Rediscovering Hawthorne by Kenneth Dauber (review)

Studies in American Fiction243 views in the FaU, 1974 Southern Review and in Costerus, 1975) Styron has put aside The Way of the Warrior in favor of a new novel-in-progress, Sophie's Choice. The nine essays in the Morris-Malin coUection are generaUy of a high quality, with the most distinguished being the reprinted pieces of Louis Rubin and of Seymour Gross and Eileen Bender. The Rubin essay is taken from his fine 1963 study, The Faraway Country: Writers of the Modem South, and stiU offers just about the soundest reading we have of Lie Down in Darkness and Set This House on Fire. The Gross-Bender essay, which originally appeared in American Quarterly, does more than any other study I know of to evaluate the Turner "literature" before Styron. Among the new essays, Matin's on The LongMarch and Morris' on In the Clap Shack are probably the best. Norman Kelvin takes a valuable warts-and-all approach as he goes through the four novels in systematic detail, objecting vigorously to Styron's difficulties with style, technique, tone, and form; Kelvin is especially unhappy with his "flawed romanticism." The essay by Robert Phillips is suggestive but seems to go too far in rooting out symbols and echoes in Set This House on Fire. The pieces on Lie Down in Darkness by John Lyons and Jan Gordon make some interesting points. TheAchievement of William Styron is a good coUection, intelligently put together by Morris and MaUn. It is not of the consistently high quality of The Literature of Memory but collections of essays rarely reach the enviable level achieved by Gray. University of Wisconsin-MilwaukeeMelvin J. Friedman Dauber, Kenneth. Rediscovering Hawthorne. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1977. 235 pp. Cloth: $13.00. Reading Kenneth Dauber's Rediscovering Hawthorne offers an occasion to reconsider traditional assumptions about literary criticism. Indeed, the reader who fails to do this has dismissed Dauber's ideas out of hand, since his whole book represents an invitation to read literature anew. Implicit throughoutRediscovering Hawthorne is a rejection of formalism and historicism as appropriate methodologies for the modern American scholar. Nor does Rediscovering Hawthorne embrace the Continental criticism now so influential in America. If not these methods, then what may be offered in their place? An answer to this question receives its test in Rediscovering Hawthorne. Dauber offers no label for his method, and any attempt to paraphrase his theoretical approach seems unfair to the author, who has wrought his intentions so meticulously in his book on Hawthorne. Perhaps the fairest avenue open to a reviewer is to quote from Dauber's "Conclusion," even though this requires omitting the arguments leading to it. But to take Dauber's "explications" out of context is simply unfair, as may be exemplified by his analysis of Jeffrey Pyncheon's death in The House of the Seven Gables. According to Dauber, "Hawthorne may not destroy Jeffrey, because Hawthorne is Jeffrey, or invested in him. Murder is impossible, suicide the only option. Action integrated with the self never carries off hostility, but only exposes it. Narrative turns in on itself, uncovering the self at the heart of narrative. Writer and written are one. The tyranny of genre fades. The work approaches pure self-expression, expression of the self' (pp. 135-36). 244Reviews If I do not recognize in this the Nathaniel Hawthorne I have known and admired for many years, I must nevertheless admit that I cannot refute Dauber's analysis, nor can I be fair to it by offering the argument in his own words, since it must appear here in truncated form. The book simply depends too heavUy on a total immersion in and understanding of the categories it constructs. The arguments of the book cannot be treated fairly as discrete parts. Nor can the "Conclusion," although in these few pages Dauber comes closest to offering a section of the book that can be isolated from the whole. How is one to analyze the Hawthorne who has "invited" (p. 224) us to read him? How is one to find what is central to Hawthorne? Dauber considers in his "Conclusion" the matter of how the critic may accept the invitation...