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.
