The Borders of Things

Blow-Up

And now Antonioni. On the same day as Bergman, no less.

Cinema and Sorrow

Ingmar Bergman is one of the handful of directors who made me believe in film. All of his pictures reveal a remarkable marriage of beauty and trauma, that combination of seeing and feeling that makes you say "ah, this is what a movie camera was made for." His career is a remarkable testimony to the power of art when one takes it seriously.

Thus, it saddens me to learn that Bergman has died.

Romance Writing

Note: This post became ridiculously long, and probably pretty boring. Consider yourself warned.

The Russian Formalists attempted to come up with a systemic model of literary evolution. In their later work, they saw individual works as meaningful within a larger system, or, more accurately, systems within systems, whether they be the system of a specific genre (say, sonnets) or the larger tradition (such as love poetry). The advantage of thinking in this way is that it allows you to see how individual works utilize the various elements of the system, while at the same time locating what makes the particular work innovative or evolutionary within the system. Of course, when speaking of literature or any other human creation, these systems can often only be read retroactively--that is, the system as such can only be derived from the works which make it up. Consequently, there are both historical and formal elements to this type of analysis.

Over the last week, I've had the opportunity to perform a reading experiment in this mode, looking at a series of historical romances from the early to mid 19th century. My question was this: can we, using a systemic approach, explain why Nathanial Hawthorne has been considered, by many critics, to be head and shoulders above the other romance writers of the period? Why has Hawthorne survived, indeed thrived, and other writers have either had mixed uptake (like Cooper, whose biggest career boost in decades was Michael Mann's Last of the Mohicans, even tho, particularly in early 20th century American Lit studies, Cooper was read), fluxuating readership (Catharine Sedgwick's Hope Leslie), or almost no cultural memory (ever heard of William Gilmore Simms The Yemassee, A Romance of Carolina?). Obviously, for the purposes of this experiment, I had to set aside a number of objections to the question. Two in particular: the first, which we could loosely call the argument from "cultural capital", claims that Hawthorne was institutionally privileged by highschools and colleges as "great," which is why you think he's better than these other writers, but this has nothing to do with the actual value of the work; the second, which we could generally loose under the argument of cultural history, objects that the question of "greatness" is an unimportant one, since The Yemassee, as much as The Scarlet Letter, reflects the 19th-Century's values, thoughts, ideologies, etc., and thus there is no reason to distinguish between the two. Two recent critical statements I recently heard in this line, but I forget who they come from, are that Pride and Prejudice only teaches us about the 19th-century, and, from another scholar, "What's 1922 about Ulysses? Such objections are reasonable, and can be reasonably answered, but if you know me very well you've probably heard me go after them before, so I won't do so now.

Back to the question: if there is something different about Hawthorne's Romances, can a systemic analysis of literary evolution ala the RFormalists suggest what that difference may be? First, a few words about the historical romance. The genre's popularity in America and elsewhere really took off with Sir Walter Scott, of Ivanhoe fame. Scott, writing about Scotland and England, created fictionalized accounts of epic moments in the development of the nation's history, with lots of high action sequences, escapes, battles, mystery, etc. The suspension of disbelief was a given in the Romance, despite its historicity, in contrast with the evolving realism of the novel, with its emphasis upon contemporary social forms, descriptions, and dialogue. The appeal of the Romance in America, still in the process of nation-building, is obvious: here is a popular and exciting way for people to imagine their history, to see themselves as part of, and the culmination of, a larger story (very Puritan; read my previous post on this). Even though, as Simms says in his preface to The Yemassee, the Romance "does not confine itself to what is known, or even what is probable" but "grasps at the possible," the genre is "the substitute which the people of the present day offer for the ancient epic" (24, 23). By offering, as he puts it, an "American romance," this epic scope plays out the "natural romance of our country" (24). History provides the material, the imagination provides the plot--together, an imaginative history emerges on a grand and sweeping scale.

The obvious conditions for affirmative myth-making are obviously in place, and Simms is perhaps the best example of this unabashed celebration of South Carolina's past, (and apology for its slave-holding present) among the romances I read. The subject of his tale is the Yemassee war with the European colonists in the early 18th-century, and while the narrative shifts point of view between the two sides of the battle, creating sympathy for the tribes losing their land and their identity, the ultimate affirmation is of the cavalier, hierarchical southern culture in its nascent stages. We see the finalization of one genocide at the hands of Gabriel Harrison/Charles Craven, the Governer of SC (a common device in the romance is a secret identity): "A short groan--a word, seemingly of song--and the race of the Coosaws was forever ended" (382) and the near-genocide of the Yemassee. Even as Simms generates a certain pathos for the fallen native peoples, the result is an ultimate affirmation of the southern culture, essentially by glorifying their conquest of a mighty and noble people. Precisely because the tribes defeated by the colonists were a (in the words of Walter Sopcheck) "a worthy adversary," there is no shame in their victory. Indeed, that nobility gets associatively placed onto the colonists themselves: here was an equal fight, a heroic fight, an epic fight, and we came out on top. Indeed, the "nobility" of the Governor is so great, that, when he offers to free his slave Hector at the novel's end for saving his life, Hector adamently refuses, preferring to be a slave of the great, good man than a free man on his own.

While the RFs would be critical of my jumping so quickly to the overarching thrust of the narrative, its "meaning," I would respond that the devices of the romance "system," such as battle sequences, love triangles, grotesque violent descriptions, secret identities, and wilderness settings, are used to contribute to the overall affirmation Simms tries to present. In other words, cultural affirmation is the dominant structuring principle, the principle which organizes all other devices, in his romance. In a sort of metaphorical transfer, the plot of the epic/romance is here substituted for the cultural history as a whole. The effect of the devices organized in this way is a flattening, in the name of the imagination, of history itself, even as historical facts keep pushing through within the text, typically in a series of footnotes which clarify a certain historical element of the tale or verify its authenticity.

In the other romances I read in my experiment, affirmation was slightly more complicated, or subdued. Cooper's Natty Bumppo, one of the heroes, is by no means celebratory of the European expansionism into the NY wilderness. Bumppo does not speak, of course, for Cooper himself, and certain qualities of the wilderness settlement, such as its diversity, which contributes to religious tolerence and dynamic productivity, are pointed to positively in the text. Consequently, there is a more ambigious work, blending European 18th-century wit and satire in the depiction of some of the European characters' vices and follies with a sort of American geo-mysticism, seen as a more authentic and profound connection with the land, evident in Chingachgook and sympathetic Europeans like Bumppo. Thus, the devices of romance found in the novel, which include battles with wild animals and depictions of fishing expeditions, are used to dramatize this wilderness vs law (318), use vs waste (249) conflict which runs throughout the novel. The consequence, as we look back on it from our own historical moment, is a clear example of affirming, not Simms's European expansionism becoming-America, but a new American ethos, a central trope in American lit, of the wilderness individual spinning away from the overall social network of meaning for a more profound experience, a sort of deep ecological refraction of society. Where Cooper is most interesting is when he shows that this is not entirely, or absolutely, a rejection of the social: when Bumppo heads off for the wilderness in the end of the novel, his departure is tearful for Effingham and Elizabeth, the aristocratic leaders of the Pioneer territory. Bumppo cannot stay, but he does not condemn. Even more ambigiously, the final sentence of the novel tells us that Bumppo is "the foremost in that band of Pioneers, who are opening the way for the march of our nation across the continent" (476). Cooper has given us enough in the novel to make that final, inevitable march problematic, with the numerous dialogues on the rights of the displaced native peoples, but the march goes on. The asocial pioneer becomes the avant-garde (and that problem demands a lot of work).

Sedgwick, like Cooper, both affirms and critiques the past, in this case Puritan New England. Like Cooper, she is using the Romance to test the past, and is willing to celebrate it where it shines, even as she chides it when it is found lacking. In oversimplistic terms, she does this by creating an essentially 19th-century proto-unitarian heroine and setting her in the middle of 16th-century Puritan culture. Hope Leslie listens to the higher morality of her own sense of justice and compassion, and does not simply abide by the strict patriarchal law of the Puritan fathers. This results in her freeing not one but two prisoners over the course of the novel, one a native servant accused of witchcraft, the other Magawisca, the daughter of a chief who has been accused of calling for a rebellion against the English, but who, in her earlier years, saved Hope's foster brother (who later becomes her husband, after yet ANOTHER love triangle pans out). Similarly, the narrative provides examples of cruelty by the Puritans as well as by the natives in their conflict, creating a more ambigious judgment, even as the narrator directly comments on the action in terms the 19th century reader would understand:

In the quiet possession of the blessings transmitted, we are, perhaps, in danger of forgetting, or undervaluing the sufferings by which they were obtained. We forget that the noble pilgrims lived and endured for us--that when they came to the wilderness, they said truly, though it may be someqhat quaintly, that they turned their backs on Egypt--they did virtually renounce all dependence on earthly supports [. . . .] An exiled and suffering people, they came forth in the dignity of the chosen servants of the Lord, to open the forests to the sun-beam, and to the light of the Sun of Righteousness--to restore man--man oppressed and trampled on by his fellow; to religious and civil liberty, and equal rights [. . .]. (73)

Echoes of manifest destiny, viewed in all its material struggle (this description comes right after the captivity narrative convention of a bloody "Indian raid"), couched in "quaint" terms, attributed with contemporary values (religious liberty? The Puritans? Not exactly.). Sedgwick, in passages such as this, which self-consciously evaluate the historical record (another trope in the Romances I read), ultimately is affirmative, even as she refuses to give the Puritans a get out of jail free card. The past, as material for an exciting story (Hope Leslie even has a ship exploding at the end), is something which we should be proud of as well as proud that we have moved on from it.

Turning, at long last, to Hawthorne. If The Scarlet Letter is clearly situated within this system, what does it do differently to deserve the status we give it today? First, to prove that it is within the system: Historical setting--check; Wilderness location--check; large sweeping epic events in lieu of realist narration--qualified check: While Hawthorne is clearly NOT realistic in this novel, there isn't a single throwdown battle scene in the SL. There are secret liasons, mysterious circumstances, and, perhaps most importantly, epic events in a spiritualized sense: sin, guilt, punishment, and redemption were the biggest games in town for the puritans. More on this later. Mistaken/secret identities--check. Narrative temporal distance from the events being narrated--check (tho this is more subdued than in the other Romances I read).

Attempt at historical refernce--check, but in a more interesting and subtle way than in the prior tales, which begins to point to how Hawthorne significantly changes, or at least reorganizes, the system of historical romance. While Puritan Salem is an obvious fact, there is/are no major actual historical event or events around which Hawthorne directly weaves his narrative. There is no Yemassee war, not as many historical personages as there are in Hope Leslie, and not the emphasis on "what frontier life was like" that we find in Cooper. What we have, instead, is another literary trope, the supposedly "found narrative", limited to the Custom House preface to the novel, in which the author says "I found this story wrapped in the letter in the attic of the custom house in Salem, from which I've drawn an 'authentic outline.'" Only the most naive of readers would have mistaken this for anything other than the common device of 18th-19th century writers claiming that "this story isn't mine." But, at the same time, there is a crucial, and very real, historical reality to which Hawthorne points to in the Custom House: the witch-trials and the persecution of Quakers. But couldn't Hawthorne have taken up the witch-trials as Simms takes up the wars in South Carolina? Of course he could have. The fact that he doesn't, and yet writes a romance based on an attributed history, makes the fictionality of the romance slightly different from that of the others. Or, more precisely, it puts the fiction and the history in a different relation to one another: Hawthorne is going after something other than the events of the historical past. Sedgwick is close to this, with Hope's universalizing ethos, as is Cooper's geo-mysticism, but there is a more ambigious, perhaps more ambitious, target here.

Along with the entirely imagined situation in the real past, Hawthorne's biggest difference from his fellow Romanticists is in his principle of narrative structure. And here is where, I would argue, Hawthorne begins to break away from the pack. For, as everyone knows, The Scarlet Letter is self-consciously concerned with symbols and their interpretation thematically just as it uses symbols structurally to organize the narrative. Plots are minimal, while signs are everything. The scarlet letter is the central symbol of the story, a brand to mark Hester Prynne's spiritual condition as an adultress. But from the very beginning, the stability of that symbolic order is challenged by Hester's artistry, sewn "with so much fertility and glorious luxuriance of fancy" that the fellow towns-women recognize that it can "make a pride out of what [was . . .] meant for a punishment" (50-51). The ambiguity introduced by the materiality of the sign continues throughout the book, to the point that the A eventually ceases to be "adultress" and becomes "Able" as a result of Hestor's good-will. Other symbolic ambiguities surrounding the letter A emerge when an A in the sky is read as "Angel" for the death of a leader, while Pearl herself is called "the scarlet letter" by Hestor (100). The final suggestion is that the letter is adopted by a grown-up Pearl as part of her English coat-of-arms. Taking only this one symbol, then, we see that the letter's meaning is flexible, multi-applicable, and open to many interpretive principles. The letter captures the imagination, makes new cultural meaning, but never rests on any one of those meanings. Indeed, we as readers see that the letter is not only slippery for the characters of the novel but also for ourselves--does its ambiguity point to the conditions of Puritan hermeneutics or does it reveal our own?

The symbols, and symbolic interpretation as a way of understanding the world, proliferate; as the narrator tells us
Nothing was more common, in those days, than to interpret all meteoric appearances, and other natural phenomena, that occurred with less regularity than the rise and set of sun and moon, as so many revelations from a supernatural source. [. . .] We doubt whether any marked event, for good or evil, ever befell New England, from its settlement down to Revolutionary times, of which the inhabitants had not been previously warned by some spectacle of this nature. (135-36)
While perhaps a bit hyperbolic, what is obviously clear is that typological and symbolic reasoning was crucial to the Puritan project: it justified it, it infused it with continual spiritual meaning, it gave its contradictions and conflicts a certain sense of coherence. The narrator of The Scarlet Letter, then, subtly but deliberatly shifts the conventions of the Romance to test not the actual values/actions of the past, either to totally or partially affirm those values, but uses the Romance to test the actual conditions of meaning through which those values were produced. In other words, Hawthorne writes a Romance not of historical epic actions, based on actual events, but a Romance of the signs of the past, a second-level of fictional abstraction. This allows him to declare, as he does in the Custom House chapter, that the story has an "authentic outline" and not historical factuality. More penetrating than facts, Hawthorne approaches the language which justified those facts and made them meaningful, a language he has inherited, albeit unwillingly.

There is much more to say about this, even tho I've already said a lot. But I think this shift in the system, partially reintroducing new elements and partially reorganizing others, suggests what makes The Scarlet Letter different. More work needs to be done as to why that difference might suggest "greatness," but that is for another post.

The Polymorphous Puritans

It is dangerous to paint in broad strokes when depicting the Puritans. They themselves were a most fastidious of people, divided from dividers ecclesiastically, separated among themselves in various denominations, distinctions, theological variations, differences enhanced by geographical locations. Salem was not Plymouth, which was not Massachusetts Bay, and they were definitely not Shakers, Quakers, Anglicans, “Papists,” or maypole dancing free-lovers like Thomas Morton. To generalize about their experience, their thought, their sense of who they are and their place in the world, then, is highly risky. But it is clear that they were precise, amazingly thorough, and caught up in a linguistic and material experiment that led them into numerous contradictions and complications, the descendents of which are still haunting America today.

While Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana may be the most famous account, it is a third-generation apology and prophecy after the fact, a looking backwards-forwards (as Sacvan Bercovitch points out) that both establishes the religious and cultural legitimacy of the puritan project and pro-jects that legacy into the future, an unprecedented bringing together what Bercovitch calls redemptive (divine, the story of the people of God) and providential (the secular world, ordained by God but not the sanctified by the redemptive plan) histories. Mather, the grandchild, writes Puritan self-imagination, a people both “sacred” and “secular,” divine and political, church and state, participants in both the divine and human economies. Thus, the first broad stroke one might venture to make: the Puritans brought together what had been apparent opposites; they mapped two vast universes on top of each other.

Such marriage of apparent contradictions is evident well before there was the Magnalia, visible in the first generation accounts of persecution, exile, and colonization. Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation offers one of these accounts, but in no way does it deserve the title story. It is a beast of a text, a literal palimpsest which was revised throughout Bradford’s life, a re-writing not of historical facts but of the glosses given to those facts. At times providence is not readily seen, just as redemption can appear as loss. While we may lump it under the name of “travel narrative,” it’s journey is epic, and thus it resists any simple name: part history, part theology, part edifying tale, part testimony, part constitution, part political theory, part book of church order, part plat book, part military history, part ledger (Bradford literally includes copies of receipts and documents the fur trade), part sermon. It is as if there is no detail that does not deserve inclusion, no minor history that cannot be annexed by the redemptive-providential tale.

Which is precisely what the Puritan marriage of opposites produces: a true multiplicity, a narrative structure that seeks to name everything. Bradford is not alone in this. Mather’s other (in)famous text, The Wonders of the Invisible World, reveals a trial process for the identifying of witches that is as morbidly thorough as it is judicially and ethically reprehensible. Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, at times, reads like a Weight Watcher’s diary, recounting the number of ground nuts a particular captor gave her on a particular day, and how they tasted. All of these details, material, gritty, at times violent, are, for Rowlandson, Mather, and Bradford, witnesses to the Divine. God, by ordaining everything providentially AND redemptively, is the force behind everything, even those things that appear evil. Grace (such as a gift of ground nuts) even in the midst of suffering (being taken captive and having your youngest child die in your arms) is still grace, while the suffering is designed to more fully integrate you into the redemptive plan. EVERYTHING fits into this frame, and thus nothing is lost to those who are setting out to capture the story in language.

For this reason, the rhetoric and language left by Puritan New England carries with it a complication to the theological frame that justified that rhetoric. Where they were, theologically speaking, radically spiritual, the Puritans were also, linguistically and cognitively, radically materialists. The physical world was more than simply illustrative of a divine plan, it was where the divine plan manifested itself, was carried out, where the Word became Flesh. A journey to the New World wasn’t simply allegorically parallel to the Israelites crossing of the Red Sea; it was, instead, a physical, material, literal redemption. Being carried into the wilderness by the native peoples wasn’t a metaphor for the lost soul, but a physical means by which the lost soul was sanctified. The divine is so immanent, in everything, that the physical, material world becomes the focus of a tremendous amount of attention, a place for experience and interpretation. Accounts of God’s redemption are accounts of beaver pelts, ground nuts, and river banks.

Is it no wonder, then, that 200 years later the Transcendentalist descendents of these puritans would fall back on a similar spiritual-materialist language? The New England attention to the materiality of the world as an expression of divine in the human recreates, and perhaps generalizes, the Puritan ethos. Since it was no longer tied to a specific creed or the concrete redemptive-providential narrative of the failed theocracy, materialist theology could spread into Walden Pond (optimistically) and into the White Whale (pessimistically). One could even say that the nineteenth century literary works simply literalized the puritan’s language, made the accounts of the material world which were already there self-conscious, took the axioms of mediation which were unacknowledged and made them visible.

Sometimes It's Just Too Easy

Life in the family isn't for everyone. You work late at night. You risk threats on your person, your reputation, your loved ones. You're always looking over your shoulder. You trust who you can, but you know that, if the situation requires it, you can be hung out to dry.

But if you do what you're told, respect the family, and, above all else, keep your mouth shut, then you'll be all right. Because the family looks out for its own.