Why "CitizenSE," The Sequel

Let's start rhetorical. After I teach "The Custom-House" later today, I'll get more historical and trace out some of the allusions Hawthorne makes in his sketch to the slave trade and the India trade on which Salem's wealthiest merchant families made their fortunes (which Maryse Conde's I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem and Bharati Mukherjee's The Holder of the World pick up and run with, as I failed to incorporate into my argument in my essay in Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature). [Update: mission accomplished.] After that, I'll explore Hawthorne's focus on ghosts and death, which Toni Morrison makes so much use of in her reading of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and of course in Beloved (which, you could argue, takes its title from a passage in "The Custom-House"). [Update: mission in progress.] And maybe by then I'll be ready to get a little personal.

It may be a little simplistic to call "The Custom-House" Hawthorne's "farewell and fuck you" to Salem, but at least the phrase gets at the anger at his home town in general and specifically at those who were responsible for removing the "Loco-foco Surveyor" (as he sarcastically called himself in an allusion to accusations that he was a partisan Democrat) from public office at the Salem Custom House. When he remarks in his preface to the second edition of The Scarlet Letter that the reactions to what he calls his "sketch of official life" could "hardly have been more violent, indeed, had he burned down the Custom-House, and quenched its last smoking ember in the blood of a certain venerable personage, against whom he is supposed to cherish a particular malevolence," Hawthorne cleverly places the violence in the overreaction of his readers to his writing. But his answer to the "public disapprobation," which he acknowledges would "weigh very heavily on him, were he conscious of deserving it"--basically to point out "the frank and genuine good humor" of the sketch and "the general accuracy with which he has conveyed his sincere impression of the characters therein described," to "utterly disclaim" any motives of "enmity, or ill-feeling of any kind, personal or political," and to conclude that "it could not have been done in a better or kindlier spirit, nor, so far as his abilities availed, with a livelier effect of truth"--only adds fuel to the proverbial fire.

In short, I see the preface to the second edition of The Scarlet Letter as the "and the horse you rode in on" p.s. to "The Custom-House." Just look at the only three sentences that use the phrase "the author" in the preface, from its beginning, middle, and end, and I think you'll see my point:

Much to the author's surprise, and (if he may say so without additional offence) considerably to his amusement, he finds that his sketch of official life, introductory to THE SCARLET LETTER, has created an unprecedented excitement in the respectable community immediately around him.

...the author begs leave to say, that he has carefully read over the introductory pages, with a purpose to alter or expunge whatever might be found amiss, and to make the best reparation in his power for the atrocities of which he has been adjudged guilty.

The author is constrained, therefore, to republish his introductory sketch without the change of a word.

No atrocities, no reparations, no revisions. This is unrepentant snark of the highest order.

I'll have to continue the rhetorical analysis later, for the question of atrocities and reparations looms large in "The Custom-House" proper. For now, let me leave you with the immediate context of the "citizen of somewhere else" line and let you mull it over on your own for awhile:

The life of the Custom-House lies like a dream behind me.... The merchants--Pingree, Phillips, Shepard, Upton, Kimball, Bertram, Hunt,--these, and many other names, which had such a classic familiarity for my ear six months ago,--these men of traffic, who seemed to occupy so important a position in the world,--how little time has it required to so disconnect me from them all, not merely in act, but recollection! It is with an effort that I recall the figures and appellations of these few. 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.

The allusions here to earlier language on the romance and on Salem in the sketch are what I'll start with next post.

CitizenSE Refuses to Offer Excuses

So, I already missed a day of Hawthorne blogging. I could invent a retroactive policy of no Sunday blogging, even though no one in the household is Christian. Or I could make a case that an early morning post should count towards the night before. Or I could explain in interminable detail how our successful shopping trip to Kashii to buy some of the winter gear we decided not to ship over to Fukuoka and even more successful "get the girls to bed early" operation failed to lead to a free evening together for the parents, much less a blogging opportunity for the dad. Or I could change the subject by complaining at length about the double jeopardy brought about by a lack of insulation in concrete-block-style Japanese apartments and a lack of central heating (either you turn on the space heater and slowly have all the moisture sucked out of your body or you freeze, even though the lows here would be nice highs back in Dunkirk this time of year).

But, not quite heroically, I will do none of that. I'll just point out that the "citizen of somewhere else" line was, like a purloined letter, mockingly staring me in the face while I looked all over "The Custom-House" for it, until I came across it earlier this morning (in the middle of tsuma's and my romantic date, after we woke up in the middle of the morning after spending most of the night repeatedly helping clingy and maybe-getting-sick girls get back to sleep)--right there on the last page. On the bright side, I'm teaching The Scarlet Letter and Beloved the rest of the semester in my Postcolonial Hawthorne course, so I'll be able to explain the blog title and prep for class at the same time, hopefully later this afternoon, after we visit a potential day care for onechan and take my wife to the doctor (it is nice to live in a place with a national health insurance system, especially given how tough the microorganisms seem to be in this corner of the world).

Why "Citizen of Somewhere Else"?

Just a few reasons, post KALS-talk and pre-getting home to put the girls to bed (you can bet onechan will stay up waiting for me, so this has to be fast):

5. It's both an allusion to a famous phrase of Hawthorne's and somewhat self-referential.

4. Has a nice ring to it, eh?

3. If I can ever find the exact source of the Hawthorne phrase, I'll have a long explanation of its context and the way I see it working in that context. But not having time now to look it up, this will have to be a foreshadowing of a reason rather than a real one.

2. The question of Hawthorne's relation to the American nationalism of his times will be the topic of many future and, one hopes, better posts. Given #5, I can't help but address my own relations with American nationalism today, as well.

1. So where is that "somewhere else" and how does one become a "citizen" of it? Is this utopianism ("no place"), endless deferral ("not this place, or that place, or the next one, or..."), or what? The possibilities multiply upon further reflection, especially when you take into account claims since the 1990s that the web is a transnationalist or postnationalist "space," not to mention the discourse of "netizen" that some have tried to popularize (I prefer "blogoramaville," myself, and find the whole "new frontier" stuff a fascinating mix of Frederick Jackson Turner and Star Trek, on which much more later. Yup, I'm talking to you, EFF.)

There, I've met my requirement of a post a day. We'll see how long I can keep up that pace and how low I'll sink to do so. More on the title, and the talk, at the same CitizenSE channel, time, etc.

So Why a Hawthorne Blog?

Shall we count the reasons?

10. No matter how you define "American" or "literature," or choose or refuse to connect them, something Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote is going to end up being important in some way to you. (Now I'll lie in wait for Eric Cheyfitz or Jay Grossman or Gregory Jay or Jane Tompkins to comment.... There are probably a dozen post ideas buried in this mega-qualified claim alone.)

9. Don't believe me? Then why do so many other writers engage his works in their fiction, drama, and criticism? And I'm not just talking about the usual suspects, from Melville to Twain to James to Faulkner to Warren to Lowell to Updike. I'm talking Chesnutt, Du Bois, Wharton, Borges, Ellison, Baldwin, Acker, Morrison, Kingston, Conde, Mukherjee, and Parks, among others. (For a start, see Brodhead's The School of Hawthorne, Budick's Engendering Romance, Coale's In Hawthorne's Shadow, Idol and Ponder's edited collection of essays, Hawthorne and Women, McCall's Citizens of Somewhere Else...and of course future posts here.)

8. The Eldritch Press and Donna Campbell Hawthorne sites are pretty darn good, but not blogs. Same goes for the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society and the Hawthorne in Salem sites.

7. The debate over academic blogging is over. (If you haven't been following it, it's no big loss.) [Update 1/22/07: Well, not literally over. In fact, when I originally wrote this, I wasn't even aware there was a controversy over the term "academic blogging" or who was known for using it. So maybe this should be revised to read, "For me, the debate over Blogging While Academic is over, to the extent that I've decided to start this blog, that is." Not quite as punchy, eh?]

6. The debate over the dangerosity of American university faculties in general and literature departments in particular is, sadly, far from over. Seems I can't help but be in the middle of it, whether I want to or not. And actually, having chosen to enter grad school around the time everyone seemed to be up in arms over the "culture wars" and "political correctness" and "the closing of the American mind" and "tenured radicals," I kind of brought it on myself.

5. Which is not to say I want to embrace Hawthorne's rhetorical pose of being an apolitical observer barely in touch with his times while actually being closely aligned personally, professionally, and politically with certain tendencies in the Democratic Party of those times. Far from it.

4. After all, I got hooked on this blogging thing when I started writing a dueling-banjos-style column for the local newspaper with a philosopher friend of mine not so long ago and created a blog to give us a potentally wider audience. (With less than a thousand visits a month, "wider" should be given far less weight than "potentially," although various search engines do bring us hits from all over the world.)

3. Even though I got a sabbatical and a Fulbright and have been teaching in Japan for several months, all of which gave me a graceful way to take a hiatus from our ongoing intellectual death match, I found that I missed blogging and began commenting all too regularly at my favorite blogs. I needed to find a way to focus my writing on my actual research so as to finally finish turning that ol' dissertation into a real book manuscript.

2. Or maybe I just needed a way to procrastinate more "productively." We'll see. (Although in point of fact, it was only through a host of distraction techniques that I was able to finish the dissertation--"The Race for Hawthorne," 1998--itself. More on them, and "the writing process," someday.)

1. So already you can see why a writer like Hawthorne appeals to me personally. Take his long post-college period of research and writing, resulting in lots of short pieces of varying quality, and finally, the books--what is that but a somewhat hopeful publication model for me? Not to mention his self-deprecations and indecisions and subtleties, his historical sense, his attention to form, structure, and craft, and his variety of modes, moods, and narrative strategies. Or that so many interesting and important scholars and critics spanning so many decades have written on him in so many interesting and important ways.

0. But Hawthorne also appeals to me politically--and precisely because his politics are so disappointing to me in so many ways. After all, his evasions, ambiguities, ambivalences, affiliations, blind spots, and prejudices are just as important to understand and assess as his achievements and influence. They may tell us as much about ourselves and our own times as him and his, if not more. And they will, if I have anything to say about it.

-1. Probably next I better explain and justify the blog title. But the girls (san-sai, almost, and nana-kagetsu) are going to wake up soon, I have to do some serious memorizing for the last Japanese language class of the week, and I have a talk to outline and quotes to compile for the Kyushu American Literature Society meeting at Fukuoka University this Saturday. It's called "American Studies and the Race for Hawthorne," so of course it will be the subject of another few posts someday.