Dislocating HawthorneRediscovering Hawthorne by Kenneth DauberReview by: Hyatt H. WaggonerNOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Autumn, 1977), pp. 90-92Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1344893 .

Accessed: 15/06/2014 06:38

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Duke University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to NOVEL: AForum on Fiction.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.223 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 06:38:01 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

NOVELIFALL 1977

Dislocating Hawthorne

KENNETH DAUBER, Rediscovering Hawthorne (Princeton, Princeton University Press,

1977), pp. 248, $13.

Literary realism, we have discovered, rests in some degree on philosophic naivete: what it takes to be the "real" is partly a societal and partly a personal construct. Setting out to

present life as it "really is," rather than as we wish it were, or as fancy or imagination would have it be, the realist in fiction selects from the images and feelings that pour in on him constantly from both the inner and the outer worlds those features, single or

clustered, that strike him as more "real" than those he discards. Usually he does this without knowing what he is doing: the real, he thinks, is not chosen but simply per- ceived as self-evidently real, like the stone Dr. Johnson kicked to disprove Bishop

Berkeley's Absolute Idealism.

The romance, it begins to appear, is, philosophically considered, more sophisticated, for it does not pretend to be a presentation of the ultimate ding an sich of "reality" but is frankly an interpretation or wish-dream. The romance clearly bears the stamp of the romancer's personality, outlook, and motives, and the modern romancer knows this. He

may even, in our time, make this awareness his chief subject and write novels about the

difficulty of writing novels, emphasizing that fiction is only fiction. And what the con-

temporary novelist knows, the critic must know. He must rid himself of the notion,

comparable to that of the fictional realist, that the literary text has some kind of objec- tive meaning and value of its own waiting to be discovered and interpreted. The

assumption that not genetic explanation but interpretation of texts is the proper work of the critic was the central error of formalism. "Formalism's tack was wrong from the

start," Dauber tells us in his discussion of his assumptions and his method.

Dauber's ultimate aim, he says, is to create an American poetics of fiction. Haw- thorne's work could serve as the basis for the theory partly because he was a romancer and knew it, partly because he has been seen for so long as a typically American writer of fiction, so that if Dauber could elicit from Hawthorne's works "the poetics that

Hawthorne might have written," it would be an American poetics that would offer

"potentially a greater corrective than most to notions of fiction that we now have." American romance should be seen not as deviant but as original and basic.

Though Dauber's authorities are contemporary Continental thinkers, he says he does not want his book to be taken as "a European reading of American writing," an exercise in imported Structuralism, but as a thoroughly American theory which will

"build away from, by building upon," past criticism. The direction that will be taken as Dauber builds "away from" is suggested by his confession that he "share[s] with structuralism a loss of belief in centers. . . [and] a general sense that we are cut off

from origins." Though my final attitude toward this book is one of disapproval, I find it not only

conspicuously intelligent and well-written but by far the most significant-by which I

do not mean personally helpful-of the recent books on Hawthorne that have come to

my attention. I want to let the author speak for himself therefore as fully as possible

90

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.223 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 06:38:01 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

REVIEWS DISLOCATING HAWTHORNE

before I voice my objections, so that it will not seem that I am inventing a straw man to attack. Thus: criticism proper begins where interpretation ends because a text is the

subjective product of the writer and each of his readers, so that there are as many "texts" as there are readers. Since Hawthorne's purpose in writing, Dauber believes, was to achieve "intimacy" with his readers, and Dauber had first to achieve an authentic

personal response to Hawthorne's writing before he could elaborate a new theory from

it, he says he began by assuming that "no 'work' even existed except in the context of a growing intimacy that was far more real than the printed page. Let the meaning of Hawthorne's writings be his attitude towards them, the purpose they served in writing."

If authorial purpose is what matters, not the aesthetic object that results, then one must of course not simply qualify but deny "the authority of the printed work." The

proper work of the critic is to decode and explain the clusters of purposive linguistic gestures that we have called literary texts. To construe them wrongly is to mistake the

purpose of the gesture, as one might, if unacquainted with the courtship rituals of certain birds, suppose that the spiraling and diving of the male woodcock in mating season were an effort to capture prey rather than to win a mate.

The subjectivity that results from this denial of ontological status to the literary work can be seen, of course, as a corrective of the mistaken notion of the New Critics and their heirs that by keeping attention centered on the isolated literary artifact and

describing it carefully they could achieve the objectivity so obviously lacking in the critical impressionism they rejected. What they did not realize was how much of what

they saw in the literary work they brought to it, either personally or generationally. Imitating the objectivity of scientists, they did not realize that not just the social sciences but the physical and biological too are "subjective" in the sense of being purposive and to the extent that the questions asked both reflect the society in which they are asked and shape the answers given. The experimenter cannot finally be eliminated from the

experiment, though his purely private fears and hopes may be. The scientific economist

may choose to ignore questions of value and purpose and produce statistical studies that have only predictive value, but the critic, who cannot refuse to deal with human values and purposes, must learn to live with and work from his subjectivity. The New Critics, we feel, ought to have known this. If they didn't, I suspect it was because they had not lost belief in centers and did not feel totally cut off from origins.

As a corrective, Dauber's position seems to me an irresponsible, but also a fashionable and philosophically sophisticated, over-correction. If it was a mistake to treat works as

though they existed wholly independently of history and of both the author and the reader (the "intentional" and "affective" "fallacies"), it seems to me a mistake for which the penalty will ultimately be greater to suppose they do not exist at all, except in some

purely private transaction between writer and the individual reader. If it was a mistake to suppose that the critic's beliefs and values would not be implicit in his supposedly objective analysis, at least the best New Critical interpretations made us want to read the works again, or more carefully, and so doing kept them alive for us. But will

deconstructing them to discover the implicit personal gestures hidden within them keep the great works of the past alive for non-professional readers? Granting with Dauber that interpretation can never seem "definitive" for more than a generation, will free-

wheeling speculation about authorial motives be any more definitive? More important,

91

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.223 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 06:38:01 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

NOVELIFALL 1977

can it help us to repossess, to "appreciate," the literature of the past, which necessarily involves the kind of re-interpretation that finds it speaking to our condition?

Despite his announced program of dethroning the text and giving up any effort to

interpret it as an organic whole, Dauber scatters interpretations of texts through his book whenever it suits his purpose. He also evaluates texts, usually only implicitly. More often than not, both the interpretations and the evaluations strike me as too subjective to be met with argument. While many critics, for example, have found sexual imagery in Hawthorne's works, often convincingly and sometimes, as in "The Maypole," pretty clearly "intended," no one before Dauber has found "The Legends of the Province House" interesting chiefly for the profusion of their phallic images. Or again, Hawthorne himself associated the house in Seven Gables with a life, or lives, and a heart, and many critics have elaborated his associations, but it remained for Dauber to see it as a womb,

Hepzibah's womb, which her allowing Jaffrey, an authority figure and hence a father, to enter prompts Hawthorne's ironic treatment of her, which Dauber finds otherwise

unexplainable. By what measure are such interpretations as these preferable to the more "common-sense" interpretations of past criticism? And what should we say about

Dauber's implicit evaluation of The Scarlet Letter as a "fragmented," "dislocated," and

"unhinged" allegory which ends with a feeble attempt to loosen Hawthorne's now

"hardened allegory"-except perhaps that it may follow from Dauber's resolve to read

every text as achieving or failing to achieve Hawthorne's desired "intimacy" with his

readers?

Why should anyone who doesn't have a dissertation to write and who must therefore

find something new to say want to rediscover Hawthorne if Hawthorne's best works do

not move him with a sense of their beauty and their truth? If our theory of fiction starts

from and ends with the writer's attitude toward his work and his purpose in writing it,

why would it not be equally valuable to rediscover Julian Hawthorne, who also no doubt

had attitudes towards his fictions and a purpose, or purposes, in writing them? What

were Shakespeare's purposes when he wrote his great plays, or Dr. Johnson's when he

wrote "London" and "The Vanity of Human Wishes"? Would finding out their pur-

poses, if we really could by deconstructing the works to discover the attitudinal mean-

ings behind the linguistic gestures, result in our valuing these works as capable of

enlarging and enriching our own experience more, or less?

If I had been persuaded by Dauber's work to the point of coming to share the

assumptions behind it and accept the conclusions in it, I suspect I would find myself much less interested in discovering Hawthorne and in rereading his works than I am.

For in Hawthorne's work, however much he subjectivized allegory, there are still centers -shared beliefs in values assumed to be more real and lasting than our personal purposes-even if Bunyan's single center is missing. In his work, "origins" still live, however reinterpreted. But if we cannot believe in any center and feel cut off from

origins, how can the works appear to be other than shards of broken pottery? Will

anyone but academic critics want to go to the trouble of piecing them together to

discover the original purpose of the potter?

HYATT H. WAGGONER, Brown University

92

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.223 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 06:38:01 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions