Magazine: Style, Spring, 1992
CRITIQUE OF CHARACTERIZATION: IT WAS
IN NOT KNOWING THAT HE LOVED HER
--------------------------------
Michel Foucault's work, and its application by literary critics to the
novel, amounts not only to a critique of a vast enterprise in literature,
but also in education, penology, in the writing of history and social
science. Foucault calls this enterprise, whose task is to examine,
classify, and write up individual lives, anthropology. I will call it
characterization. Much of Foucault's work amounts to his showing that,
since the Renaissance, discourses such as the Catholic confession,
psychology and the social sciences, and penology have functioned
together with disciplinary procedures in the church, school, army, and
prison as part of a vast network of invasive social control. Foucault
analyzes discourses not for what they say (he suspends their claims to
truth and knowledge) but for the micropractices they embody: that is,
for what they do.
Foucauldian literary critics D. A. Miller, Mark Seltzer, and John Bender
have used Foucault's perception to construct an important critique of
literary form in which the techniques of the realist novel are seen as
practices, part and parcel of the invasive social-control network.
Bender, for instance, has traced the close connection between the rise
of the novel and the development of penitentiaries and police forces.
Miller and Seltzer follow the late Foucault into a kind of fatalism by
which the power of administrators grows as techniques of
characterization are inevitably more universally and invasively applied.
They think that though artists may try to avoid playing cop, they
inevitably characterize. But I want to show that at least some artists
are such adepts at discursive politics that they can design techniques
to avoid characterizing and that in fact the concern Foucault and
Foucauldian literary critics express in theory has long been effectively
addressed by narrative artists, many of whom have operated an aesthetic
and ethic of not knowing their characters.[1] I will look at Richard
Freadman's claim that George Eliot and Henry James operated this
aesthetic and ethic, but my main example will be Hawthorne's The
Blithedale Romance, a narrative critique of characterization and an
almost theoretical, narrative statement of concerns Foucault expressed
in The Order of Things and Discipline and Punish.
Literary techniques of characterization have inevitably been thrown into
question as traditional ideas of the self have come under fire in what
has become an important debate over humanism. In my own appreciation of
novels that do not characterize, I will use elements from both sides of
this debate. Though Foucault's epistemic history ends with modern
disciplinary power, Hawthorne might be said to have shown the way beyond
Foucault's modern episteme to "a postmodern episteme," an unmaking that
expresses "an on-tological rejection of the traditional full subject"
(Hassan 55). Albrecht Wellmer, for instance, terms the postmodern moment
"a kind of explosion . . . in which reason and its subject--as source
of'unity' and of the 'whole'--are blown to pieces" (338).[2] This
"moment" has given rise to questions about the existence or knowability
of the self traditionally assumed in literary characterization. I think
more important ethical questions have been raised about whether it is
even desirable to characterize.
I will call humanism the notion that knowing and recording information
about individual selves is proper and desirable, not only in novels but
in the sciences of man such as psychology, sociology, and anthropology.
The liberal humanist, Freadman, thinks novels should be reports on
individual lives. He defends such literary characterization on ethical
grounds, worrying that if we deny the personality of characters in books,
neither they nor we who are not in books will have any claim to be
treated with moral consideration.
However, reporting on individuals is vigorously attacked on ethical
grounds as a violation of privacy by the Foucauldian literary critics,
Miller and Seltzer. Such a concern for privacy leads to Foucault's
announcement of the end of man. This antihumanism is part of Foucault's
call for a serious critique of writing about selves. It proceeds from a
sense that the self long encoded in the discourses of the human sciences
(in literature it appears as characterization) now can and ought to be
surpassed. Fredric Jameson's suggestion that this tradition be
"ruthlessly" historicized (152) is one way to surpass it. Foucault's
more Kantian approach is to examine the conditions that make discourse
about the self possible. But both Jameson and Foucault proceed from a
sense that the origin of the personality in literary characterization is
illegitimate.3 We will see that when Foucault applies a Nietzschean
genealogy to characterization he finds the most disreputable sources.
In addition to ethical grounds, the critique of characterization also
proceeds on epistemological grounds. Miller and Seltzer's fear that
there will be nothing of either ourselves or literary characters not
written up in some report is countered by Freadman's fear that novelists
might stop wanting to know their characters, or worse, that the self is
in some way unknowable. This last possibility is tied to the ontological
suspicion, signaled by Foucault and by some practicing novelists, that
the very being of the self resides in the technology, or literary
techniques (Hawthorne's term in The Blithedale Romance is "mode of
observation") that produce it.
The implication here is that character is produced by a particular
technology of knowing it and that, once produced, literary character
restricts not only what we think of ourselves, but what we can be. A
change in technology or mode of perception (and critique itself is such
a change) will change the self that we are in the process of
characterizing. In his attack on realist fiction, which he says "centres
above all on 'character,' "Christopher Nash shows that "what matters and
what's true" in realist narrative is "the details of'common', 'typical',
'average' people." In such characterization "what's to be presented as
true of men and women . . . must somehow fit with what we know" (13).
Such deference to established ideas of person "contains." It
confers on the flow of represented "thought". . . a persistent
shapeliness, consistency, and even moderate predictability within
the context of the world about it. Personality in this respect. .
. is an "institutionalization" of the "forces", the continuity, of
private experience that is as characteristic of Realism as social
institutions are. . . in containing and defining the forces of
public moral, spiritual, political and sexual behavior. (14)
Realist typologies are only one way of producing selves (see The
Evolving Self by Robert Kegan). But the "knowing" characterizations of
this particular way of looking at things are subject to institutional
pressures. Their truths about the self are merely conventional truths,
truths that may change when subjected to critique.
In his defense of "discourse of the self" (6), or realist
characterization, against the poststructuralist denial of personality,
Freadman uses George Eliot's and Henry James's novels to ask "how the
self ought to be conceived" (105). He considers James's characterization
of Maggie "a threat to received modes of fictional humanism" because
"The Golden Bowl insists on . . . a 'vicious circle'--in which . . .
knowledge [of selves] becomes a kind of nightmare" (203). He thinks such
a critique of characterization destroys the humanist personality, which
he considers the basis of freedom and justice.
But there are serious reasons for doubting that liberal-humanist
characterization protects freedom. On the contrary, as Emmanuel Levinas
puts it in a striking metaphor, an ever-advancing discourse of the self
threatens
to suppress the inner soul of man. "Reason," Levinas maintains,
"is rising like a fantastic sun that renders transparent the
opacity of creatures. Men who have lost their shadows! Nothing is
capable any longer either of absorbing or of reflecting this light,
which abolishes the very core of beings." (Megill 309)
In the same vein, Foucault's Discipline and Punish shows that discourse
of the self produces a power that deprives us of freedom: it is a
technology that normalizes, restricts, and controls. When Seltzer
applies to fictional characterization Foucault's general critique of all
discourses of the self, he concludes that "surveillance" has become "the
mode of the novel" and praises Henry James for his "exposure and
demystification of the realist mania for surveillance and his attempt to
disown the policing that it implies" (54).
Not only does Foucault's notion of discipline undercut ethical
justification of characterization. His doctrine of the disappearance of
man undercuts the epistemological possibility of characterization. It is
just possible that the self cannot be known. Because Miller and Seltzer
do not focus on this epistemological difficulty, their ethical objection
to characterization entails a kind of despair. But even though Freadman
defends characterization, he shows that George Eliot and Henry James
explore the possibility, ignored by Miller and Seltzer, of not exposing
a character. As I will show, Hawthorne's Blithedale is built on an
aesthetic of not knowing.
Like Erich Auerbach, who in Mimesis treats the historical increase of
description and characterization as an honoring of ordinary people,
Freadman thinks we benefit from being known and written up in reports.
He thinks a novel should be "a particularly complex and revealing form
of narrative report upon the social, psychological and spiritual lives
of individuals" (253). Foucault, unlike Auerbach, treats the description
of ordinary people as a fall from the grace of anonymity:
For a long time ordinary individuality--the everyday individuality
of everybody--remained below the threshold of description. To be
looked at, observed, described in detail, followed from day to day
by an uninterrupted writing was a privilege. The chronicle of a
man, the account of his life, his historiography, written as he
lived out his life formed part of the rituals of power . . . .
[But] disciplinary methods . . . made of. . . description a means
of control and a method of domination . . . . [T]he child, the
patient, the prisoner, were to become, with increasing ease from
the eighteenth century and according to a curve which is that of
the mechanisms of discipline, the object of individual
descriptions and biographical accounts. This turning of real lives
into writing is no longer a procedure of heroization; it functions
as a procedure of objectification and subjection. (Discipline and
Punish 191-92)
In these nonfictional narratives and descriptions, as the object of
description shifted from the man of power to the ordinary individual,
the function of description shifted from heroizing the target to
controlling it. Heroic description, an honor and privilege for the
powerful, did not serve to control them. The crucial change since the
eighteenth century is that the powerful have come to use narrative
descriptions as instruments for controlling ordinary people. Miller and
Seltzer have imported Foucault's sense of a change in nonfictional
description into the history of the novel. They show that "normal"
fictional characterization (I hope to show that some of the most
important narrative artists write exceptions to this "norm") is
disturbingly like the nonfictional reports used to discipline and
normalize people: school disciplinary reports, psychiatric case
histories, police reports. Seltzer says that the realist novel "closely
resembles the police report and judicial dossier. . . not merely in its
detailed and 'criminal' content but also in its form" (172). An
institutionalized technology of characterization puts "the entire world
of the text under scrutiny and under surveillance and invokes the
possibility of an absolute supervision, in which everything may be
comprehended" (51). Seltzer is not claiming that absolute knowledge of
selves has been achieved, but is pointing out that the ideal of
reporting violates people and subjects them to manipulation.
What is Nana but an extended raise-en-carte of a prostitute: an
elaborately researched "examination" sustained at the highest
level by the latest scientific notions of psychology and at the
lowest by the numerous "fiches" on which data is accumulated? . .
. Nana is the title of a file, referring both to the prostitute
who resists the record and to the novel whose representational
practice has already overcome this resistance. (Miller 21)
Foucault raises ethical questions concerning any knowing discourse about
a resisting self. His "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," for instance,
opposes characterization in the writing of history. Though such writing
conceives of itself as "neutral, devoid of passions, and committed
solely to truth,"
if it examines itself . . . it finds . . . the will to knowledge:
instinct, passion, the inquisitors, devotion, cruel subtlety, and
malice. . . . [H]istorical analysis of this rancorous will to
knowledge reveals that all knowledge rests upon injustice (that
there is no right, not even in the act of knowing, to truth or a
foundation for truth) and that the instinct for knowledge is
malicious (something murderous, opposed to the happiness of
mankind). . . . [I]ts development is not tied to the constitution
and affirmation of a free subject; rather, it creates a
progressive enslavement to its instinctive violence. (162-63).
Foucault is objecting to the turning of a life into empirical facts
about natural functions, social class, and language. Rich
characterization, or the detailed writing about ordinary people that
arose with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction, coincides with
the growth of disciplinary procedures in penology, schools, hospitals,
and so on.
Foucault's announcement of the end of the individuality that makes
characterization possible provides not only a context for recent
"characterless" fiction, but the elements of an explanation:
The individual is no doubt the fictitious atom of an "ideological"
representation of society; but he is also a reality fabricated by
this specific technology of power that I have called "discipline."
. . . In fact power produces; it produces reality . . . The
individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to
this production.
(Discipline and Punish 194)
The assertion that power creates its object throws into question the
traditional idea that characterization describes preexisting human
nature and opens a possibility for our present critique of the two-
hundred-year-old tradition of characterization. Foucault thinks the
"general critique of reason" inaugurated by Kant has been delayed by an
"anthropological sleep":
In order to awaken thought from such a sleep . . . there is no
other way than to destroy the anthropological. . . . Rejecting not
only psychologism and historicism, but all concrete forms of
anthropological prejudice, we attempt to question afresh the
limits of thought, and to renew contact in this way with the
project for a general critique of reason.
(The Order of Things 341-42)
Our rethinking of literary characterization should contribute to this
resumption of general critique. In particular, it should query the
conditions that made literary characterization possible as knowledge.
Miller and Seltzer, and in a different way Freadman, resume Kant's
epistemological critique to question these conditions. Though Freadman's
emphasis on novelists' efforts to protect their characters' privacy is
an important counter to Miller and Seltzer's assertion that novels
necessarily promote surveillance, he shares their concern when he tells
us that James's world "teems with treacherous--manipulative, prurient,
possessive--knowers" (165-66) and thus reflects a "crisis in
epistemology" (179).
For Freadman, an author's concern for characters' privacy puts the
ethics of novel writing itself in question. He points out that novels
"take liberties in art about which both Eliot and James felt
uncomfortable in life" (124) and discovers in Eliot and James an ethics
that avoids "knowingness" in favor of "solicitous knowing." Thus James's
Portrait of a Lady "leaves crucial aspects of its own story unnarrated"
(114) because of "a dread about knowing" (124), and a "'reverential
tenderness'" and "disinclination to impinge upon the private worlds of
others" make Eliot's Deronda shrink from "the assumption of a right to
know as much as he pleased" (129). Eliot's "great theme of sympathy had
ideally as its formal correlative a kind of reticence" (156). Freadman
cites a letter in which Eliot wishes she could write "something that
would contribute to heighten men's reverence before the secrets of each
other's souls, that there might be less assumption of entire knowingness,
as a datum from which inferences are to be drawn" (qtd. in Freadman 125)
. Eliot is not worried that anyone has achieved or even advocated total
knowledge of the self. I think rather that "entire knowingness"
expresses a sense like Foucault's that the assumption of a right to know
entails a violation of self.
A corrective to unloving knowingness is the dread of knowing, loving in
not knowing. This is close to Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault's
antihumanist sense that the assumption of a right to know is damaging in
itself, whether or not the knowledge it produces is illusion. Eliot's
ethics of not knowing intersects Miller and Seltzer's worry that
omniscient narration is violation. In showing this, Freadman's fear of
not knowing counters Miller and Seltzer's assertion that the novel must
pry.
But Freadman decries such an ethics of not knowing because it impugns
his humanism. For him Eliot's sense in Middlemarch "that the ethics of
realist epistemology may be open to censure" (133) because of its
intrusive prying into every corner of a character's personality "appears
to threaten the novel's entire premise of personality" (136). And he
says that the implication in James's Portrait that we are "the authors
of what we see . . . risks exhausting the reality of the other person"
(101).
Though Freadman belittles those who "impugn what we take to be the
'naturalness' of selves . . . and direct attention at our self- and
reality-constituting systematics" (8), he inadvertently admits that the
selves he values are not natural but are rather extensions and
productions of the "power" (252) of literature. But he maintains that
"freedom, justice, equality" (13) require "a margin of self which is not
socially constituted" (10), one that "exists prior to culturation" and
that "privacy, moral agency and a certain capacity for distance from
particular or coercive forms of cultural conditioning" (11) depend on
there being such a self. In sensing that socially constituted selves are
not free, Freadman is like the Foucault in Discipline and Punish who
delineates the social "discipline" that constitutes individuals. Both
worry not only that we know the characters we constitute, but that we
constitute the characters we know.
The difference between Freadman and Foucault is in their relative
optimism. Freadman deplores "anti-humanist attacks upon the substantial
individual" (252), emphasizing "the threat this poses to polity" (217),
while I think Foucault would welcome such a threat. Nevertheless,
Freadman is at one with Foucauldians such as Miller and Seltzer in
pointing out that "formal choices" of narrative technique "express
assumptions about the kinds of attention to which the human subject is
ideally entitled" (25-26). Unlike Foucault or Miller and Seltzer,
Freadman suggests the possibility of deliberately restricting the
technique of realist characterization:
That the problem of "other minds" should dwindle to the spiritual
destitution of their becoming "obvious" is [George Eliot's]
extreme formulation of the threat posed by improper--"curious,"
obtrusive, knowing, indelicate--forms of knowledge. . . . [I]n the
Preface to What Maisie Knew [James] voices his disquiet at "the
author's irrepressible and insatiable, his extravagant and immoral,
interest in personal character and in the 'nature' of a mind, of
almost any mind." (130, 164)
If we bracket Freadman's politics, we see that not only does he show
novelists avoiding panoptic characterization, but that he seems
motivated, as he shows they are, by the same horror of "clinical
curiosity" that drives Foucault's writing from The Birth of the Clinic
through Discipline and Punish and History of Sexuality.
But unlike Miller and Seltzer, who lump all characterization with
Foucault's knowledge/power, Freadman distinguishes between different
kinds of knowing the self and says that the legitimate purpose of
publicizing the private is to propose a distinction between
"knowingness" and "solicitous knowing." For Miller and Seltzer, coercive
forms of cultural conditioning are inevitable--all knowing is
knowingness--but Freadman's notion of solicitous knowing counters
knowingness with a different way of telling, a kind of characterization
that rejects obtrusive forms of knowing and does not turn a life into
writing.
For Freadman everything turns on the way authors know their characters.
He cites James's Partial Portraits, which is against "types" and for
characters of "invention" rather than chilly "observation." . . .
If Trollope "was a knowing psychologist he was so by grace; he was
just and true without apparatus and without effort." Even more so,
Balzac's creations: "It was by loving them . . . that he knew
them; it was not by knowing them that he loved." (46)
Freadman's liberal humanism meets the antihumanism of Foucault, Miller,
and Seltzer in their common abhorrence of the apparatus of knowing.
Foucault's announcement of the end of man is really a call for the end
of what James called "chilly 'observation.'"
The Blithedale Romance
Freadman points out that Isabel in Portrait of a Lady is like James's
idea of Hawthorne:
She likes to understand people, certainly: "Isabel was fond, ever,
of the question of character and quality, of sounding, as who
should say, the deep personal mystery"; yet "With all her love of
knowledge she had a natural shrinking from raising curtains and
looking into un-lighted comers. The love of knowledge coexisted in
her mind with the finest capacity for ignorance." (166)
Hawthorne's shrinking from raising curtains and looking into unlighted
corners and his fine capacity for ignorance shows most clearly in The
Blithedale Romance, which is an almost theoretical critique of
characterization. It belongs to the tradition running from Nietzsche
through Heidegger to Foucault in that it proposes not only an ethics but
an aesthetics of not knowing. Not only are Zenobia's characterization of
Priscilla and Coverdale's of Hollingsworth critiqued in the text, but,
in leaving crucial parts of the story unnarrated and the enigma of
Priscilla's and Zenobia's characters unsolved, the text reflects its
theme of critique of characterization in its form.
Coverdale says characterization is mentally unhealthy and points out
that the character he knows as Hollingsworth is largely created by his
knowingness. The chapter devoted to characterizing, entitled
"Hollingsworth, Zenobia, Priscilla," begins with
It is not . . . a healthy kind of mental occupation, to devote
ourselves too exclusively to the study of individual men and
women. . . . [I]f we take the freedom to put a friend under our
microscope, we thereby insulate him from many of his true
relations, magnify his peculiarities, inevitably tear him into
parts, and, of course, patch him very clumsily together again.
What wonder, then, should we be frightened by the aspect of a
monster, which, after all--though we can point to every feature of
his deformity in the real personage--may be said to have been
created mainly by ourselves! (69)
The high moment of this critique, in which Hawthorne anticipates
Foucault, is Coverdale's realization of "the kind of error into which my
mode of observation was calculated to lead me" (71). That is,
observation might itself have created Hollingsworth's "all-devouting
egotism" (71). It is not simply that Coverdale errs in his
characterization of Hollingsworth, but that the being of the character
resides in the knowingness of the characterization, and so the "knowing"
of that characterization is contaminated. Coverdale's reflection here is
a model of resistance to the dominant realistic and knowing
characterological practice.
This is Foucault's end of humanism. Character is no longer simply
posited; it is critiqued. As in Jameson's The Political Unconscious
where "representation of human figures or agents" cannot be taken as
constant but must "ruthlessly be historicized," Coverdale critiques his
own characterization by showing its disreputable origin. His showing how
it has been constituted by his mode of knowing amounts to its
destruction. Jameson relates the strategic "problem of the subject" to
the production by novels of "that very 'referent' . . . of which this
new narrative discourse will then claim to be the 'realistic'
reflection" (152). That is, characterization's knowingness is produced
by its mode of knowing.
Freadman notes that Henry James "suspended or 'bracketed' any gross
ethnic account of himself" in "a sort of existential 'reduction' . . .
[having] located the 'real reality' in the mind itself. . . . Character
is no longer offered . . . as already-ethical; ethics no longer emanate
self-evidently from a stable source" (39, 44). This bracketing of the
"already-ethical" is a reference to Husserl's phenomenological reduction,
or suspension of already constituted concepts. Heidegger explains
bracketing as the "suspension of the thesis of existence" (History 100)
and says it allows us to focus on something without having to consider
whether it exists. The bracketing of a whole sphere of consciousness, or
world, is called "reduction":
In the reduction we disregard precisely the reality of the
consciousness given in the natural attitude in the factual human
being. . . . The sense of the reduction is precisely to make no
use of the reality of the intentional; it is not posited as
experienced as real. (History 109)
Yet Freadman impugns James's reduction because it rules out didactic
insistence on "ethical entitlement." He says that James's suggestion in
Portrait of a Lady, "that we are in a sense the authors of what we see"
(i.e., James's suspension of the natural attitude), "risks exhausting
the reality of the other person" (101). But this suspension of the
reality of characters is just the thing to escape that discourse of the
self that Foucault shows progressively enslaving us. Though Freadman
praises Eliot for never using "intimations" about Casaubon's background
"for psychologically explanatory purposes" (160), he cannot abide in
Daniel Deronda a heartlessness that is not psychologized and explained.
Going back to Foucault, then, we see that we must not take him at face
value. Edward Said points out that Foucault ascribes "undifferentiated
power . . . to modern society" but shows a singular lack of interest in
the force of effective resistance to it ("Foucault" 15). Said faults
Foucault for failing to recognize "the relative success of
counterdiscursive attempts" and for his "un-modulated minimization of
resistance" (153). Martin Jay says Foucault focused "so insistently on
the dangers of panopticism that he remained blind to other micro-
practices of everyday life that subvert its power" (195).
When Seltzer applies Foucault to literature, he concludes that even
novels consciously written against "this supervisory power" may
contribute to it (56). An author's intention not to conduct surveillance
on his characters merely confirms it. Thus, though he recognizes
"James's attempt to imagine an alternative to the facts of power" (105),
Seltzer thinks "the novelist's search for form" inevitably dooms
"attempts to devise strategies of resistance" (135-36). "James's tactics
of representation reproduce the very tactics of power that he ostensibly
resists and disowns" (100). Though Miller and Seltzer turn a critical
eye on the invasive description that is characterization, they
effectively deny narrative artists the power of critique. Their idea
that the novel as a form precludes anticharacterizing practices of
resistance and forces writers into the police work of surveillance
derives from this blindness of the late Foucault. I appreciate Miller
and Seltzer's move to interpret not only the content of novels, but the
historically specific narrative techniques or modes of literary
discourse. However, I question their fatalism, apparently derived from
the late Foucault, and turn to the earlier Foucault of counterdiscourse
for a hint of political and ideological micropractices by which we might
escape the policing function of the prevailing narrative discourse.
Though certain authors develop anticharacterization strategies to resist
this mania for surveillance, Miller and Seltzer follow Foucault himself
in thinking such resistance hopeless.
But what of those moments signaled by Seltzer when "the narrative method
of the novel departs from this panoptic technique" (55)? Famous for his
reluctance to violate "the sanctity of a human heart," Hawthorne had a
horror of panoptic exposure and in The Blithedale Romance employed non-
characterizing techniques to subvert its power. He effectively carries
out in narrative the critique Miller and Seltzer perform on a
theoretical plane.[4] Since literary character is tied to the techniques
of characterization, any hope of resisting the supervisory power of
surveillance and detection inherent in these techniques depends on
counterdiscursive practices of noncharacterization.
Henry James writes that when a novelist loves his character, "his
prompting was not to expose her; it could only be, on the contrary . . .
to cover her up and protect her" (qtd. in Seltzer 89). Seltzer's
Foucauldian response is that
exposure is nevertheless inevitable: it inheres in the "inner
expansive force" of the form itself, in the "organic" rule of
composition that is ultimately "the very law of the game." As if
despite the novelist's covering love, over even the novelist's
ostensible protests and regret. . . . the organic "logic" of
composition itself at last gives the character away. (89)
In The Blithedale Romance, however, it is not love of character that
gives way to logic of composition, but logic of composition that gives
way to love of character. Coverdale's refusal to characterize Priscilla
is given as a loving respect for her privacy. Bersani thinks, with
Foucault, that "all the discourses about personality or the psyche . . .
are crucial disciplinary instruments in the modern exercise of power,"
but that there may be a narrative technique "for avoiding complicity in
power schemes." That technique, identical to Cover-dale's presentation
of Priscilla, is "the projection or implication of an 'unarticulated,
nonanalyzable worth'" (Subject 11).
It is thus in not knowing Priscilla that Coverdale (and Hawthorne) loves
her. As Zenobia says, "the enigma of her character, instead of being
solved, presented itself more mystically at every exhibition" (108).
Zenobia herself seems to have monopolized all the analyzable worth. She
is healthy, beautiful, educated, artistic, strong, and rich. Westervelt
speaks for realistic norms of characterization when he calls Zenobia the
"better model" of woman (96). Yet, though Zenobia wants to be loved for
herself, rather than for her social position, accomplishments, and bank
book, she is loved only for them, while Coverdale and eventually
Hollingsworth love the woman who is without analyzable or articulated
worth. The father of both women says, "Priscilla! I love her best--I
love her only! . . . So dim, so pallid, so shrinking" (202). Perhaps it
is not the character but her characterization that is dim, pallid, and
shrinking.
To love Priscilla is at one with wanting to go to Blithedale in the
first place, with the possibility of attributing human dignity where
there is no analyzable worth. As Jonathan Cobb and Richard Sennett have
pointed out:
The humanists of the eighteenth century preached an idea of the
worthiness of man, of a natural dignity in man regardless of his
position in society or his power. These enlightenment ideas of
universal human dignity have become such cliches, it is largely
forgotten how radical they are. (55)
It is in these terms that we should understand Coverdale's thought: "If
any mortal really cares for [Priscilla], it is myself, and not even I
for her realities!-poor little seamstress, as Zenobia rightly called her-
-but for the fancy work with which I have idly decked her out" (100).
This lack of interest in the facts is the aesthetic move that Megill
traces in Nietzsche, the late Heidegger, and the early Foucault. The
late Foucault provides a motive for such a move: to block the
disciplinary knowledge/power that enslaves.
For it is this demand for realities that evokes the panoptic mechanisms
of disciplinary society. Zenobia, who cares not about Priscilla, but
about her realities, says that she is "neither more nor less . . . than
a seamstress from the city" (33). And when Coverdale asks her, "How can
you decide upon her so easily," she provides a triumphant deduction from
clues worthy of Sherlock Holmes:
There is no proof which you would be likely to appreciate, except
the needle-marks on the tip of her fore-finger. Then, my
supposition perfectly accounts for her paleness, her nervousness,
and her wretched fragility. Poor thing! She has been stifled with
the heat of a salamander-stove, in a small, close room, and has
drunk coffee, and fed upon dough-nuts, raisins, candy, and all
such trash, till she is scarcely half-alive; and so, as she has
hardly any physique, a poet, like Mr. Miles Coverdale, may be
allowed to think her spiritual. (33-34)
Coverdale's enigmatic refusal to know and characterize Priscilla is an
alternative to the triumphalism of this cold knowingness. Though it is
traditional to side with the Zenobias who scoff at such lack of realism,
we should remember that it is Zenobia who operates the mechanism that
returns Priscilla to Westervelt's enslaving discipline.
In "Young Goodman Brown," and in The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne implies
that panoptic knowledge is evil in itself. Millicent Bell's comment on
The Scarlet Letter can help us appreciate what is at stake:
We tend to think that Chillingworth has sinned because he has
criminally used the knowledge he has gained in order to manipulate
and destroy the minister. But this is not what the words say. The
insistence upon illicit discovery, the assault by Chillingworth
upon sacred knowledge, is itself illegitimate. (25-26)
This is very like Foucault's already cited Nietzschean sense that "there
is no right, not even in the act of knowing, to truth or a foundation
for truth." Coverdale is like Chillingworth in his urge to snoop, but he
stops his assault on knowledge when he is denounced. This device of a
narrator who in the end does not know and does not want to know avoids
complicity in power schemes as The Blithedale Romance depicts the
possibility of deliberately abstaining from characterization. Love of
character transforms Coverdale from Priscilla's investigator into the
guard of her privacy.
Foucauldian narrative theory ties the development of characterization in
the novel to the reform movement that established penitentiaries. John
Bender points out that "When the form of story-telling now called the
'novel' emerged in the 1720's, it at once evinced an intimate self-
consciousness concerning prison and confinement" (5):
Representation itself symbolically enacts the role of constituted
authority . . . [W]ithin the novelistic container as within the
physical regime of the penitentiary, the self is perceived through
and by its narrative construction. The point is not that Defoe
proposes penitentiaries but that he delineates the subjective
order--the structure of feeling--that they institutionalize and
discloses to that order the power latent in the minutely
sequential representations of realist narrative. (44-45)
Hollingsworth represents this realist tradition as he tries to turn
Blithedale into a penitentiary, but Coverdale exposes Hollingsworth's
self-righteous scheme to reform criminals as monstrous. More importantly
for our purpose, Hawthorne refuses the knowing characterization that
arises from penitentiary-narrative construction and imagines a mode of
resistance to the structure of feeling that it institutionalizes.
Thus The Blithedale Romance acknowledges the link between realist
narration and prisons only to reject both. Coverdale's "It is really
impossible to hide anything" (175) puts him squarely in the panoptic
camp. The crisis of the novel, however, is not only Coverdale's
rejection of Hollingsworth, but Hawthorne's rejection of the realist
tradition of Defoe, Fielding, Dickens, and Eugene Sue. Until the moment
Zenobia denounces him, Coverdale attempts realist characterization by
"taking note of things too slight for record, and by bringing my human
spirit into manifold accordance with the companions whom God assigned me-
-to learn the secret which was hidden even from themselves" (160). When
he speaks of "the indices of a problem which it was my business to
solve" (91), does his utmost to "draw an inference from the scene just
past" (108), and tries to solve the "enigma" of Priscilla's character
(126), he is a student of Foucault's sciences of man, pursuing the
hidden secret of knowledge/power. In his confident wagering that "this
very evening" he can "find out the mystery of The Veiled Lady" (128),
Coverdale's alter ego in Zenobia's legend is like Sherlock Holmes or
Poe's Dupin.
The panoptic power Coverdale calls his "liberty to withdraw the curtain"
(175) refers to the right claimed by writers such as Dickens and Conan
Doyle to pull off a wall or roof to observe and report on private
lives.[5] But Zenobia denies him that liberty. "As long as the only
spectator of my poor tragedy is a young man at the window of his hotel,
I must still claim the liberty to drop the curtain" (175). The liberty
to withdraw the curtain is characterization; the dropping of that
curtain, its rejection.
It is not that Coverdale is not curious. He tells us that "nothing would
have interested me more than to witness the passion" (72). In Zenobia's
Legend, Theodore tells the veiled lady, "I would know who and what you
are!" (112). But when Zenobia denounces Coverdale's intrusion and drops
her curtain, he abandons his curiosity as unethical. In a deliberate
departure from the classical attitude toward characterization, he says
it would be a "sacrilege to come within [Priscilla's] maiden mystery"
(125) and that the "tendency which makes me pry" is "cold" (154).
So The Blithedale Romance refuses characterization, or what Seltzer
calls the "intrusive voyeurism" (30) of panoptic narration, in which
"poverty, conspiracy, criminality are purchasable spectacles" (33).
Though Priscilla was such a purchasable spectacle on Westervelt's stage,
Hawthorne does not allow her to become the object of our voyeurism. The
penal reformer, Hollingsworth, investigates, prosecutes, and convicts
Zenobia, but in a trial we are not allowed to hear. Because Coverdale
arrives late, we are never told what happened.
To lift Priscilla's veil without permission would seem a kind of
rape.[6] I think that because Hawthorne suspected the realist novel of
such violation, he proposed with The Blithedale Romance a kind of
narrative that would not turn lives into objects of knowledge. As
Strether says of Jeanne in James's The Ambassadors, "She's the most
charming creature I've ever seen. Therefore don't touch her. Don't know--
don't want to know" (163). When Coverdale falls into "a mood that . . .
robbed the actual world of its reality," he says that that mood
"involved a charm, on which . . . I resolved to pause" (160). This charm
is an aesthetic alternative to the unveiling that produces knowledge of
character, and Coverdale loves Priscilla for it.
Priscilla is not the kind of character we find probable in a world we
recognize but is rather an experiment in human figure without
characterization, a figure whose charm would be dissipated by the facts
of the case. For as Heidegger points out, in using technologies of
knowing man runs the danger of losing "the highest dignity of his
essence" and with it "concealment" (Question 32). Heidegger proposed a
notion of "neighborhood" that would shield people from knowledge. In
neighborhood, "one is over the other as its guardian watching over the
other, over it as its veil" (Way 104). In this sense, Coverdale is
Priscilla's neighbor.
Coverdale's way of loving by not knowing has a history stretching at
least to Cervantes's Don Quixote, whose "Tale of III-Advised Curiosity"
demonstrates the monstrosity of the urge to check out the woman loved.
Quixote provides the wiser alternative:
For what I want of Dulcinea of El Toboso, she is as good as the
greatest princess in the land. . . . I believe that everything is
as I see it, neither more nor less, and in my imagination I
portray her as I wish her to be both in beauty and in quality.
(249)
Cervantes plays the knight's ideal of loving without knowing against the
invasive curiosity of the husband, whose urge to know destroys
friendship and love. It is in not knowing Dulcinea--who is, in Bersani's
terms, nonanalyzable and unexamined worth, thus novelistically
uninteresting--that Quixote loves her. Except that Cervantes makes it
most interesting.
Notes
1 Allan Megill's Prophets of Extrernity traces Foucault's preference for
not knowing individuals through Heidegger and Nietzsche to Kant's
Critique of Judgment (152). Uta Liebmann Shaub calls this preference,
which Megill treats as Nietzscheanism, "Orientalism": "The Order of
Things is not the first of Foucault's works to advocate the
disappearance of the individual. In his 1963 'Preface to Transgression,'
Foucault had announced the 'new language of thought that makes us aware
of the shattering of the philosophical subject'; it is 'at the center of
the subject's disappearance that [the new] philosophical language
proceeds'" (Schaub 313).
2 Leo Bersani's A Future for Astynax, which asks "that we attempt to
resist the appeal of that unity of personality assumed by all humanistic
psychologies" (310), is clearly part of this moment: "I think that an
imagination of the deconstructed, perhaps even demolished, self is the
necessary point of departure for an authentically civilizing skepticism
about the nature of our desires and the nature of our being" (313).
Bersani's study of Rimbaud's "enterprise of negating meaning in poetry"
concludes that, "the ideal Rimbauldian utterance would . . . imply the
absence of any coherent and durable subjectivity. Literature would no
longer reveal a self; rather, it would provide models of nonstructurable
desires, of scenes of desire irreducible to a history of personality"
(231). Bersani thinks that Lautreamont in Les chants de Maldoror
discovers "the extent to which language doesn't merely describe identity
but actually produces moral and perhaps even physical identity" (194).
Bersani claims that both Lautreamont and Bronte in Wuthering Heights
"are clearly less interested in the psychological continuities which
make personality possible than in those radical discontinuities and
transformations which explode the myth of personality" (214).
3 Edward Said, in Beginnings, says Mann's Doctor Faustus is about
the end, or final unsuitability, of man as a subject that can be
represented using the written language. . . . Zeitblom's chronicle
of Leverkuhn purports to translate into "human letters" the facts
of a life and an achievement whose central feature is a radical,
antihumanistic divorce from the life of men. Thus music and an
artist's constantly self-transcending career together comprise a
total rejection of the premise that what is human is knowable, is
verbally describable, is consecutively developing, is capable of
subordination to "the human image." (162-63)
Of Ahab in Moby-Dick and Pip in Great Expectations, Said says, "Neither
character can have (Turgenev's Bazarov is another instance) a true
biography . . . A quest for what Ishmael calls the ungraspable essence
of life . . . can be narrated only at the expense of not narrating
life's ordinary generative processes" (143-44). Said thinks Foucault's
denial of the discourses of self owes much to Lacan's
contention that self-discourse involves the creation of a
paranoiac system for which the model, I think, is Freud's Dr.
Schreber. Any attempt made to relay the subject always involves
the subject's objectification of himself, which in extreme cases
like Schreber's is a fantastic hodgepodge of fantasy and fact;
discourse of self, then, is a perpetually distanced speech,
emptied of the real, elusive subject in order that the existential
self can gain clarity and definition, for others, outside itself.
(297)
4 Seltzer is not averse to such a suggestion:
The mid-century romance retains a critical and "oppositional"
character in its very resistances to what Hawthorne calls the
requirements of "the novel," retains its oppositional force, we
might say, even as it points to the conversion of oppositions into
the regulative management of crises and differences that . . .
defines the late nineteenth-century novel. (192)
5 Seltzer cites Dickens, who in Dombey and Son wishes for "a good spirit
who would take the housetops off . . . and show a Christian people what
dark shapes issue from amidst their homes," and Conan Doyle, who dreams
of even greater intrusion: "If we could . . . hover over this great city,
gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going
on" (33).
6 "A genealogy of morals, brought forth, according to Nietzsche, a
relation to knowledge that represented our access to it as necessitating
a shameful rape, the stealing, rending, forceful unveiling of hidden
truth" (Hartman 31). This is as much as saying that Foucauldian theory
began in the nineteenth century at least with Nietzsche.
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~~~~~~~~
By Richard Hull, Indiana University Northwest
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