On Hawthorne and Douglass: A Research Note

I haven't done too much with Hawthorne's "Egotism; or, the Bosom-Serpent" (1843) since I mentioned it here and here, but this passage from Frederick Douglass's "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" (5 July 1852) got me thinking about it again:

Oh! be warned! be warned! a horrible reptile is coiled up in your nation's bosom; the venemous creature is nursing at the tender breast of your youthful republic; for the love of God, tear away and fling from you the hideous monster, and let the weight of twenty millions crush and destory it forever!

I don't think Douglass was intentionally reallegorizing "Egotism," but his switching of the gender of the afflicted victim and the location/actions of the serpent sure puts Hawthorne's short story in a different light, doesn't it?

Using Hawthorne in Meiji Japan

Waiting for the day when I can research the following topic in the middle of the night from the comforts of home to my satisfaction: could Kyoka Izumi have been consciously alluding to Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" at the end of the first part of "One Day in Spring" (1906)? The answer is most likely "no." Not only does the standard list of conscious Japanese Hawthorne-alluders start in 1908 (with the exception of one 1887 novel by Kososhi Miyazaki), but Izumi would also most likely had to have read Hawthorne's tale in English, as it wasn't a favorite of his early Japanese translators. Still, there are enough textual (journey into woods, bizarre encounters, possible dream, chilling effects) and generic (gothic, fantastic, romanticism) parallels to warrant further investigation. Charles Shiro Inouye mentions in his critical biography The Similitude of Blossoms that Izumi read Hawthorne's Peter Parley's Universal History, so it's at least possible he could have read Hawthorne's short stories before 1906. Looks like I'll also be interlibrary-loaning Susan Napier's The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature.

When I get onto campus in a few hours, it'll be a nice break from grading to check out the MLA Bibliography and email Inouye and Napier. I'll let you all know what I dig up.

What Department Listservs Are For

I know, Scott is great at explaining how not to use 'em. But how about some examples of best practices?

Like one colleague of mine linking to this. Which provokes this:

Rocket ships
Are exciting
But so are roses
On a birthday

Computers are exciting
But so is a sunset

And logic
Will never replace
Love

Sometimes I wonder
Where I belong
In the future
Or
In the past

I guess I'm just
An old-fashioned
Space-man.

And this. And that.

If you can top this exchange (or simply name the poet I quoted), I'd see that we hired you in a heartbeat. If it weren't for that pesky $4.2M shortfall and hiring freeze we're muddling through right now....

Anyway, do leave a link or report on a good exchange on your department listserv. Berube shouldn't get all the best commenters.

"Death Is a Nice Sandman"

Thanks to Gillian Brown's wide-ranging reading of Hawthorne's histories for children, particularly Grandfather's Chair, in The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne (2004), I was reminded that Neil Gaiman's Sandman draws its inspiration from all over the map--including Hans Christian Anderson's "The Sandman." It was a nice touch to turn the original Sandman's brother Death into Dream's gothy sister--wondering if the specific quotation that supplies the title to this post inspired Gaiman's characterization of Death. Seems spot-on to me.

Postbellum Hauntings

I'm about to go teach "Rappaccini's Daughter," but wanted to do a quick follow-up on one of the many loose threads here at CitizenSE--a comment or two on the relation between the hauntings in Charles Chesnutt's "Po' Sandy," Ambrose Bierce's "The Haunted Valley" and "The Stranger," and Lafcadio Hearn's "On Ghosts and Goblins." What I've been trying to emphasize in the Haunting America course I've been teaching this semester is the relation between literature and history. To the key course question, "What is haunting (about) America?" one answer I've been emphasizing is its history of conflicts and tensions over land, wealth, and power. Chesnutt suggests the history of slavery haunts the postbellum South, Bierce suggests that the Indian wars and other conflicts engendered by the massive migrations to the newly U.S.-owned (but not yet held) Southwest after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the Gold Rush haunt the frontier, and Hearn puts Japanese and American hauntings in relation even as his travels and writings suggest parallels between the late 19th C modernizing and expansionist programs in Gilded Age America and Meiji Japan. Elaborations to come--later!

Colonial, Antebellum, Postbellum Hauntings

In my Haunting America course, we're starting off with a fast tour through landmarks in the history of literary hauntings and possessions in and near the U.S.: after a look at Dickinson the first two weeks of the semester, early narratives on the Salem Witch Trials and the Virgin of Guadalupe started off our historical survey, followed quickly by views of Young Goodman Brown, La Llorona, and La Malinche, visits to Irving's Sleepy Hollow and Poe's House of Usher, and considerations of the structures of Stowe's and Chesnutt's haunted rooms and narratives. Our aim has been to identify similarities and differences in the uses of ghosts and spirits in colonial, antebellum and postbellum American literature as much as it has been to test out different approaches to reading hauntings--and in the coming weeks we'll look at works by Ambrose Bierce and Lafcadio Hearn to refine our initial ideas and methods. Here I'll recap some of the results of this tour and mention some specific juxtapositions and divergences worth exploring further.

The basic idea I've been trying to get across to the students to this point in the course is the difference the Enlightenment makes in the ways in which hauntings are treated in American literatures. Before the Enlightenment, the narrators of the stories of the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe and the specters tormenting Salem Village residents take great pains to establish the reality and truth of the hauntings they represent. Although they differ in associating the hauntings with God and the Devil, they coincide in acknowledging yet attempting to overcome skeptics and doubters who look for other than supernatural explanations for the events they represent. Juan Diego, the protagonist of the Virgin of Guadalupe narrative, has to convince the colonial authorities in Mexico City to build a shrine to the Virgin in the mountains and after three visits he finally does (with the help of some well-timed miracles). Cotton Mather, although acknowledging the argument that specter evidence could be faked by the Devil or his agents ("who's to say whether the images of Scott Eric Kaufman and Joseph Kugelmass doing those unspeakable things to those texts over there are really their specters, or that they really sent them over there to do that?"), works to justify the Salem Witch Trial verdicts--and executions. These kinds of colonial narrators show up as protagonists in Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown," and Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," but now they are framed by Enlightenment-era narrators who cast Ichabod Crane's, Goodman Brown's, and Roderick Usher's susceptibility to belief in the reality of ghosts as irrationality (in the modes of humor, irony, and horror, respectively). Irving's anthropological emphasis, Hawthorne's historical allusions, and Poe's symbolic methods are used not to dismiss the irrational but instead to examine it, its effects, and its consequences. Antebellum literary hauntings, that is, stage the encounter between pre-Enlightenment and Enlightenment modes of dealing with ghosts.

This basic distinction allowed me to frame the various uses of the gothic in Dickinson and Stowe as well as in Irving, Hawthorne, and Poe--by linking the explained or rational gothic and the supernatural gothic to Enlightenment and pre-Enlightenment modes of thinking, I was able to help my students track the function of ghosts in their works and specify their related but distinctive fascinations with the shadows, blind spots, and nightmares of the Enlightenment. Before going into a few examples from Poe, Stowe, and Chesnutt, let me mention that these commonplaces in American literary history and Western intellectual history seemed to fascinate my students, who have interesting and complex relationships to the various religious traditions and beliefs about ghosts, spirits, and demons in Japan (I chose Hearn to end the "Postbellum Hauntings" unit precisely so we could revisit our earlier discussion of cultural assumptions in and about Western and Eastern hauntings).

What I think is so effective about Poe's use of the rationalistic narrator in "The Fall of the House of Usher" is not only the way that his narration leads the reader to expect the story to end one way, heightening the surprise and horror of the actual ending, but also the way in which his mistake about Roderick Usher at the end of the story raises the possibility that he might be mistaken in his earlier dismissals of Usher's beliefs. Without deviating from the explained Gothic at all--no ghosts, no spirits, no supernatural phenomena of any kind--Poe's story succeeds on aesthetic (his relation to Irving is kind of like Ringu's relation to Scream) and philosophical levels (he pushes Enlightenment-era ontologies and epistemologies to the point when you wonder if all our senses were as sensitive as Usher's whether we, too, would be overcome with horror and fear--wonder if his idea that an evil sentience pervades his ancestral grounds may well be entirely rational). The narrator's own reactions to the landscape and architecture of the House of Usher and to his repeated conversations with Usher point to the idea that a place can have an effect on your mind without any visible or sensible causes.

Decades later, at the end of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stowe attempts to politicize Poe's achievements. Critics have rightly focused on her adroit mixing of popular antebellum genres to account for the success of her novel--drawing everything from the novel of sentiment to the slave narrative, Stowe attempts to make her readers feel the evils and injustices of slavery, not just understand them conceptually. I haven't read enough Stowe criticism to see if scholars have been paying attention to her use of the gothic and the ghost story, but it is crucial to her novel's mediation of Enlightenment and Christian attacks on slavery--her linking of appeals to violations of rights to life, liberty, and property to the notions that slavery is a sin and that true Christians can neither hold slaves nor tolerate the existence of slavery. When Cassy and Emmeline conspire to manipulate Simon Legree into believing the garret in his mansion is haunted by the spirit of a slave woman he tortured, raped, and killed, they are participating in one of the classic conventions of the explained Gothic--but instead of the vulnerable protagonist being tormented by a conspiracy out to make her believe she is being haunted, here the vulnerable female slaves are the ones who are protecting themselves by making the garret the safest place for them to hide from the slave catchers trying to hunt them down after they are seen trying to escape the plantation. Stowe takes us behind the scenes to see how Cassy stages all the supposedly supernatural events that heighten Legree's guilt, horror, and fear--this is the explained Gothic with a vengeance--and asserts that it is Legree's atheism that makes him particularly susceptible to her manipulations. In so doing, she echoes Poe's language--and provides some imagery that Dickinson may well be responding to in her Civil War-era poem #670 (the revolver that is no protection against spirits, the locked door that is no protection against your own internal haunting)--in a way that mixes their philosophical and psychological emphases with her own social and political projects. Cassy's staging of an "authentic ghost story," as one late chapter title proclaims it to be, enables her and Emmeline to escape the fate of the tortured and murdered slave woman--and the martyrdom of Uncle Tom by Legree that is framed by the narrative of their escape--even as it shows the consequences on Legree of his own actions. Stowe's hauntings emphasize the horrors of slavery and install the metaphor of the slaveholder haunted by his sins and the nation haunted by the peculiar institution.

Oops, imoto just woke up. More on Chesnutt later!

IS NOT! IS NOT! MY BLOG; MY RULES!

So, I've been wondering how the Cliopatricians would like my submission to their Jamestown 2007 symposium, given its unconventional format. Well, it appears Ralph Luker likes it just fine, even if he links to the group blog I'm on leave from rather than CitizenSE.

Oh, and 458. If you read the comments there, you'll get all the in-jokes in my title. Among other things.

On Twain, Arac, and Hypercanonization

Scott and Amanda's posts at The Valve's book event on The Novel of Purpose have inspired me to go back and read Jonathan Arac's Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target from cover to cover. I was struck while reading it at its consistent good sense and effective argumentation, and particularly at how brilliantly Arac compares and contrasts Twain and Stowe in one chapter, Twain and Cooper in another, and Twain and Flaubert in yet another. Yet I must admit to being disappointed he didn't go to Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter or Melville's "Benito Cereno," two other works that were receiving a lot of critical attention from people working in race and American literature in the '90s--and two authors whom he refers to several times as writing literary rather than national narratives mid-century. So in this post I was going to try to fill in some of the gaps in Arac's comparativist approach to Twain. But I had to get caught up on teaching two of my four courses that weren't cancelled despite it being Golden Week here in Japan, dealing with tech gremlins in the office, and recovering from the short trip we took to one of the onsens about an hour outside Fukuoka on Monday. Today we took onechan and imoto to their first amusement park ever and my head is still spinning from the 6 or 8 rides we took on those spinning cups. So on the five minutes before this day is over, let me make just a few points, in bullets.

• I love the fact that a senior Americanist tried to write a book for a general audience--and particularly for the mainstream media It's really well written and well organized. Arac saves his most complex and ambitious arguments for his final three chapters, but even at his simplest and most direct, he's making important points about the limitations of AHF in its own time and in ours--and especially the weaknesses of the arguments of those who idolize the novel.
  
• Still, as an attempt to introduce the debates in the then-relatively-new field of race and American literature to a wider audience, I find the book's limitations a bit annoying. Eric Sundquist's To Wake the Nations had come out years earlier and made a strong case for looking at Pudd'nhead Wilson as Twain's most interesting response to postbellum racial politics; plus his situating of Melville's "Benito Cereno" in the context of hemispheric abolitionist debates provided strong counter-evidence to Arac's characterization of Melville as a writer of literary narrative. Even though Arac gets into transnational contexts for Twain at the end by returning to De Voto's reading of AHF as the novel of the imperialist moment in America, he never gets into Twain's anti-imperial writings of the late-19th century. So there are annoying omissions and gaps.
  
• Hawthorne presents more problems for Arac's anti-hypercanonization argument, for several reasons. For one, unlike Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter is still taught in high schools and colleges all over the country. Yet rather than fitting Arac's pattern of a literary narrative drafted into the service of Cold War liberal nationalism, Hawthorne's novel was the site of intense political debate since the 1940s--whether over religion, gender, sexuality, race, or nationalism depended on the decade--rather than idolization and defenses against attacks of racism. And Hawthorne's racial politics were a big deal in the last 14 years of his life, from the Compromise of 1850 to the midst of the Civil War. Plus, Eric Cheyfitz had already anticipated many of Arac's arguments in a brilliant essay critical of the two most influential readings of SL in the early 1990s, those by Sacvan Bercovitch and Lauren Berlant. Finally, as I've been arguing here and in my manuscript, Twain is not just messing with Sir Walter Scott in the evasion sequence of AHF; he's also contextualizing the compromise that ended Reconstruction and Hawthorne's literary and racial politics at the same time.
  

To be continued! (I hate backdating posts, but had to do it for the second time this week--you'll see why in a second!)

Welcome to Haunting America

A warm CitizenSE welcome to my Fukuoka University and Kyushu University students in my two sections of Haunting America this semester. Given that we've spent a good amount of class time the first two weeks of the semester doing close, contextual, and comparative readings of Emily Dickinson's Poem #670 ("One need not be a Chamber"), today is a great opportunity for me to recap my reasons for assigning it to kick off our course and to summarize some of my own readings of it.

As we discussed this week, the key question this course revolves around is, "What is haunting (about) America?" (If you think of the "(about)" in the previous question as a kind of ghost--sometimes there, sometimes not--it'll give you another way to think about the title of the course than the reading I gave it last week in class, where I emphasized that the "Haunting" in "Haunting America" could be read either as a gerund or an adjective.) I chose Dickinson's poem because it's short and rich and opens up so well to the various ways of reading ghosts, spirits, specters, apparitions, and hauntings in American literature from colonial times to the present that we'll be experimenting with and reflecting upon this semester.

Last week, I asked you to consider several questions:

(1) What seems to be the point the speaker is trying to make in this poem? How would you paraphrase it?

(2) What do you find interesting about the way the speaker goes about trying to make it? (Consider, for instance, the use of imagery, metaphor, allusion, rhythm, rhyme, voice, and so on--all that elements that work together to constitute the "form" of the poem.)

(3) What is your reaction to the speaker's point? What questions does the poem raise for you?

These questions, although they overlap a bit, move from imagining the poem as a kind of dramatic monologue to considering it as a formal structure to examining your own response as a reader to it. In class this week we continued discussing them, and I linked our discussions to the "how to do things with ghosts" idea of the course, which attempts to encompass literary, religious, psychological, anthropological, sociological, historical, philosophical, theoretical, and political ways of reading hauntings. I compared Dickinson's moves in her poem to two of the best-known ghost stories from English culture--Shakespeare's Hamlet and Dickens's "A Christmas Carol"--to see what light classic Renaissance and early Victorian hauntings shed on Dickinson's poem. And we all broadened the comparisons still further, exploring how Anglo-American assumptions about and traditions of representing ghosts and hauntings are similar and different from the assumptions and traditions of the cultures you're bringing into the classroom. In what ways are Japanese ghosts similar to or different from American ones? Is it worthwhile to generalize about European and Asian traditions of hauntings and spirit possessions? Where do they overlap? Where do they diverge?

Of course, what happened in each classroom was unique. So I want to use the remainder of this post to pull together what I said in both classes about Dickinson's poem and how it connects to the course.

Literary. One way of reading "One need not be a Chamber" is as a metacommentary on the tradition of the literary gothic. This intertextual mode of reading the poem emphasizes its genre, its allusions to other works of literature, its playing with specific conventions of writing and with the expectations and assumptions readers bring to it. Dickinson's speaker constructs a series of metaphors that are based upon allusions to classic scenes from the popular gothic novels and stories of England and America. To what end? I'll let you all ponder that question!

Religious: Why does Dickinson's speaker emphasize the startling, dangerous, even horrifying nature of unexpectedly encountering "one's a'self" and discovering "Ourself behind ourself, concealed"? Why not celebrate such encounters and discoveries, along with her contemporary Walt Whitman, who in "Song of Myself" proudly proclaimed, "I contain multitudes"? Many critics have argued that it's Dickinson's lifelong fascination with New England Puritanism that helps account for her speaker's tone. Whether the speaker is emphasizing that the American Puritan interpretation of the Christian notion of original sin--their doctrine of humanity's total or innate depravity, of our essential fallenness--is the source of the "Or More--" that closes the poem or is suggesting that Puritan theology itself is horrifying is for you to decide.

Psychological: Of course, with all the speaker's references to the Brain and the self and the interior, Dickinson's poem engages topics that have interested psychoanalysts and psychologists of all kinds since the late nineteenth century. From Freud's readings of dreams and slips of the tongue to the latest technological advances in brain scanning, scientists have entered into the terrain that Dickinson attempts to map through metaphor in her poem. Here at CitizenSE, I've done my share of writing on trauma, which has been described as haunting, but Dickinson's poem also engages the uncanny, identity, and other aspects of consciousness, the unconscious, and the affective that can be grouped under "the psychological." What do ghosts and hauntings--and our reactions to them--reveal about us, our thoughts, feelings, beliefs, hopes, fears, desires, aversions?

Anthropological: Several decades ago, Laura Bohannon wrote a now-famous essay called "Shakespeare in the Bush," in which she reported on the reactions of an African tribe she was doing field work on to her retelling of Shakespeare's Hamlet, in order to clarify their cultural assumptions about ghosts and how they differed from her own. This is a classic example of the connections between literature and anthropology, but there are more recent ones, as well. Over the past few decades, ethnographers have become increasingly aware that the way they write up their field work matters--and in so doing have looked to various kinds of literature and literary criticism for inspiration, models, and warnings. So although no anthropologist can go back in time to observe and interact with Dickinson, we can imagine severals ways in which they might find her poem interesting and useful.

Sociological: Last week one of the books I passed around was by a sociologist; in Ghostly Matters, Avery Gordon argues that reading hauntings--in literature and life--should be part of the contemporary sociologist's skill set. Just as anthropologists tend to analyze contemporary cultures, sociologists tend to analyze contemporary societies, but certainly in both fields there are comparativists and historicists who analyze evidence from the past as well as the present, from the written record as well as from everyday life. There are many different kinds of sociological approaches to literature--a quick search on google scholar or the databases available through the Kyudai and Fukudai libraries will turn up some on Dickinson. (I encourage you to familiarize yourself with these research tools throughout the semester.)

Historical: Traditional literary historians are interested in the life and times of the author, in the sources of and influences on the author's works, in the author's motivations and intentions, and in the reactions of the author's readers; more recently, a range of newer historicists have attempted to question and extend this range of concerns and interests. As my comments on anthropological and sociological approaches to literature and to hauntings suggest, people working in these fields need to be interested in history to even turn to Dickinson in the first place, rather than focusing solely on the present. Reading "One need not be a Chamber" historically raises questions like, "When did writers begin to focus on the ghosts in our heads rather than out in the world? What does Dickinson's poem reveal about antebellum American conceptions of haunting?"

Philosophical: Dickinson's poem also engages issues and concepts that have interested philosophers for millennia (in the West, at least): the relation between mind and body, materialism versus idealism, rationality and the irrational, and so on. Those working on the philosophy of mind, the problem of consciousness, metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology may well be interested in what the speaker has to say.

Theoretical: The speaker relies on a series of binary oppositions--inside/outside, presence/absence, life/death, literal/figurative, safety/danger, spiritual/material--but also emphasizes the ways in which ghosts and hauntings trouble them. It's possible to read Dickinson's poem deconstructively, as well as in relation to the many varieties of literary and political theory that have traversed the globe since the mid-twentieth century.

Political: Ghosts often signal something hidden or forgotten or denied or disavowed, perhaps an injustice or a crime or a scandal. Throughout the semester, we'll be examining the political dimensions of literary hauntings, the ways in which writers use ghosts to comment on or reflect upon or otherwise respond to ethical and political issues in their own times and the ways in which we can use literary hauntings to illuminate similar issues in our own time. Certainly in a post-9/11 United States, Dickinson's poetic meditation on the relation between real and imagined threats is quite relevant; recent events in the world and on the campus of Virginia Tech have made all of us quite sensitive to the complexities and ambiguities of fear, horror, terror, and danger.

I hope you all find this post useful. If so, we should consider whether we want to start a class blog, in which we post our reactions to the short stories and novels we'll be reading in class for all the world (or that portion of it that finds its way to our site) to see. I'm open to it being a multiple-language blog, as well. Let's talk about it in class next week. See you then--and hopefully back here at CitizenSE!

New Worlds for All: Encounters and Plantation (1492-1776)

Picking up from my latest latest crazy idea post, I want to spend a little more time discussing the understanding of American literature I was trying to convey at the end of my Sendai talk. I plan to go through each of the periods I identified there in separate posts over the next few weeks, starting with the first today. But before that a bit from early in the talk where I explained why I like "The American Century" rather than "postmodern culture" or "Cold War culture" as the name for the period comprising mid-to-late (or later) twentieth-century U.S. literatures. It sets up rather concisely and specifically the way I'm thinking about periodization in general:

The standard way of dating the origins of the “American Century” is to go back to Henry Luce’s pre-Pearl Harbor 1941 essay of that title, in which he argued that America needed to take up its responsibility to advance freedom and prosperity throughout the world. Proponents of this view thus hold it to be an anti-totalitarian concept, tied both to America’s subsequent fights in World War II against fascist regimes and in the Cold War against communist ones. Radical historians tend to date its origins earlier, to the 1898 liberation of the Philippines from Spanish rule and subsequent multi-year occupation to put down a Filipino independence movement. Hence, they consider the American Century to be a much more ambiguous if not imperialist concept. For now, I’m less interested in the “American Century” as a contested concept and more in the way it provides us with a useful name for a period that has posed major problems for U.S. literary historians. Most agree that modernism was the defining literary movement of the early twentieth century in the U.S. and Europe, but when did that period end and what name should the new period following it be given? The two most popular alternatives, postmodern culture and Cold War culture, both have and raise problems.

Postmodernism is a vague and baggy term that meant different things in post-W.W. II literature than it did in architecture, literary criticism, theory, or the dozens of other specialized discourse communities in which it was first used. Moreover, using it to name a period commits you to a movement-centered approach to literary history--say, from neoclassicism and gothicism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries to romanticism and transcendentalism in the mid-19th century, to realism and naturalism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to modernism and postmodernism in the rest of the 20th century. This can hide the existence of or distort the features of other literary movements in each period, misleadingly imply that older movements don’t continue into later periods, and present literary history as if it were completely separate or autonomous from other histories.

Using the Cold War to name a period avoids these problems, but commits you to a larger periodization scheme based on wars--say, from the Revolutionary War to the War of 1812 (1776-1815), then to the Civil War (1815-1865), then to World War I (1865-1918), then to World War II (1918-1945), then to the Cold War (1945-1989). This not only downplays the significance of major wars like the Mexican and Spanish-American wars, but also forces you to shoehorn literary history into the confines of military history. Including wars you think are important runs as much of a risk of putting writers who were responding to common events and issues in separate periods as excluding seemingly less important wars risks lumping very different writers together.

I don’t want to imply that my alternative term, “the American Century,” is without its own problems, but it does enable you to develop a periodization scheme that connects literary and other histories without privileging one and making the others conform to it. Moreover, it allows me to put forward the idea that literary periods overlap. If we date the American Century’s origin to 1944, when it was clear that the U.S. was winning the Pacific War and would play a major role in defeating Nazi Germany, this suggests that its early years overlap with an earlier period whose name I will unveil at the end of this talk. Moreover, we don’t know yet if the American Century has already ended or, if it has not, when it will. Some think that the Vietnam War and the oil crisis in the early 1970s marked the end of the American Century, but the Bush administration seems even more committed to military escalation than Johnson’s or Nixon’s. Others argue that the recovery of Germany’s and Japan’s economies in the 1980s signalled the end of the American Century, but American capitalism made a comeback in the 1990s and seems to have weathered 9/11 reasonably well. Still others suggest that the twenty-first century may be a globalizing century, a Chinese century, a century of resource wars or climate change or technological revolution.

By the time I returned to these issues at the end of the talk, all I had time to mention about the first period--"New Worlds for All: Encounters and Plantation (1492-1776)"--was: "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."

Today I would add "creole cultures and" before "plantation complexes" and would have made it clearer that my name for the period was borrowed from the title of a Colin Calloway book. And if I hadn't been so pressed for time, I would have noted that in this sentence, I was condensing several courses' worth of material and engaging new scholarship on early America (particularly Thomas Bender's A Nation Among Nations, Tony Hall's The American Empire and the Fourth World, and Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker's The Many-Headed Hydra). In fact, if I had been speaking in the talk to specialists rather than members of the public who happened to be involved in Tohoku University's Open University program that semester, I would have divided this huge colonial Americas (Columbus to Declaration of Independence) period into several and been more specific about my acknowledgement that the closing date for each set of national literatures would change depending on when each American nation's independence movement formally began. And I would have discussed the larger curricular context in which I believe this literary focus should be embedded: an approach to the history of the Americas that does for students something like what Charles Mann's 1491 (and the new scholarship it attempts to survey and popularize) does for its readers, namely, try to offer a non-Eurocentric history of the Americas before the Europeans' arrival.

This is because in order to identify what made Columbus's arrival the beginning of "new worlds for all," one must compare pre- and post-1492. What was it about the initial and ongoing encounters among European explorers, traders, settlers, and indigenous Americans that lead to so many changes around the world and in the hemisphere? What creole cultures and plantation complexes emerged as Europeans, Africans, and Americans (each grouping characterized by relatively equal--and quite large--spans of cultural, social, and political diversity) continued to interact with each other (in all kinds of ways)?

So that's a precis of the way I'm conceptualizing the "first" period in American literary history. Please see my courses for more details on how I've taught these issues in the past. If anyone wants access to the ANGEL space of my Introduction to American Studies course from the fall, where I pulled a lot of my ideas for the talk together--particularly in the recommended readings not mentioned on the syllabi--feel free to contact me. I also have a brief bibliography of new work on the colonial Americas period that I can email to anyone who's interested. Some of the most interesting and influential work in American Studies has been going on in this period over the past couple of decades, so I'll be returning to it after a tour through the later ones.

Adventures in Lazy Blogging: From the Sendai Talk

This was the set-up for the rest of the talk--it consists of a reading of my title, “The End of the American Century in Contemporary U.S. Literatures.” Should I have been invited to the speaker series that Tohoku University put together? Should they have withheld my honorarium? Inquiring authors want to know!

***

Let’s start with the second part of my talk’s title, “in Contemporary U.S. Literatures,” which pointedly refuses to identify a core culture that would constitute the mainstream of American literature today. Due in part to the incredible and accelerating diversification of literary production, distribution, and reception in the United States over the course of the twentieth century--not just of region, class, ethnicity, race, gender, religion, but also of publishers, formats, genres, audiences, traditions, movements, and more--many Americanists agree with me that it is better to refer to “U.S. literatures” than “American literature.” For one thing, “U.S. literatures” acknowledges that the U.S. does not have a monopoly on the term “American,” which can refer as easily to a continent or hemisphere as to any of the many literary traditions in the Americas. For another, “U.S. literatures” troubles the link between “nation” and “literature” presumed in such concepts as “national literature,” suggesting instead that there can be many literatures within a single nation-state. So one of the things I will do in this talk is introduce you to the multiplicity of contemporary U.S. literatures--and particularly to their interrelations, interactions, and interweavings.

To do this, I will focus on African American writers Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, and Octavia Butler, Afro-Caribbean writers Paule Marshall and Maryse Conde, Asian American writers Bharati Mukherjee and Karen Tei Yamashita, Latino writer Gloria Anzaldua, and Native American writer Leslie Marmon Silko. Each has participated in multiple U.S. literatures in her career. Butler, for instance, has made major contributions to both African American literature and science fiction. Mukherjee, Marshall, and Yamashita have all participated brilliantly in the literature of immigration but have also contributed to their different ethnic, racial, and diasporic U.S. literatures. Anzaldua, Yamashita, and Silko have all written literature of the U.S. West and of the borderlands, but could be grouped separately as Texas, California, and Arizona writers, respectively, not to mention in their respective pan-ethnicities as Latino, Asian American, and American Indian, or in their respective ethnicities as Chicano, Japanese-American, and Laguna Pueblo. As these few examples show, precisely because individual writers contribute to and have been influenced by multiple literatures inside and outside the U.S., it would be wrong to conclude that “U.S. literatures” means the dispersal of a unified national literature into several separate literatures with little in common. Rather, “U.S. literatures” constitute a complex and dynamic network that is at once intranational, international, and transnational.

So in part this talk tries to move us from the debates over canonization that have dominated public discussion of contemporary multicultural and multiethnic American literature to the debates over periodization implied by my title’s temporal focus: “The End of the American Century in Contemporary U.S. Literatures.” That is, rather than obsessively asking, “who counts as a major American author?” “which U.S. literatures make up the mainstream of American culture?” we ought to be asking other questions, like “what patterns or shapes have U.S. literatures formed in the past?” “what have been the relationships within, among, and between U.S. literatures?” “what might they reveal about the commonalities and differences in U.S. society?” Of course, there are any number of ways to identify literary periods in the U.S.--centuries, wars, and literary movements spring most readily to mind--which are all more or less arbitrary. Nevertheless, there’s a lot at stake in the process. To understand why, let’s look more closely at the first half of my title.

“The End of the American Century,” alludes to two of the most influential attempts by U.S. conservatives to shape the contours of a post-Cold War national consensus. One is “the end of history,” the idea Francis Fukuyama advanced in 1989 that history has reached its endpoint and achieved its purpose by revealing that the global extension of capitalist liberal democracy is humanity’s ultimate social destiny. The other is the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, which William Kristol convened in the spring of 1997 to advocate for “American global leadership,” advance “a strategic vision of America’s role in the world,” and stiffen the nation’s “resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests.” By combining the two phrases in the way I do, I aim to expose tensions within and between them--and put them to other ends than their authors intended. On the one hand, I want to suggest that Fukuyama’s vision of the end of history is circumscribed by the logic of the American Century; on the other hand, I want to suggest that Kristol’s American Century may well be in its last throes, so to speak. Unlike my talk last Saturday, when I explored the political and economic implications of the end of the American Century in Asia at the Japan-America Society of Fukuoka, today I look at the end of the American Century from a literary perspective. My core argument is that contemporary U.S. literatures, as exemplified by the writings of the nine women writers I feature in this talk, help us historicize the American Century, reexamine its logic and assumptions, and speculate about what may come after it.

Today, then, I’ll move from considering the origins and endpoint of the American Century to examining how Marshall, Jones, and Morrison have renavigated Atlantic slavery, how Anzaldua, Silko, and Yamashita have remapped North American borders, and how Butler, Conde, and Mukherjee have rewritten “American” history. I’ll close by using the insights their works provide us with to offer a new periodization scheme for U.S. literary history and to suggest what may be at stake in the reconceptualization of relations between U.S. and other literatures that it entails.

***

Want more later?

In Which I Make Extravagant Claims

Claims too extravagant to blog just yet. You'll have to click on this link to my talk in Sendai for the Tohoku Association for American Studies to see just how extravagant I can get--trying to praise the achievements of 9 prolific women writers in 45 minutes, to offer a new periodization scheme for American (in the hemispheric as well as national senses) literary history, that sort of thing. For those who do click and read, is there anything worth developing further in "The End of the American Century in Contemporary U.S. Literatures"?

OK, got to go get ready for onechan's first field trip! Of course the whole family is going along...I wouldn't miss it for the world!

[Update 3/10/07: I'm much prouder of this as an inadvertent International Women's Day post than the one I did over at Mostly Harmless on March 8--clearly I should have switched my March 6 and March 8 posts over there!]

But What About the Black Ribbon in Beloved?

Before getting further into Morrison's characterization of Baby Suggs and her relations with both Young Goodman Brown and Dimmesdale, it's worth fleshing out her portrait of Stamp Paid still further. For the red ribbon he finds in the Licking River is exhausting not only because of the racialized violence of slavery and Reconstruction, but because it also serves as a reminder of another ribbon, a black ribbon, that has a much more personal meaning to him. Reading this ribbon leads to the recognition that Morrison is linking Nathaniel Hawthorne and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper in Beloved.

Stamp Paid tells Paul D at the very end of Book 2, "'Let me tell you how I got my name.... They called me Joshua,' he said. 'I renamed myself,' he said, 'and I'm going to tell you why I did it,' and he told him about Vashti." Flash back 50 pages to get the outline of the story:

Born Joshua, he renamed himself when he handed over his wife to his master's son. Handed her over in the sense that he did not kill anybody, thereby himself, because his wife demanded he stay alive. Otherwise, she reasoned, where and to whom could she return when the boy was through? With that gift, he decided that he didn't owe anybody anything. Whatever his obligations were, that act paid them off. He thought it would make him rambunctious, renegade--a drunkard even, the debtlessness, and in a way it did. But there was nothing to do with it.... It didn't seem much of a way to live and it brought him no satisfaction. So he extended this debtlessness to other people by helping them pay out and off whatever they owed in misery. Beaten runaways? He ferried them and rendered them paid for; gave them their own bill of sale, so to speak. "You paid it; now life owes you."

But of course Stamp Paid spends all of Book 2 feeling he owes Sethe, Denver, and Paul D something. His attempt to repay his debt was rebuffed for most of Book 2, but it is not at its end--and the story he tells Paul D is his currency:

"I never touched her all that time. Not once. Almost a year. We was planting when it started and picking when it stopped. Seemed longer. I should have killed him. She said no, but I should have. I didn't have the patience that I got now, but I figured maybe somebody else didn't have much patience either--his own wife. Took it in my head to see if she was taking it any better than I was. Vashti and me was in the fields together in the day and every now and then she be gone all night. I never touched her and damn me if I spoke three words to her a day. I took any chance I had to get near the great house to see her, the young master's wife. Nothing but a boy. Seventeen, twenty maybe."

After he does eventually convey his message to her (which I'd quote if I had time), he tells Paul D,

"She got rosy then and I knowed she knowed. He give Vashti that to wear. A cameo on a black ribbon. She used to put it on every time she went to him.... I thought it would give me more satisfaction than it did. I also thought she might stop it, but it went right on. Till one morning Vashti came in and sat by the window. A Sunday. We worked our own patches on Sunday. She sat by the window looking out of it. 'I'm back,' she said. 'I'm back, Josh.' I looked at the back of her neck. She had a real small neck. I decided to break it. You know, like a twig--just snap it. I been low but that was as low as I ever got."

The resonances with The Scarlet Letter and "Young Goodman Brown" are multiple: Joshua is at once Chillingworth and Goodman Brown, faced with an instance of adultery closer to the writings of Harriet Jacobs than Nathaniel Hawthorne. Morrison's Vashti here makes the all-too-human choice not to resist, unlike Frances E.W. Harper's Vashti, the Queen of Persia, who gives up her crown "And left the palace of the King,/ Proud of her spotless name--/ A woman who could bend to grief,/ But would not bow to shame." Harper's focus on Vashti rather than Esther could be read in multiple ways, particularly in light of dialogues among Jewish traditions--as an implicit critique of Esther, as an acknowledgement that one's social positioning plays a large role in shaping avenues for resistance and their costs, or as an explicit critique of the king. Her earlier poem, "The Contrast," harshly criqitues the sexual double standard where "They scorned her for her sinning,/ Spoke harshly of her fall" while "None scorned him for his sinning,/ Few saw it through his gold;/ His crimes were only foibles,/ And these were gently told."

But Intertextual Thursday is almost over, so I'll return to the significance of Morrison's decision to tell Stamp Paid's side of the story and its relation to "Young Goodman Brown" on Saturday.

Young Goodman Brown and Stamp Paid Hear Voices

At the opening of Book 2 of Beloved, the house at 124 Bluestone Road is no longer "spiteful," as its haunting by the ghost of Sethe's slain infant daughter made it, but "loud" with what is described as "a conflagration of hasty voices." Stamp Paid, who comes repeatedly to the door of 124, red ribbon in hand and pocket, to apologize to Sethe for revealing to Paul D the circumstances of her infant's death, hears these voices as "loud, urgent, all speaking at once so he could not make out what they were talking about or to whom. The speech wasn't nonsensical, exactly, nor was it tongues. But something was wrong with the order of the words and he couldn't describe or cipher it to save his life. All he could make out was the word mine. The rest of it stayed outside his mind's reach." Earlier here I've begun reading his ribbon and ciphering the voices of 124 and I plan to continue doing so today. Like the monumentalized A at the end of The Scarlet Letter, which "the curious investigator may still discern, and perplex himself with the purport," these textual details are significant--and, like many moments in Hawthorne's novel--they point directly to Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown." So, unlike the "men of rank and dignity" at the final scaffold scene when Dimmesdale invites Hester and Pearl to join him--who "were so taken by surprised, and so perplexed as to the purport of what they saw--unable to receive the explanation which most readily presented itself, or to imagine any other--that they remained silent and inactive spectators"--I won't hesitate to draw the most obvious conclusions from this intertextual dialogue between Morrison and Hawthorne.

"Young Goodman Brown" has some well-known voices in it. What's the relation between those voices and the voices of 124? What do Morrison's voices imply about Hawthorne's? It's unlikely I'll have the time today to fully answer these questions, so without further ado let's go to the quotations! The voices Goodman Brown hears--which may be real, figments of his waking or sleeping imagination, or part of the devil's multimedia array of specter evidence designed to deceive our protagonist--emerge from "a black mass of cloud" which was "sweeping swiftly northward" although the sky was blue and "no wind was stirring":

Aloft in the air, as if from the depths of the cloud, came a confused and doubtful sound of voices. Once, the listener fancied that he could distinguish the accents of town's-people of his own, men and women, both pious and ungodly, many of whom he had met at the communion-table, and had seen others rioting at the tavern. The next moment, so indistinct were the sounds, he doubted whether he had heard aught but the murmur of the old forest, whispering without a wind. Then came a stronger swell of those familiar voices, heard daily in the sunshine, at Salem Village, but never, until now, from a cloud of night. There was one voice, of a young woman, uttering lamentations, yet with an uncertain sorrow, and entreating for some favor, which, perhaps, would grieve her to obtain. And all the unseen multitude, both saints and sinners, seemed to encourage her onward.

Note how Goodman Brown's doubt at the reality of the voices disappears when he hears what he takes to be Faith's voice, which prepares him to take up his earlier doubt "whether there really was a Heaven above him" that he had previously been able to keep at bay with the cry, "With Heaven above, and Faith below, I will yet stand firm against the devil!" As I discussed before, it's the discovery of what appears to be Faith's ribbon that sets Goodman Brown on the path toward joining the voices of the black cloud. Let's listen to the soundtrack of his flight "along the forest-path" into "the heart of the dark wilderness":

The whole forest was peopled with frightful sounds; the creaking of the trees, the howling of wild beasts, and the yell of Indians; while, sometimes, the wind tolled like a distant church-bell, and sometimes gave a broad roar around the traveller, as if all Nature were laughing him to scorn. But he was himself the chief horror of the scene, and shrank not from its other horrors.

'Ha! ha! ha!' roared Goodman Brown, when the wind laughed at him. 'Let us hear which will laugh loudest! Think not to frighten me with your deviltry! Come witch, come wizard, come Indian powow, come devil himself! and here comes Goodman Brown. You may as well fear him as he fears you!'

In truth, all through the haunted forest, there could be nothing more frightful than the figure of Goodman Brown. On he flew, among the black pines, brandishing his staff with frenzied gestures, now giving vent to an inspiration of horrid blasphemy, and now shouting forth such laughter, as set all echoes of the forest laughing like demons around him. The fiend in his own shape is less hideous, than when he rages in the breast of man. Thus sped the demoniac on his course, until, quivering among the trees, he saw a red light before him, as when the felled trunks and branches of a clearing have been set on fire, and throw up their lurid blaze against the sky, at the hour of midnight. He paused, in a lull of the tempest that had driven him onward, and heard the swell of what seemed a hymn, rolling solemnly from a distance, with the weight of many voices. He knew the tune; it was a familiar one in the choir of the village meeting-house. The verse died heavily away, and was lengthened by a chorus, not of human voices, but of all the sounds of the benighted wilderness, pealing in awful harmony together. Goodman Brown cried out; and his cry was lost to his own ear, by its unison with the cry of the desert.

Let's review, shall we? Goodman Brown--who summoned the devil himself when, walking alone in woods so thick that he "may yet be passing through an unseen multitude," remarks to himself, 'There may be a devilish Indian behind every tree. What if the devil himself should be at my very elbow!'--is now the most frightful figure in the forest. Goodman Brown--who at the beginning of his "errand" tells himself he'll return to Faith and immediately "felt himself justified in making more haste on his present evil purpose," yet first begins to doubt himself when the devil claims that "I helped your grandfather, the constable, when he lashed the Quaker woman so smartly through the streets of Salem. And it was I that brought your father a pitch-pine knot, kindled at my own hearth, to set fire to an Indian village, in King Philip's war"--now finds his voice in "unison with the cry of the desert." What seems to be at stake in "Young Goodman Brown" is not only the status of specter evidence in the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 or the problem of visible sanctity in the Half-Way Covenant of 1662, it is the entire 17th C American Puritan "errand into the wilderness." Have the Puritans been doing the devil's work--particularly in their demonizing of Native Americans--when they thought they were doing God's? Is the entire American Puritan errand damning evidence of their failure to reach the promised land, of their exodus remaining stranded in the desert?

It is questions like these, I believe, that haunt Goodman Brown after he has repudiated the devil in the climax of the story, not simply his radical doubt that anyone else, including Faith, did the same. 'Look up to Heaven and resist the Wicked One!' he implores her, but "Whether Faith obeyed, he knew not." His dying hour--and indeed the rest of his life--"was gloom," because of the doubt and despair that led him to become "A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man." His desperation stems as much from his fear that everything about the American Puritan errand that he used to believe may be wrong--that the saints may be sinners, that the godly may be ungodly, that the errand itself not only failed to change the "unconverted wilderness" but may also have brought its wildness (and in his mind its "deviltry") into the Puritans' own hearts. After all, if he is unsure of the choices his fellow-Puritans made, how can he be sure that God would honor his climactic repudiation of the Black Man? Like Dimmesdale at the close of The Scarlet Letter, he believes he goes to his God for judgement, knowing fully well that it is only grace that has the power to save his soul. It is in this sense that David Levin and Michael Colacurcio, among others, have suggested that Goodman Brown may well be representative of Puritans' internal struggles with theological and epistemological problems with specter evidence and visible sanctity--my own small contribution so far has been to highlight how the "Young Goodman Brown" has another layer of representativity, where the very attempt to civilize the wilderness and Christianize the savages is difficult to discern from the devil's work.

So, briefly now, because I only have ten minutes to go, Morrison works and plays with these voices and their larger implications in many ways. I won't discuss here the ways in which Baby Suggs and her preaching in the clearing is a counter to Goodman Brown, Dimmesdale, and the Black Man's actions and words in Hawthorne's wilderness, but her story is linked to Stamp Paid's in ways I will get to later. It's what Stamp Paid comes to believe about the voices of 124 and the ways in which he is like and unlike Goodman Brown that I want to end on here.

So, in spite of his exhausted marrow, he kept on through the voices of 124. This time, although he couldn't cipher but one word, he believed he knew who spoke them. The people of the broken necks, of fire-cooked blood and black girls who had lost their ribbons.

What a roaring.

Stamp Paid's own crisis is his doubt over the capacity of whites to repudiate the violence, exploitation, oppression, lynchings, rapes, and murders of the slavery and Reconstruction eras: "What are these people?" he asks. "You tell me, Jesus. What are they?" But Stamp Paid (aided by the narrator's use of free indirect discourse) adds a further dimension to this crisis by linking it to the history of racialization in the Americas:

The day Stamp Paid saw the two backs through the window and then hurried down the steps, he believed the undecipherable language clamoring around the house was the mumbling of the black and angry dead. Very few had died in bed, like Baby Suggs, and none that he knew of, including Baby, had lived a livable life. Even the educated colored: the long-school people, the doctors, the teachers, the paper-writers and businessmen had a hard row to hoe. In addition to having to use their heads to get ahead, they had the whole weight of the race sitting there. You needed two heads for that. Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way, he thought, they were right. The more coloredpeople spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn't the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread. In, through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made them. Touched them every one. Changed and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own.

Meanwhile, the secret spread of this new kind of whitefolks' jungle was hidden, silent, except once in a while when you could hear its mumbling in places like 124.

Yeesh, it's been 25 minutes. Not good. More on Saturday!

Why Water Imagery Matters in Hawthorne, Morrison, and Marshall

So we're heading out for Hawaii later today but I am so dissatisfied with my previous Hawthorne-Morrison posting I need to get this one off my chest before we leave and I begin my first-ever CitizenSE vacation.

Too long ago I suggested that Pearl's playing in the sea-side pool with her phantom-like reflection toward the end of The Scarlet Letter had something to do with the most puzzling part of Beloved's stream-of-consciousness monologues near the end of Beloved. It's almost as if Morrison asked herself, what if Hawthorne's pool represented a boundary between the living and the dead? what if Pearl and her reflection had somehow been able to "join" each other? or what if it were really a phantom in the pool and not her reflection? what would have happened if Pearl were possessed by her reflection? And then she imagined Beloved as a vehicle for giving her answers to these questions.

Well, there's another pool in The Scarlet Letter, this one formed by a brook in the middle of the famous forest where Hester and Dimmesdale reunite after seven years apart. Check out the language in these passages, but whatever you do don't dismiss it as mere filler, suspense-building, foreshadowing, or pathetic fallacy. To help you along, I'll italicize key SL phrases and break the flow of the passage in order to note Beloved resonances and crossings after them. So let's visit this forest brook and keep an eye on Pearl and her reflection:

It was a little dell where they had seated themselves, with a leaf-strewn bank rising gently on either side, and a brook flowing through the midst, over a bed of fallen and drowned leaves.

connection to "what it is down there" from the end of Beloved? could these leaves symbolize those who died in the middle passage or in attempted escapes from slavery or in post-slavery lynchings and other racialized violence?

The trees impending over it had flung down great branches, from time to time, which choked up the current, and compelled it to form eddies and black depths at some points; while, in its swifter and livelier passages, there appeared a channel-way of pebbles, and brown, sparkling sand.

think of the collar around the woman's neck in the middle passage scenes from the monologue for the choking up part; for the second, think of the compulsion to repeat or the compulsion to testify often associated with the kinds of traumatic experience Morrison not only writes on but makes crucial to the form of the novel (consider what triggers various characters' flashbacks and how the order in which events are narrated itself follows a traumatic logic--and think of the course of the stream in The Scarlet Letter as something like the form of Beloved

Letting the eyes follow along the course of the stream, they could catch the reflected light from its water, at some short distance within the forest, but soon lost all traces of itamid the bewilderment of tree-trunks and underbrush,

a line seemingly modified at the very end of Beloved....

and here and there a huge rock, covered over with gray lichens. All these giant trees and boulders seemed intent on making a mystery of the course of this small brook; fearing, perhaps, that, with its never-ceasing loquacity, it should whisper tales out of the heart of the old forest whence it flowed, or mirror its revelations on the smooth surface of a pool.

what does this stream connect to, Morrison might have asked--what is its source and destination? and just what do those trees symbolize? what might they be trying to block or hide? and what tales might the stream tell?

Continually, indeed, as it stole onward, the streamlet kept up a babble, kind, quiet, soothing, but melancholy, like the voice of a young child that was spending its infancy without playfulness, and knew not how to be merry among sad acquaintances and events of sombre hue.

Denver? the crawling-already baby? both?

"O brook! O foolish and tiresome little brook!" cried Pearl, after listening awhile to its talk. "Why art thou so sad? Pick up a spirit, and do not be all the time sighing and murmuring!"

But the brook, in the course of its little lifetime among the forest-trees, had gone through so solemn an experience that it could not help talking about it, and seemed to have nothing else to say.

The child went singing away, following up the current of the brook, and striving to mingle a more lightsome cadence with its melancholy voice. But the little stream would not be comforted, and still kept telling its unintelligible secret of some very mournful mystery that had happened

trauma and testimony key in Beloved--what traumatized the brook? is it like the voices Stamp Paid hears outside 124? what secret and mystery might Morrison pondered in the writing of Beloved....

--or making a prophetic lamentation about something that was yet to happen--within the verge of the dismal forest....

Just where she had paused the brook chanced to form a pool, so smooth and quiet that it reflected a perfect image of her little figure, with all the brilliant picturesqueness of her beauty, in its adornment of flowers and wreathed foliage, but more refined and spiritualized than the reality. The image, so nearly identical with the living Pearl, seemed to communicate somewhat of its own shadowy and intangible quality to the child herself.

Almost a metaphor for being possessed by your own reflection, isn't it?

It was strange, the way in which Pearl stood, looking so steadfastly at them through the dim medium of the forest-gloom; herself, meanwhile, all glorified with a ray of sunshine, that was attracted thitherward as by a certain sympathy. In the brook beneath stood another child,--another and the same,--with likewise its ray of golden light. Hester felt herself, in some indistinct and tantalizing manner, estranged from Pearl; as if the child, in her lonely ramble through the forest, had strayed out of the sphere in which she and her mother dwelt together, and was now vainly seeking to return to it.

There was both truth and error in the impression; the child and mother were estranged, but through Hester's fault, not Pearl's. Since the latter rambled from her side, another inmate had been admitted within the circle of the mother's feelings, and so modified them all, that Pearl, the returning wanderer, could not find her wonted place, and hardly knew where she was

sounds to me like Denver's and the baby ghost's reaction to Paul D's initial presence in 124....

"I have a strange fancy," observed the sensitive minister, "that this brook is the boundary between two worlds, and that thou canst never meet thy Pearl again."

ah ha! didn't I call it at the beginning of this post? and I didn't even remember this passage until I typed it in!

...alone as she was in her childish and unreasonable wrath, it seemed as if a hidden multitude were lending her their sympathy and encouragement. Seen in the brook, once more, was the shadowy wraith of Pearl's image, crowned and girdled with flowers, but stamping its foot, wildly gesticulating, and, in the midst of it all, still pointing its small forefinger at Hester's bosom!

again, we have "voices of 124"/"unspeakable thoughts, unspoken" connections, as well as the idea that Beloved was more than just a single person....

...And the melancholy brook would add this other tale to the mystery with which its little heart was already overburdened, and whereof it still kept up a murmuring babble, with not a whit more cheerfulness of tone than for ages heretofore

as if the tale of Beloved's death is part of a much-longer and much-larger mysterious, traumatizing history....

***

As long as I've got quotation fever, let me end by quoting from some related passages from Marshall's The Chosen Place, The Timeless People, which I think also influenced Morrison's coded allusions to the middle passage in Beloved:

It was the Atlantic this side of the island, a wild-eyed, marauding sea the color of slate, deep, full of dangerous currents, lined with row upon row of barrier reefs, and with a sound like that of the combined voices of the drowned raised in a loud unceasing lament--all those, the nine million and more it is said, who in their exnforced exile, their Diaspora, had gone down between this point and the homeland lying out of sight to the east. This sea mourned them. Aggrieved, outraged, unappeased, it hurled itself upon each of the reefs in turn and then upon the shingle beach, sending up the spume in an angry froth which the wind took and drove in like smoke over the land. Great boulders that had roared down from Westminster centuries ago stood scattered in the surf; these, sculpted into fantastical shapes by the wind and water, might have been gravestones placed there to commemorate those millions of the drowned.

...here on this desolate coast, before this perpetually aggrieved sea which...continued to grieve and rage over the ancient wrong it could neither forget nor forgive.

...they seemed to be puzzling over the sea in front of them which was so different from the mild Caribbean on their side of the island. Their wondering faces raised, they appeared to be asking the reason for its angry unceasing lament. What, whom did it mourn? Why did it continue the wake all this time, shamelessly filling the air with the indecent wailing of a hired mute? Who were its dead? Despairing of finding an answer they would turn away eventually and, leaving the young people romping in the surf, make their way slowly back to the village in time for the car race along the main road.

If you liked these passages from Marshall's novel, you might want to check out another passage I quoted on my other blog to honor the end of Le Blogue Berube. When I get back from my conference and blog vacation, I'll continue with the Hawthorne-Morrison thing, this time finally following through on the issue of specter evidence in "Young Goodman Brown" and Beloved!

And Now for Something Completely Different

The next paragraph's "Faulknerian feat[] of subordination" should not be read by anyone not named Scott Eric Kaufman. If you want to find out what I think about Marshall, Devi, trauma, and mourning, I recommend skipping to the third paragraph. But if you're wondering what a Hawthorne blogger is doing blogging on something and some, uh, two other than Hawthorne, the next paragraph may do. And if you're interested in how not to write when writing a conference paper, the next paragraph will most certainly do. Oh, and if you love it when the author of a blog nobody reads tells inside jokes to himself, the next paragraph is a must-read. (Must fight temptation to tell anecdote about the SF story I wrote for my AP Chemistry class and how easily amused I am. Aaaargh. OK, done. Yes.)

"Old School" readers of this blog (that empty set) will no doubt recall it used to be "mostly about Hawthorne" (and still is, in its technorati profile--I'm that lazy!). New readers (and how do you afford your rock and roll lifestyle, may I ask?)--coming here from such generous linkers (and good titlers) as The Hobgoblin of Little Minds (I'd thank BikeProf in a comments on his post, but one of the annoying features of the new Blogger, one which makes you wonder why they put it in there, is its tendency to freeze when you try to post a comment--or wait, is that just a feature of the ancient computer I'm using here in Chiba?), Old Is the New New, and Quod She--will have already noted that it now is "chiefly about Hawthorne matters" (for reasons I'm sure I'll devote a boring post to when I run out of material for Monday blogging [yes, the obscurest blog in blogoramaville has a programming schedule]). The point is, I'm delivering a paper in Hawaii on traumatic displacements and militant mourning in Paule Marshall's 1969 novel, The Chosen Place, The Timeless People and Mahasweta Devi's "Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha," a short story translated into English by Gayatri Spivak in 1995 for Imaginary Maps in T-minus, oh, less than 8 days, so the Hawthorne blogging is going to be kept to a minimum the next few days as I try to tame the formless monster that began as a paper at the 1996 American Studies Association convention on trauma and diaspora in CPTP, evolved into a submission to a collection of essays that to my knowledge was never published, morphed into a paper I was planning to insert into one of the collections of essays that I'm supposed to be co-editing, and then refused to copy itself onto the memory stick that I brought to Japan last August, forcing me to start from scratch this semester as I bring in a new topic and new writer to an already-far-too-complex (and possibly lost) old essay. So good ol' Intertextual Thursday is going to begin the project of helping me not embarrass myself more than I normally do at academic conferences, even if the main purpose of this one is to see my parents and let them see their grandkids for the only time between the Augusts of 2006 and 2007. Oh, and to make up for my most humiliating job interview ever, during which I established personal records, hopefully never to be challenged again, in the categories of inability to think on one's feet, inability to hide how flustered one is, and rapidity with which one gives up on oneself in an interview. That's all.

Anyway, my third attempt to begin this post will begin, as I tend to do here, with a quotation. It's from my conference proposal that got accepted (with a close-to-$400 registration fee, I suspect most proposals get accepted--not that that's a bad thing--so judge for yourself whether mine is any good):

Although intellectuals and activists working to define and contest the boundaries and methodologies of postcolonial studies have since its inception emphasized the comparative, transnational, and indeed global nature of the field, they have so far failed to analyze together two works of literature that offer profound meditations on the meaning, significance, and stakes of colonial/racialized trauma/testimony and mourning/melancholia in their respective times and places: Paule Marshall's novel The Chosen Place, The Timeless People for the post-independence Anglophone Caribbean and Mahasweta Devi's "Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha" for post-independence India. This failure represents a missed opportunity to bring together not only two quite different colonial/post-colonial histories and regions but also two vibrant fields of study with quite relateable trajectories.

This paper proposes to show how Marshall's and Devi's texts both represent and enact the best kinds of literary, historical, ethical, and political connections and relations postcolonial theorists, critics and scholars have been calling for, marking out, and arguing over for the past two decades. In so doing, I will suggest a certain exemplarity in the intertextual dialogue between The Chosen Place, The Timeless People and "Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha," one that has serious implications for future developments specifically in postcolonial studies and more generally in the humanities. Attending to the formal, structural, and indeed theoretical similarities between the two works will allow me to address such pressing debates within postcolonial studies as how to recognize colonialisms' impact on differently colonized groups along with the deep structures of resistance practiced by such groups, how to assess nationalist, internationalist, and transnationalist forms of resistance, and how to respond to the difficult divisions between activists from the metropole and subjects in the periphery. But it will also allow me to address such pressing debates over postcolonial studies as its intellectual and political origins, geographical and historical scope, relation to other fields, and potential for transforming both academic practices and institutions and their publics.

It may seem that I am asking a medium-length novel and a long short story to carry an inordinate amount of weight in my argument. But a quick glance at their quite similar plots and themes alone should dispel this view. Marshall's and Devi's works, although produced in different decades and regions, in response to two quite different forms of colonialism and two ambiguously (post)colonial temporalities, tell basically the same story: a well-informed and well-intentioned activist from the metropole (in the former, a radical Philadelphia anthropologist who leverages the desperation of his philanthropist funders for a success story, not to mention a tax break, into control over an alternative-to-modernization development project in the Bournehills region of a Caribbean island suspiciously like 1960s Barbados that aims to build from local knowledge and practices, empower the poorest of the poor agricultural workers in the region, and model ecological, economic, and political sustainability; in the latter, a radical urban journalist who leverages his activist and government connections to travel to and report on the failure of public and private aid efforts in a famine-stricken tribal region suspiciously like 1980s India) slowly comes to realize the profundity of the limitations of his original project (due to local, national, regional, and international politics in the Cold War era), suffers a crisis with a female lover (the former on-island; the latter long-distance), experiences reality-bending events (the former a metaphorical 'road to Damascus' conversion experience; the latter a quite magically real encounter with the 'last of the pterodactyls'), and most importantly bears witness to the historical and contemporary trauma of the rural people of the region, yet finds himself unable to offer any kind of testimony to the world outside the region. The most both sympathetically-portrayed metropolitan intellectuals can offer to the people of the region is a kind of barely articulate recognition of what they have come to dimly understand as a massive mourning project by those people for centuries-old failed rebellions against enslaving/colonizing forces.

Even this bare structuralist analysis gestures toward the deeply entangled meanings, significances, and stakes of this common Marshall-Devi story of colonial/racialized trauma/testimony and mourning/melancholia. Teasing them out and using them to take positions on crucial issues within and over the past, present, and future of postcolonial studies--and their implications for both research and teaching in and curricula and institutions of the humanities--is the project of this paper.

OK, so, sound interesting? Anyone read either or both of these works? Or heard of these authors? Thought to analyze them together? Done so? I'm under the no-doubt-mistaken impression that I am actually the first to do this. I'm happy to find out I'm wrong b/c it'll save me loads of time and space in the article that will someday follow from this....

Oh, and before I start, let me note that I've already criticized my earlier Intertextual Thursday postings as not living up to their billing--not "really" being intertextual. I've failed to do more than identify links between two works (here, The Scarlet Letter and Beloved, a much-travelled path, but one on which there is always something new to notice)--failed, that is, to explore what follows from them. As you can see from my conference proposal, years of commenting on failed comparison-contrast papers from students have vaccinated me, if you will, against falling into this trap in the genre of proposal-writing. But following through on the promises made in proposals like this one, in a way that will be satisfying both to me and my audience (assuming I have one--my 1996 Marshall paper, for instance, featured a smaller audience than panel, and two-thirds of the audience was made up of friends of mine), is the challenge facing me this week. It's not just an issue of making my balky (and nebulous and missing--cf. 2nd para if you were foolish enough to actually skip it!) prose "talky" or of concisely introducing my audience to two authors and works, two regions and traditions of social/cultural analysis of them, two theoretical concepts and two intellectual/activist projects concisely enough to leave me enough time to develop and support my claims convincingly. It's the challenge of balancing enumeration of similarities and differences with tallying of meanings, significances, and stakes with the taking and defending of positions in academic and more-than-academic wars of position.

So I'll let you "all" see the "draft" this Saturday (even if it doesn't deserve the name), in a slightly revised version of CitizenSE's Latest Crazy Hawthorne Idea. Hopefully I'll be able to actually come up with a decent ending to one of my posts on this blog that day. I may actually have to hold myself to some standards if people are actually reading this blog!

IT II: The Beloved Remix

My imaginary readers (hey, let's be optimistic on this sunny but not that warm late December Thursday in Chiba) will no doubt recall last week's not-quite-Intertextual Thursday post linking The Scarlet Letter and Beloved, in which I listed a bunch of SL quotes and hinted at how I think Morrison was making use of them in B. Well, given how little time I have to blog this morning, I'll just throw a few B quotes at you and offer a few sketchy comments. Maybe by next Thursday I'll be ready for a real intertextual post!

Last week, I suggested that Morrison was magically realizing Hawthorne's gothic and romantic tropes and figures, not to mention re-racializing some contexts Hawthorne had effectively de-racialized. Consider, as one example, the different views of the ghost that is haunting 124 Bluestone Road, on the outskirts of Cincinnati, Ohio, for much of the Reconstruction years. Is this house, "palsied by the baby's fury at having its throat cut," haunted by a ghost that is "too little to understand," as Sethe puts it? Or is Denver right that "Maybe she don't want to understand"? Is Paul D's properly Puritan question upon entering Sethe's house for the first time in 1873 and walking "straight into a pool of red and undulating light that locked him where he stood"--"Good god.... What kind of evil you got in here?"--to the point, in its unknowing evocation of the legendarily "lurid gleam" said to be cast by the scarlet letter? Or is Sethe's response--"It's not evil, just sad. Come on. Just step through," verified in part by Paul D's acknowledgment, "She was right. It was sad. Walking through it, a wave of grief soaked him so thoroughly he wanted to cry"--more on target? Or is Denver's countercharge, that the ghost is "Rebuked. Lonely and rebuked," more than adolescent projection of her own feelings onto the ghost? When Paul D exorcises the ghost, does she return in the body of a young woman known only as Beloved? The novel exists, in part, to raise questions like these, even if, Hawthorne-like, Morrison refuses to give definite answers in it.

But to return to Denver, as another example, it's worth noting that she has a Pearl-like awareness of the subtexts of her and her mother's isolation from the free black community of Cincinnati, even if, like Pearl, she lacks the knowledge of their causes. Not long after Paul D enters 124, Denver cries out:

"I can't no more. I can't no more."

"Can't what? What can't you?"

"I can't live here. I don't know where to go or what to do, but I can't live here. Nobody speaks to us. Nobody comes by. Boys don't like me. Girls don't either."

"Honey, honey."

"What's she talking 'bout nobody speaks to you?" asked Paul D.

"It's the house. People don't--"

"It's not! It's not the house. It's us! And it's you!"

"Denver!"

Denver's outburst is reminiscent of Pearl's demand that Hester put the scarlet letter back on in the famous forest scene of SL, with Denver's longing for "a sign of spite from the baby ghost" the counterpart of Pearl's demand. Yet Paul D's response initiates an extended parallel between him and the Hester of the forest scene. He suggests, "Maybe you all ought to move"--unknowingly echoing Sethe's earlier suggestion to her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, whose reply, "What'd be the point?... Not a house in the country ain't packed to its rafters with some dead Negro's grief," is somewhat reminiscent of The Scarlet Letter's narrator's hints at the haunting nature of sin and guilt--but Sethe's response to Paul D is more like the Hester at the beginning and end of the novel:

No moving. No leaving. It's all right the way it is.... I got a tree on my back and a haint in my house, and nothing in between but the daughter I am holding in my arms. No more running--from nothing. I will never run from another thing on this earth. I took one journey and I paid for the ticket, but let me tell you something, Paul D Garner: it cost too much! Do you hear me? It cost too much Now sit down and eat with us or leave us be.

Yet despite her resolve not to be moved, Sethe is running in a certain Dimmesdale-like sense--from her haunting memories of slavery, her escape from it, and after.

As for the rest, she worked hard to remember as close to nothing as was safe. Unfortunately her brain was devious. She might be hurrying across a field, running practically, to get to the pump quickly and rinse the chamomile sap from her legs. Nothing else would be in her mind.... The smething. The plash of the water, the sight of her shows and stocking awry on the path where she had flung them; or Here Boy lapping in the puddle near her feet, and suddenly there was Sweet ome rolling, rolling, rolling out before her eyes, and although there was not a leaf on that farm that did not make her want to scream, it rolled itself out before her in shameless beauty. It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves. Boys hanging from the most beautiful sycamores in the world. It shamed her--remembering the wonderful soughing trees rather than the boys. Try as she might to make it otherwise, the sycamores beat out the children every time and she could not forgive her memory for that.

Sethe's literally "terrible memory," as the narrator puts it, is linked to her belief that "the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay," as the narrator also puts it: "The 'better life' she believed that she and Denver were living was simply not that other one." Thus, Paul D's staying with Sethe and Denver, in an odd way, puts Hester in the role of Dimmesdale, striving to avoid repeating a traumatic past, and Paul D in the role of Hester in the forest scene in SL:

Sethe, if I'm here with you, with Denver, you can go anywhere you want. Jump, if you want to, 'cause I'll catch you, girl. I'll catch you 'fore you fall. Go as far inside as you need to, I'll hold your ankles. Make sure you get back out.... We can make a life, girl. A life.

It's one of Beloved's dark ironies that Sethe ends the novel like Baby Suggs and Arthur Dimmesdale before her, in danger of failing to heed Hester's advice to Dimmesdale: "Preach! Write! Act! Do any thing, save to lie down and die!"

Without jumping that far ahead, let me simply close this post by noting that Sethe and Paul D's reunion, after 18 years apart, is not unlike Hester's and Dimmesdale's meeting after a separation of 7 years. I'll put the two conversations side-by-side, so to speak, and let you draw the conclusions:

He made a step nigher, and discovered the scarlet letter.

"Hester! Hester Prynne!" said he. "Is it thou? Art thou in life?"

"Even so!" she answered. "In such life as has been mine these seven years past!"

As if to punish her further for her terrible memory, sitting on the porch, not forty feet away, was Paul D, the last of the Sweet Home men. And although she could never mistake his face for another's, she said, "Is that you?"

"What's left."

Not Half Bad Intertextual Thursday Kick-Off Post

As promised, I'm moving into Hawthorne-Morrison blogging today and hopefully Saturday, as well, although we may not be settled into Chiba-de tsuma-no ryoushin-no uchi-wa (yup, just finished my final exam in Intro to Japanese today) well enough for me to blog that day, so don't hold your breath, O hypothetical reader (it would be too optimistic to make that plural).

Let me start off by observing that it's totally unoriginal to link Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter to Morrison's Beloved. (In my manuscript, which I'll discuss Saturday [with luck], I focus on "specter evidence" in "Young Goodman Brown" and Beloved, which may actually still be original almost ten years after I first came up with the idea [can I really be that lucky?], as part of a larger argument that puts The House of the Seven Gables and Song of Solomon alongside each other [presence of the past] and The Blithedale Romance and Paradise together [failed utopias] in order to read some pregnant silences in Morrison's "Unspeakable Things Unspoken" and Playing in the Dark and make some points about race and American literature.) But since I'm not going for originality on this blog so much as stream of consciousness "free write"-style quick-hit readings--on the theory that nothing focuses the mind like knowing you have to finish what you're writing in no more than, say, 30 minutes from now--let me boldly restate the obvious on my way to hopefully less-than-obvious points.

Obvious Point I: How can anyone today read the following from "The Custom-House" and not think of Beloved?

Moonlight, in a familiar room, falling so white upon the carpet, and showing all its figures so distinctly,--making every object so minutely visible, yet so unlike a morning or noontide visibility,--is a medium the most suitable for a romance-writer to get acquainted with his illusive guests. There is the little domestic scenery of the well-known apartment; the chairs, with each its separate individuality; the centre-table, sustaining a work basket, a volume or two, and an extinguished lamp; the sofa; the book-case; the picture on the wall; all these details, so completely seen, are so spiritualized by the unusual light, that they seem to lose their actual substance, and become things of intellect. Nothing is too small or too trifling to undergo this change, and acquire dignity thereby. A child's shoe; the doll, seated in her little wicker carriage; the hobby-horse;--whatever, in a word, has been used or played with, during the day, is now invested with a quality of strangeness or remoteness, though still almost as vividly present as by daylight. Thus, therefore, the floor of our familiar room has become a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other. Ghosts might enter here, without affrighting us. It would be too much in keeping with the scene to excite surprise, were we to look about us and discover a form, beloved, but gone hence, now sitting quietly in a streak of magic moonshine, with an aspect that would make us doubt whether it had returned from afar, or had never once stirred from our fireside.

While that last sentence especially is resonating in your head, let me drop a few quotes from The Scarlet Letter to link it to one key image cluster in Hawthorne's representations of Hester Prynne, Pearl, and Arthur Dimmesdale:

"What do we talk of marks and brands, whether on the bodice of her gown, or the flesh of her forehead?" cried another female, the ugliest as well as the most pitiless of these self-constructed judges. "This woman has brought shame upon us all, and ought to die. Is there not law for it? Truly there is, both in the Scripture and the statute-book...."

But the point which drew all eyes, and, as it were, transfigured the wearer,--so that both men and women, who had been familiarly acquainted with Hester Prynne, were now impressed as if they beheld her for the first time,--was that SCARLET LETTER, so fantastically embroidered and illuminated upon her bosom. It had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and inclosing her in a sphere by herself.

In all her intercourse with society, however, there was nothing that made her feel as if she belonged to it. Every gesture, every word, and even the silence of those with whom she came in contact, implied, and often expressed, that she was banished, and as much alone as if she inhabited another sphere, or communicated with the common nature by other organs and senses than the rest of human kind. She stood apart from mortal interests, yet close beside them, like a ghost that revisits the familiar fireside, and can no longer make itself seen or felt; no more smile with the household joy, nor mourn with the kindred sorrow; or, should it succeed in manifesting its forbidden sympathy, awakening only terror and horrible repugnance.

Brooding over all these matters, the mother felt like one who has evoked a spirit, but, by some irregularity in the process of conjuration, has failed to win the master-word that should control this new and incomprehensible intelligence.

Pearl was a born outcast of the infantile world. An imp of evil, emblem and product of sin, she had no right among christened infants. Nothing was more remarkable than the instinct, as it seemed, with which the child comprehended her loneliness; the destiny that had drawn an inviolable circle round about her; the whole peculiarity, in short, of her position in respect to other children.

Once, this freakish, elfish cast came into the child's eyes, while Hester was looking at her own image in them, as mothers are fond of doing; and suddenly,--for women in solitude, and with troubled hearts, are pestered with unaccountable delusions,--she fancied that she beheld, not her own miniature portrait, but another face in the small black mirror of Pearl's eye. It was a face, fiend-like, full of smiling malice, yet bearing the semblance of features that she had known full well, though seldom with a smile, and never with malice in them. It was as if an evil spirit possessed the child, and had just then peeped forth in mockery.

Thus, Hester Prynne, whose heart had lost its regular and healthy throb, wandered without a clew in the dark labyrinth of mind; now turned aside by an insurmountable precipice; now starting back from a deep chasm. There was wild and ghastly scenery all around her, and a home and comfort nowhere. At times, a fearful doubt strove to possess her soul, whether it were not better to send Pearl at once to heaven, and go herself to such futurity as Eternal Justice should provide.

The scarlet letter had not done its office.

"Hester! Hester Prynne!" said he. "Is it thou? Art thou in life?"

"Even so!" she answered. "In such life as has been mine these seven years past! And thou, Arthur Dimmesdale, dost thou yet live?"

It is no wonder that they thus questioned one another's actual and bodily existence, and even doubted of their own. So strangely did they meet, in the dim wood, that it was like the first encounter, in the world beyond the grave, of two spirits who had been intimately connected in their former life, but now stood coldly shuddering, in mutual dread; as not yet familiar with their state, nor wonted to the companionship of disembodied beings. Each a ghost, and awe-stricken at the other ghost. They were awe-stricken likewise at themselves; because the crisis flung back to them their consciousness, and revealed to each heart its history and experience, as life never does, except at such breathless epochs. The soul beheld its features in the mirror of the passing moment.

Her face, so long familiar to the townspeople, showed the marble quietude which they were accustomed to behold there. It was like a mask; or rather, like the frozen calmness of a dead woman's features; owing this dreary resemblance to the fact that Hester was actually dead, in respect to any claim of sympathy, and had departed out of the world with which she still seemed to mingle.

"Look your last on the scarlet letter and its wearer!"--the people's victim and life-long bond-slave, as they fancied her, might say to them. "Yet a little while, and she will be beyond your reach! A few hours longer, and the deep, mysterious ocean will quench and hide for ever the symbol which ye have caused to burn upon her bosom!"

OK, so as you've been reading you've probably been thinking something like the following (besides "when is he going to stop with the quotations?! enough already!" that is): hmm, doesn't it seem as if Morrison takes many of Hawthorne's metaphors and, if not literalizes them, magically realizes them? I guess that romance/gothic/magical realism connection all the kewl kidz have been talking about makes a lot of sense! isn't the Hester/Pearl/Dimmesdale relationship (to each other and between them and their community) something of an interesting model for the Sethe/Denver/Beloved/Paul D relationship, especially when differences as well as similarities are taken into account?

Yes, dear imaginary reader, it's as if you are reading my mind. It's almost like Morrison was talking with Jean Fagan Yellin, who wrote one of the most comprehensive examinations of this social death/bond-slave theme in The Scarlet Letter back in 1989, the same year as Morrison's "Unspeakable Things Unspoken" essay on race and American literature, while both were working on their projects. Or better, that Morrison and Yellin, working independently, came to similar conclusions (beating people like Jennifer Fleischner and Sacvan Bercovitch to the punch, so to speak).

My argument, which I'll pick up next Thursday, is that you don't need to go to Morrison's later critical work to find in its claims and ornate absences evidence that she was reading and thinking carefully about race and Hawthorne--all you need to do is look in Beloved for the evidence, as critics from Jan Stryz and Caroline Woidat to Charles Lewis and Emily Miller Budick have done, or as careful historical readers of Hawthorne like Teresa Goddu and Arthur Riss have all but done. This much is, by now, quite obvious. What I'll give you next week is a string of Hawthornesque Beloved quotations to match this string of Morrisonesque Scarlet Letter passages. Hopefully then we'll all be in a position to move a few steps beyond the obvious.

Gotta post this before I turn into a pumpkin, but a quick question for my hypothetical reader(s) before I go: when could you tell the title of this premiere Intertextual Thursday post (not to be confused with a premier post) was a joke? Of course this is the "worst evah"!