Abstract: Melville, we mostly agree, is our first strong reader of Hawthorne: our blue-eyed Nathaniel really does have power greatly to deceive superficial skimmer of pages; and premise of blackness endures, even if troubled by our evolved sense of racial discourse. (1) But this is not to say that Melville always gets it right. discovery that Young Goodman Brown is no Goody Two-Shoes seems to record a perfect shock of recognition: someone (else) is taking premise of Evil pretty seriously. But given what we have learned about specter evidence, we may hesitate to address author in his very own words: is yours to penetrate, in every bosom, deep mystery of sin. words are in fact those of Devil, and Melville's own energetic will-to-blasphemy seems everywhere to shorten up distance between Hawthorne's doubtful drama and Satan's subtle plot. Then too, premise of blackness is founded not here, but in certain biographical suggestions about Egotism; or, Bosom-Serpent and The Christmas Banquet; and these, as I have suggested elsewhere, have not always been taken quite seriously. (2) Strong readings are, as we have learned, not always meticulous; and this may be particularly true in case of a literary competitor, who may well have a critical agenda his own. No harm would be done in trying to share--with Melville's Virginian Spending a month in Vermont--a certain enthusiasm for fine touches of The Old Apple Dealer or Fire Worship. One could even, at a discount, permit Melville to read more of Hawthorne than of his own readerly self into Truth-seeker of The Intelligence Office. It would take a determined skeptic to conclude that Melville errs in simply paraphrasing too explicit moral of excitable and inconstant narrator of Earth's Holocaust: danger may well be that the all-engendering heart of man might itself be consumed by a blaze whose purpose is to rid world of imperfection. But even most ardent devotee needs to be reminded that Melville significantly misquotes conclusion of The of Beautiful: When rises [rose] high enough to achieve Beautiful, symbol by which he makes [made] it perceptible to mortal senses becomes [became] of little value in his eyes, while his spirit possesses [possessed] itself in enjoyment of Reality (HHM, 517). Changing narrator's historical past tenses to generalizing present, Melville ascribes to Hawthorne virtually solipsist view that true artist cares for neither object nor audience--for nothing beyond pleasure in process of artistic aspiration itself. Surely Hawthorne had satirized this view on his very first page, where Owen Warland appeared in midst of sorts of watches, all with their faces turned from street, as if churlishly disinclined to inform wayfarers what o'clock it was. (3) Artists there are, we surely recognize, so purely bent on realizing blessed dream of their private world or complex interplay of their arcane reference that they decline to offer their reader so much as time of day: Poe, in Al Aaraaf, in Hawthorne's own day; or else, for many readers, Eliot in Wasteland. Hawthorne's text is full of learned allusion, to be sure, but he expects them to be found out. And surely final sentence of his Artist contains enough historical over-determination to suggest that subject is one oddly Platonic practitioner and not art-as-such. (4) What Hawthorne may well have felt--and no one was in a better position to underline point than Melville--is that, given reality of a marketplace literary economy, serious writer had better be prepared to live without reward of great public adulation, at least in present. Thoreau would, in first chapter of Walden, make same discovery--studying to avoid necessity of selling intricate baskets no one wished to buy. …
Publication Year: 2007
Publication Date: 2007-03-22
Language: en
Type: article
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