Facing the Veil: Hawthorne, Hooper, and Ethics

CLARK DAVIS Facing the Veil: Hawthorne, Hooper, and Ethics To speak of hawthorne and ethics has probably never been easy. Any author who so clearly declares his own disengagement from the real world, his presumably childish retreat into moonlit fantasies , is either genuinely uninterested in questions of worldly behavior or so completely interested that he insists on making the problematics of engagement his central concern. In recent years, this subdivision of the famed "Hawthorne problem" has increased its maziness due in large part to the increasingly dominant presence of revisionist political criticism . In a theoretical period deeply concerned with worldly engagement , as is ours, authorial strategies that rely on withdrawal or "veiling" (for which Hawthorne is famous) can seem suspiciously irresponsible, notably otherworldly and potentially evasive of ethical concern. Accordingly , some readers have chided Hawthorne for his failures to commit himself linguistically, personally, or politically to direct or "correct" action in the material world. Jonathan Arac, for example, argues that Hawthorne establishes "indeterminacy" as an excuse or protection from direct action: "Hawthorne's derealizing style represents objects so that we doubt their reality, yet while thus questioning what offers itself as our world, he refuses to commit himselfto the authenticity of any other world or way of seeing" (258).' Criticizing at once Hawthorne's aesthetic strategy, the "'hermeneutics of indeterminacy'" in "current criticism ," and the "politics ofFreudian compromise-formation" (257), Arac suggests that Hawthorne's failure to advocate active opposition to slavery undermines the ethical content of his work by exposing a connection between aesthetic withdrawal and inaction.2 Arizona Quarterly Volume 55, Number 4, Winter 1999 Copyright © 1999 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 Clark Davis In her 1992 article, "Sacvan Bercovitch, Stanley Cavell, and the Romance Theory of American Fiction," Emily Miller Budick counters such criticisms by turning our attention to Stanley Cavell's readings of Thoreau and Emerson, particularly to Cavell's description of what he calls Emerson's "aversive thinking." Like Kenneth Dauber in The Idea ofAuthorship in America, Budick argues that separation, the freedom to turn away, is a necessary condition for commitment. Only through what Cavell describes as "a motion of seduction"—a turning away that is also thereby a turning toward—are individuals able to take responsibility for their speaking ("Aversive Thinking" 59): "Aversive thinking, by preserving the force of both metaphysical and linguistic skepticism, compels readers and writers, listeners and speakers, to take responsibility for their words" (Budick, "Sacvan Bercovitch" 85). A similar notion , without direct reference to Cavell, is put forth by Dauber: And yet the hard truth which Hawthorne is asking his readers to face is that, despite any longings to the contrary, they must take the passage at "face" value precisely. It is in the difficulties the passage raises, not in resolving them, that Hawthorne exists . Or better, if he appears to conceal himself in the face he puts on, then as one declaring his concealment exactly, he takes responsibility for himselfall the more. ("Hawthorne" 164) In this sense, the ethical basis of Hawthorne's work, as these readers describe it, rests upon an acknowledgment of otherness, an insistence upon separation as a pre-condition for any sort of meaningful connection . To conceive the relationship in different terms, as simple "commitment " for instance, raises the possibility of compromising the autonomy ofthat to which one commits.3 The appropriative grasp ofthinking, even if understood as a provisional agreement on an "authentic" reality , reduces otherness to an idea; it transforms the other by re-placing it within a totality. That Hawthorne at times resisted such "custom house" reductions and cherished the resistance of experience to systematic thought is clearly evident; that this resistance is the basis for the ethical function ofhis work may be harder for current readers to accept. To understand more fully what such an "ethical basis" involves, it may be useful to follow Budick's lead and place Hawthorne in the broad context of postromantic thought. In particular, the work of Emmanuel Levinas provides an extension ofseveral of the Heideggerian/Cavellian Hawthorne, Hooper, and Ethics terms employed by Budick and offers a stronger argument for the centrality of otherness to the ethical relation. Working both with...