
                           20050621.00

                  Literature as hazardous waste

     Extrapolating from the Blithedale Romance, I suspect,
without having read them, that Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter and his
House of the Seven Gables may be interpreted as spiritual
hazardous waste depositories for sin, evil, and terror; in a
manner analogous to that in which the suburban community disposes
of toxic chemicals that threaten its health. The contemporary
interest in murder mystery and other accounts of violence may
have similar significance.  Fantasies that are otherwise
frightening are collected and separated from other experience, to
be contemplated in a setting that confirms their unreality, and
therefore their essential harmlessness.

     When one construes such a convention as an example of the
serpent-in-the-wilderness theory of art, the immediate issue that
arises is whether violence-and-murder-mystery art is in fact
adequate to its task of reconciling the individual to the world
in which he lives, to his fate, to his moira, mit seinem
Schicksal. Whether a given literary genre, or for that matter any
specific literary work, suffices to that function, depends
largely, I suspect, on the psychology of the reader. Some can be
comforted with simple one-dimensional tales, others require more
intricate and more sophisticated explanations in many dimensions,
and some will remain anxious and angry even in Hilbert space.

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