Welcome to Postcolonial Hawthorne

A big CitizenSE hello to my Seinan Gakuin University students taking (or thinking about taking) my Postcolonial Hawthorne course. In today's post, I want to follow of up on one of the issues that I discussed with you in class today, which we'll be expanding on next week in class--namely, the relation between postcolonial studies and American studies, or, more simply, "How is 'postcolonial Hawthorne' not an oxymoron?"

Because there's a tradition in postcolonial studies that argues for the value of distinguishing Europe's former colonies that gained their formal independence in the twentieth century from those that gained it in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, it's worth taking this question quite seriously. The term "postcolonial" is baggy and contested enough, some critics argue, that it's just not worth it to open the door to former white settler colonies like the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, places where the descendants of the European colonizers came to hold and largely still hold political power over those places' indigenous peoples and their descendants. More generally, the question of where to stop arises: if U.S. literature is postcolonial, or at least has a postcolonial period, then why not any formerly colonized nation, any nation that once was under the power of a foreign empire and has since gained its political independence? (For instance, England under the Roman Empire, Hungary under the Ottoman Empire, Poland under the Russian and Soviet empires, Korea under the Chinese and Japanese empires, and so on.) To which I ask, why not?

I've argued in a recent conference paper that there is much to be gained from this expanded definition of postcolonial studies. As preliminary evidence, look at some of the work I've highlighted in this blog: Jee Yoon Lee's on The Scarlet Letter as well as my own on Hawthorne and Maryse Conde, Mahasweta Devi, and Paule Marshall (for example). Throughout the semester, we'll consider other evidence for the value of considering Hawthorne as a postcolonial writer and antebellum U.S literature as a postcolonial literature.

Today in class, I listed several reasons why it might make sense to do this. The United States's political independence coupled with its cultural and economic dependence; the shaky state of its nationalism; the role literature was expected to play in shaping a sense of nationalism and patriotism among American citizens; the ways in which American writers relied on and revised English models--all these (and more) begin to make the case for considering Hawthorne to be a postcolonial writer.

Tomorrow Saturday Next Monday, I'll discuss my case for a new periodization scheme for U.S. literatures, which will not only provide some historical background for Hawthorne's career as a writer, but also will help me flesh out a connection I suggested in today's class between early American literature and the literature of newly independent African, Asian, and Caribbean nations following World War II.

"I Will Choose Free Will"

As it's going to be awhile before I "have to" start not-quite-live-blogging the final round of the Masters at Mostly Harmless, as my working Monday will be quite busy tying up loose ends before the start of my spring semester at Kyushu U, Seinan Gakuin U, and Fukuoka U (you know, like finally posting my course syllabi and copying my handouts for Tuesday's and Wednesday's classes), as I'm rather surprisingly on a bit of a Hawthorne roll tonight, and as Hug the Shoggoth is sending me down memory lane, I'll start today's post with a question and a story.

Gall writes, in response to a comment of mine,

“The Custom House” seems like a playful and suave (and quite humorous, at times) vindication of his own artistic freedom, re-publishing it into the face of the audience even though, as he finds in these first few paragraphs, there may be complaints. That, this self-determination, made me wonder about that “evil star”-thing, in the first place--does he, the artist, have the means to escape/disable that destiny which keeps the other custom officers in that mouldy custom shack?

He's referring to this passage from "The Custom-House," by the way:

In the first place, my coadjutors were not invariably old; there were men among them in their strength and prime, of marked ability and energy, and altogether superior to the sluggish and dependent mode of life on which their evil stars had cast them.

So I didn't quite answer his question in the comment that is still awaiting moderation at the moment, and I'm not going to yet, because I have that story to tell. It's about my Mostly Harmless co-author whose book I recommended here (in comments). Back in the early '90s, he had discovered a copy of Melville's marginalia of Milton's Paradise Lost and was working on what I thought was a fantastic reading of Moby-Dick and other works in light of it, so of course we were talking about fate and free will a lot. He once shared lyrics of a response to a well-known Rush song (the key line of which supplies the title of this post) he wrote in his undergraduate days. Now, if I was a good storyteller, I'd share those lyrics with you, but you see I have this terrible memory (and I'm not talking about Sethe's). So you'll have to wait and see if "Sloucho" will visit the comments to this post to get to the climax of this little anecdote. Sorry.

In any case, my point in not-quite-telling the story is to explain my title, the irony (probably unintended on Rush's part, or at least I hope so because then it would be the same kind of irony that the only thing ironic about Alanis Morisette's "Ironic" is its title) of which I hope is clear by now. Which now allows me to get back to some kind of answer.

This is by way of Toni Morrison's Nobel Prize speech, "The Bird in Our Hand: Is It Living or Dead?" (1993), and her essay "Home" from The House That Race Built (1997)--two of her best pieces of writing, IMHO, and worth a read or reread right now. In these two meditations on language and stories (and everything they limn), Morrison suggests that the feelings of freedom a writer experiences while writing may be illusions masking a greater dependency--on the one hand, to oppressive conventions and structures, and on the other, to the reader's response. She counsels writers and critics to break with the former and embrace the latter. I think it's good advice, but I don't think Hawthorne took the first half of it. I think the declaration of independence from Salem that is "The Custom-House" is prey to all the problems with the U.S. Declaration of Independence. I think the pledge of allegiance to the republic of letters that is "The Custom-House" reproduces some of the same problems as the colonization of the Americas and the founding of the United States. So as much as he's trying to write himself into a different story-line in "The Custom-House" than the people he satirizes in it, I think he is as trapped by the national narrative as they are. In this, I differ from Lauren Berlant and others who try to find something hopeful in Hawthorne's "citizen of somewhere else".... And I'm leaning toward that being a choice of his rather than a destiny.

I'm purposely leaving all those "I think"s in the previous paragraph--something I always tell undergraduates to strike (either the "I think" or the entire sentence)--to mark my dissatisfaction with these summary statements. But I'm too tired to think straight now and too eager to see what's happening in the Masters to continue, so look for a late-day update to this start to a post--or later, if I'm inefficient at work today.

What Would Hawthorne Say About "The Temper of the Times"?

Back when I was still writing my dissertation--actually, even earlier, as I was formulating the project and beginning my research--my grandfather and I began a series of conversations on it. "It's on race and Hawthorne," I would say, and eventually we would get around to the questions of presentism and relativism, of blame and responsibility, of my goals and my methods. No matter how many ways I would try to argue the point, he would never quite move away from his position that it was unfair for us today to judge Hawthorne for his racism. I was reminded of these conversations as I was reading Hug the Shoggoth's first full-length race and Lovecraft post, in which Daniel Gall takes on the rhetorical evasions of a representative moment in Lovecraft scholarship. The critic he responds to sounds remarkably like my grandfather, so I was quite interested in the manner of the take-down. You should be, too--in case you haven't noticed, I've been linking to HtS often enough lately to probably have caused google page rank to start discounting my links--so go back and click on that first link if you must choose only one.

OK, now that you're back, let me first recap some of my standard responses to my grandfather. I didn't use these exact words, but I don't remember my exact words from the time, and as I have now for several years been forced to carry on these conversations on my own, I'll never be able to get him to remind me of them.

1) How far are you willing to take your historical relativism? To the point where it becomes a moral relativism? Because a lot of philosophers would have a problem with your doing that--including your son. (Yes, my dad is a philosopher. And I responded to my mom's "Whatever you choose to do, don't become a philosopher" [probably not an exact quotation, come to think of it] by getting as close as I could in college with an English and Math double major, and then getting into literary and political theory in a big way in grad school, and then by debating philosophers on my political blog, but, yes, mom, thankfully I am not a philosopher. Which reminds me of my dad's joke about the reactions he gets when he tells people he is a philosopher: long pause, then, "So what are some of your sayings?" His version of the "Well, I guess I'd better watch my language, then," that I tend to get when I come out as an English professor off-campus.)

2) Even by the standards of his time, Hawthorne's racism was being judged. It takes a very reductive view of a past age to posit unanimity on any major social issue--and what was more tense than racial politics in the antebellum era?

3) And speaking of "his time," is it really so different than ours that we can't attempt to evaluate it? Isn't such an attempt also an attempt to evaluate our own time, as well? It's not like I'm trying to let us off the hook by positing racism as a past problem--quite the opposite, in fact.

Did I mention that these conversations were taking place in the wake and shadow of my first long-term relationship, with an Afro-Caribbean immigrant whom my grandmother was vehemently opposed to my dating? Not to mention the nativism and anti-semitism my grandparents surely weathered since their arrival in the States before the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act shut down immigration from southern and eastern Europe and Asia, or the fact that they lived through what Matthew Frye Jacobson writes about in Whiteness of a Different Color....

Well, Sunday is almost over, so let me just quickly mention a tack I never took: Hawthorne himself never bought into using the times to excuse the individual for his beliefs and actions. At least I don't think I took it. I wish my grandfather were still around so I could be sure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Hawthorne and Copperheads

This is more a place-holder than a post, reminding me to check out H. Arthur Scott Trask's Was Hawthorne a Paleolibertarian? (12 April 2004) and A Northern Man of Southern Principles: President Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire on Politics and the Sectional Conflict, League of the South Institute Papers 10. When a noted neo-Confederate takes up Hawthorne's political writings, I need to be there. Probably would do me some good to get a hold of Jennifer Weber's Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln's Opponents in the North as I'm doing this. Suggestions, anyone?

[Update 4/7/07: New reader Rebecca Ford of OUP, my new favorite person in the world, just sent me a link to this interview with Weber. Thanks! Keep those suggestions coming!]

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!).