Kugelmass Episodes Re-upped

There may or may not be a god or gods, but over at The Kugelmass Episodes is evidence that bloggy miracles happen, good things sometimes happen to good bloggers, and so on. After a short experiment in Coffee and Critique, Joseph Kugelmass is back blogging under his real name (if that is his real name--it's a pretty suspiciously postmodern Woody Allen-esque name, if you ask me)--which makes me pretty happy, as I tagged it as one of my five favorite thoughtful blogs over at the thread Chris Clarke started at Pandagon. If you're curious, you'll have to scan through everyone else's recs to find mine!

And isn't that a good reason to blog? To send the random google searchers who come here to the obscurest corner of Blogoramaville and happen to stay to read a CitizenSE post or three over to the best writers in the neighborhood....

Hawthorne Would Approve

No time for serious posting, but I did want to encourage you to point your browsers toward The Joy of Text, Part I, in which the Hobgoblin has cast Hawthorne in a leading role in a smashing romantic comedy. Looks like the start of a series--next episode may star Melville. Stay tuned!

It's a particularly pleasant counterpoint to this Hawthorne/Melville pairing from Robert Farley that I can't bear not to link to again. Hawthorne would encourage his more paranoid wingnut readers to check out "The Devil in Manuscript" and his second preface to The Scarlet Letter if they really want to get scared about the power of words and texts.

He'd also approve of student blogs, like "the air of ideas is the only air worth breathing", Dave Lester's Finding America, and Katie Rice's post on "The Birth-mark."

Happy Birthday to You

Over at Mostly Harmless I have a Radiohead City Music Hall flavored tribute to imoto, who turns 1 today. Tanjobi omedeto, imoto!

Got a post cooking on Twain, Arac, Hawthorne, and Melville (hopefully for Saturday), but while you're waiting with bated breath for it, I thought I'd ask a certain exasperated London scholar what he thinks of The Iron Heel and what he recommends I read to make sense of its representations of Japan besides Colleen Lye's work....

Oh, and you need to read Robert Farley on the dangerality of Melville and Hawthorne. Heh! Indeed.

[Update 4/29/07: d celebrates his daughter's first birthday at Lawyers, Guns, and Money. Which just goes to show that for some who Blog While Academic, April can't possibly be the cruelest month.]

On Twain, Hawthorne, and the Novel of Purpose

I owe Scott Eric Kaufman and Amanda Claybaugh a follow-up to my earlier Twain post, but I'm also teaching "Roger Malvin's Burial" and "Wakefield" a little later today, so I'm going to try to keep a few balls in the air here today while the girls are still were sleeping (and before [and after] I have to take took onechan to her first full-day yochien since March)--among them, the relevance of my reading of Twain to The Valve's book event on The Novel of Purpose, readings of Hawthorne's representations of colonial spaces, and the possibilities and pitfalls of pedagogy. We'll see how that goes.

So last Twain post I suggested that the coat of arms that Tom gives Jim in the midst of the "evasion" sequence in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is something of a practical joke at Hawthorne's expense. The point of the joke, though, is aimed directly at the end of Reconstruction: Jim's coat of arms signifies and dramatizes the limitations of liberal reformers, the triumph of racist reactionaries, and their collusion in imposing precisely the "badge of servitude" that the Supreme Court recently declared unconstitutional. So I agree with Scott that Twain did have a moral purpose in representing Huck's failure to stand up to Tom, but, Colacurcio-like, my reading emphasizes that Twain is historicizing this failure and making it a figure for the larger society's moral and political failings. The sense of betrayal most readers feel at Huck's actions (and lack thereof) in the last third of the novel, then, is a pale shadow of the betrayal of African Americans by the United States in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

I make this argument not to participate in what Jonathan Arac has called the hypercanonization and idolization of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, nor to excuse or condone liberal racism, but to suggest that Arac's dismissal of critics such as Fishkin, Doyno, and Jehlen (as well as David Lionel Smith, an Americanist and African Americanist at Williams College, who so far as I can tell is never directly engaged in Arac's study), who support the "novel as criticism of the end of Reconstruction" argument I have been advancing--although IMHO not quite as convincingly as I lay it out ;)--as continuing rather than contesting this Cold War tradition is a little hasty. I want to return to Louis Budd's 1962 argument that Clemens should be read as a contemporary of Page, Cable, and Tourgee (and also, I would add, John Edward Bruce, Charles Chesnutt, Anna Julia Cooper, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Ida B. Wells) and in the context of Southern debates over the meaning of Reconstruction--and try to set it on firmer intra- and intertextual ground. Arac's objection that the novel failed to make its mark is on target--he correctly points out that no contemporary reviews remarked on its racial politics--but this doesn't vitiate the attempt.

The upshot for any understanding of Hawthorne's relevance to the Claybaugh book event at the Valve is to emphasize that critiques of realism and sentimentalism in reform movements and literature may have regressive as well as progressive components. Unlike most of his literary contemporaries, Hawthorne was an anti-abolitionist; this fact has been acknowledged by most Hawthornists and Americanists--what is debated is its context, meaning, and significance. As I have already covered these matters at some length here at CitizenSE in my discusions of Hawthorne's racial politics with respect to slavery, abolition, and racial science, I want to illustrate this point with examples taken from a debate that seems much more "live" among Hawthornists: how to read his infamous "I do abhor an Indian story" line and the larger question it raises of his take on the colonization of the Americas and of the Indian Removals of the 1830s.

On the one hand, a strong case for a deep continuity between Hawthorne's attitudes toward American Indians and African Americans can be made. Hawthorne was an ardent supporter of Andrew Jackson (I read somewhere he thought him to be the best American president), the architect of the Indian Removal policy. Few American Indians appear in his fiction; those that do are often as stereotyped as the equally small number of African-American figures. Although he wrote about Indians romantically and sometimes favorably in his autobiographical writings, it seems he participated in the "Vanishing American" tradition. Perhaps his abhorrence for Indian stories stems from an aversion to actual Indians.

Yet just as many feminists argue that despite his "damned mob of scribbling women" gibe and unfavorable portrayal of Anne Hutchinson he could be considered a proto-feminist or even a feminist author, a surprisingly large number of Hawthornists argue that his abhorrence for Indian stories stems from their conventional and cliched nature. These critics see him critiquing the James Fenimore Cooper style of romanticizing American Indians and launching a critique of manifest destiny. For them, a late sketch like "Main-Street" and the early tale "Roger Malvin's Burial" provide the best evidence for their perspective on Hawthorne as a critic of historical colonialism and contemporary American expansionism.

Renee Bergland, in The National Uncanny, offers the best survey of these debates that I have seen; she ultimately argues that a reading of Hawthorne's ghosts suggests the former group has the argumentative advantage. I'll return to her readings in a later post and in the process pick up the thread on Hawthorne's use of haunting in his fiction that I dropped awhile back. But in the few minutes I have before class starts, I want to suggest that the way critics have read "Roger Malvin's Burial" reveals a lot about the terms and assumptions of this debate over Hawthorne's take on Indian Affairs. How they read his relation to the "short story of purpose" of the early 19th C--those stories responding to the calls for a nationalistic American literature to be produced (ironically, on the model of Sir Walter Scott's historical novels--how, that is, they read the politics of dissenting from the conventions of this early national literary tradition, says as much about our own critical assumptions as it does about Hawthorne's time. So soon I'll over some excerpts from my manuscript's first chapter, in which I compare and contrast David Levin's, Michael Colacurcio's, and Manfred Mackenzie's readings of "Roger Malvin's Burial," to flesh out what I'm getting at with these telegraphed comments. And I'll also look at the analysis of "colonial spaces" in "Wakefield" and other stories that deal with the wilderness/desert metaphors underlying so many of his narratives. This will help me circle back to my arguments about Hawthorne's engagement with the picturesque in particular and American landscapes in general from my second chapter and to my long-promised but not-yet-delivered readings of Lauren Berlant on Hawthorne, utopianism, and his "citizen of somewhere else" proclamation in "The Custom-House."

So it's going to get a little involved in the next few months here at CitizenSE. Hawthorne's engagements with narratives of plantation and colonization, his critiques of the emergent literary nationalism of his times, and his ruminations on landscapes, aesthetics, and manifest destiny will be my focus as my Postcolonial Hawthorne course gets into gear.

Why, Oh Why?

No chance for serious blogging the last few days--imoto had a high fever last night after running her nose since Friday and I stayed home from work today because the tsuma wasn't feeling any too hot in the morning, either. The day turned out just fine, though. Imoto's fever broke in the early morning (not that I knew, I was sound asleep--now you understand the tsuma's condition when I woke up!) and after a long late morning/early afternoon nap with mama she was feeling fine. Meanwhile I got to take onechan to her yochien and play with her and a couple of her tomodachi when I picked her up to allow said nap to go on for as long as possible. Found out onechan can climb to the top of the jungle gym and that most of the girls at the yochien have some kind of Pretty Cure gear or other. By the early afternoon imoto was trying to kick a soft little ball and a half-deflated balloon around the play room and onechan was practicing her golf swing with a rolled-up plastic poster-sized mat and whatever imoto wasn't kicking. Too bad the video camera was out of juice.

All of which means part 2 of my Adventures of Huckleberry Finn response to Scott's recent post at The Valve will just have to wait a while longer. Somehow a day like today takes the urgency out of blogging. In a good way.

Quite unlike what's been leading Joseph Kugelmass to cancel the rest of The Kugelmass Episodes. I find it interesting that he's planning to head (back) into the groves of pseudonymity the same month that Tenured Radical outed herself, and, as noted a few days ago, The Hobgoblin of Little Minds took up his mask again.

Ah, but it's time for onechan to join imoto in dreamland, so this line of thought will have to be--

Mark Twain: The Badge of Servitude

Scott Eric Kaufman has been organizing and participating in The Valve's ongoing book event on Amanda Claybaugh's The Novel of Purpose. His recent contribution is worth a close read. I'm going to take the opening his reading of the end of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn offers me to follow up on an invitation from Claybaugh herself and say a little bit more about my views on Hawthorne and 19th C reform movements.

In "The Power of Blackness and the Device of Race: On the Compromises of 1850 and 1877," the third chapter of my manuscript, American Studies and the Race for Hawthorne,

I turn to three major nineteenth-century writers who have offered assessments of Hawthorne’s racial politics as rigorous as any professional reviewer or scholar. Specifically, I examine how Herman Melville, in “Hawthorne and His Mosses” (1850), Henry James, in Hawthorne (1879), and Mark Twain, in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), offer implicit readings of Hawthorne’s racial politics, and, in the process, comment on the racial politics of the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Instead of studying Hawthorne’s relation to other major nineteenth-century writers in terms of source, influence, or intertextuality, that is, I examine what certain major responses to and revisions of Hawthorne’s texts reveal about the historical moments in which they were written. After considering how James’s and Melville’s criticism helps specify the race and Hawthorne problem that I identified in the previous two chapters, I turn to the controversial ending of Mark Twain’s novel and its puzzling allusion to the ending of The Scarlet Letter. As we shall see, Herman Melville, Henry James, and Mark Twain together tell a remarkably consistent story--a story that links the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act with the 1877 Tilden-Hayes Agreement.

This is one of my longest and most-involved chapters and I'm considering sending off parts of it to journals this fall, so I won't give it the Chapter 2 treatment (see the "Old News" category for what I'm talking about). But I will give the set-up and the conclusion to my Twain argument. Here are the two passages that begin the Twain section of the chapter, the first from The Scarlet Letter and the second from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

All around there were monuments carved with armorial bearings; and on this simple slab of slate--as the curious investigator may still discern, and perplex himself with the purport--there appeared the semblance of an engraved escutcheon. It bore a device, a herald’s wording of which might serve for a motto and brief description of our now concluded legend; so sombre it is, and relieved only by one ever-glowing point of light gloomier than the shadow:--

“On a field, sable, the letter A, gules.”

“On the scutcheon we’ll have a bend or in the dexter base, a saltire murrey in the fess, with a dog, couchant, for common charge, and under his foot a chain embattled, for slavery, with a chevron vert in a chief engrailed, and three invected lines on a field azure, with the nombril points rampant on a dancette indented; crest, a runaway nigger, sable, with his bundle over his shoulder on a bar sinister; and a couple of gules for supporters, which is you and me; motto, Maggiore fretta, minore atto. Got it out of a book--means, the more haste, the less speed.”

“Geewhillikins,” I says, “but what does the rest of it mean?”

And here's the intro to the Twain section:

Huck Finn is as perplexed by Tom Sawyer’s insistence that Jim inscribe his coat of arms on the wall of his cell at Phelps Farm as he is unsure of that armorial device’s meaning. And he remains as dissatisfied with Tom’s evasion of his questions about the meaning of Jim’s coat of arms--“We ain’t got no time to bother over that”--as he is with Tom’s eventual admission of ignorance--“Oh, I don’t know. But he’s got to have it. All the nobility does” (322). Still, Huck decides to trust Tom and goes along with his efforts to devise a plan “romantical enough” to “set a free nigger free” (294, 358). “Tom said we’d got to,” he reports: “there warn’t no case of a state prisoner not scrabbling his inscription to leave behind, and his coat of arms” (321).

Tom Sawyer’s romantical plan, in which Jim is figured both as nobility and as state prisoner, has been the subject of much critical controversy. But given Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s point that critics of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn have “built an increasingly solid case that the last portion of the novel may be read as a commentary on American race relations in the post-Reconstruction era,” the more productive question now is, what kind of commentary? There is no better way to answer this question, I propose, than to consider the meaning and significance of Jim’s coat of arms. For where it is fairly clear that Tom Sawyer’s motto (“the more haste, the less speed”) could well have been a slogan for the nation’s recent repudiation of Reconstruction, the significance of Huck’s question (“What does the rest of it mean?”) is less clear. As we shall see, answering Huck’s question can help us determine what kind of commentary Mark Twain was making, not only on the racial politics of his own times but also on the author the entire episode seems designed to confront--Nathaniel Hawthorne.

It may seem that Clemens’s transformation of The Scarlet Letter’s heraldic motto, “On a field, sable, the letter A, gules,” into Tom Sawyer’s description of Jim’s coat of arms--“crest, a runaway nigger, sable, with his bundle over his shoulder on a bar sinister; and a couple of gules for supporters, which is you and me”--is simply a joke at Hawthorne’s expense, a parody of the romance in the name of American realism, a rejection of Hawthorne’s gloom in the name of American humor. But if it is a joke, it is an eminently practical one.

And here's how I conclude the section:

In the end, then, Jim’s coat of arms suggests the source of Mark Twain’s critique of America in 1885. Whatever racist hatreds and pleasures the coat of arms encodes, it is also a critique of the nation’s turn against Reconstruction and turn toward race as a mark of distinction and badge of servitude. By making Jim’s coat of arms harken back to Hester’s ambiguous position between enslavement and freedom, Clemens points to the bitter resentments, frivolous emancipationist impulses, and uncomprehending perplexity that went into the construction of race. But even as he draws on Hawthorne’s imagery, Clemens also criticizes his politics, for the final implication of the allusions to The Scarlet Letter is to link the Fugitive Slave Act with the Tilden-Hayes Agreement. Mark Twain implies that a similar political coalition to the one that produced the Compromise of 1850 resulted in the Compromise of 1877; he quite consciously superimposes antebellum and post-Reconstruction ideologies of race in order to suggest that a new form of racial oppression as insidious in its own way as slavery was taking shape in the wake of Reconstruction. To borrow a figure Clemens might have appreciated, then, a major message of the evasion scene in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is that the same horses that Hawthorne backed in 1850 were pulling ahead again in 1877.

What happens in the middle is a survey of the uses of heraldry in Hawthorne's fiction and in The Scarlet Letter (see my posts in the categories for The Scarlet Letter and Beloved for some arguments at CitizenSE that draw on this section of the chapter); a consideration of the similarities and differences between Hawthorne's and Clemens's characters that the quoted passages from both novels suggest; a close reading of the coat of arms itself and of Kemble's illustration of it for the three political narratives inscribed in it; a comparison of Tom's, Huck's, and Jim's responses to it and them; and soon, a consideration of John Edward Bruce's journalism and activism for the light it sheds on Clemens and Hawthorne.

So, how does this connect to Scott's post and Amanda's book? Come back tomorrow, fearless readers!

The Hobgoblin Returns

No, this is not about Spider-Man 3 getting its world premiere in Tokyo. Much better news. You'll be as glad as I am that The Hobgoblin of Little Minds is back in blogoramaville. He just lost his father to cancer, so be sure to pay him a visit.