Torrential Downpour: Hawthorne

Random Paragraphs on Hawthorne
I've always thought Hawthorne one of the great masters of the short story form. Some of his stories read like episodes of The Twilight Zone ("My Kinsman, Major Monineux," "Wakefield," for example), which I consider a compliment, anyway. There's something like a Rod Serling structure (with the critical beginning and ending of the story) and Rod Serling narration.

Tomorrow in lit class I'm planning something a little different. With the exception of poetry, we rarely read more than one work by the same author; for the purposes of a general education lit course titled "The Human Experience in Literature," it is best to cover a lot of different writers. But I do think students may be able to see trends across a single writer's works, so we're reading "The May-Pole of Merry Mount," "The Minister's Black Veil," and "Young Goodman Brown" for the same class period. They are rather similar in subject matter and theme, and they feature Hawthorne's characteristic tone and narration. To provide students with a broad experience with literature, it is also useful to show how we can read multiple works by one author.

Re-reading "The May-Pole of Merry Mount" is providing me a different experience than in the past. Yes, "Jollity and gloom were contending for an empire," and the gloomy Puritans cannot have any of the reader's sympathy. And yet it seems the revelers of Merry Mount maintain a joy that cannot possibly be sustained. And perhaps Hawthorne, despite the obvious hatred of the Puritans, recognizes this: "Once, it is said, they were seen following a flower-decked corpse, with merriment and festive music, to his grave. But did the dead man laugh?" Merry Mount is joyful, and yet the life of Merry Mount is somehow inauthentic, incomplete. There is both joy and sadness to human existence; as Chief Bromden describes McMurphy's laughter in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, "but he won't let the pain blot out the humor no more'n he'll let the humor blot out the pain." But of course the Puritans are also incomplete, and so unappealing for their lack of joy and their insistence on forcing their joylessness on others.

In the past year, a great deal of my thought has been given to the contrast of Javert and Valjean in Les Miserables. Javert distances himself from humanity by his harsh stances: he cannot believe in redemption, and he cannot believe in forgiveness. It strikes me that in stories like "Young Goodman Brown" (where Brown's recognition of the common sin of humanity makes him bitter and distances himself from his faith and human connections) and "The Minister's Black Veil" (an even more obvious story of a man separating himself from humanity because of his view of sin) we again see Javert's view. But we must recall in Valjean's example forgiveness, redemption, selflessness, and humanity.

Literature offers us imagination: it gives a chance to escape ourselves, to imagine we were someone or something or somewhere or somewhen else. It allows us understanding of humanity by showing us humanity. Still, I read as myself: whenever I encounter animals being killed in fiction, I become consciously aware. In "The May-Pole of Merry Mount," I become conscious of myself when it is said that the revelers hunted animals to wear their skins, and I become conscious of myself when Endicott orders a bear shot.

Though I find Hawthorne a short story master, I've never read any of his novels. Perhaps I'll but The Scarlet Letter on my summer reading pile.

Oh, well
I bought Derrida's Writing and Difference today. There goes the summer.

And here summer comes
At most, I have 25 exams and 89 papers to grade in the next two weeks, and it will be summer.

Links
At Reginald Shepherd's Blog: "A dichotomy is commonly made between aesthetic expression and aesthetic construction, in which the two terms are set in opposition as ways of proceeding in art. One is either exploring the possibilities of one’s medium or one is expressing one’s emotional and psychological state. One is either following formal necessities or emotional necessities. I find this dichotomy to be false."

Reassigned Time addresses some of the common complaints professors make about their students. Which do college professors complain about with more vigor: university students or university administration? I'd say it's a toss-up.

twofer

The Personal Canon (or, what do we mean by "I should read that"?)


This is an expansion on my pseudo-utilitarian, anti-aesthetic theoretical views expounded upon elsewhere in this blog.

There is a major problem in devoting one's life to ideas, or more particularly, books. Unless one has a prodigious talent for reading and memory (such as Harold Bloom seems to have), one cannot possibly read everything that is great, or read everything that one wants to, or read everything that one "should." There simply isn't time. So we must prioritize" we must choose what we should read and what we should pass off (perhaps for later, if death waits long enough).

In my case, I recognize the distinct possibility that I will never read another Victorian novel. This is not deliberate by any means. It is simply because when I choose what to read, I must ask myself two questions.

1. Might I enjoy this reading experience?
2. Might this work contribute something to my mind?

If you pick up a book that you won't enjoy reading, or won't contribute something meaningful in the realm of ideas, WHY ARE YOU READING IT? Should you ever read something simply because you think, "that's a well known work, I should read that"? So I don't know that I'll ever read another Victorian novel, because I doubt I would enjoy it, and I am skeptical it would contribute much to my life of ideas (and most likely the several post-modern British works I've read that deconstruct the Victorian period and its literature contribute to my lack of interest in reading Victorian novels). But I don't know--perhaps intellectual curiosity will lead me back to such books in the future.

But the two critical questions I propose are not enough for a system. The problem is that you cannot know the answer to the first question until you've at least started the book, and you might not know the answer to the second question for years after finishing the book. So students should read books that they are assigned: somebody with at least some knowledge of the work has decided that the answer to the second question is probably. And sometimes, we should read books we really don't want to because we think we should. We just might get something out of it that we don't expect or no.

So once again, no answers, just ideas.

Derrida and the Failure of Modernism

In "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," Derrida talks about de-centering. Roughly, the center is the main idea of a structure's meaning, and Derrida talks about it no longer existing (avoiding words that suggest a lack or loss of center but admitting language doesn't easily allow it). He also suggests there are two ways to approach this non-existence of the center:

"As a turning toward the presence, lost of impossible, of absent origin, this structuralist thematic of broken immediateness is thus the sad, negative, nostalgic, guilty, Rouseauist face of the thinking of freeplay of which the Nietzschean affirmation--the joyous affirmation of the freeplay of the world and of the innocence of becomjng, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, without origin, offered to an active interpretation--would be the other side. This affirmation then determines the non-center otherwise than as a loss of the center" (888).

Editor David Richter paraphrases this way:

"Derrida contrasts two methods of freeplay, Levi-Strauss's and his own. The former is 'sad' and 'negative' in that it seeks a substitute for the absent center once provided by metaphysics; it is 'nostalgic' for origins, 'guilty' over European imperialism (...) On the contrary, Derrida's system of freeplay, like the philosophy of Nietzsche, is 'joyful' in its affirmation of the power of the will to assign and alter all values. For Derrida, the lack of a center betokens freedom, not loss of security" (889).

I've written here before of my waning interest in modernism (not the modernist aesthetic so much as the modernist weltenschaaung). A modernist is distressed by chaos, nostalgic for old values, generally sad about the loss of traditional authority and traditional center (the most important concept in modernism is probably "loss"). A post-modernist celebrates the loss of the traditional authority and center, for it connotes freedom to the individual. The non-centeredness means that we are free to explore and define meaning in new ways that can be independent of the center.

(These quotes are taken from: Derrida, Jacques. "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences." The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, 2nd edition. Ed. David Richter. New York: Bedford:St. Martin's, 1998. 878-889.)