Addendum: Portlandia knows what's up

As if anybody needed more proof that the 19th century is back in a big way: 

The Departure. Or, Holgrave the artist, part II. And, The End.

With the development of daguerreotypy, people felt that pictures could become a legitimate replacement for the thing itself. For instance, who would ever need to visit St. Mark’s Square in Venice when they could possess a picture of it wherever they were in the world? In light of these ideas, Swann says, “it seems more than possible that Holgrave’s repudiation of the materiality of history that surrounds him and his desire to reduce the old house to ashes are connected to his role as daguerreotypist. The image makes the actuality redundant” [12]. In our age, we are moving rapidly away from materiality of media in all forms. Scholarly articles and old primary sources are archived online; ebooks continue to grow in popularity, just as mp3s transformed the music industry ten years ago; practically all of our correspondence and paperwork takes place on “the cloud.”

Holgrave the daguerreotypist is ready to join us in this virtual world. However, Holgrave is also a writer, and the stories he writes aren’t about loosing ourselves from the materiality of the past. They—at least “Alice Pyncheon” is—are about the connections between past and present. That story, Swann says, “claims an intimate relationship with the past and implies the possibility of evolutionary improvement. Neither his art nor his morals here suggest the possibility or desirability of the revolutionary rupture with the past that he felt he wanted in ‘The Daguerreotypist’” [13].

So, rather than an unified Artist of all mediums, as Gilmore and Baym seem to assume, Swann sees Holgrave’s two occupations as leading him to different conclusions. And the way the novel is resolved, with the present characters reconciling, in a way, with the past, has more in common with Holgrave’s literary work than his photography. “Hawthorne seems to be suggesting,” Swann writes, “that the new technology is less liberating (at least so far) than it at first appears, that the narrative power of literature still maintains its authority. What, after all, had daguerreotypy told the characters within the novel? Is it, finally, any more than a shorthand way of making the point that there are parallels between the Colonel and the Judge?” [14]

In his novel, Hawthorne names three new technologies (the railroad, the telegraph, and daguerreotypy), placing them in a historical context. But literature, written history, still wins out in the end. Swann argues that “Hawthorne’s novel suggests that the dominant mode of representation is still (historical) writing, and the history of the naming of new ways of communication supports the notion that this was, at some level, recognized as the master code. … If that is so, then, however much the radical ruptures with the past are (temporarily) desired by Hawthorne’s hero of the summer of 1848, they remain subordinated to the syntax and grammar of a particular kind of historical sentence and narrative: one which emphasizes continuity and development (as Holgrave’s ‘Alice Pyncheon’ does) rather than discontinuity and new beginnings…” [15].

 
So, then, what implications does that conclusion have for this project. If social media is today’s telegraph and daguerreotypy, and Hawthorne’s novel argues for the privilege and perpetuation of literature, what does that say for my blog-paper? “Hawthorne’s implied criticism [is] that the failure of modern technology is that it cannot abolish or redeem history, however much it may attempt to destroy the difficulties of distance” [16]. I have attempted to destroy the difficulties of distance between 1850 and 2011. Was I successful? Even if I was, somewhat, partially, what I did could not abolish the past. Perhaps it only made the past more present. 

In the end, I guess Hawthorne would have urged me to just write a good old-fashioned story.

Selling out...

Yes, my friends, it's true. Phoebe and I are getting married, and inheriting a house from the Judge, and moving to the country, and starting our own happy little family in the suburbs. Just like that, I've changed overnight.

Please don't think too ill of me, and don't worry too much about trying to figure me out. Everybody I've told about this so far has been weighing in with their opinion on my decision. Barnes, for instance, since he thinks everything I do is just imitating Orestes Brownson, thinks that my twist is all just a parody of that whole situation--how Brownson converted to Catholicism and renounced his old friends and a lot of his old ideas. But look, I can't knock the guy. He was always searching for the right belief system, and frankly, even though he ended up as a conservative, wasn't that also being a nonconformist among his whole transcendentalist circle?

Gilmore thinks that my final act of photographing the dead judge and making that photo public parallels Hawthorne's final decision to submit to the pressures of the marketplace and write a crowd-pleasing happy ending. But since according to Temple's interpretation, I was never really removed from the marketplace at all, how could I not submit to it? If not inevitable, it should at least not be surprising.

And then you've got the people like Baym and Cohen, who both think the ending shows the forces of death confronting me for the first time. Yes, yes, I can see what they're getting at, what with a mysterious daguerreotype taken of a dead man in a dark room, and marrying into the Pyncheon family, which we basically all agree is generally awful.

In response, let me just say: for the duration of this blog, we have been going with the conceit that I am (or could have been) a real person--at least, as much as a fictional character being double-fictionalized and de-temporalized by a metafictional blog such as this can be--and, if that's the case, don't real people change their minds about things all the time? Especially 21-year-olds! And if you accept the common criticism by non-hipsters that hipsterism is mostly just an affectation, you might be somewhat justified in assuming that I was never a true, deeply rooted transcendentalist at all, but rather just an idealistic young man swept up by a fad. 

Of course, I don't think that of myself, but I'm just saying that, if you accept that I represent a person who might have lived around 1850, then could what I said above be just as plausible an explanation than that of those learned scholars?

Something only we know about

Yet the artist did not feel the horror, which was proper to Phoebe's sweet and order-loving character, at thus finding herself at issue with society, and brought into contact with an event that transcended ordinary rules. ... On the contrary, he gathered a wild enjoyment--as it were, a flower of strange beauty, growing in a desolate spot, and blossoming in the wind--such a flower of momentary happiness he gathered from his present position. It separated Phoebe and himself from the world, and bound them to each other, by their exclusive knowledge of Judge Pyncheon's mysterious death, and the council they were forced to hold respecting it. The secret, so long as it should continue such, kept them within the circle of a spell, a solitude in the midst of men, a remoteness as entire as that of an island in mid-ocean... [Hawthorne 213-214]

Hardly necessary at this point, but: "Hipster, in its revival, referred to an air of knowing about exclusive things before anyone else." [Grief 3]

Ask Ishmael: Food

Q: Dear Ishmael, you're a foodie, right? What's the best meal you've ever eaten?

A: Why yes, I am a foodie--at least as much as a man who stays on the same ship for three years at a time can be. I always say, "when cruising in an empty ship, if you can get nothing better out of the world, get a good dinner out of it at least" [1].

The best meal I've ever had was at a little mom-and-pop inn on Nantucket called the Try Pots. I haven't been back in awhile, so I'm not sure if it's still there, but if you happen to be in town, I suggest stopping in for a bowl of chowder. There is no menu; when you sit down Mrs. Hussey gives you two choices: clam or cod?

Oh, sweet friends! hearken to me. The chowder she served me and Queequeg was made of small juicy clams , scarcely bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuit, and salted pork cut up into little flakes; the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt.

Chowder for breakfast, and chowder for dinner, and chowder for supper, till you began to look for fish-bones through your clothes. Even now, when I lay in my hammock with half a ship's biscuit and a double ration of grog in my belly, I think back to that chowder and it fills me right up with warm and cozy feelings. [2]

[1] Melville 394

[2] Melville 76

World-wide webs--Clifford Pyncheon interview part two

Welcome back for the second of our two-part interview with my neighbor, Clifford Pyncheon. Last time we discussed the ways the railroad is changing society and the idea that time is a spiral, continuously revisiting old ideas in new ways.

NH: So we’ve got the railroads, and now we have the telegraph. If the railroad is to make us nomads, then how do you predict the telegraph will change the way the world works?

CP: Electricity—the demon, the angel, the mighty physical power, the all-pervading intelligence! Is it a fact—or have I dreamt it—that, by the means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence! Or, shall we say, it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the substance which we deemed it! [1]

NH: Oh, Cliff. You don’t even know.

CP: It isn’t just me. Samuel Morse himself wrote “it is not visionary to suppose that it would not be long ere the whole surface of ths country would be channeled for those nerves which are diffuse, with the speed of thought, a knowledge of all that is occurring throughout in the land, making in fact, one neighbourhood of the whole country” [2].

NH: Hmm, kind of like how I can hop on over to Twitter, click on the sidebar and find out what things people are talking about in Atlanta, Boston, San Francisco, St. Louis—heck, even Indonesia, the UAE or the Dominican Republic.

That reminds me of an 1851 book called Religion of Geology, in which Edward Hitchcock says: “The principle which I advance in its naked form is this: Our words, our actions, and even our thoughts, make an indelible impression on the universe. Thrown into a poetic form, this principle converts creation ‘Into a vast sounding gallery;/Into a vast picture gallery;/And into a universal telegraph.’” [3]

CP: “This sentence I am now uttering shall alter the whole atmosphere through all future time.” Hitchcock [4].

NH: “The air is one vast library on whose pages are for ever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered.” Charles Babbage, inventor of the computer [5].

Were they talking about the telegraph, or this medium through which I am now talking to you from 160 years in the past? What was that about history being cyclical?

Ciao for now, hip cats. 

[1] Hawthorne 183-184

[2] quoted in Swann 6 

[3] quoted in Swann 6 

[4] quoted in Swann 7 

[5] quoted in Swann 7 

Riding the rails--Clifford Pyncheon interview part one

Hi nerds! Today I’m doing something a little different. My housemate Clifford recently had an eye-opening experience, and he wants to share it with you all. So we’re going to do an interview!

Brief bio: Cliff Pyncheon was falsely (we’re pretty sure about this) imprisoned for many years, and even when he finally came home, he never got out much. But he’s super interested in technology, and he’s very optimistic about the future of our society. Remind you of anyone? ;)

NH: Hey Cliff, thanks for joining us.

CP: I’m happy to be here.

NH: So you recently took a train trip…

CP: Yes. My sister and I went out to the country for a little afternoon getaway, and it had just occurred to me that this admirable invention of the railroad—with the vast and inevitable improvements to be looked for, both as to speed and convenience—is destined to do away with those stale ideas of home and fireside, and substitute something better [180].

NH: Interesting. You know how I’m all for doing away with stale ideas. What is this “something better” you have in mind?

CP: Well, my impression is that our wonderfully increased and still increasing facilities of locomotion are destined to bring us round again to the nomadic state. You are aware, my dear sir—you must have observed it in your own experience—that all human progress is in a circle; or, to use a more accurate and beautiful figure, in an ascending spiral curve. While we fancy ourselves going straight forward, and attaining, at every step, an entirely new position of affairs, we do actually return to something long ago tried and abandoned, but which we now find etherealized, refined, and perfected to its ideal. The past is but a coarse and sensual prophecy of the present and the future [180-181].

NH: Well, that’s certainly one way to look at it. Everything old is new again, eh? Like vinyl records and suspenders—and well, most of the things on this blog. Do you really think that the railroad will make people move out of permanent homes and just perpetually wander?

CP: Why should he make himself a prisoner for life in brick, and stone, and old, worm-eaten timber, when he may just as easily dwell, in one sense, nowhere—in a better sense, wherever the fit and beautiful shall over him a home?

I really think that these railroads—could but the whistle be made musical, and the rumble and the jar got rid of—are positively the greatest blessing that the ages have wrought out for us. They give us wings; they annihilate the toil and dust of pilgrimage; they spiritualize travel! [181]

NH: I can’t say that you’re entirely wrong there, Cliff. Spiritualized travel—I like that. I think you can see evidence of that in everything from college-age backpacking trips to shows like No Reservations. No doubt that whole thing got started during the age of the railroad. Just another thing you oh-so-modern hipsters have to thank us nineteenth-centuriers for. You’re welcome.  

Stay tuned for part two of the interview, when we talk about the telegraph, and things get really interesting!