What Would Hawthorne Say About the Mooninite Invasion of Boston?

Besides my AP Chemistry final project--a science fiction/detective story set on one of the moons of Jupiter--and a brief Far Side-induced cartooning stint in high school and college that went by the name of The Gray Area, I have little to show in the area of creative endeavors and less potential. So rather than risk Seiglering any of Hawthorne's tales, I'm offering "shorter" versions here for your reading pleasure, because, as you know, CitizenSE is nothing if not a small finger taking the pulse of the American Dream. And, no, it's not the same finger that Ignignokt uses.

Shorter "My Kinsman, Major Molineux": One of Ted Turner's younger relatives comes to Boston and, after some enigmatic encounters with various natives, witnesses him being paraded through town "in tar-and-feathery dignity"; a "shrewd youth," he eventually follows an onlooker's advice to "rise in the world, without the help of your kinsman."

Shorter "Little Annie's Ramble": Young girl wanders through the streets of Boston oblivious to the panic and gridlock caused by authorities' overreaction to a guerrilla marketing campaign for an animated movie, is announced as kidnapped by a terrorist cell on Fox News, but soon returns home unharmed.

Shorter "The Gray Champion": A mysterious old man rescues the city of Boston from Mooninite invaders ("With this night, thy power is ended--to-morrow, the prison!--back, lest I foretell the scaffold!"), for "whenever the descendants of the Puritans are to show the spirit of their sires, the old man appears again."

Shorter "Fancy's Show Box": Hawthorne's inquiry into the nature of guilt and guilty thoughts, now applied to the case of those who authorized the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie guerrilla marketing campaign, and, indeed, created the Mooninites in the first place.

Shorter "Endicott and the Red Cross": Boston Mayor Thomas Menino personally rips Mooninite Lite Brite displays from various public places and pledges to extraordinarily render Err and Ignognikt.

Shorter "Young Goodman Brown": Boston Mayor Thomas Menino is tempted to believe the spectral images Ted Turner shows him of his city subjugated to the depradations of Mooninite invaders, decides to trust no one, and calls on Homeland Security.

[Gong sounds; big hook drags me offstage. Boston Chief of Police appears and says, "Move it along, people. Nothing to see here."]

On Turning a Talk into an Article

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lance Tooks Working on Hawthorne Project

I have some good news for fans of Hawthorne and the graphic arts. Lance Tooks, a former assistant editor at Marvel Comics and author of Narcissa and Lucifer's Garden of Verses who has already adapted several works by other nineteenth-century American authors to the comics medium, has announced plans to work on a Hawthorne piece this year. Details forthcoming. Here's hoping CitizenSE can snag an interview with Tooks. And that he puts his work in dialogue with the many other contemporary artists, writers, and critics working with Hawthorne's texts!

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.

Unexpectedly (but Happily) NOT the Norovirus

Or if it was the norovirus onechan has one heck of an immune system. In any case, she's back, better than ever. Her recovery started in the doctor's office kinoo and she'll be ready for school ashita. Back to Hawthorne blogging then, too.

Close Reading the Norovirus?

Try as I might, I don't have the tools to read onechan's symptoms closely enough to determine if she has food poisoning, a minor stomach bug, or the dreaded norovirus. In any case, I'm taking time off from CitizenSE until we've determined what she has and perhaps even sampled its yucky delights on our own. Because if it is what we fear it is, the next few days will not be fun.

On Dan McCall and CitizenSE

I found Dan McCall's Citizens of Somewhere Else in the Seinan Gakuin library earlier this month, and I've had a chance to read it and begin to digest it. If you want a taste of the book and don't have access to a university library or online account, you can go to Cornell's 1999 profile of McCall or check out the views Google Books or amazon.com offer you of it. What I have time to do today is respond to McCall's characterization of his project from the Cornell link:

Citizens of Somewhere Else draws on McCall's own expertise and that of major 20th century critics such as F.W. Dupee and F.O. Matthiessen--and it draws a pointed bead on more recent criticism from the post-modern, post-Freudian schools. McCall has little patience for psycho-babble from critics with a political ax to grind.

"Their political agenda controls everything," he said. "Now if you believe the literary critics, up means down, yes means no, you turn the text inside out. And these aren't just weird little people in obscure journals, they're anthologized all over the place."

McCall's own "agenda" is to stay focused on the author's intent, not what baggage critics bring to the text. This in part accounts for the deliberately conversational tone of the book.

"I want to reach anybody who loves literature. Maybe my tone is too chatty. My voice on the page is my voice in the classroom, that's the way I teach; you don't have to learn some new abstruse vocabulary. So I guess [the way I wrote the book] is a political gesture. It's meant to challenge...the modish modern critics."

Now, there's a chance McCall was misquoted. After all, the author of the profile, Franklin Crawford, misquotes his reading from "The Custom-House"--"As an accomplished orator, McCall still has plenty of flint in his hammer and he recites, with an undulating cadence, the melancholy passage from Hawthorne's preface : '"I am a citizen of somewhere else, I dwell in the realm of quiet..."'"--so there's a chance he got the above quotation wrong, too (it's not a good sign that he needed to insert both a bracketed clarifying paraphrase and an ellipsis to indicate he skipped some of McCall's words). But assuming Crawford at least got the gist of it right, I want to respond to it here today.

As I am trying to reach multiple audiences with this blog, within and outside the academy, I'm also going for a "deliberately conversational," even "chatty" tone, drawing on my years of teaching of Hawthorne and other authors, and prioritizing close readings of individual passages and intertextual relations between authors and texts here. So I have a lot in common with McCall's approach in his book. But I don't see the need to diss "modish modern critics" "with a political ax to grind" while doing my thing. Like Hawthorne in "The Custom-House," McCall here identifies the political with the guillotine in order to differentiate his project from it. Unlike Hawthorne in the preface to the second edition of The Scarlet Letter, McCall admits this move has a politics to it, calling the style of Citizens of Somewhere Else "a political gesture." This blog--and my book project--definitely has a politics, as well, but I'm going to avoid the kinds of cross-generational jostling you can see in McCall's rhetoric (not to mention the fallout from Alan Wolfe's 2003 "Anti-American Studies" TNR essay, which even Leo Marx joined in on). There's good and bad in any critic's work, much less any generation's, and having a chance to examine the ways in which Hawthorne's critics have read race in his works from the 1850s on hopefully gives me some perspective.

Now, if you go back and read my earlier posts on "The Custom-House," you'll see that I agree with McCall to a perhaps surprising extent when he argues that Hawthorne and James "defined themselves as living to some extent in the land of writing itself, the foster home of the imagination" (175) and that both made "a heroic effort to locate some America, some New-Found-Land whose spokesmen they so wanted to be" (185). Next Monday I'll explore in more detail McCall's reading of Hawthorne's "citizen of somewhere else" passage and its connection with other significant moments in his book. Then I'll turn to Lauren Berlant's The Anatomy of National Fantasy and suggest that there are more correspondences between their readings of "citizen of somewhere else" than Crawford's profile of McCall might lead you to believe.