An interlude by the woman behind the binary curtain.
It’s necessary at this point to say a few words about Holgrave as a writer, and an artist in general, since it’s such an integral part of his character. In my research for this section, the changing trends in literary criticism are very apparent. In this section I will discuss two articles by Michael T. Gilmore and Nina Baym, from 1981 and 1970, respectively. I think it’s important to bring them up because of the insights they provide, but it’s hard to discuss them in the context of this project because of their style. Both of the articles are straight-up interpretation of the text, engaging in ideas, abstract terms like “art” or “the marketplace,” while not being bothered to examine what those ideas mean in their particular historical context. As this project has been freestyling, if you will, with a new historicist/ print culture approach to the text, I couldn’t quite figure how to work in more theoretical work like this without stepping outside of my conceit for a moment. But, this being the postmoderny thing that it is, why not?
For Gilmore, Holgrave’s situation in the novel represents the perennial artistic conflict between—as Holgrave the hipster would see it—authenticity (aka exclusivity) and selling out. As a not-very-well-known writer publishing short stories in “Godey’s and Graham’s,” Gilmore says Holgrave resembles Hawthorne before the publication of The Scarlet Letter. He is not, at this point, bothered by the reactions or disapproval of his audience—he doesn’t care about being popular—and thus is able to be more forthcoming with his themes of class resentment and psychic mastery in “Alice Pyncheon” than Hawthorne is able to be with the novel itself. Hawthorne had to worry about things like supporting his family by selling books, so he cannot completely align himself with Holgrave.
The essential conflict, Gilmore says, is between the artist as a private teller of the truth and the artist as a man of society who can appeal to the general reader. In the end, Holgrave and Hawthorne both make the compromise that combines salability with knowledge of the heart. Hawthorne writes a “happy ending” to please his readers, and Holgrave settles down with Phoebe and turns conservative. Gilmore finds that the ambivalence in the prose at the end points to the notion that the compromise is not a happy one; when you make the truth public, like Holgrave did with the death photo of Judge Pyncheon, you corrupt the integrity of the art.
Baym also sees the story as the struggle of an artist in a suspicious and repressive world. As an artist, Holgrave embodies the “Maulian” qualities of creativity, life force, energy, virility and sexuality. His radicalism is directly linked to his being an artist, because as an artist his energies work as a destabilizing influence upon the institutions of society. When he tells Phoebe the story of Alice Pyncheon, we see how he is the best Maule of them all. He refuses to let his art be corrupted and turn into witchcraft; instead he aims to practice his art as an agent of progress and reform. The reason he has been so successful thus far is because of the freedom afforded him by his nomadic lifestyle.
His dilemma in the novel, then, is to see if he can reattach himself to his ancestors and his past without losing his spiritual independence. And in the end, he does not exactly succeed. Holgrave cannot assert himself as a Maule until the judge is dead. Finally, the power the Pyncheons held over the Maules is broken. But then, Holgrave immediately gets absorbed into the Pyncheon family. Irony! Like Gilmore, Baym also detects an undercurrent of uneasiness with Holgrave and Hawthorne about the ending, and so for her his self-integrity has been compromised as well.
Both of these analyses take the “artist” as a sort of idealized form, a figure who stands apart from “society” until the corrupting influences of that society inevitably seep into his character, which is supposed to remain pure and whole. Both apparently consider the photography and the writing to be merely two manifestations of the same artistic spirit, both apparently pointing us to the same conclusion about Holgrave and the novel. Later in the project, I will challenge this interpretation by looking at Charles Swann, who sees a contradiction between Holgrave the daguerreotypist and Holgrave the writer, and Mark Grief, whose analysis of hipsterism I will try to apply to Holgrave.
No comments:
Post a Comment