Reading the Text That Isn't There: Paranoia in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Literary Criticism and Culturaltheory)

READING THE TEXT THAT ISN’T THERE Paranoia in the Nineteenth-Century American Novel Mike Davis Routledge New York & L...

Author: Mike Davis

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READING THE TEXT THAT ISN’T THERE Paranoia in the Nineteenth-Century American Novel

Mike Davis

Routledge New York & London

Published in 2005 by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016 www.routledge-ny.com Published in Great Britain by Routledge 2 Park Square Milton Park, Abingdon Oxon OX14 4RN www.routledge.co.uk Copyright © 2005 by Taylor & Francis Group, a Division of T&F Informa. Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photo copying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writ ing from the publishers. Catalog record is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 0-203-00605-4 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN: 0-415-97105-5 (hardback: alk. paper)

I wish to dedicate this book to my wife Marnia, without whose intelligence and support I would understand nothing and accomplish less, and to the brilliant former academic Adrienne Donald, who explained eighteenthcentury England to me in a way that made sense of nineteenth- century America. Dr. Donald is missed; we need more like her in academe.

Contents

Acknowledgments

v

Introduction The Gothic Logic of Paranoia

1

Chapter 1

Wieland’s Transformations: The Problem of Closure in the “Opening” American Novel

18

Chapter 2

“Hidden Significance”: The Marble Faun as Post Script to Seven Gables

42

Chapter 3

Rhetorical Razors: “Lurking Significance” in the “Vexatious Coincidence” of Benito Cereno

66

Chapter 4

Literary Cloaks, Practical Jokes, and the Esophagus Hoax: Concealment, Conspiracy, and the Contrivance of History in Twain

92

Notes

130

Bibliography

161

Index

167

Acknowledgments

For his superhuman efforts as a critic, eleventh-hour editor, and mentor-dis guised-as-peer, I am indebted to Bruce Simon. For their criticism, encourage ment, humor, and insights, I want to thank Jeff Tucker, Rebecca Jaroff, and Gavin Jones. For their guidance and support (and most of all their patience), I am grateful to my advisors, Lee Mitchell and William Gleason. This book is the result of a highly collaborative effort, and it is simply as a matter of con venience that it appears under my name.

Introduction The Gothic Logic of Paranoia

[T]here is a style of mind, not always right-wing in its affiliations, that has a long and varied history. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. 1 [O]f all the fiction of the West, [the American] is most deeply influenced by the gothic, is almost essentially a gothic one. 2 At its most accessible dialogic level, this book is an attempt to synthesize two of the more engaging and long-lived claims in American Studies: Leslie Fiedler’s literarily grounded assertion of the gothic nature of American litera ture and Richard Hofstadter’s historically grounded contention that the American political arena has had, from its inception, a paranoid component. It would seem to be more useful to speak of synthesizing than of reconciling the two claims because neither could be expected necessarily to preclude the other. In fact, on a certain superficial level, the two phenomena discussed by Hofstadter and Fiedler (both of them grounded in the projection of anxiety- based fantasies) almost insist upon being related to one another. After all, one of the primary components of gothic literature is its technique of taking an object of desire and projecting it into the external world as an object of fear, 3 just as Freud’s textbook contention about paranoia is that it takes a desired ho mosexual advance and projects it into the external world as an unwanted ho mosexual attack. 4 The relationship between the gothic blurring of desire/fear and the para noid blurring of desire/persecution is not without significance in this study. Its importance, however, is secondary. To understand what is most important about the relationship, it will be helpful to clarify the stakes of the claims of Fiedler and Hofstadter. As sweeping as Fiedler’s claim may first appear, it is re ally only a claim of intensity. He does not contend that American literature is so extraordinarily gothic as to make the gothicism of English and German lit erature insignificant; the gothic tradition is one that Fiedler implies and that literary history shows to have been indulged in by the entire West. It is only visible,

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READING THE TEXT THAT ISN’T THERE

according to Fiedler, to a greater degree in America (appearing promi nently in the work of virtually all of the writers whom Fiedler categorizes as canonical). Hofstadter claims even less. The paranoid style that he sees in American politics is, in his opinion, very likely as prevalent and apparent in the politics of other nations. 5 If we look at Hofstadter’s argument, however, we find that he is able to do something with America that he would be hard pressed to accomplish with any other nation: he is able to trace the paranoid style back virtually to the dawn of official United States history. America may not be more paranoid than the European countries with which Fiedler com pares its literature; its history of paranoia may not run back any further than the history of paranoia in any of the nations that Hofstadter has in mind; but even if Hofstadter’s rhetoric belies the importance of the claim, his argument shows us that there has been room in American politics for the paranoid style for as long as there has been any such thing as American politics. Just as Hofstadter can trace the paranoid style in American politics all the way back to the beginning of American politics, so can Fiedler trace the gothic back to America’s earliest writers. 6 And precisely as it is less useful to claim that the American political arena is more paranoid (than other political arenas) than it is to observe that the American political arena has always been marked by the paranoid, so it is less useful to remark that the American liter ary tradition is more gothic (than other literatures) than it is to say that it has always been gothic. But even if American politics has always been marked by the paranoid and American literature has always been marked by the gothic, does the rela tionship between the gothic, the paranoid, and America require an explana tion more complicated than a simple recognition of and respect for chronological coincidence? If America emerged at the time of the rise of the gothic novel and the paranoid political style in Europe; and if the gothic novel and the paranoid political style are still around elsewhere, then is it at all sur prising (or even worth commenting on) that American literature has always been marked by a gothic influence and the American political style has always been marked by a paranoid influence? Does any attempt to stress the impor tance of this “always” not run the risk of ringing rather hollow? What would we make of a claim that a certain nation founded in the 21st century was dis tinct from other nations in that it had always had access to computers? The primary aim of this book is to demonstrate that the relationship be tween America’s literary gothicism and its paranoid political style is a matter of greater complexity and importance than can be accounted for in terms of simple chronological coincidence—that the two are in fact directly related. In this study, we will examine the four nineteenth-century novelists (Brockden Brown, Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain) from Fiedler’s list of American canonical writers. 7 It is a matter of convenience that the novelists under consideration here happen to be the first four novelists mentioned by Fiedler. Far more relevant to

THE GOTHIC LOGIC OF PARANOIA

3

this project, however, is the fact that these writers produced works that em phasize different symptoms of paranoia. Psychologists, historians and social critics place different values on such paranoid symptoms as megalomania, per secution, hysteria, conspiratorial fantasy and interpretive distress, but the texts under consideration in this study will enable us to look clearly at the main symptom of paranoia (megalomania, as it registers itself with characters, nar rators, self-consciously canonical authors, and readerships) and the four other symptoms most frequently invoked in discussions of paranoia. 8 The paranoia in Brown’s Wieland is primarily the product of Clara Wieland’s hysteria; the paranoia in Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun enables us to look at a laughably flimsy construct of a Catholic conspiracy; the very real conspiracy in Benito Cereno enables us to focus on the persecution of Amasa Delano by Babo as well as a mocking narrative voice; and since the most obvious genre for the interro gation of interpretive distress is the detective novel, we will conclude with an examination of Twain’s overlooked A Double-Barrelled Detective Story, a book that parodies and imitates the English detective novel in many of the same ways that Brown’s Wieland parodies and imitates the English gothic novel. Whether we are inclined to accept Fiedler’s canon or not, one purpose of this study is to explore a certain relationship—useful to think of as an evolu tionary distillation of the paranoid from the gothic—that exists between four of the most important 19th-century American novelists. This evolution, which we will study more closely in the chapters to follow, is perhaps the most liter arily pronounced symptom of the paranoid style that Hofstadter examines in American politics— and should help to clarify the relationship that I posit be tween the always of America’s gothicism and that of its paranoid politics. Another purpose of this study is to trace out a trajectory concerning the evershifting location of the site of the paranoid consciousness in the produc tions of the nineteenth-century writers that Fiedler (along with such seminal critics as D.H.Lawrence and Richard Chase) chose to single out as canonical. The present study is not at all invested in ratifying or reifying the canonical or non-canonical status of the writers under examination, but in explaining something that they had in common that might have been responsible for their canonization in the first place—a trajectory that the critics who canon ized them failed to comment on explicitly, perhaps because the culture that produced those critics was engaged in the (paranoid?) project of revealing things to itself about itself through systematic concealment. A SURVEY OF TERMS One of the limitations of claiming that American literature is a literature of the gothic is that such a claim is not limited enough to be very useful. “Gothic” is one of the loosest, baggiest, and most monstrous of literary terms. What is most problematic about Fiedler’s generalization is that at the same time that it sounds as if it is claiming everything, its lack of specificity enables it to claim very little.

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And to say (as I will) that Fiedler’s formulation is im proved by the substitution of “paranoid” for “gothic” is, without further clar ification, merely to exchange one lack of specificity for another—for “paranoia” is as loose and baggy a monster in the field of psychoanalysis as “gothic” is in literature. 9 The similarities between the two terms do not end with the blurring of desire (with fear or persecution). Probably more telling is the fact that both tend to defy the traditional genus-species method of definition; rather, both are routinely categorized according to the principles outlined by Wittgenstein’s notion of “family resemblance,” according to which certain concepts are defined by a set of overlapping similarities. The gothic novel is seen as a bundle of conventions, paranoia as a bundle of symptoms. A gothic can be a gothic without a dungeon or a rotting corpse or a supernatural event or a melodrama or an embedded narrative or even a gothic building, just as a paranoiac can be a paranoiac without megalomania or hypochondria or a fas cination with patterns or even a sense of persecution, for, as Hofstadter points out, we can be paranoid on behalf of someone else. But we associate the items from these two lists with the two categories; we may not always find all (or even most) of the conventions/ symptoms in what we call the gothic or the paranoid; but when we label things as gothic or paranoid (or encounter such labels), we do expect to be reminded of the qualities belonging to the set. In the introduction to The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, for instance, Sedgwick is being less cryptic than pragmatic when she cautions, “I have not tried to say that the important Gothic conventions are all about one thing, but have tried to find different ways of showing that the several conventions are about, and are like, each other” (6). We do have to start somewhere, after all; and the recognition that family resemblance definitions are a muddle, but nevertheless a meaningful muddle, is a start. With that caveat in mind, we can proceed to the more precise defini tions of these terms that will be at work in this study. Although Sedgwick’s work on the gothic is one of very few to attempt to discuss the genre at length in the abstract, her various definitions are only partially useful here; for she is invested in a more strict application of the term than Fiedler, who excludes Hemingway alone from his otherwise entirely gothic American canon. For the present, it is more useful to turn to Robert B.Heilman, one of Sedgwick’s sources, for an understanding of the term gothic that is more consonant with Fiedler’s use. Heilman sees gothic literature as the “rehabilitation of the extra rational.” 10 His language is reminiscent of more familiar attempts to define the gothic, as in the formulation that we encounter in such sources as M.H. Abrams’ Glossary of Literary Terms, according to which “the term ‘Gothic’ has also been extended to a type of fiction which lacks the medieval setting but develops a brooding atmosphere of gloom and terror, represents events which are uncanny or macabre or melodramatically violent, and often deals with aberrant psychological states. 11 The importance of psychological aberration (one possible unraveling of Heilman’s “extra-rational”) to what is often meant by “gothic” is difficult to overestimate. In the case of a text such as William Godwin’s Caleb Williams, for instance, it is not the


5

concrete gothic imagery— the prisons or the abusive authority figure—that remind us of the gothic im agery of Anne Radcliffe or Matthew Lewis; rather, it is the consciousness induced in the reader by the use of such imagery in the work of Radcliffe or Lewis. When we categorize Caleb Williams as gothic, we do so less because of what is specifically gothic about it than because Caleb (both as character and narrator) reminds us of what we feel like when we read a gothic novel. In other words, the “aberrant consciousness,” that phrase from Abrams’ glossary of all places, functions quite nicely as the common denominator be tween the writers whom Fiedler categorizes as gothic on his own list. In each of the chapters that follow, we will examine the location of the primary “aber rant consciousness” and explore the stakes of the shifts from one site to an other. But for now, we need only go so far as to recognize that Fiedler’s “extended” use of gothic is the use made here and throughout this study. Instead of attempting to overcome the imprecision of Fiedler’s claim by nar rowing the meaning of his key term (“gothic”), I would suggest that we sub stitute a particular kind of aberrant consciousness, the paranoid consciousness. And although “paranoia” could, in other contexts, prove as un manageable as “gothic,” we will manage, by breaking down its symptoms in the four chapters that follow, to discover which symptom is most important from a literary standpoint and what sort of ideological work the canon pro posed by Fiedler might have been doing for the Americans who accepted it. In one sense, the term paranoia as it is encountered in this study is meant to do the sort of work that it does for Hofstadter: evocative work. It is a good word for evoking, as Hofstadter mentions, the qualities of “suspicion, heated exaggeration, and conspiratorial fantasy.” Most importantly, as this is a literary study, I will be using paranoia primarily in what is arguably its most literary sense: the sense of overreading—motivated by the megalomaniacal compul sion to read and reread a text until the consciousness doing the interpreting (as character, narrator, or flesh-and-blood reader) is able to relate the text directly to himself or herself. This paranoid hermeneutic thrives on tracing out patterns and deriving meaning from them regardless of the tenuousness of their objec tive existence as perceptible patterns. 12 Like Hofstadter, I must disavow all claims of “clinical [psychoanalytical] rigor”; 1 3 unlike him, however, I shall trace the sense in which I use the term back to its psychoanalytical roots, privileging megalomania—like Freud and Lacan, though perhaps the literary manifesta tion of megalomania will enable us to account for its genesis more satisfyingly than Freud is able to account for it in paranoid patients. 14 As mentioned earlier, one of the chief similarities between the ordinary definitions of “gothic” and “paranoid” is that both are presented in terms of a family resemblance. Paranoia has long been seen as a bundle of symptoms that range from megalomania, hypochondria, and hallucination to delusions of per secution and the stressing of patterns, etc. Which symptom is most important varies not only from expert to expert, but from context to context for the same

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expert. In his study of Daniel Paul Schreber (one of history’s most celebrated paranoiacs), Freud cautions, “I must not omit to remark at this point that I shall not consider any theory of paranoia trustworthy unless it also covers the hypochondriacal symptoms by which that disorder is almost invariably accom panied” (157; emphasis Freud’s); he later illustrates that the accompaniment of hypochondria is only almost invariable when he remarks, “It will be remem bered that the majority of cases of paranoia exhibit traces of megalomania, and that megalomania can by itself constitute a paranoia” (175). Alternatively, when Hofstadter speaks of paranoia, he is interested in neither hypochondria nor megalomania; for him, “the feeling of persecution is central” (4). Which symptom is most important to clinical cases of paranoia or his torical episodes of paranoia the present study will not undertake to determine. No doubt persecution, hypochondria, and conspiratorial fantasy have a right ful place in the conventional definitions of paranoia; indeed, to carry the comparison to the gothic one step further, we might well call them the con ventions of paranoia. And just as it is possible to write a gothic novel without the secret passageways that we associate with the generic gothic novel, we can certainly speak of a nonhypochondriacal paranoia. But even though we must recognize the validity of any number of variant definitions of paranoia, we can hardly expect them to function with any precision in this study. For that rea son, it is necessary to specify the symptom of paranoia that will be most im portant in the chapters that follow and to clarify the consequences of that symptomatology. For that specification, perhaps it is best to turn to Lacan, who ratifies the importance of Freud’s second choice, megalomania, 15 in his own mock ing paraphrase of the Schreberian problem: “They say I’m paranoid, and they say that paranoiacs are people who refer everything to themselves. In this case they are mistaken; it’s not I who refer everything to myself, it’s he who refers everything to me, it’s this God who speaks non-stop inside me.” 16 Although there will be moments in the forthcoming chapters when less important elements of paranoia (particularly the conspiratorial fantasy men tioned by Hofstadter) 17 will warrant special scrutiny, the most important el ement is always megalomania. But we must not conflate paranoia with megalomania. The megalomaniacal impulse only becomes paranoid when it insists on relating external phenomena directly to itself in organized ways. To put it yet another way, “paranoia” will be used in the following chapters to refer to the idiosyncratic hermeneutic strategy of any megalomaniacal consciousness that enables that consciousness to see the external world in terms of patterns radiating outward from (or zeroing in on) itself. 18 This focus on the megalomaniacal aspect of paranoia might be seen as little more than a matter of convenience, just as Hofstadter’s use of American history is a matter of convenience (see note 5). And certainly it is convenient not to have to quarrel with such figures as Freud and Lacan over the most im portant symptom of paranoia. But convenience is not what dictates our set tling on the symptom of megalomania. For the significance of that symptom, we must review


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someone else’s quarrel, that between Hofstadter and another historian, Gordon S.Wood. MORE RATIONAL THAN REASON ITSELF The first section of this introduction closed with a promise of relating three things: the gothic, the paranoid, and U.S. political history as distinct from the European history with which it is so intertwined. In the second section, we saw that one way of thinking of the gothic was as an “aberrant consciousness” and that the peculiar aberration of the paranoid consciousness to be discussed hereafter is a peculiarly transformative megalomania. To spell out the impli cations of that second section, my contention is that Fiedler’s formulation concerning the gothic quality of American literature can be thought of as a megalomaniacal tendency (on the part of narrators, characters, or implied readers) to see patterns that center on themselves (and on the part of writers to see Old World literary patterns as possible tools for the repression of an emerging American literary voice). If we think back to Horace Walpole’s Manfred in The Castle of Otranto (the first gothic novel), then we can see that the Lacanian sense of paranoia really has not taken us very far from the gothic. But in bridging the gap between the gothic and the paranoid, we have not come much closer to U.S. political history. It is not enough, however, simply to bridge the gap. We began by ac knowledging the near simultaneity of the rise of the gothic novel, paranoid political projects, and official U.S. history. One important reason for turning, at this point, to Gordon Wood’s revision of Hofstadter’s argument is that Wood not only contends for the importance of the simultaneous rise of para noid thinking and official U.S. history, but manages, through the historiciza tion of the relative cognitive validity of paranoid thought in Europe and America, to account for a peculiar fetishization of the paranoid on the part of American politics. 19 Wood begins with an assumption shared by historians, psychoanalysts, and literary critics alike. For despite the variety of opinions concerning what constitutes paranoia, everyone seems to be in perfect agreement as to when it was first constituted. As Wood observes, By the eighteenth century conspiracy was not simply a means of explain ing how rulers were deposed; it had become a common means of explain ing how rulers and other directing political events really operated…. Yet at this very moment when the world was outrunning man’s capacity to explain it in personal terms, in terms of the passions and schemes of the individuals, the most enlightened of the age were priding themselves on their ability to do just that. The widespread resort to conspiratorial inter pretations grew out of this contradiction. 20 Quite simply, paranoia is the enfant terrible of the enlightenment. 21

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But to understand the crux of Wood’s argument, we must push this ge nealogy one step further—toward the recognition that if paranoia is the enfant terrible of the enlightenment, then America is the enlightenment’s favorite son. Or at least this was the light in which many Americans chose to see their land of democracy, founded (at least rhetorically) on such abstract principles as lib erty and equality. Here the differences between the stances of Wood and Hofstadter become clear. For Hofstadter, American paranoia is simply one paranoia among many to be studied. But for Wood, paranoia flourishes in American politics to an extent that it could not flourish in Europe. The reason for the difference, in his opinion, is the French Revolution: The French Revolution, more than any other single event, changed the consciousness of Europe. The Revolution was simply too convulsive and too sprawling, involving the participation of too many masses of people, to be easily confined within the conventional personalistic and rational istic modes of explanation. For the most sensitive European intellectuals, the Revolution became the cataclysm that shattered once for all the tra ditional moral affinity between cause and effect, motives and behavior. That the actions of liberal, enlightened, and well-intentioned men could produce such horror, terror, and chaos, that so much promise could re sult in so much tragedy, became, said Shelley, “the master theme of the epoch in which we live.” (431) Perhaps because of the greatness of their geographical distance (or the paucity of their critical distance) from France, late 18th- and early 19th-century Americans tended not to see the French Revolution as “too convulsive and too sprawling” to be accounted for by conspiracies, and all too eagerly embraced the views of an expelled French Jesuit, Abbé Barruel, according to whom: Everything in the French Revolution, even the most dreadful of crimes, was foreseen, contemplated, contrived, resolved upon, decreed; that everything was the consequence of the most profound villainy, and was prepared and produced by those men who alone held the leading threads of conspiracies long before woven in the secret societies, and who knew how to choose and to hasten the favorable moments for their schemes. (quoted in Hofstadter, 12) Barruel attributed the conspiracy to anti-Christians, Freemasons, and Illuminati; and even though, as Hofstadter points out, “it is uncertain whether any member of the Illuminati ever came” to America, many Americans were quick to conclude (with characteristic megalomania) that the Illuminati had finished with France and were setting their sights on the United States (Hofstadter, 12–3). This fear registered itself on the American political stage in many ways, most notably in the formation of the anti- Masonic political party. According to Wood, American


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voters were more sus ceptible to paranoid fantasies about conspiratorial manipulation of governmental affairs than were Europeans. In support of his claim, Wood points out that Barruel’s conspiracy theories were far better received in America than in his native France and accounts for the difference in terms of America’s fetishization of enlighten ment principles and values: “late eighteenth-century Americans did not ex perience this transformation in consciousness [the move away from the totalizing hermeneutic strategies of the enlightenment] as rapidly and to the same extent as Europeans” (432). This difference is perhaps the single most satisfying way of accounting for the difference that Fiedler perceives be tween American literature and other literatures of the West. 22 As we shall see in the next section, gothic literature, whether perceived as an anti-en lightenment or an ultra-enlightenment product, is invariably tied to the en lightenment. And if America can be said, as Wood claims, to have lingered in the enlightenment, then there can be nothing surprising about the per sistently gothic quality of its literature as remarked upon by Fiedler. THE ARCHITECTONICS OF ENLIGHTENMENT: GOTHIC STRUCTURES AND PANOPTICONS Although the gothic is doubtless appreciated in the literary community as the only literary genre to be named for an architectural style; and although we are all doubtless familiar with Foucault’s work on the panopticon, paranoia, and enlightenment, the literary community has failed to appreciate the impor tance of the architectural relationship between the fictive panopticon and the fictions that occur within gothic confines. A brief review of the implications of this architectural-literary phenomenon will not only help us to put the American gothic in its proper literary-historical place, but to appreciate the ways in which the megalomaniacal impulse to perceive patterns centering on oneself can be seen as integral to the structure of the American gothic. Whether it is more apt to contend that paranoia is a metaphor for the enlightenment or that the enlightenment is a metaphor for paranoia I cannot say. What Foucault tells us, however, is that Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon is apt enough as a metaphor for both. The differing ways in which the English gothic novel reacted to the panopticon over the course of the latter half of the 18th century are suggestive of the change in consciousness that Wood de scribes as antienlightenment/European; and the ways in which American gothicism tended to return to (rather than react against) the panopticon sug gest that the difference between the American and the European reaction to the French Revolution (the difference between putting people in charge of history and putting history in charge of people) 23 is echoed in the American approach to the gothic novel. The panopticon is an almost magical structure in that it makes paranoia both possible and productive 24 for large numbers of people. The whole purpose of the panopticon is to inculcate paranoia in its inhabitants, to make each in mate believe himself to be the center of attention. The paranoiac’s suspicion that he is

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always being watched is simultaneously the boon and the bane of his mega lomania; he is a cynosure, and therefore a person of importance; but cynosure comes at the price of a loss of privacy. “It is obvious,” writes Bentham, that the more constantly the persons to be inspected are under the eyes of the person who should inspect them, the more perfectly will the pur pose of the establishment have been attained. Ideal perfection, if that were the object, would require that each person should actually be in that predicament during every instant of time. This being impossible, the next thing to be wished for is, that, at every instant, seeing reason to be lieve as much, and not being able to satisfy himself to the contrary, he should conceive himself to be so. (34) The inmates of Bentham’s panopticon are to be encouraged to take what would ordinarily qualify as precisely the sort of “imaginative leap” that Hofstadter associates with paranoia. 25 It is not a matter of whether they can prove that they are being watched; it is a matter of whether anyone can prove that they are not. Typically, the “imaginative leap” in a paranoid argument can be traced to the moment in which the paranoiac makes an assertion and then shifts the burden of proof from himself to anyone inclined to dispute the as sertion. Though the claim of persecution by Catholics, for example, is likely, eventually, to give way to the adducing of bits of idiosyncratically relevant ev idence, the best evidence that the paranoiac has for his position is everyone else’s inability to prove that he is not being persecuted by Catholics. And in the absence of a compelling reason to trust the Freemasons, it is safe, from the paranoid point of view, to assume that they are in league with the Catholics. 26 Miran Bozovic puts it simply: “What is then staged in the panopticon is the illusion of constant surveillance…. Thus, discipline is internalized” (16–7). The panopticon is effective to the extent that it replaces the flimsy no tion of conscience with a more concrete, productive, and manipulable para noia. “Hence the major effect of the Panopticon,” writes Foucault: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effect, even if it is discontinuous in its ac tion; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exer cise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it. (200) The more persuaded the inmates of the panopticon are that they are being watched, the less necessary it is to watch them. The panopticon realizes per fection as soon as every inmate believes he is being watched all the time when in fact none of them are ever being watched at all. The building’s de velopment (like


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the development of the gothic novel) is a more organic and interactive affair than its construction; its growth is in fact the measure of its reconstruction of its inhabitants. The efficacy of the panopticon is quan tifiably related to the amount of time that it takes to reduce its inmates to a state of paranoid delusion. 27 “But the panopticon,” as Foucault makes clear, “must not be under stood as a dream building: It is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form; its functioning, abstracted from any obstacle, resistance or friction, must be represented as a pure architectural and optical system” (Discipline, 205). The panopticon, then, can be thought of as the architectural centerpiece of the enlightenment. The inspection-house is not only the house of light, but the house that light built. 28 But the panopticon exists in tension with another sort of architecture, the gloomier and clumsier architecture of the gothic. Gothic literature, as is the case with the literature of the panopticon, is profoundly related to the enlight enment. Gothic novels are variously post-enlightenment, anti-enlightenment, and ultraenlightenment; but more often than not, as we shall see most dra matically in Brockden Brown (of the American gothicists) the gothic structures for which these novels are named prove only to be panopticons in disguise. Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), the godparent of all gothic novels, is a rigorously anti-enlightenment project. Causality is not only elided, but defied. When a huge helmet falls out of the sky, killing the son of the villainhero Manfred, explanation is neither offered nor sought for. 29 And the absolute absence of a correlation between intention and effect is empha sized by the ceaseless misfirings of Manfred’s dynastic designs. But Anne Radcliffe’s revivification of the gothic novel some thirty years later (during the upheaval of France, as Wood would doubtless be quick to point out) is clearly inflected by the sense that there can be no return from the enlightenment. Progress is possible; but the way back to a non-causal, non-ra tional world is barred. In Radcliffe’s explained supernatural system (the hall mark of her work), ghosts are never the explanation for events, not even when they would seem to be the most reasonable explanation; people simply do not disappear into thin air, no matter how difficult it is to have them disappear into something else. Despite the winding corridors and crazy stairways of the gothic buildings in which she locates her narratives, Radcliffe’s characters manage to bear an astonishing resemblance to Bentham’s inspector or his in mates. Secret corridors and peepholes abound. For Radcliffe, even a reversion to preenlightenment architecture does not prevent the literal architectural re alization (in a somewhat stunted form) of Bentham’s Panopticon. 3 0 Already, the uses to which the gothic is being put in England can be seen to be shift ing over time. Before we move on to an examination of the trajectory of the American gothic novel, it will be useful to trace out the shifts that appeared in the various English representatives of the genre, if only for highlighting the differences in the development of the gothic on either side of the Atlantic.

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Just as Radcliffe’s work suggests that there can be no going back from the enlightenment, so it proved that there could be no return (within the gothic mode) from Radcliffe’s explained supernaturalism. When Matthew Lewis tried to recapture the anti-enlightenment flavor of Walpole’s Otranto, it was impossible for him to make his way to the pre-Radcliffean unexplained supernatural. Although he succeeds, in The Monk, in sustaining the supernat ural qualities of the supernatural characters (ghosts, demons, etc.), he does not succeed at leaving them unexplained. The need to account for things runs through the work. The efficacy of a magic potion is accounted for in terms of its having been demonically concocted; Ambrosio is persecuted not by fate but by Satan; discernible intentions lead directly to effects. The supernatural, though explained in supernatural terms, is explained nevertheless. Nothing happens for no reason; even the supernatural is thick with causality. 31 Although these novels, to return to Wood’s point about the French Revolution, were written as symptoms of the enlightenment, they soon came to be read (in Europe at least) as critiques of it, along with the dozens of gothic novels written at the dawn of the nineteenth century. According to Wood, however, the American reaction to the French Revolution differed so greatly from that of Europe as to prevent American readers from perceiving anything critical of enlightenment in gothic novels. Not only was the American nation itself virtually devoid of gothic architecture; it was ideologically devoid of a need for the return to the gothic. In America, the panopticon did not have to exist in tension with the gothic castle (as in Walpole) or in fusion with it (as in Radcliffe); it could and did displace the gothic architecture of the gothic novel entirely. 32 And whereas the central structure of the English gothic novel remained an actual gothic building, the structure of the American gothic be came the metaphorical equivalent of the panopticon: paranoia. In Lewis’ The Monk, for instance, the individually corrupt Ambrosio imprisons the innocent Bianca in his monastery; but in The Marble Faun, Hawthorne’s narrator nonchalantly posits an elaborate Catholic conspiracy in order to explain Hilda’s absence from the final chapters of the text. In Lewis’ work, the gothic element is the confinement itself; for Hawthorne it is the mechanism behind the confinement. Perhaps even more significantly, the most outrageous moment in Brown’s Wieland (the spontaneous combustion of the patriarch) occurs not in some dank and sequestered corner of a castle, but in the open, airy space of a neoclassic temple. And if we are to accept the possibility (as Wieland himself seems to) that Wieland’s combustion is a form of divine retribution for his having failed to follow through on the duty he felt to convert Native Americans to Christianity, then it is absolutely a moment of an all-seeing authority figure (God) using his own structure (the temple) as an arena of discipline.


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OTHER ORDERS BEHIND THE VISIBLE [P]aranoia itself, as the psychoanalytic definitions of the condition indi cate, is essentially a crisis in interpretation…. The classic symptoms of paranoia, in other words, involve making false sense of the world…. [T]he paranoiac looks “behind” the ostensible meaning of language to an alternative one. At the heart of paranoia, then, is a battle to understand/impose meaning. (Bran, 44–6) But what induces the reader (or what induced the implied reader of the nine teenth century) to buy Hawthorne’s Catholic conspiracy against Hilda? How do such paranoid narratives sell themselves? The important thing to remem ber is that paranoia is, quite literally, a narrative project if only because it is productive of fictions that are perceived (and that perceive themselves) as re alities. The fact that the very lack of evidence for a conspiracy is inevitably in terpreted by a paranoiac as evidence of the alleged conspirators’ skill at concealing the conspiracy indicates what is most novel-like about paranoia for the paranoiac: the assertion of a plot is sufficient to supply the place of plot. But whereas novels are sustained assertions of plots that isolate themselves in the suspension of disbelief, a paranoiac’s conspiracies are sustained assertions of plots that integrate themselves into reality by suspending any need for re ality. This tendency to supply plot simply through bare assertion could almost qualify as the running gag of paranoia if only paranoiacs could laugh at it along with everyone else. From the paranoid point of view, paranoid narra tives are not generated ex nihilo; rather, they are seen as readings of the text of the universe. The text has to be read and reread in order to be perfectly related to the paranoid consciousness that reads it (much in the same way that Amasa Delano reads and rereads the events on the San Dominick—not with insistent reference to his own megalomania, but with obsessive reference to a megalo maniacal worldview according to which certain power relations obtain be tween whites and blacks). As Hostadter tells us, the advocate of the paranoid style is the person who believes that “history is a conspiracy” (29), that close reading is always at the mercy of closer writing and that the discovery of seemingly concealed messages —in literary texts or historical documents more generally—may be our way of playing into the hands of our ancestors. To expose one conspiracy is to run the risk of drawing attention away from another. This can be done unintentionally, for even a paranoiac of the best intentions may be duped into discovering a decoy-conspiracy. But a resolute paranoiac can never be dis tracted by such decoys for long. The best paranoiacs are characterized by con stant revision; their conclusions may remain the same; but the ways in which they reach them shift almost immediately after their discovery Put another way, even though the point of the project of reading never changes, the project of reading never stops. For the paranoiac, the difference between text and reading is simply a matter of time. Each reading of the text exists only to serve as the text for the subsequent

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reading. The assumption of the paranoiac is that the truth, whatever it is, is obscure. It is never on the surface, always beneath it. And whenever a reading of a text is produced, it cannot be long before the reading comes to be regarded as too obvious, too superficial to be true. As Leo Bersani points out with a phrase from Pynchon, “paranoia…is the ‘reflex of seeking other orders behind the visible’” (181). Bersani very pro ductively associates paranoia with ‘interpretive distress’ (179); for my pur poses, however, it is perhaps more useful to think of paranoia as the distress caused by interpretive overproduction, an overproduction that relates itself in an endlessly repeating cycle to the Pynchonesque reflex of seeking other or ders behind the visible. Put another way, paranoia is less interpretive distress that metainterpretive distress; the problem for the paranoiac is that there is rarely any difficulty in finding the other orders that are sought behind the vis ible; once found, however, these orders are themselves visible (if not to others, then to the paranoiac). And the act of bringing an interpretation to the sur face is the act that necessitates putting it aside for yet another interpretation. The interpretation is no longer regarded as an interpretation, but as a patently visible order that must itself be interpreted. To overread a text is only to take a step in the direction of paranoia; paranoid potential is only fully realized when one overreads readings on the way to overreading overreadings. As Schreber says, “The ‘thinking-itover-thought’ denoted something perhaps also known to psychologists: it often leads a person to turn his will power in the opposite direction or at least change it from that which at first he may have felt inclined to follow, but which on further consideration automatically causes doubts” (Memoirs, 141). Lacan moves toward a literary model in com menting on this paranoid impulse: “I would go even further—the delusional, as he climbs the scale of delusions, becomes increasingly sure of things that he regards as more and more unreal…. Moreover, the discursive products char acteristic of the register of paranoia usually blossom into literary productions, in the sense in which literary simply means sheets of paper covered with writ ing” (77). And Bersani himself completes the chain by moving past literature to literary theory for further elaboration of the point: “The theoretician’s dis trust of theory—the sense that what theory seeks to signify is hidden some where behind it—repeats the paranoid’s distrust of the visible” (181). As Schreber and Lacan attest, the paranoid impulse is to “automatically doubt” and reread. Once an interpretation has been found and the finding of it has transformed the finder’s sensibility of the interpretation from one of discov ery into one of casual observation, the possibilities for interpreting the interpre tation are limitless. One possibility is that the appearance constructed by the interpretive faculty of the paranoiac is itself an illusion imposed on the paranoiac from without, that the clues which led to such and such a reading of a certain text, the components which built themselves into whatever image the paranoiac sees, were deliberately planted by someone whose existence it is impossible to ver ify, someone whose desire is to throw the reader off the track, to lead us


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down a path to a false but superficially satisfying conclusion that masks or opposes or un dermines the underlying principles and objectives of the text. The only evidence of the existence of such a force or person is what the paranoiac sees as the overly neat way in which the clues or decoys or traces fit together in order to give an im pression which is distrusted simply because of the assumptions that whatever is discovered is obvious and that there is always something behind the obvious. The process goes on until all the discoveries and all of the clues that led to them can be related to some single, unifying principle. 33

What we shall see in the chapters that follow is that the first four novel ists in Fiedler’s gothic canon (for reasons about which we can speculate in the conclusion) seem to have been embraced by those who took charge of the can onizing process in accordance with this penchant for revisionism and over reading. The paranoia itself is gradually squeezed out of the narratives and emptied into other literary sites further and further removed from the narra tives, such as the narrative persona, the author, and the reader. The paranoia is always there; it is almost certainly always doing the same thing; 34 but like a true paranoiac, it refuses to reach the same conclusion in the same way; it re fuses to privilege the text over the reading. The paranoid literary project is not only engaged with paranoia, but pursues that engagement in a paranoid fash ion, a fashion of interpretive distress that leads to endlessly nuanced revisions, a fashion that never tires of seeking other orders behind the visible. THE REVISIONARY TRAJECTORY In the first chapter, I examine the declaration of literary independence that is Brockden Brown’s Wieland and the ways in which he inscribes England (and particularly its gothic conventions) as the source of a hostile literary tradition intended to stifle a burgeoning American literature. The English literary conventions are out to get America; and Brown demonstrates, in the prob lematic final chapter of his first novel, what will happen to American litera ture if it allows those conventions to overtake its heroes and heroines. Although his argument is that an entire national literature is at risk, the stakes within the book are limited to the character-narrator of Clara Wieland. In the second chapter, I examine the slightly larger conspiracy that oc cupies Hawthorne in The Marble Faun. In this case, the hostile forces are no longer the mere literary conventions of the English gothic novel, but the lit eral realization of those conventions. It isn’t simply that the gothic mode calls for Catholic Europe to be out to get the lily-white heroines of Anglo-America; the gothic mode has been abandoned; and it is now represented as historical fact that Catholic Europe is out to do what the gothic novels always claimed it was out to do. Once again, our heroine is at stake; but we are directed to read her out of her plight not by turning away from the literary conventions that Brown had already urged us to abandon, but by turning to another set of conventions that Hawthorne

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had helped to construct. 35 As is typical of para noia, everything is at stake; and the forces in league against our heroine are mind-bogglingly multifarious and powerful; but what is typical about the paranoia of The Marble Faun is its proposition that we can read our heroine out of her problem, a problem that others would probably regard our para noia as having read her into in the first place. Importantly, in Brown’s Wieland, the paranoia of the narrative is located in the unreliable narrator-heroine Clara Wieland. In The Marble Faun, it shifts to a fairly reliable narrator (unnamed) who is sympathetic to the hero ine (Hilda). In both cases, it is firmly entrenched in the text (though we can see it moving away from the characters with whom it is most directly con cerned). In my third chapter, I examine what is probably the most remarkable instance of paranoia that saturates various levels of the narrative that pretends to contain it: Melville’s Benito Cereno. The misdirected paranoia of Amasa Delano, the (anti-) hero, is of course incontestable. But there are other para noias in the narrative that are generative of, generated by, or even unrelated to his own fitful paranoia. Whereas the Catholic conspiracy of The Marble Faun is a laughable flight of fancy on Hawthorne’s part, the conspiracy against Delano has the distinction of being historically based. He has every reason to think that Cereno is out to get him, just as Babo has every reason to suppose that Cereno is out to expose the plot of the slaves, and just as Cereno has every reason to suppose that he will end up being killed by one side or the other. What is most problematic about Melville’s tale, however, is the artful way in which his narrator refuses to direct the reader’s sympathies to one camp or the other, the way that the narrative voice mocks Delano for being gullible and for being suspicious. More than the reluctant Cereno and the scheming Babo, the one who is out to get Delano is the teller of his tale. And then we come to Twain, whose most obviously paranoid moments are confined, for the most part, to his lesser known works. Since sleuths are supposed to detect conspiracies, perhaps it is unfair to cry ‘paranoia,’ in re sponse to all of Twain’s detective fiction, but a careful assessment of Twain’s A Double-Barreled Detective Story (in which Twain takes it upon himself to kill off Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes) will demonstrate that the most important plot in the story is not the one that baffles Holmes, but the one di rected against the reader by the author. Twain does not locate paranoia in the deluded consciousness of a character or the xenophobic consciousness of a participating narrator or the mocking consciousness of a disembodied narra tor. Twain flings the conspiracy out of the text and into the world. He con spires against his readers and asks them to conspire against one another. He assures those that will not conspire that they have already been conspired against, that the joke is on them because of human helplessness generally in the face of a history that has been carefully concocted to direct us to conclu sions that we must reject and revise simply because of their obviousness. It isn’t enough to eschew English literary conventions or to construct our own literary conventions


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or to defy those conventions, once constructed, as the mocking constraints that they are. The best we can hope to do is to force the conventions to work against themselves, to embrace the conventions of the English detective novel for the purpose of playing a practical joke on the greatest of all English detectives, Sherlock Holmes himself. Hofstadter unpacks his contention that the paranoiac sees history itself as a conspiracy by explaining that “the distinguishing thing about the paranoid style is not that its exponents see conspiracies or plots here and there in history, but that they regard a ‘vast’ or ‘gigantic’ conspiracy as the motive force in historical events” (29). Is there something that we can see in Fiedler’s canon that he himself did not see, some paranoid project that exists between his choices of canonical figures as well as within their individual productions? Do we desire history or fear it? Do we pretend to desire it only because we see it as an attack? Is American history a visi ble order behind which our literature dares to peek? And can all of this really have started at the dawn of the nineteenth century? In order to answer those questions, perhaps we should remember what we gain by categorizing history as an almost sentient and malicious force, particularly when we recall that America’s official his tory is a virtual history-lessness even though its unofficial history is one that many Americans are only too eager to forget. Perhaps our literary paranoia is a product of our innocence, but perhaps it is more precisely the product of our desire to be lieve in our own innocence. Let us see.

Chapter One Wieland’s Transformations: The Problem of Closure in the “Opening” American Novel

Wieland appears everywhere to be converting itself, explicitly or implic itly, into images of its own literary procedure. 1 Consciousness itself is the malady. 2 WHERE TO BEGIN The place to start is not necessarily the beginning. And Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, though invoked by many canonical studies as the first American novel, 2 is not the beginning. It is neither the first novel written in America nor the first novel written by an American author. One purpose of this chapter, however, is to examine the importance of ascribing to this novel a primacy that it does not have. But it is even more important to recognize that although there are many ways in which Wieland cannot be spoken of as first, there is one way in which it must be; for Wieland is a first-person narra tive. And the first-person is the first stop on this paranoid journey. As the in troduction indicated, the organizing principle of this study is not so much the degree or intensity of paranoia that we encounter in various nineteenth-cen tury American texts, but in the gradual shifting of sites for the paranoid mode of consciousness. And though we shall come to see that Brown’s Wieland is a paranoid project inasmuch as the narrative seems to be “out to get” Clara Wieland, that paranoid modality shall prove to be less important than the fact that the story is not only about Clara, but is told by her. 3 None of this is meant to suggest that the location of a paranoid con sciousness in a first-person character/narrator was an innovation of Charles Brockden Brown’s—or even that it is a distinctively nineteenth-century American practice. We know, of course, that Brown quite consciously lifts this device from William Godwin’s Caleb Williams. But what he does with this de vice—particularly in the closing chapter of his narrative, a chapter that has so troubled so many critics —is to raise the stakes of paranoia in narrative. Like Caleb Williams, Clara Wieland is the mouthpiece for the articulation of the plot that has been formed against her. But unlike Godwin, Brown uses the plot against Clara to point out

WIELAND’S TRANSFORMATIONS

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the ways in which plot has functioned in the English novel and the ways in which it might function differently in an American tale. Indeed, we might say that Wieland’s subtitle, The Transformation, An American Tale, spells out its narrative project. For Brown’s project, as we shall see, is to transform Godwin’s paranoid device in order to tell an American tale. But more than that, as I will argue (particularly in re gard to Wieland’s bizarre final chapter), Brown’s project is to show his American readers the ways in which American literature must fail if it does not manage to transform the devices that it appropriates from the literature of England, a literature that the text and narrator of Wieland—perhaps para noiacally—both seem to regard as “out to get” American literature, out to pre vent Brown’s American Tale from running its natural course. Clara Wieland’s narrative is tainted throughout by her hysteria, but her hysteria proves more coherent than the literary conventions of the sentimental English novel, conventions that strangle—for they do not merely constrain— the final chapter of Brown’s novel. Although hysteria is not always associated with paranoia, the two are frequently encountered alongside one another (just as paranoia is often encountered alongside megalomania and a tendency to see patterns where others see coincidence or nothing at all). Pioneering psychia trist Emil Kraepelin 4 sees hysteria as an integral component of paranoia, and Clara Wieland’s hysterical narration of Wieland does eventually reduce itself to a paranoid rant—even though her brother really is out to get her. V-LAND, WE-LAND, VY-LAND, WHY-LAND? The problem of Brown’s first novel begins with the pronunciation of its title: Wieland. 5 That title implicitly asks us to consider what happens to a European name, even the name of a relatively famous German poet, 6 when it is trans planted to America. One particular mispronunciation of the title (Why land?) raises the question of whether the changes that a single name is apt to undergo are symptomatic of larger changes one might expect to see wrought in Europeans and their respective cultural practices (e.g. German poetry) as the result of their transatlantic emigrations. Though geographically removed from Europe, America is obviously tied to European traditions, traditions that are aesthetically as well as ideologically charged. There is a sense in which the American Revolution can be seen as anti-European, a severing of European (and particularly English) ties; but there is also a sense (perhaps best articulated by Edmund Burke) in which American independence stands as a testament to the ideological maturation of England’s socio-political heritage. And if America’s declaration of inde pendence can be seen, from a political vantage point, as a simultaneous repu diation of England and an out-Englishing of the English, then the aesthetic question faced by the burgeoning republic can be seen in terms of a choice be tween developing the European artistic traditions that still tied America to the Old World and repudiating those traditions in favor of a self-consciously na

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tionalistic and rigorously un-derivative aesthetic, a declaration of literary and artistic independence meant to underscore American separatism. Brown’s selection of a title (a European name) that was almost certain to be mispronounced by a substantial portion of the American readership to which his novel was directed is our first alert to the possibility that Brown’s project, in Wieland, is to attempt to answer the aesthetic question raised by America’s political independence. To elaborate on an earlier point, the novel’s full title, Wieland; or the Transformation, an American Tale seems to respond to that aesthetic question with almost mathematical precision by moving from something distinctively European (the name Wieland) through the idea of transformation (the potential of mispronunciation) to the notion of the American. My argument, in other words, begins with an examination of the possi bility that Brown’s first novel is about writing the first significant American novel. 7 Wieland draws on and reshapes the European novel, 8 particularly the gothic novels of England and Germany. But it mimics the devices of European novels without engaging in the debate between them. For instance, even though Brown was writing in the heyday of the dispute between the two foremost gothicists of the time, Ann Radcliffe (the rationalist) and M.G.Lewis (the su pernaturalist), 9 Brown considered William Godwin his most important influ ence—and this at a time when the aberrant consciousness (as it is found in Godwin’s Caleb Williams, for example) was yet to be recognized as the primary element of gothic fiction. 10 By taking Godwin’s book as his model, Brown was able to write something between a gothic novel and the Godwinian “novel of ideas,” i.e. to contribute to the European literary tradition through the transfor mative process of merging two pre-existing strands of that tradition. 11 In this chapter, we will need to examine the ways in which that merger oc curs both intra- and inter-textually from Wieland’s beginning (its title) through the bulk of its body (from Theodore Wieland’s spontaneous combustion to the homicidal rampage of his son). But in our conclusion (which will concern Brown’s conclusion) we shall have to move from the intra- and intertextual to the meta-textual, i.e. to the ways in which Wieland ceases to function as a self- contained (albeit allusive) narrative to an awareness of itself as a paradigm for narrative (specifically for American narrative), a paradigm forged out of other paradigms, but independent and critical of those paradigms. That one of those paradigms is best represented by the paranoid narra tive of Godwin’s Caleb Williams is relevant on two levels. The first level, which is specific to this chapter on Brown, concerns an understanding of Brown’s seemingly unnecessary final chapter as a sort of paranoid account of the way in which American literature might be conspired against by the European lit eratures from which it is derived; the second level, which is more integral to my study as a whole, concerns the importance of Brown’s decision to put this strangely metaphorical literary argument into the mouth of his hysterical (and justifiably paranoid) narrator/heroine, Clara Wieland. Before we can appreci ate the importance of Brown’s choosing Clara to be the mouthpiece of meta textual


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paranoia in the final chapter, however, we must first come to understand why it is not only productive, but warranted and reasonable, to view that chapter in the paranoid light that I intend to cast on it. Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds forcefully articulates the critical consensus concerning the novel’s conclusion when she says that “Wieland does not even ‘end’ in the usual sense: it does not conclude with an explanation of the fore going, nor does it provide a ‘key’ to the novel as a whole that would unify the preceding chaotic impressions. It simply stops.” 12 Through an examination of Wieland’s engagement with its own historical and literary milieu, particularly its preoccupation with the literary productions of Brown’s contemporaries, it becomes plain that the critical consensus is both anticipated and answered by the very conclusion that it calls into question. The conclusion of the novel, when read in the proper context (the context of the rest of the novel as well as the novel’s own literary context), becomes, in Hinds’ own parlance, the ‘key’ not only to Clara Wieland’s narrative, but to an understanding of Brown’s place with regard to his authorship of that narrative. We can see how the text of the novel can only make sense of itself by stepping out of itself, how it in sists upon being abandoned by the reader in order to contain the reader (and upon being contained by its circumstances, particularly the circumstances of a newborn America and an as yet unborn American literature, in order to present itself as self-contained). As a novel whose self-referentiality can be measured primarily in terms of its intertextuality, Wieland is a peculiarly in teresting metafiction 13 —and our awareness of it as such is perhaps the most useful way we have of accounting for its superficially curious position in the tradition of the American novel. A MATTER OF CONTEXT Wieland is an aggressively intertextual book. It imitates the English gothic novel seemingly with the sole purpose of deviating from the formula. And yet, Wieland is not repetition with a difference, but a tacit recognition of the fact that repetition makes its own difference, that the duplication and reduplica tion of certain predictable patterns in varying contexts alters the signification of those patterns—and that, in the right context, repetition without any su perficial difference can turn the patterns against themselves. 14 In an extended passage on the itinerant element incidental to the recov ery of seemingly pristine and/or authoritative texts, Brown’s Clara Wieland (who, despite her German name, shares the initials of Godwin’s Caleb Williams 15 ) dramatically allegorizes the problem of text and context: [M]y brother and Pleyel were bandying quotations and syllogisms. The point discussed was the merit of [Cicero’s] oration for Cluentius, as de scriptive, first, of the genius of the speaker; and, secondly, of the manners of the times…. The controversy was suddenly diverted into a new chan nel by a misquotation. Pleyel accused his companion of saying “pollicea tur”

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when he should have said “polliceretur . ” Nothing would decide the contest, but an appeal to the volume. My brother was returning to the house for this purpose, when a servant met him with a letter from Major Stuart. He immediately returned to read it in our company…. [The] letter contained a description of a waterfall on the Monongahela. A sudden gust of rain falling, we were compelled to re move to the house… [where we] engaged in sprightly conversation. The letter lately received naturally suggested the topic. A parallel was drawn between the cataract there described, and one which Pleyel had discov ered among the Alps of Glarus. In the state of the former, some particu lar was mentioned, the truth of which was questionable. To settle the dispute which thence arose, it was proposed to have recourse to the let ter. My brother…determined to go in search for it…. In a few minutes he returned…. At length Pleyel said, “Well, I suppose you have found the letter.” “No,” said he. [A third argument ensues concerning a voice Wieland heard on his way to retrieve the letter.] 16 For the characters in this scene, one argument on the verge of being settled is interrupted by another, which, on the verge of being settled, gives way to a third. 17 Brown’s characters (in this scene and elsewhere in Wieland and Brown’s other novels) are forever pursuing authoritative texts, the recovery of which is itself responsible for removing them from the context in which the texts in question would be of use. 18 Moreover, as becomes clear when the references in this scene are traced out, the relationship between Brown’s characters and their texts is analogous to that between Wieland and its readers. Texts have a way of literally captivating their au diences—enveloping their readers and pervading their environments—as proves to be the case when the storm breaks just as Clara and her companions have fin ished Stuart’s description of a cataract. No sooner have they finished reading about the waterfall than water begins to fall, forcing them, ironically enough, to seek shelter away from the text that they are in the process of reading. Much like the Maxwell-Stuart subplot that frustrates and mystifies so many of Wieland’s critics, the Stuart letter resists being read, prevents itself from being read—and yet haunts the characters’ conversation after they have fled from it. But what about the reader? If Brown is setting up an analogy between readers and characters, then the reader should not only flee from one to an other of Wieland’s subplots, but be enveloped by the novel as well. How is this textual captivation accomplished? In what way does the reader mimic the characters s/he is reading about? The last question is the wrong question, for it relies on imitative strate gies employed by eighteenth-century English novelists, such as DeFoe, Richardson, Radcliffe, and Lewis, who shared the objective of compelling the reader to go through the cognitive processes of their protagonists. Brown in verts this schema


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by having his characters imitate the reader. In reading Wieland, for instance, Brown’s reader is not reading Pro Cluentius. But by hav ing Pleyel and Wieland recite passages from Pro Cluentius, Brown is forcing his characters to discuss the text in which they themselves appear—for fratri cide is central to Wieland as well as Pro Cluentius, in which Cicero attempts to defend his client Cluentius from the charge of murdering Oppianicus by pointing out that Oppianicus was guilty of fratricide and observing that all forms of wickedness or crime were comprehended in Oppianicus’ murder of his brother. The climax of Wieland, of course, occurs as Clara analyzes her willingness to kill her brother Theodore in self-defense. UNDERWRITING/OVERREADING One cannot help being puzzled, therefore, by Alan Axelrod’s claim (in his gen erally useful monograph on Brown) that “there is nothing in [Cicero’s Pro Cluentius] that bears directly upon Wieland.” 19 Axelrod’s position (though ameliorated by his willingness to examine the metaphorical relevance of Pro Cluentius) can be traced to the tendencies of his critical forbears, who were cu riously content (and sometimes even anxious) to dismiss the details of Brown’s novels, particularly his classical references and multi-lingual puns, as so much “haphazard” or “slovenly” gibberish. 20 As we might expect on the basis of the discussion of overreading in my introduction, the fact that these trivial details and hard-to-follow allusions prove, over and over again, to bear directly on the larger narrative in which they appear is actually more relevant to the paranoia of Wieland than Carwin’s connection with the infamous Illuminati 21 or the (presumable) murder of Wieland that is disguised as spontaneous human combustion or the conspir acy of silence against Clara when her guardian and acquaintances learn that her homicidal brother has escaped prison and intends to murder her. We will have ample opportunity to pursue the paranoid implications of secret soci eties and far-reaching cabals in Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun; what is most interesting about Brown’s reliance on the Illuminati in Wieland is that he seems to use them as a red herring, only one of many strange choices that he makes in the course of the narrative. Certainly Brown’s novels lack the traditional markers of literary mastery (characters drift in and out of the narrative and are sometimes forgotten about entirely; everyone seems to talk like everyone else; the mechanisms used to move the plot ahead are often painfully contrived), but he is quite sophisticated in his use of detail. His seemingly inexhaustible capacity for embedding meaning in the seemingly meaningless details of his narrative cries out more effectively for a paranoid reading than his invocation of the Illuminati. As demonstrable as his clumsiness in other areas is, it is equally easy to see that he pays an almost chronic attention to such details as individual word choices and allusions, 22 as indicated by his penchant for lexical (and particularly onomastic) play. I have already pointed out the ironies and double entendres inscribed in the names of

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the Theodore and Clara in Wieland. But Brown’s playfulness extends through out his corpus and runs the gamut from the ironic to the polyglot to the ana grammatic. W.M.Verhoeven and William J.Scheick have pointed out that Brown’s Ormond, for instance, is an account concerning an inconstant woman named Constantia and her bizarre relationship with a French woman who uses the alias Monrose (French for Rose Mountain). The account is delivered by an unwise woman named Sophia to a seemingly irrelevant German named I.E. Rosenberg (Latin/German for That Is, Rose Mountain). 23 Nelson goes on to point out that the title character of Brown’s longest major novel, Arthur Mervyn, consistently portrays himself as an everyman figure—and that his surname, when coupled with his first initial, produces a homophonic anagram of ‘every man’ (ev’ryman). In a similar vein, Clithero Edny, the protagonist in the tale within a tale of Edgar Huntly, would be the hero of the novel were it not for the imposition of a mediating narrator/hero figure (Huntly) in conjunction with his (Edny’s) own inability to act in accordance with his circumstances: hence the homophonic anagram, ‘tend heroic’ly.’ In an early review of Dunlap’s Life of Charles Brockden Brown (which in cluded some of Brown’s previously unpublished fiction), an anonymous re viewer remarks on Brown’s strange decisions concerning which points in his texts he wanted to underscore and which points he barely touched on: A ludicrous importance is given to trifles; the vast mind is seen busied, amazed and anxious about incidents or intimations that are wholly inad equate to the concern they give or the effects which are traced to them, and which ordinary men would be ashamed to notice. What would be nothing elsewhere is every thing here. The feelings not only appear to obey the impulse they receive and tend unerringly to their object, but in a state of excitement and tumult, they are excellent philosophers; they shew the mind’s perfect consciousness of all that is passing within; they appear to remember that they are afterwards to render an account of themselves…. [Brown’s characters] feel as if they were very peculiar and must attract as much attention as they bestow upon themselves, and es pecially that mischief must lurk in every thing which appears mysterious to them. Then they plunge into solitudes and heap conjectures upon conjectures about endless possibilities. 24 This anonymous reviewer is remarkably attuned to one of Wieland’ s central concerns, a concern that plays into and draws on its fascination with the con nection between overreading and paranoia (though the reviewer uses neither term). Whether the paranoid argument is made concerning the Illuminati or Communist infiltration of the American government, “the vast mind is seen busied, amazed and anxious about incidents or intimations that are wholly inadequate to the concern they give.” This detail-oriented mentality is pres ent in all of Brown’s fiction; and while it is important to see that it is a men tality that must reproduce


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itself in the reader in order to be appreciated, it is perhaps more important to note that it is there, in the voice of Clara Wieland, whether it is perceived or not (for a conspiracy of signification, a conspiracy of details need not be perceived in order to be a conspiracy). Indeed, it is the extent to which Brown allows the insignificant to overdeter mine the significant (the mention of a waterfall to cause water to fall)—the extent to which Brown sets up and maintains an almost mystical and pseudo causal relationship between text and context—it is to this extent that we can see a curiously intense anxiety on the part of the text of Wieland to account for itself. This anxiety is duplicated and reduplicated in Wieland, occurring not only on the level of the characters and the narrator, but extra-textually (i.e. authorially) as well. IS THERE SUCH A THING AS HYSTERICAL SPONTANEOUS COMBUSTION? The connection between paranoia, conspiracy theories, and the compulsion to account for the most seemingly trivial phenomena has been formulated succinctly by Leo Braudy: “the paranoid interpretation…recapitulated the effort to create a personal pattern of meaning that could absorb, explain, and transcendently settle accounts…Paranoia solved your life.” 25 Like America it self, Brown was a child of the enlightenment; and the totalitarian impulse that Adorno detects in the enlightenment project is demonstrated by Brown’s need to account for everything by accounting for the little things and allowing the little things to account for their larger contexts. The beauty of the paranoid assertion that “It’s all a conspiracy” is the word “all,” thanks to the invincible argument that anything that would tend to undermine (or even appear irrel evant to) the conspiracy is itself asserted to be an integral part of the conspir acy; those elements which cannot be directly incorporated into a given conspiracy theory are not dismissed, but held up as representative of that part of the conspiracy behind which the rest is concealed. The explained supernatural is the method that Ann Radcliffe uses in order to “transcendently settle accounts”; but Brown opts for a technique that is at once more involuted (i.e. self-referential, metafictional) and notarized (i.e. otherreferential, antifictional). Not incidentally, Radcliffe’s heroines are made ever more hysterical through the course of the novels in which they ap pear—until things are suddenly explained according to “scientific” or “ra tional” principles. In Wieland, however, Brown presents Clara as given to exaggeration and other symptoms of hysteria from the outset of her tale. And once she reaches the apogee of hysteria, the solution occurs not through ex planation, but violence. Even though her persecution turns out not to have been in her mind, she is left in a state of hysteria even after the narrative is brought to a close and the danger of her brother is removed. In that regard, she is less like the heroine of a Radcliffe novel than the reader of a Radcliffe novel who knows that the danger is confined to the book but applies the sense of danger experienced while reading to such

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ambient phenomena as a slam ming door or a creaking stair. It is a case of hysterical exaggeration to apply our fears from one scenario (the book we are reading) to another (the house in which we are reading the book), and Brown’s Clara Wieland is hysteria run amok because she does not know what to do with her hysteria once it is no longer appropriate, once the stimulus that made it warranted has been re moved from the equation of her life. So she ends up writing precisely the kind of story that a reader of Radcliffe would write once Radcliffe has successfully taken all the ghosts and demons and other things that go bump in the night away from the reader, the kind of frenetic (and heavily plotted) love story that became popular with English and American readers alike in the wake of the gothic novel. In other words, if Wieland reads like two novels, it is because it is an attempt on Brown’s part to explore two different novelistic trajectories, the gothic trajectory that controls (but fails to contain) Clara’s story and the romance trajectory that intrudes at the end as what we can perhaps interpret most productively as an accurate projection of the tendency of the English novel. The fact that the “damn’d mob of scribbling women” about which Hawthorne complains can be seen as having inherited many of their standard devices from an army of imitators of Radcliffe is perhaps the best demonstra tion that the two seemingly different “accounts” in Wieland are not so irrec oncilable as they might initially seem. The novel’s emphasis on its own attempt to “transcendently settle accounts” is even suggested by the emphasis it places on the importance of the various meanings of “account.” The story of Clara’s father, for example, begins with his conversion to the Camissard faith, “on account” of which he leaves England for America, thinking “that it was his duty to disseminate the truths of the gospel among the unbelieving nations” (10). When he fails in this perceived assignment, he begins to expect his death, concerning which we receive the “exact account” that is supplied to Clara by her maternal uncle, “whose profession,” conve niently enough, is “that of a surgeon” (14), and who arrives on the scene of the text just in time to witness and demystify Wieland’s demise, only to dis appear as soon as he has done so. But Brown’s desire to justify the decision to open his novel with anything as strange as the possibility of spontaneous human combustion leaves him dissatisfied with Wieland’s reading of his own death as a way of rendering account for his failure to live up to his own reli gious beliefs, as well as with the surgeon’s opinion that it was “merely an irreg ular expansion of the fluid that imparts warmth to our heart and our blood, caused by the fatigue of the preceding day, or flowing, by established laws, from the condition of the thoughts” (19; emphasis added). For there is a footnote—more scholarly than literary—that directs the reader to “one of the journals of Florence” for a case “exactly parallel” to Wieland’s (19). The note seems more attributable to Brown than to the nar rator (Clara). But in any case, it is strangely out of place, and seems to belong in Brown’s preface, a paragraph of which is spent apologizing for the “extraor dinary and rare”


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phenomena of the novel (specifically Wieland’s combustion and Carwin’s biloquism). 26 There are too many accounts, however. Three contradictory possibilities concerning Wieland’s combustion are simultaneously extended and suppressed by the text. The first contradiction is between Wieland’s proleptic assessment of his death as divine retribution and Clara’s uncle’s assessment, an assessment which, in turn, relies for its support upon Clara’s articulation of it and her (or Brown’s) inclusion of a supporting footnote. Spontaneous combustion is pre sented as a more reasonable account of Wieland’s demise than divine retribu tion. But a third possibility, more reasonable still, the possibility of murder, is suppressed even by the vocabulary of its articulation: My father, when he left the house, besides a loose upper vest and slippers, wore a shirt and drawers. Now he was naked; his skin throughout the greater part of his body was scorched and bruised. His right arm exhib ited marks as of having been struck by some heavy body. His clothes had been removed, and it was not immediately perceived that they were re duced to ashes. His slippers and his hair were untouched…. By his im perfect account, it appeared that while engaged in silent orisons, with thoughts full of confusion and anxiety, a faint gleam suddenly shot athwart the apartment. His fancy immediately pictured to itself, a person bearing a lamp. It seemed to come from behind. He was in the act of turning to examine the visitant, when his right arm received a blow from a heavy club. At the same instant, a very bright spark was seen to light upon his clothes…. This was the sum of the information which he chose to give. There was somewhat in his manner that indicated an imperfect tale. My uncle was inclined to believe that half the truth had been suppressed. (18; emphasis added) We would seem to be justified in thinking that either more or less than “half the truth had been suppressed”; for what is most interesting about the sur geon’s account is that it seems, instead of placing half its weight on Wieland’s testimony, to dismiss that testimony entirely. How does a visitant (whether dimly or hysterically perceived) contribute to the surgeon’s assessment? How does a blow upon the arm—a “fact” the truth of which, as Clara points out, “cannot be doubted” (19)—legitimize Clara’s uncle’s conclusion? One must seek out the journals of Florence in order to understand how these details bolster the surgeon’s case. David Lee Clark points out the parallels between Wieland’s death and the “spontaneous combustion” of Dan G.Maria Bertholi: “the skin on the greater part of both bodies was scorched; in both [cases], the right arm appeared to have been ‘struck with a club’…[and] not a single hair of the head had been touched.” 27 But there is nothing in the text of Wieland to provide the reader with this informa tion, only a footnote that tells the reader (in true Brownian fashion) to abandon the text that s/he is reading in order

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to search out another that will make sense of it. Any reader who fails to scurry off in the prescribed way can only be baffled by the doctor’s ability to reach the conclusion of sponta neous combustion in the face of the testimony that Wieland provides. As Bernard Rosenthal points out, “The reader has only the word of the victim who essentially says a light shone, a club hit him, and a spark ignited his clothing. A rational hypothesis would not be hard to construct.” 28 But what Brown wants us to understand, whether we seek out the jour nals from Florence or not, is that the surgeon’s argument does have a ration ale of its own. It serves as a bizarre parody of enlightenment thought, proceeding, in its own twisted way, from the pretence of conditionality to a strangely unwarranted certitude. If, as the surgeon contends, Wieland did in deed spontaneously combust, then it was probably a result of the “condition of his thoughts,” the thoughts of a man in a state of “confusion and anxiety.” So once we have reached the conclusion that he did spontaneously combust (that conclusion being a trans-rational event that happens behind rather than within the conditional argument—an event that conceals itself, in other words, behind its argument), we can see that Wieland was in no state to un derstand (or accurately relate) the circumstances of his death, which entitles us to dismiss the visitant that he “seemed” to see as a product of his “fancy.” This is precisely how paranoid readings work. Wieland’s death (involving tropes of light and fire) and Brown’s over handling of it pose several questions. Is there something combustible about enlightenment? 29 Can the need to account for phenomena—all aspects of all phenomena—be made to outrun itself? To restate the problem with which this section began (the problem with the traditional paranoid claim that “It’s all a conspiracy”): A theory which presumes to account for everything gives itself permission to account for all other theories, including the theories against which it contends. To move in opposition to traditional logical mod els, i.e. to view our premises in light of our conclusions rather than to reach our conclusions on the basis of our premises, is to foreclose alternative possi bilities and explanations before they have a chance to arise. And whether a man has “seen the light” of religion or works under the light of the scientific method, the conclusion (however tentatively reached by our narrator) is that his thought is what ignites him. 30 Just as Clara’s meticulous account of the argument concerning Pro Cluentius and her subsequent (though arguably consequent) elision of the de tails in the argument concerning the waterfall indicate an ontological status of accounting for phenomena (to the extent that points are either belabored or entirely disregarded), so does Brown’s desire to account for everything leave things curiously unaccounted for. Clara’s overstated need to validate her most provocative claims makes a theme of a narrator’s awareness of the potential for readerly skepticism; and the result is that our attention is brought to bear not upon the explanations that we are given, but the need, both implicitly and ex plicitly traceable to enlightenment cognitive patterns, of explanation generally.


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SHOULD WE BELIEVE HER (EVEN IF SHE ASKS US NOT TO)? My narrative may be invaded by inaccuracy and confusion… What but ambiguities, abruptnesses, and dark transitions, can be expected from the historian who is, at the same time, the sufferer of these disas ters? (147) One of the more problematic elements of Clara Wieland’s narrative is its pre tense that it is not the last word on her bizarre family history. It imagines it self to be in contention with alternative narratives to which we, as readers, have no access. 31 This is pretense, not perversity, since the donné of the novel, as stated in the preface, is that it is an epistolary address from Clara to a “small number of friends” (3). 32 But despite what Mark Seltzer calls “Clara’s repeated concern that she is distorting events by her narration of them, 33 she insists that Carwin’s (non-existent) account “insofar as it differs from [hers], is false” (211). We know that we cannot trust Clara. But I contend that we really have no idea how far not to trust her. 34 There seems to be something coy and care fully contrived about her choice to subvert her own authority and then to (pretend to) conceal that subversion behind a jarringly transparent attack on other sources of authority. Another coy moment in the text occurs when she speaks of her first sighting of Carwin. “Perhaps you will suspect,” she writes, “that such were the first inroads of a passion incident to every female heart…. I shall not controvert the reasonableness of the suspicion, but leave you at lib erty to draw, from my narrative, what conclusions you please” (54). Perhaps the best way to understand the sort of liberty that Clara allows the reader is to examine a metaphorically charged passage on the construction of Wieland’s temple: “My father furnished the dimensions and outlines, but al lowed the artist whom he employed to complete the structure on his own plan” (11–2). The relationship between Wieland and his “artist” seems quite analo gous to that between Brockden Brown (Clara’s figurative father) and his narra tor, whose voice is essential to the execution of what can have been nothing more than an outline without it. But that narrative—albeit a product of Clara’s artistry—serves in turn as an outline for its readers, whose hermeneutic crafts manship must rely wholly upon their assessment of Clara’s credibility. 35 Cynthia Jordan 36 is the most articulate of a host of critics who speak to the issue of the unreliable narrator in Brown’s work (and, by extension, of the place of Brown’s work in American literature). Clara, as Jordan points out, “shows herself to be, by nature and by design, an eminently unreliable narra tor” (165), making her the vehicle through which Brown “originates episte mological themes that have come to be recognized as quintessentially American, themes long acknowledged in the works of our major writers, Hawthorne, Melville, and James” (171). Jordan’s argument is nicely seconded by Roland Hagenbuchle, who observes that “In view of the epistemological crisis in post-Revolutionary

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American culture, it is hardly surprising that the ‘unreliable narrator’ is an American invention, and ‘unreliable narratives’ con tinue to be a specifically American device that…achieves its climax in the works of James.” 37 Whether the unreliable narrator is a distinctively American invention or not (and certain critics would be inclined to dispute the point with Hagenbuchle), Brown’s use of the unreliable narrator is itself a sort of chal lenge to overread the novel, a challenge for us to spot Clara’s inconsistencies and to use the story that she tells as a means toward understanding the story that happened. If we look at the details of the narrative (as in the case of her father’s spontaneous combustion), we can draw our own conclusions. We are asked, in other words, to read not only the text that is there, but the text that isn’t. Clara’s version of reality is a reading of reality that, by its admission of its own hysterical inadequacies, provokes alternative readings in its reader. The text itself, in this case, is not the text; it is an interpretation that must in turn be interpreted, with levels of meaning forever emerging from beneath other levels of meaning. To play the textual game of Wieland is to play a paranoid game, a game of assuming that we can outread Clara’s own reading of the events in her life on our way to getting to the truth. Somewhere in the details of the names and inter-textual allusions, we are encouraged to assume that there is a secret order that is ultimately decipherable. On its own, Clara’s unreliability serves simply as an invitation for the reader to detect the ways in which Wieland unsays itself, the ways in which it allows us to read the text that isn’t there. But that unreliability is coupled with an imaginary consternation concerning non-existent competing narratives in order to force the reader to consider which texts precisely are not there and whether we are supposed to be reading them. TRIAL (& TRIAL) & ERROR (& ERROR & TRIAL) Godwin came and all was light. 38 Brown’s unmistakable indebtedness to Godwin is an excellent starting point for an examination of what Clara’s unreliability may be trying to get at, particularly when we recall Godwin’s Caleb Williams as one of the first and finest examples of textual disfigurement and self-destruction. Caleb Williams is structured by five trials: two of them witnessed by Williams (at first- or sec ond-hand); and the other three requiring him to speak in his own defense. The paranoia that critics usually talk about in Caleb Williams is a paranoia that happens to such characters as Williams and Falkland in the novel: Falkland’s paranoid obsession with the preservation of his honor and the para noia that he induces in Williams through the persecutory figure of Gines (a henchman/secret agent who hounds Williams to the verge of a cosmic dis trust, a belief not that everything is out to get him, but that everything might be). But paranoia operates in Caleb Williams on a more


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profound level, a level of secret code in which the details that structure the narrative actually com municate a message that precisely controverts the message of the prose of the novel (in much the same way that the prose concerning Wieland’s combus tion raises the possibility of a murderous conspiracy precisely by avoiding any mention of murder). The first of the five trials concerns Williams’ master, Falkland, who stands accused of the murder of a minor character named Tyrrel. Falkland’s defense sets up a pattern of exculpation according to which the accused pro ceeds from a proclamation of innocence to a claim of indifference concerning the outcome of the trial to an assertion of the burdensomeness of living to a strangely dissonant request for exoneration: “I stand here accused of a crime, the most black that any human creature is capable of perpetrating. I am innocent…. My life has been spent in the keenest and most unintermitted sensibility to reputation. I am al most indifferent as to what shall be the event of this day. I would not open my mouth upon the occasion, if my life were the only thing that was at stake…. Your decision can never have the efficacy to prevent the miserable remains of my existence from being the most intolerable of all burthens…. Gentlemen, if by your decision you could take away my life, without that act being connected with my disgrace, I would bless the cord that stopped the breath of my existence for ever…. My life is a worthless thing. But my honour, the empty remains of honour I have now to boast, is in your judgment, and you will each of you, from this day, have imposed upon yourselves the task of its vindicators. It is little that you can do for me; but it is not less your duty to do that little.” 39 The second trial concerns a pugilistic peasant who strikes an adversary dead with a single blow. The peasant begins by insisting that the homicide was an “accident,” and is reported, in Williams’ summary of his defense, to have said that he did not care what became of him…. He did not know but it would be kindness in them to hang him out of the way; for his con science would reproach him as long as he lived, and the figure of the de ceased, as he had lain senseless and without motion at his feet, would perpetually haunt him…. One unlucky minute had poisoned all his hopes, and made life a burden to him. (134) Falkland, who had been “discharged with every circumstance of credit” (106) in his own trial, orders that the peasant be “discharged” (135). Williams is the accused in the third trial, but seems not to have learned the proper way to conduct his defense. Although innocent of the charges against him (whereas Falkland was guilty of murder and the peasant, at least, of involuntary manslaughter), Williams simply proclaims his innocence and asserts Falkland’s

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guilt. He does not pretend to be apathetic about the trial and mentions nothing about his life being a burden—and is promptly imprisoned. He releases himself under his own recognizance in order to find another judge, to whom he relates a more insistent proclamation of his own innocence and a more elaborate version of Falkland’s culpability. Once again, no gestures toward indifference or the burdensomeness of life are made. He is roundly censured by the judge before being returned to prison. The novel ends with another trial, in which Williams triumphs over Falkland, though he claims to be incapable of relishing the victory (and offers a bizarre sort of apology for his own innocence): “[T]he hateful mistake [Williams’ accusation of Falkland] into which I fell has produced the present scene. I now see that mistake in all its enor mity…. I came to accuse, but am compelled to applaud. I proclaim to all the world that Mr. Falkland is a man worthy of affection and kindness, and that I am myself the basest and most odious of mankind! Never will I forgive myself the iniquity of this day. The memory will always haunt me, and embitter every hour of my existence. In thus acting I have been a mur derer—a cool, deliberate, unfeeling murderer. —I have said what my ac cursed precipitation has obliged me to say. Do with me as you please! I ask no favour. Death would be a kindness, compared to what I feel!” (334) Williams’ adoption of the rhetorical strategy employed by Falkland and the peasant results in Falkland’s confession and Williams’ own exoneration. For the third time in the book, the assertion of apathy (“Do with me as you please!”) and of the burdensomeness of life (“Death would be a kindness”) re sult in a legal triumph. For the third time in the book, Williams has leveled formal accusations against Falkland; and it is hard to fail to see why the charges finally stick. It seems that the only lesson Williams has taken away from his adven tures is an awareness of when he should lie—a lesson in the light of which it becomes almost impossible to read his address to the reader at the end of his story as anything other than the baldest sarcasm: I thought that, if Falkland were dead, I should return once again to all that makes life worth possessing. I thought that, if the guilt of Falkland were established, fortune and the world would smile upon my efforts. Both these events are accomplished; and it is now only that I am truly miserable…. Falkland, I will think only of thee, and from that thought will draw everfresh nourishment for my sorrows!… I began these mem oirs with the idea of vindicating my character. I have now no character that I wish to vindicate: but I will finish them that [Falkland’s] story may be fully understood; and that, if those errors of [his] life be known which [he] so ardently desiredst to conceal, the world may at least not hear and repeat a half-told and mangled tale. (336–7)


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Although many critics claim to appreciate the relevance of Caleb Williams to Wieland—an appreciation based on the text of Wieland as well as on the basis of Brown’s remarks about (and comparison of himself to) Godwin during the composition of the novel, no serious critical attempt has been made to compare the ending of Wieland with that of Caleb Williams. It would seem to be a comparison worth making; the possibility that Brown’s final chapter (like Williams’ postscript) is a sort of coded message, a message that must be overread in order to be read at all. In the next section, we shall examine the ways in which Williams’ mangled tale (mangled nearly to the point of annihi lation by a contextual sarcasm which enables the conclusion to unsay itself) in forms the structure of Wieland, the ways in which Clara Wieland’s imitation of her initialsake, Caleb Williams, carries through precisely to Wieland’ s final chapter, which exists in the same sort of tension with the rest of the novel as that between Williams’ postscript and everything that precedes it. LOOSE ENDS OF A MANGLED TALE Anyone familiar with the burgeoning body of Brown criticism knows that Charles Brockden Brown is a particularly difficult writer to take seriously. 40 The climax of Wieland, for example, is somehow eclipsed by the anti-climax, the final chapter that Brown seemingly appended to the novel because, ac cording to most critics, he needed to tie up loose ends. 41 And the loose ends that needed tying up pertained to what is generally referred to as the “abortive Conway subplot,” concerning an English girl named Louisa Conway who finds herself imported into an American novel rather sporadically through the first half dozen chapters and then ends up dropping out of the narrative en tirely until the end, when her family history rears its superficially incongru ous head—apparently for the sole purpose of stripping the book of any vestige of unity that it might have claimed for itself. Wieland’s readers so frequently denounce the closing chapter of the novel as bad—glaringly, hideously, un forgivably bad 42 —that one critic (Tompkins) has raised the interesting ques tion of whether Brown was even trying to write a good book. 43 As one would expect, there are certain critics whose readings of Wieland fly in the face of the consensus, critics who contend that instead of being in contestably and obviously bad, Wieland’s final chapter is problematically and subtly good— or at least clever. Russo, for instance, incorporates the moraliza tion of the final chapter into his argument that the “double-tongued deceiver” of the novel is a schizophrenic Clara, who is, unbeknownst to herself, the real biloquist of the novel. And Bill Christopherson argues that the chapter is about the psychic infidelity of the minor Mrs. Stuart, who, according to Christopherson’s reading, “‘falls,’ in other words, even though she stops short of committing the deeds she thinks about.” Christophersen contends that the “same kind of guilt compromises Clara: though she does not actually wield the knife against her brother, the

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realization that she has been on the verge of doing so traumatizes her and constitutes a virtual ‘fall.’” 44 I am not about to deny the subtleties of Wieland; indeed, I stress them. My larger argument, after all, is about paranoia, which, examined from a lit erary viewpoint, must always get back to its most literary symptom, that of overreading. So I cannot object to Russo’s argument on the grounds that it has to go so far out of its way to reach its own conclusion; I do object, however, to his implicit contention that his argument is the best sense-making appara tus that we have when it comes to dealing with Wieland’s final chapter. If Russo’s argument holds water, it is as a resonance, an implicit possibility that exists in tension with a more obvious, more historicized explanation. But since the obvious has to be dealt with—even in a setting of overreading— we should probably begin our examination of the final chapter by considering its literal context, according to the bracketed information we re ceive at the beginning: “[Written three years after the foregoing, and dated at Montpellier]” (234; Brown’s brackets). And from that literal context of Montpellier three years later, we need only take a surprisingly effortless step to the literary context that had begun to take shape some four years prior to the novel’s composition. Everyone in the 1790s knew that the proper setting for a Gothic novel was in a Catholic nation. France, Spain, and Italy were favorite choices for English gothicists; but a gothic novel simply could not take place in England. The gothic “device” of a Catholic setting was so thoroughly understood that Jane Austen could make it integral to one of the most important jests in her Northanger Abbey, the definitive parody of the gothic novel. Though left un published until 1818, Northanger Abbey was finished and had been sold to a publisher by 1803. 45 In the book, Catherine Morland, Austen’s heroine, has read far too many of the gothic novels that flooded the English market in the final decade of the eighteenth century The most important book in Morland’s gothic education is, of course, Udolpho; but Austen ridicules Radcliffe less than the elements belonging to the gothic tradition; more than anything, she ridicules the formula of the form, listing several acid tests by which any potential heroine can tell whether she is in a gothic novel or not. Austen’s characters are hyperaware of literary forms—so much so that when Catherine Morland confides in her beloved Henry Tilden that she sus pects his father of having murdered his wife, Henry hardly bothers to point out that he and his sister witnessed their mother’s death. Instead, he declares, in a long-winded fit of intertextuality, that Northanger Abbey is in a non- Catholic setting: Charming as were all Mrs Radcliffe’s works, and charming even as were the works of all her imitators, it was not in them perhaps that human na ture, at least in the midland counties of England, was to be looked for. Of the Alps and Pyrenees, with their pine forests and their vices, they might give a faithful delineation; and Italy, Switzerland, and the South of France,


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might be as fruitful in horrors as they were there represented…. But in England it was not so. (199–202) Neither Charles Brockden Brown nor his Clara Wieland, of course, had access to this passage. But the Catholic-Protestant dichotomy that Austen points out was rampant in the gothic literature of the time, so incontestably and recognizably rampant that it deserved to be ridiculed. Moreover, it is im portant to remember that Austen, in ridiculing the conventions of the gothic novel, was not engaging in a particularly arcane or erudite form of humor. Brown’s critics are usually ready to concede Brown’s debt to the gothic novel as well as the importance of the gothic genre at the time of Brown’s writing; but they don’t seem to take their own acknowledgments seriously They freely admit that Brown, particularly in Wieland, was manipulating the gothic for mula, but rarely explain how or why. Norman Grabo suggests that Brown single-handedly attempted to forge an American literary tradition 46 (and I agree). But what does it mean for the first American novel to be—or at least to sport the trappings of—a gothic? Why should the first American novel imitate a form developed in England that systematically places itself in Catholic Europe? By making his first novel a gothic and setting it in America, Brown asks where the novel belongs, where the gothic novel should go, and what direction the American novel should take. His answer is both sophisticated and accessible. One of the most interesting things about Wieland is that the book is completely at odds with its narrator, who wants to write her story as a gothic even though it clearly lacks so many gothic elements. Much like Austen’s Catherine Morland, Clara Wieland struggles to see herself as a gothic hero ine. But the story of Wieland—the outline supplied to the narrator-artist by the father-figure Brown— denies Clara, over and over again, the Catholic fodder that she needs, in much the same way that Catherine Morland is de nied that fodder by her beloved Henry as well as Austen’s mocking third person narrative voice. Clara’s grandfather, for instance, is a native of Saxony (37), where Lutheranism had officially displaced Catholicism as early as 1560. And Clara’s half-hearted attempt to associate her father with the French (traditionally Catholic in the Gothic novel) is frustrated by her admission that her father’s mind was poisoned by the Camissards, radical French Protestants. 47 Significantly, Clara almost begins her tale anew in the fifth chapter, when the narrative begins, unsuccessfully, to be tugged toward Europe by Clara’s loveinterest, Pleyel, who wants to persuade Clara’s brother Theodore of “the necessity of making a voyage to Europe” (39). In the first chapter, Clara opened her discussion of her family history by saying, “My father’s an cestry was noble on the paternal side… My grandfather was a younger brother, and a native of Saxony” (6). We return to precisely this sort of decla ration in the opening paragraph of the fifth chapter, when Clara decides to re iterate, “My ancestors were noble Saxons” (37).

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In the intervening pages the narrative has gotten no closer to Catholic Europe or gothic castles; but Clara has done her best to identify herself with Radcliffe’s Emily St. Aubert. Both The Mysteries of Udolpho and Wieland open with mysterious circumstances connected to the deaths of the hero ines’ fathers. Interestingly, the only unresolved mystery in all 600+ pages of The Mysteries of Udolpho is the first one, concerning the unreported line that Emily St. Aubert read (despite her father’s instructions) while burning his papers after his death. Similarly, the single most inexplicable event in Wieland is doubtless the combustion of Clara’s father (as Carwin’s bilo quism 48 and Clara’s somnambulism and Theodore’s religious mania are all adequately demystified). But perhaps the most important feature of the fifth chapter is that it contains Clara’s superficial repudiation of gothic trumpery: The tales of apparitions and enchantments did not possess that power over my belief which could even render them interesting. I saw nothing in them but ignorance and folly, and was a stranger, even to that terror which is pleasing. But this incident [the disembodied voice heard by Pleyel and Theodore] was different from any that I had ever before known. Here were proofs of a sensible and intelligent existence, which could not be denied. Here was information obtained and imparted by means unquestionably super-human. (45) The means, of course, are not “unquestionably super-human” at all. Even be fore his admission of responsibility for the voices, Carwin suggests that they can most reasonably be attributed to a biloquist with inscrutable motives. 49 Clara, however, has to regard the voices as superhuman in order to draw a dis tinction between the contemptible gothic heroines of novels and the real gothic heroines of life. The contempt that she pretends to feel for the gothic novel is contradicted over and over again by the actual events of her story, which follows that of Emily St. Aubert with as much precision as Austen’s par ody. A mere two paragraphs before Clara’s attack on the gothic novel, for in stance, Pleyel is informed by a voice that his lover is dead. When he asks the voice how it knows, it responds, “From a source that cannot fail.” This is pre cisely what happens to Emily St. Aubert, whose uncle tells her that her beloved Valancourt has degraded himself and is no longer worthy of her. When she asks him how he knows, he assures her that his information comes from a source that cannot fail. And in both cases, of course, the information turns out to be misinformation. 50 Clara’s ambivalence toward the gothic—her explicit contempt for it matched with her persistent imitation—is reminiscent of Brown’s own am bivalence. Brown’s ambivalence toward gothic devices manifested itself in var ious articles that he wrote as the editor of the Weekly Magazine. In one such article, he writes: Take an old castle; pull down a part of it, and allow the grass to grow on the battlements, and provide the owls and bats with uninterrupted habi


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tations among the ruins. Pour a sufficient quantity of heavy rain upon the hinges and bolts of the gates, so that when they are attempted to be opened, they may creak most fearfully. Next, take an old man and woman, and employ them to sleep in a part of this castle, and provide them with frightful stories of lights that appear in the western or the east ern tower every night, and of music heard in the neighbouring woods, and ghosts dressed in white who perambulate the place. Convey to this castle a young lady; consign her to the care of the old man and woman, who must relate to her all they know, that is all they do not know, but only suspect. Make her dreadfully terrified at the relation, but dreadfully impatient to behold the reality. Convey her, perhaps on the second night of her arrival, through a trap-door, and from the trap door to a flight of steps downwards, and from a flight of steps to a sub terraneous passage, and from a subterraneous passage, to a door that is shut, and from that to a door that is open, and from that to a cell, and from that to a chapel, and from a chapel back to a subterraneous passage again; here present either a skeleton with a live face, or a living body with the head of a skeleton, or a ghost all in white, or a groan from a distant part of a cavern, or the shake of a cold hand, or a suit of armour mov ing—fierce ‘put out the light, and then’ — Let this be repeated for some nights in succession, and after the lady has been dissolved to a jelly with her fears, let her be delivered by the man of her heart, and married. 51 Or again: One merit the writer may at least claim; that of calling forth the passions and engaging the sympathy of the reader, by means hitherto unemployed by preceding authors. Puerile superstition and exploded manners; Gothic castles and chimeras, are the materials usually employed for this end. 52 But despite Brown’s ambivalence toward the formulaic nature of gothic fic tion, he thinks somewhat highly of Ann Radcliffe: Ann Radcliffe is, without doubt, the most illustrious of the picturesque writers…. Her two last romances, ‘Udolpho,’ and ‘The Italian,’ are little else than a series of affecting pictures connected by a pleasing scene. This is the great and lasting excellence of her works; and, to limit the attention, as is usually done, to her human figures, is no less absurd than to look at nothing in a sea-view but the features of the pilot… Yet Mrs. Radcliffe’s work is beautiful and interesting… The Castle of Otranto laid the foun dation of a style of novel writing, which was carried to perfection by Mrs. Radcliffe… The great talents of Mrs. Radcliffe made some atonement for the folly of this mode of composition, and gave some importance to

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exploded fables and childish fears, by the charms of sentiment and de scription; but the multitude of her imitators seem to have thought that description and sentiment were impertinent intruders, and by lowering the mind somewhat to its ordinary state, marred and counteracted those awful feelings, which true genius was properly employed in raising. 53 Nonetheless, the best that Wieland can do for Clara is an imitation- Catholic villain. Carwin masquerades as a Spanish Jesuit. 54 When Clara writes of Carwin’s “transformation into a Spaniard” (68), she italicizes the term, which happens to be the subtitle of the novel. But a genuine Jesuit vil lain cannot be imported into an American gothic any more than an American gothic, despite its narrator’s best efforts, can be imported to Catholic Europe. Fictions in Wieland seem to respect national boundaries, which is why the German tragedy that the Wieland circle intends to perform for itself never sees the light of day in Pennsylvania (80). Wieland’s twenty-first chapter is crucial to its development, for it is here, with a quarter of the novel remaining, that Clara finally makes up her mind to take her story to Catholic Europe. She tells us that her uncle “imagined that new airs would restore my languishing constitution… For this end, he pro posed to me to take up my abode with him in France or Italy.” Is it possible for her narrative to move? It would seem to be so; for only two paragraphs ear lier we learn that Pleyel’s German sweetheart, Madame de Stolberg, has trekked to the U.S. in search of him. But she doesn’t go—not for another fifty pages, not until her tale has been concluded, not until the only material that remains is the material that strikes the reader as an intrusion upon or violation of that which has preceded it (like Caleb Williams’ sarcasm). What is the place of the English novel in America? How thoroughly should American novelists conform to the English tradition? Brown’s answer is patriotic, perhaps even jingoistic. The fact is that Brown’s novel, which he regarded, with good reason, as the first important American novel, “works” all the way up to the final chapter, i.e. until it con forms to the tradition of the gothic novel as established in England. The novel becomes a tiresome plot summary from the moment Clara Wieland an nounces that she currently resides in France, one of the few locations where, according to English convention, the Gothic novel is supposed to take place. Brown sounds a warning here that he will repeat in the preface to Edgar Huntly and that was later confirmed by the relative failure of Cooper’s Precaution 55 : The American literary tradition cannot imitate the English. English literary practices, much like the character of Louisa Conway, can fade into and out of a novel, but must finally be left behind —or they will wreck everything. 56


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STRUCTURAL LITERARY NATIONALISM Surprisingly little has been made of the fact that Brown’s narrative of bilo quism (i.e. of too many voices) climaxes in a moment of silence. Clara Wieland tells us that at the moment of her realization that her brother Theodore is on the verge of murdering her, her “tongue refused its office” (221). Godwin’s Williams characterizes a moment of Tyrrell’s silence with pre cisely the same phrase (99). Both novels are very much about voice; and Brown seems particularly interested in exposing/exploiting the limitations of the first person voice of his narrator. Yet, as Robert Hume points out, “first person narration by the protago nist is not well suited to eliciting the sort of effect gothic writers try to produce in the reader.” 57 Radcliffe and Lewis present their gothic narratives through omniscient narrators who limit their own omniscience in order to create an aesthetic tension that is finally dissipated by the need, on the part of the writ ers and their readers, “to transcendently settle accounts.” They create the same cognitive anxiety in their reader that exists in their characters, so that when in cidents such as Ludovico’s abduction in Udolpho (which is accounted for in terms of a conspiracy that is almost more laughable than the supernatural al ternative) is demystified, the reader is left feeling grateful for the absurd ac count. Godwin’s first person narrator settles accounts all along, by cuing us into Falkland’s almost incredible conspiracy (involving his henchman Gines as well as the readily exploitable vestiges of English feudalism) against Williams. As nearly as the reader can determine, the conspiracy against Williams is real, though the question that remains concerns whether the detection of a conspir acy, even when it is real, is still indicative of a paranoid mode of consciousness. Brown bridges the gap between Godwin and the more traditional goth icists, employing the first person voice of Caleb Williams along with the gothic trappings of the school of Radcliffe in order to institute an American litera ture, a literature that, according to Fiedler “is the most gothic of any in the West” (54). Brown’s use of Godwin’s first person paranoid voice is repetition with a difference: the difference being that Clara Wieland does not seem to realize that she is more suited to a Godwinian novel of ideas than to the gothic novel into which she attempts to inscribe herself. To take things one step fur ther, the difference in this repetition with a difference is itself a repetition, an employment (albeit ultimately unsuccessful) of the tropes and conventions of gothic narrative into a narrative in which they do not belong. Brown’s American Tale is really little more than a suturing of the two most popular prose literary styles flourishing in late eighteenth-century England. But what is arguably new, and arguably American about this suturing is that it is not purely synthetic or reconciliatory. Not only are the two literary modes not made to work together; they are not allowed to do so. Pains are ob viously taken to keep them at odds with one another, to pit the Godwinian mode against the Radcliffean, to prevent them from harmonizing into an aes thetic unity. Clara struggles vainly to get to Europe and realize her status as a gothic heroine

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precisely when she is least in need of that literary convention in order to qualify as the American Emily St. Aubert. Brown’s use of spontaneous human combustion as an explanation of Wieland’s divine immolation and his demystification of the “supernatural” voices the Wieland’s hear as a joke played by Carwin the biloquist are precisely evocative of Radcliffe’s explained supernatural. Moreover, these events occur in the portion of the text that is the most fraught with danger for our heroine, i.e. when she has most reason to fear phys ical danger from her psychotic brother and sexual assault from Carwin. But there is one more ingredient in Radcliffean narrative than the coupling of fears of sexual assault/threats of physical danger with seemingly supernatural phe nomena that ultimately prove explicable. That ingredient is the frustrated love plot, which is the role that Pleyel fulfills in Clara Wieland’s narrative. But Clara is too busy trying to move her eminently gothic story to Catholic Europe to re alize that it is already gothic enough. And when she finally gets to Montpellier, all of the other gothic elements are missing. Pleyel’s love plot has been worked out; the threat of the homicidal brother has been removed; and the mysterious voices have been explained (though inadequately) by Carwin. Significantly, Clara only manages to ruin her own gothic tale because of the limitation she faces of being a first-person narrator. When she is in America and is most beset by the trappings of a gothic narrative, she is not allowed to know that she is so beset. The empowered figures in the novel (her uncle and the political authorities)—precisely as is the case with Falkland’s manipulation of the empowered aristocracy in Caleb Williams—constitute a de facto conspir acy against her, deciding that it is better for her not to know that her homicidal brother has escaped prison, so that she does not know to be frightened when she has the most reason to be frightened. The aristocrats who help Falkland to per secute Williams do not believe Falkland to be guilty any more than the people who assist Clara’s uncle in the conspiracy of silence believe Clara to be in real danger. But in both novels, precautions that might otherwise be perceived as paranoid on the part of the first-person narrator/characters are proven to be fully warranted. The difference, however, is that Caleb Williams uses his para noia to combat the conspiracy against him while it is operating, whereas Clara does not know to become paranoid until it is too late. She disintegrates into a paranoid state only after she is removed from all danger. And it is precisely at this point that she delivers the final chapter, with its terribly complicated plot lines involving terribly insignificant characters in what appears to be a terrible muddle of protoVictorian love plots and duels. Precisely as was said of Brown by the anonymous reviewer, Clara’s mind is now seen to be “busied, amazed and anxious about incidents or intimations that are wholly inadequate to the con cern they give or the effects which are traced to them.” I said at the outset of this chapter that in order to understand Brown’s project, we would have to examine it not only from an intra- and inter-textual standpoint, but from a meta-textual standpoint as well. Wieland is not only about the failure of Clara’s narrative to generate the skittish paranoia that Radcliffe induces in her


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reader through an omniscient account of bumps in the night and mysterious lights that serve as a code to reveal an otherwise con cealed order of malevolent beings perceived to be in league against a heroine. Neither is it limited to an examination of the ways in which authority figures persecute innocents through witting and unwitting abuses of power. Nor is the real paranoia in Wieland to be found simply in the kind of overreading that its detail-driven signification invites. For though there are hidden persecutory or ders that exist in the narrative on all of these levels, the real site of a paranoid battle in Wieland, the real hidden force that is out to get Clara is the structure of the narrative that she attempts to tell and its refusal to do her bidding. The final chapter, the one that Clara is allowed to deliver once she accomplishes her book-long objective of getting to Catholic Europe, is a sort of textual destruc tion of the narrator. Only when Clara achieves her objective does she genuinely lose control of her narrative; precisely when the narrative seems to be playing into her hands, doing her bidding, it is actually subverting her, attacking her more successfully than Carwin or her insane brother ever did. Brown, whom W.M.Verhoeven calls “the trickster-artist,” has elevated literary conspiracy to a meta-textual level by pitting Clara’s own narrative against her. Where Radcliffe gives us an omniscient rendering of a situation meant to induce para noia, and where Godwin gives us a first-person account of a situation that ac tually calls for paranoia, Brown shifts the paranoia from the situation in the text to the site of literary production itself, allowing the competing agendas of the various components of narrative to combat one another through (perhaps overly) subtle sign systems and allusions. The transformative property of Brown’s Wieland; or the Transformation, an American Tale, in other words, is ideological as well as aesthetic. It unites the textual conspiracy of Radcliffe’s “explained supernatural” with the socio political conspiracy of Caleb Williams to defend itself and the American novel from the perceived threat of an English cultural colonialism that was all too thoroughly entrenched at the time of Wieland’s composition. It is a tale meant, like Brown’s other novels as well as his literary criticism, “to foster the new American literature in its own ‘War of Independence’ from Europe”; 58 it is a beginning not because of what it precedes chronologically, but of what proceeds from the transformation that it effects—a revolution (distinctively American and distinctly uneasy) in the relation between competing forms of narrative, authors and audiences, narrators and readers—a revolution that takes its next step in the work of Hawthorne, whose Marble Faun was released in England, of all places, under Wieland’s subtitle: The Transformation.

Chapter Two “Hidden Significance”: The Marble Faun as Post Script to Seven Gables

But—allowing that he had caught a true glimpse into the hidden signif icance of Miriam’s gesture—what a terrible thralldom did it suggest! Free as she seemed to be—beggar as he looked—the nameless vagrant must then be dragging the beautiful Miriam through the streets of Rome, fet tered and shackled more cruelly than any captive queen of yore follow ing in an emperor’s triumph. 1 [T]he obsessive and ironic repetitions in The Marble Faun…suggest that Hawthorne perceived himself not as regaining his former creativity but as copying it. 2 HAWTHORNE REVISING HAWTHORNE The purpose of this chapter is to examine the ways in which Nathaniel Hawthorne “turns the screw” in the project of the relocation of the paranoid consciousness that we explored in Brown. In our discussion of Wieland, we saw that the paranoia in the text was actually less significant than the paranoid structure of the text, the hidden layer of meaning on which Brown’s narrator could be seen as pitted against her own narrative. In Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, we shall again be examining literal examples of paranoia (most obvi ously, the Catholic conspiracy responsible for the abduction of Hilda near the end of the narrative); but once again, the example of paranoia in the text shall prove to be less significant than the way in which paranoia—in the sense of a belief in a secretly antagonistic force that others fail to see—structures the text. For although this argument is hardly the first treatment of The Marble Faun to regard that novel as Hawthorne’s response to his own The House of the Seven Gables, it is the first to suggest that Faun’s relation to Gables is one of conspiratorial opposition. In other words, this chapter shall move us from the pitting of a narrator (Clara Wieland) against her own narrative ( Wieland) to the pitting of one narrative ( The Marble Faun) against another ( The House of the Seven Gables). In order to examine this textual conflict, we shall first have to explore the most obvious ways in which The Marble Faun imitates The House of the Seven

“HIDDEN SIGNIFICANCE”

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Gables (and shall be obliged to cover some familiar critical terrain with a new sense of focus). But before moving on to the subtler levels of imitation between the two texts, we will do well to concentrate on what The Marble Faun itself has to say about how imitation works and what it can accomplish. As we shall see, its arguments on the subject of imitation are extensive and thoroughly developed. Then we will be well positioned not only to examine individual moments of imitation between the two texts, but to understand what kind of work, according to The Marble Faun, this imitation does. Ultimately, we shall discover that Faun ’s imitation of Gables does precisely the same kind of work between the two novels that the Catholic conspiracy to abduct Hilda does within The Marble Faun. Specifically, we shall see that Faun recognizes a conspiracy of abduction in itself in order to suggest the presence of a conspiracy of murder in Gables. A COMMON THREAD There are many similarities between Faun and Gables—the most obvious oc curring, perhaps, on the levels of characterization, leitmotif, vocabulary, and imagery. These similarities will be discussed at length later in this chapter, but the most important connection between the two novels is almost certainly their thematic linkage: a foregrounded concern with the contaminative prop erty of sin. In his preface to The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne rather boldly (if somewhat ironically) announces the moral that his novel is meant to im press upon the reader: “the truth, namely, that the wrongdoing of one gener ation lives into the successive ones, and, divesting itself of every temporary advantage, becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief.” 3 The idea that indi vidual transgression is larger than the individual who transgresses, that the sins of the father are the sins of the son, is what structures the feud between the Maules and the Pyncheons in Gables. With the marriage at the end of Gables, the property dispute between the Maules and Pyncheons is resolved, so that only the sin itself (“pure and uncontrollable”) remains—despite the fact that the transgressor, his victim, and even the motive for the transgression have all been eliminated from the equation. This notion of sin becoming larger than itself and exceeding the control of the original transgressor is quite similar to the position adopted by the nar rator in The Marble Faun. “An individual wrongdoing,” he observes, “melts into the great mass of human crime, and makes us—who dreamed only of our own little separate sin—makes us guilty of the whole” (177). Hilda reiterates this idea when she scolds Miriam, “While there is a single guilty person in the universe, each innocent one must feel his innocence tortured by that guilt. Your deed, Miriam, has darkened the whole sky!” (212). The narrator imme diately ratifies Hilda’s point by adding, “Every crime destroys more Edens than our own!” (212). As similar as this notion of the growth of sin is to that espoused in Gables, there is a difference. For here the sinner’s guilt is not trans mitted to the sinner’s

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progeny, but rather has the effect of transmitting the sin ner into a sense of universal guilt. For now, however, the similarity in theme is more important than the difference. It is the first link in what Elzbieta Olesky has perceptively called a “chain of metonymies” between Gables and Faun. I am indebted to Olesky not only for raising an intelligent question about the link between these two novels, but for articulating it so clearly: “What happens when the ‘chain of metonymies’ extends beyond the limits of narrative, when one of an author’s novels (not necessarily meant as a sequel) picks up the narrative threads or… ‘doubles back’ to an earlier novel, seeking ‘to become’…the totalizing, or universalizing, metaphor.” 4 Her own answer is that Gables is a sort of prepa ration for Faun, evidence of which she sees most clearly in her reading of Jaffrey Pyncheon’s “mysterious death” in Gables as a pre-enactment of the “powerful scene of the murder of [Miriam’s] Model” in Faun (16). Like Olesky, Alfred H.Marks is interested in reading the scene of Jaffrey Pyncheon’s mysterious death in Gables. He is less invested in linking this death to Faun, however, than in contending that Clifford Pyncheon is to a certain extent responsible for Jaffrey’s demise. 5 While I agree with Olesky and Marks, both critics stop short of making their arguments as strong as possi ble. Their arguments exist in an as yet unrealized symbiosis; as we shall see, Marks’ notion of Clifford’s guilt is precisely the best way we have of cinching Olesky’s sense of the connection between Gables and Faun; and Olesky’s no tion of the connections between the two novels is the best way we have of cinching Marks’ argument about Clifford’s guilt in Gables. But before we make either the case for Clifford’s guilt or for the extent to which Faun imitates Gables, we will do well to explore the rules of imita tion that Faun explicitly provides us. For if it is important that Faun is a copy of Gables, it is perhaps even more important that Faun tells us precisely what we can and cannot expect copies to accomplish. A CONSPIRACY OF IMITATIONS In the course of The Marble Faun, Hawthorne conditions his reader into a very precise relation to imitation—through a series of lectures on the subject that he periodically interrupts his text in order to deliver. These lectures begin with the distinction that he insists upon making between Hilda (who “ceased to aim at original achievement in consequence of the very gifts which so exquisitely fitted her to profit by familiarity with the works of the mighty Old Masters” [57]) and the other copyists of Rome (who “attempt only a su perficial imitation” [59]). The difference between her copies and the other copies, Hawthorne insists, is real; Hilda’s productions are “marvelous” be cause they “come from her hands with what the beholder felt must be the light which the old master had left upon the original in bestowing his final and most ethereal touch” (59). Other copyists, when they fail (as they always do) to imitate their target originals to perfection, are


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said to have come up short: “invariably they leave out just the indefinable charm that involves the last, inestimable value” (58); but when a copy of Hilda’s differs from its orig inal, she seems to have been “enabled to execute what the great master had conceived in his imagination, but had not so perfectly succeeded in putting upon canvas” (59). The vast majority of imitations may fall short of their ob jects; but there are some imitations that actually outdo their originals; in deed, some of the works of the “mighty old masters” are only fully realized through Hilda’s imitations of them. Having made as much of this distinction as he can, Hawthorne pro ceeds, in the manner that characterizes most of the rhetorical moves of The Marble Faun, to collapse it. He concludes by observing that Hilda “was but a finer instrument, a more exquisitely effective piece of mechanism, by the help of which the spirit of some great departed painter now first achieved his ideal, centuries after his own earthly hand, that other tool, had turned to dust” (59; emphasis added). His use of “mechanism” anticipates the dismissive rhetori cal tack that he will take, in the following paragraph, concerning Hilda’s com petitors: “Other copyists… spend their lives in painting the works, or perhaps one single work, of one illustrious painter over and over again: thus they convert themselves into Guido machines, or Raphaelic machines” (59; emphasis added). 5 The reader may wonder, in the lines that follow, wherein lies the difference between a mechanism and a machine, considering that both are derived from a Greek root for “contrivance.” And that is when Hawthorne bursts upon the scene once more to announce the contrived nature of his own distinction: “Hilda was no such machine as this” (60). Why not? Because, we are told, “she wrought religiously, and therefore wrought a miracle” (60). We bounce back and forth between similarity and difference. Hilda is like other copyists in that her paintings are imitations. She is unlike them in that her im itations are better. She is like them in that she is a mechanism and they are machines. But she is unlike them in that her mechanism somehow functions “religiously.” Because of the inflated rhetoric that allows for the claim that an “effective piece of mechanism…wrought religiously, and therefore wrought a miracle,” we are justified in wondering whether Hilda’s similarities to or dif ferences from the other copyists are more important. Fortunately, the discus sion of imitation is prominent enough in the rest of the text to help us answer this question. For instance, Hawthorne’s narrator resumes his discussion of the mech anistic aspect of imitation in a digression on sculpture during a visit to Kenyon’s studio: In Italy, there is a class of men whose merely mechanical skill is perhaps more exquisite than was possessed by the ancient artificers, who wrought out the designs of Praxiteles; or, very possibly, by Praxiteles himself. Whatever of illusive representation can be effected in marble, they are ca pable of achieving, if the object be before their eyes. The sculptor has but to present these men with a plaster cast of his design, and a sufficient block of marble, and tell them that the figure is imbedded in the stone, and must

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be freed from its encumbering superfluities; and, in due time, without the necessity of his touching the work with his own finger, he will see before him the statue that is to make him renowned…. [It is] not his work, but that of some nameless machine in human shape. (115; emphasis added) A sculptor, like any of Hilda’s “mighty old masters,” may lack the expertise to “execute what [be has] conceived in his imagination,” and will turn to this “class of men whose merely technical skill” will succeed where “his own earthly hand, that other tool” would have failed. These Italian artificers, in other words, do routinely for sculptors what Hilda is said to accomplish reli giously for painters. The distinction between Hilda and the other copyists, which was collapsed by the invocation of “mechanism” and “machine” and then re-established by the assertion that Hilda is “no such machine” is here collapsed again; for she is as precise an analog for these “merely mechanical” artificers as can be asked for. Perhaps, though, Hawthorne’s rhetoric is not so dismissive after all. His whole tirade against these “nameless machine[s]” is certainly informed by a sort of contempt for such an uninspired process, as he makes it clear that he somehow resents sculptors for taking credit for other people’s technical prowess: [T]he process of actually chiselling the marble [is something] with which (as it is not quite satisfactory to think) a sculptor in these days has very lit tle to do…. In no other art, surely, does genius find such effective instru ments, and so happily relieve itself of the drudgery of actual performance; doing wonderfully nice things by the hands of other people, when it may be suspected they could not always be done by the sculptor’s own. (115) Strangely, these technicians, these “nameless machine[s]” precisely fulfill Hilda’s role with regard to the “mighty old masters.” Just as the masters’ orig inals are gestures toward masterpieces that are only fully realized in Hilda’s imitation of them, these technicians allow for the realization of the (presum ably otherwise unrealizable) genius of their sculptor-employers. Despite his fitfully dismissive rhetoric, in other words, Hawthorne seems to be building a case for imitation. And he appears to do so throughout the text. For not only does Hilda outdo the masters; not only do the “nameless machine[s]” outdo their employ ers; but Kenyon himself manages, through the imitation of other sculptors, to outdo his models, and through the imitation of a model, to outdo reality. In his studio, Kenyon shows Miriam “a grand, calm head of Milton, not copied from any one bust or picture, yet more authentic than any of them, because all known representations of the poet had been profoundly studied, and solved in the artist’s mind” (117–8; emphasis added). Kenyon’s synthetic imitation of other imitations is presented as a solution to the problem of a ridiculously un corroborable authenticity. And Kenyon once again uses imitation to “solve” an original in his attempt to create a bust of Donatello:


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[T]he true image of his friend was about to emerge from the facile mate rial, bringing with it more of Donatello’s character than the keenest ob server could detect at any one moment in the face of the original…. By some accidental handling of the clay, entirely independent of his own will, Kenyon had given the countenance a distorted and violent look, combin ing animal fierceness with intelligent hatred. Had Hilda, or had Miriam, seen the bust, with the expression which it had now assumed, they might have recognized Donatello’s face as they beheld it at that terrible moment when he held his victim over the edge of the precipice. (272) Just as there is no evidence (ocular proof being unavailable) to confirm that Kenyon’s Milton is superior to any of the imitations it is said to surpass, so there are no witnesses to confirm his having captured Donatello at the single most important moment of his life, the moment of his supposed transforma tion from innocence to experience. 6 And before the clay model can be shown to Miriam or Hilda, “the sculptor again applied his artful fingers to the clay, and compelled the bust to dismiss the expression that had so startled” his companion and himself (272–3). The imitation of Donatello is not allowed to “work” because it “works” too well. Like all of the other imitations that we encounter in The Marble Faun, it is “startling” in its productivity. The single most startling instance of such productivity, however, occurs with the most rigorously layered instance of imitation in the novel: Hilda sat listlessly in her painting room…near [her copy of] the por trait of Beatrice Cenci, which had not yet been taken from the easel…. Now, opposite the easel hung a looking glass, in which Beatrice’s face and Hilda’s were both reflected. In one of her weary, nerveless changes of po sition, Hilda happened to throw her eyes on the glass, and took in both these images at one unpremeditated glance. She fancied—nor was it without horror—that Beatrice’s expression, seen aside and vanishing in a moment, had been depicted in her own face likewise, and flitted from it as timorously (204–5) Hilda, in glimpsing a reflection of a copy of a portrait of the long dead Beatrice Cenci immediately “solves” the grandest “original” with which the book is concerned: the problem, as mentioned in the preceding section, of original sin and the transmission of sin: “‘Am I, too, stained with guilt?’ thought the poor girl, hiding her face in her hands.” Importantly, Hilda’s question does not come in the context of a discussion of whether the father’s sins are those of the son or whether in Adam’s fall we sinnèd all. Her realization of the possibility that she shares Beatrice Cenci’s guilt is taught to her through the property of artistic imitation. Here we see an example in which artistic imitation is itself used to transmit the idea of the transmission of guilt.

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Importantly, however, the implication of the universality of guilt is im mediately squelched by the narrator, who intrudes upon the scene to answer Hilda’s question with another question: “Not so, thank heaven!…Who, in deed, can look at that mouth—widi its lips half apart, as innocent as a baby’s that has been crying—and not pronounce Beatrice sinless?” (205). And the narrator’s defense, of course, is less of Beatrice than of Hilda. Beatrice’s inno cence, because it is copied into the same mirror that reflects Hilda, has become the litmus test for Hilda’s innocence. If Hilda is innocent, it is because of Beatrice’s mouth (more specifically, because of her own facsimile of Guido’s rep resentation of Beatrice’s mouth); if she is guilty, it is because of Beatrice’s patri cide. And she is innocent because the narrator defies us to produce anyone to pronounce her guilty. But the narrator has not answered Hilda’s question with a question accidentally; he is directing us to the structural irony implicit in the answer to his question—for it is Hilda, and only Hilda, who can pronounce and has pronounced Beatrice guilty. “Yes, yes,” she says of Beatrice to a shocked Miriam, “it was terrible guilt, an inexpiable crime, and she feels it to be so. Therefore it is that the forlorn creature so longs to elude our eyes, and forever vanish away into nothingness! Her doom is just!” (66). 7 So Hilda is trapped, by the circumstances of imitation, into self-condemnation. She is guilty both because of Beatrice’s guilt and because of her own recognition of Beatrice’s guilt. Her guilt is imitative of the guilt that she herself sees in Beatrice. The details concerning imitation in Hilda’s narrative—for Hawthorne’s narrator insists, just prior to inserting himself into the text of The Marble Faun, that he has learned the story from Hilda—have conspired against her. Imitation triumphs not only over original creations, but over creators as well. Furthermore, the implication that imitation has a certain self-authenticating power leads us to wonder whether it is autogenetic (or perhaps innately par ricidal) as well. Just as Kenyon’s distance from Milton serves to authenticate his imitation, and just as Beatrice Cenci’s presence in the text is directly pro portionate to the distance of the copies from the original of the portrait, so it is that perhaps the most important imitation in the novel turns out to have turned itself genuine: Scattered here and there with careless artifice stand old altars bearing Roman inscriptions. Statues, gray with the long corrosion of even that soft atmosphere, half hide and half reveal themselves, high on pedestals, or perhaps fallen and broken on the turf. Terminal figures, columns of marble or granite porticoes, arches, are seen in the vistas of the wood paths, either veritable relics of antiquity, or with so exquisite a touch of artful ruin on them that they are better than if really antique. At all events, grass grows on the tops of the shattered pillars, and weeds and flowers root themselves in the chinks of the massive arches and fronts of temples, and clamber at large over their pediments, as if this were the thousandth summer since their winged seeds alighted there.


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What a strange idea—what a needless labor—to construct artificial ruins in Rome, the native soil of ruin! But even these sportive imitations, wrought by man in emulation of what time has done to temples and palaces, are perhaps centuries old, and, beginning as illusions, have grown to be venerable in sober earnest. The result of all is a scene, pen sive, lovely, dreamlike, enjoyable and sad, such as is to be found nowhere save in these princely villa-residences in the neighborhood of Rome; a scene that must have required generations and ages, during which growth, decay, and man’s intelligence wrought kindly together, to render it so gently wild as we behold it now. (72–3; emphasis added)

The upshot of this passage is obvious: imitation ruins gradually become real. More importantly, however, we must consider the ways in which these imitations can be said to solve a problem different from the one solved by Kenyon’s bust of Milton. For whereas Kenyon’s bust was said to have solved the problem of the original, the problem these ruins solve is the problem of their own status as imitation ruins. And they solve this problem not by be coming better ruins than the ruins that they imitate, but simply by becoming old enough to qualify as legitimate ruins in themselves. That solution, as we see in the passage, is only generative of another problem: the problem of there being a superfluity of genuine ruins in Rome. Eventually, we come to see how fully invested the narrator is in his claim that these genuinely ruined artificial ruins do not belong in Rome, for he picks up the thread of his argument again nearly a hundred pages later: The Italian climate, moreover, robs age of its reverence and makes it look newer than it is. Not the Coliseum, nor the tombs of the Appian Way, nor the oldest pillar in the forum, nor any other Roman ruin, be it as dilapi dated as it may, ever gives the impression of venerable antiquity which we gather, along with the ivy, from the gray walls of an English abbey or cas tle. And yet every brick or stone, which we pick up among the former, had fallen ages before the foundation of the latter was begun. This is owing to the kindliness with which Nature takes an English ruin to her heart, cov ering it with ivy, as tenderly as Robin Redbreast covered the dead babes with forest leaves. She strives to make it a part of herself, gradually oblit erating the handiwork of man, and supplanting it with her own mosses and trailing verdure, till she has won the whole structure back. But, in Italy, wherever man has once hewn a stone, Nature forthwith relinquishes her right to it, and never lays her finger on it again. Age after age finds it bare and naked, in the barren sunshine, and leaves it so. Besides this nat ural disadvantage, too, each succeeding century, in Rome, has done its best to ruin the very ruins, so far as their picturesque effect is concerned, by

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stealing away the marble and hewn stone, and leaving only yellow bricks, which never can look venerable. (165; emphasis added) According to the former passage on ruination, artificial ruins are ridiculously superfluous in Rome, cluttered as it is with the genuine article. But according to the latter, ruin itself is impossible in Italy. The genuine ruins, in other words, fail precisely where the imitations succeed. Grass grows in the chinks of the imitation ruins; but nature “relinquishes her right” to the real ones, leaving them “bare and naked.” Moreover, it seems that the only ruins with a chance of survival are the artificial ruins, since the genuine ruins are denuded by vandals and architects of their venerable marble. The real ruins are, no doubt, real ruins; but the imitation ruins are superior both because enough time has passed to render them genuinely venerable and because they have a more genuine (i.e. a more English) look about them. To employ one of Hawthorne’s more loaded word choices, the Roman atmosphere creates a problem for ruins that imitation ruins manage to “solve.” Imitations so consistently surpass their originals in this text that it seems reasonable to press the English/Greek resonance of the mechanism/machine distinction to its extreme, which is to say that art is at its best, its most effec tive, when it is most mechanical, i.e. most contrived. An imitation of an im itation outdoes the original because of the many layers of artifice involved; and the more extended the process of imitation, the more satisfying the result ant artwork is likely to be. The reasons for citing the second long passage above are for the most part the same as the reasons for citing any of the passages in this section: to show the ways in which The Marble Faun seems to regard imitations as capa ble of “solving” originals. One of the contentions of this argument, after all, is that The Marble Faun is an imitation that functions as a solution of its orig inal, The House of the Seven Gables. However, the reason for the italicization of “ivy” in that passage is to remind the reader of Hawthorne’s central prefa torial remark to The Marble Faun : “Romance and poetry, ivy, lichens and wallflowers, need ruin to make them grow” (3). But before we turn to the in dividual moments of imitation and ruination in Faun that can be said to solve their original counterparts in Gables, let us first focus on the more general similarity between the two novels: their problematic claims to the status of ro mance. It may well be (as Faun’s preface suggests) that ivy requires ruin to make it grow; and it may well be (as suggested in the passage above) that ruins require ivy in order to achieve the look of ruins. But one of the chief obstacles to a discussion of the similarities between Gables and Faun is that Faun is so unlike any of Hawthorne’s other “romances,” even if it is in the context of Faun that he tells us what the requirements of romance are.


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IMITATION OF ROMANCE If we recall the context of Hawthorne’s claim about the requirements of ro mance, we can see one of the more telling ways in which Faun can be said to solve the problem of Gables. In the preface to Faun, Hawthorne writes: No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a ro mance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mys tery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land. It will be very long, I trust, before romance writers may find congenial and easily handled themes, either in the an nals of our stalwart republic, or in any characteristic and probable events of our individual lives. Romance and poetry, ivy, lichens, and wallflow ers need ruin to make them grow. (3) Evan Carton is probably the most vociferous of the critics who would point out to us how ironic it is for Hawthorne to give such attention to the essen tial ingredients of romance is his own least successful novel. After all, The Marble Faun is not only the last and least regarded 8 of Hawthorne’s four ro mances; it is the only one not to be set in America. Carton’s reading of this ironic moment as a Hawthornean instance of al most clinical repression has proven useful to many of Faun ’s psychological critics, including Olesky. But our argument is less concerned with the psycho logical implications of this moment than in the ways in which it resonates with the larger structure of The Marble Faun. In this section, we shall consider the ways in which The Marble Faun’s status as a romance is itself an imitation of the copyists that it contains—the ways in which, like Hilda’s rivals, it fails to come up to the level of its originals; and the ways in which, like Hilda, it surpasses those originals. We must linger over this point because it is not sim ply the purpose of this chapter to show that Faun is indeed an imitation of Gables, but to attempt to understand what the stakes of that imitation are. Hawthorne’s claim that America lacks the kind of historical grounding that romance requires flies in the face of practically his entire corpus. Everything that Hawthorne had written prior to that preface—everything from the vexed religiosity of “Young Goodman Brown” to the petty politick ing of “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” to the practical politicking of Pierce’s biography to the romantic distance of The Scarlet Letter to the romantic prox imity of The House of the Seven Gables to the romantic immediacy of The Blithedale Romance 9 —was redolent of history (history as dynamic and vibrant or as dusty and still—but American, in any case). The claim that America does not provide the romance writer with suitable material should put read ers of The Marble Faun on their guard from the outset.

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Is this romance, by virtue of being set in Rome, somehow more truly ro mantic than its predecessors? Though I cannot fully embrace Evan Carton’s answer, I will borrow his more precise formulation of the question. In the preface to The Marble Faun, as Carton points out, romance is depicted as an art that can exist, somewhat contradictorily, only in a region of transcendence (a “poetic or fairy precinct”) and in an atmosphere of ruin. In neither case does it engage American “actualities.” Hawthorne literally exiles it from America in this passage and ignores or forgets the fact that he himself has previously published three romances that take their themes from American history and the events of American life. (67) 10 Hawthorne’s exile of the Romance from America is very much like Brown’s exile of Clara Wieland to Catholic Europe; for both are calculated, jarring moments of conventionality designed to call attention to the notion of liter ary inheritance. Just as Hilda and Kenyon become (during their summer away from the States) the sole “inheritors” of a Rome that they will eventually aban don (309), Brown and Hawthorne are the heirs of a literary tradition whose conventions must be questioned in terms of their relevance to the construc tion of an American literary tradition. Moreover, Hawthorne’s “exile” comes precisely at the beginning of what is unanimously regarded as the least romantic (and most un-Hawthornean) of his novels. 11 Recall also that Hawthorne’s distinction between the novel and the romance is a peculiarly American (or at least decidedly English) distinc tion, since “novel” translates into the major European languages as roman, it self an abbreviated reference to the matter of Rome—all of which tends to triply problematize the course of Hawthorne’s fiction, since his American ro mances are better at being romances than the one romance that he set in Rome, that most literally and metaphorically romantic of all places. Is Hawthorne responding to the same sort of impulse that led Brown to fling his gothic heroine into Catholic Europe? Is he slyly asserting, in his own belletris tic way, that Romans are essential to romans—or perhaps that they are a suf ficient, if not always a necessary, ingredient? Or is he manipulating the convention? Given the literary context that he had created for himself (and of which, as Richard Brodhead demonstrates, he was certainly aware), this conventionality of his seems to beg the question: How far are Romans from Americans? “On the one hand,” observes Michael Colacurcio, nobody should think to flatter himself by rehearsing the American past as one long and unbroken train of magnalia. Error, infirmity, and crime there abundantly were; not so much as to rival Imperial Rome, perhaps; nor even, as it turned out, sufficient to sponsor a full-length American gothic romance; but quite enough, surely, to dot the landscape of histor ical


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imagination, here and there, with a fair number of negative monu ments in “dark funeral stone.” (157) 12 Colacurcio goes on to list examples of the sordidness of the American past and concludes with the observation that “without some sense of ‘the Hawthornesque’ as something like Historical Irony, we would be doomed to wander forever among the pleasing vagaries of ‘Hawthorne’s Ambivalence to ward Puritanism’” (159). 13 But if we grant, for the moment, Hawthorne’s sense of Historical Irony, then the motives behind his seemingly misguided insistence on the inappro priateness of America as a setting for romance become clear in the face of his even more risible attempt to distinguish Rome from America by calling atten tion to a “threefold antiquity” that turns out to apply to both nations. In the first chapter of The Marble Faun, a mere three paragraphs after his strange preface, his narrator writes of glancing at “the ruins, Etruscan, Roman, Christian, venerable with a threefold antiquity” (6) and goes on to argue that the atmosphere of Rome, heavy with history as it is, should imbue his narra tive not with a sense of mystery or inaccessibility, but one of familiarity, so that it “may seem not widely different from the texture of all our lives.” Again and again, Hawthorne’s narrator comes to conclusions that defy his own premises and/or circumstances. When the Etruscans were displaced by the Romans, there was a genealogical transformation in the occupancy of cen tral Italy, a transformation that eventually gave way to an ideological transfor mation when the Romans declared themselves Christian under Constantine. So the difference between Rome and America that Hawthorne has taken such pains to set up turns out to be no difference at all, since America, with its his tory of displacement of the Native Americans by the English, who themselves underwent an ideological transformation into Americans, mimics the layered structure of Roman history nearly to perfection. Colacurcio makes much of Hawthorne’s view of America as a “storied” land (513); I would argue that his word choice is even more precisely resonant than he knows, that in The Marble Faun Hawthorne takes a step left implicit by the architecture of the Pyncheon House: the equation of America with three stories/ storeys, each larger than and somehow supported by the one be neath—and all grounded in misappropriated land. Hawthorne’s narrator in The Marble Faun speaks of a time when Italy was “yet guiltless of Rome.” Similarly, there was a time when Colonel Pyncheon was yet guiltless of the supplantation of Matthew Maule and when America was yet guiltless of itself and Europe was yet guiltless of the colonization of the Americas. 14 America, despite and because of its guilt, is both too faint and too accu rate a copy of Rome. This ambivalent assessment, Carton rightly observes, is rampant not only throughout The Marble Faun and in Hawthorne’s note books, but in the writings of Hawthorne’s American contemporaries, who re garded the Catholic Church (for which Rome stood metonymously) both “as a deadly threat to

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American community” and as a “kind of model of the purposeful, coherent, and secure community that Americans increasingly felt they lacked” (47). That the very rhetoric which Hawthorne employs to dis tinguish Rome from America should serve, under scrutiny, only to collapse the distinction will not surprise any reader of The Marble Faun who pays at tention to the case that Hawthorne makes, in the course of his narrative, for the power of imitation. In this particular, the similarity not only outweighs the dissimilarity; the dissimilarity proves only to be the similarity in another guise. We shall see this process happening again and again on the subtler lev els of narrative in Faun and Gables. Just as The Marble Faun, even if it fails to live up to the standard of “romance” set by the three novels preceding it, is the only tale that manages, literally, to be a story of Rome, we shall find that it is in the ways in which it seems to fall short of Gables that it actually “doubles back” to Gables in order to rewrite that story. The tension between the two novels turns out to be symmetry after all—but only if we look, in paranoid fashion, at the meaning behind the meaning (which is precisely the move that Faun ’s treatment of imitation authorizes us to make). IMPLICATIONS OF IMITATION Once Hawthorne has conditioned us to respond to imitations in a certain way (i.e. as “solutions” to originals), we are prepared to look at several of the many moments in which Faun imitates Gables and to work our way toward the so lution of Gables that these moments of imitation may contain. Although the discussions of Olesky and Marks do a great deal to establish the connections between Faun and Gables, there are many linkages between the novels that have yet to be discussed. Instead of relying on the assertions of other critics, it will be useful to attempt to cinch the connections that others have seen by way of exploring the thematic linkages between the two novels in greater de tail. Only then will we be prepared to appreciate the tenability of the claim that Hawthorne pits Faun against Gables. Carol MacKay has noted that Hawthorne, in his composition of The Marble Faun, employed a kind of copying that was entirely new to his career: the incorporation of protracted and substantially unaltered descriptive pas sages from his notebooks directly into the novel. 15 Though we have touched on the way in which the theme of Faun is itself a protracted and substantially unaltered version of the theme of Gables, we might well be astonished at the extent to which the language used to articulate this theme in Faun would ap pear to belong more to Gables than to the book in which it appears. For in stance, in the context of his discussion of the way in which the commission of one’s “own little separate sin” makes the sinner “guilty of the whole…great mass of human crime,” Hawthorne’s narrator contends that Miriam and Donatello are as guilty “as any hand that ever clutched a grandsire’s throat” (176–7)—a patent allusion to the strange red marks that appear on the throats of Colonel Pyncheon and those of his descendants who die under mysterious circumstances in Gables.


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Not only, however, does the narrator of The Marble Faun pretend to have forgotten the thesis of the preface to The House of the Seven Gables when he allows Kenyon to inform Donatello that in the United States, “each gener ation has only its own sins and sorrows to bear” (302), but he acts as if he is unaware of the historical resonances implicit in this statement by reproduc ing, just prior to Kenyon’s assertion, Holgrave’s tirade against the sinfulness of history in The House of the Seven Gables. According to Holgrave, there is doubt whether even our public edifices—our capitols, state houses, courthouses, city hall, and churches—ought to be built of such perma nent materials as stone or brick. It were better that they should crumble to ruin once in twenty years, or thereabouts…. [The] old Pyncheon House, [with] its dark, low-studded rooms, its grime and sordidness, which are the crystallization on its walls of the human breath that has been drawn and exhaled here in discontent and anguish…ought to be purified with fire— purified till only its ashes remain! (184) So perhaps Holgrave (prior to his conservative reformation after marriage at least) is the narrative persona who writes, in The Marble Faun, All towns should be made capable of purification by fire, or of decay, within each half-century. Otherwise, they become the hereditary haunts of vermin and noisomeness, besides standing apart from the possibility of such improvements as are constantly introduced into the rest of man’s contrivances and accommodations. It is beautiful, no doubt, and exceed ingly satisfactory to some of our natural instincts, to imagine our far pos terity dwelling under the same rooftree as ourselves. Still, when people insist on building indestructible houses, they incur, or their children do, a misfortune…. So, we may build almost immortal habitations, it is true; but we cannot keep them from growing old, musty, unwholesome, dreary, full of death scents, ghosts, and murder stains. (301–2) If anything, the second passage, with its invocation of “death scents, ghosts, and murder stains” is even more applicable to The House of the Seven Gables than the first. And despite the fact that the ‘permanent materials’ mentioned in the first passage are the materials used to build the public edifices in Gables, the applicability of the notion of lasting public structures is, particularly when we consider the second passage, far more applicable to the eternal city of Rome than to a brick courthouse in Massachusetts. Indeed, except for the dis tinction between ‘edifices’ and ‘towns’ (and the specific invocation of the Pyncheon house in the first citation), these two passages are entirely fungible. But neither in Faun nor in Gables do we encounter genuine purification through fire. In both novels, the project of purification is simply abandoned. Gables abandons the question of guilt and accountability and the Pyncheon house itself upon the

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marriage of a Pyncheon (Phoebe) to a Maule (Holgrave). And Faun, instead of speaking to the question of Donatello’s guilt and accountability, raises (and unsatisfyingly answers) the question of why Hilda was abducted by a secret Catholic network. The symmetries between The Marble Faun and The House of the Seven Gables are more than thematic, however; they carry a significance, perhaps a “hidden significance,” according to which it seems that Hawthorne is invit ing his audience to read not only between the lines, but between the texts. On the level of characterization, for instance, the symmetries are overwhelming: Kenyon and Holgrave are both observer-artists who end up betrothed to in nocent “doves” (Hilda and Phoebe). Clifford and Donatello are amoral sybarites who attach themselves to women (Hepzibah and Miriam) tainted by transgressions 16 that predate their respective narratives. And Jaffrey and Miriam’s model are second-echelon characters, important primarily as villains whose deaths create problems for Clifford/Hepzibah and Donatello/Miriam. Then too, Miriam’s model bears a striking resemblance to the demon in Hilda’s favorite painting (Guido’s Michael [112–3]) and poses frequently for Miriam. Jaffrey Pyncheon bears a striking resemblance to Hepzibah’s portrait of Colonel Pyncheon and poses frequently for Holgrave. Somewhat more subtly, Donatello is troped as a faun in the opening chapter of The Marble Faun; during Miriam’s visit to the catacombs, her model is troped as a satyr; 17 and Miriam later informs Donatello that she would not shrink even if she were confronted by one of his “rough cousins, a hairy satyr” (78; emphasis added). 18 Neither does Hepzibah shrink when Jaffrey, Clifford’s rough cousin, attempts to force his way into the Pyncheon House. 19 The similarities in the functions of the various characters lead to sim ilarities in their problems and their ways of handling those problems. As Carton has observed, when Donatello kills the model, he replicates in his own new relation to Miriam the relationship between Miriam and the model from which he sought to free her. Donatello thus assumes the role of the model, whose mysterious bond to Miriam is repeatedly suggested to involve a bloody deed of which he was the author and she was—or appeared to be—indi rectly guilty. (39)

This is exactly the case with Clifford and Hepzibah, who seem to have begun the Pyncheon sin anew upon Jaffrey’s demise. The whole source of trouble for the Pyncheon family has been the disputed quality of their claim to the land that Colonel Pyncheon appropriated from Matthew Maule. Immediately after Jaffrey’s death, Holgrave (the sole remaining Maule) marries Phoebe (the sole marriageable Pyncheon); and they move, with Clifford and Hepzibah, out of the


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Pyncheon House and into Jaffrey’s country estate. At the very mo ment of the union of the Maules and the Pyncheons, in other words, the property that was the source of dispute between the two families is abandoned by both families. Clifford, upon Jaffrey’s demise, assumes the role of Pyncheon patriarch in a new scene with an undetermined history. He takes on the role of Jaffrey precisely as Donatello takes on the role of Miriam’s model. But there would seem to be a difference inasmuch as Donatello killed Miriam’s model and Clifford is only suspected (and ultimately—though un satisfyingly—exonerated) of the murder of Jaffrey. At this point, however, the similarities in structure, theme, and charac terization between these two novels are less important than the similarities to which we shall now turn our exclusive attention: those between Clifford and Donatello. And our reason for focusing on these similarities—our reason for raising the question of whether Donatello is the imitation that “solves” Clifford— is to raise the question of whether that seeming difference between Clifford and Donatello can be made to disappear. In order to build the case for Clifford’s guilt (as Marks does), we shall of course have to turn to The House of the Seven Gables. But the fact of Clifford’s guilt, even if it can be proven, is less important to this study than the fact that Donatello’s murder and similarity to Clifford is what most effectively raises the question of Clifford’s part in Jaffrey’s death. Again, our primary interest in this chapter is in the almost hidden layer of meaning on which The Marble Faun can be seen as conspiring against Clifford. It may be a frame-up; and certainly The Marble Faun cannot prove the guilt or innocence of a character in another novel. But before we explore the possibility of Clifford’s guilt, let us examine the ways in which The Marble Faun further specifies a connection between Clifford and Donatello. One of the stranger requests that Gables makes of its reader is that we not be disconcerted by Clifford’s flight upon Jaffrey’s demise—a flight that is mimicked on a bizarrely detailed level in The Marble Faun. In a chapter enti tled “The Flight of Two Owls,” Clifford argues with a stranger about the ap propriateness of using telegraphy to bring murderers to justice. Because “murderers…are often excusable in their motives,” he observes, “I really can not applaud the enlistment of an immaterial and miraculous power in the universal world to hunt at their heels” (265). Whether Clifford himself is guilty or not, the question of the excusability of certain murders is precisely the question raised by Donatello’s dispatching of Miriam’s model, who, it seems, could not otherwise have been prevented from terrorizing Miriam. 20 Hepzibah comes to her own conclusion during her flight with Clifford: that the Pyncheon “house was everywhere!,” that it “transported its great, lumbering bulk with more than railroad speed, and set itself down on what ever spot she glanced at” (258). She and Clifford, her fellow owl, cannot es cape the Pyncheon House. In the twenty-eighth chapter of The Marble Faun, entitled “The Owl Tower,” we see how it may be that “The Flight of Two Owls” is a flight doomed to failure even if it manages to escape its own text. For this is one of several points in the text in

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which the resonances between Faun and Gables appear on a particularly subtle (read “hidden”) level. Donatello guides Kenyon on a tour of his tower. As is the case with the Pyncheon House, it is three stories tall. As is the case with the Pyncheon House, there is a plant growing on the roof that arrests the narrator’s atten tion. And as is the case with the Pyncheon House, it is occupied by two owls, creatures with no role in the novel apart from their occupancy of the tower: Following the staircase still higher, they came to another room of similar size and equally forlorn, but inhabited by two personages of a race which from time immemorial have held proprietorship and occupancy in ru ined towers. These were a pair of owls, who, being doubtless acquainted with Donatello, showed little sign of alarm at the entrance of visitors. They gave a dismal croak or two, since it was not yet their hour to flap duskily abroad. (254) Can we take the two owls as “personages” meant to stand for the Pyncheon fugitives? Perhaps we will do well to remember the first attempt at flight on the part of our two owls, Hepzibah and Clifford: their decision to go to church (169). After making themselves ready, they decide that it is not yet time for their egress: “We are ghosts!” exclaims Clifford. “We have no right [to be] any where but in this old house, which has a curse on it, and which, therefore, we are doomed to haunt,” whereupon they shrink “back into the dusky passage way, and close the door” (169). Their decision that it is not, to borrow a phrase, “yet their hour to flap duskily abroad” occurs in “The Arched Window,” the single chapter in The House of the Seven Gables that most precisely mirrors a chapter from The Marble Faun (“A Scene in the Corso”). The three chief episodes of “The Arched Window” concern Clifford’s reactions to a water cart, an organ grinder, and a parade. The water cart is ob served to leave “a broad wake of moistened earth, instead of the white dust that had risen at a lady’s lightest footfall” (160; emphasis added); the organ grinder is an Italian, who makes way, in the course of the narrative, for a political pro cession, which itself affects Clifford profoundly. The narrator characteristi cally eschews the indicative in his description: [I]f an impressible person, standing alone over the brink of one of these processions, should behold it, not in its atoms, but in its aggregate—as a mighty river of life, massive in its tide, and black with mystery, and, out of its depths, calling to the kindred depth within him—then the conti guity would add to the effect. It might so fascinate him that he would hardly be restrained from plunging into the surging stream of human sympathies. (165) “So,” we are then told, “it proved with Clifford” (165), who is restrained by Hepzibah and Phoebe. When he is asked to explain what drew him to (and almost


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over) the balcony, he says, “had I taken that plunge, and survived it, methinks it would have made me another man” (166). When we look at the festival of the Corso in Faun, we see that somewhere in the crevasse between Gables and Faun Clifford seems, in a sense, to have taken just such a plunge and to have emerged as the other man he resembles in so many other partic ulars: Donatello. The Corso scene is played out with a metaphorical substitution that op erates in the minutiae of the situation as well as in its general structure. In the first place, the participants in the festival are portrayed as carrying on a “war fare…of counterfeit sugar plums” which burst into white lime dust upon im pact. They also throw “handfuls of flour or lime into the air…whiten[ing many] a black coat or priestly robe” (365). Though no water cart appears on the scene to settle the dust, we again see Italians abandoning the street in order to make way for a procession, as the Roman “populace,…nobility and priesthood take little or no part in the [parade],” which would have been abandoned long ago if not “for the hordes of Anglo-Saxons who annually take up the flagging mirth” (436–7). And Kenyon, according to the narrator, wrongs himself by fail ing to “plunge into the throng of other maskers, as at the carnival before” (437), when he had danced alongside Donatello, who was costumed as a faun. 21 What of the possibility that Faun ’s procession is a sort of hypothetical consequence of the procession that Clifford attempts to plunge into from his window? What of the possibility that Clifford has taken an intertextual plunge from which he emerges, as he says he will, another man? Drawing on the terminology of René Girard, Olesky suggests that Donatello functions as a“monstrous double” of Clifford Pyncheon, that Clifford resurfaces in Faun to pick up where Clifford left off in Gables. But to what end does this resur facing occur? Although I have said that the resurfacing itself, the way in which Faun invites us to see Donatello as Clifford’s monstrous double, is more im portant than the conclusion that such a resurfacing seems to warrant regard ing Gables, it will be important for us to explore that conclusion in greater detail before speculating more fully about the implications of what can be seen as an intertextual mystery in which the imitation “solves” the original. Obviously, that exploration must involve a re-examination of Marks’ con tention that Clifford Pyncheon is in fact responsible for the death of his cousin Jaffrey. As Marks’ argument, which is primarily a Freudian reading of the text of Gables and of Hawthorne’s own life, is readily available, I will not rehearse it here. Instead, in the next section we shall examine the structural, rhetorical, and ironic manner in which Gables calls the exoneration of Clifford into question (and echoes Wieland) as a way of supplementing Marks’ more compelling presentation of his own thesis. RECONSIDERING GABLES AS A MURDER MYSTERY It may seem strange to suggest that Olesky’s argument can help Marks’ and that Marks’ can help Olesky’s where each needs help most. But the apparent logical

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flaw in conclusions that simultaneously establish and rely upon each other, is, of course, the very flaw in paranoid logic that we discussed in the chapter on Wieland (the leap, mentioned by Hofstadter, from the undeniable to the unbelievable). Although this section will review (briefly) the ways in which Gables itself insinuates the possibility of Clifford’s guilt, it is crucial that the reader bear in mind that this insinuation is (in the opinion of the writer) insufficient to warrant anything more than the raising of a few pointed ques tions. Only when we return to Faun and its literal Catholic conspiracy against Hilda will we be able to fully synthesize the arguments of Marks and Olesky through understanding the possibility that Clifford’s guilt is our strongest rea son for “doubling back” from Faun to Gables and that the doubling back is it self the most persuasive evidence of Clifford’s guilt. And once we have more fully discussed the limitations in the case that is to be made against Clifford, we shall be capable of understanding the flawed, but nevertheless meaningful, relationship between these two texts. Particularly relevant to the case for Clifford’s guilt is the fact that, apart from acknowledging its cleverness, critics of Hawthorne’s corpus, even at their most deconstructive, have done surprisingly little with the speculative quality of Hawthorne’s prose. His perverse employment of anything but the indicative mood at the most important points of his narratives is consistently read as little more than a playful reminder of his investment in that “fairy precinct” between the actual and the imaginary Key details are guessed at; crucial bits of informa tion are presented as sound (or at least acceptable) theories. Whatever is said to have been the case turns out only to have been reported as the case because, after all, it must have been the case. The gurgling noise, for instance, that character izes the Pyncheons in The House of the Seven Gables is a sound that the narrator admits never to have heard, though he has it on the authority of “some people” that it sounded like an “apoplectic symptom” (113), which is only reasonable, since a certain doctor, “who appears to have been a man of eminence, upheld [the cause of Colonel Pyncheon’s death], if we have rightly understood his terms of art, to be a case of apoplexy” (16; emphasis added). His colleagues disputed with him and offered their own contradictory theories, but ultimately “returned an unassailable verdict of Sudden Death’” (17). Indeed, the Pyncheon deaths are made to be as difficult for the reader to swallow as Brown made the death of Wieland, Sr. The chief similarities be tween the deaths of Wieland, Sr. and Colonel Pyncheon are threefold: their mysteriousness, their occurrence so early in their texts, and the fact that they strike seemingly powerful, patriarchal figures in the parts of their estates that they regard as sanctuaries. But even closer to Wieland’s seemingly ridiculous spontaneous combustion (with its mystifying details of a lamp, a spark, and a club) is the second Pyncheon death, that of Jaffrey, Sr. According to the records in the case,


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there were circumstances irrefragably indicating that some person had gained access to old Jaffrey Pyncheon’s private apartments, at or near the moment of his death. His desk and private drawers, in a room contigu ous to his bedchamber, had been ransacked; money and valuable articles were missing; there was a bloody handprint on the old man’s linen. (310) The resonances with Wieland are useful to a point, but less important than the fact that the deaths, in both cases, seem to cry out for simpler explanations than those provided by the text. Although Clifford is convicted of having murdered the senior Jaffrey, he is ultimately exonerated of the crime by the narrator and the text and the population of Salem precisely because the junior Jaffrey dies under remarkably similar circumstances, in a house occupied by Clifford, shortly after his release from prison, in one of the few moments in the text in which Clifford is both unaccompanied and his whereabouts are unknown even to his sister, over whose shoulder the reader conveniently happens to be looking while Jaffrey is dying a “natural, and—except for some unimportant particulars, denoting a slight idiosyncrasy—by no means an unusual form of death” (309). Those unimportant details—and one cannot help remembering that pesky club in the Wieland scene—are identical to the details surrounding the death of the original Pyncheon patriarch: “indicat[ions of] violence,” “the marks of fingers on his throat, and the print of a bloody hand on his [collar]” (16). The “theory” that “arose” to account for Jaffrey, Jr.’s slightly idiosyn cratic death insists that the repetitive nature of these three Pyncheon deaths (two of which have occurred during Clifford’s lifetime) proves them all, de spite their “unimportant particulars,” to have occurred independently of “Clifford’s agency” (311). Just as the conclusion reached by Clara Wieland’s uncle flies in the face of every bit of evidence we have concerning Theodore, Sr.’s death, so the reader has to question the conclusion reached by the Salemites in this case. Why is it that if Maule’s son was suspected of strangling Colonel Pyncheon (as he was) and Clifford was convicted of strangling Jaffrey, Sr. (as he was)—why is it that the apparent strangulation of Jaffrey, Jr. gives way to a theory of atavistic apoplexy in all cases? Why does the text introduce such markers of violence and foul play only to disregard them? The richest question that Richard Brodhead raises with re gard to The Marble Faun can be seen to apply precisely to this confusing aspect of Gables: “What are we to make of a novel that so prominently hushes the speech it seems designed to express?” (77). There is something mystifying in the way that the novel seems to point so accusingly at Clifford only to pronounce him innocent in the end. And that mystification infects not only the reader, but the characters within the novel as well. Consider what Holgrave has to say: Men and women and children, too, are such strange creatures that one never can be certain that he really knows them, nor ever guess what they have been, from what he sees them to be now. Judge Pyncheon! Clifford!

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What a complex riddle—a complexity of complexities—do they present! It requires intuitive sympathy, like a young girl’s, to solve it. (178–9; em phasis added) In the opinion of at least one astute reader (Holgrave), Gables presents a com plex riddle that is in need of solution. It is Holgrave’s analogue, Kenyon, who solves the problem of the bust of Milton in The Marble Faun. But I would sug gest that Kenyon is less relevant to the solution of the riddle of Gables than is the intuitively sympathetic figure of Hilda and the way in which her abduction by a secret Catholic conspiracy enables her to solve the riddles posed by Faun. IMITATION OF CONSPIRACY As Robert Levine and others have pointed out, the popular American con sciousness from the late 18th well into the 19th century regarded the “guilt” of Rome as a forgone conclusion. The links between Rome and Catholicism and between Catholicism and conspiracy were made almost automatically. And it is Hawthorne’s facile exploitation of those easy linkages in the final chapter of The Marble Faun that make his last novel the most obvious candidate for a study such as this. Miriam’s “thralldom” to her model (which is simultaneously detected and pronounced invisible by Kenyon) 22 is analogous to her thralldom to Rome: “Free and self-controlled as she appeared, her every movement was watched and investigated far more thoroughly by the priestly rulers than by her dearest friends” (465). Moreover, her surveillants suspect her “of connection with some plot, or political intrigue”; and it is “really quite a matter of course under a despotic government” that not she, but her associate Hilda, should dis appear from the narrative (wordlessly, and without a struggle or even anything akin to an explanation until the tacked-on conclusion—exactly as was the case with Brown’s Louisa Conway in Wieland) to be held captive, in as flagrantly gothic a fashion as can be conceived, in a convent. But the priests are not the only sneaks in Rome. Just as the narrative of Miriam turns out always to be a narrative of the illusion of independence (a narrative according to which there is always something behind Miriam, be it her model or the clerisy of Rome, controlling her), so the narrator himself turns out to be more controlled by his narrative than in control of it. In his conclusion, which appeared in the second and later editions of the novel as Hawthorne’s response to his readers’ “demand for further elucidations,” the narrator’s response to the explanation of Hilda’s abduction by Miriam’s invis ible (and heretofore unimagined) spies is both baffled and baffling: “How ex cessively stupid in me not to have seen it sooner” (465). But given the context of the conclusion (a concession to readerly demands), the deprecating tone of this indictment seems to be directed more at the readers than at the narrator, as if the conspiratorial explanations offered by the conclusion were somehow latent in the story as it originally stood. 23


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Indeed, there is virtually no evidence within the text to guide the reader to the conclusion of conspiratorial abduction. 24 Hilda is on her way towards a doorway in the Cenci Palace in the final sentence of the forty-second chap ter; she has fallen completely out of the text by the first sentence of the forty third. Her disappearance occurs between chapters, with no account at all made to the reader. And the very absence of clues concerning the nature of her disappearance is what the narrator suggests (with more sarcasm than irony) should lead the reader to attribute it to the mechanisms of a despotic state. Yet we hardly know who the narrator is when he makes this suggestion. He is aware of himself as an authorial figure, outside of the action of his novel, in his preface and conclusion. In the conclusion, however, he actually engages his characters in conversation, though he refers to himself in the third person until the moment of his interaction with Hilda and Kenyon: “There comes to the author…,” “He reluctantly avails himself…,” “He designed the story…,” “the author fortunately has it in his power…” (463–4), etc. But once the three of them have climbed to the top of St. Peter’s (of all places) to gether, the third person disappears, though we are eased from ‘he’ to ‘I’ via ‘we’, ‘my’, and ‘me’: To confess the truth, he [the author] was himself troubled with a curios ity similar to that which he has just deprecated on the part of his readers, and once took occasion to cross-examine his friends, Hilda and the sculp tor, and to pry into several dark recesses of the story, with which they had heretofore imperfectly acquainted him. We three had climbed to the top of St. Peter’s, and were looking down upon the Rome we were soon to leave, but which (having already sinned sufficiently in that way) it is not my purpose further to describe. It oc curred to me, that, being so remote in the upper air, my friends might safely utter, here, the secrets which it would be perilous even to whisper on lower earth. ‘Hilda,’ I began…(464; emphasis added) This shift from the third person singular subjective to the first person singu lar subjective via the first person plural subjective, the first person singular possessive, and the first person singular objective enables the narrator, in the course of a single paragraph, to sneak from the periphery of his tale into its center, much as the explanation of the peripheral, tacked-on conclusion re shapes the central events of the novel. Only by becoming a character, of course, can a narrator turn to his char acters for explanations concerning the tale of which he has been presumed by the reader to be in control. Suddenly, however, the narrator is at the hermeneutic mercy of his own Hilda, for whose abduction he seemed to be responsible before he became I. The narrative persona of Hawthorne’s conclu sion, in other words, fails to stand up—in precisely the same way that the Roman conspiracy against Miriam and Hilda fails to stand up as anything more than a pasteboard solution

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to a problem that the narrator is himself re luctant to acknowledge. Our seemingly omniscient, third person narrator im itates a fallible, first-person narrator at precisely the same time that he is concocting (or pretending to have his characters concoct) a hare-brained, im itation conspiracy. To read the novel as a conspiracy against itself, in other words, is to miss the importance of the imitative strategies that Hawthorne underscores in the conspiratorial appendix. The novel only imitates a novel that conspires against itself; for the paranoid substitution of the interpretation-of-an-interpretation for the reading-of-a-text teaches us that if the appendix is a conspiracy behind the rest of the novel, then the rest of the novel is likely a conspiracy behind something else—perhaps the very something ( The House of the Seven Gables ) that it most precisely imitates. The single most important aspect of the structural relation between Faun and Gables is that Faun relates to Gables in precisely the same way that the final chapter of Faun relates to the preceding portion of the text. Now we are prepared to see how that can be said to be the case. The final chapter of Faun was composed and included only after the rest had already been written and submitted to the world. It is literally a postscript to the novel that con tains it. And it is blatantly, heavy-handedly paranoid. It can be categorized as such not simply because of the conspiracy (which is not, of itself, a sufficient indicator of paranoia), but because of the uncritical way in which the narra tor accepts and promulgates a conspiratorial explanation both of Hilda’s ab duction and of Miriam’s behavior. The narrator does not attempt to resist the claim that Miriam’s “every movement” was, unbeknownst to her, “watched and investigated” by the subtle and possibly malign forces of Rome. The mo tives that are ascribed to the Roman clerisy for abducting Hilda (their inter est in keeping an eye on Miriam) are completely disproportionate to the amount of energy and secrecy demanded by the abduction. And this lack of a sense of proportion seems to Hilda and Kenyon and the narrator to be a per fectly natural thing to ascribe to the inscrutable city of Rome, which is known for (i.e. paranoiacally regarded as explicable in terms of) its secret machina tions. To the three of them, it is not only conceivable, but “obvious that Miriam’s privacy and isolated life could only be maintained through the con nivance and support of some influential person connected with the adminis tration of affairs” (464–5). That this obvious point was not at all obvious is attested by the fact that the conclusion had to be written at all. It is neither the purpose nor the place of this argument to prove that the explanation offered by the conclusion could not possibly be arrived at on the basis of the text of the first edition of the novel. But it is certainly difficult to imagine such a reading. The invocation of the conspiracy in the conclusion is seemingly so unanticipated by the text that precedes it as to appear more in the light of a creation of what happened than a report of it. The conspiracy in the novel, in other words, is inserted into the novel after the fact by the non integral conclusion.


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Contra Marks, I would argue that the same could be said of Gables. For although the evidence that something other than apoplexy claimed Jaffrey Pyncheon’s life is quite strong, the evidence that points to Clifford as the mur derer is circumstantial at best. It is only when we become almost paranoiacally sensitive to the extent to which the text of Gables goes out of its way to cover for Clifford that he begins to appear overpoweringly guilty. And it is the mur derous character of Donatello, created after Clifford had already been submit ted to the world, who most effectively leads the reader to the possibility that the text of Gables conspires with Clifford to help him conceal his guilt. The hypothetical argument works in reverse, roughly as follows: if Donatello re sembles Clifford in so many ways; and if Jaffrey resembles Miriam’s model in so many ways; and if Donatello undeniably murdered Miriam’s model; and if Clifford’s innocence in the matter of Jaffrey’s death is only a matter of specu lation; and if imitations really do “solve” originals (even when we did not sus pect, as we probably did not with regard to the pre-Kenyonesque busts of Milton, that there were any problems with the originals); if all of this is true, then the narrator of The Marble Faun seems less concerned with Miriam and Hilda than he is in persuading us of Clifford Pyncheon’s responsibility for the death of his cousin Jaffrey. The conspiracy, in other words, is inserted into the pre-existing text by the text composed later. 25 Moreover, our attention is im mediately diverted from the obliquely raised possibility of an American’s guilt to the arresting certainty of an Italian conspiracy. CONCLUSIONS If The House of the Seven Gables is a murder mystery, it can claim that status only on the terms employed by The Marble Faun, just as The Marble Faun, insofar as it is a conspiracy-novel, can claim that status only on the terms of the appendix added to it in its second printing. Each textual additive serves as a stratum of meaning that changes our interpretation of the layers be neath. In a truly paranoid fashion, the reader is obliged to dig his way to the surface. A single conspiracy turns everything against everything else. A sin gle chapter in The Marble Faun turns the rest of the text against another text. While the standard hermeneutic practice is to expose a layer of mean ing beneath a text, a paranoid hermeneutic can only conclude that the exis tence of one layer implies the existence of others. But if Radcliffe can turn a narrative against a character and Godwin can turn a narrator against his characters and Brown can turn a narrative against its narrator and Hawthorne can turn one narrative against another, then can there really be other paranoid tensions worthy of exploration? Herman Melville will show us that there are, though he will have to take us outside of his texts and into his audience in order to find them.

Chapter Three Rhetorical Razors: “Lurking Significance” in the “Vexatious Coincidence” of Benito Cereno

“I hate a suspicious man…but I must say I like a cautious one.” 1 Like negroes, these powers own man sullenly; mindful of their higher master; while serving, plot revenge. 2 IMPLICATIONS ABOUT THE IMPLIED READER Of chief importance to recent critical discussion of Benito Cereno has been the significance of Amasa Delano’s failure to piece together the state of affairs on board the San Dominick. Not surprisingly, many critics tie their readings of the novel directly to their attempts to answer the question of why Delano’s reading falls short, why he might be said to under-read the San Dominick. 3 If we recall the jocular observation that even paranoids have real enemies, 4 it is perhaps superficially tempting to suggest that paranoia is precisely what Delano needs in the situation in which he finds himself for most of the nar rative that concerns him. After all, there is a secret plot; his life is imperiled; messages are transmitted in code; and power relations are intentionally dis guised. To parrot the tone of most critical work on the novella, the text of the San Dominick is apparently one requiring a reading that privileges details over generalities, one in which a secret code must be cracked and systematically ap plied to reality in order to access the truth. The scholarship on Benito Cereno is some of the best work yet done on Melville. And the positions outlined above are productive—to a point. Nevertheless, in this chapter, we shall have occasion to challenge both the generic paranoia that Delano seems to require and the critical stance concern ing the San Dominick as a typical Melvillean sort of text that makes typically eagleeyed demands on its reader. Indeed, we shall examine the extent to which Delano does apply a paranoid (though wrongheaded) mode of interpre tation to the events on the ship and the ways in which his hermeneutic appa ratus is defeated by the fact that meaning, instead of lurking beneath the surface, rises to the surface in the tale—so that things turn out not only to be what they are called, but to be so in more ways than one.

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As in the preceding two chapters, however, the paranoia that we exam ine in the tale shall prove to be only symptomatic of and less important than the ways in which paranoia structures the tale. The paranoid theories that Delano adopts and discards to account for what he sees on the San Dominick are wrong because he reverses the roles of potential ally (Cereno) and chief an tagonist (Babo) very much in the same way that Melville reverses the sympa thies of the reader with regard to Delano (the narrative locus) and Babo (his antagonist). But whereas Babo compels Cereno into a conspiracy against Delano, Melville’s narrator entices the reader into an allegiance against him— so that the reader becomes a more willing, more complicit participant in Delano’s hermeneutic crisis than Cereno ever is. In chapter one, we saw how Brown pitted a narrative against its narrator; in chapter two we examined the way in which Hawthorne pitted one narrative ( The Marble Faun) against an other (The House of the Seven Gables); and in this chapter, although we shall explore the paranoid characteristics of Delano’s thought processes, the ulti mate stake will prove to be the way in which Melville elevates conspiratorial textual antagonism to a new level, reaching out of the text to pit the reader against the narrative locus of Delano’s consciousness. Because previous chapters have been invested in the paranoid notion of treating interpretations as texts that require further interpretation, it will be necessary to begin this discussion by reviewing Melville’s celebrated distinc tion between “superficial skimm [ing]” and “eagle-eyed read[ing]” and to test whether Delano is such a superficial skimmer as he is widely considered to be 5 —and whether the text of events on board the San Dominick actually in vites such eagle-eyed reading as is often supposed. Once we have a clearer idea of where the “lurking significance” in Benito Cereno really lurks, we shall be prepared to understand 1) how it is that Delano fails to generate the proper conspiracy theory and 2) precisely what is most clinically paranoid about the alternative theories that he does generate. Only then will we be able to see how it is that Delano’s peculiar brand of paranoia prevents him from establishing the critical distance from himself that his situation requires in order to be properly interpreted; and this is precisely the critical distance that we will then be able to appreciate Melville as having established between Delano and the reader. We shall come to see, in other words, that readerly detection or suspicion of the plot on board the San Dominick can be viewed as quite far from paranoid interpretation not simply because it proves to be right, but because the way in which the audience is led to such a conclusion exists in such glaring contradistinction to the way in which Delano goes about setting up his own hypotheses. THINGS AND WHAT THEY ARE CALLED If asked, most critics of American literature would presumably recall that Melville invokes his distinction between the “superficial skimmer of pages” and the “eagle-eyed reader” not in reference to his own prose, but to the work of Hawthorne. And presumably there is nothing wrong with the critical stance that,

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as Lawrance Thompson puts it, “Melville tells us more about him self in that passage…than about Hawthorne.” 6 However, the move that we make when applying this distinction to Melville’s prose is more than a move from Hawthorne to Melville; it is a move from titles to texts as well: But with whatever motive, playful or profound, Nathaniel Hawthorne has chosen to entitle his pieces in the manner he has, it is certain that some of them are directly calculated to deceive—egregiously deceive, the superficial skimmer of pages. To be downright and candid once more, let me cheerfully say, that two of these titles did dolefully dupe no less an eagle-eyed reader than myself. 7 It is one thing to apply to Melville’s corpus a remark that Melville makes or claims to make in reference to Hawthorne’s corpus; but this passage that we apply so routinely—and with apparent justification—to Melville’s corpus (from the architecture of Billy Budd down to Father Mapple’s sermon in Moby- Dick) claims only, on its most literal level, to apply to Hawthorne’s titles. When we come to Benito Cereno, we do well to remember that the de ception —the egregious deception—that Melville finds in Hawthorne is demonstrated by the way in which Hawthorne’s titles are designed to deceive, that there is in fact tension between story and title, between the thing and what the thing is called. For on the San Dominick, things have a strange way of managing to live up to their titles, of being precisely what they are called. The words and symbols on board are designed to inform—perhaps even to egregiously inform—Delano about his situation. But Delano’s megalomania prevents him from registering the superficial (though telling) significance of the labels he uses and encounters on Cereno’s ship. Like many first-time read ers of Benito Cereno, Delano misses points that are on the surface by failing to take the names that he and others give to things aboard the San Dominick seriously. The signals that Delano receives prompt him to waver between trust and suspicion; and uncannily enough, he wavers wrong every time. Not sur prisingly, if we interrogate Delano’s perceptions and the motives behind his perceptions, we will be well on our way to an examination of the motives of the many nineteenth-century readers who failed (or refused) to trust Delano’s suspicions or to suspect his trust. AT FIRST GLANCE: BENITO CERENO James Kavanagh and Robert Levine have given us two of the more insightful treatments concerning readerly first impressions of Benito Cereno. But despite an overall similarity of argument, Kavanagh and Levine are diametrically op posed on the matter of how much Melville tips his hand in the course of a first reading of the novel. According to Kavanagh, “Delano puts every possible construction on the evidence before him except the correct and most obvious one” (140), whereas

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Levine contends that it is flatly impossible for the reader to ascertain the nature of the relationship between Babo and Cereno on a first reading of the tale. 8 The importance of a first reading of any text as complex as Benito Cereno is apt to seem slight; 9 moreover, it seems somewhat ridiculous to argue about the hypothetical conclusion reached by Melville’s implied reader when there is a general consensus that part of Melville’s design as a writer is always to imply at least two readers (one eagle-eyed and one a superficial skimmer). Of course the implied eagle-eyed reader will reach different (though perhaps not necessarily correct) conclusions than the implied super ficial skimmer. And any argument about the differences in the conclusions would seem likely to degenerate into a simple attempt to hierarchalize vari ous reader responses. That is not, however, the case with Benito Cereno, for in Benito Cereno we have a Melvillean tale that is perhaps uniquely suited to arguments con cerning implied readers and first readings. There is still, of course, the Melvillean binary between superficial skimming and eagle-eyed reading; but because of the presence of Amasa Delano, that binary invites rather than pre cludes a discussion of a first reading of the text. Our first response to the mys tery of Benito Cereno is crucial because Delano’s most important shot at reading the mystery of the San Dominick is his first reading of the circum stances in which he finds himself. Eagle-eyed though Melville’s Delano may seem not to be, he is the implied reader of the story; or at least his reading is the implied first reading. We may take issue with his reading; we may scoff at the conclusions he reaches; but the dramatic tension we encounter on a first reading of Benito Cereno is less a result of the tensions within the story than the tensions between our first reading of what Delano experiences and his own first reading of that experience. Whether we resist or embrace the con clusions Delano reaches, to read Benito Cereno is to place ourselves vicariously in a life-threatening context from which Delano, for all his hermeneutic shortcomings, emerges unscathed. Although Kavanagh seems justified in observing, along with Sandra Zagarell, that Amasa Delano does indeed perform a good deal of “epistemo logical fancy footwork…in order not to understand what is amiss on the San Dominick,” 10 it is difficult to contend that he (or the reader) could be ex pected to ascertain the nature of the relationship between Babo and Cereno. A responsible reader can only be made nervous by the prospect of ascertain ing anything in a text as litotesladen and rife with contradictions as Benito Cereno; but as difficult as it may be to ascertain what is amiss on the San Dominick, it is probably equally difficult not to suspect. In this respect, at least, the argument of this chapter will come much closer to Kavanagh’s than to Levine’s. But before we invest ourselves further in a discussion of readerly first impressions of Benito Cereno, we should briefly examine the intra-textual sup port for the importance of first impressions.

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AT FIRST GLANCE: THE SAN DOMINICK As Delano boards the San Dominick, we are told that “his one eager glance took in all the faces, with every other object about him.” 11 It is probably safe to conjecture that whenever a narrative mentions “one eager glance” that pre tends to take in “every…object,” the reader would seem to be not only per mitted to question, but obliged to challenge the initial conclusions reached by the glancer, particularly when the caution is added that a ship not only “hoard[s] from view [its] interior until the last moment, but…upon sudden and complete disclosure, has…something of the effect of enchantment.” Delano’s first impression of the San Dominick—his enchanted disclosure—is the product of a glance characterized not only as “eager,” but shortly there after as “impatient” (39). The narrator of Benito Cereno seems as impatient to characterize Delano’s glance as eager as Delano himself is to take in the San Dominick. Moreover, the text of Benito Cereno calls attention to the importance of Delano’s first impression from its own outset. In other words, the reader’s first impression of this story that “seems to create new blind spots for every new reading” 12 should in some sense take into account the story’s own sense of the importance of first impressions. That Delano glances over the San Dominick impatiently is less important than the tenacity with which he clings to the im pression generated by that eager reading. Having taken in the total picture at a glimpse, he does not know how to see the details, much less how to re-see them or to allow such revision to influence his thinking or behavior. That parallax of misinterpretation is the difference between Delano’s first reading of what happens to him and a reader’s first reading of Melville’s account of Delano’s account of what happened to Delano: the significance of details provided either by Delano or by Melville’s narrator with reference to Delano, whose eager glance is embedded in a matrix of details designed for eagle-eyed investigation. There is collusion between the details that one need not be paranoid in order to detect—not even on a first reading. For instance, the average mid-nineteenth century reader who encoun tered Benito Cereno was probably not aware that the historical name of the ship that Melville calls the San Dominick was actually the Tryal, though the associations between San Dominick and the slave insurrections of Santo Domingo as the eighteenth century drew to a close were apt to suggest them selves in a story set in the year 1799. 13 But what should catch the reader’s eye, in any case, is the simile that Delano stumbles upon as he approaches the strange ship: it was no purely fanciful resemblance which now, for a moment, almost led Captain Delano to think that nothing less than a ship-load of monks was before him. Peering over the bulwarks were what really seemed, in the hazy distance, throngs of dark cowls; while, fitfully revealed through the open port-holes, other dark moving figures were dimly descried, as of Black Friars pacing the cloisters. (36)

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However quickly and unreasonably Delano comes to the monk metaphor— however superficially we may suppose him to have skimmed the San Dominick— his metaphor is absolutely eagle-eyed in its relevance to the tale. Monastic imagery, of course, pervades Benito Cereno. Cereno is likened to Charles V just before his decision to abdicate the throne in order to retire to the monastery at Yuste (41). Because of his garb, Babo is said to resemble a Franciscan monk (45). And Delano sees the shaving chair as something out of the Inquisition (70). These instances help to establish the credibility of Delano’s metaphor; but they do so only in metaphorical terms. Far more im portant than the way in which we keep returning to this metaphor is the way in which it becomes literally relevant, the way in which its significance trans forms itself from something that is hidden/ figurative into something that is literal/etymological. For Delano does not simply liken the blacks aboard the San Dominick to monks; he likens them to Black Friars, a nickname applied specifically to Dominicans. Three paragraphs before learning the name of Cereno’s ship (i.e., before learning that everyone aboard might rightly be called a “Dominickan”), Delano has already begun to think of the blacks on board as Dominicans. Long before he realizes that the blacks of the San Dominick re semble, in their rebellion, the rebellious black Dominicans of Hispaniola, Delano has begun to think of them as Dominicans. Put another way, in utter contrast to the point that Melville makes about Hawthorne’s titles, the thing in Benito Cereno turns out to be precisely what it is called. Even “Black Friars” turns out to be a more apposite word choice than it initially seems; for even though everyone aboard the San Dominick may rightly be called a “Dominickan,” only the blacks resemble the historical monks to which they are metaphorically linked. Just as the Dominicans were the monks put in charge of the Spanish Inquisition, so the blacks of the San Dominick are the friars who act as thought police and word police in their own micro-inquisition. 14

Obviously, the reader of Benito Cereno is not responsible for tracing out every historical allusion of the text on a first reading. Undoubtedly the simi larities between Torquemada (the Dominican Grand Inquisitor who perse cuted the powerful bishop Pedro Aranda) and Babo (the Grand Inquisitor of the San Dominick who leads the attack against his master Alexandro Aranda) are relevant to an informed critical reading of the text. 15 And undoubtedly, it is relevant that “the longest-lived Inquisitorial tribunals were those established in Spain’s colonial holdings in the Americas (including the tribunal at Lima, the city where the rebels in Benito Cereno are ultimately tried and executed). 16 But the reader does not require these details in order to form an adequate first impression of Benito Cereno. The reader need only pay attention to the words on the page. For the meaning of Delano’s first metaphor does not lurk be neath the surface of the tale; it lurks upon the surface, on the skin of language that is presumed to cover a deeper musculature of content. Delano’s hasty metaphor

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serves as an example of a linguistic sign that overdetermines its own relation to the contents of the ship that he takes in at a glance. An equally important instance of such overdetermination occurs out side of the tale’s linguistic sign system. In addition to being one of the more arresting symbols that we encounter in the tale, this non-linguistic sign ap pears quite early in the narrative, as eager to be taken in by the reader as Delano is to take in the San Dominick. It is the “principal relic of faded grandeur” that Delano observes upon boarding: the ample oval of the shield-like stern-piece, intricately carved with the arms of Castile and Leon, medallioned about by groups of mythological or symbolical devices; uppermost and central of which was a dark satyr in a mask, holding his foot on the prostrate neck of a writhing figure, like wise masked. (37; emphasis added) As has been adequately observed by other critics, 17 the figures depicted by the carving seem to be reversed when their masks are removed at the end of the novel, i.e. when Delano holds down Babo (“the prostrate Negro”) with his right foot as Babo (who is “snakishly writhing”) attempts to stab Cereno. But the reversal is not as straightforward as it might initially seem. Most impor tantly, the physical reversal of the positions occupied by the dark figure (Babo) and the one whose color goes unmentioned (Delano), precedes Delano’s epiphany. It seems, in fact, to precipitate the epiphany. 18 Delano does not solve the riddle of the carving in order to reverse the shadow that it foreshadows, but finds himself in a reversal of the carving before he can be credited with solving its riddle. And in the meantime, he is strangling the supine Cereno. Somehow, there are three figures (and two prostrate necks) in the tableau foreshadowed by the carving that includes only two figures and one neck. The symbol, in other words, doesn’t quite work—not even if we take a reversal of the figures in the carving to be a legitimate literal enactment of the carving’s metaphorical content. Contrary to the startling productivity of Delano’s black friar metaphor, the carving seems only to suggest the circum stances of Delano’s escape, not to overdetermine it. But in order to see the way in which the symbolic content of the carv ing overdetermines the events of the story, we must turn to another tableau; for the relevance of the carving is very like the relevance of Delano’s black friar simile in that both crop up not twice, but three times in the course of the text. Between Delano’s comparison of the blacks to Dominicans and the implicit realization that they are like the rebellious Dominican blacks of Hispaniola, there comes the information that their ship is called the San Dominick. And between his observation of the carving of the two figures and his participation in the final tableau, there is another intermediate step: the shaving scene.

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[Babo] then made a gesture as if to begin, but midway stood suspended for an instant, one hand elevating the razor, the other professionally dab bling among the bubbling suds on the Spaniard’s lank neck… Don Benito[’s]… usual ghastliness was heightened by the lather, which lather, again, was intensified in its hue by the contrasting sootiness of the Negro’s body. Altogether the scene was somewhat peculiar, at least to Captain Delano, nor, as he saw the two thus postured, could he resist the vagary, that in the black he saw a headsman, and in the white, a man at the block. But this was one of those antic conceits, appearing and vanishing in a breath, from which, perhaps, the best regulated mind is not always free. Meantime the agitation of the Spaniard had a little loosened the bunting from around him, so that one broad fold swept curtain-like over the chairarm to the floor, revealing, amid a profusion of armorial bars and groundcolors—black, blue, and yellow—a closed castle in a blood- red field diagonal with a lion rampant in a white. ‘The castle and the lion,’ exclaimed Captain Delano—‘why, Don Benito, this is the flag of Spain you use here.’ (71–2) Delano cannot look at the sooty figure of Babo and the trembling Spaniard’s lank (and incidentally prostrate) neck without stumbling onto another of his strangely apt metaphors: the black headsman stooping over a white man at the block. And no sooner does he articulate this vagary to himself than the rele vance of the scene to the carving becomes eerily underscored by the revelation that Cereno’s bib is the flag of Spain. Recall that the two figures in the carv ing appear directly above the arms of Castile and Leon, the same castle and lion that appear on the Spanish flag which is directly beneath the heads of Babo and Cereno. The riddle of the carving solves itself long before it defies it self. The figures remove their masks before they change positions. Once again, instead of lurking beneath the surface (where we have come to expect para noids to delve for meaning), the significance of the carving “lurks” in plain sight—with a marker as conspicuous as the flag of Spain to serve as ratifica tion of the aptness of Delano’s unconsciously eagle-eyed vagaries. A reader who links the carving directly to Delano’s escape without con sidering the mediating role of the shaving scene makes precisely the same mis take that Delano makes throughout the narrative: the mistake of assuming that Delano is the central figure in a tale whose title would seem to indicate otherwise. For if one aspect of the radically perverse dimension of meaning in Benito Cereno is that things keep turning out to be what they are called, then Delano’s flaw in the tale is in relating himself to metaphors and symbols that are more properly applied to Benito Cereno. If we do not see the shaving scene as mediating between the carving and the final tableau, then we may be pressed to wonder, along with Delano, how Cereno ends up in the final tableau at all. But that is the wrong question, for Delano is the one who does not belong in the tableau, since he had no place in the carving.

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That the carving was somehow about Cereno and Babo be comes clear to all readers (including Delano) by the end of the text. But it is one of Delano’s idiosyncrasies to be so long in arriving at the conclusion. And as we shall see, the idiosyncrasy, as suggested by his position in the tableau, is a result of his desire to put himself, in true paranoid fashion, at the center of everything on the San Dominick, including the relationship between Babo and Cereno—a relationship that he intrudes upon before understanding. 19 Delano does not apply the carving to the shaving scene or the connec tion between the two to Cereno because he is too busy trying to connect him self to everything else on the San Dominick. “Not Captain Delano, but Don Benito, the black, in leaping in the boat, had intended to stab” (85). The scales fall from Delano’s eyes the moment he realizes that the dagger isn’t pointed at him. He can only see the conspiracy of the San Dominick once he entertains, with some seriousness, the notion that he is not the target. His in ability to perceive the conspiracy directed against Benito Cereno is a result of his desire to generate theories of conspiracies directed at himself. He is capa ble of generating other conspiracy theories, conspiracy theories that do not concern him. Indeed, at one point he stumbles upon the correct explanation for the events aboard the San Dominick; but a conspiracy that fails to place Delano at its center cannot retain his attention. He cannot focus on such pos sibilities because he is less interested (even though he has reason to suspect that his life is in danger) in figuring out what is going on than in insisting upon his being at the center of things. When the evidence constrains him to consider non-Delano-centered theories, he invariably dismisses such theories out of hand or decides to reserve judgment or simply changes his topic of thought. We will examine these dismissals in more detail later on. First, how ever, let us examine Delano in the light of Freud’s contention that the para noid mode of thought is an elaborate way of encoding the assertion, “I love only myself.” THINGS TAKEN PERSONALLY [I]t is in fact the very thought of himself as a gothic protagonist—or rather, the thought that he has been imagining himself at the center of a gothic tale—that often facilitates [Delano’s] return to ease and suspi ciousness. (Coviello, 161) Delano’s interpretation of the events on board the San Dominick is driven by an unwitting attempt on his part to displace the title character from his role in the story. What is remarkable about the hermeneutic moves that Delano makes is not simply that he is most interested in what concerns him most directly, but that he tends to dismiss any information (however relevant it may be to the puzzling out of his perilous situation) that does not relate in obvious ways to him. He devotes an inordinate amount of thought to the impressions that he and Cereno are

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making on each other, entertains megalomaniacally absurd no tions of his importance to the San Dominick’s crew, and consistently distracts himself from reading the events aboard the San Dominick as if they might have a bearing on anyone or anything other than himself. Others in a similarly dangerous situation might be expected to be chiefly interested in what they perceive as bearing upon themselves most directly. But on an almost clinically literal level, Delano relies upon a proleptic formula tion of the Schreberian slogan, “Everything happens with reference to me.” 20 Recall that after Cereno’s alarmingly direct questions, Delano is two entire pages in coming to the suspicion of something he cannot take personally: piracy. Delano is right, of course, to reject the idea that Cereno is a pirate— just as the reader who rejects the possibility is right. But there are presumably very few readers who reject that possibility for the reasons that Delano offers for his own rejection: “Had the Spaniard any sinister scheme,” Delano rea sons, “it must have reference not so much to him (Captain Delano) as to his ship (the Bachelor’s Delight)” (55). Although this assertion would seem to be sound, it does not solve the problem of piracy. Delano, however, cannot bring himself to take the piracy plot seriously. He dismisses it for two reasons. In the first place, he observes, the San Dominick is caught in a current that is taking it away from the Bachelor’s Delight. Because piracy requires prox imity between the ships involved, Delano reasons, “any suspicion combining such contradictions must need be delusive” (55). The current is not merely an obstacle to piracy; it is, to Delano’s mind, a “contradiction.” Less than completely satisfied with that argument, however, Delano re turns to the sort of thinking that made him suspicious of Cereno’s name: But those questions of the Spaniard. There indeed, one might pause. Did they not seem put with much the same object with which the burglar or assassin, by day-time, reconnoitres the walls of a house? But, with ill pur poses, to solicit such information openly of the chief person endangered, and so, in effect, setting him on his guard; how unlikely a procedure was that? Absurd, then, to suppose that those questions had been prompted by evil designs. Thus, the same conduct, which, in this instance, had raised the alarm, served to dispel it. In short, scarce any suspicion or un easiness, however apparently reasonable at the time, which was not now, with equal apparent reason, dismissed. (56–7) Just as Delano suspects that Benito Cereno is not Benito Cereno’s name be cause it sounds a little too realistic, so he suspects that Cereno’s questions are not the questions of a pirate because they sound too much like the questions one would expect from a pirate (again we see him blankly—even perversely— refusing to accept things at face value). It does not occur to Delano that he might be Cereno’s prisoner. It does not occur to him that if he is not allowed to return to the Bachelors Delight, then any suspicions that Cereno might raise in him would

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be moot in the event of a piratical attack. But most remarkably of all, it does not occur to Delano to include Cereno’s questions when he later stops the text in order to list the most puzzling events that he has encountered on board the San Dominick (66). Of course, the four points that make their way onto Delano’s list all concern race and power on the ship. And Cereno’s questions appear to have little to do with race and power. But when Delano generates his list, he is not aware of himself as plunging into an examination of racial relations aboard the San Dominick; he supposes that he is only “turning over, in a purely spec ulative sort of way, some lesser peculiarities of the captain and crew” (65). That these lesser peculiarities do turn out to be highly relevant to the solu tion of the puzzle of Benito Cereno is yet another testament of Delano’s intu itive sense of what is amiss aboard the San Dominick—and perhaps an even greater testament of his reluctance to reach any sort of a conclusion in which he does not figure prominently. When he considers the possibility of piracy, Delano does not consider himself an ironic person, which is to say that however capable he may be of de tecting the irony in some of the things he says, he is incapable of putting it there. ‘So, Don Benito—padlock and key—significant symbols, truly.’ Biting his lip, Don Benito faltered. Though the remark of Captain Delano, a man of such native simplicity as to be incapable of satire or irony, had been dropped in playful allusion to the Spaniard’s singularly evidenced lordship over the black; yet the hypochondriac seemed in some way to have taken it as a malicious reflec tion upon his confessed inability thus far to break down, at least, on a ver bal summons, the entrenched will of the slave. Deploring this supposed misconception, yet despairing of correcting it, Captain Delano shifted the subject; but finding his companion more than ever withdrawn, as if still sourly digesting the lees of the presumed affront above-mentioned, by- andby Captain Delano likewise became less talkative, oppressed, against his own will, by what seemed the secret vindictiveness of the morbidly sensi tive Spaniard. But the good sailor himself, of a quite contrary disposition, refrained, on his part, alike from the appearance as from the feeling of re sentment, and if silent, was only so from contagion. (51; emphasis added) Delano meant only what he said, that the padlock and key were “significant symbols”; he imagines that Cereno has delved beneath the surface to an ironic— i.e. an unintended and incorrect—meaning. The mistake that Delano mistakenly ascribes to Cereno is the mistake that Delano himself makes of looking too deeply into exchanges and regarding them as personal affronts. The same sort of unintentionally ironic exchange occurs with the arrival of the supplies that Delano has requisitioned from the Bachelor’s Delight:

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Captain Delano sought [Cereno’s] permission to serve out the water, so that all might share alike, and none injure themselves by unfair excess. But sensible, and on Don Benito’s account, kind as this offer was, it was received with what seemed impatience; as if aware that he lacked energy as a commander, Don Benito, with the true jealousy of weakness, re sented as an affront any interference. So, at least, Captain Delano in ferred. (66) The third instance of Delano’s sense of Cereno’s sensitivity occurs when Delano informs him that Atufal waits outside his cabin: Don Benito recoiled, as if at some bland satirical touch, delivered with such adroit garnish of apparent good-breeding as to present no handle for retort. He is like one flayed alive, thought Captain Delano; where may one touch him without causing a shrink? (80) This sort of concern, on Delano’s part, about the impression that he is mak ing on Cereno and the impression that Cereno is making on him runs so thor oughly through the text of Benito Cereno that it is hardly exaggeration to say that Delano takes the whole of his visit to the San Dominick personally. Examples such as these do not simply abound in the text; they virtually constitute the text. Consider, for instance, Delano’s awareness of himself as the moral center of the San Dominick, a superhuman force that goes about crushing people into good behavior under his polite remonstrances, as in his discussion with Cereno concerning Atufal: “Ah now, pardon me, but that is treating the poor fellow like an ex-king indeed. Ah, Don Benito,” [said Delano] smiling, “for all the license you permit in some things, I fear lest, at bottom, you are a bitter hard master.” Again Don Benito shrank; and this time, as the good sailor thought, from a genuine twinge of his conscience. (80) Or in his encounter of a sailor who lowers his head at his approach: Upon Captain Delano’s approach, the man at once hung his head below its previous level; the one necessary for business. It appeared as if he de sired to be thought absorbed, with more than common fidelity, in his task. Being addressed, he glanced up, but with what seemed a furtive, dif fident air, which sat strangely enough on his weather-beaten visage… How plainly, thought [Delano], did that old whiskerando yonder betray a consciousness of ill-desert. No doubt, when he saw me coming, he dreaded lest I, apprised by his Captain of the crew’s general misbehavior, came with sharp words for him, and so down with his head. (60; empha sis added)

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Once Delano relates the sailor’s behavior to the force of his own moral pres ence, the reason for the man’s strange air becomes plain. Moreover, a single rebuff from Delano is usually enough; just as he thinks a second may be necessary for his host, Cereno comes around: He descended to the cabin to bid a ceremonious, and, it may be, tacitly rebukeful adieu. But to his great satisfaction, Don Benito, as if he began to feel the weight of that treatment with which this slighted guest had, not indecorously, retaliated upon him, now supported by his servant, rose to his feet, and grasping Captain Delano’s hand, stood tremulous; too much agitated to speak. (82) Delano wonders somewhat about each of his strange experiences and obser vations aboard the San Dominick; but his primary concern is with Cereno’s seemingly icy reserve. He wonders why Cereno seems to take everything he does so personally and whether he should take Cereno’s incivilities personally. Benito Cereno is one pendulum swing after another between Delano’s wounded pride and his gratified sense of acceptance. Within minutes of boarding, he experiences anxiety over “what he could not help taking for the time to be Don Benito’s unfriendly indifference,” but comforts himself with the observation that the “same reserve was shown towards all but his faithful servant” (41). He begins “to regard the stranger’s behavior something in the light of an intentional affront” (51), but manages, after a little thought, to persuade himself differently: “whatever in a serious way seemed enigmatical, was now good-naturedly explained away by the thought that, for the most part, the poor invalid scarcely knew what he was about; either sulking in black vapors, or putting idle questions without sense or object” (57). Shortly after “Delano’s pride began to be roused” (81) by Cereno’s perceived antisociabil ity, Delano is overcome by “pleased surprise” as he observes “Don Benito advancing—an unwonted energy in his air, as if, at the last moment, intent upon making amends for his recent discourtesy” (83). And now Delano re buffs himself: “I have done him wrong, selfreproachfully thought Captain Delano; his apparent coldness has deceived me; in no instance has he meant to offend” (83). But if Delano spends far more time taking things personally than puz zling things out while he is aboard the San Dominick, it is because the one must always be prompted by the other. The conspiracy theories that Delano generates to account for Cereno’s strange behavior occur as his last ditch ef fort to avoid the conclusion that he never wants to reach: that Cereno doesn’t like him. Whenever Delano is capable of persuading himself that Cereno is not being uncivil, he does not bother with his conspiracy theories. Consider the manner in which Delano arrives at his theory that Cereno is a common sailor who is impersonating a captain. Delano begins by assert ing that there are two options for the “alternations of courtesy and ill-breed ing” in his host: innocent lunacy or wicked imposture. The possibility that Cereno is simply

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sometimes rude is not so much an alternative as a stepping stone to the alternative of imposture, which is the only alternative that Delano, who insists on taking Cereno’s behavior personally, leaves open for himself. He dismisses lunacy not because of any particular evidence of Cereno’s lucidity, but because, “in an incipient way, he began to regard the stranger’s conduct something in the light of an intentional affront,” which “virtually vacate[s]…the idea of lunacy” (52). But the choice to be offended not only eliminates the option of lunacy; it eliminates itself. The affront Delano perceives cannot simply be an affront directed by one captain (Cereno) at another (Delano); it must indicate some kind of impersonation plot. Delano’s insistence on not being affronted by Cereno, in other words, is so severe that when the inference of an affront from Cereno becomes unavoid able, Cereno must prove to be someone other than Cereno. But Delano cannot induce himself to buy his own conspiracy theory. Perhaps he sees the weakness of the paranoid argument that Cereno cannot be Cereno’s name because it is such a common name as to be just the sort of name that an impostor would adopt. 21 Or perhaps he is really persuaded, as he seems to be, by Cereno’s beard (52–3). In any case, he accepts Benito Cereno as the genuine article. And no sooner does he do so than he decides to dismiss the idea of an affront; for though “the circumstance which had pro voked that distrust remained unexplained,” Delano talks to himself not of ‘if’ but of ‘when’ the “little mystery should have been cleared up” (53). For all his puzzling over Cereno’s seemingly bad manners, Delano ends by deciding to “leave open margin” to Cereno’s “black-letter text” (53). His agenda to get to the bottom of things is really only an agenda to make himself feel unslighted; that accomplished, he decides to withhold judgment. In this respect, he is close to being a paranoid; for, like a paranoid, what he cannot take personally he does not take into account. But a paranoid eventually manages to see significance lurking everywhere. The slogan of paranoid thinking might very well be Schreber’s confession: “Everything happens with reference to me.” Although Delano seeks the “lurking significance” in the gesture made towards him by a sailor who may only be “busy with the stay” (62), he does not know what to make of the signal—for the signal, like all of the other furtive signals he encounters on the San Dominick, is made with reference to Cereno and Babo. Delano tries to take the references personally and does an adequate job of generating conspiracy theories when the application puzzles him. But what is most paranoid about him limits him; he puts himself at the center of the mystery that he is trying to solve. He is a Sherlock Holmes who insists on being sleuth, murderer, and victim all at once, which, as we shall see, prompts him to detect the wrong conspiracy theories and to dismiss the right one. CONSPIRACY When, towards the end of the story, Cereno urges Delano to leave the San Dominick, he adds, “and God guard you better than me, my best friend.” Delano,

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who is never unaffected by fond sentiments, immediately forgets all of the supposed insults that he has endured, and “would now have lingered” were it not for Babo’s “admonitory eye” (84). Delano makes no secret to him self or to the text that his departure from the boat is prompted not by his own desire or Cereno’s request, but Babo’s expression. But despite this instance; and despite Delano’s characterization of Cereno as a captain who “has little of command but the name” (47); and de spite his suspicion, during the shaving scene, that Babo and Cereno are “en acting some sort of play”; and despite the fact that all orders on the San Dominick are given by Babo rather than Cereno; and despite Delano’s vague sense of the shipboard whites as “pawns” (59); and despite the two unretali ated black-on-white attacks; despite all of this, Delano is still unprepared for he revelation that is in store concerning the San Dominick. To claim that Delano is not prepared for that revelation because of his “singularly undistrustful good nature” is to overlook the paranoid flights of fancy to which he is subject throughout the text. The most exaggerated of these occurs during his second encounter with the sailor in the rigging: the mad idea now darted into Captain Delano’s mind, that Don Benito’s plea of indisposition, in withdrawing below, was but a pretense; that he was engaged there maturing his plot, of which the sailor, by some means gaining an inkling, had a mind to warn the stranger against; incited, it may be, by gratitude for a kind word on first boarding the ship. (62) Delano is quite a force: a man before whom guilty sailors and captains alike hang their heads in shame and one for whom innocents are willing to risk their lives out of “gratitude for a kind word.” In this scene and elsewhere, Delano evinces a propensity for taking the taking of things personally a bit too seriously and a bit too far. It is this desire to personalize the conspiracy theo ries that he generates— to monogram the San Dominick with his anno domini initials—that leads him down one frustratingly circular path after another. Delano’s attempt to persuade himself that the very ubiquity of the name Cereno makes it suspicious is a typically paranoid gesture. But even more ques tionable than his method of forming the suspicion is his abrupt method of dis missing it; for Delano no sooner surmises that Cereno might be feigning his illness as well as his identity than he abandons the whole notion of this plot: To think that, under the aspect of infantile weakness, the most savage en ergies might be couched—those velvets of the Spaniard but the silky paw to his fangs. From no train of thought did these fancies [of Cereno’s imposture] come; not from within, but from without; suddenly too, and in one throng, like hoar frost; yet as soon to vanish as the mild sun of Captain Delano’s goodnature regained its meridian. (52)

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Delano’s suspicions, which come “not from within, but from without,” disap pear with a mood swing. His objectively grounded theory gives way to a sub jective dismissal, a turn of events which would seem to be all to the good, since we know that this particular theory of imposture is incorrect. But Delano does not try to do anything else with the information he has. He does not produce or attempt to produce an alternative explanation for Cereno’s baffling behav ior; his “goodnature” having “regained its meridian,” Delano has no further use for his conspiracy theory. “Away with suspicion,” (53) he tells himself. Whereupon Cereno approaches and does something truly suspicious. He asks Delano how long his ship has been anchored, what his cargo is, whether there is much money aboard the Bachelor’s Delight, how many men Delano has, how well armed the men are, and whether they will be aboard the Bachelor’s Delight that evening. Cereno cannot even meet Delano’s eyes as he asks these questions: “with every token of craven discomposure [Cereno] dropped his eyes to the deck” (53). And Delano, who has just tossed away his suspicions, does not even have a chance to retrieve them before he is distracted by something else: ere Captain Delano could cast a cool thought upon what had just passed, the young Spanish sailor before mentioned was seen descending from the rigging…. At this moment the young sailor’s eye was again fixed on the whisperers, and Captain Delano thought he observed a lurking significance in it, as if silent signs of some Freemason sort had that instant been interchanged. This once more impelled his own glance in the direction of Don Benito, and, as before, he could not but infer that himself formed the subject of the conference. (54) Delano has good reason, as he walks away from Babo and Cereno, to be “wrapped in thought”; it is no surprise that his mind passes “from one suspi cious thing to another” (55). But despite his virtual certainty that Babo and Cereno were plotting against him, he is unable to produce a conspiracy the ory centered on himself. At least part of Delano’s problem on the San Dominick is his inability to capitalize on his own paranoid inclinations. By that I mean that he isn’t para noid enough; for there is a conspiracy on the San Dominick, though Delano is too busy detecting conspiracies that don’t exist to detect the one that does. And nowhere do we see the fitful, underdeveloped quality of his paranoia more clearly than in his creation of the list to which I have alluded: [Recognizing] the Spanish sailor who had seemed to beckon from the main chains, something of his old trepidations returned. Ah, thought he—gravely enough—this is like the ague: because it went off, it follows not that it won’t come back.

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Though ashamed of the relapse, he could not altogether subdue it; and so, exerting his good nature to the utmost, insensibly he came to a com promise. Yes, this is a strange craft; a strange history, too, and strange folks on board. But—nothing more. By way of keeping his mind out of mischief till the boat should arrive, he tried to occupy it with turning over and over, in a purely speculative sort of way, some lesser peculiarities of the captain and crew. Among oth ers, four curious points recurred. First, the affair of the Spanish lad assailed with a knife by the slave boy; an act winked at by Don Benito. Second, the tyranny in Don Benito’s treatment of Atufal, the black; as if a child should lead a bull of the Nile by the ring in his nose. Third, the trampling of the sailor by the two ne gros; a piece of insolence passed over without so much as a reprimand. Fourth, the cringing submission to their master of all the ship’s under lings, mostly blacks; as if by the least inadvertence they feared to draw down his despotic displeasure. Coupling these points, they seemed somewhat contradictory. But what then, thought Captain Delano, glancing towards his now nearing boat,— what then? Why, Don Benito is a very capricious commander. But he is not the first of the sort I have seen; though it’s true he rather ex ceeds any other. But as a nation—continued he in his reveries—these Spaniards are all an odd set; the very word Spaniard has a curious, con spirator, GuyFawkish twang to it. And yet, I dare say, Spaniards in the main are as good folks as any in Duxbury, Massachusetts. Ah good! At last “Rover” has come. (65–6) His suspicions are brought on by the sight of the sailor who might have been signalling him or might have been fastening a stay. But even if his suspicions are warranted, he does not know why he must bother with them, since they never get him anywhere. He is “ashamed” of them. But in spite of his “undis trustful good nature,” he cannot suppress them entirely; so he comes to his “compromise.” Without invoking psychoanalytical language, Delano re proaches himself for being paranoid, but decides that the best way to control his paranoia is to indulge it without becoming invested enough in it to reach any conclusions. One can avoid the pitfalls of paranoia if one is paranoid in a “purely speculative sort of way.” So Delano generates his list, persuades him self that it cancels itself out, and proceeds, with a latent outburst of paranoid thought, to try to make something conspiratorial out of “the very word Spaniard,” a move that is canceled, in turn, by an ethnic relativism among people of European descent. Although this last cancellation points back to ward the racialized quality of the list itself, Delano cannot pursue it because he is distracted by the arrival of his whaleboat.

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Delano’s ague-like vacillations between suspicion and self-reproach run through the entire text of Benito Cereno. When he is overcome by a “suspicion of collusion” between Babo and Cereno in the shaving scene, he asks himself what their object “could be,” but doesn’t bother to answer. When Cereno asks him to ascend the ladder to the platform of hatchet-polishers, he does not bother to wonder why he imagines that they will attack him, but smiles “at his late fidgety panic” when they do not (47). Despite his assumption that the sailor in the rigging wants to convey a report “unfavorable to the captain” that might confirm his “previous misgivings” about Cereno; despite his suspicion that Atufal is “laying in wait for him”; despite his concern “that at the signal of the Spaniard he was about to be massacred”; despite his surmise that the crew might be “lurking in the hold”; despite the “superstitious suspicions” that “swarmed” through his mind; and despite his sense of involvement in “some iniquitous plot”; despite all of this, Delano smiles “at the phantoms which had mocked him”; he cannot “but marvel at the panic by which him self had been surprised”; he thinks he must have “been beside himself”; he calls himself “sappy Amasa”; he sloganizes, “Away with suspicion”; and he poses the sarcastic question, “What, I, Amasa Delano—Jack of the Beach, as they called me when a lad—I…that used to go berrying with cousin Nat and the rest; I to be murdered here at the ends of the earth?” Given Delano’s suspicions, it is quite surprising that he has no answer, no favorite theory, no default explanation, no “least unreasonable” conjecture to offer to his sailors when they ask him why Cereno has leapt into their boat. But given the vehemence with which he discards each conspiracy theory that he generates concerning the San Dominick, it is no surprise at all: Don Benito sprang over the bulwarks, falling at the feet of Captain Delano …The dismayed officer of the boat eagerly asked what this meant. To which, Captain Delano, turning a disdainful smile upon the unaccount able Spaniard, answered that, for his part, he neither knew nor cared; but it seemed as if Don Benito had taken it into his head to produce the im pression among his people that the boat wanted to kidnap him. (84) To the very end, Delano regards Cereno as “unaccountable.” Under the cir cumstances, he is surprisingly eager not to speculate about Cereno’s inten tions. Whatever Cereno’s motives, be they playful or profound, it seems certain that they are designed to deceive—egregiously deceive—the people aboard the Bachelors Delight. Although Delano refuses to conjecture about Cereno’s motives, the motives themselves are unimportant in the face of a manifest plot. Even at this point in the story, the only thing clear to Delano about the plot of Benito Cereno is that there is one. He doesn’t know the identity of the plotters or the motives for the plot or his relation to the plot. He neither knows nor thinks he knows. He doesn’t even get

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around to his false accusation of Cereno, “this plotting pirate means murder” (84), until Babo leaps at him. And the reader has little choice but to wonder why. DELANO’S MOTIVES Delano’s reasons for generating conspiracy theories are two-fold. Some theo ries are generated as a means of soothing his pride, ruffled periodically by the perceived affronts of Cereno; these theories occupy his attention only so long as it takes for him to persuade himself that Cereno has not meant any harm. Other theories are generated as a means of accounting for the other puzzling phenomena that he encounters aboard the San Dominick; and these theories occupy his attention only so long as they help him to the conclusion that there is a conspiracy that takes him as its specific target. In a simplified sense, Delano abandons the affront-driven conspiracies and is abandoned by the enigma-driven conspiracies. He abandons the affront-driven conspiracies whenever his “good nature” returns; and he feels compelled to give up on the enigma-driven conspiracies whenever new evidence crops up that would seem to contradict the centrality of the role that he has used them to carve out for himself as victim. 22 That these idiosyncrasies of Delano’s are characteristic of paranoia is im portant to the present study. But Benito Cereno is less invested in offering us a pre-Freudian portrait of paranoia than in examining what would appear to be the key concern of the story: the race relations aboard the San Dominick. Neither is it possible (or even useful) to explain Delano’s complete bafflement at Cereno’s actions towards the end of the story in terms of his inchoate para noia alone. Delano’s racism is, of course, terribly important to an understanding of how he can be completely theory-less in the face of Cereno’s bizarre action. Moreover, that racism is important to an understanding of how Delano can fail to suspect what he has already suspected. Although it is impossible for Delano, by the time Cereno jumps into his boat, to have ascertained the na ture of the relationship between Babo and Cereno, it seems equally impossi ble for him not to suspect. This claim remains tenable even in the absence of a particularly close reading by Delano or the reader. All that the reader need perceive about Benito Cereno is that it is a mystery. Because the chief mecha nism of a mystery is to divert our attention from its solution, we should sus pect every possibility. The reader of Benito Cereno is no more justified in dismissing theories simply because Delano dismisses them than the reader of the Pink Panther series would be in accepting the theories of Clouseau at the outset of a case. 23 And the reader need not be particularly imaginative in order to suspect a racial conspiracy, since Delano himself is the one to raise the pos sibility on several occasions. True, he rarely gives that particular conspiracy theory much thought. When he asks himself whether Cereno could be “any way in complicity with the blacks,” he rejects the question out of hand, as the blacks are “too stupid” (63) and turns his attention to a sailor working on a knot. The sailor hands Delano the knot, which is promptly taken from him by a black who throws it overboard as he

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utters “some African word, equivalent to pshaw” (64). The black has dismissed the knot precisely as Delano has dismissed the correct so lution to the mystery: that solution being that Cereno is in some way com plicit with the blacks. Despite his assessment of Babo as “uncommonly intelligent” (76), Delano is not capable of re-examining his belief in the impossibility of a conspiracy in volving both races. Consider the first time he imagines such a conspiracy: If Don Benito’s story was throughout an invention, then every soul on board, down to the youngest negress, was his carefully drilled recruit in the plot: an incredible inference. And yet, if there was ground for mistrust ing his veracity, that inference was a legitimate one. But those questions of the Spaniard. There, indeed, one might pause. (56; emphasis added) Note the progression of Delano’s thoughts. That a plot can be so intricate as to involve even female blacks strikes Delano as “an incredible inference.” Nevertheless, his dismissal of the plot gives way to an admission of its possi bility. Then, strangely, we encounter the “But” of the following paragraph. Cereno’s piratical questions would presumably heighten Delano’s fears; in stead, Delano presents them as something of a contradiction, as if he has al ready forgotten the possibility that he has just acknowledged. The incredible inference remains beyond belief even after Delano pauses to try to consider it. Delano only reflects on “stupidity” twice in the story—both times in the context of a suspicion of complicity between Cereno and the blacks. The more notable instance appears above; and the other occurs when Delano is frightened by the prospect of preceding Cereno up the ladder to the platform of the hatchetpolishers: Gingerly enough stepped good Captain Delano between them, and in the instant of leaving them behind, like one running the gauntlet, he felt an apprehensive twitch in the calves of his legs. But when, facing about, he saw the whole file, like so many organ-grinders, still stupidly intent on their work, unmindful of everything beside, he could not but smile at his late fidgety panic. (47; emphasis added) Delano’s unbending regard for a black or black-inclusive conspiracy as stupid leads him to the only line of thinking that is weaker than his logic con cerning Cereno’s name or his rejection of piratical intent behind Cereno’s pi raticalsounding questions. The only trick of Benito Cereno is that the correct solution is the one most weakly dismissed. It’s a whodunit in which the mur derer turns out really to be the one with the most questionable alibi.

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THE READER’S MOTIVES All of which brings us back to the most important difference between the readings of Kavanagh and Levine; for whereas Kavanagh’s contention about “the simplest and most obvious construction” of the story applies to Delano, Levine’s remark about the impossibility of certainty pertains to the reader of the text. Apparently it was not only possible, but ordinary for the mid-nine teenth-century readers of Benito Cereno to generate first readings of the events of the San Dominick that corresponded remarkably with Delano’s. 24 Doubtless these readers were deceived, egregiously deceived. But why? What motives did the text have for deception? And more importantly, what motives did the readers have for being deceived? What was it that prevented Delano and certain readers of his story from entertaining, with any seriousness, the idea of a black-inclusive conspiracy—much less a black-dominant one? One approach to answering this question is to consider the ways in which Melville’s Captain Delano is emblematic of the complacent nine teenth-century American reader whose fear of subtle forms of black resistance to white power is so intense as not to be able to recognize them. Charles Swann, a recent critic who attempts to construct a profile of that complacent nineteenth-century reader, concedes that Benito Cereno is a politically radical tale. But Swann goes on to pose an interesting question about the almost in escapably “anti-slavery and antiracist” readings of it that have been popular for the past three decades. Since the critics of today have so little difficulty in regarding the text as everything that should have disturbed an ante-bellum Southerner, Swann wonders whether our historical distance is, in and of itself, sufficient to account for the profoundly different readings of Benito Cereno that have been generated over the years. In response to the provocative ques tion, “What [was] there to stop [the] Southern reader of [1855] from having his or her prejudices and fears confirmed by Melville’s story?,” Swann con vincingly asserts that there was “nothing” to prevent the Southern reader from resisting Melville’s text far more noisily than s/ he did and compellingly inter rogates the historically demonstrable omission of resistance to the tale from such important southern writers and critics as William Gilmore Simms. 25 But why should there have been resistance on the part of the Southern readership to Melville’s story? As critics and historians alike point out, the South of 1855 was deeply invested in two claims about slave insurrections. The first was that a successful insurrection could never occur; the second that nothing could be worse than if a successful insurrection did occur. 26 The manner in which Delano’s consciousness grapples with the situation on board the San Dominick is a perfect illustration of these two assumptions in action. As Kavanagh observes, What most confuses Delano about the scene aboard the San Dominick is the absence of the network of repressive practices and apparatuses that

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would ratify his own heavily imaginary sense of himself and of reality, that would reproduce the ideology (the “lived relation to the real”) which would make his world look as it should. 27 Much like the Southern slaveholder whose primary thought on the possibility of insurrection is “It will never happen,” the New Englander Delano refuses to see a world whose racial hierarchy fails to correspond to his own notions of the natural relations between races. And many of his readers go along with him. The possibility of black hegemony (rather than black complicity) can only be approached metaphorically by Delano, perhaps most strikingly dur ing the shaving scene (when he likens Babo to a headsman and Cereno to a man at the block). But even this intuition, which Delano regards as an “antic conceit,” plays back into his own racially overdetermined method of reading. Importantly, Delano allows the shaving scene in Benito Cereno to do the same work that shaving had done and would continue to do in American literature for some time. In 1799, for instance, as a response to the slave rebellion in Santo Domingo, Charles Brockden Brown published an article that specifically refers to the anxieties Brown presumed his white readers to feel when sub mitting themselves to black barbers. 28 There is also the example of Charles Chesnutt’s remarkable short story, “The Doll,” which centers almost exclu sively on the shaving of a white man by a black barber. 29 Even Stephen Crane’s The Monster, that tale of black facelessness, proceeds from its open ing description of Trescott “shaving his lawn as if it were a priest’s chin” to the banter of the barber shop in which, as Joseph Church points out, “com placent white men disregard the literal and symbolic razors poised near their own faces.” 3 0 But how are we to construe the image of a subservient black holding a razor to the neck of the white who is supposedly in charge? Is the point sim ply that disempowered people are likely to wind up in positions that put their masters at their mercy? Or is it paranoid to wonder whether there is some thing more? Is it not reasonable to argue that the image is rather an exposure of a fantasy on the part of the members of the empowered group that servants are only dangerous when their masters put them is such positions? The ma jority of critical discussions of Melville’s shaving scene refer us to the anxieties on the part of most antebellum white Americans concerning the possibility of black insurrections. Less remarked upon has been the comforting side of the shaving image for the typical white reader, the implicit assumption that a black man requires a razor and a white man’s consent in order to have him at his mercy. I would argue that there is a question behind the shaving scenes of American literature. To what extent, these scenes ask, does the rhetoric of ter ror as practiced by empowered whites serve to contain fears about disempow ered blacks rather than to express or face them? What do we learn about Delano’s fears when we see that the most terrifying image of black empower ment that he is capable of imagining is that of a single Babo decapitating a single Delano?

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Delano’s paranoia (prompted by everything from the missing flag to Cereno’s behavior to the black-on-white violence that he witnesses on the ship) is certainly warranted. But it is also fettered by assumptions that show a greater investment in preserving his racial ideology than his life. The extent to which the reader allows her/his first reading of the events on board the San Dominick to be overdetermined by Delano’s assumptions is the extent to which s/he perceives Delano’s peculiarly selective variety of paranoia as a workable and coherent mode of consciousness. The tenor of most recent criticism, however, is that for such readers, the second reading will have much the same effect as a suspicious first reading would have had. The disjunction between what is the case and what Delano allows himself to perceive is the important matter, regardless of whether it is appreciated (or can be appreciated) on a first reading. But if only because of Delano’s role as the narrative locus, it is impor tant to consider the importance of a suspicious first reading, one that per ceives the blacks as the ones who are empowered long before perceiving that they physically dominate the whites. Only when we recognize the chronic manner in which white words and deeds aboard the San Dominick are author ized and modulated by blacks can we see the extent to which the images of black power on the ship serve to distract us from the importance of the black voice. Or, to reiterate in terms of the shaving image, the threat to the jugular vein is the screen which conceals the threat to the larynx. Benito Cereno stakes quite a lot on the rhetorical ascendancy of the blacks on board the San Dominick inasmuch as that ascendancy is repeatedly emphasized before their physical power is ever revealed. 31 White voices con stantly give way to black voices in a way that suggests that the blacks must be perceived as rhetorically empowered regardless of their ability to slit the throats of the whites presumed to control them. For instance, as Cereno de livers his fictionalized account of the misadventures of the San Dominick to Delano, his narrative is gradually taken over by Babo: The Spaniard proceeded, but brokenly and obscurely, as one in a dream. —“Oh, my God! Rather than pass through what I have, with joy I would have hailed the most terrible gales; but—” His cough returned and with increased violence; this subsiding, with reddened lips and closed eyes he fell against his supporter. “His mind wanders. He was thinking of the plague that followed the gales,” plaintively sighed the servant. (44) Another such vocal displacement occurs a few pages later, when Delano in terrogates one of Cereno’s sailors: “The questions were briefly answered, confirming all that remained to be confirmed of the story. The negroes about the windlass joined in with the old sailor, but, as they became talkative, he by degrees became mute” (60).

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Of course, the most strikingly revelatory statement that Babo makes about his relation to Cereno’s voice comes when he baldly announces that he will actually pace Cereno’s participation in his conversation with Delano as he is shaved: “And now, Don Amasa, please go on with your talk about the gale, and all that; master can hear, and between times master can answer” (72). After Babo cuts Cereno, the captain begins “mingling with his words, inci dental praises, less qualified than before, to the blacks, for their general good conduct” (73). But the “particulars were not given consecutively, the servant at convenient times using his razor, and so, between the intervals of shaving, the story and panegyric went on with more than usual huskiness” (73). But the shaving scene is only one instance in which the subservient fig ure proves to be in control. Cereno’s authority on the ship is forever calling it self into question. The very first administrative technique that Delano ascribes to Cereno is delegation. He condescended to no personal mandate. Whatever special orders were necessary, their delivery was delegated to his body-servant…So that to have beheld this undemonstrative invalid gliding about, apathetic and mute, no landsman could have dreamed that in him was lodged a dicta torship beyond which, while at sea, there was no earthly appeal. (41–2) But doubtless the most important instance of black displacement of a white voice occurs when Babo forces Delano into the same position in which Delano found Cereno: one of authorizing white orders through black articulation: While giving some directions about setting a lower stu’n’sail, suddenly Captain Delano heard a voice faithfully repeating his orders. Turning, he saw Babo, now for the time acting, under the pilot, his original part of captain of the slaves. This assistance proved valuable. (79; emphasis added) There is no telling whether these particular instances could have oc curred if the blacks had not been in control of the ship; but if the narrative had ended before divulging that a black uprising had occurred, if we had been left with the impression that Babo really was Cereno’s slave, we would still have reason to suspect the blacks of controlling the ship rhetorically regard less of their physical or political power over the whites. Indeed, the first two thirds of Benito Cereno serve primarily to problematize the master-slave relationship. “The master’s domination,” as Eric Sundquist observes, slides into slavery when he understands his parasitic dependence on his slave; the slave’s subservience slides into mastery when he understands that his very consciousness of freedom is a mode of liberation. In the Hegelian paradox, mastery (like slavery) both is and is not…. Mastery

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becomes a mournful liability, while the condition of slavery conceals an indulgence in the most terrifying power. 32 “There is something suspicious,” noted one nineteenth-century writer, “in the constant never ending statement that we are not afraid of our slaves.” 33 Perhaps there is something equally suspicious in the empowered white’s claim that her/ his deepest fear is of blacks gaining control through insurrection. But if this fear of insurrection only serves to hide a deeper fear that the enslaved black can gain control of her/his white master without staging an insurrec tion, then it is easy to account for the lack of southern resistance to Benito Cereno noted by Swann. The fact of insurrection aboard the San Dominick, if not a happy resolution to the mystery for Southern slaveholders, at least of fers the consolation of its implication that the rhetorical ascendancy of Babo and his crew can only be accounted for in terms of a successful rebellion. Consider the text’s superficial interpretation of Babo’s silence after his capture: “he uttered no sound, and could not be forced to. His aspect seemed to say, since I cannot to deeds, I will not speak words” (102). Babo is charac terized as ending up in the position in which he was supposed to have begun: as a slave whose voice is as conspicuously absent as his powerlessness is con spicuously present. Even if slave owners in the South knew the importance of keeping their slaves from reading and writing and exercising themselves rhetorically in other ways, Benito Cereno seems (at least on a first reading) to indulge the reader in the fantasy that power is always signified by the appropriate symbols. When the uprising comes, the story implies reassuringly, the slaveholders will know it. There will be knives and hatchets and razors. Benito Cereno would seem to be a disavowal of Sundquist’s contention that slavery is and is not. Just as para noia fails to function properly in the absence of the proper conspiracy; so does disempowered rhetoric fail to function in the absence of razors. CONCLUSIONS Delano is egregiously deceived by the conspiracy aboard the San Dominick be cause of the obstacle that he himself puts in the path of the paranoia that could help him to solve the mystery: the obstacle of a racial hierarchy to which he cannot but cling. Melville’s narrator does not simply show us that Delano does not see; he shows us why. Although the motives for deception may not at first leap out at us, the narrator neither succumbs nor invites the reader to succumb to the paranoia in Benito Cereno; he simply leaves the option open. Egregious deception of the superficial skimmer is not an end in itself. Melville’s narrator is not out to get the reader simply because he is out to get the reader. He is out to get Delano. The reader who tries to take the plot of Benito Cereno personally makes the mistake of Delano’s egocentrism; that reader is too paranoid, too anxious to relate everything to himself, too busy detecting imaginary plots

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related to himself to detect plots that do exist and relate to others. But the reader who, like Delano, blindly dismisses the plot out of hand, makes the mistake of Delano’s racism; that reader is not paranoid enough, less invested in coherent conspiracy theories than in those that con form to certain preordained ideological expectations, expectations which it is the business of the paranoiac to defy or confirm at his own convenience, and never simply to ratify obligingly. The narrator of Benito Cereno invites the reader to join him in a conspir acy against Delano, 34 a conspiracy in which the reader becomes a more will ing, more complicit participant than Cereno ever is. The details mentioned by the narrator subtly alert the reader to and underscore the tendencies and patterns that Delano misses. He creates patterns that become patterns before Delano has a chance to notice them (e.g. the Black Friars, the carving); he cues us, even on a first reading, to the importance of rhetoric and of control ling rhetoric and of Delano’s inability to control his own rhetoric, much less to notice who controls the rhetoric on board the San Dominick. If Brown’s important move was to pit narrative against narrator in Wieland and Hawthorne’s was to pit one narrative ( The Marble Faun) against another (The House of the Seven Gables), then Melville’s is to use the narrative voice of Benito Cereno to pit the reader against Delano, the story’s own narra tive locus. Melville goes to the periphery of the narrative circle to conspire against the story’s center. This involvement of the reader opens up a series of questions that were to be explored by Melville in his later work (particularly Billy Budd) and by later writers such as James, Wharton, and Howells: Can the reader step into the fight without choosing sides? And can one choose sides without becoming fair game? And can a reader who doesn’t want to be come fair game resist a text that insists on her/his inclusion? For some time now, standard critical practice has been to answer questions such as these by adverting to Henry James, who does treat the readerly relation to the text with more sophistication, perhaps, than any of his contemporaries. In the next chapter, however, we shall examine the more accessible and perhaps more comprehensive ways in which Twain engages and is engaged by such riddles.

Chapter Four Literary Cloaks, Practical Jokes, and The Esophagus Hoax: Concealment, Conspiracy and the Contrivance of History in Twain

The distinguishing thing about the paranoid style is not that its expo nents see conspiracies or plots here and there in history, but that they re gard a “vast” or “gigantic” conspiracy as the motive force in historical events. History is a conspiracy. 1 Poor child, to have to fight England, Burgundy, and a French conspiracy all at the same time—it was too bad. She was a match for the others, but a conspiracy—ah, nobody is a match for that, when the victim that is to be injured is weak and willing. 2 TAKING HUMOR SERIOUSLY—AN INTRODUCTION Van Wyck Brooks’ well-known claim that, in Mark Twain’s case, “the making of the humorist was the undoing of the artist” 3 has not been so easily side stepped as the other arguments propounded in his widely discredited The Ordeal of Mark Twain. Critics still tend to attempt to separate Twain-the-hu morist from Twain-the-artist or Twain-the-social-critic or Twain-the-pseu donymoushistorical-figure. Perhaps the greatest difficulty we face in any attempt to analyze Twain’s prose stems from our own justifiable reluctance to take humor seriously. Critics are in the habit of building arguments out of facts; we are equally in the habit of building arguments out of fictions; but we are certainly not in the habit of building arguments out of jokes. As Henry Nash Smith observes, “criticism is notoriously helpless in the presence of writing that is really funny.” 4 But is this helplessness acceptable? If Brooks is on to something when he writes that American humorists “do not know themselves how much they are concealing,” 5 then perhaps it is the role of the critic to attempt to unravel the significance of the jokes. In fact, Twain’s humor can be—and occasionally is—read as produc tively as the rest of his prose, even though such analyses run the risk of being dismissed with a rebuttal as simple as, “It’s only a joke.” 6 This chapter would appear to be vulnerable to just such a rebuttal, for while the broadest concern of the present argument is to demonstrate that Twain came to internalize the notion of history

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as a conspiracy (as Hofstadter puts it), the more precise for mulation would appear to be that Twain regarded history as a practical joke on a cosmic scale. Although we will be examining Twain’s attitude about his tory as it registers itself throughout his corpus, our argument will begin with one of Twain’s more obscure texts: A Double-Barrelled Detective Story. The rea sons for beginning with this text are three-fold. In the first place, A Double-Barrelled Detective Story contains what is ar guably Twain’s most famous literary practical joke: the esophagus hoax (which so outraged Brooks). The practical joke itself is less important than Twain’s tsktsking response to the readers who were taken in by his joke; that response is representative of the critical attitude towards history that Twain attempts to inculcate in his reader. A second reason for focusing on the only famous passage from a rela tively obscure text is that the passage itself appears, in reworked form, in both The Innocents Abroad and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (both of which help to clarify not only Twain’s attitude towards history, but his sense of the distinctions between the way things are done in America and the way they are done in Europe). The third reason for the emphasis placed here on A Double-Barrelled Detective Story is specific to the format of this study, which began with an ex amination of the ways in which Charles Brockden Brown reworked the ele ments of William Godwin’s Caleb Williams into a paranoid novel that pits the story against its own narrator. The main plot of A Double-Barrelled Detective Story is lifted directly from Caleb Williams. The persecution of Jacob Fuller by a man who chases him around the globe for a wrong he has not committed is a precise echo of Gines’ tireless persecution of the innocent Caleb Williams. Both novels are dedicated to fostering paranoia as we ordinarily think of it: the sense that someone is after us and that we cannot trust anyone without running the risk of betraying ourselves to our persecutors. The people we are inclined to trust could turn out to be in league with our persecutors, so we trust no one at all. The literary practical joke that is the centerpiece of A Double-Barrelled Detective Story is an instance of literary paranoia having reached its extreme. It is no longer merely Gines who is out to get Caleb Williams for making the mistake of trusting the law to protect him; Twain’s esophagus hoax teaches us that the real conspiracy in A Double-Barrelled Detective Story is targeted at us. The writer is out to get us; he wants to take advantage of our inattention, our gullibility, our willingness to trust him. And if we, the readers of a story, cannot trust the writer, whom can we trust? Put simply, A Double-Barrelled Detective Story is Twain’s most carefully plotted 7 and notoriously conspiratorial fiction. First published in book form in 1902, this spoof on the detective genre contains what is possibly the most famous literary hoax in American literature, the “esophagus” passage that so troubled Van Wyck Brooks and has since intrigued numerous readers. 8 The jokes of this spoof are more serious than they seem and their implications are more

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serious still for an understanding of the rest of Twain’s corpus and of the position assigned to Twain’s humor in American literature. Despite the risk run here of taking humor too seriously, I hope to demonstrate that Twain’s at titude towards practical jokes is tied to and representative of his sense of his tory as an elaborate hoax, an incomprehensible conspiratorial force whose victims are made to resemble the victims of practical jokers. Additionally, the chapter should help us to appreciate the ways in which Twain’s sense of his tory as a conspiracy differs from the paranoid interpretation of history as de scribed by Hofstadter and yet invokes, parodies, and modifies the paranoid perspective as an interpretive mode. Because Twain’s esophagus hoax is per haps better known to readers than the story that contains it, let us begin with a brief review of A Double BarrelledDetective Story. THE PARTICULARS OF THE CASE The most double-barrelled aspect of Twain’s A Double-Barrelled Detective Story is that it is really two stories foisted onto and into each other. The ordi nary relations between plot and subplot do not obtain, as almost a third of the text is an entire eclipse of the main plot (a woman’s revenge against her hus band) by the subplot (Twain’s parody of Sherlock Holmes). It is melodrama fused to farce, picaresque conjoined to parody. The story begins with a Virginia wedding between a man named Jacob Fuller and “a young girl” whose name we never know. 9 The wedding takes place against the wishes and better judgment of the bride’s father, whose ha rangues against the bridegroom in his attempt to dissuade his daughter from the marriage are somehow reported to Fuller. As a typical Twainian Southerner, Fuller explains that his first impulse, when he learned of the insults hurled at him by his father-in-law, was to shoot the man “down like a dog” (6). 10 Instead, however, he has decided to kill him “by inches” (6). For the first three months of their marriage, Fuller’s wife en dures “all the humiliations, all the insults, all the miseries that the diligent and inventive mind of the husband could contrive, save physical injuries only” (6). After each abuse, Fuller urges his wife to flee to her father’s house and explain how terribly she has been treated. She refuses. “He shall never know by my mouth,” she says (7). Eventually, Fuller loses patience. He drags the woman out of bed at midnight, ties her to a tree, strikes her across the face with a cowhide, and sets his bloodhounds on her, calling them off only when she is naked. Then he lights out for the territory, leaving her to be discovered early the next morn ing by passing farmers. Unbeknownst to Fuller, the young bride is carrying their child, a boy that she names Archy and raises in “a secluded New England village” (10) where she is known by the name Stillman. One day she learns that her son’s sense of smell is


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extraordinarily refined. She calls it the “gift of the bloodhound” (12) 11 and incorporates it into her plan for revenging herself upon Jacob Fuller. Once Archy is old enough, she tells him what his father did to her. She tells him that Jacob Fuller is now living in Denver and that Archy is to go there, familiarize himself with his scent, and threaten to reveal his crime to the Denver populace. Archy is to give him a certain number of days to get out of town and is then to follow him wherever he goes. Then the process is to be repeated. “You will make of him,” she says to Archy, “another Wandering Jew” (21). Archy does as he is told. He goes to Denver and acquaints himself with a miner named Jacob Fuller, whom he terrifies into selling his mine and flee ing. Archy pursues him “here and there and yonder” (36) until Fuller settles in a small Montana mining community called Silver Gulch. The plan is to allow Fuller to think he has escaped his pursuer and to settle into a routine be fore Archy starts the cycle of persecution and pursuit all over again. Archy returns to Denver to treat himself to “a little season of comfort” (39) before banishing Fuller from Silver Gulch. While in Denver, however, he learns that he has been pursuing the wrong man, “a cousin of the guilty one” (40–1). But when he returns to Silver Gulch to attempt to rectify things, he finds that Jacob Fuller has fled. Archy pursues the wrong Fuller through California and across the Pacific and back before taking a rest in a mining camp called Hope Canyon. In this tiny community, Archy shares his cabin with a young man named Sammy Hillyer, whose only role in the story is ostensibly to connect the first barrel of the shotgun to the second. Sammy Hillyer has a kinsman who calls himself Flint Buckner. Although Buckner is eventually revealed to be Stillman’s father (the real Jacob Fuller), the plot actually comes to focus, at this point, on Flint Buckner’s flunky, Fetlock Jones. Fetlock Jones is a young Englishman whom Buckner berates, mistreats, and attempts to kill for several vicious pages before Jones’ identity as the nephew of Sherlock Holmes is revealed. Here a word about the genesis of A Double-Barrelled Detective Story is in order; for Twain’s initial desire seems to have been to perform a sort of liter ary euthanasia. Because Arthur Conan Doyle (despite his best efforts) could not seem to kill Sherlock Holmes off himself, Twain’s original idea was appar ently to do it for him. 12 And so it comes to pass, in the most matter-of-fact way, that Sherlock Holmes stops off at Hope Canyon to pay a visit to his kins man Fetlock during his tour of America. At first, this troubles Fetlock, who has scheduled the murder of the de tested Flint Buckner for the very night of Holmes’ arrival. But the more he thinks about it, the less concerned he becomes: “Anybody that knows him the way I do knows he can’t detect a crime except where he plans it all out before hand and arranges the clues and hires some fellow to commit it according to instructions…. [T]he best way to throw a detective off the track, anyway, is to have him along when you are preparing the thing” (96).

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Jones stores a great deal of blasting powder around and underneath Buckner’s cabin, lights a four hours’ length of fuse while out strolling with his Uncle Sherlock at 8 P.M., and makes sure to be at the local saloon with his uncle when the explosion takes Buckner’s life at midnight. Holmes (like Archy and his mother at the outset of the tale) misreads all of the clues and accuses the innocent Sammy Hillyer of the murder (bringing the total to two kinsmen of Fuller who are wrongly persecuted in the course of the tale). Fortunately for Hillyer, Stillman is able, with the help of his su perhuman nose, to reconstruct the crime. Hillyer is freed; Fetlock Jones con fesses; and Holmes, shattered by his defeat in detection at the hands of Stillman, goes on his way. Then the wrong Jacob Fuller, the one persecuted by Stillman, wanders into town in a completely deluded state. He confuses Stillman with Holmes and announces that Holmes has been chasing him around the globe for years, allowing him not one moment’s peace. He is taken at his word; vigilante par ties are formed; and Holmes is hunted down and nearly lynched. When the leader of the mob asks whether Holmes should be hanged or shot, one of the lynchers cries out, “Neither!…He’d be alive again in a week; burning’s the only permanency for him” (170). The others agree; and Holmes is about to be burned at the stake when Twain relents and sends in Sheriff John Fairfax with a speech that is a reprise of Colonel Sherburne’s anti-mob diatribe in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The story closes with the dispersal of the mob, an apology to Holmes, a report of Fetlock Jones’ escape (regarded as felicitous by the people of Hope Canyon, since everyone admired him for killing Buckner), and Hillyer’s con fession of the true identity of Flint Buckner to Stillman (who is preparing to accompany the recovering Jacob Fuller back to Denver). SITUATING THE PARTICULARS OF THE CASE Twain appropriates Stillman’s global pursuit of the innocent Jacob Fuller di rectly from the most explicitly persecutory of the original gothic novels, 1 3 Caleb Williams, in which Falkland dispatches Gines, the superhuman hench man, to disrupt the life of the innocent Williams no matter where he settles. But the most clinically paranoid moment of Twain’s tale comes with the wrong Fuller’s delusional announcement of his plight: I escaped in the night and went a long way off in the mountains some where, and lived disguised and had a false name. I got more and more troubled and worried, and my troubles made me see spirits and hear voices, and I could not think straight and clear on any subject, but got confused and involved and had to give it up, because my head hurt so. It got to be worse and worse; more spirits and more voices. They were about me all the time; at first only in the night, then in the day too. They were


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always whispering around my bed and plotting against me, and it broke my sleep and kept me fagged out, because I got no good rest. (163–4) In Jacob Fuller, in fact, we have the intersection of a baffling number of tropes from gothic and paranoid narrative. If Stillman’s mother had the idea of chas ing her husband from one town to the next from Godwin, then the turn of phrase she uses to describe the process (to “make of him another Wandering Jew”) refers to a number of other gothic novels, most notably Matthew Lewis’ The Monk, which offers the most famous treatment of that figure. And Twain, in his selection of the character’s name and the alias that his innocent kinsman adopts, seems to play along. Jacob Fuller’s name (both semantically and ge nealogically) is his destiny, since the Biblical Jacob is renamed Israel (Jew) and since Fuller (given that the root “fu-/ful-” in Greek means “to rush on”) is sim ply an encryption of “one who flees” (or wanders). When Fuller changes his name to James Walker, he actually changes nothing, since James is merely a variant of Jacob and Walker is an anglicization of Fu-ller. Similarly, in the sem inal paranoid case of Schreber, his name (both semantically and genealogically) is the root of his paranoid destiny. The voices that he hears plotting against him “at first only in the night, then in the day too” 14 are terribly concerned with his name. The names selected for the characters overdetermine their destinies. History is a force against which they cannot fight back—a force that is out to get them even in the act of labeling them. Additionally, it is Sherlock Holmes’ name (in the sense of his reputa tion) that allows him to play Dr. Flechsig to Fuller’s Schreber in a cosmic bat tle that takes on fictive-fleshly relevance for the demented Jacob Fuller. 15 One night the whispers said, “We’ll never manage, because we can’t see him, and so can’t point him out to the people.” They sighed; then one said: “We must bring Sherlock Holmes. He can be here in twelve days.” They all agreed, and whispered and jibbered with joy. But my heart broke; for I had read about that man, and knew what it would be to have him upon my track, with his superhuman penetra tion and tireless energies. The spirits went away to fetch him, and I got up at once in the mid dle of the night and fled away…. It was forty days before that man caught up on my track. I just escaped. From habit he had written his real name on a tavern register, but had scratched it out and written “Dagget Barclay” in the place of it. But fear gives you a watchful eye and keen, and I read the true name through the scratches, and fled like a deer. (163–5) The paranoiac’s ability to see the writing beneath the writing, the significance beneath the significance, the palimpsest hidden by the superficial text, comes to play an important role in Twain’s fiction (particularly in the case of that lit eral palimpsest, Connecticut Yankee), as we shall see.

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But most important to the story is the invincibility of the paranoid per spective, the paranoiac’s ability to think that whatever looks least like perse cution is only persecution in disguise. “Think of the difficulties!” Stillman writes to his mother, [T]here would be none if I only could advertise for him. But if there is any way to do it that would not frighten him, I have not been able to think it out, and I have tried till my brains are addled. “If the gentle man who lately bought a mine in Mexico and sold one in Denver will send his address to” (to whom, mother?), “it will be explained to him that it was all a mistake; his forgiveness will be asked, and full repara tion made for a loss which he sustained in a certain matter.” Do you see? He would think it a trap. Well, any one would. If I should say, “It is now known that he was not the man wanted, but another man—who once bore the same name, but discarded it for good reasons”—would that answer? But the Denver people would wake up then and say…“Why did he run away if he wasn’t the right man? —it is too thin.” If I failed to find him he would be ruined there—there where there is no taint upon him now. (43–4) Stillman’s persecution of Fuller, because it is misguided and becomes a story of the persecutor’s attempt to rescue the persecutee from fantasies of a perse cution that began genuinely enough but has since become a mission of mercy, is the most involved story of persecution in Twain’s tale. But the tale itself is nothing but a series of misguided persecutions. The story opens with Fuller’s persecution of his wife for a grudge he bears his father-in-law. Holmes mis guidedly persecutes Sammy Hillyer for a crime he did not commit. Most ab surdly, the vigilantes persecute Holmes in retribution for his reported persecution of Fuller, of whom he has never even heard. Even Fetlock Jones’ Englishness, when coupled with his method of killing Flint Buckner, seems to refer to the most famous of botched conspiracies, Fawkes’ Gunpowder Plot. Everyone is out to get the wrong man—even Twain, who seems to be out to get Holmes for the crime of Doyle’s impotent resurrection of his detective at the behest of his readership. But, as was suggested in the last chapter, in Twain’s writing we can see that the shifting alliances of narrative conspiracy no longer confine themselves to the text. Plots are no longer simply for the reader, for there has emerged the possibility of plotting against the reader, as the central hoax of this detective tale attests: It was a crisp and spicy morning in early October. The lilacs and labur nums, lit with the glory-fires of autumn, hung burning and flashing in the upper air, a fairy bridge provided by kind Nature for the wingless wild things that have their homes in the tree-tops and would visit to gether; the larch and the pomegranate flung their purple and yellow flames in brilliant broad splashes along the slanting sweep of the wood land; the sensuous fragrance


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of innumerable deciduous flowers rose upon the swooning atmosphere; far in the empty sky a solitary esopha gus slept upon motionless wing; everywhere brooded stillness, serenity, and the peace of God. (53–4) This is the introductory paragraph of the fourth chapter of A Double- Barrelled Detective Story. It pretends to be a description of Hope Canyon, the mining community in which the bulk of the action of the narrative takes place. It occasioned so much consternation among Twain’s readership that the author took it upon himself to explain the passage in an open letter to the Springfield Republican. Importantly, the letter appeared in April of 1902, two months after the serialization of A Double-Barrelled Detective Story in Harper’s. Although the letter has been incorporated in a number of reprints of the story since then, it was not included in the tale’s first edition in book form, even though that edition did not appear until June 19 of the same year. Because this letter is indispensable for an understanding of Twain’s evaluation of his own hoax, it is necessary to quote it in full: To the Editor of the Republican:

One of your citizens has asked me a question about the “oesophagus,” and I wish to answer him through you. This is in the hope that the an swer will get around, and save me some penmanship, for I have already replied to the same question more than several times, and am not getting as much holiday as I ought to have. I published a short story lately, and it was in that that I put the oesoph agus. I will say privately that I expected it to bother some people—in fact, that was the intention—but the harvest has been larger than I was calculating upon. The oesophagus has gathered in the guilty and the in nocent alike, whereas I was only fishing for the innocent—the innocent and confiding. I knew a few of these would write and ask me; that would give me but little trouble; but I was not expecting that the wise and the learned would call upon me for succor. However, that has happened, and it is time for me to speak up and stop the inquiries if I can, for letter writ ing is not restful to me, and I am not having so much fun out of this thing as I counted on. That you may understand the situation, I will in sert a couple of sample inquiries. The first is from a public instructor in the Philippines: Santa Cruz, Ilocos. Sur, P.I. February 13, 1902. My Dear Sir: I have just been reading the first part of your latest story, entitled “A Doublebarreled Detective Story,” and am very much delighted with it. In Part IV, Page 264, Harper’s Magazine for January, occurs this passage: “far in the empty sky a solitary ‘oesophagus’ slept upon motionless wing; everywhere brooded stillness,

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serenity, and the peace of God.” Now, there is one word I do not understand, namely, “oesophagus.” My only work of reference is the “Standard Dictionary,” but that fails to explain the meaning. If you can spare the time, I would be glad to have the meaning cleared up, as I consider the passage a very touching and beau tiful one. It may seem foolish to you, but consider my lack of means away out in the northern part of Luzon. Yours very truly. Do you notice? Nothing in the paragraph disturbed him but that one word. It shows that that paragraph was most ably constructed for the de ception it was intended to put upon the reader. It was my intention that it should read plausibly, and it is now plain that it does; it was my inten tion that it should be emotional and touching, and you see, yourself, that it fetched this public instructor. Alas, if I had but left that one treacher ous word out, I should have scored! scored everywhere; and the para graph would have slidden though every reader’s sensibilities like oil, and left not a suspicion behind. The other sample inquiry is from a professor in a New England uni versity. It contains one naughty word (which I cannot bear to suppress), but he is not in the theological department, so it is no harm:

Dear Mr. Clemens: “Far in the empty sky a solitary oesophagus slept upon motionless wing.” It is not often I get a chance to read much periodical literature, but I have just gone through at this belated period, with much gratification and edification, your “Double-barreled Detective Story.” But what in hell is an oesophagus? I keep one myself, but it never sleeps in the air or anywhere else. My profession is to deal with words, and oesophagus interested me the moment I lighted upon it. But as a companion of my youth used to say, “I’ll be eternally, co-eternally cussed” if I can make it out. Is it a joke, or I an ignoramus? Between you and me, I was almost ashamed of having fooled that man, but for pride’s sake I was not going to say so. I wrote and told him it was a joke—and that is what I am now saying to my Springfield in quirer. And I told him to carefully read the whole paragraph, and he would find not a vestige of sense in any detail of it. This also I commend to my Springfield inquirer. I have confessed. I am sorry—partially. I will not do so any more—for the present. Don’t ask me any more questions; let the oesoph agus have a rest—on his same old motionless wing. Mark Twain 16 What we have in the esophagus hoax is perhaps neither more nor less than a literary practical joke. And perhaps it is true that to scrutinize a practical joke at all is to over-scrutinize it. For three reasons, however, we are warranted in subjecting this particu lar practical joke to scrutiny. The first is that the joke is a joke of omitted de tection in a story that bills itself as a burlesque of detective fiction; the second is that Mark


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Twain, though legendary for his humor, is also legendary for his aversion to practical jokes; and the third is that a practical joke that defies the ordinary relation between target and audience (inasmuch as the audience be comes the target) would seem to take on a peculiar significance in a tale de voted to misguided persecutions. SCRUTINIZING THE ESOPHAGUS: DETECTION [W]hat has this reader done to me that I should persecute him? 17 Given Twain’s contempt for detective fiction in general, it is initially unsur prising that he should choose to have a little joke at his readers’ expense in A Double-Barrelled Detective Story. His most biting remark about the detective genre (“What a curious thing a ‘detective’ story is. And was there ever one that the author needn’t be ashamed of, except Poe’s ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’?”) 18 is amplified by such parodies as A Double-Barrelled Detective Story and The Stolen White Elephant (in which New York City’s entire detec tive force is frustrated in its attempt to track down a rampaging white ele phant). So, despite Twain’s own use of detectives, 19 it is entirely possible that the practical joke is directed at anyone inclined to read a detective story, be it parodic or not. It is even more likely, of course, that the joke is meant as a broadside against readers of Doyle. The running gag of A Double-Barrelled Detective Story is Sherlock Holmes’ inability to stay dead. This inability cannot be explained literarily (i.e. with reference to Holmes) or even authorially (i.e. with reference to Watson as chronicler of Holmes’ adventures or to Doyle as creator of the pair); it is only historically (i.e. with reference to Doyle’s flesh-and-blood readership) that Holmes’ resurrection can be accounted for. Doyle’s fans pleaded Holmes back into existence. The readers took an active role in the making of the tales spun by Doyle. Importantly, Twain keeps Watson (Holmes’ figurative author) out of A Double-Barrelled Detective Story. And more importantly, he allows Holmes to survive. The practical joke that Twain plays on the uncritical mem bers of his audience seems significant, therefore, in that it calls attention to the fact that his frustration is not so much with Holmes or with Doyle as it is with the audience that clamored for more cases to be solved by Doyle’s dead detective. We might say that even though A Double-Barrelled Detective Story is largely a joke, it is a joke meant to teach us a lesson about the way we read and react to written material. If Holmes’ resurrection is burlesqued, it is because it is burlesquable. Twain’s ridicule is grounded in the fact that he sees something as having gone wrong; and so it is at least possible that the practical joke of the esophagus passage is designed to help assign the blame. It is arguable that Twain’s joke is actually an attempt, on his part, to discipline his (and Doyle’s) audience, an attempt to point

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out the absurdity of admiring a detective’s critical think ing without thinking critically about the detective’s own story. Twain tricks his readers in order to urge them to be better readers (not only of his own stories, but of all stories heard at second-hand, including the story of history, which we must evaluate critically in order to find inconsistencies and un grounded assertions). But Twain’s own extensive theorization of the produc tivity of literary hoaxes and/or practical jokes calls this possibility into question, for Twain (as we see in the next section) not only had a low opin ion of practical jokes, but had become painfully aware of how useless they were in the literary arena. SCRUTINIZING THE ESOPHAGUS: HAPLESS HOAXES For Twain’s aversion to practical jokes, it will be fruitful to return to Brooks, who claims that “Mark Twains sole and willful purpose” in the esophagus pas sage “is to disturb the contemplation of beauty, which requires an emotional effort, to degrade beauty and thus divert the reader’s feeling for it” (261). 20 Though Brooks’ attack on Twain with regard to the esophagus hoax is not sur prising, it is surprising that he grounds his attack on the supposed beauties of a passage in which the plants listed refuse to correspond to the heights, color schemes, and functions assigned to them. It is puzzling that he foregrounds his investment in picturesque sentimentality and simply adverts to Twain’s aversion to practical jokes without capitalizing on the seeming discrepancy. Brooks directs us to Twain’s Autobiography, in which Twain handles practical joking scathingly and at length: In those extremely youthful days I was not aware that practical joking was a thing which, aside from being as a rule witless, is a base pastime and disreputable. In those early days I gave the matter no thought but in dulged freely in practical joking without stopping to consider its moral aspects. During three-fourths of my life I have held the practical joker in limitless contempt and detestation; I have despised him as I have de spised no other criminal, and when I am delivering my opinion about him the reflection that I have been a practical joker myself seems to in crease my bitterness rather than to modify it. 21 At the risk of sounding paranoid, a reader might reasonably object that the pas sage above could itself be a practical joke. Isn’t it exactly the sort of diatribe that one would expect from a confirmed practical joker? Is Twain joking, in other words, about practical joking? Isn’t his loathing a little too overstated not to be sarcastic? Other passages, however, tend to confirm a “straight” reading: When grownup persons indulge in practical jokes, the fact gauges them. They have lived narrow, obscure and ignorant lives and at full manhood


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they still retain and cherish a job lot of leftover standards and ideals that would have been discarded with their boyhood if they had then moved out into the world and a broader life. There were many practical jokers in the new Territory. I do not take pleasure in exposing this fact, for I liked those people; but what I am saying is true. I wish I could say a kindlier thing about them instead. If I could say they were burglars or hatrack thieves or something like that, that wouldn’t be utterly uncom plimentary. I would prefer it. But I can’t say those things. They would not be true. (103) 22 Elaborating on Albert Bigelow Paine’s contention that Twain “seldom in dulged physically” in practical jokes, Brooks writes, “In point of fact, he ab horred them… he had [never] outgrown his instinctive resentment against the assaults to which his dignity had had to submit” as a young journalist in Nevada (248–9). Brooks’ psychologization of Twain with regard to practical jokes is grounded in his own sense of the humor of the American West as ferocious. Whether that characterization is accurate or not, he is quite right to point out the “singular ferocity” of Twain’s early productions: [M]ost of Mark Twain’s early jokes are ferocious to a degree that will hardly be believed by any one who has not examined them critically…. The titles of his Western sketches reveal their general character: The Dutch Nick Massacre, A New Crime, Lionizing Murderers, The Killing of Julius Caesar “Localized,” Cannibalism in the Cars. He is obsessed with the figure of the undertaker and his labors, and it would be a worthy task for some zealous aspirant for the doctor’s degree to enumerate the occa sions when Mark Twain uses the phrase “I brained him on the spot” or some equivalent. “If the desire to kill and the opportunity to kill came always together,” says Pudd’nhead Wilson, expressing Mark Twain’s own frequent mood, “who would escape hanging?” His early humour, in short, was almost wholly aggressive. It began with a series of hoaxes, “usually intended,” says Mr. Paine, “as a special punishment of some par ticular individual or paper of locality; but victims were gathered whole sale in their seductive web.” (250–2) Brooks goes on to point out that the early hoaxes to which he refers were gen erally directed, according to Paine and Twain, against corrupt politicians. But even these early hoaxes, directed against specific individuals, could not help making a target of the readership as well. An editorial on the esophagus hoax that appeared in the New York Times refers to one of these hoaxes without so much as mentioning the personal target that Twain had in mind: The success of Mark Twain’s joke recalls to mind his story of the petri fied man in the cavern, whom he described most punctiliously, first giv ing a picture of the scene, its impressive solitude, and all that; then going on to

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describe the majesty of the figure, casually mentioning that the thumb of his right hand rested against the side of his nose; then after fur ther description observing that the fingers of the right hand were ex tended in a radiating fashion; and, recurring to the dignified attitude and position of the man, incidentally remarked that the thumb of the left hand was in contact with the little finger of the right—and so on. But it was so ingeniously written that Mark, relating the history years later…declared that no one ever found out the joke, and, if we remember aright, that that astonishing old mockery was actually looked for in the region where he, as a Nevada newspaper editor, had located it. 23 In Twain’s account of his hoax in Sketches New and Old, he had had a “falling out” with a man named Sewell, the coroner and justice of the peace of Humboldt, who “held an inquest on this man that had been dead and turned to everlasting stone for more than three hundred years!” The verdict that Twain put in Sewell’s mouth was that the petrified man had died of “pro tracted exposure.” Unfortunately for the coroner, other newspaper editors failed to see through Twain’s joke and reprinted his story throughout the world. “Petrified Man” clippings from these papers were sent to Twain’s office; and Twain mailed them to the enraged Sewell. 24 Even if “The Petrified Man” can be attributed to that first quarter of Twain’s life (in which he participated thoughtlessly in practical jokes) his smug retelling of the tale occurs in 1875, when he was well past middle age. Moreover, it is prefaced by a remark that further complicates the meaning of the esophagus hoax in A Double-Barrelled Detective Story: “Now, to show how really hard it is to foist a moral or a truth upon an unsuspecting public through a burlesque without entirely and absurdly missing one’s mark.” Even if Twain was attempting, through his esophagus hoax, to teach his readers something about the value of reading critically, he was apparently aware that the message and the lesson were pointless. And if he knew that the “unsus pecting public” would learn nothing from his esophagus hoax, then why did he bother? Was his aversion to practical jokes simply an aversion to being vic timized by them? Despite his protestations to the contrary, does he not show himself to be an inveterate practical joker? To appreciate this question, we should turn to another of Twain’s liter ary practical jokes, the one which, according to George Williams III, “made Mark Twain known to Western readers.” 25 This phony narrative (known ei ther as “My Bloody Massacre” or “The Massacre at Dutch Nick’s”) is ostensi bly an attack on questionable stock exchange practices; for Twain tells the story of a man who murders his family and commits suicide in response to a brokerage scandal: Ah, it was a deep, deep satire, and most ingeniously contrived. But I made the horrible details so carefully and conscientiously interesting that the public devoured them greedily, and wholly overlooked the following distinctly stated facts, to wit: The murderer was perfectly well known to


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every creature in the land as a bachelor and consequently he could not murder his wife and nine children; he murdered them “in his splendid dressed-stone mansion just in the edge of the great pine forest between Empire City and Dutch Nick’s,” when even the very pickled oysters that came on our tables knew that there was not a “dressed-stone mansion” in all Nevada Territory; also that, so far from there being a “great pine for est between Empire City and Dutch Nick’s,” there wasn’t a solitary tree within fifteen miles of either place; and, finally, it was patent and noto rious that Empire City and Dutch Nick’s were one and the same place, and contained only six houses anyhow, and consequently there could be no forest between them; and on top of all these absurdities I stated that this diabolical murderer, after inflicting a wound upon himself that the reader ought to have seen would kill an elephant in the twinkling of an eye, jumped on his horse and rode four miles, waving his wife’s reeking scalp in the air, and thus performing entered Carson City with tremen dous éclat, and dropped dead in front of the chief saloon, the envy and admiration of all beholders. 26

The hoax went over both better and worse than Twain had anticipated— better in the sense of its being received as genuine; worse in that its falsity was therefore all the more irritating to the readers and journalists who had credited it. Regional editors did not see through it as they had seen through “The Petrified Man.” Williams tells us that “papers up and down the Pacific Coast immediately reprinted the story believing it to be true.” When Twain published a single line the next day (“I take it all back.— Twain”), the backlash was staggering. A spate of editorial chastenings poured in, with Twain taking the punishment for a story that he had told in order to punish a local saloonkeeper. According to Dan De Quille (Twain’s colleague and bunkmate at The Territorial Enterprise), Twain’s satire (though ostensibly directed against corruption in the stock market) was also directed against a specific personal target: Twain’s purpose was “to embarrass Pete Hopkins, of the Magnolia Saloon, who had offended Twain in some way” (cited in Williams, 123). But De Quille is as baffled by this misdirected venom as any twentieth century reader would be, and adds that he “could never quite see how this [hoax] was to hurt Pete Hopkins.” The targets of Twain’s practical jokes seem always to be manifold: the petrifaction craze and Sewell; market corruption and Hopkins; picturesque sentimentality and Holmes. And always, of course, the reader. Twain closes his recollection of “My Bloody Massacre” by mentioning that he actually wit nessed a misreading of his hoax—and moralizing on what he took away from the experience: The one facing me had the morning paper folded to a long, narrow strip, and I knew, without any telling, that that strip represented the column that

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contained my pleasant financial satire. From the way he was excit edly mumbling, I saw that the heedless son of a hay-mow was skipping with all his might, in order to get to the bloody details as quickly as pos sible; and so he was missing the guide-boards I had set up to warn him that the whole thing was a fraud. Presently his eyes spread wide open, just as his jaws swung asunder to take in a potato approaching it on a fork; the potato halted, the face lit up redly and the whole man was on fire with excitement. Then he broke into a disjointed checking off of the par ticulars —his potato cooling in mid-air meantime, and his mouth mak ing a reach for it occasionally, but always bringing up suddenly against a new and still more direful performance of my hero. At last he looked his stunned and rigid comrade impressively in the face, and said, with an ex pression of concentrated awe: “Jim, he b’iled his baby, and he took the old ‘oman’s skelp. Cuss’d if I want any breakfast!” And he laid his lingering potato reverently down, and he and his friend departed from the restaurant empty but satisfied. He never got down to where the satire part of it began. Nobody ever did. They found the thrilling particulars sufficient. To drop in with a poor little moral at the fag-end of such a gorgeous massacre was like fol lowing the expiring sun with a candle and hope to attract the world’s at tention to it…. I found out then, and never have forgotten since, that we never read the dull explanatory surroundings of marvelously exciting things when we have no occasion to suppose that some irresponsible scribbler is try ing to defraud us; we skip all that, and hasten to revel in the blood-cur dling particulars and be happy. (emphasis Twain’s) 27

The esophagus hoax differs from “My Bloody Massacre” in that there are no “marvelously exciting things.” But the two hoaxes are nevertheless analogous. The picturesque gush occupies the place of gory details. The botanical inac curacies of the description and functional incongruities of the plants (along with the implicit question of which particular “wingless wild things” exactly require and make use of chromatic “fairy bridges” to the treetops) are the same as the “guide-boards” that Twain’s readers overlooked in his massacre hoax. The readers of the massacre hoax were taken in by the general tenor of the story of the massacre because they read only for general tenor; they did not think to weigh the individual details against each other because they had “no occasion to suppose that some irresponsible scribbler” was toying with them. Similarly, the readers of the esophagus hoax were taken in by the general tenor of the picturesque description because they had no reason to be suspicious. So the question recurs. If Twain had in fact learned his lesson about literary prac tical jokes and had not “forgotten it since”; and if he hated practical jokes so


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vehemently, what explanation can there be for the esophagus hoax in A DoubleBarrelled Detective Story? Is the answer simply that the hoax was a private practical joke? Are we to take Twain at his word when he claims to regret his use of the term “esoph agus,” since the passage would otherwise have “slidden through every reader’s sensibilities like oil, and left not a suspicion behind”? Was his goal really noth ing more elaborate than to slip a suspicious passage past an unsuspecting read ership without raising suspicions? In order to answer this question, we must turn to the third reason mentioned above for scrutinizing this particular prac tical joke: the relation between target and audience that it exploits in the con text of a tale devoted to misguided persecutions. SCRUTINIZING THE ESOPHAGUS: EXTRATEXTUAL PERSECUTION One of the more astonishing moves that Van Wyck Brooks makes in his treatment of Twain’s humor is to link practical jokes rather cavalierly with murder: “It requires an infinitely smaller psychic effort to expel one’s spleen in a verbal joke than in a practical joke or a murder” (251). But Twain’s own remarks about practical joking (not to mention the ferocity of his early jour nalistic attacks) seem to warrant a schematic of humor that gives way to a schematic of violence. 28 Twain not only belabors his hatred for Sewell in his recollection of “The Petrified Man,” but closes the account by saying that he deluged Sewell with clippings of the story (“for spite, not for fun”) because he “hated” the coroner, and was “pacified” and “pleased” by tormenting him. His final assertion, which resonates strangely with Brooks’ remark, is, “I could not have gotten more real comfort out of him without killing him” (Sketches, 242). 29 “The Petrified Man” was not simply a joke on the unsuspecting reader. And it was more than an attack on Sewell; it was a persecution of Sewell, just as, according to De Quille, “My Bloody Massacre” was intended as a persecu tion of Hopkins. What offense Sewell and Hopkins had given Twain is not specified. We know only that he was angry with them and that his anger vented itself in the form of practical jokes that must strike us as clumsily mis directed at best. 30 It is readily apparent that practical jokes are nothing if not (more or less) gentle, covert persecutions and/or small-scale conspiracies. But Twain demonstrates a peculiar sensitivity to this point. In addition to the remarks he makes in “The Petrified Man,” there is his report of the sense of paranoid panic to which he gives way when a practical joke 3 1 is played upon him as a cub pilot on the Mississippi. The trick begins with Twain’s mentor, Mr. Bixby, asking Twain whether he feels competent to negotiate a bend widely known as “about the plainest and simplest crossing in the whole river.” Twain replies that he can handle the bend easily. Bixby then observes, “You think so, do you?” in a tone of voice which

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“shook [Twain’s] confidence.” Bixby immediately abandons Twain and recruits a number of passengers and virtually all of the crew members into a conspiracy against him. He is given false information by the crew; and mur murs of consternation arise from the decks. Twain writes, My imagination began to construct dangers out of nothing, and they multiplied faster than I could keep the run of them. All at once I imag ined I saw shoal water ahead! The wave of coward agony that surged through me then came near dislocating every joint in me…. I began to climb the wheel like a squirrel; but I would hardly get the boat started to port before I would see new dangers on that side, and away I would spin to the other; only to find perils accumulating to starboard, and be crazy to get to port again…. I flew to the speaking-tube and shouted to the engineer: “Oh, Ben, if you love me, back her! Quick, Ben! Oh, back the immor tal soul out of her!” I heard the door close gently. I looked around, and there stood Mr. Bixby, smiling a bland, sweet smile. Then the audience on the hurricane deck sent up a thundergust of humiliating laughter… [T]he hardest part of it was that for months I so often had to hear…“Oh, Ben, if you love me, back her!” 32

As Bixby’s later interrogation makes clear, Twain’s role as the victim of this practical joke is not unlike the reader’s role in any of Twain’s literary hoaxes; for Twain in this instance, like the reader in the others, should have known better. “Didn’t you know there was no bottom in that crossing?” asks Bixby. “Yes, sir,” replies Twain, “I did.” Bixby moralizes, “Very well, then. You shouldn’t have allowed me or anybody else to shake your confidence in that knowledge” (95). The common knowledge of definitions, geography, and thermal proper ties should prevent any reader from crediting a story about a bachelor who kills his wife and children and rides four miles through a pine forest in the middle of the desert with the bloody scalp of his wife still steaming with her body heat at the end of the trek. The glaring contradictions and absurdities are “guide boards.” And Twain’s knowledge of the river was the guide-board that should have prevented him from crediting the outlandish measurements 33 and warn ings reported to him by the crew. Twain’s shortcoming is the same as the reader’s: a failure to be suspicious of authority, whether the authority in ques tion is simply a man with a measuring pole or the writer of a narrative. The engine that runs virtually all practical jokes is a lack of suspicion on the part of the victim. In “dousing” (perhaps the most familiar practical joke), the water is dumped onto the head of the victim not because he is incapable of circumventing the trap, but because there is no reason for him to suspect that others will have taken the trouble to place a bucket of water over his door way.


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The gulled reader of A Double-Barrelled Detective Story accepts the esoph agus as a throaty warbler of some sort because it appears in Harper’s Magazine (and not even in the April issue) and because the reader’s eyes have learned to move mechanically over descriptive passages, fastening on the terms relevant to sight, sense, and smell in order to form a hasty composite of the scene and move on with the story. The unsuspecting Twain, when some of his acquain tances donned masks and held him up one bitterly cold night as he made his way through the Nevada countryside, should have recognized their voices. He should have known it was only a joke. But panic got the better of him and he failed to be suspicious of the hold-up. He made the mistake of thinking that what looked like an armed robbery was in fact an armed robbery simply be cause people pointed guns at him and demanded his money. 34 Practical jokes punish people for having dropped their guard even when there is no particu lar reason for them to have their guard up; if practical jokes are “as a rule wit less,” it is because their point is simply to make fun of people for being less paranoid than they would need to be in order to see through the jokes. On the steamboat, for instance, Twain failed to make the Schreberian assumption that when Bixby left him at the wheel, it was to talk to the other people on ship about him. To laugh at the butt of a practical joke is to a laugh at a per son precisely for having failed to be paranoid. The laughter is merely an en crypted form of the assertion, “Couldn’t you tell we conspired against you to make you look like a fool?” One aspect of the paranoid consciousness, its ability to see patterns that others fail to detect, is useful in the context of a detective narrative. But an other aspect, its ability to reach conclusions that relate those patterns to one self, is useful for the avoidance of covert persecutions (be they life-threatening or merely practical jokes). Because the esophagus hoax occurs within the con text of a detective novel (albeit a parody of a detective novel), a paranoid read ing of Twain’s DoubleBarrelled Detective Story is doubly useful. The innocent are persecuted in that tale. Archy’s mother suffers for mar rying the man she loves. Archy suffers for being born with a fine sense of smell. The villain’s cousin suffers for having the same name as the villain. Sammy Hillyer suffers for Holmes’ incompetence. Holmes suffers for Fuller’s delusions. No one who is persecuted in the story has any reason to expect per secution. Holmes has no more reason to be on his guard against the lynch mob than Twain had to be on his guard against his acquaintances on the night of the hold-up. And Twain’s readers have no more reason to be on their guard than Holmes. Perhaps, though, that last assertion isn’t precisely accurate. Perhaps Twain’s readership was more suspicious of Twain than he would have us be lieve. Twain’s “Petrified Man” did not enjoy the unmitigated success that Twain later claimed for it. And perhaps the letters that he quotes in the Springfield Republican were not, strictly speaking, representative of the re sponse to the esophagus hoax. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that Eric Sundquist was not the first of Twain’s readers to perceive that Twain’s “unique mix of journalistic

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observation, outright invention, and piercing cynicism made the hoax a philosophical principle.” 35 SCRUTINIZING THE ESOPHAGUS: TWAIN’S READERSHIP Twain denounces practical jokes—yet he perpetrates them. Twain claims to have learned that literary practical jokes never have a salutary effect on their audience —yet he perpetrates them. Twain claims that he wanted the esopha gus passage to slide through his readers’ consciousnesses “like oil” —yet when a few people resist the passage, he exposes his own ostensibly private hoax to the entire public. And the esophagus hoax is itself only symptomatic of a larger tendency in Twain’s work, a tendency to “put up” on the reader when ever the opportunity offers. 36 But most questionable of all is Twain’s assertion that without that one word he would have “scored! scored everywhere,” for this implies that “esophagus” is what set the readers on their guard when the overwhelming evidence is that readers were already suspicious of Twain. He had hoaxed them too many times. True, some suspicions of Twain’s hoaxing tendency were confined to ex pressions as reluctant as that of the following review of A Double-Barrelled Detective Story: One cannot help thinking that the great joke of the story lies in the fact that there is none…. One likes laughing, but hates being laughed at. With such an old friend as Mark Twain, however, it is pleasanter to as sume one’s own dullness than to imagine that one is being taken in. 37 Far more frequently, however, the distrust with which Twain’s reviewers ap proached him was a good deal less tentative. According to William Dean Howells, this distrust was so pronounced that people refused to believe a true story that Twain had heard and entitled, straightforwardly enough, “A True Story”: [B]y far the most perfect piece of work in [Sketches New and Old] is “A True Story,” which resulted, we remember, in some confusion of the av erage critical mind when it was first published in these pages a little more than one year ago…. The shyness of an enlightened and independent press respecting this history was something extremely amusing to see, and one could fancy it a spectacle of delightful interest to the author if it had not had such disheartening features. Mostly the story was described in the notices of the magazine as a humorous sketch by Mark Twain; sometimes it was mentioned as a paper apparently out of the author’s usual line; again it was handled non-committally as one of Mark Twain’s extravagances. Evidently the critical mind feared a lurking joke. 38


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As the poignant, pathetic tale of “an old black cook [whose] children were sold away from her, and how after twenty years she found her youngest boy again,” it is difficult to see how anyone could have interpreted “A True Story,” as “a humorous sketch.” But if Twain’s reader is used to being toyed with, then we can understand how some reviewers could be led to interpret the very act of writing a poignant, pathetic tale as a sarcastic assault on Twain’s part. The “lurking joke” is simply Twain’s ability to respond to any reader who likes the story with a mean-spirited, “You didn’t think I was serious, did you!” Note that even if “ATrue Story” had been intended as a joke, there would not have been anything particularly funny about it. The only fault that Twain could have found with his readers would have been that they were not paranoid enough to see that his story was an attack on their gullibility. But as Howells attests, many of them were suspicious enough to see a hoax that wasn’t there. Howells’ position is reiterated in a review from The Boston Daily Advertiser: “[Twain’s] audience gets into a queer state after a while. It knows not what to trust…. Even when Mr. Clemens has made a re ally fine period, or introduced a brilliant descriptive passage, he takes pains to turn the affair into a joke at the end.” 39 The laughter cuts two ways. Twain’s letter to the Springfield Republican obviously mocks readers who are not suspicious enough, whereas Howells’ re view smiles gently at readers who are too suspicious. To be too suspicious is to be paranoid. It is to detect authorial conspiracies when they don’t exist as well as when they do—to read texts that aren’t there. It is to sidestep the pitfalls of practical jokes as well as to spend a great deal of energy sidestepping imagi nary pitfalls that turn out to be quite solid ground. It is to assume the fate that Stillman’s mother designed for Jacob Fuller, whose punishment is to be perse cuted so frequently as to feel persecuted all the time. 40 Perhaps the lesson to take away from Twain’s hoaxes is that the compe tent reader is neither too gullible nor too suspicious. But that is rather a sim plistic conclusion to reach in the face of the energy and space that Twain devotes to the theorization and deployment of literary practical jokes over the course of his career. As Lawrence Berkove points out, “By 1889, when he pub lished A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Twain had long been re flecting about life’s hoaxes and practical jokes and imitating them in his art. His use of these devices is a distinguishing feature of his style over his entire career. 41 Just as Twain learned something from the practical joke that Bixby played on him as a cub pilot, it appears that Twain’s practical jokes are de signed to convey an important and complex message to his audience. Berkove is quite right in his characterization of Connecticut Yankee as “a hoax —a serious hoax”; for there is a degree of seriousness in all of Twain’s hoaxes. And although the analysis of Twain’s hoaxes that I have made thus far (and the argument that I will develop in what is to follow) could focus on any of Twain’s hoaxes, including Connecticut Yankee, which is obviously more fa miliar to readers than A Double-Barrelled Detective Story, I have chosen to con centrate

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on the esophagus hoax not only because it is the most widely discussed of Twain’s hoaxes, but because it appears in no less than three different guises (at three distinct periods) in Twain’s career. 42 The three instances rely for their effect upon a deepening distrust in Twain’s reader. By 1902, the unsuspecting audience of the beginning of Twain’s career is required to have developed a dis trust not unlike that described above by Howells. As we shall see in the next section, Twain exposes the source for the esophagus passage as a hoax in his first book, The Innocents Abroad, ridicules a cousin of the paragraph openly in the middle of his career in Connecticut Yankee, and returns to it more subtly in the final decade of his life in A Double-Barrelled Detective Story. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ESOPHAGUS As we saw earlier, one meta-hoax aspect of “The Petrified Man” was the fact that Twain credited himself with the hoax when he had almost certainly de rived it from a similar prank played seven years earlier by John Phoenix. 43 Similarly, Twain credits himself with the esophagus hoax even though he took the principal elements of the joke from certain guidebooks that he ridicules in The Innocents Abroad. During his discussion of the Holy Land, Twain tells us that he is frankly baffled by the landscape because of the way it has been described to him throughout his life. He is confused not because the landscape fails to tally with the descriptions, but because the descriptions were misleading despite their accuracy. He first cites a passage from William C.Grimes: On the east, the wild and desolate mountains contrast finely with the deep blue lake; and toward the north, sublime and majestic, Hermon looks down on the sea, lifting his white crown to heaven with the pride of a hill that has seen the departing footsteps of a hundred generations. On the northeast shore of the sea was a single tree, and this is the only tree of any size visible from the water of the lake, except a few lonely palms in the city of Tiberias, and by its solitary position attracts more at tention than would a forest. The whole appearance of the scene is pre cisely what we would expect and desire the scenery of Gennesaret to be, grand beauty, but quiet calm. The very mountains are calm. 44 Once Twain sees the actual landscape, he cannot help observing that the description is “Ingeniously written…and well calculated to deceive” (509). 45 He adds that “if the paint and the ribbons and the flowers be stripped from it, a skeleton will be found beneath” (509). He goes on to quote a passage from Life in the Holy Land that makes it difficult to give him full credit for the concluding lines of his esophagus hoax:


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Flowers bloom in this terrestrial paradise, once beautiful and verdant with waving trees; singing birds enchant the ear; the turtledove soothes with its soft note; the crested lark sends up its song toward heaven, and the grave and stately stork inspires the mind with thought, and leads it on to meditation and repose. (510) Somewhat less than felicitously, the writer of Holy Land adds, “It was a world of ease, simplicity, and beauty; now it is a scene of desolation and misery,” which causes Twain to pounce: “It describes in elaborate detail what it terms a‘terrestrial paradise,’ and closes with the startling information that this par adise is ‘a scene of desolation and misery.’” He continues: Nearly every book concerning Galillee and its lake describes the scenery as beautiful. No—not always so straightforward as that. Sometimes the impression intentionally conveyed is that it is beautiful, at the same time that the author is careful not to say that it is in plain Saxon. But a care ful analysis of these descriptions will show that the materials of which they are formed are not individually beautiful and cannot be wrought into combinations that are beautiful. (510–1; emphasis Twain’s) Here we see Twain taking the part of the unsuspecting reader. He acts as an advocate for the gullible, demystifying a hoax by which he himself has been taken in. But he does more than expose the hoax; he gives the reader direc tions for discovering such hoaxes in the future, particularly his esophagus hoax, which gives the impression of a picturesque scene through its use of ma terials that cannot be wrought into any sensible combinations at all, much less picturesque ones. Although the thrust (a tension between impression and description) and the progression (from flowers to trees to birds to meditation) in the Holy Land passage above are precise equivalents of the esophagus hoax, clearly the objec tives and picturesque methods of the descriptions are quite different. There are no similar turns of phrase; the Holy Land writers objectify nature where Twain’s picturesque writing tends to subjectify it; and most importantly, the description is intended as a mask rather than a joke. For those similarities, we must turn to Connecticut Yankee, in which we encounter the following: [W]e dreamed along through glades in a mist of green light that got its tint from the sundrenched roof of leaves overhead, and by our feet the clearest and coldest of runlets went frisking and gossiping over its reefs and making a sort of whispering music comfortable to hear; and at times we left the world behind and entered into the solemn great deeps and rich gloom of the forest, where furtive wild things whisked and scurried by and were gone before you could even get your eye on the place where the noise was;

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and where only the earliest birds were turning out and get ting down to business with a song here and a quarrel yonder. 46 Twain understands the misleading descriptions of the Holy Land as the up shot of a misguided piety and not as a veiled attack on picturesque writing in general. But in this passage from Connecticut Yankee, we see not only similar ities of word choice (‘furtive wild things’/‘wingless wild things’), but parallel semantic gambits that make this passage closer to the esophagus hoax than the descriptions that Twain mocks in Innocents Abroad. Nature is made active and almost conscious in both passages: where the larch and the pomegranate “fl[i] ng their purple and yellow flames in brilliant broad splashes,” the runlet goes “frisking and gossiping.” And in both cases, the picturesque description gives way to a “lurking joke.” As one contemporary critic observed of the pas sage in Connecticut Yankee, “This does not sound like Twain at all, but seems to have been written by him merely to show the reader what he could do in the way of fine descriptive writing when the mood seized him. The touch that spoils it is the earliest birds ‘turning out and getting down to business.’” 47 That spoiling touch is precisely what the Boston reviewer was getting at: “Even when Mr. Clemens has made a really fine period, or introduced a bril liant descriptive passage, he takes pains to turn the affair into a joke at the end.” And the joke of the spoiling touch is itself one of Twain’s guide-boards (the very guide-board that would make it difficult for his readers to take “A True Story” at face value): the fact that Twain is widely known as a humorist whose attacks on sentimentality were unrelenting. By the time of the esophagus’ third incarnation, Twain’s readers were no longer the unsuspecting audience that had swallowed “My Bloody Massacre.” He had exposed his own hoaxes and those of others to them; he had engaged in sentimentality only to explode it at the end. It is no surprise that of the two gulled readers whose letters he submits to the Springfield Republican, one was “away out in the northern part of Luzon” in the Philippines and the other did “not often get a chance to peruse periodical literature.” Despite his declared aversion to practical jokes, Twain had made a career of “putting up” on the reader. The central hoax of A Double-Barrelled Detective Story is not a glaring exception to Twain’s abstinence from practical jokes that occurs as a blip on the screen in the final phase of his life. It is part of a project to educate read ers into a general, uneasy suspiciousness that can be traced to the beginning of his career as a writer and his earlier career as a journalist. Twain’s fascina tion with hoaxes was outstripped by only one thing: his fascination with his tory. But more specifically, as several critics have hinted, his fascination is with history as a hoax. A brief review of that fascination will be useful.


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TWAIN’S HISTORY OF PRACTICAL JOKES (AND HIS PRACTICAL JOKE OF HISTORY) [Connecticut Yankee] should bring us much closer to the goal of establish ing that there are particular ideas and values which are characteristic of Mark Twain, and that they exist in an unbroken chain from the forma tive years of his youth to the end of his life. 4 8 Twain’s success in writing travel books comes largely from his pervasive concern with attitudes toward history. 4 9 The tendency of reviewers to suspect a “lurking joke” in Twain’s works goes back as far as his first book, The Innocents Abroad. In his review of the book, Bret Harte described it as nothing but “a huge practical joke.” And though the obvious target of any literary joke is its audience, we have seen Twain’s tendency to focus his sights on other targets as well. The ancillary tar get in The Innocents Abroad, over and over again, is history itself. By troping history as a practical joke, Twain anticipates Hofstadter’s claim concerning the paranoid attitude towards history: “History is a conspiracy.” That which seems harmless and indisputably authentic—the past is, after all, a matter of public record—is out to get us. Practical jokes work because we don’t think to be suspicious of those who play them on us; and history plays cruel jokes on us only because we fail to be suspicious of it. Our only defense, in either case, is paranoia. In his first fulllength production, almost all of Twain’s practical jokes are either exposures of or participations in the hoaxishness of history. Throughout the book, Twain prefaces historical observations with such qualifications as “our guide said” or “we were told.” The only historical claims he leaves unqualified are those couched in terms that serve as a sarcastic reaf firmation of history as inadmissible in the court of modern consciousness be cause it is hearsay. Take, for example, his remarks on what is purported to be Noah’s grave: The proof that this is the genuine spot where Noah was buried can only be doubted by uncommonly incredulous people. The evidence is pretty straight. Shem, the son of Noah, was present at the burial, and showed the place to his descendants, who transmitted the knowledge to their de scendants, and the lineal descendants of these introduced themselves to us today. (443) Similar instances abound in the text; but one further example will help to demonstrate Twain’s contempt for the logic of hearsay: We were shown the place where our Lord appeared to his mother after the Resurrection. Here also a marble slab marks the place where St. Helena… found the crosses about three hundred years after the Crucifixion…. So

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they [presented Christ’s cross to a sick woman] and behold, a miracle! The woman sprang from her bed smiling and joyful, and perfectly restored to health. When we listen to evidence like this, we cannot but believe. We would be ashamed to doubt, and properly, too. Even the very part of Jerusalem where this all occurred is there yet. So there is really no room for doubt. (562) His attacks on traditions, however, are mild in comparison to his attacks on traditions that pretend to be confirmed by other traditions, as in the follow ing example: The most reliable traditions tell us that this was known to be the earth’s center, ages ago, and that when Christ was upon earth he set all doubts upon the subject at rest forever by stating with his own lips that the tra dition was correct. (565) Twain’s criticisms are not leveled solely at religious traditions, but at the proj ect of history itself. He goes on to point out that our own ridiculous misread ings of the past will be duplicated by the future’s misreadings of our present. He suggests that the following entry concerning Ulysses S.Grant is something we might expect from an almanac printed in the year 5868: Uriah S. (or Z.) Graunt—popular poet of ancient times in the Aztec provinces of the United States of British America. Some authors say flourished about A.D. 742; but the learned Ah-ah Foo-foo states that he was a contemporary of Scharkspire, the English poet, and flourished about A.D. 1328, some three centuries after the Trojan war instead of before it. He wrote “Rock Me to Sleep, Mother.” (336) Twain’s suspicion of oral and written traditions, though never again mined as flagrantly as it is in the “huge practical joke” of The Innocents Abroad, recrude sces—more subtly and damningly—throughout his work, most notably in Connecticut Yankee and Joan of Arc. Before we review these later attacks, how ever, it will be helpful for us to examine the ways in which Twain came to di rect his vitriol at history that isn’t hearsay, i.e. history recovered and (mis) interpreted through such scientific disciplines as geology, anthropology, archeology, and philology. His most sustained attack on science as a tool for the interpretation of the past occurs in “Some Learned Fables for Good Old Boys and Girls,” which concerns the findings of a contingent of swamp creatures that venture into the larger world in an attempt to understand their origins. When the group encounters railroad tracks, the esteemed Professor Mud Turtle cries, “Humble yourselves, my friends, for we stand in a majestic presence. These are parallels of latitude.” 50 The explorers set up camp in order to document their discovery. During the


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night, a train comes by. All are astonished by the profound mind of Professor Mud Turtle, who explains that the train must have been the Vernal Equinox. A short while later another train rolls past in the opposite direction; the theory that it must be the Autumnal Equinox is dismissed out of hand. Then Lord Longlegs proclaims it to have been the Transit of Venus, to which Chief Inspector Lizard objects, “But how is this? Venus should traverse the sun’s surface, not the earth’s.” Longlegs, however, is ready with his response: My friend has touched the marrow of our mighty discovery. Yes—all that have lived before us thought a transit of Venus consisted of a flight across the sun’s face; they thought it, they maintained it, they honestly believed it, simple hearts, and were justified in it by the limitations of their knowledge; but to us has been granted the inestimable boon of proving that the transit occurs across the earth’s face, for we have SEEN it! (616; emphasis Twain’s) Twain, perfectly aware that to see is to interpret and that to interpret is to risk misinterpretation, derides eyewitness accounts along with “hard evidence.” He reiterates this point with the swamp creatures’ geological interpretation of a brick-and-mortar building: After close examination of the fronts of the caverns, and much thinking and exchanging of theories, the scientists determined the nature of these singular formations. They said that each belonged mainly to the Old Red Sandstone period; that the cavern fronts rose in innumerable and won derfully regular strata high in the air, each stratum about five frog-spans thick, and that in the present discovery lay an overpowering refutation of all received geology; for between every two layers of Old Red Sandstone reposed a thin layer of decomposed limestone; so instead of there having been but one Old Red Sandstone period there had certainly been not less than a hundred and seventy-five! And by the same token it was plain that there had also been a hundred and seventy-five floodings of the earth and depositings of limestone strata! The unavoidable deduction from which pair of facts was the overwhelming truth that the world, instead of being only two hundred thousand years old, was older by millions upon mil lions of years!” (621–2) Once the explorers make their way to a wax museum, their assumption that they have made a “peculiarly gratifying discovery [of] Man, perfectly pre served, in a fossil state” leads to strange conclusions about the prodigiousness of the human stomach: “The straw it had eaten, so many ages gone by, was still in its body, undigested—and even in its legs” (625). Twain goes on to in dict the reliability of archeological interpretations of human “traces”:

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Back of the burial place was a mass of ashes, showing that Man always had a feast at a funeral—else why the ashes in such a place; and showing, also, that he believed in God and the immortality of the soul—else why these solemn ceremonies? (626) In the end, however, Twain turns his attack back to language as a means of transmitting historical data by offering a parody of the Rosetta Stone. Professor Woodlouse, the chief philologist on the expedition, discovers the “Mayoritish Stone,” which reads, in English, as follows: In 1847, in the spring, the river overflowed its banks and covered the whole township. The depth was from two to six feet. More than 900 head of cattle were lost, and many homes destroyed. The Mayor ordered this memorial to be erected to perpetuate the event. God spare us the repetition of it! Professor Woodlouse’s translation, of course, gets a number of details right, but destroys the general sense: One thousand eight hundred and forty-seven years ago, the (fires?) de scended and consumed the whole city. Only some nine hundred souls were saved, all others destroyed. The (king?) commanded this stone to be set up… (untranslatable)…repetition of it. (627) Elsewhere (in Life on the Mississippi) Twain registers his contempt for the in terpretive capacities of science in a particularly biting remark: “There is some thing fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact” (129). 51 The epistemological upshot appears to be that we don’t know nearly as much as we imagine we know. If we can’t trust those who tell us what happened and we can’t trust ourselves to interpret the evidence of archeology correctly, what can we know about his tory? According to Nadia Khouri, the answer is simple: For Twain, “the past is lost.” 52 When we juxtapose Twain’s contempt for accounts of history with his assaults on scientific interpretation of historical data, her assertion seems a trifle understated. For Twain, history is laughably, irretrievably lost. What we perceive as a geological formation can turn out to be a construction. And when we examine his later works (as we shall momentarily), such as Connecticut Yankee, Joan of Arc, and the Autobiography, we find that he seems to regard history itself as a practical joke of which everyone (for everyone is always already posterity) is the unwitting and unintended target. Hofstadter’s description of history as a conspiracy almost gets at Twain’s conception, but not quite. For Hofstadter, the paranoid mind sees history as a conspiracy directed at itself or the group of which it is a representative. But for Twain, history is a misdirected conspiracy, a practical joke targeted in some


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incomprehensibly malicious way at an obscure Nevada coroner or perhaps meant as a punishment of a saloonkeeper in response to an unspecified of fense. As posterity, as readers of history, we are like the audiences taken in by the “seductive web” of a hoax intended for someone else. I am hardly the first critic to remark on Twain’s conception of history as “a grim and mirthless hoax.” 53 What is new about the argument made here, however, is an appreci ation of the ways in which Twain’s lifelong fascination with history is reiter ated, demonstrated, and complicated by his lifelong fascination with and deployment of practical jokes as a means of persecution. All history is a hoax; all talk about history is a meta-hoax. Let us, then, examine Twain’s sense of the hoaxishness of history as he presents it in the final phase of his career. HANK AND JOAN AND MARK I dreamed I was born and grew up and was a pilot on the Mississippi and a miner and a journalist in Nevada and a pilgrim in the Quaker City, and had a wife and children and went to live in a villa at Florence—and this dream goes on and on and sometimes seems so real that I almost believe it is real. I wonder if it is? But there is no way to tell, for if one applies tests they would simply aid the deceit. I wish I knew whether it is a dream or real. 54 If we are to take Twain at his word, he seems to have considered Joan of Arc to be “worth all his other books together.” 55 Though often read as little more than a failed historical romance or an effusive exercise in the idealization of womanhood, this fiction of Twain’s provides us with acute insight into the equivalence that he perceived (and asserted) between hoax and history. Throughout the book, the narrator displays the same unhealthily com placent skepticism as the swamp creatures in “Learned Fable.” He takes great pains to convince us of his own reliability by opposing his “rigorous” meth ods of interpretation to the sloppy, inconsistent thinking of his contempo raries. In a discussion of several competing traditions concerning the magical powers of the tree of Domremy, he remarks, One of them I knew to be the truth, and that was the last one. I do not say anything against the others; I think they were true, but I only know that the last one was; and it is my thought that if one keep to the things he knows, and not trouble about the things which he cannot be sure about, he will have the steadier mind for it—and there is profit in that. (11; emphasis Twain’s)

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It is difficult to take his claims of epistemological rigor seriously, however, since he has just devoted a paragraph to proofs of the botanical kindnesses of fairies: [W]henever a child died the fairies mourned just as that child’s playmates did, and the sign of it was there to see: for before the dawn on the day of the funeral they hung a little immortelle over the place where that child was used to sit under the tree. I know this to be true by my own eyes, it is not hearsay And the reason it was known that the fairies did it was this—that it was made all of black flowers of a sort not known in France anywhere. (10) More ridiculously still, his knowledge of the fairies follows on the heels of his own self-defeating skepticism concerning dragons: It was thought that this dragon was of a brilliant blue color, with gold mottlings, but no one had ever seen it, therefore this was not known to be so, it was only an opinion. It was not my opinion; I think there is no sense in forming an opinion when there is no evidence to form it on. If you build a person without any bones in him he may look fair enough to the eye, but he will be limber and cannot stand up; and I consider that evidence is the bones of an opinion. But I will take up this matter more at large at another time, and try to make the justness of my position ap pear. As to that dragon, I always held the belief that its color was gold and without blue, for that has always been the color of dragons. (8–9) The narrator’s repeated cautions that “world history [is gotten] at second hand and by hearsay” (42) and that knowledge is conflated with opinion because “one gets most things at second hand in this world” (11) serve to ironize his tale not only because of his naiveté, but because Joan of Arc comes to the reader not at second or even third hand, but at fifth hand. It is the product of the historical figure Samuel Clemens, who has invented the literary figure Mark Twain, who claims that the book is translated by an imaginary linguist named Alden, whose translation is of a phony tale told by Sieur Louis de Conte concerning the historical figure of Joan of Arc. Joan of Arc is one hoax stacked upon another. If, as Winfried Fluck tells us, Connecticut Yankee “seems an especially rewarding text for…a discussion of fiction and history,” 56 then perhaps we can add that Joan of Arc, Twain’s his torical fiction, is especially rewarding for a discussion of the collapse between the two. Perhaps Twain’s narrator is not as naive as he appears, but merely clowning. There is reason to think that the translator, at least, must have sensed the ridiculousness of stressing in his preamble that the biography of Joan of Arc “is the only story of a human life which comes to us under oath” after having informed us in his own preface that in Joan’s era, “lying was the common speech of men [and] honesty was become a lost virtue” (x). In any case, the


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epistemological absurdities of the tale, compounded by the hoax of a spectrum of imaginary personae who pretend to be capable of comprehend ing historical information and transmitting it to the reader, serve not only to undermine the historical value of the story, but the value of history itself. But if history is a hoax, it is a hoax whose consequences can be deadly. Joan is burned at the stake because the French conspiracy against her includes the judge, who endorses the wrong facts in her personal history. Nowhere, however, is Twain’s conspiratorial portrait of history more fully developed than in Connecticut Yankee, which, according to J.D.Williams, “does embody a philosophy of history, as recent critics have emphasized” (102). The narrative construction, though not as thoroughly stratified as that of Joan of Arc, exhibits something of the same multifarious quality. As Helena Maragou points out, “one can only wonder whether Twain himself was totally unconscious of the irony involved in his use of the two secondary narrative voices—the first narrator and Clarence—who should ordinarily add ‘credibil ity’ to his main protagonist’s account. The use of ‘witnesses’ in the creation of the story only enhances its phantasmagoric character.” 57 This is the problem of history. It is hearsay more or less phantasmagorically corroborated. Hank Morgan’s whole notion of progress is tied directly to his under mining of the Catholic Church. 58 And he conspires against that ubiquitous symbol of conspiracy only to learn, in the end, that it has conspired against him. Although Clarence charges the clerisy with being better conspirators than Morgan (simply because Morgan loses), there is nothing in the Catholic conspiracy against Hank that is not absolutely dwarfed by Hank’s conspiracy against the Church. His secret network of schools and communications and henchmen makes the Church’s game look a trifle lame. “I had the civilization of the nineteenth century,” he boasts, “booming under its very nose, a gigan tic and unassailable fact—and to be heard from yet, if I lived and had luck” (51). He is proud of his “confidential agents…whose office was to…gnaw a little at this and that and the other superstition, and so to prepare the way gradually for a better order of things” (51). Critics of Connecticut Yankee are quick to point out Hank’s selfimportance. The title of John Zurlo’s essay on the novel, “Hank’s Egomania,” 59 is representative of most critical thought concerning the character of Hank Morgan. But Hank’s egomania doesn’t function in the same way as Amasa Delano’s in Benito Cereno. Hank’s impulse to be a cynosure leads him to conspire against the world in which he finds himself rather than to theorize fruitlessly about how it might be conspiring against him. Despite sharing Delano’s egomania, Hank is, in many ways, the opposite of Delano. Whereas Delano entertains all sorts of outrageous theo ries concerning the goings-on aboard the San Dominick, Hank resists the ex planation of a conspiracy even when it is provided to him by his most trusted advisor. Morgan and Delano are both conspired against; and they are both egomaniacs; the difference is that Morgan goes on the offensive. He is too busy hatching conspiracies of his own to worry about those being hatched against him.

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True to Twainian form, the most gentle register of Hank’s subversion (to explode chivalry through laughter on his way to exploding the Church with gunpowder) takes the form of yet another misguided practical joke; for the audience that is qualified to laugh at it simply isn’t available to Morgan. Richard Slotkin summarizes the misdirected quality of the joke aptly: The Yankee…compels the knights to change their heraldic devices for nineteenth-century billboard advertisements—‘USE PETERSON’S PROPHYLACTIC TOOTHBRUSH—IT’S ALL THE GO.’ As the Yankee himself suggests, the point of the joke—and hence its ideological charge— will be lost on an audience that cannot read and has no notion of either advertising or toothbrushes. 60 Perhaps the reason for the success of the Catholic conspiracy against Morgan is its more practical method of targeting. Though familiar to most readers, the details of this conspiracy are worth reviewing. Significantly, the Catholic plot begins just as Clarence (Morgan’s right-hand man) has finished playing a prank on Hank by proposing that the English royal family be replaced by a regal line of housecats. Once Clarence has earned Hank’s confidence, he yowls: “Me-e-e-yow-ow-ow-ow—fzt— wow!” Hank is about to “scold him” when his wife Sandy barges in to an nounce that their daughter, Hello Central, 61 is ill. The doctors who are consulted unanimously advise that the child be taken away and insist that she “must have sea air.” Although he has a number of irons in his historical fire, Hank acts immediately: [W]e took a man-of-war, and a suite of two hundred and sixty persons, and went cruising about, and after a fortnight of this we stepped ashore on the French coast, and the doctors thought it would be a good idea to make something of a stay there…. At the end of a month I sent the vessel home for fresh supplies, and for news…. However, my attention was suddenly snatched from such matters; our child began to lose ground again, and we had to go sitting up with her, her case became so serious…. Well, during two weeks and a half we watched by the crib…. Then our reward came…. Then we looked the same startled thought into each other’s eyes at the same moment: more than two weeks gone, and that ship not back yet. (234) Hank does not unravel the conspiracy for himself, not even after his return to an England that has reverted to its old ways. The demystification is left to Clarence: “Smart as you are, the Church was smarter. It was the Church that sent you cruising—through her servants the doctors.” “Clarence!”


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“It is the truth. I know it. Every officer of your ship was the Church’s picked servant, and so was every man of the crew.” “Oh, come!” “It is just as I tell you. I did not find out these things at once, but I found them out finally. Did you send me verbal information, by the commander of the ship, to the effect that upon his return to you, with supplies, you were going to leave Cadiz” — “Cadiz! I haven’t been at Cadiz at all!” —“going to leave Cadiz and cruise in distant seas indefinitely, for the health of your family? Did you send me that word?” “Of course not. I would have written, wouldn’t I?” “Naturally I was troubled and suspicious. When the commander sailed again I managed to ship a spy with him. I have never heard of ves sel or spy since. I gave myself two weeks to hear from you in. Then I re solved to send a ship to Cadiz. There was a reason why I didn’t.” “What was that?” “Our navy had suddenly and mysteriously disappeared! Also as sud denly and as mysteriously, the railway and telegraph and telephone serv ice ceased, the men all deserted, poles were cut down, the Church laid a ban upon the electric light!” (241–2) Hank’s conspiracy to enlighten England (reminiscent of the Illuminati that figure so prominently in Brockden Brown’s work) is defeated by a darker, more powerful conspiratorial force: the Church. But note that in Hank’s report of this conversation, he comes across on a first reading as the consummate anti-paranoid. Though he is the one whose “secret longed-for point” is the destruction of the Catholic Church, he finds it difficult to credit Clarence’s assertions of a Catholic conspiracy against him. “Clarence!” he objects; then “Oh come!” And his astonishment throughout Clarence’s presentation of the evidence serves as a constant reminder that his overwhelming antagonism for Catholicism is intellectual rather than hysteri cal; we are to see that Hank Morgan, arch-enemy of Catholicism though he is, resists the paranoid theories of Catholic conspiracy that were characteristic of his own nineteenthcentury New England. 62 Clarence must convince him. But Clarence convinces him with “proofs” that function despite two im portant considerations: 1) this is the first conversation Hank has had with Clarence since the latter abused his confidence with the cat-prank and 2) we only have Clarence’s word for his proofs. Note that there is no external evidence to support any of Clarence’s claims. He can’t show Hank the false report about Cadiz because the fact that he only had the captain’s word for it is what made him suspicious; he can’t produce the spy because the fact that the spy has disappeared is what con vinced him of foul play; he can’t produce any of the Church’s elaborate net work of picked servants because Hank hasn’t brought any along. He doesn’t actually assert that the

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Church is responsible for the mysterious disappearance of the navy; he merely mentions this disappearance in the same frantic para graph as the Church’s ban on the light bulb. 63 Consequently, despite Hank’s superficial attempts to deflect all of the paranoia onto Clarence, he merely comes across as the paranoid follower of a paranoid leader during the scene that prompts the most paranoid act of the novel, the Battle of the Sand Belt. As Fluck has observed: When it has to be acknowledged that the fantasy [Hank’s fantasy of suc cess] cannot be convincingly upheld any longer, it collapses and submits to melodramatic gestures of despair and to a paranoia, in which “the rest of the world,” threatening the inflated self, can only be encountered with raw aggression. (145) Where Hank’s intentions with regard to history were always, to his own mind, “good,” the Church’s are evil. And with Clarence’s revelation, the Church takes on the qualities of the traditional “enemy” of the paranoid mind as de scribed by Hofstadter: Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history…. free, active, demonic agent. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history himself, or deflects the course of history in an evil way. (32) Although the Church actually functions as a mechanism that prevents the de flection of history by arresting Hank’s premature developments, Hank cannot help seeing it as deviating maliciously from the new historical course that he has set for humanity. Moreover, as Hofstadter’s analysis of the paranoid mind would lead us to expect, he takes the Church’s “Interdict” on his progress personally: “The paranoid’s interpretation of history is…distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of some one’s will” (32). Even though the people of England voluntarily desert Morgan upon learning of the Church’s interdict, he insists that they don’t know what’s best for them or what they want. It is only the Church’s will that balks him, not the fact that he has tried to compress thirteen centuries into a few years. More importantly, even though the Church’s ban on the light bulb and the sudden disappearance of telegraph and telephone lines would seem to indicate clerical resistance to new technology, he concludes that the Church is really out to get him even though no move is made against him until he de clares England a Republic and mentions where he can be found. If history in Connecticut Yankee is a conspiracy, it is only a conspiracy that fights for self-preservation in the novel. Hank Morgan picks a fight with history and loses after having become what he sets out to squelch: a transhis torical force


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that attempts to move history along a certain path. Morgan fails to become what Twain called himself in an unpublished philosophical work dated a thousand years after his death: “the Father of History.” 64 ABANDONING THE ESOPHAGUS It seems natural to close this argument on the conspiracy of history with ref erence to Connecticut Yankee if only because that text most aptly dramatizes the extent to which the hoax of history is prepared to fend off resistance. It is perhaps the most protracted of Twain’s discussions of the “no accident” the ory of history espoused by the narrator of “The Story of the Old Ram” in Roughing It (“Don’t tell me it was an accident that he was b[o]iled. There ain’t no such thing as an accident” [388]), by Satan in “Letters from the Earth” (“There are no accidents” [901]), or by Twain himself 65 in his essay entitled “The Turning Point of My Life.” In his remarks about the causes that effected (rather than affected) Caesar’s decision to cross the Rubicon, he observes that it is a musician’s trumpet blast that makes up Caesar’s mind for him: [T]hat stranger was a link in Caesar’s life-chain, too; and a necessary one. We don’t know his name, we never hear of him again; he was very casual; he acts like an accident; but he was no accident, he was there by compul sion of his life-chain, to blow the electrifying blast that was to make up Caesar’s mind for him, and thence go piping down the aisles of history for ever…. I was one of the unavoidable results of the crossing of the Rubicon. If the stranger, with his trumpet blast, had stayed away (which he couldn’t, for he was an appointed link) Caesar would not have crossed. 66

Though “casual” about his role, the trumpet blaster is “causal” in the way that everything is. And in a parody of the paranoid consciousness, which relates everything to itself, Twain connects Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon to his own birth. Twain replays this logic of consequence in order to observe, “I can say with truth that the reason I am in the literary profession is because I had the measles when I was twelve years old” (935). The mechanism of history is a mechanism of consequence that prompts him to add, “I see no great differ ence between a man and a watch, except that the man is conscious and the watch isn’t, and the man tries to plan things and the watch doesn’t” (936). The analogy’s employment of a time-keeping device seems itself a far from acci dental reference to history. In yet another remark from the essay, Twain casts himself in precisely the same light as the frustrated Hank Morgan:

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Circumstance, working in harness with my temperament, created them all [the details of existence] and compelled them all. I often offered help, and with the best intentions, but it was rejected—as a rule, uncourte ously. (936) It is with the best of intentions that Morgan tries to help the sixth century into the nineteenth. But his assistance is less than courteously rejected; and he wakes up from his thirteen-century sleep to take up exactly where he had left off before his excursion into the past. Hank, despite his secret schools and fac tories, his own education and technological prowess, and his avowed inten tion of altering the course of history, is unable to put a dent in the sixth century. There is no trace— other than his own testimony and a small hole in a single suit of armor—of the Boss’ impact on English or world history. But there is another reason that makes it almost imperative to close with reference to the conspiracy against Hank, for it is an important reprise of the closing chapter of Wieland, where our study began. Recall that Clara Wieland was constrained by the guide-boards of gothic narrative to end up leaving her well-lit Protestant soil for the darkness of Catholic Europe. Her gothic narra tive cannot vouch for its own gothic authenticity until she leaves Pennsylvania for France. The agent responsible for Clara’s removal is the genre into which she has written herself: Catholicism simply plays into the gothic package. The Catholicism that tricks Hank into abandoning his proto-Protestant England for Catholic France is no longer a force of narrative, but of history It is a re versal of the same historical forces that would allow Joan of Arc, when taken out of French hands and given to the English, to be burned at the stake, the same fate that assured the “only permanency” for Sherlock Holmes. Twain may find fault with his audience for reading the text that isn’t there; but he is much more likely to fault them for accepting the text that is. His in terrogation of history may verge on the paranoia that Hofstadter attributes to those who see “a ‘vast’ or ‘gigantic’ conspiracy as the motive force in historical events”; but it is always at least somewhat playful—perhaps the only appropri ate response to a history that he cannot help figuring as a practical joke. Though Twain toys with history throughout his literary career, we see (in Joan’s fate) that the stakes become more and more serious toward the end. In Connecticut Yankee, the game was still at the level of the practical joke. Twain almost certainly intended the massive carnage of the Battle of the Sand Belt to be read in “the comic-epic tone which permits us to laugh unreservedly at the obliteration of Tom in a Tom and Jerry cartoon, without agonizing over the realities of pain. 67 Bearing this caution in mind, I think we can see that despite the stress Twain places on the seriousness of the hoax of Connecticut Yankee, it is, more than anything, a joke. Maragou tells us that “playing games is a theme that has informed the humor of most of Twain’s novels; yet, in no one of them has it attained such a prominence as in Yankee.” 68 Card players can see how astute Maragou’s ob


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servation is even in the bleakness of the Battle of the Sand Belt, in which Hank and Clarence lead a contingent of teenage boys against thirty thousand knights. The three narrators of Connecticut Yankee are Twain (who gives us the Preface, A Word of Explanation, and his Final Post Script), Hank Morgan (who writes the body of the tale), and Clarence (who wraps up Morgan’s man uscript after Merlin has put Hank into a thirteen-century sleep). Before we ever open the book, of course, we know that Twain is a joker; but when we learn that Hank and Clarence must rely on fifty-two helpers in order to play their hand against chivalry, it is difficult to resist the numerological metaphor of a standard deck of playing cards—and to conclude that our other two nar rators are jokers as well. But to joke about history is not to escape it. And, regrettably, Twain’s presentation of history as a misguided conspiracy is a fantasy, an attempt to es cape from the same responsibility that almost all conspiratorial American nar ratives attempt to evade; it is a struggle to assert America’s pastlessness despite the fact of a past of colonialism, imperialism, and slavery. 69 It is simply one more stage in the development of an American literature designed to highlight oppositions between American fidelity and European corruption, modern rec titude and ancient depravity, New World order and Old World chaos. Whether the narrative in question chooses to allegorize the conspiracy against America by pitting narrator against genre, narrative against narrative, author against narrator, or author against reader, the conspiracy that America faces is always, in the most fundamental sense of the term, Catholic. Everyone is against America. America is the victim. How can America be guilty of perse cution when it is so busy being persecuted by Illuminati, freemasons, Jesuits, and even history itself? Twain, clearly an informed and articulate anti-imperi alist, actually gave way to the following jingoistic outburst in his “A Defence of General Funston”: “We [Americans] shall [part company with] the sceptered land-thieves of Europe, and be what we were before, a real World Power…by right of the only…hands guiltless of the sordid plunder of any helpless peo ple’s stolen liberties.” 70 To take the islands of the Filipinos is imperialism; yet to take the hills of the Navajo is manifest destiny. To assert that American im perialism begins only in the 1890s is an astonishingly bold maneuver; it is a confession of guilt that gains far more than it concedes; it postdates white im perialism 71 based in North America by four hundred years. CLOSING THOUGHTS We have examined conspiracies that shift from one site to another, but the tar get is always the same: American innocence. Twain both attacks and asserts that innocence most obviously by trying to gull the unassuming American readership with his esophagus hoax, but he has more in common with the other writers examined in this study than may seem obvious at first. Just when it seems that Clara Wieland is going to recover from her brother’s attacks on her, she is captured by an English literary tradition that refuses to leave well enough alone

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in the final chapter of Wieland. The Maules and Pyncheons ac cuse each other of the theft of land that initially belonged to neither, but Clifford (whose innocence Hawthorne later calls into question) is depicted as a victim of circumstance. Amasa Delano, who sued Benito Cereno for a share of the profits from the recaptured Tryal (a slaver), manages to figure in his own mind as the innocent victim of slaves being imported to the innocent New World from Africa. Twain urges his reader to be critical of history. He springs the esophagus hoax on us to teach us to read more critically, and he is himself critical of Leopold’s atrocities in the Congo and of the ubiquity of lynchings in the South and of the antiSemitism that led to the Dreyfus case. But he goes out of his way throughout his career to vilify Native Americans. (He even vilifies James Fennimore Cooper for the sentimental excess of por traying Native Americans sympathetically.) What does he get through these maneuvers? He gets precisely the same thing that Brown and Hawthorne and Melville got (or that their narratives all allowed their readers to construct): a picture of America that suits Americans. 72 It’s the English literary tradition that ruins the final chapter of Wieland by forcing the innocent American Clara Wieland to Catholic Europe for a bunch of proto-Victorian nonsense. It’s the Catholic Church that spoils The Marble Faun by abducting the innocent American painter Hilda. It’s the slaves aboard the San Dominick who trick the forthright, sincere, unironic Amasa Delano into mortal danger. In spite of himself and his own investment in the idealization of American innocence, Twain seems to suggest with his esophagus hoax that literary history is like any other history: just another trick. We can’t trust characters, stories, narrators, or even authors—for their purpose is always to manipulate us. American innocence is itself a trope for the gullible reader, and paranoia, like Twain’s gambit concerning colonialism, is a defense mechanism that gains us far more than it concedes. When we can concentrate on such phony enemies as the English literary tradition or the Catholic Church or slave uprisings off the coast of South America or even tex tual traps set for us by our literary lions—when we can concentrate on such phony enemies, we reaffirm our own innocence. The ones that we think of as being out to get us don’t even make sense as enemies, so we must not have any. In the introduction, we saw how we could apply Freud’s formulation con cerning paranoia to the English gothic novel, for both the paranoid and the gothic novelist are adept at taking an object of desire and projecting it into the external world as an object of fear. The texts that we have surveyed have all ul timately confirmed the value of paranoia for the American reader. Clara Wieland was right to be suspicious of her brother, but there was a deeper con spiracy afoot, a conspiracy of the European continent to appropriate her American story with its own conventions. Hawthorne uses Donatello conspir atorially against Clifford Pyncheon, but at the end of The Marble Faun he equates his own textual intrigue with a secret Catholic plot—something that Americans should be wary of when they are visiting Italy. Melville shows us that despite all of Delano’s suspicions, he is insufficiently paranoid to unravel the mystery of The San Dominick. And


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Twain laughs at us for failing to be on our guard as readers in precisely the same way that Clara Wieland and Hilda and Amasa Delano should have been as characters. Our downfall is invariably our innocence. When we pretend to be distressed by our innocence, we project that innocence into the external world not as the subject of debate, but as the object of fear; so it makes perfect sense for us to tell ourselves that we are vulnerable to everything from Catholics to slave uprisings to gothic conventions. Just as the pleasure of reading a gothic novel is the titillation of being frightened by ghosts that we don’t believe in, so the pleasure of exploring these textual conspiracies (whether they are directed at characters, texts, narrators, or readers) is the titil lation of being frightened by sinister forces that aren’t really out to get us. In other words, it is precisely because we were so fond of championing our American innocence in the nineteenth century that we were drawn to writers who depicted that innocence as the source of our downfall. Just as the English gothic novelists did, we took an object of desire (our supposed inno cence) and projected it into the external world as an object of fear (the thing that could get Clara or Hilda or Delano killed). We read Twain despite his his tory of playing practical jokes on us because his ability to continue to con us when we should have known better is a testament to our innocence. We were drawn to texts featuring outlandish conspiracies (texts that seemed to encour age, advocate, inculcate or even necessitate a paranoid mindset on the part of characters, narrators and readers); we were drawn to these texts precisely be cause of the ways in which they ratified our own innocence. If paranoia helps us spot our enemies by reading the text that isn’t there, then our innocence is reaffirmed each time we read the text that is.

Notes

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION 1. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (NY: Knopf, 1965)3. 2. Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (NY: Criterion, 1960) 124. 3. Although this observation is not original with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, it is perhaps best articulated in her excellent Coherence of Gothic Conventions (NY: Methuen, 1986) vi–vii, the most useful comprehensive study of the gothic to have been produced to date. See also G.R.Thompson, ed., The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Romanticism (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1974), par ticularly Thompson’s introduction. 4. Sigmund Freud, Three Case Histories (NY: Collier’s, 1977) 135. 5. “I choose American history to illustrate the paranoid style only because I happen to be an Americanist, and it is for me a choice of convenience. But the phenomenon is no more limited to American experience than it is to our contemporaries. Notions about an all-embracing conspiracy on the part of Jesuits or Freemasons, international capitalists, international Jews, or Communists are familiar phenomena in many countries throughout modern history” (Hofstadter, 6). 6. Fiedler lists only those writers whom he perceives to be the canonical figures in American literature, beginning, predictably, with Charles Brockden Brown: “In America, [a list of canonical authors] would begin with Charles Brockden Brown and Edgar Allan Poe (if short fiction were considered a suf ficient claim), and would continue through Hawthorne, Melville, Mark Twain, Henry James, and perhaps Stephen Crane, ending with Hemingway and Faulkner… [T]he American catalogue includes only one writer, Hemingway, whose major works do not include a good many deeply influ enced by the example of the gothic” (125). Fiedler’s argument, at least inso far as it concerns the earliest phase of American literature, would only be bolstered by the inclusion of such non-canonical writers as Susanna Rowson and Hannah Foster. For a discussion of the exclusion of Rowson and Foster from the canon and Brown’s inclusion, see Nina Baym’s “A Minority Reading of Wieland” in Bernard Rosenthal’s Critical Essays on Charles Brockden Brown (Boston: G.K.Hall and Co., 1981) 87–104. 7. Although a number of literary critics (notably Timothy Melley and Patrick O’Donnell) are working intensely with the topic of paranoia as it registers it self in

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

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20th-century (particularly post-WWII) American literature, I think it is important for us to realize that our literature was behaving in paranoid ways and engaging paranoid themes long before readers encountered such figures as Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. I need hardly point out that by reckoning with Fiedler’s now obsolete canon of 19th-century writers, we are likely to confront the aporia of two (presumably) different Americas, the America of the 19th century and the America of the 1960s that produced the work of Hofstadter and Fiedler. However, a word of explanation for the terms of my engagement with Fiedler’s list is in order. Although Henry James is arguably our most important 19th-century novelist, I stop short of James because I wholeheartedly agree with Gertrude Stein’s contention that he is the first of the modernist writers. Because of differences in their aesthetic and epistemological agendas, I believe it is fair to say that even in his early 20thcentury work, Twain was writing with a 19th-century sensibility—some thirty years after James had begun to write with what we would come to see as a 20thcentury sensibility. Freud vacillates between emphasizing hypochondria and megalomania; Jacques Lacan tends to privilege megalomania and persecution; Emil Kraepelin privileges hysteria; Hofstadter and Gordon Wood are more inter ested in conspiracy; and Leo Bersani focuses almost entirely on interpretive distress in his discussion of paranoia (which is consistent with Robert Heilman’s discussion of the gothic as the “rehabilitation of the extra-rational” and Eric Santner’s contention that paranoia is a state of having “too much consciousness”). These distinctions are discussed in greater detail in the next section of this introduction, “A Survey of Terms.” That historians and literary critics have struggled with the term “paranoia” for decades is unsurprising. For an indication of how slippery a concept para noia is (even for professionals in psychiatry), see Salman Akhtar, “Paranoid Personality Disorder: A Synthesis of Developmental, Dynamic, and Descriptive Features,” American Journal of Psychotherapy 44 (1990):5–26. In addition to commenting critically and helpfully on the distinctions between the ways Paranoid Personality Disorder is categorized in different versions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (specifically DSM- III and DSM-III-R), Akhtar points out that different phenomenological models relate different kinds of paranoia (generic paranoia, paranoid person ality disorder, and paranoid schizophrenia) to each other in different ways. In the previous footnote, I only scratch the surface of distinctions made by the luminaries of psychology with my invocation of Freud, Lacan, and Kraepelin. Akhtar begins his article with a systematic survey of nine differ ent takes on paranoia (from Valentin Magnan’s in 1893 to that articulated by Peter Polatin in 1975). “Charlotte Bronte’s ‘New’ Gothic,” From Jane Austen to Joseph Conrad: Essays Collected in Memory of James T.Hillhouse, ed. Robert C.Rathburn and Martin Steinmann, Jr. (Minneapolis: UP Minnesota, 1958) 123. Sixth Edition (NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993) 78. As Nicol Bran puts it, “I find clear symptoms of this ‘interpretive paranoia’ in examples of postmodern fiction which obsessively foreground the process of interpretation, often revealing it to be paranoid. By doing so, such texts draw attention to the reader’s own paranoid quest to interpret as s/he reads” (“Reading Paranoia: Paranoia, Epistemophilia and the Postmodern Crisis of Interpretation,” Literature and Psychology 45 [1999]:44). As Bran’s title and this quotation

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15.

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suggest, she is specifically concerned with the paranoia of postmodernity, but she also acknowledges the importance of the connection between paranoia and interpretation in earlier phases of enlightenment thought: “Postmodern existence is a continual process of trying to find meaning in the face of the knowledge that meaning is always relative and contingent. The world which provided the backdrop for modernism may have been similarly bewildering and fragmented to those who lived through it, but it was still part—albeit a gradually disintegrating part—of the ‘Enlightenment project’” (45). In one sense, this book is an attempt to trace precisely the sort of “gradual disintegrat[ion]” Bran mentions. Hofstadter’s disavowal occurs on p.3. The need to relate all things to himself does not preclude the paranoiac’s abil ity to perceive reality from the perspective of others. In his review essay, “The Listening Eye: Postmodernism, Paranoia, and the Hypervisible,” Jerry Aline Flieger points out, “Lacan’s theory seems to suggest that paranoid knowledge may be read from two angles: it may be considered as either the province of the ‘errant’ psychotic in error—hopelessly adrift from human symbolic inter action; or as the grounding of intersubjectivity, the daily double dealings of all-too-human dupes with their fellows… [T]he other, as subject, is impli cated, not just ‘projected’ in our image but understood to be the object that objectifies us in turn” (Diacritics 26.1 [1996]: 105). In this study of Fiedler’s exclusively male canon, it is not surprising that megalomania should crop up as central. Despite the justifiable reluctance of critics such as Naomi Schor and Judith Halberstam to reduce paranoia to a purely gendered (or genderable) category, Halberstam does offer a valuable distinction between what she calls “Male/Paranoid Gothic” and “Female/ Gothic Paranoia”: “Masculine paranoia, or paranoid Gothic, and the theory it comes to resemble produces a monomaniacal system which centers narcis sistically upon the male body. Feminine paranoia or Gothic paranoia leads to a politics of fear which finds horror to be figured by, but not isolable to, the female body” (Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters [Durham: Duke UP, 1995]:112). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book III: The Psychoses, 1955–1956, trans. Russell Grigg (NY: Norton, 1993) 135. For Lacan’s more condensed treat ment of Schreber, see Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (NY: Norton, 1977) 179– 225. The important thing to remember about the role of conspiratorial fantasy in paranoia is that it functions in such a way as to provide an outlet for mega lomania. It is an excellent method of calling attention to oneself through de flection, of displacing oneself into the position of a cynosure. My paranoia is about me to the extent that I am the object of their persecution. I become my own subject, in other words, through my having become their object. As Lacan puts it, “The double reversal, I do not love him, I hate him, he hates me, undoubtedly gives us a clue to the mechanism of persecution. The prob lem is entirely one of this he. In effect, this he is multiplied, neutralized, emp tied, or so it seems, of subjectivity. The persecutory phenomenon takes on the character of indefinitely repeated signs, and the persecutor, to the extent that he is its support, is no longer anything more than the shadow of the per secutory object” (90). According to yet another perspective, “Paranoia is the tendency to see external events and things forming patterns that appear to be harmful (negative paranoia) or beneficent (positive paranoia), which


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20. 21.

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pat terns appear to center on the person seeing” (Hendrik Hertzberg and David C.K.McClelland, “Paranoia,” Harper’s June 1974:60). What is distinctive about this definition, derived from the work of Andrew Weil, is that it allows for positive paranoia. To suppose that the universe is “for” one rather than “against” one is to stress a megalomaniacal organization of patterns in the ab sence of persecution. And the importance of this possibility is its recognition of the fact that while persecution can help paranoia to function (by obscur ing the megalomaniacally desirable position of a cynosure), it is not integral to paranoia. In Freud’s discussion of persecutory fantasy, he is able to trace the persecutory symptoms of paranoia to megalomania, but admits that he cannot account for the megalomania itself. Although this definition locates paranoia in an individual consciousness (and would appear to diverge significantly from Patrick O’Donnell’s defi nition of “cultural paranoia”), I must point out that the individual para noid loci I examine in this study share a set of cultural assumptions and are manipulated into their paranoid responses by similar cultural stimuli. Accordingly, it may be useful for the reader to reflect on O’Donnell’s defi nition of cultural paranoia as “an intersection of contiguous lines of force—political, economic, epistemological, ethical—that make up a dominant reality (or episteme, or paradigm, or habitus, or structure of feel ing) empowered by virtue of the connections to be made between materi ality, as such, and the fictional representations or transformations of that materiality which come to affect its constitution.” I quote from “Engendering Paranoia in Contemporary Narrative” (boundary 2 19.1 [1992]:182) rather than O’Donnell’s more recent (and more comprehen sive) Latent Destinies: Cultural Paranoia and Contemporary U.S. Narrative (Durham: UP Duke, 2000) because the earlier piece figured in my think ing about paranoia as a graduate student in the 1990s. Like Hofstadter, Wood emphasizes the conspiratorial (rather than the mega lomaniacal) element of paranoid thinking; the historical applicability of his argument is nevertheless relevant here. “Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly 39 (1982):410–11. For an extensive discussion of paranoia as an enlightenment by-product, see Eric Santner’s My Own Private Germany (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996), especially chapter two. Santner neatly balances the historical and metaphor ical relationships between the two concepts. The historical connection be tween paranoia and the enlightenment is perhaps most famously commented on by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (NY: Pantheon, 1977), but has been elaborated on by Leo Braudy in “Providence, Paranoia, and the Novel,” ELH 48 (1981):619–37, and Leo Bersani in The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990), particularly chapter 8. Because the historical connection has been amply discussed, I emphasize the metaphorical relationship that draws upon the work of the most important critic of the enlightenment, Theodor Adorno. Notions of paranoia and enlightenment are so strangely intertwined that it can be difficult to tell, on the basis of definitions alone, which one is under discussion at a given time. Consider the resonances between the following quotations from Theodor Adorno and Dr. Weber, the superintendent of Daniel Paul Schreber’s mental asylum:

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For the Enlightenment, whatever does not conform to the rule of computation and utility is suspect Every spiritual resistance it encounters serves merely to increase its strength…. Enlightenment is totalitarian…. In advance, the Enlightenment recognizes as being and occurrence only what can be apprehended in unity: its ideal is the system from which all and everything follows. (Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment [NY: Continuum, 1976] 6–7.) The paranoid form of illness became more and more marked, crys tallized out so to speak, into its present picture. This kind of illness is, as is well known, characterized by the fact that next to a more or less fixed elaborate delusional system there is complete possession of men tal faculties and orientation, formal logic is retained, [and] marked af fective reactions are missing…the patient is filled with pathological ideas, which are woven into a complete system, more or less fixed, and not amenable to correction by objective evidence and judgment of cir cumstances. (Daniel Paul Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness [Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988] 271.)

Note how easily and appropriately whole clauses concerning paranoia and enlightenment could be swapped between the excerpts from Adorno and the superintendent. Adorno can help Weber to observe that paranoia is totalitar ian just as Weber can help Adorno to characterize enlightenment as a more or less fixed elaborate delusional system in which formal logic is retained. 22. The difference is relevant politically as well as aesthetically and does not con fine itself to academic publications. In a recent New York Times article, German novelist Peter Schneider speculates, “These growing divisions [be tween the U.S. and Europe]—over war, peace, religion, sex, life and death— amount to a philosophical dispute about the common origins of European and American civilization. Both children of the Enlightenment, the United States and Europe clearly differ about the nature of this inheritance and about who is its better custodian.” (“Across a Great Divide,” 13 Mar. 2004, late ed.: B7). 23. For a similar argument concerning contemporary American literature, see Timothy Melley’s Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2000). In his discussion of the role played by (or attributed to) Lee Harvey Oswald in the Kennedy assassination, Melley observes that the popular idea of Oswald “conserves a traditional conception of agency in the face of extraordinary evidence to the contrary” (135). This ability of Americans to cling to the ideas we like rather than the ones dictated by our experience is a testimony to what David Bromwich calls “the American psychosis.” Taking his cue from D.H.Lawrence, Bromwich ar gues compellingly that the peculiar psychological aberration of Americans may be that “[t]heir experience does not get to them” (“The American Psychosis,” Raritan: A Quarterly Review 21.4 [2002]:33). In fact, Melley’s discussion of what he calls “agency panic” (which concerns a “comforting model of self” [45]) in contemporary America is astonishingly similar to a tension that Bromwich points out between the self as “real” and society as “bondage”—a


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tension that he explores brilliantly through the 17th-century figures of John Winthrop and Roger Williams. As for the productivity of the panopticon, Bentham opens his argument with the following boast: “Morals reformed—health preserved—industry invig orated— instruction diffused—public burthens lightened—Economy seated, as it were, upon a rock—the gordian knot of the Poor-laws are not cut, but untied—all by a simple idea in Architecture!” (The Panopticon Writings, ed. Miran Bozovic [NY: Verso, 1995] 31). “What distinguishes the paranoid style is not, then, the absence of verifiable facts… but rather the curious leap in imagination that is always made at some critical point in the recital of events…the careful preparation for the big leap from the undeniable to the unbelievable” (Hostadter, 37–8). Here again we see conspiratorial fantasy as the realization of a megalomani acal impulse; for to league the Freemasons with the Catholics against oneself is to take three unrelated elements and turn them into a pattern centering on oneself. It is in this way that paranoia has to do with finding conflicts where others would not know to look for them, with setting up antagonisms and alliances that others would never imagine. As Hofstadter points out, “The status of those who were opposed by these anti movements of Catholics were preponderantly poor immigrants. Mormons drew their strength from the na tive rural middle class. Ironically, the victims themselves were associated with similar anti sentiments. Freemasonry had strong anti-Catholic associations. Mormons were anti-Catholic, and, to a degree, anti-Masonic. Yet their de tractors did not hesitate to couple staunch foes. It was sometimes said, for ex ample, that the Jesuits had infiltrated Freemasonry, and the menace of Catholicism was frequently compared with the menace of Mormonism…. The ecumenism of hatred is a great breaker-down of precise intellectual dis criminations” (14–5). This reduction to a state of paranoid delusion is precisely the role of the gothic architecture in, for example, The Mysteries of Udolpho. Every locked door seems to conceal something dreadfully important to the heroine’s fate, as does every mysterious tapestry and every unexplored hallway. And the se cret passageways and peepholes make the narrative a narrative of competing inspectors, unseen monitors who use their powers of invisibility in the strug gle for control of the structure. Cf. Bozovic’s point: “In this case the inspec tor ‘s apparent omnipresence is preserved only in the eyes of those who do not see him; since they do not see him anywhere in the panopticon, they clearly cannot see that they are not being seen” (9). “In Foucault’s view, the crucial model of the procedures of observation, ex amination, and registration that characterize the disciplines and therewith ‘constitute the individual as effect and object of power, as effect and object of knowledge’ was provided by Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon. Not simply an ingenious architectural design for an ideal prison in which the inmate would learn to internalize the agency of observation, it was for Foucault a crucial metaphor for the technical rationality that emerged in the Enlightenment” (Santner, 85). My thinking about the panopticon was also heavily influenced by a seminar with Tom Keenan, who handles the topic with characteristic brilliance in “Windows: Of Vulnerability,” from The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (NY: Routledge, 1993) 121–141.

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29. There are conjectures that the helmet is from a statue of Prince Alfonso the Good, which is soon discovered to be missing its helmet, but there is an ex traordinary discrepancy in size. Before any serious explanations are offered, the narrative loses interest in accounting for how the death of Manfred’s son occurs, focusing instead on Manfred’s punishment of the peasant who ob serves the resemblance between the giant helmet and the one from the statue. 30. Gordon Wood’s remarks about the abundance of conspiratorial thinking in the West in the eighteenth century are not without relevance to the success of Radcliffe’s explained supernatural. “Conspiratorial interpretations—at tributing events to the concerted designs of willful individuals—became a major means by which educated men in the early modern period ordered and gave meaning to their political world. Far from being symptomatic of irra tionality, this conspiratorial mode of explanation represented an enlightened stage in Western man’s long struggle to comprehend his social reality. It flowed from the scientific promise of the Enlightenment and represented an effort, perhaps in retrospect a last desperate effort, to hold men personally and morally responsible for their actions” (411). The further political rami fications that Wood points out also hold true for paranoia in literature: “Mandeville clearly perceived time had no better way of describing the mul titude of complicated and crisscrossing causal chains he saw than to invoke the traditional Protestant concept of ‘providence.’ For those who would be enlightened and scientific, this resort to the mysterious hand of God was no explanation of human affairs at all but rather a step backward into darkness. Things happened, as John Adams noted, by human volition, either ‘by Accident or Design.’ Some confusing event or effect might be passed off as an accident—the result of somebody’s mistaken intention—but a series of events that seemed to form a pattern could be no accident. Having only the alternative of ‘providence’ as an impersonal abstraction to describe system atic linkages of human actions, the most enlightened of the age could only conclude that regular patterns of behavior were the consequences of con certed human intentions—that is, the result of a number of people coming together to promote collective design or conspiracy” (419). 31. For more in this vein on the gothic novel, see Thompson’s The Gothic Imagination. 32. In his discussion of Bentham’s panopticon (a discussion which stresses Bentham’s role as architect over his role as philosopher), Foucault refers to the late 18thcentury transformation of the Hotel-Dieu, which was “increas ingly conceived of as a base for the medical observation of the population outside.” As he points out, “after the burning down of the Hotel-Dieu in 1772, there were several demands that the large buildings, so heavy and so disordered, should be replaced by a series of smaller hospitals; their function would be to take in the sick of the quarter, but also to gather information… to keep the authorities informed of the sanitary state of the region.” Relevant though it may be for us to appreciate that gothic architecture is quite prob ably that which can best be described as “large…heavy… and disordered,” it is also important for us to appreciate (as Foucault does) that the panopti con is about more than architecture just as the gothic novel is about more than the castles in which its earliest productions are staged. Nevertheless, it may well be useful to reduce things to architectural terms if only for the mo ment. Stripped of Radcliffe’s secret passageways and peepholes, gothic buildings are antipanopticons: they are obfuscatory architecture, architec ture that doesn’t seem to


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facilitate the watching of many by one. But the gothic form is a fantasy for paranoiacs, a fantasy that tends to level the play ing field. It is a way of writing enlightenment problems into medieval con texts. What Foucault’s argument suggests is that the distinctions between the enlightenment and other periods can best be registered in an architec tural metaphor (consider his emphasis on Bentham’s almost flippant boast ing about his “simple idea in architecture”). It is therefore no surprise that romanticism’s most overt and systematic rejection of the enlightenment should take the form of a novel named after a defunct form of architecture. It is equally unsurprising that the gothic participates so profoundly in the enlightenment mode which it excoriates. If paranoia is symptomatic of en lightenment, then the paranoia that exists on various levels of gothic narra tive would seem to indicate a sense that there is no going back—that Bentham’s simple idea in architecture works independently of the architec ture itself. The panopticon does not have to be built in order for people to feel that they are being watched all the time, for discipline has saturated all levels of human activity. The gothic novel functions almost as an allegoriza tion of the reformation of the disciplinary model in the West (see Discipline and Punish, 209–17). 33. In Schreber’s case, that single unifying principle is God. At first it seems to Schreber that the conspiracy directed against him has been architected by his psychiatrist, Paul Flechsig. But when the conspiracy becomes too elaborate to be attributed to Flechsig, it seems clear to Schreber that it is actually part of an eternal war between Schrebers and Flechsigs. This war, in turn, can only be accounted for in terms of a larger, more important war between the various peoples of the planet. Whether the Aryans are to remain God’s cho sen people is intimately connected to the battle between the Flechsigs and the Schrebers. But even this explanation is not sophisticated enough. It is the resolution that a lesser detective than Schreber would settle for, but Schreber is more of a detective than his antagonists suppose. He is worthy of greater opponents than Flechsig or the Flechsigs or even the Persians, Jews, and Romans. And we know that he is worthy of greater opponents precisely be cause of his unrelenting investigation which shows us who his opponent re ally is. “From the…unequal battle between one weak human being and God Himself, I emerge, albeit not without bitter sufferings and deprivations, victorious, because the Order of the World is on my side” (Schreber, 79). The order of the world is the order behind the visible that only Schreber can see. Schreber’s paranoia (his ability to see behind the visible) is his salvation, not his curse; it is what allows him to defeat God. As Lacan points out, “Schreber’s god knows things only on their surface, he sees only what he sees” (128). Lacan regards Schreber’s unceasing revisions as symptomatic of his megalomania: “[There is] a continuity between the initial and the final interlocutors of the delusion, in which we can recognize that there is some thing in common between Flechsig, the tested souls, the realms of God with their various meanings, posterior and anterior, upper and lower, and, finally, the ultimate god to whom everything appears to be reduced at the end, when Schreber has placed himself in a position of megalomania” (126). God’s lim itation is that he keeps reading the text instead of reading the reading. I hap pen to agree with Lacan’s assessment; but even if the revisions are not symptomatic of the megalomania, they are the most marked manifestations of paranoia in Schreber and others.

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34. See my conclusion for my argument about the goal of paranoia in the narra tive chain selected by the canonizers. 35. This reading grows out of Richard Brodhead’s contention that by the time Hawthorne came to write The Marble Faun, he had to contend with the problem of being the canonical writer in America.

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE 1. Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly, ed. Norman S. Grabo (NY: Penguin, 1988) 267. 2. See, for example, Richard Chase’s The American Novel and Its Tradition (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1957). And though Leslie Fiedler, in his Love and Death in the American Novel, does allude to such early American novels as Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (1791) and Hannah Foster’s The Coquette (1797) before plunging into an analysis of Brown, he tends to handle these early works only briefly and in the context of a broad literary discussion that works its way from Samuel Richardson to Sinclair Lewis and back. When he does focus on Charlotte Temple, it is to remark that it “is a book scarcely written at all, only in the most perfunctory matter told… [and] apparently comprises something that is not literature, though it is pub lished in the guise of literature” (68). Fiedler’s systematic analysis of American writers really only gets underway when he comes to Brown in his excellent chapter entitled “Charles Brockden Brown and the Invention of the American Gothic.” 3. Edward Cahill discusses the parallels between Brown’s aesthetic agenda and his political environment in his thoughtful and thoroughly researched “An Adventurous and Lawless Fancy,” Early American Literature 36 (2001): 31–70. As Cahill observes, “the aesthetic culture” of Clara’s family can be seen as “an implicitly but specifically political project, an attempt to imagine an adequate world from within an inadequate one” (60). Cahill also points out that “Brown’s interest in the ‘mystery’ of secret societies such as the Illuminati is as much of a literary nature as a political one (note 7). 4. Emil Kraepelin, whose Psychiatrie forms the basis of The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association, saw paranoia as almost inextricably linked to hysteria. 5. Considering the cultural mix of the American readership in the 1790s, there can be no doubt that Brown expected his novel to reach readers who would be unfamiliar with the fundamentals of German pronunciation. Incidentally, I have only listed variable pronunciations of the first syllable and haven’t even covered possibilities involving the correct pronunciation of the second sylla ble: [länt]. 6. Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813) was known for his Oberon as well as his translations of Shakespeare, who is quoted repeatedly in Wieland. For what I call the “aggressive intertextuality” of Wieland, see section 3 of this ar gument, “A Matter of Context”; and for a fuller discussion of Brown’s en gagement with Shakespeare in Wieland, see Wayne Franklin’s “Tragedy and Comedy in Brown’s Wieland” Novel 8 (1975):147–63. 7. For the best discussion of how far a cry Wieland is from being the “first” American novel, see Nina Baym’s “A Minority Reading of Wieland” As Baym points out,


8.

9.

10.

11.

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“the absence of seriousness in [the novels of Brown’s pred ecessors] does not speak to its presence in Brown” (87). What matters to my argument is not whether Brown lives up to Baym’s (or anyone else’s) ideas of seriousness (read significance), but his awareness of himself (well-founded or not) as a serious novelist and the relative tendency of his novels to take them selves seriously. For Baym’s cogent essay, see Critical Essays on Charles Brockden Brown, ed. Bernard Rosenthal (Boston: G.K.Hall, 1981) 81–103. Although much of what Baym says is indisputably true, most readers will benefit from reviewing Paul Lewis’ “Charles Brockden Brown and the Gendered Canon of Early American Fiction,” Early American Literature 31 (1996): 167–88. Lewis interrogates Brown from a very different angle than my own, but argues convincingly that those who want to remove Brown from the canon in order to make room for his female contemporaries are not necessarily engaging in a feminist project, as Brown’s incisive critiques of pa triarchy and his explicit engagement with feminist issues (as in Alcuin) should make him central to studies of early American feminism. According to Lewis, Brown was “committed to probing and dramatizing the conflict be tween patriarchal practices and the challenges to them raised by early femi nist critiques” (168). He adds provocatively (and justifiably) that “if Brown’s first name had been Charlotte, as the creator of our first utopian feminist di alogue (Alcuin, 1798) and of fictions that explore the widest imaginable range of woman’s lives and lifestyles, (s)he would now be the early American author most studied and revered by the canon revisers” (170). Drawing on Peter Brooks’ Reading for the Plot, Harriet Hustis observes that “Brown’s narrators lead the reader through a deliberate narrative maze of ‘de viance, detour, and intention that is irritation’ and attempt feats of affective manipulation previously unattempted in any Gothic novel” (“Deliberate Unknowing and Strategic Retelling: the Ravages of Cultural Desire in Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly,” Studies in American Fiction 31 (2003): 107. Hustis’ sly echo of Milton’s claim, in Paradise Lost, to be en gaged in a project “unattempted yet in prose or rhyme” is perhaps a fair in dication of how seriously Brown appears (to critics such as Hustis and myself) to have taken his own project. Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797), an implicit critique of Lewis’ The Monk (1796), itself an implicit critique of Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), appeared only a year before Wieland was published. This critical commonplace has perhaps become overly commonplace, as wit nessed by its inclusion in Abrams’ definition of the Gothic in his Glossary of Literary Terms; and it should certainly be the objective of discussions such as mine to question the value of such commonplaces. But the fact remains that the looseness with which critics apply the term “gothic” to fictions coupled by their persistence in the application must lead us to the conclusion that there is something to the term— something that connects its application to Otranto, Udolpho, Caleb Williams, and Wieland. And as far as I have been able to determine, the common denominator between these texts is a con cern with what Abrams calls “aberrant psychological states,” consciousnesses that usually either start out paranoid or are reduced to paranoia through their circumstances. Daniel E.Williams points out the importance (to Brown at least) of making this transformation historically based in his “Writing under the Influence: An Examination of Wieland’s ‘Well Authenticated Facts’ and the Depiction of Murderous Fathers in Post-Revolutionary Print Culture,” Eighteenth-Century

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12.

13.

14.

15.


Fiction 15 (2003): 643–668. “Clearly,” Williams tells us, “Brown wanted to tell an American Gothic tale that, as it was grounded in fact, was even more terrifying than castles and ghosts” (665). Moreover, as Williams demonstrates, the story of the Wieland’s is grounded not simply on the single historical case of James Yates (as much of the critical literature suggests), but is clearly en gaged with the deistically charged murder-suicide of William Beadle. “Charles Brockden Brown and the Frontiers of Discourse” in Frontier Gothic: Terror and Wonder at the Frontier in American Literature, ed. David Mogen et al. (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1993) 120. For a slightly different discussion of the metafictive aspects of Brown’s work, see Cathy N.Davidson’s Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (NY: Oxford UP, 1986) 239–253. “Brown is always tempted to continue narrating, unraveling another thread in the fabric, and to recommence or repeat a plot with the context or point of view slightly changed, for this will yield a different view of causes and con sequences. Such tendencies threaten to explode the teleology of plot itself.” Beverly R.Voloshin, “Wieland: Accounting for Appearances,” The New England Quarterly 59 (1986): 354. Although we shall examine more obvious and traditional instances of paranoia in the novel, Voloshin’s point about Brown’s compulsive narration, his need to be forever “unraveling another thread in the fabric” is what is most symptomatic of the paranoia discussed in the introduction, the paranoia of overreading, of finding hidden signifi cance in the details and then of finding hidden significance in the hidden sig nificance of the details. For Derrida’s celebrated assertion that iteration alters, see “Signature Event Context” in his Limited Inc., trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1988). Brown’s enthusiasm for Godwin was such that in his outlines for Wieland, his C.W.character was Charles Wieland (who ultimately became Clara’s brother, Theodore), a plan which, had he carried it out, would have left Brown’s Christian name incorporated into the full name of his title charac ter, much as William Godwin had incorporated his Christian name into the name of his title character, Caleb Williams. (For Brown’s outline, see the Kent State edition of Wieland, 420– 441.) Incidentally, Brown’s decision to change Charles Wieland to Theodore Wieland seems important to me if only because so much has been made of Brown’s supposedly negative attitude to ward irony and sarcasm. It is true that he wrote, in 1799, that “candid and upright [people] will…perceive that irony and sarcasm…have no ten dency but to propagate error, to deprave the moral sentiments of mankind, and to vitiate their reason, by supplying them with a fallacious standard of belief (Literary Essays & Reviews, ed. Wolfgang Weber and Wolfgang Schafer [NY: Peter Lang, 1992] 15). And perhaps there is no use in contending that this attack on irony is itself ironic; but Brown’s onomastic choices indicate a great willingness to play with irony, particularly when he can do so on a multi-lingual level (“Underwriting/Overreading”). Because Theodore (whose name means “God gives,” or, in King James parlance, “the Lord giveth”) claims to have slaughtered his family at God’s behest, his name clearly functions as an ironic— and arguably a caustic—evocation of the scriptural apothegm, “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.” A more obviously ironic name is that of Clara, our narrator, who comes across as any thing but lucid in her (self-consciously) hysterical narrative.


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16. Wieland and Memoirs of Carwin (Kent, OH: UP Kent State, 1977) 30–1. 17. Interestingly, the third argument, concerning the voice Wieland hears and its importance with regard to the later voices that he hears or claims to hear, is only on the verge of being settled at the end of Wieland, which leaves the reader uncertain of the responsibility of Carwin the biloquist (whose role is also uncertain, as he is called “the principal person” by Brown in his preface and a “red herring” by Nina Baym and other critics). 18. For a similar argument concerning this passage, see Alfred G.Litton’s “The Failure of Rhetoric” in The Lamar Journal of the Humanities 16 (1990):26–7. 19. Charles Brockden Brown: An American Tale (Austin: UP Texas, 1983) 80. 20. In the introduction to the 1926 edition of Wieland, Fred Lewis Pattee speaks of Brown’s “headlong rapidity of composition” (xliii), a sentiment that is echoed by Warner Berthoff, who mentions Brown’s “haphazardness of…ex ecution” in the 1962 edition of Arthur Mervyn (vii). Robert D.Hume ob serves that “critical accounts of Brown agree on some points—especially his slovenly construction” (“Charles Brockden Brown and the Uses of Gothicism: A Reassessment,” Emerson Society Quarterly 66 [1972]:10). Larzer Ziff, moreover, blandly asserts that “we may note at the outset that Wieland has been poorly planned and changes direction about one-third of the way through” (“A Reading of Wieland,” PMLA 77 [1962] 51). It is un surprising to see modern-day critic Nina Baym echoing Ziff’s points con cerning Brown’s shoddy craftsmanship in her own essay on Brown, whose title itself as an echo of Ziff’s: “A Minority Reading of Wieland.” 21. For American paranoia regarding the Illuminati, see Robert Levine’s indis pensable Conspiracy and Romance (NY: Cambridge UP, 1989). 22. Roberta F.Weldon, who writes that Wieland “has at its center a strong pat tern of classical allusions and resonances,” is one of few critics to demonstrate how these references and allusions do important “work” in the novel. (“Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland: A Family Tragedy,” Studies in American Fiction 12 [1984]:1– 11; citation from page 1.) 23. Verhoeven points out the Monrose-Rosenberg connection in note 11 of his “Displacing the Discontinuous; Or, the Labyrinths of Reason: Fictional Design and Eighteenth-Century Thought in Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond’ in Rewriting the Dream: Reflections on the Changing American Literary Canon, ed. W.M.Verhoeven (Rodopi: Amsterdam-Atlanta, 1992) 226. For Scheick’s argu ment concerning naming-as-masking in Ormond, see “The Problem of Origination in Brown’s Ormond” included in Rosenthal’s Critical Essays (135). 24. This review, which originally appeared in North American Review 9 (1819): 58– 77, is included in Rosenthal’s Collected Essays (25–40). 25. “Providence, Paranoia, and the Novel,” ELH 48 (1981): 626; emphasis added. 26. The suicidal and homicidal manias of Clara’s ancestors are the subject of an other strangely out-of-place footnote (179), as is Carwin’s ventriloquism (198). 27. Charles Brockden Brown: Pioneer Voice of America (Durham: UP Duke, 1952) 167. For a fuller discussion of Wieland’s death, see Lee B.Croft’s “Spontaneous Human Combustion in Literature: Some Examples of the Literary Use of Popular Mythology” College Language Association Journal 32 (1989): 335–47. The most compelling reading of (the preposterousness of) spontaneous combustion appears in James R.Russo’s (otherwise overstated) “‘The Chimeras of the Brain’: Clara’s Narrative in Wieland,” Early American Literature 16 (1981):84.

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28. See Rosenthal’s Critical Essays, 106. It is extremely important to realize that Ann Radcliffe would have had absolutely no difficulty accounting for Wieland’s death in a far more satisfying way than Clara and her uncle do. Indeed, Brown seems to go out of his way to include all of the details that would be used by a Radcliffean narrator to demystify Wieland’s death only to disregard them for a sensationalistic thrill. 29. When one recalls the “bright spark,” presumably from the lantern, that Wieland (says he) saw “light upon his clothes,” it is impossible not to detect a macabre and humorous resonance in the final sentence of Brown’s foot note, in which he declares that “Maffei and Fontana have thrown some light upon the subject [of spontaneous human combustion]” (19; emphasis added). In Memoirs of Carwin, Brown tropes the connection between en lightenment and conspiracy by implying an association between Carwin and the (aptly named) Illuminati, a secret society of the late 18th century whose presence in Western politics and role in Brown’s work is discussed at length (as mentioned in footnote 19) in Levine’s Conspiracy and Romance. More im portantly, for Brown’s playful (and, considering Wieland and Carwin, strangely detached) awareness of the connections between reading, secret so cieties, suspicion, conspiracy, concealment, and history, see his “Remarks on Mysteries,” Literary Essays and Reviews (209–10), in which he writes, “Nothing is more agreeable to all readers than mystery…. A very famous and perpetual mystery is the institution of free-masonry, an institution whose long duration and extensive diffusion are, themselves, as great myster ies as any which their secret conclaves are witness to…. Mysterious frater nities seem to have abounded in all ages…. Such fraternities have been much more numerous than is commonly imagined. An industrious inquirer would discover hints and traces of their existence, in numerous cases where, at present, they are, generally, unsuspected. The catalogue of religious and political sects, that have hitherto existed, would be greatly enlarged, if the collector were able to add to those which think publicity a duty, those whose fundamental rule has been concealment.” 30. The most sustained and intelligent discussion of Wieland’s engagement with the enlightenment appears in the third chapter of Axelrod’s Charles Brockden Brown. Axelrod observes, for instance, that Brown is “ostensibly [a] Quaker novelist [who] produced in Wieland a drama of depravity and fatality in which ‘Inner Light’ seems but the product of hallucination and spontaneous combus tion…. In this visually gloomy novel, [Wieland’s combustion] is one of only two instances of bright light…. Brown admits light but grudgingly into most of Wieland…. By linking the two literally brightest moments of his novel to the darkness of error rather than to the illumination of truth, Brown inverts the very metaphor that informed an ‘Age of Enlightenment’” (74–8). 31. Had Brown finished his Memoirs of Carwin, this problem might well have disappeared. 32. In his “Free Indirect Discourse and the Experiencing Self in Eighteenth- Century American Autobiographical Fiction: The Narration of Consciousness in Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland,” New Comparison 9 (1990):73–89, Harald Kittel observers that “as far as the fictive reader is concerned Clara’s nar rative may be incomplete; yet for the actual reader this is his only source of in formation, the reality on which his own reflections may be based. Thus, Brown’s novel topicalizes a tenet of one of the more recent schools of thought in literary theory: the self-


33. 34.

35.

36.

37. 38.

39. 40.

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referentiality of fictional texts” (77). More important to my argument is the fact that Wieland, despite its decision to maintain the il lusion of imaginary addressees, does not maintain the illusion of an epistolary address. The chapters are numbered rather than dated, and never signed. And even the final chapter, which makes a faint gesture towards epistolarity with the bracketed observation that it is dated “three years after the foregoing” is only a letter by implication, and not by illusion. Seltzer, 83. Russo, who makes the most extreme case for Clara’s unreliability, is one of few critics to point out that “she has inherited insanity from both sides of her family” (60). For a fuller discussion of hermeneutics and liberty in Wieland (and the rele vance of Locke), see Toni O’Shaughnessy’s “‘An Imperfect Tale’: Interpretive Accountability in Wieland” Studies in American Fiction 18 (1990):41–54. In Wieland, according to O’Shaughnessy, “authors engage in willful abuse of representation and manipulate readers’ customary interpretive strategies not for purposes of community and communication but for purposes of power. Readers are suspicious and confused and refuse to accept the responsibility that, according to Locke, goes along with the ‘Liberty’ of forming their own interpretations. Authors cannot be trusted as acting in good faith; readers cannot interpret authoritatively but cannot escape interpretation. The au thor’s position becomes a morally indecipherable one; his intentions have no direct relation to the effects of his voice” (42). In “On Rereading Wieland: The Folly of Precipitate Conclusions,” Early American Literature 16 (1981):154–74, Jordan plays down the importance of her groundbreaking position, which has since become a critical common place, by tracing it to the work of Richard Chase, Richard Poirier, and Richard Brodhead. “American Literature and the Crisis in Epistemology: The Example of Charles Brockden Brown,” Early American Literature 23.2 (1988):133. For the letter to Brown from Elihu Hubbard Smith in which Smith makes this perennially quoted assertion about Brown, see Harry R.Warfel’s Charles Brockden Brown: American Gothic Novelist (Gainesville, FL: UP Florida, 1949) 43–4. In another letter included in Warfel’s biography (this one from Brown to Smith), Brown measures his progress on his “Philadelphia novel” (Arthur Mervyn, Warfel speculates) in terms of Godwin’s novel: “I had planned so that I could finish a work equal in extent to Caleb Williams in less than six weeks; and I wrote a quantity equivalent to ten of [Godwin’s] pages daily, till the hot weather and inconvenient circumstances obliged me to relax my diligence” (54). In her “Profits of Altruism: Caleb Williams and Arthur Mervyn,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 22 (1988):47–69, Dorothy J. Hale contends that “any reading of Arthur Mervyn that fails to take into ac count its relation to Caleb Williams…will necessarily miss the moral struc ture that informs Brown’s work” (68). I think she understates the case inasmuch as Caleb Williams is almost essential for an understanding of the structure (moral and otherwise) of the whole of Brown’s corpus. William Godwin, Caleb Williams (NY: Penguin, 1987) 104–6. Even Sidney J.Krause, the foremost of Brown’s critics, is unabashed in his condescension: “A neurasthenic young man…who obviously took himself too seriously, Charles Brockden Brown could scarcely have been one’s first choice to

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41.

42. 43.

44. 45.

46. 47.

48.

49.


become an authentic candidate for authorship of the first impor tant novel in America” (introduction to the Kent State paperback version of Wieland [1977] xvi). In assessing the opinion of critics concerning Wieland, Michael D.Butler writes, “All believe the ideas of the novel demand that it end before the anti- climactic if not contradictory final chapter,” “Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland: Method and Meaning,” Studies in American Fiction 4 (1976) 127. Like Butler, I contend that despite Wieland’s occasionally “grotesque” con struction, “Brown’s work is held together by a conscious and consistent method which imposes a necessary order on the novel” (127). Franklin dismisses the ending as “simply the last in a series of confusions and reversals” (150). Nina Baym seems to take her cue from Tompkins in asserting that all of the evidence that we have pertaining to Brown’s career suggests that he was only in the literary business for the money—and that he wasn’t even good enough at being bad to support himself (87). The Apparition in the Glass: Charles Brockden Brown’s American Gothic (Athens, GA: UP Georgia, 1993) 35. At least one estimate places the date of composition as early as 1794, the year Udolpho appeared. For a brief and informative discussion of the date of com position, see Henry Ehrenpreis’ introduction to the Penguin Edition of Northanger Abbey (NY: 1985) 9. The Coincidental Art of Charles Brockden Brown (Chapel Hill: UP North Carolina, 1981) x. In yet another cheap attempt at gothicism, Clara first refers to the Camissards (on page 8) as “Albigensenists,” a group of French Protestants centered in Albi, significantly named inasmuch as albinism (both spiritual and onomastic) was perceived as indispensable to the Gothic novel. The name of the heroine of Udolpho, Emily St. Aubert, is one of many variations of the word white to appear in the names of Radcliffe’s (and other gothicists’) characters. For a fuller discussion of issues of whiteness and naming, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “The Character in the Veil: Imagery of the Surface in the Gothic Novel,” PMLA 96 (1981):258. For perceptive commentary on why Brown chooses to coin the term “bilo quism” for a phenomenon that his contemporaries would have been com fortable calling “ventriloquism,” see David Kazanjian’s “Charles Brockden Brown’s Biloquial Nation: National Culture and White Settler Colonialism in Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist,” American Literature 73 (2001): 459–496. According to Kazanjian, “Brown’s Carwin in effect tames the Gothic text of ‘goblins and spectres’ implicit in the word ventriloquism by producting a ‘biloquial’ skill of his own mastery out of his ‘thirst of knowl edge’” (483; emphasis Kazanjian’s). Apart from its treatment of these key terms, this subtle and intriguing argument does an excellent job of demon strating and interrogating Brown’s engagement with Kantian axiology. Few critics, even with the most oudandish hypotheses, have been able to make any sort of sense out of Clara’s seemingly over-inflated hatred for Carwin. But her antipathy becomes perfectly consistent with the larger agenda of her narrative when one realizes that Carwin, who first enables her to play the role of a gothic heroine, eventually makes that role impossible.


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50. Other similarities include Clara’s inability to open a door inside her own bed room (88), an event which occurs to Emily in Montoni’s castle, along with Brown’s Radcliffean relationship to mystery in the novel. As any number of critics have noted, the mysteries in The Mysteries of Udolpho exist for no other reason than to be demystified at the end—and to force the reader to inter nalize the heroine’s anxiety in the form of a deferred gratification of intellec tual/aesthetic desire. Similarly, William M. Manly observes that “when the mysteries [of Wieland] are brought to light they appear trivial and uninter esting; they have their meaning in the agonies they have produced” (“The Importance of Point of View in Brockden Brown’s Wieland” American Literature 35 [1963]:320). 51. “A Receipt for a Modern Romance,” signed Anti-Ghost, appeared in Brown’s Weekly Magazine, II.22 (June 30, 1798) and is reprinted in Literary Essays and Reviews (8). I attribute the piece to Brown because, according to the ed itors of the collection, Brown’s authorship of this piece is highly probable, though not certain. In any case, he saw that it was printed. 52. Edgar Huntly, 3. 53. Literary Essays and Reviews, 90 and 143–4. 54. His name, Francis Carwin, also serves as an anagram for Franciscan Wir (English/ Latin metonymy for Catholic Man). 55. Precaution (1820), Cooper’s first novel, was about Englishmen in England. He did not make a name for himself as a writer until he turned to Americans in an American setting, first with The Spy (a tale of the American revolution) and then The Leatherstocking Tales (featuring the American woodsman Natty Bumppo). 56. I will even go so far as to suggest (within the relatively safe confines of a foot note) that Wieland is doubly prescient. Its first twenty-six chapters (with their emphasis on melodrama, self-analysis, gothicism, narrative unreliabil ity, and a straining of readerly credulity that depends upon such bizarre nat ural “coincidences” as the conjunction of spontaneous combustion and ventriloquism) constitute a virtual alphabet of literary devices at the disposal of the American novelist. But the last chapter, which is plotheavy, fitfully sen timental (i.e. sentimental at its own convenience and not wholly engaged with the sentimental tradition, as is the gothic), and sustains readerly in credulity through social “coincidences” such as contrived meetings between and absences of characters who are hastily sketched so as to be the more quickly set into motion—this last chapter, if nothing else, is shorthand for the archetypal Victorian novel. Put another way, the tension between the first twenty-six chapters and the chapter that follows is the tension that Brown perceives between what American literature must be and what English liter ature is destined to become. 57. “Charles Brockden Brown and the Uses of Gothicism,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 18 (1972):16. 58. Weber and Schafer, Introduction, Literary Essays and Reviews, xvii.

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO 1. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, ed. Richard Brodhead (NY: Penguin Classics, 1990) 108. The ‘captive queen of yore following in an em peror’s triumph’ alludes to at least three different Zenobias: 1) the historical Zenobia; 2)

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2. 3. 4.

5.

6.


the Zenobia of The Blithedale Romance who is ‘captivated’ by Hollingsworth; and 3) the sculpture of Zenobia that Hawthorne discusses in the preface of The Marble Faun. For an extended discussion of sculptured captives, see Jean Fagan Yellin’s Women & Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven: Yale, 1989) 99–124. Yellin treats Hiram Powers’ The Greek Slave (undoubtedly the most popular American sculpture in Europe from 1841–3, and certainly familiar to Hawthorne) at length. Evan Carton, Hawthorne’s Transformations (NY: Twayne, 1992) 94. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (NY: Penguin Classics, 1981) 2. Elzbieta Olesky, “Hawthorne’s Monstrous Doubles: Metonymic Links be tween The House of the Seven Gables and The Marble Faun,” Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 18.2 (1992):15. Marks, Alfred H., “Who Killed Judge Pyncheon? The Role of the Imagination in The House of the Seven Gables,” PMLA 71 (1956):355–69. Marks’ case is compelling, as Pyncheon’s death occurs while the reader is looking over Hepzibah’s shoulder for Clifford, whom she cannot find. Later on, a hired mes merist is reported to have divined that Jaffrey died of natural causes, but there is no reason for the critical reader to accept this assertion, particularly as Clifford’s response to the death is to flee the scene, purchase a train ticket, and begin babbling to a stranger about how unfair he thinks it is for civilization to rely on such tools as the telegraph in tracking down murderers. The suspicious circumstances of Jaffrey’s demise have prompted other critics to suggest other possible suspects as his murderers. Clara B.Cox makes an interesting case for Holgrave as suspect in “‘Who Killed Judge Pyncheon?’ The Scene of the Crime Revisited,” Studies in American Fiction 16.1 (1988):99–103, and Paul J. Emmett adds Hepzibah as a suspect in his “The Murder of Judge Pyncheon: Confusion and Suggetion in The House of the Seven Gables,” Journal of Evolutionary Psychology 23 (2003):189– 95. Emmett’s larger argument is about the “murderous rage” in the hearts of a number of potential killers of the judge, and he does a good job of explaining the major problems of accepting the text’s initial explanation of Jaffrey’s death. To date, there has been only fitful engagement with Hawthorne’s anticipation of Walter Benjamin in this section of the novel. It is uncanny, however, that Hawthorne’s invocation of “that indefinable nothing, that inestimable some thing, that constitutes the life and soul through which the picture gets its im mortality” should so strikingly evoke Benjamin’s linkage, in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” between an artwork’s aura and its unique location in time and space—and all just prior to speaking, quite liter ally, about mechanical reproduction. Because a formalistic treatment of imi tation in these texts is dictated by the terms of my larger argument, I do not delve here into the far more significant socio-historical anxieties concerning artistic reproduction that Hawthorne foregrounds in both Gables and Faun, though I hope to have the opportunity to pursue these anxieties in my future research. For a sense of what the stakes of that argument seem to be in the es timate of current critics, readers should consult the work of Cathy N. Davidson and David Anthony. As Anthony writes, “Davidson suggests that during this period Hawthorne was facing ‘his own, direst apprehension about representation,’ concerns which extend to the ethical politics not only of artis tic reproduction, but also of subjectivity itself in the age of


7.

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mechanical tech nologies such as the daguerreotype” (“Class, Culture, and the Trouble with White Skin in Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables,” Yale Journal of Criticism 12 [1999]:262). I quote from Anthony’s brief (but provocative) as sessment of/response to Davidson’s “Photographs of the Dead: Sherman, Daguerre, Hawthorne,” South Atlantic Quarterly 89 (1990):667–701. Let me point out that Donatello’s transformation, of which so much is made in the book, is never anything more than a matter of assertion by the other characters in the novel and the narrator (who claims, in the end, to have learned his story from them). He is more playful before the murder than af terwards; but he never says anything reprehensibly stupid when the other characters wink at one another over his stupidity, and never utters anything redolent of the somber wisdom that they attribute to him after the murder. It is not insignificant that most of these instances of the triumph of imita tion (Hilda’s epiphany of guilt, the moment of Donatello’s ‘fall,’ and even Kenyon’s bust of Milton, that most famous apologist for the felix culpa) per tain to the idea of an innately depraved humankind. As the theological and theodical elements of The Marble Faun have been treated sufficiently by other critics, I am interested in them only insofar as they help us to detect the sort of hermeneutic agenda that Hawthorne urges his reader to con struct in the course of the novel, with its “ceaseless efforts to dictate its own interpretation” (Carton, 34). However, Carton has nicely summarized the prevalent critical stance with regard to the relevance of imitation in the con text of a fortunate fall: “Kenyon charges that Catholicism promotes an un derstanding of human experience as cyclical and repetitious, a transformative process with no ultimate term. As a religious idea, the Fall, whether fortunate or unfortunate, provides humankind with a telos, a point of origin and of destination along a linear spiritual journey. The critique of the rite of confes sion— and of Catholicism in general—in The Marble Faun is that it obscures or even precludes this singular spiritual journey by producing a multitude of material copies, imitations, even caricatures of it” (56–7). This is true in terms of contemporary commercial/critical assessment. In Hawthorne’s own lifetime (and shortly thereafter), Faun did quite well. As Millicent Bell has observed, “when The Marble Faun came out, copies flew out of bookstores: sales in the first year alone exceeded the total sales to be achieved in the writer’s lifetime by any of his earlier romances” (“The Marble Faun and the Waste of History,” Southern Review 35.2 (1999):356. Other favorite texts of historicist critics (such as Michael Colacurcio and Lauren Berlant, who not only thematize history in Hawthorne’s fiction, but read Hawthorne as a historian) include “Alice Doane’s Appeal,” “The Maypole of Merry Mount,” and “Roger Malvin’s Burial.” For a more sustained argument concerning The Marble Faun as a challenge to American complacency, see John Michael’s “History and Romance, Sympathy and Uncertainty,” PMLA 103 (1988):150–161. The critical estimate of The Marble Faun as the most uncharacteristically re alistic of Hawthorne’s work can be traced back at least as far as James’ Hawthorne, in which James observes that Hawthorne, to his credit, attempts “to deal with actualities more than he did in” his earlier novels. Henry James, Hawthorne (Ithaca, NY: Great Seal Books, 1966) 131.

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13. Carton makes an interesting supplemental point: “The Marble Faun never ac tually takes its Americans home. In fact, America, as it exists in Hawthorne’s novel, is a symbolic construct, a foil to the foreignness or ‘otherness’ of Italy, not a real place. Although it is repeatedly identified with ‘actualities’ and with ‘the reality of life,’ the America that appears in the novel bears little resem blance to the country to which Hawthorne returned in 1860” (109)—mean ing that America is made most romantic (most Rome-like) in its apposite opposition to a strikingly actual (given the expectations that the remainder of Hawthorne’s corpus had created in Hawthorne’s readers) Rome. 14. Again, Carton complements this point nicely: “The U.S. was seen in one in stance as a noble and progressive nation and a rich subject for literary ideal ization; in the other, it was a complacent, self-deceiving, and perhaps even corrupt society to which the truth-telling writer stood in opposition…. Despite the lofty sentiments of the Declaration of Independence, it had quickly become self-evident that, for all worldly intents and purposes, men were not created equal. The slavery system and the escalating controversy over its perpetuation and expansion provided the most dramatic example of social inequality in America. There were many others. American Indians continued to be displaced or slaughtered along the nation’s advancing frontier” (4–5). 15. For Colacurcio’s most cogent arguments concerning Hawthorne’s awareness of the “bitter ironies of Indian supplantation,” see his treatment of “Main Street” (156) and “Roger Malvin’s Burial” (107–30) in The Province of Piety (Durham: Duke UP, 1995). A brief survey of Hawthorne criticism will con firm Colacurcio’s contention that “in the bulk of serious criticism, denials of significant historicity have been much more prominent than affirmations. Indeed, the psychologists and the moralists have often seemed to vie with each other for the right to publish the discovery that history was no very sig nificant part of Hawthorne’s essential subject” (15). The critical oversight that Colacurcio points out is currently being corrected by numerous literary critics and in psychoanalytical circles as well. See, for instance, Neill Matheson’s “Melancholy History in The House of the Seven Gables,” Literature and Psychology 48.3 (2002):1–37. In a formulation that resonates complexly with my overall argument here, Matheson observes, “A melan cholic conception of history involves the passing on of an unknown piece of otherness into the present…. Hawthorne’s novel suggests a view of culture as containing a heterogeneous fragment of history, which determines institu tions and events while being obsessively hidden, as if it threatened a scandal or contradicted the official story. The obsessiveness, desperation, and desire surrounding this secret are belied by the suspicion that there is really noth ing to hide” (34). 16. Carol Hanberry MacKay, “Hawthorne, Sophia, and Hilda as Copyists: Duplication and Transformation in The Marble Faun,” Browning Institute Studies 12 (1984):93– 120. 17. Miriam’s guilt, though established to the narrator’s satisfaction, remains a se cret between herself and her model. Hepzibah’s is the guilt of inheritance, her failure to right the wrong of Pyncheons’ land grab. 18 “He was clad in…goat-skin breeches, with the hair outwards, [resembling an] antique Satyr” (30). 19. “‘What are you, my friend?’ she exclaimed, always keeping in mind his sin gular resemblance to the Faun of the Capitol…. ‘Do not fear that I shall shrink, even if


20.

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one of your rough cousins, a hairy Satyr, should come caper ing on his goat legs out of the haunts of far antiquity’” (78). “She made a repelling gesture with her hand, and stood a perfect picture of prohibition” (127). Though Jaffrey is never categorized as ‘rough,’ he is var iously ‘fierce,’ ‘grim,’ and ‘formidable.’ One point in which Marksian readers of Gables might be interested is that the stranger begins his discussion with Clifford by observing, “The best chance in pleasure, in an easterly rain, I take it, is in a man’s own house, with a nice little fire in the chimney” (259). This remark is ironically charged by the fact of Hepzibah’s failed attempt to build a fire just prior to Jaffrey’s ar rival: “the storm demon kept watch above, and, whenever a flame was kin dled, drove the smoke back again, choking the chimney’s sooty throat” (224; emphasis added). There is something suspicious in this chronology, since the previous year’s carnival precedes the action of the novel, which opens with Kenyon’s own amazement at Donatello’s resemblance to the Faun of Praxiteles. Shouldn’t the costume have taken something off the edge of Kenyon’s amazement? This uncanny prolepsis-within-a-prolepsis gives us further reason to wonder just how far back we can push Donatello’s fictive prehistory, whether it can in deed be pushed back to Gables. I repeat my first epigraph here only because of its crucial similarities to my next quotation: “Free as she seemed to be, beggar as he looked, the nameless vagrant must then be dragging the beautiful Miriam through the streets of Rome” (108). In “Miriam and the Conversion of the Jews in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun,” Studies in the Novel 33 (2001):430–443, Augustus M.Kolich points out that the idea of abduction by Catholics was very much on the mind of Anglo-American readers, if only in response to the highly publicized case, in 1858—just two years prior to the publication of Hawthorne’s novel—of Edgardo Mortara (the six-yearold child of the Bolognese Jewish couple Momolo and Marianne Mortara). Despite his Jewish parentage, the fact that Edgardo had been baptized by a family servant prompted the Church to abduct and adopt the boy, who was raised “under the intense, per sonal supervision of Pope Pius IX” and “eventually became a priest” (430). Hawthorne speculates dichotomously on the subject of Hilda’s disappear ance in his fiftieth chapter: “Either a pledge of secrecy had been exacted, or a prudential motive warned her not to reveal the stratagems of a religious body, or the secret acts of a despotic government—whichever might be re sponsible in the present instance—while still within the scope of their juris diction” (456). The leap from a despotic government to that government’s suspicion of Miriam and abduction of Hilda is a difficult one to make. And what clues there are in the narrative concerning her abduction suggest that the priest to whom Hilda confessed Miriam’s sin is the one who betrayed her trust and reported her to the authorities, though Kenyon, after questioning him, is satisfied of his having kept her secret. The layered model of paranoid logic discussed in this study (according to which texts generate interpretations that the paranoid comes to regard as texts in need of further interpretation) can be traced back to Thomas Pynchon’s definition of paranoia as the “reflex of seeking other orders behind the visible.” (For example, just as the invisible, absolute power wielded over Miriam by her model gives way, upon his death, to the invisible, absolute power of a “despotic state,” so there is

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something behind the something else behind The House of the Seven Gables and The Marble Faun.)

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE 1. Herman Melville, The Confidence Man, ed. Herschel Parker (NY: Norton, 1971) 40. The speaker is the title character. 2. Herman Melville, “The Bell Tower,” in The Complete Shorter Fiction (NY: Knopf, 1997) 184. 3. See, for example, James Kavanagh, “‘That Hive of Subtlety’: Benito Cereno as Critique of Ideology,” Bucknell Review 29 (1984):127–157 and Eric Sundquist, “Slavery, Revolution and the American Renaissance” in The American Renaissance Reconsidered ed. Walter Benn Michaels and Donald E.Pease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985) 1–33. 4. The line is usually attributed to Henry Kissinger. 5. For a particularly lucid and engaging treatment of this theme, see Peter Coviello’s “The American in Charity: ‘Benito Cereno’ and Gothic Anti- sentimentality,” Studies in American Fiction 30 (2002):155–80. “What sort of reader, then, is Amasa Delano?” Coviello asks, only to answer, “In the broadest view, he is plainly a bad one” (158; emphasis Coviello’s). Coviello reads Benito Cereno in much the same way that I read Wieland (i.e. as a gothic critique of the sentimental tradition), and the only reservation I have about his argument is that he characterizes Delano’s cluelessness aboard the San Dominick as “a catastrophic failure of reading,” when clearly it is not catastrophic for Delano—and may be the very thing that preserves his life. 6. Lawrance Thompson, Melville’s Quarrel With God (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1952) 135. See also Buford Jones, “Some ‘Mosses’ from the Literary World: Critical and Bibliographical Survey of the Hawthorne-Melville Relationship,” in Ruined Eden of the Present: Hawthorne, Melville, Poe— Critical Essays in Honor of Darrel Abel, ed. G.R.Thompson and Virgil Lokke (West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 1981) 173–203. 7. Herman Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in Moby-Dick, ed. Herschel Parker and Harrison Hayford (NY: Norton, 2002) 530. 8. Conspiracy and Romance: Studies in Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville (NY: Cambridge UP, 1989) 166. 9. Kavanagh and Levine would be hard-pressed to disagree with Helen Lock when she observes that “the paradox and inversions that inform this text, and that undercuts the authority of the narrative voice, become completely clear only on a second reading” (“The Paradox of Slave Mutiny in Herman Melville, Charles Johnson, and Frederick Douglass,” College Literature 30.4 (2003):68. 10. Sandra A.Zagarell, “Reenvisioning America: Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno,’” ESQ 30 (1984):246; quoted perceptively by Kavanagh. 11. Herman Melville, Benito Cereno in Melville’s Short Novels, ed. Dan McCall (NY: Norton, 2002) 38. 12. Professor Bruce Simon (of SUNY-Fredonia), personal conversation, 22 July 1993. 13. The first instance of this now familiar critical observation is probably from Margaret Y.Jackson, “Melville’s Use of a Real Slave Mutiny in ‘Benito Cereno,’” CLAJ 4 (1960):79–93. See also Bernard Rosenthal, “Melville’s Island,” Studies in


14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

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Short Fiction 9 (1974):1–9. Eric Sundquist is probably the critic who is most celebrated for bringing the importance of this observation to light. For inquisitional overtones, see Gloria Horsely-Meacham, “The Monastic Slaver: Images and Meaning in ‘Benito Cereno,’” The New England Quarterly 56 (1983): 261–66 or Glenn C.Altshuler, “Whose Foot on Whose Throat? A Reexamination of Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno,’” CLAJ 18 (1975):383–392. See John Bernstein’s “Benito Cereno and the Spanish Inquisition,” Nineteenth Century Fiction 16 (1962):345–50. Gwen Crane, Inquisitors, Wizards, and Writers: Literary Portraits of Authority (Ph.D. Diss., Princeton University, 1991) 291. In addition to Horsely-Meacham, Altshuler, and Crane, see Ruth Knafo Sutton, “Master and Slave in ‘Benito Cereno,’” in Ritual in the United States: Acts and Representations, ed. Don Harkness (Tampa, FL: American Studies, 1985) 1–3. “That moment, across the long-benighted mind of Captain Delano, a flash of revelation swept, illuminating in unanticipated clearness, his host’s whole mysterious demeanor, with every enigmatic event of the day, as well as the entire voyage of the San Dominick. He smote Babo’s hand down, but his own heart smote him harder. With infinite pity he withdrew his hold from Don Benito. Not Captain Delano, but Don Benito, the black, in leaping in the boat, had intended to stab” (85). On three occasions, Delano tries to come between Babo and Cereno. The first is his offer to buy Babo (58); the second is his request that Cereno send Babo out of the cabin so that the two captains can speak privately (77); and the third (which occurs after Delano and Cereno have gone over the figures that Delano wanted to keep from Babo) is Delano’s attempt to race back from the deck to Cereno’s cabin when he notices that Babo has followed him up: “having done all that was needed for the present, Captain Delano, giv ing his orders to the sailors, turned aft to report affairs to Don Benito in the cabin; perhaps additionally incited to rejoin him by the hope of snatching a moment’s private chat while the servant was engaged upon deck” (79). Delano meets with failure on each occasion. As discussed in the introduction, the primary motive for a paranoid read ing is to relate a text to oneself; if the text cannot be applied to oneself, the paranoid approach is to generate a reading of the text and a reading of the reading for the purpose of proving that everything happens with reference to the paranoiac. One of the more compelling ironies of Benito Cereno is that the plot of the story does relate to Delano on the surface even though he tries to make it relate in more elaborate ways. And the reader who fo cuses on Delano’s misreadings rather than the clues within the story repli cates Delano’s megalomania by making the American captain the cynosure of the tale. “Don Benito Cereno—a sounding name. One, too, at that period, not un known, in the surname, to supercargoes and sea captains trading along the Spanish Main, as belonging to one of the most enterprising and extensive mercantile families in all those provinces; several members of it having title; a sort of Castilian Rothschild, with a noble brother, or cousin, in every great trading town of South America. The alleged Don Benito was in early man hood, about twenty-nine or thirty. To assume a sort of roving cadetship in the maritime affairs of such a house, what more likely scheme for a young knave of talent and spirit?” (52)

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22. This schematization is of limited value as most of his conspiracy theories are prompted by a sense of wounded pride coupled by an observation of some thing puzzling. 23. I draw this parallel between Delano and Clouseau not only because both are conspicuous bunglers, but because Delano, like Clouseau, ends by escaping danger and solving the case. 24. As I do not take issue with the fairly solid critical consensus concerning the response of Melville’s contemporaries to Benito Cereno, I shall do little more than summarize that consensus in this section. For readings of Melville’s con temporaries’ readings of Benito Cereno, see Charles Swann’s “Benito Cereno: Melville’s De(con)struction of the Southern Reader,” Literature and History 12 (1986):3–15 as well as his “Whodunnit? Or, Who Did What? Benito Cereno and the Politics of Narrative Structure” in American Studies in Transition, ed. David E. Nye and Christen Kold Thomsen (Odense: Odense UP, 1985) 199–234. Others who address this concern include Sandra Zagarell (see note 12) and Eric Sundquist (see note 3). 25. Swann, 4–5. 26. Zagarell and Sundquist both make this point. 27. Kavanagh, 141. 28. I am indebted for this example to Jay Fliegelman, who discusses the article in question, “On Shaving,” in his introduction to Brown’s Wieland (NY: Penguin, 1991) xii: “A plague [of yellow fever] had tellingly but falsely [been] linked to ships arriving from the revolution-wracked French island of Santo Domingo and by implication to the ‘plague’ of French Revolutionary ideol ogy. An article ‘On Shaving’ appearing in the very first issue of the Monthly Magazine, a journal Brown founded and edited in 1799 and 1800, in structed those ‘adverse to resign their throats to so keen an edge in the hands of another’ …on the fundamentals of shaving themselves.’” The unsigned article, like many of the day, is presumably by the editor—in this case Brown; but whether he wrote the article or not, he saw fit to print it at a time when white anxieties about black insurrections would have been unusually high. 29. Chesnutt’s “The Doll” first appeared in The Crisis in 1912. It has been reprinted in The Short Fiction of Charles Chesnutt, ed. Sylvia Lyons Render (Washington, D.C.: Howard UP, 1974). The protagonist of the story, Tom Taylor, is a black barber who is on fairly good terms with the respectable and presumably wellintentioned Judge Beeman, a white man who is supposed to see to it that Colonel Forsyth, a white racist from the South, is “made com fortable” during his visit to the North (405). Judge Beeman, who seems to stand in for the reader because the action of the story takes place between Taylor and Forsyth before his eyes, is unable to interfere successfully and is compelled to observe as Forsyth attempts to demonstrate the inherent sub servience of the black race by boasting of his murder of Tom Taylor’s father while Taylor shaves him. Most of the drama of the story takes place in Taylor’s mind as he struggles with his own desire to slit Forsyth’s throat. For a number of reasons (including his promise to have his daughter’s doll re paired, his more general desire to remain a dependable father, and his con cern about the fate of the other barbers who work for him and for the damage that such an act would do to the careers of black barbers everywhere), he re frains from the retributive murder that he could so easily accomplish. The story, however, does not


30. 31.

32. 33. 34.

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end there. After Forsyth leaves the barber shop and claims to have proven his theory about the submissiveness of blacks, Chesnutt adds a final paragraph: “The judge was not sure that the colonel had proved his theory, and was less so after he had talked, a week later, with the barber. And, although the colonel remained at the Wyandot [Hotel] for several days, he did not get shaved again in the hotel barber shop” (412). “The Black Man’s Part in Crane’s Monster,” American Imago: A Psychoanalytic Journal for Culture, Science, and the Arts 45 (Winter, 1988):354–5. As Gavin Jones observes, “Melville’s narrative…suggests that the Africans are not trapped by their discourse, but are able to assume freely the language of their controllers and use it to impose silence upon them. The tale does not leave us with the impression of an African community retreating into the privacy of its own drum language, but of an active and adaptable community capable of breaking through the barrier of tribal division by assuming the language of colonial power” (Dusky Comments of Silence: Language, Race, and Herman Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno,’” Studies in Short Fiction 32 [1995]:49). To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1993) 156–7. William Howard Russell, My Diary North and South, vol. 1 (London: 1863) 113. Coviello’s article did not appear until well after the preliminary version of this chapter had been written, but he puts the case almost identically: “As readers, we are in this moment given to understand ourselves as smarter than the narrated Delano, but only inasmuch as we identify with and stick close by the omniscient narrative voice itself, which has promised to collude with us, to share with us its worldly, knowing perspective, and in effect to whisper to us behind Delano’s back. Inasmuch as we are with the narrative voice, that is, we are safe from its ac cusations of ignorance and unworldliness” (167; emphasis Coveillo’s).

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR 1. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (NY: Knopf, 1965) 29; emphasis Hofstadter’s. 2. Mark Twain, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin (New York: Oxford UP, 1996) 305. 3. The Ordeal of Mark Twain (NY: Dutton & Co., 1933) 265. 4. See the “Introduction” to Mark Twain: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Henry Nash Smith (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963) 1. Although Smith’s generalization is for the most part accurate, Sacvan Bercovich offers penetrating critical insights into the workings of Twain’s humor in “Deadpan Huck,” Kenyon Review 24.3 (2002) 90–134. 5. Brooks, 255. 6. For instance, in his analysis of Twain’s “My First Lie and How I Got Out of It,” Evan Carton spends three pages developing a persuasive close reading of the primary joke in the essay, but feels compelled to close his discussion with the question, “Or is the passage in fact nothing more than a joke about in fant con artists and the invention of the safety pin?” (165). “Speech Acts and Social Action:

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9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.


Mark Twain and the Politics of Literary Performance,” The Cambridge Companion to Mark Twain, ed. Forrest G.Robinson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995) 153–74. The double entendre is what makes this claim defensible. The research for this analysis of one of Twain’s jokes furnished many re minders of the critical dangers of analyzing humor. In his A Bibliography of the Works of Mark Twain, Merle Johnson summarizes A Double-Barrelled Detective Story in the following single paragraph: “This story is not to be taken too seriously but only as an attempted burlesque on Sherlock Holmes. It contains the famous hoax paragraph in which ‘a solitary esophagus slept upon motionless wing’” (NY: Harper and Bros., 1935) 76. Mark Twain, A Double-Barrelled Detective Story in The Stolen White Elephant and other Detective Stories, ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin (NY: Oxford UP, 1996) 3–4. The woman’s first name remains a mystery throughout the text. Later in the story, she uses the surname Stillman, though it is not clear whether that is her maiden name or merely a convenient alias. In Following the Equator, Twain writes of the reprisals that a group of practi cal jokers can expect from one of their targets: “for with all his good nature, Ed was a Southerner—and the English of that was, that when he came back he would kill as many of the conspirators as he could before falling himself” (ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin [NY: UP Oxford: 1996] 25). Jeanne Ritunnano argues compellingly that Archy’s olfactory prowess is sim ply a mocking literalization of a description of one of Doyle’s characters in Study in Scarlet, in which one character, because of his relentless pursuit of two villains, is called “a human bloodhound.” “Mark Twain vs. Arthur Conan Doyle on Detective Fiction,” Mark Twain Journal 16 (1972):10–14. Doyle tried to put Holmes to rest once in 1893 (with his Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes) and again in 1917 (with His Last Bow), but enthusiastic fans refused to part with their favorite detective on both occasions. Twain ultimately spares Holmes’ life in his 1902 text, but might have revived and revised his spoof had he lived to see the post-1917 resurrection of the character. As discussed in my introduction, although Caleb Williams would not have been classified as gothic by Godwin or his contemporaries, our expanding notion of what constitutes gothicism has led to the inclusion of Godwin’s novel in most lists of gothic texts, such as the one offered by M.H.Abrams in his A Glossary of Literary Terms. Semantically, the persecutorial voices are interested in Schreber’s apostolic qualities because of his middle name, Paul. Genealogically, their interest is in the cosmic battle between Schrebers and Flechsigs. Although the passage that follows from Twain reads as if it has been lifted from Schreber’s Memoirs, I am not trying to suggest that Twain had any first hand knowledge of Schreber or of Freud’s interest in the Schreber case, as the Memoirs were not published until 1903, a year after A Double-Barrelled Detective Story. Neither am I attempting, in some pseudo-Jungian way, to suggest that Twain had tapped into the collective unconscious for his portrait of paranoia. What is striking about the similarities between Jacob Fuller’s case and that of Daniel Paul Schreber is simply that both draw so heavily on the portrait of paranoia as it had come to be depicted in a literary tradition that is traceable to the gothic novel.


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16. The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories, ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin (NY: Oxford UP, 1996) 468–70. Twain’s letter appeared on April 12, 1902, but was not included in the first book version of A Double-Barreled Detective Story (released in June of that year); my references in this chapter, as noted above, are to the facsimile of the 1902 text that appears in the Oxford UP volume entitled The Stolen White Elephant and Other Detective Stories. However, the letter to the Republican was inserted by Twain into the version of A Double-Barreled Detective Story included in The $30, 000 Bequest and Other Stories, and has been included in reprints of that text by subsequent ed itors (including Fishkin). 17. Mark Twain, Roughing It, ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin (NY: Oxford UP, 1996) 443. Twain asks this question in order to excuse himself from “persecuting” the reader with a William Gilpin/John Muir-esque description of “the big trees and the marvels of Yo Semite.” It is relevant that his practical joke in A Double-Barrelled Detective Story operates under the very guise of the gushily picturesque writing that he has publicly derided as persecutory. See also the remark that he (and Charles Dudley Warner) made in The Gilded Age: “In a word, the great puttyhearted public loves to ‘gush,’ and there is no such dar ling opportunity to gush as a case of persecution affords” (ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin [NY: Oxford UP, 1996] 393). 18. This remark, from one of Twain’s unpublished notebooks, is cited by Alan Gribben in “‘That Pair of Spiritual Derelicts’: The Poe-Twain Relationship,” Poe Studies 18. 2 (1985) 17. Eric Mottram argues that Twain’s good detectives emulate Chevalier Dupin and that his parodies emulate everything from the Pinkerton Detectives to Sherlock Holmes: “[Pudd’nhead] Wilson turns de tective within a world understood, as it is for Poe’s Chevalier Dupin, to be fixed in its bases and grasped for control by the man best fitted to manipu late this assumption. (Twain mocks this part of the plot thoroughly in The [sic] Double-Barrelled Detective Story)” (“A Raft Against Washington: Mark Twain’s Criticism of America” in A Sumptuous Variety, ed. Robert Giddings [London: Visions, 1985] 243). 19. Pudd’nhead Wilson must rank foremost. But there is also the Tom Sawyer of Tom Sawyer Detective and Tom Sawyer Conspirator and the Simon Wheeler of Simon Wheeler Detective. 20. Though Henry Nash Smith is quite right to point out that Brooks’ assertion is based on an equation of “beauty with the outworn cult of the natural sub lime that had blighted whole acres of nineteenth century American prose” (“Introduction,” 4), he does not hypothesize a reason for this particular lapse in Brooks’ judgment. I am indebted to him for his point and attempt to fill the gap in his argument in what follows. 21. The Autobiography of Mark Twain, ed. Charles Neider (NY: Harper Perennial, 1990)48. 22. Given the tortured publication history of Twain’s Autobiography, it is impor tant to note that Twain avidly condemned practical jokers in materials de signed for publication during his lifetime. His most withering attack on practical jokers occurs, characteristically enough, as a digressive assault in a book review intended to condemn Paul Bourget’s Outre-Mer for its profound misreading of American culture: “M.Bourget did not discover a type of co quette; he merely discovered a type of practical joker. One may say the type of practical joker, for these people are exactly alike all over the world. Their equipment is always the same: a vulgar mind,

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23. 24.

25. 26.

27. 28.

29.

30.


a puerile wit, a cruel disposi tion as a rule, and always the spirit of treachery” (Collected Tales, vol. 2, 170). Bequest, 471. The editorial on “The Petrified Man” apparently came from a reader who had gotten his story at second-hand, i.e. from Twain’s Sketches New and Old, in which Twain exaggerates the particulars (and the success) of his hoax. In his original appearance in The Territorial Enterprise, Twain’s “Petrified Man” was said to be only one hundred—not three hundred— years old; he thumbed his nose with only one hand—not both—at the reader; and Twain claimed that “everybody received him in good faith,” though several newspaper editors reprinted the story for the hoax that it was, so that it appeared in the San Francisco papers under the title of “A Washoe Joke.” Twain also takes full credit for the hoax even though some thing very similar had been pulled off only seven years previously by a writer named John Phoenix, who subtly described the figurehead on a clip pership as thumbing its nose at the high seas. But the hoax has an even longer history, and can be traced back at least as far as Rabelais, who de scribes a nose-thumbing contest between a couple of characters in the nineteenth chapter of Pantagruel. I am indebted, for this research, to Walter Blair’s “The Petrified Man and His French Ancestor,” Mark Twain Journal 19 (1978):1–3. That the hoax grows in its outrageousness and its success between its initial appearance and Twain’s recollection of it—that the tall tale, in this instance, is not merely the medium, but actually the subject of a “fish story”—is suggestive of a notion to which we shall have occasion to return: the hoax about a hoax, or meta-hoax. Mark Twain: His Life in Virginia City, Nevada (Riverside, CA: Tree by the River Publishing 1986) 121. I quote from Twain’s recollection of the hoax in Sketches New and Old in order to incorporate Twain’s explanation of the ludicrousness of the particu lars of the hoax. The original, which coincides more thoroughly with Twain’s recollection than the original of “The Petrified Man” coincides with Twain’s recollection of it, can be found in Williams’ study (121–3). Mark Twain, Sketches New and Old (UP Oxford, 1996) 245–6. See also, for example, Peter Messent’s “Comic Intentions in Mark Twains ‘A Double-Barreled Detective Story,’” Essays in Arts and Sciences 28 (1999): 35–51. According to Messent, “Humor is, of course, often associated metaphorically with forms of violence” (37). Concerning the aggression of Hank Morgan’s humor in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Judith Fetterley has observed, “Behind the desire to make someone look ridiculous is the desire to destroy that person, if not lit erally, then in terms of his power over the minds of others, his image in their eyes” (467). “Yankee Showman and Reformer: The Character of Mark Twain’s Hank Morgan” (Stuart Hutchinson, ed. Mark Twain: Critical Assessments, vol. 3 [The Banks: Helm Information, 1993] 460–83). I say “clumsily misdirected” because it is difficult to see how Hopkins is slighted by “My Bloody Massacre” and because the people who knew Sewell tended to be the ones who dismissed “The Petrified Man” as “A Washoe Joke,” whereas those taken in generally tended to be too far removed from the scene of the story to care about the name of the coroner in an obscure Nevada town.


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31. Note that this practical joke actually served a pedagogical purpose, as the pilot under whom he was apprenticing used it to teach him about the river. 32. Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, ed. John Seelye (NY: Oxford UP, 1990) 93– 5. Note that “the hardest part of the joke” is the part that lingers. It is the continuation of the assault after the joke itself has been played out. As with the newspaper clippings that Twain sent Sewell, the practical joke is an in stance of persecution that becomes a tool for further persecution. 33. His pseudonym itself is a reminder of this joke. The measurement that re duces him to helplessness is the cry, “Mark twain!” 34. As with the other Twain-related practical jokes, this one had consequences that extended far beyond the joke itself. At the end of Roughing It, Twain claims that his perspiration from fear combined with the cold to result in an illness that lasted three months and cost him “quite a sum in doctors bills” (569). He also complains that there were too many robbers for the joke to be fully convincing. “They were not smart;” he says (perhaps presciently), “they ought to have sent only one highwayman, with a double-barrelled shotgun” (568–9; emphasis Twain’s). Twain claims that this was the incident that prompted his resolve never to participate in practical jokes again. Compare this claim to the claim he makes about the esophagus hoax: “I will not do so any more—for the present.” 35. “Introduction” to Mark Twain: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Eric Sundquist (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1994) 4. 36. The phrase “put up” is from Twain’s book review of Paul Bourget’s Outre-Mer. A few pages after he excoriates the American practical jokers who “put up” on Bourget, he “puts up” on the reader with this bit of mock astronomical history: “Leverrier advanced the hypothesis that the Milky Way was caused by gaseous protoplasmic emanations from the field of Waterloo, which, ascending to an altitude determinable by their own specific gravity, became luminous through the development and exposure—by the natural processes of animal decay—of the phosphorus contained in them. This theory was warmly complimented by Ptolemy, who, however, after much thought and research, decided that he could not accept it as final. His own theory was that the Milky Way was an em igration of lightning bugs; and he supported and reinforced this theorem by the well-known fact that the locusts do like that in Egypt” (Collected Tales, vol. 2, 176). Admittedly, the guideboards of this passage are a great deal more ob vious than those of the esophagus hoax. But the principle is the same. The reader is responsible for recognizing the passage’s internal inconsistencies with reference to external, “common” knowledge —e.g. the knowledge that “as tronomese” should not give way to phrases such as “do like that in Egypt” and the knowledge that Ptolemy could not have refuted the hypothesis of an as tronomer whose work postdated his own by nearly two millennia. 37. Critical Assessments, vol. 2, 262. 38. Critical Assessments, vol. 2, 51. 39. Cited by Carton, 162 40. Recall Theodor Adornos and Gordon Wood’s concept of paranoia as an en lightenment phenomenon and the role that paranoia plays in Bentham’s en lightened prison, the panopticon (as discussed by Foucault). In the panopticon, it is only necessary to watch people until they are convinced that they are being watched all the time. The paranoid fantasy of being the cen ter of attention for

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41. 42.

43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51.

52. 53. 54.


some invisible enemy is actively inculcated in Bentham’s subjects for the purpose of replacing the moral sense with a paranoid sense. The moment they become paranoid is the moment that they are deprived of the evidence for the paranoid conclusion they have been led to reach. They no longer need to be actively watched or persecuted in order to behave as if they are, just as the wrong Jacob Fuller continues to run from Stillman long after Stillman loses track of him. “A Connecticut Yankee: A Serious Hoax,” Essays in Arts and Sciences 19 (1990): 28. Although I read Twain’s esophagus hoax as a revision of his own work, Lane Cooper points out that the phrase “lilacs and laburnums” appears to have been drawn from The Seamy Side, A Story by Walter Besant and James Rice (NY: Dodd Mead & Co., 1880) 297. For Coopers article, see Modern Language Notes 47.2 (1937):85–7. For a succinct discussion of Twain’s ideas concerning “unconscious plagiarism,” see Randall Knoper’s “American Literary Realism and Nervous ‘Reflexion,’” American Literature 74 (2002):731. In light of Twain’s remarks on this process, it is unlikely that he makes a conscious effort to rework the material of the esophagus hoax throughout his career. For compelling examinations of how “unconscious plagiarism” can be seen as a calculated self-defense mechanism, see David Ketterer’s “‘Profesor Bafin’s Adventure’ by Max Adeler: The Inspiration for A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court?,” Mark Twain Journal 24 (1986):24– 34 and Horst H.Kruse’s “Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee: Reconsiderations and Revisions,” American Literature (62) 1990:464–483. Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin (NY: Oxford UP, 1996) 509. Compare his description of the esophagus hoax as “ably constructed for the deception it was intended to put upon the reader.” A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, ed. Allison R.Ensor (New York: Norton, 1985) 59. Frederick Anderson, ed., Mark Twain: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1971) 203. Berkove, 8. James M.Cox, “A Connecticut Yankee: The Machinery of Self-Preservation” in Smith’s (not Sundquist’s identically titled) Mark Twain: A Collection of Critical Essays, 122. Collected Tales, vol. 1,613. What is perhaps Twain’s most scathing attack on the scientific method occurs in “Adam and Eve’s Diary.” Eve writes, “I was never smart enough to be around when the water was running uphill; but now I do not mind it. I have experimented and experimented until now I know it never does run uphill, except in the dark. I know it does in the dark, because the pool never goes dry, which it would, of course, if the water didn’t come back in the night. It is best to prove things by actual experiment; then you know; whereas if you depend on guessing and supposing and conjecturing, you will never get ed ucated” (Collected Tales, vol. 2, 705–6). “From Eden to the Dark Ages: Images of History in the Work of Mark Twain,” Canadian Review of American Studies 11 (1980):162. Berkove, 16. Cited by Berkove, 10.


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55. Edward Wagenknecht, Mark Twain: The Man and His Work (Norman: Oklahoma UP, 1967) 60. 56. “The Restructuring of History and the Intrusion of Fantasy in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” in Forms and Functions of History in American Literature: Essays in Honor of Ursula Brumm (Berlin: Schmidt, 1981) 135. 57. “Game Playing and Fantasy in Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee,” American Literary Realism 26 (1993):29. 58. “This would undermine the Church…. Next education—next freedom—and then the Church would begin to crumble…. I had no scruples, but was will ing to assail it in any way or with any weapon that promised to hurt it” (78–9). 59. Mark Twain Journal 21 (1983):60. 60. “Mark Twain’s Frontier, Hank Morgan’s Last Stand” in Sundquist’s Critical Essays, 121. 61. For a fascinating discussion of this name as a comment on American cultural engagement with technology and “barely suppressed” erotics, see Seth Lerer’s “Hello, Dude: Philology, Performance, and Technology in Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee” American Literary History 15 (2003):471–502. 62. See, for instance, Levine’s Conspiracy and Romance. 63. I am not trying to suggest that Clarence is conspiring against Hank or even that the Catholic conspiracy is intended as a literal practical joke. I think that the Catholic conspiracy of Connecticut Yankee truly happens as much as anything else can be said to happen in the novel, by which I mean that we are to suspend as much disbelief concerning the conspiracy as we do with regard to Hank’s time travel. How far this suspension of disbelief should go is debatable, since the most compelling readings of the book dismiss Hank’s time travel entirely and read the whole as the unconscious fancy of a man who has been struck over the head with a crowbar. 64. “Letters from the Earth” in Collected Tales, vol. 2, 880–928. 65. I hope that, by this point, the irony of referring to “Twain himself” is clear. Bret Harte was perhaps the first, but certainly not the only, critic to perceive Twain’s use of a pseudonymous literary persona as part of a practical joke. 66. Collected Tales, vol. 2, 930. 67. Maragou, 38. 68. Her point is generally sound even if perhaps overstated. The bizarre jokes that Tom and Huck play on Jim at the end of Huck Finn make for an ending that prominently (and humorlessly) displays Twain’s game-playing tendencies. 69. Speaking specifically about race (and how to read Pudd’nhead Wilson in light of the racism of Huckleberry Finn) Stephen Railton reaches a similar conclu sion: “America would still rather revise its past than see what was really there” (“The Tragedy of Mark Twain, by Pudd’nhead Wilson,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 56 [2002]:544). 70. Twain’s simultaneously scathing and naïve diatribe, which first appeared in the May 1902 edition of the North American Review, is included in Mark Twain’s Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the Philippine-American War, ed. Jim Zwick (Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1992) 120–32. I quote from p. 122. 71. It is important to note that Twain was an ardent critic of the American finan cial network that backed Leopold in the Congo long before the Spanish American

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conflict which, according to more traditional historians, ushers in the age of American imperialism. 72. Although I do think this suitable delusion eventually carried the day, I do not mean to suggest that it went uncontested. Fiedler’s canon in and of itself is a testament to the extent to which our culture came to internalize the notion of American innocence, but there were critiques of this implicit ideology as it was being formulated. As Anders Stephanson has pointed out in his compelling Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire of Right (NY: Hill and Wang, 1995), “There were those, however, who did not flinch from embrac ing colonialism pure and simple. They thought it was a good thing and not at all incompatible with democracy at home. That a nation presumably based on the idea that ‘all men are created equal’ would now rule subject populations was not a conceptual difficulty. Once understood as wards or children, they could be classed with such excluded domestic groups as women, blacks, and Indians. And here, readily available, was indeed a long domestic experience to draw on, namely, that of handling subject populations of Indians…. In condensing the oppositional view, I have made it more cohesive than it really was. Throughout one tended to come up against a basic contradiction, on which indeed the ex pansionists came down gleefully again and again: the United States had always been about subjugation and displacement, thus demonstrating, as Henry Cabot Lodge proudly declared, ‘a record of conquest, colonization, and terri torial expansion unequalled by any people in the nineteenth century’ If no more territory could be taken because it was contrary to essential American principles, one might as well give New Mexico back to the Apaches” (91–104).

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Index

A Abrams, M.H., 5 Adorno, Theodor, 27 American Revolution, 21 Austen, Jane, 37–39

Christopherson, Bill, 36 Church, Joseph, 94 Cicero, 23 Clark, David Lee, 29 Clemens, Samuel, see Twain, Mark Colacurcio, Michael, 56–57 Concealment, 4, 14, 16, 27, 30–31, 52, 100, 105, 122 Conspiracy, 3, 13–14, 17–18, 27, 43, 45– 46, 60, 61, 64, 66, 68, 70, 72, 80, 85, 88, 99, 100, 116, 130, 131–133, 135, 136, 138–139 Cooper, James Fenimore, 41, 137 Coviello, Peter, 80 Crane, Stephen, 94

B Barruel, Abbé, 9 Bentham, Jeremy, 10–12, Berkove, Lawrence, 120 Bersani, Leo, 15 Bozovic, Miran, 11 Braudy, Leo, 27 Brodhead, Richard, 56, 66 Brooks, Van Wyck, 99–101, 110–111, 115 Brown, Charles Brockden, 19–44, 94, 132 Arthur Mervyn , 25 Edgar Huntly , 19,41 Ormond , 25 Wieland , 3, 13, 16, 19–44, 46, 56, 65, 67, 70, 98, 100, 135, 137 Burke, Edmund, 21

D DeFoe, Daniel, 24 De Quille, Dan, 113–114, 116 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 18, 86, 101, 103, 105–106, 109, 135 E Eagle-eyed reader vs. superficial skimmer, 71–72, 73–74, 79 Enlightenment, 8–10, 12–13, 27, 30–31 Esophagus hoax, 100–101, 106–108, 112, 115 Explained supernatural, 12–13, 27, 43, 44

C Caesar, Julius, 134–135 Camissards, 28, 38 Canonicity, 3–4, 17–18, 19, 138–139 Carton, Evan, 45, 55, 60 Catholicism, 3, 11, 13–14, 17, 37–38, 40– 41, 44, 45–46, 57, 60, 64, 66, 131–133, 135, 137, 138 Cenci, Beatrice, 51–52 Charles V, 76 Chase, Richard, 3 Chesnutt, Charles, 94

F Fiedler, Leslie, 1–5, 7, 10, 16, 18, 42 Fluck, Winfried, 129 Foucault, Michel, 10–12 Freemasons, 9, 11, 137

167

168

INDEX

French Revolution, 8–10, 13 Freud, Sigmund, 1, 6–7, 80, 138 G Girard, René, 63 Godwin, William, 5, 20, 21–22, 24, 32–35, 41–42, 44, 70, 100, 104 Gothicism American vs. European, 2, 10, 12–13, 21–22, 37–38, 42, 44, 138 conventions, 4, 6, 20, 36–37, 39–41, 67, 135 definition, 5 genre, 1–3, 104, 138 imagery, 4, 5, 39–40 rationality/irrationality, 5, 7, 12 structures, 4, 10–13, 38 Grabo, Norman, 37 Grimes, William C, 121 H Hagenbuchle, Roland, 32 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 28, 45–70, 73 The House of the Seven Gables , 46– 47, 54–70, 98, 137 The Marble Faun , 3, 13, 17, 25, 45–70, 98, 138 Heilman, Robert B., 5 Hemingway, Ernest, 5 Hinds, Elizabeth Jane Wall, 22 History American vs. European, 8–10, 54–58, 100, 136 as a form of persecution, 8–10, 105, 110, 124, 130, 133–134, 135, 136, 137 as a hoax, 99, 101, 123–128, 129, 138 Hofstadter, Richard, 1–4, 6–7, 9, 14, 18, 64, 99, 124, 133–134, 136 Howells, William Dean, 98, 120 Hume, Robert, 42 Hysteria, 3, 20, 22, 27, 29, 32 Hypochondria, 6 I Illuminati, 9, 25, 26, 132, 137 Imaginative leap, 11

Imitation, 46–64; see also Hawthorne, Nathaniel Implied reader, 74 Innocence, 18, 46–47, 51–52, 58, 61, 70, 118, 137–139 Interpretive distress, 3 Intertextuality, 21–22, 32, 37, 42, 63 J James, Henry, 32, 98 Jordan, Cynthia, 31 K Kavanagh, James, 74, 75, 92, 93 Khouri, Nadia, 127 Kraepelin, Emil, 20 L Lacan, Jacques, 6–8, 15–16 Lawrence, D.H., 3 Lewis, Matthew, 13, 21, 24, 42, 104 Levine, Robert, 66, 74, 75, 92 M MacKay, Carol, 58, 69 Maragou, Helena, 136 Marks, Alfred H., 47, 58, 61, 64 Megalomania, 3, 6–7, 9, 14, 73, 79–80, 83– 85, 98, 117, 130 Melville, Herman, 32, 71–98 Benito Cereno , 3, 14, 17, 70, 71–98, 130–131, 137–138 The Confidence Man , 71 Metafiction, 22, 27, 42–43 Milton, John, 50, 52 Monstrous double, 64 O Olesky, Elzbieta, 46, 58, 63, 64 Overreading, 6, 14–16, 25–26, 32, 35, 36, 44, 68, 82, 105 P Paine, Albert Bigelow, 111 Panopticon, 10–12 Paranoia definitions of, 4, 6–7, 14, 27

INDEX

inculcation of, 10, 44, 71, 85, 89, 98, 100 link to gothic, 3–4, 80 logic of, 27, 30, 85, 87, 94–95, 98, 105, 118, 120, 133 narratological locations of, 3–4, 16–18, 19, 22, 42–44, 68, 72, 98, 106, 136–138 symptoms of, 3, 6; see also Conspiracy; Hypochondria; Hysteria; Interpretive Distress; Megalomania; Overreading; Persecution in U.S. politics, 1–3, 7–8 Persecution, 6, 11, 17, 27, 44, 100, 103, 105–106, 109, 116, 118, 120, 128 Phoenix, John, 121 Poe, Edgar Allan, 109 Practical jokes, 18, 100, 108–110, 112, 114, 116–118, 124, 128, 136, 139 Praxiteles, 49 Pynchon, Thomas, 15 R Racialization of power, 14, 71, 82, 91, 93– 95, 97–98 Radcliffe, Anne, 12–13, 21, 24, 27, 37–38, 40, 42, 44, 70 Richardson, Samuel, 24 Romance, 28, 54, 55, 56 Rosenthal, Bernard, 30 Russo, James R., 36 S Santo Domingo, 76 Scheick, William J., 25 Schreber, Daniel Paul, 6–7, 15–16, 81, 85, 104–105, 117 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 4–5 Seltzer, Mark, 19, 31 Shaving, 78, 89, 94–96 Shelley, Percy, 9 Simms, William Gilmore, 93 Slotkin, Richard, 131

169

Smith, Henry Nash, 99 Spontaneous human combustion, 28–30, 38, 65 Sundquist, Eric, 96–97, 118 Superficial meaning, 71, 77, 79, 81, 90 Supernatural, 12, 43 Swann, Charles, 93, 97 T Tompkins, Jane, 36 Torquemada, 77 Twain, Mark, 98, 99–139 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court , 100, 105, 120–123, 125, 127, 129–134, 135, 136 “A Defence of General Funston,” 137 A Double-Barreled Detective Story , 3, 18, 99–139 summary, 101–104 “A True Story,” 119, 123 Autobiography , 110, 127 Joan of Arc , 125, 127–129, 136 “Letters from the Earth,” 134 Life on the Mississippi , 116–117, 127 “My Bloody Massacre,” 113, 115, 116 Roughing It , 134 Sketches New and Old , 112,116 “Some Learned Fables for Good Old Boys and Girls,” 125–128 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , 104 The Innocents Abroad , 100, 120–122, 124–125 “The Stolen White Elephant,” 109 “The Turning Point of My Life,” 134– 135 U Unreliable narrator, 32 V Verhoeven,W.M., 25,44 Voice, 41–42, 95–97 W Walpole, Horace, 8, 12–13 Wharton, Edith, 98

170

INDEX

Wieland, Christoph Martin, 20 Williams, George III, 113 Williams, J.D., 130 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 4 Wood, Gordon S., 7–10, 12, 13 Z Zagarell, Sandra, 75 Zurlo, John, 130

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