Unexpected Echoes of "Old News"...

...in my own mix of seriousness and humor at my WAAGNFNP premiere? Did I handle the issues I chose to focus on there any better than those Hawthorne's narrator and he did in "Old News"?

Back to the Passages That Kicked Off the Lazy Blogging

Here they are, again, from "Old News" (which I neglected to mention earlier is narrated by a nameless figure who addresses his antebellum readers as he peruses volumes of colonial newspapers, focusing in separate sections on the late 1730s, the late 1750s, and the late 1770s, and attempting to identify “the characteristic traits” of eighteenth-century New England):

There is a good deal of amusement, and some profit, in the perusal of those little items, which characterize the manners and circumstances of the country. New-England was then in a state incomparably more picturesque than at present, or than it has been within the memory of man; there being, as yet, only a narrow strip of civilization along the edge of a vast forest, peopled with enough of its original race to contrast the savage life with the old customs of another world. The white population, also, was diversified by the influx of all sorts of expatriated vagabonds, and by the continuous importation of bond-servants from Ireland and elsewhere; so that there was a wild and unsettled multitude, forming a strong minority to the sober descendants of the Puritans. Then there were the slaves, contributing their dark shade to the picture of society. The consequence of all this was, a great variety and singularity of action and incident.

But the slaves, we suspect, were the merriest part of the population--since it was their gift to be merry in the worst of circumstances; and they endured, comparatively, few hardships, under the domestic sway of our fathers. There seems to have been a great trade in these human commodities. No advertisements are more frequent than those of 'a negro fellow, fit for almost any household work;' 'a negro woman, honest, healthy, and capable;' 'a young negro wench, of many desirable qualities;' 'a negro man, very fit for a taylor.' We know not in what this natural fitness for a taylor consisted, unless it were some peculiarity of conformation that enabled him to sit cross-legged.

What I didn't cite earlier was the rest of the second passage:

When the slaves of a family were inconveniently prolific, it being not quite orthodox to drown the superfluous offspring, like a litter of kittens, notice was promulgated of ‘a negro child to be given away.’ Sometimes the slaves assumed the property of their own persons, and made their escape: among many such instances, the Governor raises a hue-and-cry after his negro Juba. But, without venturing a word in extenuation of the general system, we confess our opinion, that Caesar, Pompey, Scipio, and all such great Roman namesakes, would have been better advised had they staid at home, foddering the cattle, cleaning dishes—in fine, performing their moderate share of the labors of life without being harassed by its cares. The sable inmates of the mansion were not excluded from the domestic affections: in families of middling rank, they had their places at the board; and when the circle closed round the evening hearth, its blaze glowed on their dark shining faces, intermixed familiarly with their master’s children. It must have contributed to reconcile them to their lot, that they saw white men and women imported from Europe, as they had been from Africa, and sold, though only for a term of years, yet as actual slaves to the highest bidder. Setting fine sentiment aside, slavery, as it existed in New-England, was precisely the state most favorable to the humble enjoyments of an alien race, generally incapable of self-direction, and whose claims to kindness will never be acknowledged by the whites, while they are asserted on the ground of equality. Slave labor being but a small part of the industry of the country, it did not change the character of the people; the latter, on the contrary, modified and softened the institution, making it a patriarchal, and almost a beautiful, peculiarity of the times. (my italics)

Now back to part of the manuscript I skipped:

The italicized sentence was deleted when “Old News” was collected in The Snow-Image (1851) in the midst of the continuing controversy over the Fugitive Slave Act, as was a footnote that originally appeared at the end of the longer passage: “Nevertheless, some time after this period, there is an advertisement of a run-away slave from Connecticut, who carried with him an iron collar riveted round his neck, with a chain attached. This must have been rather galling. Undoubtedly, there had been a previous attempt at escape.”

How are we to read these passages and the differences between the 1851 version and the 1835 version of “Old News”? How are we to reconcile the joke about genocide a few pages before this passage on slavery--"The first pages, of most of these old papers, are as soporific as a bed of poppies. . . . Here are President Wigglesworth and the Rev. Dr. Colman, endeavoring to raise a fund for the support of missionaries among the Indians of Massachusetts Bay. Easy would be the duties of such a mission, now!"--with the pious praise of John Eliot six years later in Grandfather’s Chair? How are we to reconcile the overt anti-black racism of the longer passage with Melville’s praise of Hawthorne’s “depth of tenderness” “boundless sympathy with all forms of life,” and “omnipresent love” fifteen years later in “Hawthorne and His Mosses”? Discerning Hawthorne’s intentions in “Old News”--particularly his relation to the narrator--is clearly of paramount importance for deciding the question of his racism.

I will return to the issue of ethnic humor shortly, but the central problem raised by “Old News” is clearly the issue of slavery and anti-black racism. We could read the longer passage above, with H. Bruce Franklin, as evidence that Hawthorne shared William Gilmore Simms’s racist views, or, with Jean Fagan Yellin, as Hawthorne’s New England version of “the classic plantation novel Swallow Barn (1832), in which the slavery apologist John Pendleton Kennedy had recently pictured the blacks as happy and their bondage as light.” Or we could attempt to build upon Yellin’s observation of the “peculiarly contradictory views” expressed in the passage by arguing that Hawthorne accentuates the narrator’s inability to interpret correctly the pages right under his nose (78). The narrator does not appear to notice that both the callous separation of families that he jokes about and the repeated escape attempts he reports on refute his assertions that the slaves endured “few hardships” or were “reconcile[d] . . . to their lot”; indeed, the passage might well be calculated to prompt readers to ask why the narrator is unable to carry his questioning of a slave’s “natural fitness for a taylor” over to a more general questioning of African Americans’ natural fitness for slavery.

These options come down to a simple question: is Hawthorne as racist and obtuse as his narrator? When Yellin points out that “he adopts a manner that fails both as satire and as whimsy,” is she too quick to attribute these views and this manner to Hawthorne himself? How we answer these questions is crucial to our understanding of Hawthorne’s later revisions the year before he would write the Life of Franklin Pierce. When Hawthorne deleted the particularly racist passage from the 1851 version of “Old News,” so as to emphasize that he was not “venturing a word in extenuation of the general system” of slavery (257), was he simply hiding his deepest convictions? Or was he worried that his subtle undercutting of the narrator’s views would be missed by his post-Compromise readers, and so sought to minimize the aid and comfort misreadings of his sketch would give the South by explicitly limiting his narrator’s comments to early eighteenth-century New England?

***

Those who have been following my "Old News" blogging know that I've offered some answers to these questions over the past few weeks. What I'm curious about are your own answers to these questions, your own questions prompted by my answers, and your own readings of these passages. Given that I'm suffering some slight gastrointestinal distress (translation: my fucking stomach is fucking killing me!), I don't have the energy or inclination to do more than that tonight (translation: typing while doubled over your keyboard sucks!).

So Why All This Lazy Blogging Lately?

OK, so there's a method to my madness in putting about half of my chapter two manuscript up on this blog over the past few weeks and today would be a perfect day to explain it, but I have too much to do. So here's a quick list:

1) I've been revising the chapter all last month and will continue to do so this month, so putting up the old version here gives me something to compare my new material to and remind myself what I thought the central point of the chapter was.

2) There's an off-chance that the scholars I'm in dialogue with in the actual manuscript will notice when I'm referring to their work without their name or works mentioned here and give me some feedback. Given that this is the obscurest blog in Blogoramaville, I doubt it, but a guy's gotta hope.

3) Perhaps a tiny bit more likely is that someone even now doing work that overlaps with mine will benefit from seeing parts of my manuscript and will want to return the favor. But see the last sentence in #2--I have to hope that "younger" folks are slightly more likely to be blog readers or at least google searchers than the "older" folks I'm not-quite-citing here at CitizenSE.

4) I'm using this lazy blogging as a set-up for doing some Leo Marx Machine in the Garden blogging in the near future, as well as more review posts on new articles/chapters/books on the picturesque.

5) Given how short the winter vacation actually is here on the Japanese academic calendar and how I'll be missing summer vacation back in the States because of it--not to mention how fantastic the weather has been here lately--I've been enjoying the family time and, to the extent I've been motivated to do so, concentrating on other work, like course planning, research, and reading rather than on Hawthorne blogging. All the loose threads I've left hanging in the previous months will eventually be worked with again, but for now it's easier to cut and paste--and somehow the March crappy blogging I've done has resulted in the best month in CitizenSE history (visit-wise), much better than the even worse February blogging I only sometimes brought myself to do.

6) So hopefully April won't be the cruelest month, blog-wise. I think that actually getting a full semester to teach Postcolonial Hawthorne (at Seinan Gakuin U, as opposed to the abbreviated version I taught at Kyushu U in the fall) will only be good for CitizenSE.

There's more to be written, but not now. Hopefully next week, if I'm not completely panicking about teaching the following day by then.

What Would Hawthorne Say About The Blogocalypse Carnival?

Why, "read it," of course!

[Update: Oh, and "You're an idiot for not linking to this gem in it." My only excuse is I'm behind on my bloggy visiting and too caught up in not-quite-live-blogging the LPGA's first major to take time to figure out how to fit it in my Douglas Adams meta-epic simile there.]

[Update 4/3/07: Plus, "You should just give up blogging and leave it to those who are incapable of writing a bad post."]

Will It Ever End? Of Racism and Responsibility

If the subtitle doesn't make it clear, my title is a reference both to my "Old News" blogging and the question of responsibility I take up in this part of Chapter Two....

***

The claim I have advanced in this chapter is that we should stop ignoring Hawthorne’s scandalous perspective on slavery, just as we should stop trying to explain it away or averting our eyes from its effects and consequences. Instead, we should try to understand it, with all the “critical sympathy” David Levin calls on us to muster. And I contend that the best place to begin is with the acknowledgment of Hawthorne’s racism. How, then, does our view of one of antebellum America’s preeminent moral and intellectual historians change when we explicitly bring issues of race, racism, removals, slavery, supplantation, manifest destiny, and the Civil War into focus? I want to suggest that if we are to take Hawthorne’s moral historicism seriously, we should not exempt him from the kind of searching questions he posed to the Puritan past. How, then, should we evaluate claims that Hawthorne’s moral and intellectual historicism has a kind of exemplariness--that it deserves to be a model for contemporary Americanist endeavors?

I allude here, of course, to Michael Colacurcio’s argument that “some generalized form of [Hawthorne’s] inquiry offers the best rationale for our own efforts at a distinctive American Studies.” Colacurcio’s Hawthorne is less the source out of which all American literature flows than the origin, inspiration, and high-water-mark of what is best about the American Studies project: “to consider, even if only to problematize, what [we] find distinctive in [our] own national culture” (17), even as we continue to discover reasons for persistently making “significant denial[s] of the separate moral existence of America” (16). To Colacurcio, Hawthorne is an exemplary intellectual historian insofar as he dispassionately, often ironically, and never in a celebratory manner, marks what is American about the United States. He is an exemplary moral historian in that he denies the “American ideology,” denies, that is, any kind of American moral exceptionalism.

There are worse examples to follow than Hawthorne’s (and Colacurcio’s), I concede, but if my chapter accomplishes anything, it will be to problematize Colacurcio’s vision of Hawthorne as exemplary moral historian. A step further: if this book accomplishes anything, it will be to problematize Colacurcio’s vision for American Studies in the next century. This chapter has been something of an extended quarrel with Colacurcio’s granting of exemplary status to Hawthorne’s moral historicism. To be clear, I have not tried to argue that Colacurcio’s commitment to Puritan origins has blinded him to the significance of race and racism. In fact, the great achievement of The Province of Piety was not only to demonstrate the interrelation of the “matter of the Puritans” and the “matter of the Revolution,” but also to imply that both are linked indissociably yet indirectly with “the matter of the Indians.” Colacurcio implies that Hawthorne saw the “matter of the Indians” through the lens of the “matter of the Puritans” and “the matter of the Revolution,” so that he tended to reenact rather than analyze his age’s view of what was “the matter with the Indians,” even as he carefully, subtly, and sensitively explored what was “the matter with the Puritans” and “the matter with the Revolution.” Furthermore, Colacurcio’s work implies that Hawthorne, like too many of his contemporaries, had little to say about “the matter of slavery,” a matter that only the abolitionists were claiming was what made the United States “America.” Still, my point in this chapter is to emphasize that Hawthorne’s exemplarity extends to his limitations as well as his achievements.

Colacurcio’s own willingness to broach moral issues in scholarship leads me to wonder what impact, if any, the understanding of Hawthorne’s racial politics I have been advancing might have on Hawthorne’s literary and intellectual reputation. I want to caution against one inference that might be drawn from my argument. Some might conclude that because Hawthorne may well have been racist in a manner similar to his narrator in “Old News,” our only recourse is to repudiate him, to stop reading his works. Such a move, I believe, would be to reenact rather than to analyze the limitations of the traditional stories we have told about Hawthorne’s racial politics. In this day and age, we take for granted our transcendance of both nineteenth-century racial science and nineteenth-century literary criticism. But why is it that most of our best analyses of race and Hawthorne almost precisely reproduce some of their most troubling assumptions? Twentieth-century Hawthornists have by and large been just as troubled as Hawthorne’s contemporaries by the question, “Why not slavery?” Of course, we no longer mimic George Curtis’s and Edward Dicey’s appeals to Hawthorne’s nature, his mental constitution, his genius--in short, his white-but-not-quite-Anglo-Saxon racial identity--to explain why he didn’t directly confront the question of slavery in his romances. That is, we are less likely today to naturalize ethical issues, to make the question of responsibility and inheritance a matter of nature. We are more likely to appeal to Hawthorne’s racism, though. And if this appeal has the formal function of the earlier appeals to Hawthorne’s race--to shut down further inquiry so as to allow us to move on to what we like about Hawthorne’s fiction--then it will be no advance from, much less transcendence of, the racialist presuppositions of our earliest literature and criticism. What if instead of aiming for transcendance of these presuppositions we were to immerse ourselves in them so as to better understand their incredible and troubling persistence? What if instead of assuming that writers have a responsibility to write directly and realistically about the political issues of their times we were to take responsibility for recognizing how their fictions are shaped by and intervene on their times in necessarily indirect and mediated ways, and that there is no substitute for reading them?

That Hawthorne probably shared many of the racist attitudes of his times is only the beginning of the story. I have tried to show in this chapter that his racism was no mere personal prejudice, not simply a set of attitudes or ideas that are easy to separate from what he does best. On the contrary, his racism contributed to shaping his very aesthetics and his conception of American citizenship and nationhood. But there is a way in which my decision to read “Old News” replicates the very problem I have tried to diagnose: our tendency as critics to attack the question of Hawthorne’s racism in isolation and by piecemeal, focusing almost obsessively on the same half-dozen individual works, the same dozen passages, and bringing it all down to our interpretation of a few choice words. I still think this step is a necessary one. But it certainly is not sufficient. Hawthorne was partially right when he claimed in the preface to The Snow-Image that we will have to study the whole range of his characters to decide this question, but the task is actually much larger than this. It involves rethinking our sense of the shape of his career, reading the full range of his race writings, considering his relations with his contemporaries, and contextualizing the discourses he drew on and revised. In other words, there are limits to conceiving of an author’s racism as a purely individual matter, as a question of an individual’s intentions. Clearly, there is much more to the issue of authorial racism than stereotype-hunting, for merely identifying a stereotype does nothing to analyze how a given stereotype is embedded in a narrative and how it is being deployed--whether is being critiqued, transformed, or simply reiterated. This word “deployed,” in conjunction with “narrative,” brings the author back in a non-expressivist way--it emphasizes the importance of reading if we are to come up with a plausible, non-reductive account of authorial intent. Yet there is a way in which too firmly linking the issue of racism with the issue of intentionality ensures that we will absolutely miss the most insidious ways white supremacy works. For if we set our standard for identifying a racist literary utterance as a strict version of “with malice aforethought,” we will have capitulated to an ahistorical, decontextualized, individualist conception of what is at stake in racism. Unless, that is, we understand that questions of race and racism are inseparable from questions of ideology and history, and that none of these questions can be answered without careful reading, we are likely to continue avoiding an engagement with Hawthorne’s perspective on slavery.

One legacy of our New Critical distrust of intentionality means that most efforts to identify authorial racism through reference to authorial intention will be half-hearted at best. At the same time, our efforts to defend or vindicate Hawthorne can be just as problematic and just as reliant on discovering authorial intent. They often smack of the strategy of the defense attorneys in the beating of Rodney King case; it sometimes seems that, like them, we slow down Hawthorne’s narrative flow into “super slo-mo” and then stop it and display a series of freeze-frames, inscribing them into our own narrative of Hawthorne’s intentions in the process. But if defining racism or anti-racism strictly by an individual agent’s intentional acts is problematic, jettisoning the category of intentionality altogether guarantees that we will miss the question of responsibility. As I showed in the previous chapter, even in those very approaches that seem to have rigorously excluded them, appeals to authorial intention uncannily return. My solution to this problem has been to attempt to produce the most sophisticated reading of authorial intent that I could on a specific sketch and to make some preliminary contextualizing gestures. Moving from moralizing on an individual’s lamentable prejudices to identifying the racial projects with which individuals align themselves in a given racial formation is the way I have tried to refigure the problem of racism and intentionality.

A brief look at how Jacques Derrida has dealt with the scandal of Nietzsche’s appropriation by Nazism can be instructive here. Contrary to the popular stereotype of deconstruction’s celebration of the “death of the author” and of the “free-floating signifier,” Derrida is most concerned with preventing Nietzsche scholars from letting Nietzsche and themselves off the hook by rejecting the Nazis’ use of Nietzsche as a “falsification of a legacy and an interpretive mystification.” That is, Derrida criticizes the notion that intentional readings (“Nietzsche meant this; the Nazis misread him”) are the final word--“the effects or structure of a text are not reducible to its ‘truth,’ to the intended meaning of its presumed author, or even its supposedly unique and identifiable signatory” (28)--precisely in order to emphasize, not dissipate, the question of responsibility. Derrida ventriloquizes a possible response to this line of thought:

One can imagine the following objection: Careful! Nietzsche’s utterances are not the same as those of the Nazi ideologues, and not only because the latter grossly caricaturize the former to the point of apishness. If one does more than extract certain short sequences, if one reconstitutes the entire syntax of the system with the subtle refinement of its articulations and its paradoxical reversals, et cetera, then one will clearly see that what passes elsewhere for the “same” utterance says exactly the opposite and corresponds instead to the inverse, to the reactive inversion of the very thing it mimes. (30)

Derrida’s response to this objection is absolutely crucial:

Yet it would still be necessary to account for the possibility of this mimetic inversion and perversion. If one refuses the distinction between unconscious and deliberate programs as an absolute criterion, if one no longer considers only intent--whether conscious or not--when reading a text, then the law that makes the perverting simplification possible must lie in the structure of the text “remaining” . . . . Even if the intention of one of the signatories or shareholders in the huge “Nietzsche corporation” had nothing to do with it, it cannot be entirely fortuitous that the discourse bearing his name in society, in accordance with civil laws and editorial norms, has served as a legitimating reference for ideologues. There is nothing absolutely contingent about the fact that the only political regimen to have effectively brandished his name as a major and official banner was Nazi. (30-31)

This is not as formalist an answer as it may first appear, for later in his essay Derrida links the possibility of Nazi rearticulations of Nietzsche to the uncanny and to ideological apparati, including the educational system and other institutions. But Derrida’s response does insist that reading is crucial to all these questions. And as it turns out, one of his protocols for reading Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, Thus Spake Zarathustra and especially On the Future of Our Educational Institutions is that “one must allow for the ‘genre’ whose code is constantly re-marked, for narrative and fictional form and the ‘indirect style.’ In short, one must allow for all the ways intent ironizes or demarcates itself, demarcating the text by leaving on it the mark of genre” (25). The risk of Derridean deconstruction, however, its wager, is a refusal to reduce “responsibility” to “intentionality” and a refusal to avoid reading for authorial intention nevertheless: “the category of intention will not disappear; it will have its place, but from that place it will no longer be able to govern the entire scene and system of utterance.”

Obviously, the example of Nietzsche and the Nazis has its own limits; there have been no state-sponsored mass extermination projects in the name of Nathaniel Hawthorne, to say the least. But the most successful defense of slavery this country has ever seen relied on precisely the same rhetoric and discourses that Hawthorne’s narrator deployed in “Old News.” This is a more significant finding than the question of Hawthorne’s racism, as urgent as that question is. However we determine the relation between author and narrator in “Old News,” the question of Hawthorne’s and our responsibilities remains.

Yes! More Chapter Two Blogging (Part IV)

The lazy blogging continues.

***

Perhaps.

Or could it be that these readings are projections of our own attitudes and desires onto the gaps between Hawthorne, his narrator, and the old Tory? It is certainly true that Hawthorne effects a double displacement of racialist attitudes--putting them in the mouth of a figure who is only a figment of his narrator’s imagination--and that the narrator’s aestheticization of the old Tory’s racialism through the picturesque may not be approved of by Hawthorne. But in order to defend the claim that he is critical toward both the old Tory and his narrative, we would have to examine the range of Hawthorne’s writings on slavery, African Americans, the French and Indian Wars, the Revolutionary War, Anglo-American relations, and American nationality in order to discern what his actual views were on these matters, to determine how his views on each matter are related to each other. Only then could we determine his relation to his narrator in “Old News” with any degree of confidence. Given the difficulties of pursuing such a potentially infinite thematic endeavor, a more fruitful project might be to examine Hawthorne’s later deployments of the picturesque. Since the narrator’s racialism and his use of the picturesque are so related, if Hawthorne were to reveal that he had no problems with the picturesque--if, that is, Hawthorne were to consistently put the picturesque to a similar use as his narrator--then we would perhaps be justified in seeing a significant overlap between the narrator’s racialist views of American nationality and Hawthorne’s own. My hunch is that there are enough thematic and aesthetic parallels to suggest that an unambiguously “subversive” reading of Hawthorne’s intentions in “Old News” is difficult to sustain.

Consider, first, the implications of the narrator’s defense of slavery and its similarity to Hawthorne’s later writings. “Slave labor being but a small part of the industry of the country,” the narrator concludes, “it did not change the character of the people; the latter, on the contrary, modified and softened the institution, making it a patriarchal, and almost a beautiful, peculiarity of the times” (257). Just as the ambiguously-worded claim that the slaves “endured, comparatively, few hardships, under the domestic sway of our fathers” masks an implicit comparison to slavery in the South or in the Caribbean, so too does the narrator’s conclusion imply the superiority of the character of the eighteenth-century New Englanders, which was not changed by the presence of slave labor, but which instead “modified and softened the institution,” to the perhaps more corruptible nineteenth-century Southerners. But corruptible by what? The simple answer is “slave labor”––which is somewhat ambiguous, as it could refer to slavery as an institution or to the slaves doing the labor. But Hawthorne’s syntax and rhetoric implicitly place the blame on the slaves themselves for the modifications wrought on the Southern character and the concomitant harshness of slavery outside of New England. Traces of the same assumption can be seen in the parallelism in the following line from “Chiefly About War Matters”: “There is an historical circumstance, known to few, that connects the children of the Puritans with these Africans of Virginia, in a very singular way.”By contrasting New England and the South in terms of a Puritan/African dichotomy, Hawthorne implies a similar influence on the Southern character by African Americans as his narrator does in “Old News.” Similarly, the claim that “slavery, as it existed in New-England, was precisely the state most favorable to the humble enjoyments of an alien race, generally incapable of self-direction, and whose claims to kindness will never be acknowledged by the whites, while they are asserted on the ground of equality”--later excised in the 1851 reprint of the sketch in The Snow-Image--seems to be what is underlying the “what was to be done with the slaves?” dilemma over which we saw Hawthorne agonizing in the previous chapter.

Consider, also, the racialist narrative of Our Old Home that links England and America. In Our Old Home, Hawthorne had written of an “unspeakable yearning towards England” that remains even “[a]fter all these bloody wars and vindictive animosities.”But he quickly shifts from a rhetoric of sympathies and yearnings to one of hereditary connection. He moves from emphasizing an ideological “amalgamation,” speaking of his “becoming sensible of the broader and more generous patriotism which might almost amalgamate with that of England, without losing an atom of its native force and flavor” (37), to acknowledging that he “was often conscious of a fervent hereditary attachment to the native soil of our forefathers, and felt it to be our own Old Home” (40). As Lawrence Sargent Hall has shown, “The history of [Hawthorne’s] social thought during the years he spent in England, as it is written in his journals, in Our Old Home, and especially in the unfinished English romance, is the story of his theoretical attempt to amalgamate on the basis of blood relationship the best elements to be found in these two widely separate societies.”

In light of these thematic continuities between the beginning and end of his career, the aesthetic evidence that Hawthorne shares the “Old News” narrator’s views on slavery and American nationality is even more compelling. When we consider the extent to which Hawthorne was committed to picturesque aesthetics throughout his career, the idea that he was pointing out the politics and ideological investments of this genre in “Old News” without also, at some fundamental level, endorsing them becomes difficult to believe. Consider the implicit colloquy on race and the picturesque between Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Henry James that we can trace in Melville’s “Hawthorne and His Mosses” (1850) and “Benito Cereno” (1855), Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860) and “Chiefly About War Matters” (1862), and James’s Hawthorne (1879).

Twenty years after “Old News” was first published, and four years after it was republished in The Snow-Image, Herman Melville, in “Benito Cereno,” showed the limits of the conception of slavery, the enslaved, and the picturesque in Hawthorne’s sketch. Melville’s protagonist is the good-hearted Northerner, Captain Delano, a man of “a singularly undistrustful good nature, not liable, except on extraordinary and repeated incentives, and hardly then, to indulge in personal alarms, any way involving the imputation of malign evil in man,” a man who, furthermore, “like most men of a good, blithe heart, . . . took to negroes, not philanthropically, but genially, just as other men to Newfoundland dogs.” In “Benito Cereno,” Melville shows how Delano’s romantic racialism leads him to exclude Africans from the realm of humanity, which in turn leads to his failure to suspect the slave rebellion that has occurred on board the Spanish ship he encounters at sea, the San Dominick. Instead, whatever suspicions arise in the course of his stay on the slave ship center on the possibility that its captain, Don Benito Cereno, is a pirate.

Melville’s narrator takes great pleasure in showing the mental processes by which Delano talks himself out of his suspicions and makes himself comfortable in the midst of a slave revolt. As it turns out, the picturesque is crucial to Delano’s domestication and aestheticization of the Spanish slave ship. In the course of first meeting Cereno and hearing his far-fetched story that purports to explain the paucity of Spanish crew-members and the fact that the Africans are unchained, Delano is charmed by the sight of Babo supporting Cereno and “the beauty of that relationship which could present such a spectacle of fidelity on the one hand and confidence on the other” (176). But even though Delano also appreciates Cereno’s “provincial costume, picturesque as any in the world,” the narrator notes, perhaps in free indirect discourse, the association that Cereno’s picturesque appearance conjures in Delano’s mind: it gave Cereno the “incongruous” appearance of “an invalid courtier tottering about London streets in the time of the plague” (177). This is part of a pattern in which Delano attempts to domesticate that which is foreign and puzzling to him (as, for example, when he compares the Ashanti oakum-pickers to “so many gray-headed bag-pipers playing a funeral march” [166]), yet the very attempt to do so brings up images of death, which are just as immediately explained away, until the next strange and troubling event occurs.

As many critics have pointed out, the shaving scene is emblematic of this process. But few have taken note of the means by which Delano is charmed by the appearance of the ship’s cuddy:

The place called the cuddy was a light deck-cabin formed by the poop, a sort of attic to the large cabin below. Part of it had formerly been the quarters of the officers; but since their death all the partitionings had been thrown down, and the whole interior converted into one spacious and airy marine hall; for absence of fine furniture and picturesque display of odd appurtenances, somewhat answering to the wide, cluttered hall of some eccentic bachelor-squire in the country, who hangs his shooting-jacket and tobacco-pouch on deer antlers, and keeps his fishing-rod, tongs, and walking-stick in the same corner. (210-211)

Here, Delano calms himself by superimposing the grounds of a picturesque country estate upon a Spanish slave ship, telling himself over and over that Cereno isn’t piratical, just eccentric. Melville’s goal here is to demonstrate that the same world-view that needed the picturesque to gentrify and Anglicize an enigmatic Spaniard slaver also generated a pro-slavery romantic racialism with respect to non-Europeans. By showing the limits of this benevolent Northern view of slavery, Melville demonstrates Northern complicity with the slave system, for the moment Delano realizes how Babo has deceived him, he orders his men to put down the slave rebellion.

As we shall see in more detail next chapter, Melville’s “Hawthorne and His Mosses” is crucial to understanding Hawthorne’s racial politics. Here, let me simply point out that Melville’s Virginian narrator in the 1850 essay claims that Hawthorne himself has deep insight into precisely the “imputation of malign evil in man” that Delano lacks and that the narrator of “Benito Cereno” claims to have. Delano thus corresponds more closely to those Americans in “Hawthorne and His Mosses” who are unable to recognize Hawthorne’s genius, even as his racialist deployment of the picturesque is uncannily similar to Hawthorne’s narrator in the first section of “Old News.” Perhaps, then, “Benito Cereno” constitutes at most a critique of Hawthorne’s narrator in “Old News.” But if my hunch that the narrator of “Benito Cereno” is a pro-slavery Southerner is warranted, this will have been the second time that Melville has Southerners lay claim to the living legacy of Puritanic Calvinism. We shall see in the next chapter how praise from a Puritanic Cavalier can be double-edged; here, we begin to see why the narrator of “Benito Cereno” might want his readers to see a slave rebellion through the lens of Calvinist doctrine. Thus, even if Hawthorne is not reducible to his narrator in “Old News” or to Delano (whose commitment to “a national mission in which political regulation and racial hierarchy were raised to such a pitch that calculated manipulation cannot be divorced from naiveté”), it is not necessarily a compliment to his racial politics to link him with the narrator of “Benito Cereno,” as Melville has done.

Hawthorne, however, appears to have blithely ignored “Benito Cereno,” for in his preface to The Marble Faun, the picturesque again reappears in a particularly charged context--in the list of what makes writing romances in America so difficult--“no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong.”Indeed, Henry James would focus on precisely this moment in Hawthorne (1879). Even as he famously amplified on Hawthorne’s complaint about the paucity of American resources for the literary artist, James would criticize Nathaniel Hawthorne’s interest in the picturesque as the mark of a merely provincial writer:

Americans have as a general thing a hungry passion for the picturesque, and they are so fond of local color that they contrive to perceive it in localities in which the amateurs of other countries would detect only the most neutral tints . . . . Hungry for the picturesque as he always was, and not finding any very copious provision of it around him, he turned back into the two preceding centuries, with the earnest determination that the primitive annals of Massachusetts should at least appear picturesque.

In effect, James’s comment functions as a reading of “Old News.” The racial politics of such a search for the picturesque in American history and society can be read between the lines, as it were, of James’s own evocation of the mind-set of Hawthorne’s generation, with its “superstitious faith in the grandeur of the country, its duration, its immunity from the usual trouble of earthly empires” (133):

This faith was a simple and uncritical one, enlivened with an element of genial optimism, in the light of which it appeared that the great American state was not as other human institutions are, that a special Providence watched over it, that it would go on joyously for ever. . . . From this conception of the American future the sense of its having problems to solve was blissfully absent; there were no difficulties in the programme, no looming complications, no rocks ahead. . . . There was indeed a faint shadow in the picture—the shadow projected by the ‘peculiar institution’ of the Southern States; but it was far from sufficient to darken the rosy vision of most good Americans, and above all, of most good Democrats. (133)

James’s use of “picture” and “shadow” imagery to describe slavery implies his own judgment of the racial politics of the picturesque, which functions precisely to promote the “rosy vision” that James identified with Hawthorne’s sense of the American national character and its future.

Ignoring Melville’s warning and demonstrating the accuracy of James’s implicit characterization, Hawthorne, in an 1862 travel essay entitled “Chiefly About War Matters,” would replay Delano’s picturesquing of Cereno and Babo in “Benito Cereno.” Consider the way in which Hawthorne he reports an encounter with a band of escaped slaves in the course of his tour to Manassas in the midst of the Civil War:

One very pregnant token of a social system thoroughly disturbed was presented by a party of Contrabands, escaping out of the mysterious depths of Secessia; and its strangeness consisted in the leisurely delay with which they trudged forward, as dreading no pursuer, and encountering nobody to turn them back.

They were unlike the specimens of their race whom we are accustomed to see at the North, and, in my judgment, were far more agreeable. So rudely were they attired--as if their garb had grown upon them spontaneously,--so picturesquely natural in manners, and wearing such a crust of primeval simplicity, (which is quite polished away from the northern black man,) that they seemed a kind of creature by themselves, not altogether human, but perhaps quite as good, and akin to the fauns and rustic deities of olden times. I wonder whether I shall excite anybody’s wrath by saying this? It is no great matter. At all events, I felt most kindly towards these poor fugitives, but knew not precisely what to wish in their behalf, nor in the least how to help them. For the sake of the manhood which is latent in them, I would not have turned them back, but I should have felt almost as reluctant, on their own account, to hasten them forward to the stranger’s land; and, I think, my prevalent idea was, that, whoever may be benefitted by the results of this war, it will not be the present generation of negroes, the childhood of whose race is now gone forever, and who must henceforth fight a hard battle with the world, on very unequal terms. On behalf of my own race, I am glad, and can only hope that an inscrutable Providence means good to both parties.

The picturesque is what makes the encounter, despite the ethical dilemma in which it places Hawthorne, “agreeable,” what enables him to link the escaped slaves to his characterization of Donatello in The Marble Faun. In this, Hawthorne is not so far from Englishman Edward Dicey, who accompanied Hawthorne on his tour of Manassas and whom we met in the previous chapter issuing a racialized defense of Hawthorne’s politics. In his Six Months in the Federal States, Dicey has confessed that, in contrast to the “dull barren fields of Maryland,” he was travelling through, he

could not help watching the colored folk in the cars with more than usual interest. I had not been long enough in the country to lose the sense of novelty with which the black people impress a stranger. To me they are the one picturesque element in the dull monotony of outward life in America. With their dark swarthy skins varying from the deepest ebony to the rich yellow hue—with their strange love for bright colors in their dress, no matter how stained and faded, and yet, gaudy as they are, arranged with a sort of artistic instinct—with their bright laughing smiles and their deep wistful eyes, they form a race apart, a strange people in a strange land.

Although Dicey’s rhetoric here echoes the liberal strain of the romantic racialism that was so prevalent among abolitionists, we have seen in the previous chapter how his pro-abolition attitudes could coincide quite comfortably with a virulent anti-black racism. In short, the picturesque was not racially innocent; even when it seemed to carry romantic connotations. Dicey’s example and the implicit argument of Melville’s “Benito Cereno” showed it to be a crucial element in the sensibility of dominance.

What this means is that those who want to make a case for Hawthorne’s subversion of his narrator’s perspective in “Old News” must contend with the way at least minimally stylized public personae of Hawthorne’s appear to endorse this very vision and style throughout his career. In fact, one might make the argument, following Lawrence Sargent Hall, that Hawthorne saw politics through the picturesque:

Hawthorne believed in letting things go their own way until it was quite certain they were going badly. . . . Since he by no means sanctioned too strict an intervention, the efforts of government and community to improve social conditions had to be, in his allegorical way of thinking, like a gardener’s attempts to enhance landscape. Wherever the art of man has “conspired with Nature, as if he and the great mother had taken counsel together how to make a pleasant scene,” the outcome proves fortunate. It is not so where nature has been contraverted, or ignored, or too hard pressed. . . . (29-30)

Although Hall later concludes that “Of all social and political philosophies the equalitarian ideal seemed most in accord with natural distinctions” to Hawthorne (131), this apparent commitment to equalitarianism that accords with “natural distinctions” does not let Hawthorne off the hook, either. As Larry Tise has shown, Joseph Tracy’s 1833 book Natural Equality, based on his address in favor of colonization, was “one of the first attacks on abolition” in the United States. Tise gives Tracy’s work pride of place in focusing on three crucial themes that would reappear in proslavery writings over the next three decades--“denying the theory and practice of equalitarianism”; “scoring abolitionism as a revolutionary movement against American republicanism”; and “proposing the transformation of slavery into a school of moral training” (271-272). All three of these themes can be detected in “Old News.” The narrator’s racist defense of slavery and racialist invocation of the links between America and England implicitly suggest that abolitionist immediatism and rivalry with England are cases in which “nature has been contraverted, or ignored, or too hard pressed.” Hall’s contention that “the efforts of government and community to improve social conditions had to be, in his allegorical way of thinking, like a gardener’s attempts to enhance landscape” suggests that his anti-abolitionism--for which his contemporaries tried to account using rhetoric of “taste” and “fastidiousness”--might more properly be said to have an aesthetic basis. Hawthorne’s linking of politics with picturesque landscape gardening could well be the source of his anti-abolitionism.

Table Talk

Sometimes a Hawthorne blog just needs to relax and revel in the cuteness at the end of a nice spring day. Perhaps onechan is a little Pearl-like in what follows, interjecting herself into an adult conversation and all, perhaps not.

***

SCENE: Last night, at spaghetti place in YouMe [Dream] Town Plaza (a mall). CONSTRUCTIVIST, TSUMA, and ONECHAN waiting for food to arrive. IMOTO happily chomping on spoon. Somehow the conversation has turned to the concept of kawaii [cuteness].

TSUMA: A Japanese celebrity was saying on tv that the meaning of "kawaii" has changed over the years. It used to mean "kawauso"--pitiful--but lately it's become a word that Japanese teenage girls use to bond over. It's like showing you're part of the group.

CONSTRUCTIVIST: So is it possible to disagree over whether something is cute? Like, would you ever say, "kawakunai" [not cute]?

TSUMA: Kawaikunai.

CONSTRUCTIVIST: [realizing once again he has a lot of studying to do before taking the placement test in April] Yes.

ONECHAN: It's like gucha-gucha skaato. [TSUMA laughs.]

CONSTRUCTIVIST: What? What does that mean?

ONECHAN: Gu-cha...gu-cha. [CONSTRUCTIVIST looks at TSUMA.]

TSUMA: Wrinkled.

ONECHAN: Gucha-gucha skaato. Kawaikunai.

CONSTRUCTIVIST: [Pause, then gets it.] Ah, a wrinkled skirt isn't cute!

TSUMA: I wonder if that's what the older girls at the yochien have been telling her?

***

Would have staged this scene at Mostly Harmless, but have been doing so much daddy blogging there lately it was starting to read like a diary. Plus it would have completely overshadowed my not-quite-live-blogging the PGA and LPGA tournaments that are coming to a close today at Doral and Superstition Mountain, respectively.

Certainly Hawthorne appreciated the power of little kids to steal scenes--after The Scarlet Letter, did he ever give one a prominent and repeating role in any of his later novels? I'm too frustrated over the state of my internet access tonight and eager to check the golf results to answer that myself!