Late Essays : 2006-2017

by J. M. Coetzee

  The novel ends in moral and formal chaos: the narrator who has so carefully and comprehensively chronicled the events of her life begins to lose control both of her life and of the narrative itself. Her companion Amy, who has for so long been so close that she seems to be Roxana’s second self, offers to murder the child; Roxana either does or does not (we are not sure which, we are beginning to have doubts about her truthfulness) give Amy the nod; and the deed, it seems, is done – we do not know how or where or when because Roxana does not want to know.

  Defoe had no models for the kind of extended fiction he was writing: he was not only making up the story as he went along, he was making up the form too. Although it cannot be proved, there is every reason to believe he wrote at speed and with little revision. It would be wrong to say that the last sixty or seventy pages of Roxana were written in a state of possession – Defoe was too clear-minded, too intelligent, too professional for that. But he was certainly writing beyond his powers, beyond what either he or his contemporaries thought him capable of.

  2. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

  In 1694 the magistrates of the town of Salem in Massachusetts passed a law making adultery a crime for which the following punishment was prescribed: the guilty pair were to sit for an hour on the gallows with ropes about their necks, after which they were to be severely whipped; then for the rest of their lives they were to wear, cut out of cloth in a clearly visible colour and sewn onto their garments, the capital letter A, two inches in height.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne came upon this singular fact in the course of exploring the annals of the early years of the New England settlement. The idea of writing a story about a woman sentenced to wear the mark of her crime like an identifying brand, going about her daily life under the constant censorious gaze of the community, held a unique interest to him. Although his family history qualified him eminently as a New Englander (a Hawthorne had been among the first settlers of Massachusetts), he had reason to think of himself as a traitor to his traditions, undetected because, unlike his heroine, he carried no distinguishing mark.

  As his notebooks attest, Hawthorne had little sympathy with the policing of morals. On the scale of sinfulness, sexual transgressions seemed to him far outweighed by the inhuman cold-heartedness of the Puritan temperament in its New England manifestation, particularly when this expressed itself in intrusions into the private lives of others in the name of pastoral care.

  The plot of The Scarlet Letter was devised by Hawthorne to bring together two concerns of his: the fate of the ostracized truth-bearer; and the intrusion of the scientific spirit, with its programmatic elision of sympathetic movements of the heart, into the exploration of human psychology. The first of these concerns was relevant to his sense of himself as critic of American society, the second to his vocation as a writer.

  Hawthorne was in his mid-forties when he embarked on The Scarlet Letter. His literary output hitherto had been meagre: aside from children’s stories, a mere two volumes of short fiction. To the literary public he was known, in his own ironic words, as ‘a mild, shy, gentle, melancholic, exceedingly sensitive, and not very forcible man’, a dabbler in literature who seemed to have adopted ‘Hawthorne’ as a pen name on account of the quaintness of the word.1 The Scarlet Letter was at first meant to be a short story too, but as he worked on it in a state of total absorption it grew in length. He completed it in a brief seven months and published it in 1850. His spurt of creative energy was not exhausted: the novels The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance followed in the next two years.

  Hawthorne’s publisher found The Scarlet Letter to be somewhat short for a book. At his prompting, Hawthorne added a rambling preface entitled ‘The Custom-House’, purporting to tell how, in the course of his duties as customs officer of the port of Salem, he had discovered, among odds and ends in a dusty corner of the customs house, a packet containing some fine though moth-eaten red cloth in the shape of a letter A embroidered in gold thread. In this way ‘The Custom-House’ dramatizes the moment when the germ of the novel occurred to him. It also spells out, more trenchantly than we read in the novel itself, the purpose (or one of the purposes) behind its writing:

  The figure of that first ancestor [i.e., the first of the American Hawthornes], invested by family tradition with a dim and dusky grandeur, was present to my boyish imagination as far back as I can remember. It still haunts me, and induces a sort of home-feeling with the past, which I scarcely claim in reference to the present phase of the town. I seem to have a stronger claim to a residence here on account of this grave, bearded, sable-cloaked, and steeple-crowned progenitor – who came so early, with his Bible and his sword, and trode the unworn street with such a stately port, and made so large a figure, as a man of war and peace – a stronger claim than for myself, whose name is seldom heard and my face hardly known. He was a soldier, legislator, judge; he was a ruler in the Church; he had all the Puritanic traits, both good and evil. He was likewise a bitter persecutor; as witness the Quakers, who have remembered him in their histories …

  His son, too, inherited the persecuting spirit, and made himself so conspicuous in the martyrdom of the witches [i.e., the witchcraft trials of 1692], that their blood may fairly be said to have left a stain upon him. So deep a stain, indeed, that his dry old bones, in the Charter-street burial-ground, must still retain it, if they have not crumbled utterly to dust.

  I know not whether these ancestors of mine bethought themselves to repent, and ask pardon of Heaven for their cruelties; or whether they are now groaning under the heavy consequences of them in another state of being. At all events, I, the present writer, as their representative, hereby take shame upon myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred by them – as I have heard, and as the dreary and unprosperous condition of the race [i.e., the Hawthornes], for many a long year back, would argue to exist – may be now and henceforth removed.2

  The writer cannot always tell the deepest motive behind his writing. But Hawthorne clearly believed or wanted his readers to believe that writing The Scarlet Letter was an act of expiation, meant to acknowledge inherited guilt and to put a distance between himself and his Puritan forebears.

  Although voices were raised against the book (a commentator in the Church Review of January 1851 called it ‘the nauseous amour of a Puritan pastor with a frail creature of his charge’), The Scarlet Letter was soon recognized as a landmark in the young literature of the United States.3 Three decades after it appeared, Henry James was able to celebrate it as a book that might with pride be offered to the European gaze, ‘exquisite … [yet] absolutely American’.4

  The character in The Scarlet Letter who embodies the cold-hearted strain in the Puritan temperament is Roger Chillingworth, who chills whatever he touches. Back in England he had married young Hester Prynne but (it is delicately implied) had been unable to pay her her marital due. Years later Hester still shudders when she recalls his touch.

  Chillingworth makes his appearance in the first scene of the book, when he observes Hester on the scaffold with the child in her arms that is proof of her adultery. At once he guesses that the pastor, Arthur Dimmesdale, is the father. His revenge takes the form of worming his way into Dimmesdale’s confidence, pretending to tend to his health while secretly devouring his strength.

  Chillingworth illustrates an element of Hawthorne’s compositional method that has been termed allegorical. Although, in putting him together, Hawthorne drew on his reading of popular Gothic romances like The Monk by Matthew Lewis and Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin, he is meant to be a living illustration of the indifference to the integrity of the soul that underlies a loveless psychological science.

  Another and more complex ‘allegorical’ character is Pearl, daughter of Hester and Dimmesdale. Pearl has a number of roles to fulfil in the moral scheme of the book. She needs to stand for the ideal of personal autonomy that has been claimed by the lovers (hence her wild antics and indifference to
solitude). She also needs to stand for the principle that one should affirm the truth no matter what the consequences (hence her refusal to let Hester discard the scarlet letter and her pressure on Dimmesdale to confess). Finally she needs to embody the spirit of the scarlet letter (hence her fantastical garb). Since the first two roles are more than a little in conflict, and since the scarlet letter (this is the deep point of the book) always stands for more than we think we know, Pearl becomes a particularly difficult character to grasp as a whole: it is only by breaking her down into distinct roles that we can understand what function she is fulfilling at any moment in the text. Her cause is not helped by the cloying sentimentality with which Hawthorne sometimes treats her.

  Dimmesdale and Hester, the other principal characters in the book, are not constructed ‘allegorically’ at all, though Dimmesdale has allegorical features grafted onto him, notably the gesture of shielding his breast, which may or may not be painfully imprinted with his own version of the scarlet letter.

  The novel The Scarlet Letter is not an allegory – that is to say, it is not a story whose elements map closely onto the elements of another story taking place in some other, parallel realm. It does, however, rely on being read in an allegorical spirit: without the Judaeo-Christian tradition of allegorical reading behind it, it would be a bare little fable indeed. It is the scarlet letter itself, rather than the events of Hester’s life, that signals to us we are moving in an allegorical world. The scarlet letter is the sign of meaningfulness: what the letter stands for, Adulteress or Angel or anything else, even Artist, is unimportant compared to the fact that it stands for something outside itself; also compared to the supremely ironic fact – on which the whole book pivots – that the meaning of the letter is mobile, does not always have to be what it was intended to be by those who brought it into existence.

  Hester takes over a sign that was imposed on her as a mark of sin and shame and, by an effort all her own, gives it another meaning. That other meaning is articulated neither to her fellow citizens nor to the reader: it belongs to Hester alone and is not necessarily articulable. Similarly, we do not know what the consuming project of writing the book titled The Scarlet Letter – a three-word motto to which Hawthorne’s person would thereafter always be linked – meant to Hawthorne himself. We can guess, however, that as Hester stands in relation to early Puritan society, so Hawthorne stood in relation to the New England of his day.

  Henry James – whose 1878 book on Hawthorne has become a classic of American criticism, not least for what it says about James’s own ambitions as a novelist at the time of its writing – was not wholly approving of The Scarlet Letter or indeed of Hawthorne’s general approach to fiction. At the heart of James’s critique is his distaste for allegory. ‘To my sense,’ he writes, ‘allegory … is quite one of the lighter exercises of the imagination … It has never seemed to me to be … a first-rate literary form.’ (Hawthorne, p. 70)

  James is here echoing Edgar Allan Poe, who in reviewing Hawthorne’s stories had been similarly dismissive: ‘In defence of allegory,’ he wrote, ‘there is scarcely one respectable word to be said … Under the best circumstances, [allegory] must always interfere with that unity of effect which, to the artist, is worth all the allegory in the world’.5

  Hawthorne did not use the term novel for The Scarlet Letter or any of his other long fictions. The term he preferred was romance, by which he indicated that he was neither aspiring to nor attempting the denseness of social texture or the complexity of social relationships that we find in such English novelists as Charles Dickens.

  James discusses at length the plight of Hawthorne and any aspiring American writer of Hawthorne’s day – that is to say, of the generation or two before James himself:

  It takes so many things, as Hawthorne must have felt later in life, when he made the acquaintance of the denser, warmer, richer European spectacle – it takes such an accumulation of history and custom, such a complexity of manners and types, to form a fund of suggestion for a novelist. (Hawthorne, p. 55)

  There is a degree of sympathy here toward his predecessor, but a degree of condescension too: the condescension of a cosmopolite who has sat at the feet of Turgenev and Flaubert toward a provincial forebear. Whether that condescension is merited is no longer as obvious as it must once have seemed. ‘Romances’ set on the western frontier (Fenimore Cooper) or in Puritan New England (Hawthorne) or on the high seas (Herman Melville) no longer seem to us inherently inferior to the ‘novels’ that James was learning to write.

  The year after The Scarlet Letter appeared, Melville brought out Moby-Dick, the grandest of American fictions of its day in ambition and scale, a work which dips as unashamedly into allegory as Hawthorne ever did. Melville was a friend and admirer of Hawthorne, his senior by fifteen years. In the same year that The Scarlet Letter came out, Melville published what was nominally a book review but was in fact an inquiry into the mind of Hawthorne, drawing upon such mysterious earlier stories as ‘The Minister’s Black Veil’, ‘Wakefield’, and ‘Young Goodman Brown’. How true, how deeply felt, he asks, was Hawthorne’s engagement with the Puritan past? Was he drawn to it merely by its quaintness and novelty as a subject for fiction; or was his writing desk an arena where he in secret wrestled with inherited demons?

  Though the suspicion had already been in the air in the 1840s that Hawthorne drew on the Puritan past simply for its picturesque qualities, it was James who formulated the charge most clearly:

  Nothing is more curious and interesting than [the] almost exclusively imported character of the sense of sin in Hawthorne’s mind; it seems to exist there merely for an artistic or literary purpose. He had ample cognizance of the Puritan conscience; it was his natural heritage; it was reproduced in him; looking into his soul, he found it there. But his relation to it was only, as one may say, intellectual; it was not moral and theological. He played with it and used it as a pigment; he treated it, as the metaphysicians say, objectively. He was not discomposed, disturbed, haunted by it, in the manner of its usual and regular victims … What pleased him in [his] subjects was their picturesqueness, their rich duskiness of colour, their chiaroscuro. (Hawthorne, pp. 67–8)

  Melville reflects too on this key question, the question of Hawthorne’s moral sincerity. At first his response is uncertain:

  For spite of all the Indian-summer sunlight on the hither side of Hawthorne’s soul, the other side – like the dark half of the physical sphere – is shrouded in a blackness, ten times black … Whether Hawthorne has simply availed himself of this mystical blackness as a means to the wondrous effects he makes it to produce in his lights and shades; or whether there really lurks in him, perhaps unknown to himself, a touch of Puritanic gloom – this I cannot altogether tell.

  But then, more resolutely, he continues:

  Certain it is, however, that this great power of blackness in him derives its force from its appeals to that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free … Perhaps no writer has ever wielded this terrific thought with greater terror than this same harmless Hawthorne … You may be witched by his sunlight, transported by the bright gildings in the skies he builds over you; but there is the blackness of darkness beyond … In one word, the world is mistaken in this Nathaniel Hawthorne. He himself must often have smiled at its absurd misconception of him. He is immeasurably deeper than the plummet of the mere critic. For it is not the brain that can test such a man; it is only the heart.6

  Melville is surely right here in pointing toward the conflict out of which the action of The Scarlet Letter grows: between hopes that in the New World a free, happy, loving life ought to be possible, unencumbered by Old World guilts; and the countervailing intuition that there may be intractable and unappeasable forces within us that will forever thwart such revolutionary hopes. This conflict is played out in the lives of Hester and Dimmesdale, jointly and individually. Dimmesdale i
s clearly the figure of the artist whose secret wound is the source of his eloquence (his art) but also of his alienation from his fellow men. Although he twice falls under the sway of Hester (first during his liaison with her, then briefly when he allows himself to be persuaded that he and she and Pearl should run away to Europe), he is at heart unconvinced that the sense of sinfulness can be escaped from.

  Hester is a more independent thinker (she is at one point compared explicitly with Anne Hutchinson, who in 1638 had been excommunicated and banished from the colony of Massachusetts for preaching that the intuitions of the soul took priority over dogma). At heart Hester never accepts the verdict of society on her; her every effort is devoted to overturning that verdict by undermining the prescribed meaning of the scarlet letter and giving it a meaning of her own. As she asserts during her secret meeting with Dimmesdale in the forest, the place where presumably they used to make love, ‘What we did had a consecration of its own. We felt it so!’ (p. 140) The moral intuitions of the individual (or of the loving couple) override doctrine.

  Hester is a powerfully attractive character, not only in her boldness of thought but in her physical person. Her nature, which is at one point described as ‘rich, voluptuous … Oriental’ (p. 64), manifests itself in her dark, abundant tresses, which flow free in the first scene of the book, when she confronts her judges, but are then coiled away under her demure cap, to be set loose only one more time, in the forest scene with Dimmesdale. Here, tellingly, it is the child Pearl who compels her to imprison her hair again, as she also compels her to resume the scarlet letter and to stand with Dimmesdale on the scaffold.