Mark Twain: The Badge of Servitude

Scott Eric Kaufman has been organizing and participating in The Valve's ongoing book event on Amanda Claybaugh's The Novel of Purpose. His recent contribution is worth a close read. I'm going to take the opening his reading of the end of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn offers me to follow up on an invitation from Claybaugh herself and say a little bit more about my views on Hawthorne and 19th C reform movements.

In "The Power of Blackness and the Device of Race: On the Compromises of 1850 and 1877," the third chapter of my manuscript, American Studies and the Race for Hawthorne,

I turn to three major nineteenth-century writers who have offered assessments of Hawthorne’s racial politics as rigorous as any professional reviewer or scholar. Specifically, I examine how Herman Melville, in “Hawthorne and His Mosses” (1850), Henry James, in Hawthorne (1879), and Mark Twain, in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), offer implicit readings of Hawthorne’s racial politics, and, in the process, comment on the racial politics of the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Instead of studying Hawthorne’s relation to other major nineteenth-century writers in terms of source, influence, or intertextuality, that is, I examine what certain major responses to and revisions of Hawthorne’s texts reveal about the historical moments in which they were written. After considering how James’s and Melville’s criticism helps specify the race and Hawthorne problem that I identified in the previous two chapters, I turn to the controversial ending of Mark Twain’s novel and its puzzling allusion to the ending of The Scarlet Letter. As we shall see, Herman Melville, Henry James, and Mark Twain together tell a remarkably consistent story--a story that links the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act with the 1877 Tilden-Hayes Agreement.

This is one of my longest and most-involved chapters and I'm considering sending off parts of it to journals this fall, so I won't give it the Chapter 2 treatment (see the "Old News" category for what I'm talking about). But I will give the set-up and the conclusion to my Twain argument. Here are the two passages that begin the Twain section of the chapter, the first from The Scarlet Letter and the second from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

All around there were monuments carved with armorial bearings; and on this simple slab of slate--as the curious investigator may still discern, and perplex himself with the purport--there appeared the semblance of an engraved escutcheon. It bore a device, a herald’s wording of which might serve for a motto and brief description of our now concluded legend; so sombre it is, and relieved only by one ever-glowing point of light gloomier than the shadow:--

“On a field, sable, the letter A, gules.”

“On the scutcheon we’ll have a bend or in the dexter base, a saltire murrey in the fess, with a dog, couchant, for common charge, and under his foot a chain embattled, for slavery, with a chevron vert in a chief engrailed, and three invected lines on a field azure, with the nombril points rampant on a dancette indented; crest, a runaway nigger, sable, with his bundle over his shoulder on a bar sinister; and a couple of gules for supporters, which is you and me; motto, Maggiore fretta, minore atto. Got it out of a book--means, the more haste, the less speed.”

“Geewhillikins,” I says, “but what does the rest of it mean?”

And here's the intro to the Twain section:

Huck Finn is as perplexed by Tom Sawyer’s insistence that Jim inscribe his coat of arms on the wall of his cell at Phelps Farm as he is unsure of that armorial device’s meaning. And he remains as dissatisfied with Tom’s evasion of his questions about the meaning of Jim’s coat of arms--“We ain’t got no time to bother over that”--as he is with Tom’s eventual admission of ignorance--“Oh, I don’t know. But he’s got to have it. All the nobility does” (322). Still, Huck decides to trust Tom and goes along with his efforts to devise a plan “romantical enough” to “set a free nigger free” (294, 358). “Tom said we’d got to,” he reports: “there warn’t no case of a state prisoner not scrabbling his inscription to leave behind, and his coat of arms” (321).

Tom Sawyer’s romantical plan, in which Jim is figured both as nobility and as state prisoner, has been the subject of much critical controversy. But given Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s point that critics of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn have “built an increasingly solid case that the last portion of the novel may be read as a commentary on American race relations in the post-Reconstruction era,” the more productive question now is, what kind of commentary? There is no better way to answer this question, I propose, than to consider the meaning and significance of Jim’s coat of arms. For where it is fairly clear that Tom Sawyer’s motto (“the more haste, the less speed”) could well have been a slogan for the nation’s recent repudiation of Reconstruction, the significance of Huck’s question (“What does the rest of it mean?”) is less clear. As we shall see, answering Huck’s question can help us determine what kind of commentary Mark Twain was making, not only on the racial politics of his own times but also on the author the entire episode seems designed to confront--Nathaniel Hawthorne.

It may seem that Clemens’s transformation of The Scarlet Letter’s heraldic motto, “On a field, sable, the letter A, gules,” into Tom Sawyer’s description of Jim’s coat of arms--“crest, a runaway nigger, sable, with his bundle over his shoulder on a bar sinister; and a couple of gules for supporters, which is you and me”--is simply a joke at Hawthorne’s expense, a parody of the romance in the name of American realism, a rejection of Hawthorne’s gloom in the name of American humor. But if it is a joke, it is an eminently practical one.

And here's how I conclude the section:

In the end, then, Jim’s coat of arms suggests the source of Mark Twain’s critique of America in 1885. Whatever racist hatreds and pleasures the coat of arms encodes, it is also a critique of the nation’s turn against Reconstruction and turn toward race as a mark of distinction and badge of servitude. By making Jim’s coat of arms harken back to Hester’s ambiguous position between enslavement and freedom, Clemens points to the bitter resentments, frivolous emancipationist impulses, and uncomprehending perplexity that went into the construction of race. But even as he draws on Hawthorne’s imagery, Clemens also criticizes his politics, for the final implication of the allusions to The Scarlet Letter is to link the Fugitive Slave Act with the Tilden-Hayes Agreement. Mark Twain implies that a similar political coalition to the one that produced the Compromise of 1850 resulted in the Compromise of 1877; he quite consciously superimposes antebellum and post-Reconstruction ideologies of race in order to suggest that a new form of racial oppression as insidious in its own way as slavery was taking shape in the wake of Reconstruction. To borrow a figure Clemens might have appreciated, then, a major message of the evasion scene in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is that the same horses that Hawthorne backed in 1850 were pulling ahead again in 1877.

What happens in the middle is a survey of the uses of heraldry in Hawthorne's fiction and in The Scarlet Letter (see my posts in the categories for The Scarlet Letter and Beloved for some arguments at CitizenSE that draw on this section of the chapter); a consideration of the similarities and differences between Hawthorne's and Clemens's characters that the quoted passages from both novels suggest; a close reading of the coat of arms itself and of Kemble's illustration of it for the three political narratives inscribed in it; a comparison of Tom's, Huck's, and Jim's responses to it and them; and soon, a consideration of John Edward Bruce's journalism and activism for the light it sheds on Clemens and Hawthorne.

So, how does this connect to Scott's post and Amanda's book? Come back tomorrow, fearless readers!

After the Great War: Revolution and Constitution (1763-1815)

Continuing from here and here, I really need to expand on this sentence from my Sendai talk:

As Conde and Mukherjee hint, the aftershocks of England’s catastrophic victory over France in the great war of the eighteenth century paradoxically created the conditions for the age of revolutions across the hemisphere.

Because it's not enough to be "no doubt the profoundest Hawthorne blogger for at least one millenium to come, or two," I have to colonize all of American (in the continental and hemispheric sense as well as the national one) literature in a grand new metanarrative of not-just-U.S. literary history, too.

But the problem is I have to go to a party with the new 21st Century Program students and my faculty associate's cigarette is only going to last so long.

So let me just give a hat tip to Thomas Bender's A Nation Among Nations and thank my students in my Intro to American Studies and Postcolonial Hawthorne classes from the fall semester for getting me thinking that what we call the French and Indian Wars and what others call the Seven Years' War might just be to the eighteenth century what WW II was for the twentieth. More on this later!

From Narratorial Racial Aesthetics to Authorial Racial Politics (Part III)

For earlier posts in this series, click the "Old News" label. We're jumping right in today at the end of Chapter 2!

***

So where has this exploration of the narrator’s explicit racism and implicit racialism gotten us? Has it helped us answer the question of Hawthorne’s racism, or only raised its stakes? Assuming for the moment that Hawthorne shares his narrator’s views, is our only response that in matters of race as opposed to aesthetics, Hawthorne consistently “reinforc[ed] wrong by a blindness which seems the very counterpart of his clear vision in his own realm”? Or has the strict separation between politics and aesthetics implicit in this answer been rendered untenable, given the intimate interrelation between the picturesque and racialism we have just witnessed in “Old News”? But is the assumption that Hawthorne shares all his narrator’s views warranted? Might he only share some of them--or perhaps even none? If Hawthorne is neither as racist nor as obtuse as his narrator, could he actually be seeking to undercut his views? If so, which ones?

We may begin to answer these questions by emphasizing the author/narrator distinction and assuming that Hawthorne was not simply expressing his own views in “Old News.” Indeed, recent trends in Hawthorne scholarship encourage us to believe that this may not be an arbitrary assumption. As Allison Easton has characterized the tales and sketches comprising Hawthorne's early unpublished collection, The Story Teller,

The artist figures of the early 1830s are . . . critically presented[;] their views are tested and their poses not necessarily validated. These narrative figures are personae adopted as deliberate exercises in point of view, much as the narrator in ‘Old News’ opts to tell the last part of the sketch through the eyes and voice of an old Tory. This strategy is further developed in the sketches in particular, which set out to explore how the scenes would look through different people’s eyes.

Easton’s survey of Hawthorne’s earliest fiction suggests that at the very least he was exploring different narrative personae for purposes of artistic exploration and that at most he was creating different narrative persona for particular historiographical or political ends.

A rapid survey of early historical sketches not connected with the Story Teller project that nevertheless engage colonial American history in a manner similar to “Old News” illustrates the degree to which the attitudes of Hawthorne’s narrators determine the way the same events are reported. The Puritanic narrator of “Dr. Bullivant” (1831), like the anti-Puritan narrator of “Old News,” focuses on transformations in the American colonies, but this time in the 1670s, which he describes in terms of the traditional narrative of declension, blaming the escalating “degeneracy” of the times on the “increasing commercial importance of the colonies, whither a new set of emigrants followed unworthily in the track of the pure-hearted Puritans” (36-37). By contrast, the anti-aristocratic narrator of “Sir William Pepperell” (1833) attributes the corruption of the Puritan errand not to the 1670s but to the period of the French and Indian Wars, describing the effects of the war in precisely the same terms that the pro-aristocratic narrator of “Old News” would describe the Revolutionary War (170-171). Similarly, Hawthorne would return to the period of the French and Indian Wars in “Old Ticonderoga” (1836) and “A Bell’s Biography” (1837), treating the landscape in much the same way as he treated the colonial newspapers in “Old News” in the former travel narrative (385-389) and utilizing a vigorously pro-democracy narrator in the latter who emphasizes the equality of man (480-486). And all the events in “Old News” are reported in Grandfather’s Chair (1841)--including a similar description of New England slavery--except that here it is the 1730s rather than the 1750s that are characterized as Anglophilic and luxurious, and in no complimentary terms: “the simplicity of the good old Puritan times was fast disappearing” in the face of “a pompous and artificial mode of life, among those who could afford it.”

If this brief survey warrants the claim that Hawthorne’s views do not completely coincide with the narrator’s in “Old News,” then a range of possibilities emerges. Perhaps, like the narrator in the third section, Hawthorne is trying in the first section to “exemplify, without softening a single prejudice proper to the character which we assumed,” that those who held to the racial attitudes of eighteenth-century New England “were men greatly to be pitied, and often worthy of our sympathy” (274). Perhaps Hawthorne is attempting to unsettle his anti-slavery readers with the same kind of temporal leaps that the narrator describes at the opening of the third section, when he moved from immersing himself in the “monarchical and aristocratic sentiments” of the 1750s to examining newspapers from the 1770s, in which “such sentiments had long been deemed a sin and shame” (269). Perhaps, that is, Hawthorne is trying to immerse his readers in the racist and pro-slavery sentiments of the 1730s, so that they, too, feel “as if the leap were more than figurative” and come away temporarily “tinctured . . . with antique prejudices”––in other words, so that they better understand the force and appeal of such sentiments (269). Perhaps, then, just as the narrator is trying to exonerate loyalists in the late 1770s, Hawthorne is also trying to make his readers experience how “pardonable” it was for Puritans to have been slave-holders in the late 1730s (274). In this view, Hawthorne would see his role as akin to the narrator’s--to defend unpopular past views from uncharitable presentist readings.

Or perhaps what he is trying to do is more subtle and less supportive of the narrator’s views. Perhaps, that is, Hawthorne is dramatizing the way in which the narrator moves from trying to gain an understanding of a position that was scoffed at in nineteenth-century New England, to sympathizing with it, and finally to advocating it. Perhaps, then, what happens in the first section of “Old News” is a similar, but implicit, version of the process the narrator explicitly glosses at the opening of the third section: “Our late course of reading has tinctured us, for the moment, with antique prejudices” (269). According to this view, Hawthorne sees his role as demonstrating the power of reading to contaminate temporarily the narrator’s--and by extension, any reader’s--thinking. Rather than sharing his narrator’s sympathies for and clumsy advocacy of eighteenth-century New England slavery, he is simply attempting to show how the narrator came to hold such views.

Or perhaps Hawthorne is more subversive than analytical toward his narrator’s perspective. Perhaps he is suggesting that the racism of the first section is precisely one of those “antique prejudices” to which the narrator’s problematic historicist proclivities make him particularly susceptible. Perhaps, that is, “Old News” is a critique of the narrator’s style of and attitude toward historicization. In his effort to find instances of merriment and beauty to brighten his view of what he imagines as a Puritan-dominated 1730s, he is willing to excuse, and indeed aestheticize, the slavery in which “the merriest part of the population” is held, seeing it as “a patriarchal, and almost a beautiful, peculiarity of the times” (256, 257). According to this view, Hawthorne would be emphasizing the contrast between the narrator’s sarcastic invocation of beauty in the third section (“It is the beauty of war, for men to commit mutual havoc with undisturbed good humor” [274]) with his earlier willingness to see New England slavery as beautiful--in order to imply that the narrator himself is committing “havoc with undisturbed good humor.” Perhaps, then, the joke is really on the narrator, for, like the “specimens of New-England humor” he dismisses as “wearisome” (252), his own attempts at ethnic humor are also “laboriously light and lamentably mirthful; as if some very sober person, in his zeal to be merry, were dancing a jig to the tune of a funeral-psalm” (252). Perhaps, that is, Hawthorne is framing the narrator’s own “zeal to be merry” in the first section of “Old News” as something akin to dancing a jig to the tune of the funeral-psalm of racist enslavement and supplantation.

Perhaps.

***

To be continued....

Just a New Way of Periodizing (and Conceptualizing) "American" Literature, That's All; or Adventures in Lazy Blogging, Part II: The Sequel

Remember those extravagant claims I alluded to making in my Sendai talk? Well, here's the most extravagant of all of them. With its implications.... Hey, end on a high note, right? (The talk, not the blog--don't get your hopes up!)

***

What, then, is the new understanding of U.S. literary history that the works of Anzaldua, Butler, Conde, Jones, Marshall, Morrison, Mukherjee, Silko, and Yamashita make possible? I identify six periods in U.S. and new world history from Columbus to the present: 1) New Worlds for All: Encounters and Plantation (1492-1776); 2) After the Great War: Revolution and Constitution (1763-1815); 3) Manifest Destiny: Expansion and Consolidation (1803-1896); 4) A New Nation: Modernization and Migration (1877-1952); 5) The American Century: Hegemony and Transformation (1944-?); 6) Contemporary U.S. Literatures: Transnationalism and Globalization (?-). While the specific dates and names of each period will vary for each nation in the new world, the processes identified in the subtitles will remain fairly consistent across the hemisphere.

As Anzaldua, Conde, Silko, and Yamashita show, encounters between European explorers, traders, and settlers with indigenous Americans and with enslaved Africans took place across the hemisphere, and different kinds of plantation complexes emerged. As Conde and Mukherjee hint, the aftershocks of England’s catastrophic victory over France in the great war of the eighteenth century paradoxically created the conditions for the age of revolutions across the hemisphere. As Butler, Jones, Morrison, Silko, and Yamashita suggest, newly independent nation-states across the Americas dealt with the conflicts that came with expansion and consolidation, including border wars, civil wars, and Indian wars. As Jones, Morrison, Silko, and Yamashita reveal, most nation-states in the region then embarked on a process of modernization, which included a strengthened central government, industrialization, urbanization, and immigration. As Anzaldua, Marshall, and Silko suggest, the U.S., as one of the most successful modernizers in the hemisphere, and rivalled only by England, Germany, Japan, and Russia in the world, established itself as a rising power during this period, which meant that its neighbors got a preview of the American Century well before the Middle East and Asia did.

Of course, these nine writers represent a fraction of the U.S. literatures that make possible this new understanding of national and hemispheric histories and that lead me to suggest that the key processes of our time are competing versions of transnationalism and globalization. Also, even all the U.S. literatures that could be linked to these processes are only a small fraction of the literatures of each nation-state in the hemisphere, many of which represented, responded to, and influenced past and present processes quite differently than U.S. literatures have.

With this in mind, the periodization scheme I have laid out here today points the way to a large-scale collective project for Americanists around the world: understanding the interrelations, interactions, and interweavings among the literatures of the new world; mapping the ways in which the intranational, international, and transnational network of U.S. literatures links up with those of other literatures of the Americas; making sense of the juxtapositions, parallels, and other patterns that such a mapping makes possible, in a way that forges new understandings of the relations between literary and other histories; and trying to settle the questions hovering about the end of the American Century and the emergence of something new from it. This is a huge project, but if we want to make sense of the past, present, and especially the future of literatures in and outside the U.S., if we truly believe that another world is possible than that of the American Century, this is what I believe scholars of my generation should be working on in coming decades.

***

So yes, read the nine novels listed in the labels below and get a new understanding of what constitutes American literature and how to organize its study, plus a new perspective on the history of the world since Columbus....

A Few Crazy Ideas

My weekend posting is going to have to be shorter and crappier than usual in the foreseeable future, as I switch back to a regular work schedule on weekdays starting next Monday, which means both onechan and imoto will be needing more attention when I'm back home.

Have I mentioned here that in the last two months, imoto has started standing/cruising/walking (at least when you hold her hands or when she makes her way to a stroller and starts using it as a walker!), clapping, waving goodbye, babbling (from "emma" to "mama" and this kind of "dadadadadadadada" thing that may well be addressed to me, not to mention "upffffff" and screeches of delight, frustration, or outrage of all kinds--quite a step up from crying to be held when I come home from work, which was the first big development in her relationship with me), teethed her way to her (at last count) first 4 teeth coming in (two bottom middle ones first, then the corresponding two top one)? Or that onechan has been moving her ratio of "I'm a big girl"/"I'm a baybeeeeeee" closer to 4-1 over the same time period? (Could it be that the Uh Oh Diva Girl is figuring out that imitating her younger sister is not a winning strategy for a three-year-old? Could it be that going to the Baptist yochien and seeing how all the older kids act is good for her? Signs point to "yes.") She's also gotten really into drawing and is doing a lot of cool arts things in her yochien, plus making some new close frends. My point here is that we're right in the middle of our favorite baby phase (from rolling over to walking and talking) for imoto and witnessing a major transformation in onechan's life (the end of the terrible twos, which we thought happened last spring, but never underestimate the intelligence of a two-year-old--she was perfectly capable of figuring out what worked for the atarashii akachan and using it for herself [but for a year?!!!--yup]) in the CitizenSE household, and I want to be there for as much of it as I can.

So, a list today. Projects I'm considering for the post-Fulbright future:

1) EDITING: Reading Hawthorne in Showa Japan has a nice ring to it, eh? Here's the plan: I contact the NH societies of the U.S. and Japan before leaving Fukuoka with a proposal to edit a collection of essays that translates/collects representative work from the most influential Hawthornists of Japan during this period (asking the NH Society of Japan to do the selecting and share the bill for translating with the NH Society of the U.S.) and publishes short responses from the most influential Hawthornists of the U.S. (as selected by the NH Society of the U.S.). My contribution would be coordination and an introductory essay that compares/contrasts the developments of Hawthorne Studies in the two nations during this time period.

2) CONFERENCE: I want to organize an international conference on the cultural politics of U.S. literatures and literary criticism in Japan. Obviously, one of the big turns in U.S. literary studies of the past couple of generations has been toward historicizing the reception and cultural work of "classic American literature" and of tracking the politics of literary reputation and the formation of what's taken to be the "traditional" American literary canon. This has extended in the U.S. into studies that do the same kinds of analyses, not of American literature, but of Americanist literary criticism. To give a few examples of famous people doing both kinds of work, think Tompkins on gender, Lauter on Melville and modernism, Pease on the Cold War, Kaplan on U.S. imperialism...the list goes on and on. So what I envision is finding out who's doing that same kind of work in Japan and around the world by organizing an international conference on the subject. By casting my net wide--inviting work from the late Tokugawa period to the present, rather than focusing on a specific period--I get to highlight the best new work in and on Japan in the U.S. Obviously this would be of interest to postcolonial studies, as well, given Said, Spivak, Bhabha in general and specifically Gauri Viswanathan's trailblazing work on English Studies in India, Annika Hohenthal's work on English in India, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan's "Learning from Said" (in Politics and Culture 1 [2004]), and so on.

3) RESEARCH: I need to get my language abilities in Japanese to the point where I can read literary criticism in Japanese passably well to do this, but I want to eventually be able to contribute my own little pieces to the larger work that the conference would feature. Given my primary specialty, I would most likely focus on the cultural work of studies of antebellum U.S. literatures, but I would have to be flexible and see what the most revealing literary criticism turns out to be. What I'm particularly interested in is the range of responses by Japanese Americanists to the U.S. occupation of Japan and how the politics of American Studies in Japan relates to--and what it may reveal about--larger debates in Japanese society over American culture over the course of the Showa period.

So there you have it. I'm going back to a 4/3 teaching load in August, doing my best to avoid immersing myself in service as I consciously chose to do when I first got the job (on which more later), and still have three major and several minor projects to complete without a leave in the foreseeable future (having decided to use mine with the Fulbright, rather than save it for my return), but hey, a guy can dream, right? Or rather, a guy can get back to work for the next 5 months and see how close he can come to wrapping up the ongoing projects....

On Turning a Talk into an Article

A while back, I announced with little fanfare here that I've made a .pdf version of my Hawaii talk on Marshall, Devi, trauma, and mourning, complete with handouts, available to CitizenSE's legions of adoring fans. To depart from my usual habit of launching into close readings here, I want to talk a bit more generally about revision and publication plans for this piece.

One of the first things you'll realize if you read the whole thing is that I don't cite readings of either work from any scholars, critics, or theorists--much less mention the name of anyone besides the authors and their characters. If you've read any of my other work, or heard any of my previous talks, you'll know what a departure that was for me. If you've even just read a couple of my posts here, you probably can guess how difficult it was for me to do without close readings or citations for fifteen minutes. Of course, I did allude to controversies within and over postcolonial studies in general and particular debates over postcolonial identities (the theme of the panel), but I correctly figured that the panel wasn't going to draw too many people with any great expertise in the subjects I was addressing in the talk, so I kept my allusions issue-focused and accessibly-worded, so as not to bog down my larger argument. As I mentioned before, overall I'm happy with my choices and think the talk turned out more than halfway decent, despite all that I wanted to do that I didn't allow myself to do in it. (I've just finished a draft of an 18-page opus in an area completely, well, almost completely outside my specialty for a non-academic audience that I'll be revising over the next three weeks and delivering on the 24th, and all I can say is that those extra 10 pages make all the difference!)

The main reason why I didn't start citing other people in the talk is that I wouldn't know where or how to stop. While my prime sources were Cathy Caruth's brilliantly edited and introduced collection of essays, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, and David Kazanjian's and David Eng's equally accomplished and more recent essay collection, Loss: The Politics of Mourning, the list of people doing serious work on trauma and mourning is long and imposing--and the debates are serious, intricate, and difficult to follow. There has also been a lot of great work done on Marshall and a smaller amount, though perhaps even better, work done on Devi. Plus there's the larger traditions of critical and theoretical work on the Caribbean and on South Asia, the history of attempts to put marxism and psychoanalysis in dialogue with each other, and the ways both relate to the debates within and over postcolonial studies. So figuring out how to elegantly bring all that work to bear on developing and refining my own arguments is the challenge of turning this talk into an article.

Here's how confident I am in my larger project, though: I really can see this as a PMLA paper. Or, if I want to speak more directly to postcolonial studies folks, I could go for one of the journals that Amardeep Singh has provided links to--perhaps, in the spirit of aiming high, Ariel (it's too literary to aim for a journal like Cultural Critique, I think, and probably not Critical Inquiry's cup of tea). The point is, the eventual paper will be shaped by my understanding of its audience (first, the editors of the journal I shoot for, and only later their readers)--so it could become almost anything. What attracts me about PMLA is the potential to reach non-specialists as well as specialists, but assuming I'm successful, I would lose out on the street cred of getting into Ariel. I think at this point trying to jam it into the co-edited collection on trauma and melancholy that's been going nowhere fast for far too long is not a good idea. The point is to try to break the peer-review barrier!

So if anyone wants to give me any suggestions on the talk-->article process or even the talk/article itself, I'm all ears. I'm done with grading by the end of next week and working on another talk I'll be giving in Sendai in the first week of March while we're visiting family in Chiba, so I don't foresee turning serious attention to expanding the talk into an article until after we get back from Sendai.

This is definitely one of those old ideas of mine that's still new, so it would be smart to take advantage of a great teaching schedule from April to July to send out a big article to a major peer-reviewed journal and hopefully snag a good publication during my teaching leave. Because at the rate the book manuscript is (not) going, if I finish it next summer it will be a miracle, especially given the 4-3 load that awaits me just three weeks after I return to the States from Japan!

Now back to our regularly scheduled program of close readings and vain attempts to build a readership for the obscurest outpost of blogoramaville.

From Hawthorne's Wilderness Field to Morrison's Jungle Clearing

On Thursday, I ran out of time before I could explain how Morrison's changing Hawthorne's Puritans' encroaching and racialized wilderness into the "new whitefolks' jungle," the "secret spread" of which was "hidden, secret, except once in a while when you could hear its mumbling in places like 124," connects to the voices Young Goodman Brown and Stamp Paid hear. Well, it seems to me Morrison is linking Hawthorne's concern with the problem of evil during the 17th C to her own explorations of the problem in the 19th C. The Black Man preaches in "Young Goodman Brown," 'Depending upon one another's hearts, ye had still hoped, that virtue were not all a dream. Now ye are undeceived! Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness. Welcome, again, my children, to the communion of your race!' Morrison takes lines like these and uses them to address the temptation to believe that whites are devils or inherently evil that spans black intellectual history from Olaudah Equiano to Malcolm X and beyond. If you think I'm exaggerating, check out the figure of Baby Suggs, who does her own preaching in a forest clearing but who ends her life a Goodman Brown-esque figure of gloom and despair.

Among the voices Stamp Paid hears when he approaches 124 is Baby Suggs's; his discovery of the young girl's ribbon in the Licking River exhausted his marrow in a way that lead him to believe he understood her better than he did while he was trying to argue her out of the deep depression that lead her to take to her bed and contemplate colors, searching for something harmless in the world.

Fingering a ribbon and smelling skin, Stamp Paid approaches 124 again.

"My marrow is tired," he thought. "I been tired all my days, bone-tired, but now it's in the marrow. Must be what Baby Suggs felt when she lay down and thought abut color for the rest of her life." When she told him what her aim was, he thought she was ashamed and too shamed to say so. Her authority in the pulpit, her dance in the Clearing, her powerful Call (she didn't deliver sermons or preach--insisting she was too ignorant for that--she called and the hearing heard)--all that had been mocked and rebuked by the bloodspill in her backyard. God puzzled her and she was too ashamed of Him to say so.

Consider their argument, which echoes in Stamp Paid's ears long after Baby Suggs's death:

"You blaming God," he said. "That's what you are doing."

"No, Stamp, I ain't."

"You saying the whitefolks won? That what you saying?"

"I'm saying they came in my yard."

"You saying nothing counts."

"I'm saying they came in my yard."

"Sethe's the one did it."

"And if she hadn't?"

"You saying God give up? Nothing left for us but to pour out our own blood?"

"I'm saying they came in my yard."

"You punishing Him, ain't you."

"Not like He punish me."

"You can't do that, Baby. It ain't right."

"Was a time I knew what that was."

"You still know."

"What I know is what I see a nigger woman hauling shoes."

But Morrison, like Hawthorne, links the theological and the psychological, the political and the personal:

Now, eight years after her contentious funeral and eighteen years after the Misery, he changed his mind. Her marrow was tired and it was a testimony to the heart that fed it that it took eight years to meet finally the color she was hankering after. The onslaught of her fatigue, like his, was sudden, but lasted for years. After sixty years of losing children to the people who chewed up her life and spit it out like a fish bone; after five years of freedom given to her by her last child, who bought her future with his, exchanged it, so to speak, so she could have one whether he did or not--to lose him too; to acquire a daughter and grandchildren and see that daughter slay the children (or try to); to belong to a community of other free Negroes--to love and be loved by them, to counsel and be counseled, protect and be protected, feed and fed--and then to have that community step back and hold itself at a distance--well, it could wear out even a Baby Suggs, holy....

Trying to get to 124 for the second time now, he regretted that conversation: the high tone he took; his refusal to see the effect of marrow weariness in a woman he believed was a mountain. Now, too late, he understood her. The heart that pumped out love, the mouth that spoke the Word, didn't count. They came in her yard anyway and she could not approve or condemn Sethe's rough choice. One or the other might have saved her, but beaten up by the claims of both, she went to bed. The whitefolks had tired her out at last.

Well, once again I've run out of time, so this will have to suffice as a quotation dump if not actually an idea. More Thursday!

How Did Faith's Ribbon End Up in Stamp Paid's Hands?

So finally I have a chance to share one of the Morrison-Hawthorne ideas I'm most excited about, and which, more than 10 years since it first came to me, is still original, I believe. The only other time I tried to share some of this was at a job talk almost exactly 9 years ago and people there seemed to think it was new, even if they didn't choose to make me an offer. Since then, although I've taught it in 1999 and 2003 twice, I've been too nervous someone would beat me to it in print to even check if anyone had (makes a lot of sense, right?). In any case, I think the following idea is "new": correct me if I'm wrong!

As you can tell from my previous Hawthorne-Morrison posts, I'm particularly interested in Book 2 of Beloved, which frames and then delivers the "unspeakable thoughts, unspoken" of the women of 124 (and, as I'll show, not only of those women). As I've devoted a few posts to the idea that Beloved is possessed not only by the spirit of Sethe's "crawling-already baby" but also by the spirits of those who died in the middle passage, I want to turn our attention from the monologue to the frame, and particularly to the figure of Stamp Paid, who hasn't gotten nearly the critical attention his place in the novel suggests he deserves. Let's start with a simple question: where did he get the ribbon he holds as he attempts to check in on Sethe, Denver, and Beloved after Paul D has left 124? As this post's title suggests, the answer is going to take us to "Young Goodman Brown." But first it takes us to the Licking River:

Tying his flatbed up on the bank of the Licking River, securing it the best he could, he caught sight of something red on its bottom. Reaching for it, he thought it was a cardinal feather stuck to his boat. He tugged and what came loose in his hand was a red ribbon knotted around a curl of wet woolly hair, clinging stil to its bit of scalp. He untied the ribbon and put it in his pocket, dropped the curl in the weeds. On his way home, he stopped, short of breath and dizzy. He waited until the spell passed before continuing on his way. A moment later, his breath left him again. This time he sat down by a fence. Rested, he got to his feet, but before he took a step he turned to look back down the road he was travelling and said, to its frozen mud and the river beyond, "What are these people? You tell me, Jesus. What are they?"

Before proceeding further with this key passage, let me turn to a similarly important passage from "Young Goodman Brown," one that, it turns out, also involves a ribbon:

But something fluttered lightly down through the air, and caught on the branch of a tree. The young man seized it, and beheld a pink ribbon.

'My Faith is gone!' cried he, after one stupefied moment. 'There is no good on earth; and sin is but a name. Come, devil! for to thee is this world given.'

This is the moment that Goodman Brown, "maddened with despair," sets himself practically flying down the forest-road he has been travelling, into "the heart of the dark wilderness," heading through the "haunted forest" toward the witches' sabbath presided over by a "dark figure" or "sable form" that he had originally set out on his "errand" into the "unconverted wilderness" precisely to reject and turn back from. Morrison has many figures for what triggers a similar despair that grips her characters; for Stamp Paid, as for Goodman Brown, it is a ribbon. Let's go back to Beloved to see what I'm talking about:

Eighteen seventy-four and whitefolks were still on the loose. Whole towns wiped clean of Negroes, eighty-seven lynchings in one year alone in Kentucky; four colored schools burned to the ground; grown men whipped like children; children whipped like adults; black women raped by the crew; property taken; necks broken. He smelled skin, skin and hot blood. The skin was one thing, but human blood cooked in a lynch fire was a whole other thing. The stench stank. Stank up off the pages of the North Star, out of the mouths of witnesses, etched in crooked handwriting in letters delivered by hand. Detailed in documents and petitions full of whereas and presented to any legal body who'd read it, it stank. But none of that had worn out his marrow. None of that. It was the ribbon.

Faith's pink ribbon has turned red, stained by the blood of the black victims of white terrorism during the Reconstruction period. Rather than being ambiguous specter evidence, as the "something" that Young Goodman Brown seizes, beholds, and takes to be damning testimony to his wife's "infidelity" and indeed to the "innate depravity" of all humanity, Stamp Paid's ribbon is all too real, its testimony as speechless and unheard as any of the more formal attempts to stop the deviltry of the KKK and similar terrorist organizations in the postbellum South. Hawthorne scholars tend to read "Young Goodman Brown" as a coded commentary on the Salem Witch Trials and the dangers it taught of taking specter evidence to be real; I believe Morrison is trying to suggest through her "Young Goodman Brown" allusions in Beloved that the violence of the middle passage, slavery, and Reconstruction should be seen as a much great national tragedy. To see the full scale and scope of Morrison's coded suggestion, however, we have to follow this ribbon further, connecting it both to Stamp Paid's and Baby Suggs's despair and to the voices surrounding 124 in Book 2. But the girls are up from their nap, and duties domestic and professional call. Next week, then.

Trauma, Mourning, Marshall, Devi

One of the great things about being an academic is that you can do a lot of work in your head. Say imoto--who I may start referring to here as Giggling Science Girl (because she giggles at the drop of the hat and has amazing powers of concentration and observation for an 8-month-old) or Standing-Already Girl (uh, thinking through the Morrison reference there, that would be a no) or maybe just Grabby Girl (nothing is safe from her now that she can crawl and sometimes half-stand half-balance on chairs and small tables or the kotatsu I love to work on because it's heated)--wakes you up at 2 am, but it's too cold in the house to seriously contemplate getting out of bed and firing up the computer, the space heater, and the kotatsu, yet in the time it took to change her diaper and go to the bathroom the cold woke you up enough to get you thinking about everything you have to do the next day, so rather than aimlessly stressing, you can do something productive like come up with an outline for the conference paper you've been working on.

Normally I don't outline when I write. I write down a lot of notes and do a lot of brainstorming by hand, then type them and key notes from my research process into a Word document, type out some key quotations I know I want to use in the paper, and agonize over my introductory paragraph or three until I feel some confidence about my thesis, and then start into the body. When I start again the next day, I edit what I wrote to get warmed up, then pick up where I left off. This process continues until I finish the first draft. Then the serious editing starts. But more on my inefficient and time-consuming writing process later.

For this paper, however, I have to be much more disciplined than usual. Here's what the panel looks like:

Friday
Time: 3:00 - 4:30 PM 1/12/2007 Room: Waikiki III (Marriott)
Session Topic: Postcolonial Identities
Session Chair: Waggaman, Beatrice

Decolonization and Surrealism in Aimé Césaire’s Two Plays: "A Season in the Congo" and "Tragedy of King Christophe”
Waggaman, Beatrice Villanova University

Literary Vestiges of France in the Mississippi Valley
Metzidakis, Stamos Washington University in Saint Louis

Traumatic Displacements and Militant Mourning: Paule Marshall’s The Chosen Place, The Timeless People and Mahasweta Devi’s “Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha”
Simon, Bruce Kyushu University

The Colonial Poems
Puch-Bouwman, Jen The University of the South Pacific

Going third in a 90-minute panel means I have to keep it to 15 minutes, because I can count on the two people ahead of me to go over time (nothing personal, everyone does it) and I don't want the person going last to hate me for the rest of my life.

So here's the outline for the paper:

Outline (15 minutes, 7 pages)
I. Intro (1): key issues, debates, claims
II. Structural Similarities (2): the chart I'm preparing will allow me to do a faster plot summary than usual b/c I'll let my audience read the details
III. Detail Similarities (1): these are bonus details that allow me to clarify I'm not talking about influence and transition into the next, bridge section
IV. Differences (4): summarize via works' different perspectives on and uses of trauma/testimony and mourning/melancholia, using chart and quotes handouts--again, I can let my audience read the details, so I can keep this short
V. Significance of Intertextual Dialogue (3): I can use this section to spell out what I mean by "traumatic displacements" and "militant mourning" and make a case for the theoretical significance of the two works
VI. Stakes of Dialogue (3): the two works together provide a meeting-space for thinking through key issues facing activists and intellectuals today--a space for debate not consensus
VII. Conclusion (1): implications for postcolonial studies, black studies, marxism

Well, this is probably meaningless to anyone but me, but I did promise I'd give the update on the conference paper today. Little did I know when I made the promise that our flight leaves 6 am tomorrow morning, which means we have to get up at 4:30 am, or that the three-year-old's formal photos we put off taking until today would be a two-hour extravaganza, complete with hair (lots of it), make-up (lipstick only!), costumes (kimono and yellow princess dress), and lighting--or that the process would be so fascinating and horrifying at the same time that I had to get it all down on video"tape" and thus would be unable to do any real thinking about the paper during it--or that it would go on so long I'd have little time to write this evening. Long story short, it's time to put the girls to bed! Next post from Kyushu!

How Pearl and Beloved Show Why Water Imagery Matters

Well, as predicted, I missed last Saturday. Today I hope to have time to get into some passages from The Scarlet Letter that I overlooked for a long time, but which I now believe hold one key to understanding the prose poem that is Beloved's monologue in Toni Morrison's Beloved. So for those (imaginary) readers looking forward to a post on heraldry in Hawthorne's works and its relation to race, I'll try to devote a Close Reading Tuesday to that topic. [Update: mission accomplished].And for those (hypothetical) readers interested in what a real Intertextual Thursday post would look like, I'll try to oblige with a post that goes beyond noting parallels between characters and plot elements in The Scarlet Letter and Beloved to actually consider what follows from them [Update: mission only somewhat and tangentially accomplished, but not on Hawthorne and Morrison].

Today, though, let's start, as I like to do with brainstorming-type writing, with a quotation--or rather, a set of quotations, the first two from The Scarlet Letter and the last from Beloved.

Hester bade little Pearl run down to the margin of the water, and play with the shells and tangled seaweed, until she should have talked awhile with yonder gatherer of herbs. So the child flew away like a bird, and, making bare her small white feet, went pattering along the moist margin of the sea. Here and there, she came to a full stop, and peeped curiously into a pool, left by the retiring tide as a mirror for Pearl to see her face in. Forth peeped at her, out of the pool, with dark, glistening curls around her head, and an elf-smile in her eyes, the image of a little maid, whom Pearl, having no other playmate, invited to take her hand and run a race with her. But the visionary little maid, on her part, beckoned likewise, as if to say,--"This is a better place! Come thou into the pool!" And Pearl, stepping in, mid-leg deep, beheld her own white feet at the bottom; while, out of a still lower depth, came the gleam of a kind of fragmentary smile, floating to and fro in the agitated water.

At first, as already told, she had flirted fancifully with her own image in a pool of water, beckoning the phantom forth, and--as it declined to venture--seeking a passage for herself into its sphere of impalpable earth and unattainable sky. Soon finding, however, that either she or the image was unreal, she turned elsewhere for better pastime.

Down by the stream in back of 124 her footprints come and go, come and go. They are so familiar. Should a child, an adult place his feet in them, they will fit. Take them out and they disappear as though nobody ever walked there.

By and by all trace is gone, and what is forgotten is not only the footprints but the water too and what it is down there. The rest is weather. Not the breath of the disremembered and unaccounted for, but wind in the eaves, or spring ice thawing too quickly. Just weather. Certainly no clamor for a kiss.

Beloved.

As this trio of quotations should hint to you, I'm going to try to draw some connections between Pearl and Beloved in this post--specifically between Pearl's reflection and the mystery of who Beloved is and where she came from. For I believe that Hawthorne's representation of Pearl influenced Morrison's characterization of Beloved as well as Denver.

Recall that the narrator of The Scarlet Letter repeatedly emphasizes Hester's dressing Pearl in an outfit that makes her seem to be "the scarlet letter in another form; the scarlet letter endowed with life!" Like the scarlet letter, Pearl is represented as fiery and vengeful. When the Puritan children, taking time away from their usual pastimes of "playing at going to church, perchance; or at scourging Quakers; or taking scalps in a sham-fight with the Indians; or scaring one another with freaks of imitative witchcraft," decide to torment Hester and Pearl (in one of the [unintentionally?] funniest lines in the novel, one says, "Behold, verily, there is the woman of the scarlet letter; and, of a truth, moreover, there is the likeness of the scarlet letter running along by her side! Come, therefore, and let us fling mud at them!"), Pearl's response, "after frowning, stamping her foot, and shaking her hand with a variety of threatening gestures," is to suddenly "rush at the knot of her enemies, and put them all to flight." The narrator notes then that "She resembled, in her fierce pursuit of them, an infant pestilence,--the scarlet fever, or some such half-fledged angel of judgment,--whose mission was to punish the sins of the rising generation."

For Ella in Beloved, Beloved too is a symbol of sin and retribution:

When Ella heard 124 was occupied by something-or-other beating up on Sethe, it infuriated her and gave her another opportunity to measure what could very well be the devil himself against "the lowest yet." There was also something very personal in her fury. Whatever Sethe had done, Ella didn't like the idea of past errors taking possession of the present. Sethe's crime was staggering and her pride outstripped even that; but she could not countenance the possibility of sin moving on in the house, unleashed and sassy.

But Pearl and Beloved are much more than the symbols others make of them. Some (including Sethe and Denver) believe Beloved to be Sethe's daughter "in another form," the baby ghost that was haunting 124 before Paul D's arrival "endowed with life." (Although Denver tells Paul D, "At times, I think she was--more.") Paul D is tempted to believe Stamp Paid's supposition that Beloved may be a girl who was "locked up in a house with a whiteman over by Deer Creek. Found him dead last summer and the girl gone.... Folks say he had her in there since she was a pup." But Paul D isn't satisfied with this theory. In conversation with Stamp Paid, he says, "She reminds me of something. Something, look like, I'm supposed to remember." And upon his return to 124 he realizes that "Something is missing.... Something larger than the people who lived there. Something more than Beloved or the red light. He can't put his finger on it, but it seems, for a moment, that just beyond his knowing is the glare of an outside thing that embraces while it accuses." So just who or what is Beloved? Where does she comes from? What does she want?

One way to begin answering these questions is to note that unlike Pearl in the previous SL passage, Beloved doesn't rush at her enemies, but instead feels herself to be abandoned when others do so. When the former abolitionist Edward Bodwin arrives at 124 as Ella is leading an attempted exorcism, Sethe mistakes him for Schoolteacher and tries to attack him and Denver runs after her to stop her, as we find out from the free indirect discourse that marks Beloved's last appearance (in the flesh) in the novel:

Sethe is running away from her, running, and she feels the emptiness in the hand Sethe had been holding. Now she is running into the faces of the people out there, joining them and leaving Beloved behind. Alone. Again. Then Denver, running too. They make a hill. A hill of black people, falling. And above them all, rising from his place with a whip in his hand, the man without skin, looking. He is looking at her.

For Beloved, this is the last straw; her own confused (and confusing) account of her life (lives?) focuses obsessively on losing Sethe--or the women she confuses with Sethe:

Three times I lost her: once with the flowers because of the noisy clouds of smoke; once when she went into the sea instead of smiling at me; once under the bridge when I went in to join her and she came toward me but did not smile. She whispered to me, chewed me, and swam away. Now I have found her in this house. She smiles at me and it is my own face smiling. I will not lose her again. She is mine.

The imagery in the last scene where the young woman Beloved is present in the novel--the hill of black people, the man without skin--references Beloved's second loss. But the passages where this scene is narrated--incoherently by Beloved--make it clear that it couldn't possibly be Sethe she lost then. Let's start with the relatively coherent summary and follow it up with the stream of consciousness version to see why this is so:

Sethe went into the sea. She went there. They did not push her. She went there. She was getting ready to smile at me and when she saw the dead people pushed into the sea she went also and left me there with no face or hers.

I cannot lose her again my dead man was in the way like the noisy clouds when he dies on my face I can see hers she is going to smile at me she is going to her sharp earrings are gone the men without skin are making loud noises they push my own man through they do not push the woman with my face through she goes in they do not push her she goes in the little hill is gone she was going to smile at me she was going to a hot thing


They are not crouching now we are they are floating on the water they break up the little hill and push it through I cannot find my pretty teeth I see the dark face that is going to smile at me it is my dark face that is going to smile at me the iron circle is around her neck she does not have sharp earrings in her ears or a round basket she goes in the water with my face

If you've seen Amistad, you may recall the scene where the woman on the slave ship commits suicide; if you've read Uncle Tom's Cabin, you may recall a similar attempted suicide on the Mississippi River (I can't recall now if Tom saved the woman or not). If you read Beloved's monologue in its entirety, you'll see that most of it is a fragmented narration of a similar scene from the middle passage. Beloved asks herself at the beginning of the monologue, "how can I say things that are pictures," although without a question mark (as the entire monologue is without punctuation), this comes off as much as a rhetorical question admitting defeat from the start as an open question that the rest of the monologue attempts to answer. But as I read it, this middle passage scene is the second of the three losses Beloved suffers. In fact, I think you can break the three scenes of Beloved's monologue down into eight parts, despite the difficulty presented by a narrator for whom "All of it is now it is always now":

1-2. Somewhere in Africa, where an infant girl is separated from her mother by a slave raiding party.

I see her take flowers away from leaves she puts them in a round basket the leaves are not for her she fills the basket she opens the grass I would help her but the clouds are in the way ... I am not separate from her there is no place where I stop her face is my own and I want to be there in the place where her face is and to be looking at it too ... In the beginning I coud see her I could not help her because the clouds were in the way in the beginning I could see her the shining in her ears ... Sethe is the one that picked flowers, yellow flowers in the place before the crouching. Took them away from their green leaves.... wanted to help her when she was picking the flowers, but the cloud of gunsmoke blinded me and I lost her. Three times I lost her; once with the flowers because of the noisy clouds of smoke....

3-5. On a slave ship during the middle passage, where a young girl witnesses the bodies of those who died en route pushed overboard by the slave traders and a woman who commits suicide by following them into the sea.

In the beginning the women are away from the men and the men are away from the women storms rock us and mix the men into the women and the women into the men that is when I begin to be on the back of the man for a long time I see only his neck and his wide shoulders above me I am small I love him because he has a song when he turned around to die I see the teeth he sang through ... there will never be a time when I am not crouching and watching others who are crouching too I am always crouching the man on my face is dead ... we are all trying to leave our bodies behind the man on my face has done it it is hard to make yourself die forever you sleep short and then return ... those able to die are in a pile I cannot find my man the one whose teeth I ave loved a hot thing the little hill of dead people a hot thing the men without skin push them through with poles the woman is there with the face I want the face that is mine they fall into the sea which is the color of bread she has nothing in her ears ... [see above middle passage quotes] ... All I want to know is why did she go in the water in the place where we crouched? Why did she do that when she was just about to smile at me? I wanted to join her in the sea but I could not move....

6-8. This is the most confusing one, but I believe that the teenage girl Stamp Paid talked about attempted suicide from a bridge and was possessed by the spirit of the baby ghost that had been haunting 124, who then returns to 124 in the flesh.

there is no one to want me to say me my name I wait on the bridge because she is under it there is night and there is day

again again night day night day I am waiting no iron circle is around my neck no boats go on this water no men without skin my dead man is not floating here his teeth are down there where the blue is and the grass so is the face I want the face that is going to smile at me it is going to in the day diamonds are in the water where she is and turtles in the night I hear chewing and swallowing and laughter it belongs to me she is the laugh I am the laugher I see her face which is mine it is the face that was going to smile at me in the place where we crouched now she is going to her face comes through the water a hot thing her face is mine she is not smiling she is chewing and swallowing I have to have my face I go in the grass opens she opens it I am in the water and she is coming there is no round basket no iron circle around her neck she goes up where the diamonds are I follow her we are in the diamonds which are her earrings now my face is coming I have to have it I am looking for the join I am loving my face so much my dark face is close to me I want to join she whispers to me she whispers I reach for her chewing and swallowing she touches me she knows I want to join she chews and swallows me I am gone now I am her face my own face has left me I see me swim away a hot thing I see the bottoms of my feet I am alone I want to be the two of us I want the join

I come out of blue water after the bottoms of my feet swim away from me I come up

....Three times I lost her: ...once under the bridge, when I went in to join her and she came toward me but did not smile. She whispered to me, chewed me, and swam away....

Here's where the Pearl quotations that I began this post with help out the most, because they allow us to see that the passage from Beloved that I quoted at the beginning and end of this post deal with reflections, mirror images, and phantoms--and help us understand that the "I" in this scene sometimes refers to the baby ghost and sometimes to the traumatized young woman. But it's dinner time, so I'll have to continue this next Saturday!

CitizenSE's Latest Crazy Hawthorne Idea I

For CitizenSE's inaugural Latest Crazy Hawthorne Idea post, I want to pick up where I left off in an article of mine from almost seven years ago now, on the meaning, significance, and stakes of the re-visions of The Scarlet Letter in Maryse Conde's I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem and Bharati Mukherjee's The Holder of the World. In that article, I was most interested in examining the concept of hybridity, popularized (though not originated) by postcolonial studies scholars such as Homi Bhabha, for the possibilities its careful use could bring to American Studies (and the dangers of careless uses). So I focused on the contrasting ways in which Conde and Mukherjee "hybridized" Hawthorne and New England, particularly by analyzing their reimaginings of Hester and Pearl. In the course of doing this, I tended to valorize Conde's over Mukherjee's version of hybridity, while of course being fair to Mukherjee (in fact, I showed how Holder quite cleverly responds to criticisms of her earlier novels and stories), but ultimately suggested that taken together, they open the way for a re-evaluation of Bhabha's often-criticized use of hybridity and of the implications of postcolonial studies for research, teaching, and curricula in American Studies. It was a long, complex argument, and I tried to cover too much ground in it, so I'm glad to get another crack at it as the last chapter of my book manuscript.

Thanks to thoughtful, perceptive, and constructive criticisms of the collection my essay appeared in, Postcolonial Theory and the United States, by such reviewers as Malini Johar Schueller and Rachel Adams, I now have a clearer sense of how to frame, articulate, and develop my original argument. And thanks to the opportunity my Fulbright has offered me to teach my Postcolonial Hawthorne course at three different universities in Fukuoka (yes, it's official, I get to repeat the course twice next semester), the manuscript is also going to benefit from the perspectives of undergraduate and graduate students from Japan as well as America (in my Hawthorne and Morrison and New World Slavery and the Transatlantic Imagination graduate seminars at SUNY Fredonia).

To give one example of the benefits of such experience (and of rereading works you're familiar with when teaching them, no matter how many times you've read them before), I want to mention some passages from "The Custom-House" I recently re-discovered, connect them to some passages from The Scarlet Letter, and thereby reshape one of my arguments about Mukherjee's particular version of "hybridizing Hawthorne." For as much as I prefer Conde's to Mukherjee's in general, one weakness is her tendency to locate hybridity in the Caribbean and portray New England as strictly monocultural, her tendency to hybridize New England by putting it in a larger hemispheric context. Where Mukherjee outdoes Conde, I believe now, is in recognizing various versions of New England and showing how the dominant group in the region was actively suppressing its actual hybridity. Her re-reading of Hawthorne suggests that he turned away from the most interesting story he could have told about colonial New England.

Well, it turns out that "The Custom-House" itself can support certain of Mukherjee's narrator's speculations about Hawthorne. From his opening contrast between his "native town of Salem, at the head of what, half a century ago, in the days of old King Derby, was a bustling wharf" and the sad state of commerce in 1840s Salem, to his recognition that records of "the former commerce of Salem...and memorials of her princely merchants--old King Derby--old Billy Gray--old Simon Forrester--and many another magnate in his day" could be used as "materials of local history," to the way in which he frames his (imaginary) "discovery of some little interest"--the (imaginary) remains of Hester's scarlet letter and the document by Surveyor Pue outlining her "life and conversation" (which he mock-seriously offers to exhibit to interested readers in order to authenticate his romance)--Hawthorne shows a keen awareness of the importance of the India trade to Salem's economic history in colonial and early national America. Let's look more closely at that last example, for it seems to me now to be one key inspiration of Mukherjee's novel, or at least the source of one of her narrator's key claims about the limitations of The Scarlet Letter:

Poking and burrowing into the heaped-up rubbish in the corner; unfolding one and another document, and reading the names of vessels that had long ago foundered at sea or rotted at the wharves, and those of merchants, never heard of now on 'Change, nor very readily decipherable on their mossy tombstones, glancing at such matters with the saddened, weary, half-reluctant interest which we bestow on the corpse of dead activity,--and exerting my fancy, sluggish with little use, to raise up from these dry bones an image of the old town's brighter aspect, when India was a new region, and only Salem knew the way thither,--I chanced to lay my hand on a small package, carefully done up in a piece of ancient yellow parchment.

Hawthorne's implicit comparison between the ultimate value of commercial, historical, and literary endeavors, his admission of failure in his attempt to imagine a "brighter" (and transregional) Salem, and his immediate turn toward what for him is a more compelling story rooted in "local" history--all these aspects of this passage find their way into The Holder of the World.

Another "Custom-House" passage, taken in tandem with a late scene in The Scarlet Letter, also helps to put Salem in world history--and, not coincidentally, it's another moment when Hawthorne tries to imagine what the Salem Custom House used to be, in the years "before the last war with England" ruined Salem's commercial fleet:

On some such morning, when three or four vessels happen to have arrived at once,--usually from Africa or South America,--or to be on the verge of their departure thitherward, there is a sound of frequent feet, passing briskly up and down the granite steps.

As Conde no doubt would point out, what's elided by the reference to the War of 1812, as well as by the list of characters one might find in early national Salem--from the "sea-flushed ship-master" to "the smart young clerk," with the euphemistic mention of "other miscellaneous ones to diversify the group"--is the 1807 abolition of the slave trade. But as Mukherjee might add, the chapter entitled "The New England Holiday" weaves the slave trade and the India trade into the climax of The Scarlet Letter. Take its contrast between the "generation next to the early emigrants," who "wore the blackest shade of Puritanism, and so darkened the national visage with it, that all the subsequent years have not sufficed to clear it up" and the "faces of strange people, and Indians among them, and sailors" that Pearl notices and asks Hester about--and its less euphemistic catalog of those who "enlivened" the "sad gray, brown, or black of the English emigrants" with "some diversity of hue," including not only a "party of Indians" but also "some mariners," a "part of the crew of the vessel from the Spanish Main," who would "go near to be arraigned as a pirate" in the 1840s for their "depradations on the Spanish commerce." Take its observation that "the sea, in those old times, heaved, swelled, and foamed very much at its own will, or subject only to the tempestuous wind, with hardly any attempts at regulation by human law." Take its remark that "the buccaneer on the wave might relinquish his calling, and become at once, if he chose, a man of probity and piety on land."

All this adds up to a series of recognitions: the very "questionable vessel" on which Hester, Dimmesdale, and Pearl plan to escape Puritan New England may well have been involved in the slave trade or the India Trade or piracy on the Spanish Main. Hawthorne's narrator's rhetoric, in its ambigious shifts between clothes and faces, mixes racial and moral discourses. Hawthorne's evocation of the transregionality of colonial New England may not be as fleshed out as Melville's in Moby-Dick and "Benito Cereno," nor as willing to critique injustice, but it does recognize the possibility and perhaps even the desirability of telling other stories of New England than The Scarlet Letter's "tale of human frailty and sorrow." Mukherjee may make much of Hawthorne's earlier exasperation at his fellow Custom-House officers who "spoke with far more interest and unction of ther morning's breakfast, or yesterday's, to-day's, or to-morrow's dinner, than of the shipwreck of forty or fifty years ago, and all the world's wonders which they had witnessed with their youthful eyes," while both she and Conde may run with his implicit suggestion (especially when read in tandem with certain sketches from the late 1830s and early 1840s that I'll get more into later) that there may be something illicit in the supposedly "long-established rank" of the "families which now compose the aristocracy of Salem" in particular and New England more generally, but in so doing they are activating potentials in Hawthorne's own writing, not importing something foreign into it.

All right, this is as far as I have time to go for now. There's a lot more to say on what Mukherjee in particular did with the theme of leaving New England, but since I inexplicably failed to bring The Holder of the World with me to Japan, this will have to wait for another time. Next Saturday, look for my case that Toni Morrison drew on both "Young Goodman Brown" and little-recognized passages from Chapters 14-16 of The Scarlet Letter, as well as more often commented-upon passages from his first novel and The House of the Seven Gables, in assembling some of the key characters and themes of Beloved. I'll be talking about how ribbons, brooks, and pools not only help connect specter evidence and trauma in Hawthorne and Morrison, but also show why it's as important to look at the relations between Pearl and Denver, Pearl and Beloved, and the Salem witch trials and Reconstruction as those between Hester and Sethe or colonial Puritans and antebellum Americans.