 
            Notes on the Blithedale Romance (11)

                         20050705.02

     We have recently read about three farms: Jane Brox's
farm was one dimensional, Donald Hall's farm was two
dimensional, George Ripleys farm, Blithedale, has 3 or more
dimensions.  Why? How?  That mystery is the riddle of
literary creation and creativity.

     Brox's farm was calculated, surveyed, sterile,
pasteurized, the pest control people, the folks who kill all
the germs and insects had been there. Sam, to whom the
spirits had fled, had been side-lined, categorized as an
unreliable drug addict and ignored.  The other members of the
farm family appear in the book as emotionally empty; and
what little passion remained in Jane Brox made her want to
get away from it all.

     Hall's farm is similarly, though not quite so sterile.
The grandfather is an animated idol.  The poor unfortunate
neighbors disdained or ignored.  The author's exile at
boarding school, his father, his wives are the links to his
fate, and these he is unable to write about.  Hall himself
returns to the farm as a refugee from academia, a senior
citizen now, to waste away in a retirement home.

     Both of these farms have been made unproductive by
realism; the spirits that inhabited them have been banished,
both from the landscape and from the literature.

     What makes Hawthorne different is his inability to
banish the spirits. He makes a virtue of necessity: None of
_his_ characters, none of the Blithedale inmates are real, at
minimum they appear on a stage as actors whose words and
emotions Hawthorne has scripted.  More ambitiously they may
be seen as the disembodied spirits that inhabit the mind of
Hawthorne himself, (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung)
vestiges of Hawthorne's own passion, which he has invested
with bodies and clothes, into whose hair he has woven flowers
and wreaths, whose persons he has shrouded with veils, white
and black.

     Then, dialectically, the first shall be last, and the
last shall be first: the unreal shall be real, and the real
proves to be unreal. The message to would-be writers is to
trust the imagination, not to censor it: not to presume to
tell it what is true or false, what is real or unreal, right
or wrong, beautiful or ugly, but to let it have free rein to
lead the story where it wants to, where it needs to go.

     Henry James was in error when he charged Hawthorne with
"the absence of a keen perception of abuses." With that
judgment, James was probably characterizing himself.  My
construction is that Hawthorne's perception of abuses was so
acute, that his emotional (spiritual) survival depended on
his repressing, denying that perception.  It is quite
possible, if not indeed likely, that in the end, Hawthorne
came to accept his public person as real, that he ended his
life, believing his own fabrication, at least in part.
The evil spirit that bedeviled Hawthorne dwelled not in
some distant past, but in the immediate present; and his
name was Franklin Pierce, whom Hawthorne thought of as his
friend. Pierce was the Westerveld to whom Hawthorne would
have sold his soul, if it had been within his power. But
souls, contrary to the Pierce-Hawthorne propaganda, are not
marketable, and in Hawthorne's writing is conclusive
evidence that Hawthorne's bargain with Pierce was invalid
in heaven.  Zenobia's intercession was not even required. 
Perhaps it might be better said, that Hawthorne's
sensitivity was displaced into his writing, where
admittedly it remains hidden, concealed, inapparent, veiled,
awaiting the perspicacity of the occasional reader, hiin
enkelte, to discover, unearth, and perhaps resuscitate it.

                          * * * * *
Copyright 2005, Ernst Jochen Meyer
