The Scarlet Letter involves the interpretation of symbols. Meteors, Hawthorne tells us, were considered "revelations from a supernatural source," but he cautions us that such revelations are necessarily given to the community rather than to the individual:

But what shall we say, when an individual discovers a revelation, addressed to himself alone, on the same vast sheet of record! In such a case, it could only be the symptom of a highly disordered mental state, when a man, rendered morbidly self-contemplative by long, intense, and secret pain, had extended his egotism over the whole expanse of nature, until the firmament itself should appear no more than a fitting page for his soul's history and fate.

The narrator here critiques what Robertson McQuilkin calls the "existential hermeneutic"--the application of all texts to one's personal history--but does Hawthorne? The description he gives above echoes Poe's morbid characters--Egeus or Roderick Usher or Auguste Dupin--whom I've elsewhere argued are Kierkegaardian prophets, possessors of a subjective "acute religious sensibility." Would Hawthorne disagree?

Here's a more concrete question. The entire community sees an "A" in the clouds from a meteor one night. Dimmesdale, who has fathered a child out of wedlock and kept it a secret for seven years, sees "adulterer." Everyone else sees "angel," in the wake of the death of Governor Winthrop, who after all is now an angel (I'm not sure what theologians these folks read). Anyway, here are the options, as I see them:

(a) Dimmesdale, who himself has an acute religious sensibility, interprets correctly, and the rest of the community, who after all do not know the facts, are wrong; God is out to get Dimmesdale;
(b) The narrator's voice is Hawthorne's, and so only the community has the authority to interpret revelations; God is not out to get Dimmesdale;
(c) Both interpretations are valid, since religious signs are by nature shifting and subjective; in this case it is Dimmesdale's conscience that is out to get him, although God likely works through that conscience;
(d) There is no God or He is silent, and Hawthorne mocks all attempts at finding meaning in natural phenomena.

It's an important question because the novel is in some sense about signs, the most prominent being the "A" that gives it its title. The letter is meant to stand for ignominany, which it does, but only for awhile; after a few years have gone by,

The letter was the symbol of her calling. Such helpfulness was found in her,--so much power to do, and power to sympathize,--that many people refused to interpret the scarlet A by its original signification. They said it meant Able; so strong was Hester Prynne, with a woman's strength.

Later, the transformation is even more radical: "The scarlet letter had the effect of the cross on a nun's bosom. It imparted to the wearer a kind of sacredness."

In fact, even the characters themselves become signs ripe for reading--Hester Prynne is sin for the townspeople and freedom for the reader; Dimmesdale is holiness and guilt; Chillingsworth is evil and monomania (pretty much for the townspeople and for us). Hawthorne even calls Pearl a "symbol" and a "hieroglyphic." The Scarlet Letter is a novel of signifiers, and we're led to believe that they are easily interpreted--almost allegorical. That's why the book is assigned in high schools, and that's why I hated it. But every step of the way, Hawthorne confounds our interpretations--he multiplies and destroys signifieds, but leaves the signifiers in tact. He presents us with a world of signifiers with infinite signifieds, the type of world Barthes and Derrida would praise more than a century later. And he does so in antiquated and conventional language and under the guise of morality--a kindhearted old man gently telling us that there's no such thing as meaning.

Color me impressed.

Loose Ends

Anybody want to defend Nathaniel Hawthorne to me? I've always hated him (and I've read his three major novels--The Scarlet Letter, House of the Seven Gables, and The Blithedale Romance).

When I described my loathing to Dr. Boudreau, the graduate coordinator of UGA's English department, she asked if I'd read The Scarlet Letter since high school. I sheepishly admitted that I had not. "Give it another try," she said. "You need to read that book when you're old enough to imagine your life falling apart."

And so here I am, plowing through the book again. I do like it more than I liked it eight years ago--but I still don't connect with it the way I connect with Hawthorne's contemporary Herman Melville, who is frustrating in a totally different way. Melville's problem, as I've discussed elsewhere, is that he's a mess; his books never seemed planned at all, but instead they're Darwinist approaches to literature. He tosses everything in by chance and the cream of each reader's crop rises to the surface.

Hawthorne, on the other hand, seems to have planned every comma of The Scarlett Letter. It's masterfully controlled, but it seems to me as though that control has suffocated the book. I'm so aware of Hawthorne's intentions and his artistry that the characters can't breathe, and he won't allow me to really feel anything for them. Do any of you have a similar experience? Meredith, aren't you a Hawthorne fan?

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Meanwhile, the latest trend seems to be to question John Steinbeck's place in the literary canon. In an interesting and personal piece for the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley wrestles with the ghost of old Tom Joad, finally coming down on neither side of the love-him-or-hate-him fence. A few thoughts on that article:

- Yardley notes that the Nobel Prize committee privileges "political orthodoxy" over "literary distinction." No kidding. Take a look at this list of Nobel Prize winners for literature; you've never heard of most of them. Look at the reasons the committees give for their choices; they will not out-and-out state that "we like this person's opinions rather than their art," but that's the subtext behind phrases like "lofty idealism" and "spiritual perception." The Prize was originally meant to go to "the most outstanding work of an idealistic tendency," and if the World Wars killed that notion, the committee still loves "correct" opinions.

- He also says that his love for Steinbeck abated at about the same time his love for Faulkner grew. I've always been told that's a natural progression--Steinbeck and Faulkner are never in vogue at the same time, taking as they did completely opposite (political vs. impressionistic) attitudes toward what was essentially the same mileau: poor people in the 1920s and '30s. I wonder if we'll see a rash of Faulkner-bashing ten years from now when Steinbeck re-enters the Academy.

The Stooge

I avoided reading Tom Wolfe for some time because of his fifth-grade reaction to criticism from John Updike (whom I love), John Irving (whom I like), and Norman Mailer (whom I've never read). So now that I'm finally reading Bonfire of the Vanities, I'm wondering if their criticism was fair.

Updike said that Wolfe's "A Man in Full still amounts to entertainment, not literature, even literature in a modest aspirant form. Like a movie desperate to recoup its bankers' investment, the novel tries too hard to please us." Updike is usually not such a bloodthirsty critic; in my fairly extensive reading of his nonfiction, I've been struck by how magnanimous he is, always trying to find good things about books he doesn't like. So I'm going to assume that either (a) He really, really hates A Man in Full; or (b) He is somehow personally threatened by Tom Wolfe.

Mailer was a little more veiled in his criticism, calling Wolfe ""the most gifted best-seller writer to come along since Margaret Mitchell" and coyly noting that "Extraordinarily good writing forces one to contemplate the uncomfortable possibility that Tom Wolfe might yet be seen as our best writer. How grateful one can feel then for his failures and his final inability to be great--his absence of truly large compass."

I'm going to avoid dealing with Updike's criticism of Wolfe, mostly because doing so would involve defining "literature," which Updike is probably happy to do but which I am not. But I think Mailer is on to something here. Bonfire is enormous, fiction (or literature, whatever) on a grand scale--other critics have noted a similarity to Dickens (as they have with Irving), and that's fair enough. But at the beginning, the book gave me the impression that it will be a Percyan novel ideas, wrapping Wolfe's wordy prose around guilt and sin and bigotry and a million other issues.

But Wolfe can't control this for long; like Mailer, I think he lacks a "truly large compass." Less than halfway through, Bonfire of the Vanities turns into a potboiler, plot-driven and hurried. That doesn't make it bad--it just makes it less permanently interesting. It's a page-turner, but I don't think I'm going to remember much about it next year. On the other hand, other than its length, the novel is custom-made for a film adaptation, whereas something like Lancelot is less immediately engrossing but has more permanent value, at least for me.

The same is true of Irving, although I'll argue that Irving's prose is better-written. Lisa Simpson introduces Wolfe to Moe the Bartender by saying "He uses more exclamation points than any other living author." I'll vouch for that and add to it, elipses. Nearly every paragraph features ten-plus exclamation points and at least five aggravating dot-dot-dots. In this, he reminds me of that most overrated of 19th-century authors, Edgar Allan Poe (who himself plays a minor role in Bonfire of the Vanities). I come close to hating Poe, and I hate him because of the stagy melodrama of his prose. Like Wolfe, he's plot-driven, despite his fan base's concerted attempts to prove otherwise, and like Wolfe, he's a fan of exclamation points, italics, and dashes. Too many of Poe's short stories end with a frenzied interjection: "I had walled the monster up within the tomb!"; "[he]--was the man that was used up"; "These are the full, and the black, and the wild eyes--of my lost love--of the lady--of the LADY LIGEIA!" It's the stuff of B-grade horror films, and it's no wonder Vincent Price adapted so many Poe stories.

Wolfe is better than Poe, though. While he cannot sustain a philosophical theme through the course of his enormous novel, he at least has grand ambitions (I am still not convinced E.A.P. did), and his prose is never less than enjoyable, while any trip through Poe is like slogging through the streams of vomit and urine that so populate his stories. Literature? Who cares? Cohesive? Probably not. But Wolfe's worth reading--if not for the questions he halfheartedly raises . . . then at least for the way he ignores them!

Polished and Precise Like the Brains Behind the Gun Should Be

I'm reading Battle-Pieces, Melville's collection of Civil War poems right now. Melville is not typically known as a poet--if you've read any of his verse, it's likely only "Billy in the Darbies," the brief poem that concludes Billy Budd, Sailor. And there's a reason for that: He's mostly hamfisted, although he's got a few lines of great power. (My favorite so far is "Storms are formed behind the storm we feel." I'm not sure what to make of it, but it sticks in my brain.)

One thing Melville repeatedly suggests is that war is a young man's game, fought and apparently controlled entirely by youth while the older, wiser, and more experienced men stand beside helplessly:

Grief to every graybeard
When young Indians lead the war ("Apathy and Enthusiasm" II.21, 22).

And, more to the point:

Youth must its ignorant impulse lend--
Age finds place in the rear.
All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys ("The March Into Virginia" 4-6).

I'm no Civil War scholar, but wasn't the war started by old men? Hasn't this been the case for wars all throughout history? Old men start the wars and then step aside to let young men fight them. That's certainly the rhetoric around our current war.

And so I wonder if Melville's condemnation isn't misplaced. The young fight the wars, but then, they're forced to. Theirs is the enthusiasm--the old men have the apathy, although it is only personal apathy. They're more than willing to take a vested political or economical interest in the war and then send the young men off to die for that interest.

Czeslaw Milosz seems to be much closer to the point in his beautiful, heartbreaking "Child of Europe," written in the immediate aftermath of World War II:

The voice of passion is better than the voice of reason.
The passionless cannot change history. (5.7-8)

Milosz's sarcasm gets at the same idea as Melville but makes things clearer: It's not the young men's fault. It's the old men who behave as young men--the old men, who should know better but force themselves not to.

By the way, if anyone reading this knows more about the Civil War than I do and wants to correct my impressions, please do.

Updike and Emerson, Pt. 2

In my last post, I argued that (a) both Updike and Emerson tend to be victims of the P.C. Age in academia; and that (b) the former has a certain understanding of and affection for the latter. In this post, I will point out similarities to Emerson's thought in Updike's most famous and most well-read book, 1961's Rabbit, Run.

I've read Rabbit, Run more times than any other book, beginning my senior year of college, although I've never been assigned the novel in a class. I didn't assign it as my Freshman Comp II class's novel, either--my students did not by and large respond positively to "A&P" (a dagger through my heart!), and I didn't want to have to defend the graphic sex in the novel, even if the sex in Rabbit, Run pales in comparison to nearly every other Updike novel. I've written two class papers on the novel--one comparing Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom to Mr. Wheelock in Dorothy Parker's "Such a Pretty Little Picture" and one tracing the history of the criticism of the novel, from the early reviews that treated Rabbit as an existential hero to more recent criticism that treats him or his author as a terrible human being.

That's one of the major debates swimming around Rabbit, Run--are we supposed to admire or condemn Rabbit Angstrom? He abandons his wife and child, not so much to find a better life as because he's just bored. His decisions wreak havoc on his family; they destroy almost everything stable in the novel, but Rabbit doesn't seem to mind. And then when he decides to return to his wife, he wreaks his mistress' life, too. Is this just the price to pay for freedom? Or is Updike, the semi-orthodox Christian, giving us an object lesson of something to avoid?

I take the viewpoint that Updike condemns his most famous protagonist, however gently he does it. There's really nothing special about Harry; he works as a salesman in all four of the novels, and while he seems to have some talent for it, that speaks against rather than for his specialness. In Rabbit, Run, he is an emblem of the alienation of the lower-class male; with nothing to distinguish his pathetic life from the pathetic lives of those around him, he must convince himself he is special by clinging to basically four things: sex, food, gardening, and basketball. (I won't go into detail on most of these here.)

His reasoning for the flight he takes away from his wife sounds distinctly Emersonian. Emerson famously takes Socrates' command to "Know Thyself" and expands it to

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. ("Self Reliance." Essays and Lectures. Library of America, 1983.) 260.

Updike suggests this passage in Rabbit, Run; Harry receives his flight recommendation from The Mickey Mouse Club, where an adult Mousketeer named Jimmie conflates "Know Thyself" with "Be Thyself":

Know Thyself, a wise old Greek once said. Know Thyself. Now what does this mean, boys and girls? It means, be what you are. Don't try to be Sally or Johnny or Fred next door; be yourself. God doesn't want a tree to be a waterfall, or a flower to be a stone. God gives to each one of us a special talent . . . And He gives to each of us the special talents to become these things, provided we work to develop them. We must work, boys and girls. So: Know Thyself. Learn to understand your talents, and then work to develop them. (Fawcett, 1996. 10).

Rabbit's spiritual advice, then, comes from Emerson by way of Walt Disney.

But Rabbit--never a great thinker--ignores the rest of Emerson's catalogue in formulating his non-plan for escape. In this way, he is a typical reader of Emerson, disgarding a 40-year career and focusing entirely on "Self-Reliance." Emerson's philosophy is not, after all, quite so simple as that essay makes it out to be. Whereas he claims there that he will follow his own impulses and that "if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil" (262), he elsewhere admonishes his readers to do the right thing, even if the right thing is not their natural impulse: "Let a man keep the law,--any law,--and his way will be strown with satisfactions" ("Prudence" 360). It seems that you can and should trust yourself only once you've committed yourself to the spiritual laws of the universe and to Emerson's famous Oversoul, that part of the Divine that fills all of us. Freedom, for Emerson as for Kierkegaard, is twinned with responsibility, because

A man cannot speak but he judges himself. With his will, or against his will, he draws his portrait to the eye of his companions by every word. Every opinion reacts on him who utters it. ("Compensation" 294)

I suggest that for Emerson, trusting oneself is ultimately the same thing as trusting society, providing that society consists of self-actualized individuals who are aware of their connection to one another through the Oversoul.

And so Harry Angstrom is not an emblem of Emersonian self-realization or even of self-trust. He trusts himself, but for all the wrong reasons; he trusts himself in the face of all evidence to the contrary. As another character tells him, "you worship nothing except your own worst instincts" (115). Even after he wrecks the lives of nearly everyone around him, he can't see that his compass is out of line, and the novel ends with him running off into the sunset yet again. This running strikes me as distinctly non-Emersonian in and of itself; it is the opposite of taking a bold stand on one's beliefs; it is pure cowardice.

Now, as I think that the New Yorker piece suggests that Updike was aware of the range of Emerson's material and was not interesting in pinning him down to the simplistic evaluation typical of lay readers, it cannot be a mistake that Harry's philosophy sounds like but is not Emerson's. When I first read the novel, I assumed it was a critique of Emerson, and maybe it is; maybe Updike didn't read the rest of Emerson's catalogue until he wrote that piece in 2003; or maybe it, like Pierre, it's a critique of a certain aspect of Emerson's philosophy. But since I love Updike and I'm beginning to love Emerson, I choose to believe that among other things, Rabbit, Run is a critique of misreadings of Emerson, an object lesson drawn from "Compensation" and "Prudence" rather than from "Self-Reliance."

Updike and Emerson, Pt. 1

I love John Updike. My 95-page chapter on the first two Rabbit Angstrom books was my favorite part of my master's thesis, even though it got cut because it was an "indefensible argument." (I can tell that story another time, if anyone is interested.) And I love his criticism; Updike seems like he reads for 18-20 hours per day, and his comments and evaluations are usually sharp and interesting.

So you can imagine my horror today when a visiting philosopher, Dr. Russell Goodman (who's a very nice, very approachable, and brilliant man), took a potshot at him during a lecture on Ralph Waldo Emerson and Pragmatism. He talked about common misconceptions and oversimplifications of Emerson's message; he's often treated as though his sole message were "follow your bliss d00d," a viewpoint which ignores almost every essay other than "Self-Reliance."

"The New Yorker, for example," he said in a voice dripping with irony, "had John Updike"--he pronounced that name with the sneer that I'm used to hearing from academics--"write a condescending piece on Emerson. And then, 25 years later, they couldn't find anyone new, so they had Updike write another one." Goodman suggested that Updike subscribes to the popular view on Emerson's thought and condemns him for his own misreading. I was upset at first, but I rethought my opinion; I'd read the second piece, from 2003, but at that point I hadn't read all that much Emerson and my own opinion followed those oversimplifications pretty closely. Maybe Updike dropped the ball on this one. I mean, the man's not perfect.

I own two books of Updike's criticism--Picked-Up Pieces and Hugging the Shore--but that's not even half of his critical output, and I couldn't find his original (1970s?) essay on Emerson in them. But he makes offhand references to the Sage of Concord from time to time, always in either neutral or positive terms. Here's an example, from an essay called "Whitman's Egotheism":

Like many of his radiant literary generation, he borrowed courage from Emerson; but Whitman's brave advice bears no accent of the lectern, and small flavor of the stoic.

Updike may privilege Whitman here, as he privileges Melville elsewhere, but this is hardly a condemnation of Emerson; he gives the latter credit for the former's existence. Elsewhere, he claims that Emerson began a new tradition in American prose style, "cranky, granular, impulsive, confessional." This description is a positive for Updike--he uses it to contrast John Cheever's "taut and mordant" older style with his newer, more satisfactory one.

In an essay on Knut Hamson, Updike actually takes the author to task for criticizing Emerson, and it is by means of the conventional misreading of Emerson that Hamson is able to criticize him: "Emerson's major failings are 'his undeveloped psychological sense and thereafter his overdeveloped moral sense.' Reverse the proportions, and you have Hamsun." Updike does not in this essay directly combat the myth of Emerson--after all, the enemy of my enemy is not my friend--but he hints at it.

It's not until "Big Dead White Male: Emerson Turns 200" in 2003 that Updike directly rejects the Emersonian myth. I am not sure how Goodman found the article condescending; Updike has clearly read nearly everything that Emerson produced, and his tribute to him reads a bit like a hagiography. He praises him for his antinomianism (usually a positive quality in Updike's brand of Christianity), and says that only Poe equalled him"as a homegrown critical and creative mind." (I have my own, anti-Updike opinions of Poe, but nevermind for now.)

I wonder if Goodman does not mistake Updike's attack on Lawrence Buell for an attack on Emerson. He is indeed harsh to Buell--a major scholar of the American Renaissance and, though I cannot find the evidence, a man who I am certain has written some major essay or another on Updike--whom he accuses of ivory-tower intellectualism and defensiveness. I think these are critiques that Emerson would get behind, at least in principle; after all, John Dewey argues that he is the "philosopher of democracy," always privileging the pragmatic over the abstract, and Emerson himself never bowed to or defended the past.

Besides that, I think that Updike is in actuality defending Emerson against Buell and other ivory-tower types:

A hundred years after Emerson's centennial was declared a school holiday in Concord and marked by an oration by William James and a public prayer that the spirit of Emerson inspire all present, he is put forward gingerly, apologetically, as a devalued stock on which we might still want to take a flyer . . . The endorsement seems excessively hedged, linking the sage's value to a presumed madness in society. Emerson was too much a realist, I think, to dismiss the workings of a society as mad, even a society like his own, passionately riven antebellum America. He pitched his palace of the Ideal on the particularities and rationale of what existed.

Updike's problem is with the political correctness that attempts to "prove" that Emerson was a racist or a classist and that discards his work because of it. These concerns are beside the point; and Emerson still has a lot to say, particularly in the essays which people don't usually read. Updike views Emerson as a consummate humanist, speaking directly to the human condition and offering concrete advice for it.

If this whole debate sounds familiar, it's because it's the same one that rages around Updike himself. Is he a racist? Is he a sexist? Maybe--that's not really my call to make. But his novels manage to speak to me, and they speak to many others as well, even if the Academy treats him as damaged goods. I've been at three different schools now, and I'm still the only academic I know who deals with him. And I don't get why that's the case.

Part 2 of this post will involve an Emersonian reading of Rabbit, Run, but give me a few days.