Worst Close Reading Tuesday Post Evah!

The first has to be the worst, so let's go set the bar low. From "The Custom-House":

While thus perplexed,--and cogitating, among other hypotheses, whether the letter might not have been one of those decorations which the white men used to contrive, in order to take the eyes of the Indians,--I happened to place it on my breast. It seemed to me,--the reader may smile, but must not doubt my word,--it seemed to me, then, that I experienced a sensation not altogether physical, yet almost so, as of burning heat; and as if the letter were not of red cloth, but red-hot iron. I shuddered, and involuntarily let it fall upon the floor.

Who's speaking? It's in the first person, and it's autobiographical, but it's not exactly Hawthorne himself (at least not the "inmost Me" who remains "behind the veil," as he puts it early in the essay). Instead, it's the speaker formerly known as the "Loco-foco Surveyor," the "I" who refers to "The Custom-House" and The Scarlet Letter as "POSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF A DECAPITATED SURVEYOR." It's a ghostly voice speaking "from the realm of quiet" as a "citizen of somewhere else."

What adds another level of complexity to the question is the fact that the highly dramatic "discovery" of the scarlet letter and Surveyor Pue's six-page document outlining the "life and conversation of one Hester Prynne" (which this passage transitions between), not to mention the remains of the letter and the document themselves, are inventions on Hawthorne's part. The reader, it seems, is bound to do more than smile or doubt the speaker's word, but also to smile at and doubt the speaker himself, in some sense. The speaker's later claim that "the main facts of the story [of The Scarlet Letter] are authorized and authenticated by the document of Mr. Surveyor Pue" is highly ironic (and funny), as Hawthorne was in fact founding his romance on an imaginary source "discovered" by a fictionalized version of himself.

What's He Talking About? While trying to solve the "riddle" of a "certain" "much worn and faded" "affair of fine red cloth" with "greatly frayed and faded" "traces of gold embroidery" upon it--"how it was to be worn, or what rank, honor, and dignity, in by-past times, were signified by it"--or otherwise arrive at the "deep meaning, most worthy of interpretation," of "the mystic symbol" that was "subtly communicating itself to my sensibilities, but evading the analysis of my mind," the speaker tries it on. In a highly qualified passage--"it seemed to me, then, that I experienced a sensation not altogether physical, yet almost so, as of burning heat; and as if the letter were not of red cloth, but red-hot iron"--the speaker implies that he almost felt as if he were being branded by the letter. So he "involuntarily" drops the letter and turns his attention to the document--and never refers to the letter itself in the rest of "The Custom-House."

So What Is Going On Here? This is going to have to be very telegraphed, but I see this passage as encapsulating what makes Hawthorne so interesting (at least to me). The explicit reference to Indians and implicit reference to the branding of slaves in the midst of an entirely fictional explanation of "how a large part of the following pages came into my possession" that "offers proofs of the authenticity of the narrative therein contained" (lines that never fail to remind me of white abolitionists' editorial or authenticating prefaces to slave narratives), one preceded by an admitted failure to imagine a time "when India was a new region, and only Salem knew the way thither," narrated by this fictionalized and ghostly autobiographical persona hits all my formalist, intertextualist, historicist, and comparativist buttons at the same time. And don't get me started on what other Hawthornists have done with this passage! Is Hawthorne identifying with Hester? Seared by her sin? Admitting he can't take the heat she withstands? Allegorizing his relationship with antebellum feminism? Appropriating the experience of (especially female) slaves? The possibilities, if not endless in themselves, are endlessly debate-able.

Work calls, so maybe I'd better pick up this stream of consciousness on Intertextual Thursday by linking the "scarlet letter as social death" argument I made in my dissertation with my yet-to-be-finished manuscript's treatment of Morrison's rearticulation of The Scarlet Letter in Beloved. That way if travel prevents me from doing CitizenSE's Latest Crazy Hawthorne Idea on Saturday (going back to Chiba, Chiba, Chiba....), at least I'll have laid the groundwork for the following Saturday's entry.

"Why CitizenSE" IV

OK, so far in my "Why CitizenSE" posts I've reviewed some of the contexts of Hawthorne's "citizen of somewhere else" line from the end of "The Custom-House," and read it as a kind of declaration of independence from Salem and a pledge of allegiance to the republic of letters. But declaring independence necessitates severing already-existing ties. And, in order for Hawthorne to have something to pledge allegiance to, he needs to distinguish a republic of letters from the realms of politics, economics, and religion. He accomplishes both these goals by linking his feelings toward Salem to his feelings for his ancestors.

So why did Hawthorne return to Salem? Let's skip to his most direct (and deceptive) answer:

On emerging from the Old Manse, it was chiefly [a] strange, indolent, unjoyous attachment for my native town, that brought me to fill a place in Uncle Sam's brick edifice, when I might as well, or better, have gone somewhere else. My doom was upon me. It was not the first time, nor the second, that I had gone away,--as it seemed, permanently,--but yet returned, like the bad half-penny; or as if Salem were for me the inevitable centre of the universe.

In fact, throughout "The Custom-House," Hawthorne resorts to multiple metaphors when trying to convey his feelings upon returning to Salem, after having lived in Concord from 1842 to 1846, to take up his new post, an appointment by President James Polk as "chief executive officer" of the Salem Custom-House. In part, these metaphors serve to minimize and obscure his connections with the Democratic Party. But only in part. As many Hawthorne critics have pointed out, they introduce themes and problematics that structure The Scarlet Letter and connect Hawthorne to his main characters. Putting that topic aside for the moment, let's examine Hawthorne's acknowledgement that Salem "possesses, or did possess, a hold on my affections, the force of which I have never realized during my seasons of actual residence here.... [T]hough invariably happiest elsewhere, there is within me a feeling for old Salem, which, in lack of a better phrase, I must be content to call affection." And while noting in passing his association of happiness and "elsewhere," and his highly qualified statement of affection for "old Salem," which together foreshadow his closing "citizen of somewhere else" declaration, let's focus instead on his discontent with "affection" to describe Salem's forceful hold on his feelings. Why does he keep returning to metaphors of "instinct," "curse," "spell," "destiny," and "doom" when discussing Salem? Because his feelings are complex, despite his efforts to look objectively at Salem or think rationally about it.

There are many such "objective" descriptions scattered throughout "The Custom-House," but as realistic as they are, they are saturated with Hawthorne's emotions. In his first sentence mentioning Salem, for instance, even though he is trying to get to a description of the Salem Custom-House itself, he sounds practically Faulknerian:

In my native town of Salem, at the head of what, half a century ago, in the days of old King Derby, was a bustling wharf,--but which is now burdened with decayed wooden warehouses, and exhibits few or no symptoms of commercial life; except, perhaps, a bark or brig half-way down in melancholy length, discharging hides; or, nearer at hand, a Nova Scotia schooner, pitching out her cargo of firewood,--at the head, I say, of this dilapidated wharf, which the tide often overflows, and along which, at the base and in the rear of a row of buildings, the track of many languid years is seen in a border of unthrifty grass,--here, with a view from its front windows adown this not very enlivening prospect, and thence across the harbour, stands a spacious edifice of brick.

Note in particular the extended contrast between past and present and the way the description seems to perpetuate itself, seemingly against the author's wishes, with its multiple dashes, dependent clauses, and editorializing adjectives. The next extended description of Salem continues these rhetorical practices and draws the logical conclusion:

Indeed, so far as its physical aspect is concerned, with its flat, unvaried surface, covered chiefly with wooden houses, few or none of which pretend to architectural beauty,--its irregularity, which is neither picturesque nor quaint, but only tame,--its long and lazy street, lounging wearisomely through the whole extent of the peninsula, with Gallows Hill and New Guinea at one end, and a view of the alms-house at the other,--such being the features of my native town, it would be quite as reasonable to form a sentimental attachment to a disarranged checkerboard.

Yet the attachment persists, and its strength is such that Hawthorne's declaration of independence again returns to "objective" description of Salem, this time embedded in an exended metaphor, in order to achieve the separation he desires:

Soon, likewise, my old native town will loom upon me through the haze of memory, a mist brooding over and around it; as if it were no portion of the real earth, but an overgrown village in cloud-land, with only imaginary inhabitants to people its wooden houses, and walk its homely lanes, and the unpicturesque prolixity of its main street. Henceforth, it ceases to be a reality in my life. I am a citizen of somewhere else.

I've already discussed this passage in the context of Hawthorne's ideas about romance and the imagination, but my point here is that Hawthorne's "objective" descriptions in "The Custom-House" read like an attempt to exorcise a haunting connection to Salem.

In trying to explain this connection, Hawthorne turns to a language of soil and roots, death and inheritance, but only to identify its limitations:

It is now nearly two centuries and a quarter since the original Briton, the earliest emigrant of my name, made his appearance in the wild and forest-bordered settlement, which has since become a city. And here his descendants have been born and died, and have mingled their earthy substance with the soil; until no small portion of it must be necessarily akin to the mortal frame wherewith, for a little while, I walk the streets. In part, therefore, the attachment which I speak of is the mere sensuous sympathy of dust for dust. Few of my countrymen can know what it is; nor, as frequent transplantation is perhaps better for the stock, need they consider it desirable to know.

Even though he dismisses the "mere sensuous sympathy of dust for dust" here, he returns to it a few paragraphs later, only to end on a more emphatic conclusion in favor of "transplantation":

This long connection of a family with one spot, as its place of birth and burial, creates a kindred between the human being and the locality, quite independent of any charm in the scenery or moral circumstances that surround him. It is not love, but instinct. The new inhabitant--who came from a foreign land, or whose father or grandfather came--has little claim to be called a Salemite; he has no conception of the oyster-like tenacity with which an old settler, over whom his third century is creeping, clings to the spot where his successive generations have been imbedded. It is no matter that the place is joyless for him; that he is weary of the old wooden houses, the mud and dust, the dead level of site and sentiment, the chill east wind, and the chillest of social atmospheres;--all these, and whatever faults besides he may see or imagine, are nothing to the purpose. The spell survives, and just as powerfully as if the natal spot were an earthly paradise. So it has been in my case. I felt it almost as a destiny to make Salem my home; so that the mould of features and cast of character which had all along been familiar here--ever, as one representative of the race lay down in his grave, another assuming, as it were, his sentry-march along the Main-Street--might still in his day be seen and recognized in the old twn. Nevertheless, this very sentiment is an evidence that the connection, which has become an unhealthy one, should at last be severed. Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed soil.

Hawthorne's invocation of racialized discourses--of soil, roots, planting, replanting, and transplanting; of family and inheritance; of the features and character of one's "natal spot" that create an instinctive "kindred between the human being and the locality"; of spell, destiny, and doom--helps provide a context for his dismissal of those who can trace their ancestry back a mere three generations at most as having "little claim to be called a Salemite," as well as his earlier overview of Salem geography "with Gallows Hill and New Guinea at one end, and a view of the alms-house at the other," for New Guinea was a neighborhood where immigrants and free blacks lived. But Gallows Hill and the alms-house suggest that Hawthorne saw inheritance in more than physical terms. Indeed, he links Gallows Hill with his ancestors and the alms-house with the Custom-House, with his distant and recent past.

Let's look first at the ways in which Hawthorne describes how the distant past--his family history--connects him to Salem through strong and complex feelings:

But the sentiment has likewise its moral quality. The figure of that first ancestor, invested by family tradition with a dim and dusky grandeur, was present to my boyish imagination, as far back as I can remember. It still haunts me, and induces a home-feeling with the past, which I scarcely claim in reference to the present phase of the town. I seem to have a stronger claim to a residence here on account of this grave, bearded, sable-cloaked, and steeple-crowned progenitor,--who came so early, with his Bible and his sword, and trod the unworn street with such a stately port, and made so large a figure, as a man of war and peace,--a stronger claim than for myself, whose name is seldom heard and my face hardly known.

Here, the haunting "figure of that first ancestor" provides Hawthorne with a "stronger claim to residence" in Salem than his own efforts and "induces a home-feeling with the past, which I scarcely claim in reference to the present phase of the town." Yet the "moral quality" produced by his knowledge of ancestry and "family tradition" is ambivalent at best:

He was a soldier, legislator, judge; he was a ruler in the Chuch; he had all the Puritanic traits, both good and evil. He was a likewise a bitter persecutor; as witness the Quakers, who have remembered him in their histories, and relate an incident of his hard severity towards a woman of their sect which will last longer, it is to be feared, than any record of his better deeds, although these were many. His son, too, inherited the persecuting spirit, and made himself so conspicuous in the martyrdom of the witches, that their blood may fairly be said to have left a stain upon him. So deep a stain, indeed, that his old dry bones, in the Charter Street burial ground, must still retain it, if they have not crumbled utterly to dust! I know not whether these ancestors of mine bethought themselves to repent, and ask pardon of Heaven for their cruelties; or whether they are now groaning under the heavy consequences of them, in another state of being. At all events, I, the present writer, as their representative, hereby take shame upon myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred by them--as I have heard, and as the dreary and unprosperous condition of the race, for many a long year back, would argue to exist--may be now and henceforth removed.

Doubtless, however, either of these stern and black-browed Puritans would have thought it quite a sufficient retribution for his sins, that, after so long a lapse of years, the old trunk of the family tree, with so much venerable moss upon it, should have borne as its topmost bough, an idler like myself. No aim, that I have ever cherished, would they recognize as laudable; no success of mine--if my life, beyond its domestic scope, had ever been brightened by success--would they deem otherwise than worthless, if not positively disgraceful. "What is he?" murmurs one gray shadow of my forefathers to the other. "A writer of story-books! What kind of business in life,--what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation,--may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler!" Such are the compliments between my great-grandsires and myself, across the gulf of time! And yet, let them scorn me as they will, strong traits of their nature have intertwined themselves with mine.

Here, Hawthorne suggests simultaneously how tenuous his connection to Salem is--if his distant ancestors provide his strongest claim to citizenship and residence in Salem, he is in danger of beng disinherited by them as a worthless, disgraceful, degenerate idler--and how strongly he identifies with the republic of letters. To the extent that he has inherited their "spirit" and "traits," it is to condemn them for their "cruelties" and take shame upon himself for their "sins" against Quakers and the martyred victims of the Salem witch trials; despite their "scorn" for his most "cherished" aims, the entire purpose of "The Custom-House" is to explain his return to literary life, to vindicate the "writer of story-books" as fulfilling a serious and valued "business in life."

Of course, this return to literary life is a resurrection from political death and job-induced lethargy. But Hawthorne's repeated invocations of a kind of "culture of poverty" argument to describe the enervating effects of appointment to a political office--such as in his initial description of his Custom-House co-workers as being characterized by "that lack of energy that distinguishes the occupants of alms-houses, and all other beings who depend for subsistence on charity, on monopolized labor, or any thing else but their own independent exertions"--are framed by two key metaphors. Consider Uncle Sam:

An effect--which I believe to be observable, more or less, in every individual who has occupied the position--is, that, while he leans on the mighty arm of the Republic, his own proper strength departs from him. He loses, in an extent proportioned to the weakness of force of his original nature, the capability of self-support.... He usually keeps his ground just long enough for his own ruin, and is then thrust out, with sinews all unstrung, to totter along the difficult footpath of life as he may.... His pervading and continual hope--a hallucination, which, in the face of all discouragement, and making light of impossibilities, haunts him while he lives and, I fancy, like the convulsive throes of the cholera, torments him for a brief space after death--is, that, finally, and in no long time, he shall be restored to office.... Why should he toil and moil, and be at so much trouble to pick himself up out of the mud, when, in a little while hence, the strong arm of his Uncle will raise and support him? Why should he work for his living here, or go to dig gold in California, when he is so soon to be made happy, at monthly intervals, with a little pile of glittering coin out of his Uncle's pocket? It is sadly curious to observe how slight a taste of office suffices to infect a poor fellow with this singular disease. Uncle Sam's gold--meaning no disrespect to the worthy old gentleman--has, in this respect, a quality of enchantment like the devil's wages. Whoever touches it should look well to himself, or he may find the bargain to go hard against him, involving, if not his soul, yet many of its better attributes; its sturdy force, its courage and constancy, its truth, its self-reliance, and all that gives the emphasis to manly character.

"Neither the front nor the back entrance of the Custom-House opens on the road to Paradise," indeed. Instead, Uncle Sam's gold is the carrier of a cholera-like disease that can bring irreparable damage to body, character, and perhaps soul. In part this rhetoric is a parody of "repentance of the evil and corrupt practices, into which, as a matter of course, every Custom-House officer must be supposed to fall"--and of which Hawthorne himself was accused by those seeking to unseat him--and part of the series of puns on the word "custom" that run throughout the essay. Indeed, Hawthorne references "the received code" that it was his duty upon appointment to bring all his Whig subordinates to the "axe of the guillotine" and the "established rule" even they recognized to be replaced by "younger men, more orthodox in politics, and altogether fitter than themselves to serve our common Uncle," so as to emphasize his kindness in not firing all of them, whatever "discredit" and "detriment to [his] official conscience" this decision was supposed to bring. However, even more important than distinguishing himself from the Whigs who guillotined him--thereby giving in to one of the "ugli[est] traits of human nature...to grow cruel, merely because they possessed the power of giving harm"--Hawthorne uses the figure of Uncle Sam to imply the value of the literary realm over the political, not just in the self-reliant way it enables him to regain his vigor and support his family, but in a moral sense, as well.

Consider the other federal metaphor Hawthorne uses in "The Custom-House," the "enormous specimen of the American eagle, with outspread wings, a shield before her breast, and, if I recollect aright, a bunch of intermingled thunderbolts and barbed arrows in each claw," that hovers over the entrance to the Custom-House:

With the customary infirmity of temperament that characterizes this unhappy fowl, she appears by the fierceness of her beak and eye and the general truculency of her attitude, to threaten mischief to the inoffensive community; and especially to warn all citizens, careful of their safety, against intruding on the premises which she overshadows with her wings. Nevertheless, vixenly as she looks, many people are seeking, at this very moment, to shelter themselves under the wing of the federal eagle, imagining, I presume, that her bosom has all the softness and snugness of an eider-down pillow. But she has no great tenderness, even in her best of moods, and, sooner or later,--oftener sooner than late,--is apt to fling off her nestlings with a scratch of her claw, a dab of her beak, or a rankling wound from her barbed arrows.

Lauren Berlant has done an excellent reading of this passage that I will discuss in a future post, for her book The Anatomy of National Fantasy has many important and provocative readings of Hawthorne's "citizen of somewhere else" line. But for now let me just emphasize that Hawthorne links Uncle Sam and the federal eagle with the worst traits of his ancestors in his distant past and political opponents in his recent past.

I'll close with one last quote to illustrate how the republic of letters emerges from the realms of politics, religion, and commerce in "The Custom-House"--this time a reflection on how the "Surveyor of the Revenue" is seen by Hawthorne's "fellow-officers, and the merchants and sea-captains with whom my official duties brought me into any manner of connection":

It is a good lesson--though it may often be a hard one--for a man who has dreamed of literary fame, and of making for himself a rank among the world's dignitaries by such means, to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are recognized, and to find how utterly devoid of significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves, and all he aims at.

As both girls are crying and today is the day we're celebrating onechan's third birthday, I'll have to draw the conclusion of this post next week. But for now note how the language of claims and aims and fame echoes the language Hawthorne uses when discussing his ancestors and the ties that bind him to Salem--and which he breaks in "The Custom-House."

What Would Hawthorne Say About Mold...and the CCST?

Why mold? Well, regular readers of this now "multicellular microorganism" of the meme chain that is blogoramaville will no doubt recall that in the few previous autobiographical moments here, I was complaining--stoically, mind you--about (the process of) having gotten sick. Why did I get sick? Because the humidifier we ordered to resolve our seemingly intractable dispute over freezing-but-moist or warm-but-parched (itself caused by a lack of central heating or insulation in a concrete-block style apartment in a city whose average low never dips below freezing and whose lowest average high is higher than something like half the average highs where our house is located) came late. Seems like the shipping company had trouble finding our place. In a vain attempt to make up for the lateness and head off the rare (for this family) quadfecta (imoto-->onechan-->mama-->dada before anyone in the transmission chain got better), we ran said humidifier almost non-stop, even on rainy days, for a week, only thinking to mop up the condensation on the three huge sliding-door-style-windows-to-balconies-we-don't-even-use a few days ago. Hence the mold around the bases of said windows and probably other places we don't yet know about.

Which means we have to pay some cleaning ladies our landlady knows a hundred bucks to remove the mold and leave the apartment on the day they do so--onechan's birthday--for the health of our still-not-better-musume. Then we have to seriously consider whether we should abjure the wall-mounted space heaters entirely and get a ground-based space heater or heated carpet; run the wall-mounted space heaters as usual (that is, along with the humidifier) and get a dehumidifier and an air purifier; or run the wall-mounted space heaters hardly at all, open all our picture windows for at least two hours per day (whether or not we all have to leave the house that day), and maybe still get an air purifier. Intrepid readers will no doubt be racing each other to become the first to leave a comment on this blog with suggestions for dealing with this situation.

Anyway, my point is that Hawthorne would no doubt have found in said situation materal for a notebook entry or letter at least. But how would it read? Hence our first-ever CitizenSE reader contest: for best parody of a Hawthorne notebook entry or letter on our mold situation. The contest closes at midnight on 11 December 2007 and the winner will get not only "publication" on this blog but also a "prize" to be named later.

As you can see, I'm planning ahead for blog sweeps week, because I'm going to need to compete with this year's (apparent) winner, Michael Berube and the show trials and intellectual death match steel cage bouts of his We Are All Giant Nuclear Fireball Now Party--not to mention everyone else on my own nominations for "best educatacalistic (vaguely literary or cultural)" in my own ever-expanding "of interest" list in the right margin.

Which leads me to my second-evah CitizenSE reader contest: for cleverest Hawthorne allusion in the areas of a) accusations, b) verdicts, c) confessions, d) sentences, and e) overall commentary for, from, and on The Chris Clarke Show Trial. (I've used-up all the ham-handed/-fisted ones in far too many of Berube's comments areas.) The contest closes at midnight on 12 December 2007 and the winner will get not only "publication" on this blog but also a "prize" to be named later.

OK, time to stop. My tsuma is up and about and we can't wait to watch what looks to be a movie from the people who have been bringing the world the brilliant Ghost in the Shell-spinoff Stand Alone Complex. We have definitely had enough of only watching kids' anime in Japan--like onechan's latest obsession, PreCure Splash Star--which thankfully hasn't made it to the US yet to continue displacing Dora the Explorer and PowerPuff Girls in her affections, obsessions, and imagination. Next Sunday maybe I'll share with you the many different names she's come up with for herself and fellow family members in the past year. Pearl is the obvious Hawthorne link there.... We'll see.

CitizenSE's Latest Crazy Hawthorne Idea I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CitizenSE Metablogs

Still not well enough to get back to serious Hawthorne blogging. But why should I refrain from all Hawthorne blogging when I don't have time or energy to continue my episodic reading of "The Custom-House" that itself is a stepping-stone toward explaining what this blog is and why it exists? There's no good reason!

So, without further ado, here's a programming schedule I'm going to try to stick to way more closely than my "Hawthorne a day" pledge. [Note: the following has been updated to reflect my latest thinking.]

Mondays: Why CitizenSE? (blog ontology, metaphysics, and epistemology--and maybe someday a turn to the personal)

Tuesdays: Close Reading Tuesday (something for or from the Kyushu University Postcolonial Hawthorne class that's wrapping up soon this semester, which, by the way, I will likely get to revise for both Seinan Gakuin University undergraduates and Fukuoka University graduate students next semester)

Wednesdays: Unexpected Hawthorne Wednesday (Hawthorne lists, quotes, trivia, and other things that may surprise you--cheap, yes, but this is my busiest teaching day, where I commute to three different campuses. I hope to replace it with Historicizing Hawthorne after the fall semester ends or when I run out of material)

Thursdays: Intertextual Thursday

Fridays: Weirdest Hawthorne Link CitizenSE Can Find in 15 Minutes [Update: name changed (see categories) due to shortage of weird Hawthorne posts findable in 15 minutes.]

Saturdays: CitizenSE's Latest Crazy Hawthorne Idea (sneak previews of Ideas from the Manuscript)

Sundays: What Would Hawthorne Say? (jeremiads, allegories, current events, bloggy intertextuality, etc.) or Daddy Blogging (kawaii-itude) or Reader "Mailbag" (should anyone ever read this blog)

This schedule is subject to change without notice. The fall semester (and academic year) ends in late January 2007 in this part of Japan. So this schedule will change with notice in February 2007.

As today is Friday, but I posted a Weird Hawthorne Link on Wednesday, this schedule has already begun, prematurely (or even proleptically). Look for my Latest Crazy Hawthorne Idea tomorrow. I promise it's a doozy.

CitizenSE Interrupts Blog Hiatus to...

...bring you not-exactly-breaking-Hawthorne-news-to-me: Sophia and Una Hawthorne's remains were shipped to Concord to be with Nathaniel's, thanks to a Dominican Order founded by his daughter Rose!

And yes, the musume futari got their mama and papa sick.

Why "Citizen SE," Take Three

Were anyone other than the humble proprietor of this "insignificant microbe" of an outpost at the outer limits of blogoramaville (verily, a new colony on the electronic frontier) to have been reading my earlier posts, no doubt one of them would ask something like "so, where have you been?" (having seen behind my veil to the inmost Me, this reader no doubt realized I would immediately take defense and bristle at the implied allusion to my one-Hawthorne-post-per-day rule). To which smart-aleck reader I would reply, "Ask my two coughing, feverish, snot-bubble-blowing, and clingy musume!" and say no more. Another reader, concerned at the length of the awkward silence that ensued, would helpfully chime in, "So...by 'citizen of somewhere else,' you're arguing Hawthorne meant 'anywhere but Salem,' right? But what does this have to do with your choice of the blog title?" To which nice and smart but just a little condescending reader, I would reply in kind, "Not exactly," and, "be patient." Miffed at my sleep-deprived surliness, this reader would respond, "OK, big guy, answer me this, then. Where is the 'unrepentant snark' you referred to in your last post? Irony may not always be in the eye of the beholder, but in this case all I read and hear from Hawthorne is elaborate politeness. Also, your characterization of Hawthorne as raging bull in the china shop of mid-19th C Salem is not exactly kosher. What happened to the Hawthorne I know and love?" Which gives me the opening I need to drop this framing device and get into the meat of this post.

Yes, the elaborate politeness of Hawthorne's preface to the second edition of The Scarlet Letter is strikingly...elaborate. That's my point. Referring to oneself in the third person, as Hawthorne did at the key moments in his short essay, is often a move that distances the speaker from, and elevates him above, his audience. It's in keeping with Hawthorne's other efforts to position those who took offense at his characterization of Whig Custom-House officers in the earlier sketch as overreacting to an entirely innocent effort from an entirely apolitical literary man. Certainly there's some truth to his overreaction charge. But you don't have to have read a good Hawthorne biography or looked in the Centenary Edition at the relevant letters and journal entries or read scholarly essays that analyze the rhetoric and historical context of "The Custom-House" to get my point. Just keep in mind that the very first line of the preface reads:

Much to the author's surprise, and (if he may say so without additional offence) considerably to his amusement,....

If you felt aggrieved by "The Custom-House," I don't see how you can help but take "additional offense" to such an authorial confession of "considerabl[e]...amusement" at your hurt feelings. The fact that non-aggrieved readers would be less likely to understand or share your reaction--and might even be inclined to join Hawthorne in finding your confusion of writing with arson and murder amusing--would be even more infuriating, would it not, especially because the confusion was not yours but one Hawthorne attributed to you? The fact that the preface lends itself to two different and opposed readings--in one, Hawthorne is shocked, just shocked, that anyone could ever find anything offensive in his "sketch of official life" (yet finds the misreadings a little funny) and is eager to put things right, but can't even identify the source of the misreadings in anything he wrote or intended; in the other, Hawthorne's surprise stems from the fact that his sketch's strategies worked as well as they did at causing his political opponents such frustration and anger and amused to have a chance to rub it in yet further as the very controversy their reactions contribute to gives the offending sketch a wider audience even more likely to take his rhetoric at face value--is not, then, a product of ambivalence or ambiguity or Hawthorne's proleptic knowledge of reader-response and post-structuralist theory. It shows that the best unrepentant snark is the kind that infuriates its targets to no end but leaves those who were not its targets wondering why said targets were and are so infuriated. Michael Berube understands this, which is why his brand of unrepentant snark is just as much and sometimes more fun than that of those who round out CitizenSE's own "funniest snark in blogoramaville" list (in order from #2 to #6): The Poor Man Institute, Sadly, No!, Happy Furry Puppy Story Time, Jesus' General, and fafblog!. (Hey, it's end-of-year-blog-awards time. I'm just getting in the spirit of the season. Now back to Hawthorne.)

So why did I say "not exactly" to the helpful "citizen of somewhere else"="anywhere but Salem" idea? First, it doesn't go far enough. Hawthorne's "Henceforth...I am a citizen of somewhere else" is a kind of declaration of independence from Salem. Like Jefferson, Hawthorne is explaining and justifying why it has become "necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another" (and in the process positing a choice as a necessity), declaring the "causes which impel them to separation" by listing a "long train of abuses," appealing to "brethren" who nevertheless have been and remain "deaf to the voice of justice & consanguinity," and, therefore, "acquiesc[ing] in the necessity which denounces our separation" (Hawthorne's "Henceforth" even restores the "eternal" cut by the Continental Congress from this line of Jefferson's draft of the Declaration). I'll get into this more when I turn to Hawthorne's representations of, connections with, and feelings toward Salem in a later post. [Update: mission accomplished.]

The "anywhere but Salem" interpretation of "citizen of somewhere else" is also too vague. We should be cautious to avoid specifying it too narrowly, at the same time. For even as Hawthorne alludes to the American Revolution (positioning himself as an American citizen), he also repeatedly references the French Revolution in "The Custom-House." By identifying his "figurative self" as victim of the Whig political guillotine (who for a while was "careering through the public prints, in my decapitated state, like Irving's Headless Horseman; ghastly and grim, and longing to be buried, as a politically dead man ought"), by joking that the title of his book ought to be POSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF A DECAPITATED SURVEYOR, and by setting up his "citizen of somewhere else" paragraph with the hope that

the sketch which I am now bringing to a close, if too autobiographical for a modest person to publish in his lifetime, will readily be excused in a gentleman who writes from beyond the grave. Peace be with all the world! My blessing on my friends! My forgiveness to my enemies! For I am in the realm of quiet!"

Hawthorne at once positions himself as a magnanimous martyr to Whig revolutionary terror, as a true aristocrat being sacrificed by the party of Salem's aristocracy that is operating in the very mode of democratic extremism they claim to oppose, and as the last of the series of ghosts that haunt "The Custom-House." (More on these ghosts later, too. And in The Scarlet Letter itself.) So it's not exactly right to put "The Custom-House" unproblematically in the tradition of Jeffersonian democracy (with its "tree of liberty nourished by blood of tyrants" strains), unless you see that tradition as itself problematized and strained. (After all, Jefferson blamed King George for blocking efforts by the colonists to end the slave trade yet also signalled his intent to defend American slavery by condemning the king's version of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation; Jefferson affirmed the "self-evident" truth that "all men are created equal" in the Declaration of Independence yet called in Notes on the State of Virginia for scientific investigations to confirm his suspicions of the racial inequality of African Americans; Jefferson condemned slavery in part for its corrupting tendencies on masters yet continued to hold slaves and do more than hold Sally Hemings; Jefferson denounced "merciless Indian savages" who fought with England in the Declaration of Independence, praised American Indians in Notes on the State of Virginia, and saw them as an obstacle to the expansion of the American "empire of liberty" that he helped engineer with the Louisiana Purchase. Hawthorne has his own contradictions on these issues, which we'll explore later.)

For alongside the echoes of American revolutionary rhetoric are suggestions that to be a "citizen of somewhere else" is to write from "beyond the grave," from "the realm of quiet," as a "politically dead man"--perhaps as a citizen of the "Hall of Fantasy" Hawthorne imagined in a story from the previous decade, one whose political death returns him to literary life. Consider the following passages as Hawthorne's exploration of this theme:

In view of my previous weariness of office, and vague thoughts of resignation, my fortune somewhat resembled that of a person who should entertain an idea of committing suicide, and, altogether beyond his hopes, meet with the good hap of being murdered.

No longer seeking nor caring that my name should be blazoned abroad on title pages, I smiled to think that it now had another kind of vogue. The Custom-House marker imprinted it, with a stencil and black paint, on pepper-bags, and baskets of anatto, and cigar-boxes, and bales of all kind of durable merchandise, in testimony that these commodities had paid the impost, and gone regularly through the office. Borne on such queer vehicle of fame, a knowledge of my existence, so far as a name conveys it, was carried where it had never been before, and, I hope will never go again.

But the past was not dead. Once in a great while, the thoughts, that had seemed so vital and so active, yet had been put to rest so quietly, revived again.

Thus Hawthorne introduces another theme--one that I'll connect later to the "anything dead coming back to life hurts" theme from Toni Morrison's Beloved--in the course of setting up his "discovery" of "a certain affair of fine red cloth, much worn and faded" which, "on careful examination, assumed the shape of a letter," along with "several foolscap sheets, containing many particulars respecting the life and conversation of one Hester Prynne, who appeared to have been rather a noteworthy personage in the view of our ancestors." In emphasizing his struggles to turn these meager (indeed, invented!) materials into a historical romance and thereby resurrect his literary imagination, Hawthorne is not simply being self-deprecating, or trying to win the reader's sympathy, or strategically lowering reader expectations for the romance that follows "The Custom-House." Consider the following passages, which elaborate on earlier difficulties in "exerting [his] fancy, sluggish with little use," as well as from "that lack of energy that distinguishes the occupants of alms-houses, and all other human beings who depend for subsistence on charity, on monopolized labor, or anything else but their own independent exertions" (E. Franklin Frazier and Daniel Moynihan, meet Nathaniel "Mr. Culture of Poverty OG Himself" Hawthorne):

My imagination was a tarnished mirror. It would not reflect, or only with miserable dimness, the figures with which I did my best to people it. The characters of the narrative would not be warmed and rendered malleable, by any heat that I could kindly at my intellecual forge. They would take neither the glow of passion nor the tenderness of sentiment, but retained all the rigidity of dead corpses, and stared me in the face with a fixed and ghastly grin of contemptuous defiance. "What have you to do with us?" that expression seemed to say. "The little power you might once have possessed over the tribe of unrealities is gone! You have bartered it for a pittance of the public gold. Go, then, and earn your wages!" In short, the almost torpid creatures of my own fancy twitted me with imbecility, and not without fair occasion.

I had ceased to be a writer of tolerably poor tales, and had become a tolerably good Surveyor of the Customs. That was all. But, nevertheless, it is any thing but agreeable to be haunted by a suspicion that one's intellect is dwindling away; or exhaling, without your consciousness, like ether out of a phial; so that, at every glance, you find a smaller and less volatile residuum. Of the fact, there could be no doubt; and, examining myself and others, I was led to conclusions in reference to the effect of public office on the character, not very favorable to the mode of life in question.

I'll note in passing the continuation of the ghosts/haunting motif that runs throughout "The Custom-House" in these passages--that will be the subject of a future post--but here call your attention to the way in which Hawthorne blames the imagination-deadening "mode of life" of a Custom House officer for causing him to lose "the little power [he] might once have possessed over the tribe of unrealities." If "citizen of somewhere else" refers to Hawthorne's choice of the republic of letters over the town of Salem, then it is a realm where the natives are restless. The "tribe of unrealities" may well be "creatures of [his] own fancy," but until he is figuratively rendered a corpse who can offer Salem his own "ghastly grin of contemptuous defiance," Hawthorne remains incapable of "dream[ing] strange things, and mak[ing] them look like the truth."

So let's return to the immediate context of the "citizen of somewhere else" line that I ended the previous post by quoting at some length. As Hawthorne puts it, his dismissal from the Custom-House has made him look forward to the time when his memories of Salem will be as hazy as if the town "were no portion of the real earth, but an overgrown village in cloud-land, with only imaginary inhabitants to people its wooden houses, and walk its homely lanes, and the unpicturesque prolixity of its main street." Never mind Hawthorne's uncharacteristic and jarring failure to maintain parallelism in this passage; what's crucial is that his proleptic and hypothetical reverie leads directly into the present-tense declaration, "Henceforth, it ceases to be a reality in my life. I am a citizen of somewhere else." The actual natives of Salem have become less significant to Hawthorne than the rebellious "tribe of unrealities." Hawthorne's fellow Custom House officers, who in the past were enough under his power to, as he puts it, dread "some discourtesy at my hands"--a situation which at the time "pained and amused" him to "behold the terrors that attended my advent" to office--have become "but shadows in my view; white-headed and wrinkled images, which my fancy used to sport with, and has now flung aside for ever" (perhaps a worse discourtesy to suffer than the "charge" he must "plead guilty to"--of "abbreviating the official breath of more than one of these venerable servants of the republic"). Similarly, Hawthorne can barely "recall the figures and appellations" of the merchants whose names had "such a classic familiarity for my ear six months ago," the "men of traffic, who seemed to occupy so important a position in the world." Whereas the romance becomes 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 other," Salem has become as abstract and inconsequential as a bad story idea. Whereas the "warmer light" of the "somewhat dim coal-fire" in Hawthorne's study at midnight "mingles itself with the cold spirituality of the moonbeams, and communicates, as it were, a heart and sensibilities of human nature to the forms which fancy summons up," converting them "from snow-images into men and women," the citizens of Salem suffer the opposite fate, becoming mere "imaginary inhabitants" of an "overgrown village in cloud-land." In short, Hawthorne suggests that as difficult as the process of turning the scarlet letter into The Scarlet Letter was, and as imperfect as the result is, it will still have more reality in his life, and potentially in the lives of his readers, than any more transient political or economic realities.

But there's more to the story of "The Custom-House." Stay tuned.