The Romance of National Fantasy

I want to start with a portion of an essay I wrote last semester in a class on the American novel in which we read The Scarlett Letter and then compare that reading to some of the concerns that come up in Berlant’s book on national fantasy, and our course’s project of examining everyday life:

Filled with apparently lost souls and misguided intentions, Hawthorne’s Scarlett Letter seems to be interested in the play between surface appearance and interior composition. Consider the following passage from the chapter “The Interior of a Heart,” in which the narrator describes Reverend Dimmesdale’s reflections on the visions that appear before him in his fanciful misery:

None of these visions ever quite deluded him. At any moment, by an effort of his will, he could discern substances through their misty lack of substance, and convince himself that they were not solid in their nature, like yonder table of carved oak, or that big, square, leather-bound and brazen-clasped volume of divinity. But, for all that, they were, in one sense, the truest and most substantial things which the poor minister now dealt with. It is the unspeakable misery of a life so false as his, that it steals the pith and substance out of whatever realities there are around us, and which were meant by Heaven to be the spirit's joy and nutriment. To the untrue man, the whole universe is false--it is impalpable--it shrinks to nothing within his grasp. (97)

We know that Dimmesdale’s suffering comes from his knowledge that his exterior life does not match the interior knowledge of his past actions. Thus, we might say that the visions that appear to him are a manifestation of his desire to be free from the torment laid upon him by his own duplicity. Yet, he sees through the unsubstantial visions to the actual objects that make up his world, which are ‘solid in nature.’ The book and table are solid, by nature of being physical objects. However, we might also read the phrase to indicate that they are solid objects in the natural world, meaning that the translucent visions might have a real existence in the supernatural world. Not only does this play on the solidity of nature open up something beyond the material world, it fixes that something in the objects placed before the Reverend in his study.

The more significant of these objects, in the light of this interweaving of nature and the supernatural, is “the brazen-clasped volume of divinity.” The OED gives a figurative definition of brazen as “hardened in effrontery; shameless,” which by the example from 1853 that follows , seems to have a particular relevance to religious or social matters. The clasp, also according to the OED, can connote the “act of surrounding or comprehending and holding.” Therefore, the bronze clasping upon the physical book not only indicates the reverend’s brazen attempts to maintain a grasp upon his professional life as his private sins betray it, but also the presumptuous attempt by a book to comprehensively contain knowledge of the divine. As a symbol of Dimmesdale’s professional and spiritual life the book takes on a symbolic meaning that stretches it between the material and the immaterial world of his visions. Thus, when the narrator moves on in the next sentence to remark that these visions were “the truest and most substantial things the poor minster now dealt with,” he does so ironically, since the book and its writing are equally ethereal. In other words, focusing on the psychological reading of Dimmesdale’s torment allows us to understand only one aspect of his character. Caught between his public and private lives, he begins not only to doubt the truth of his sanctioned beliefs, but also to create an alternative reality out of the abscesses in his mind.

I then go on to argue that the tortured reverend functions as a kind of romantic hero in the novel. This use of the concept of romance is fairly specific; it comes from reading the form of the novel as a tension between realism and romance, defined not as romantic love necessarily, but as an innocent means of reading the world. The classic example that we started this other class with was Don Quixote in Cervantes’s novel of the same name. The night’s madness in that work places him outside the normal realm of logical understanding of the world, but by doing so Cervantes demonstrates (among other things) that all other forms of structuring the human world are equally delirious – they just happen to be more widely accepted. Thus, the innocence of the romantic hero conceals and simultaneously reveals an insight into a different form of truth. By arguing that Dimmesdale can be read as a part of this tradition, I’m attempting to identify something similar to what I think Berlant is noting when she discusses the tension between utopia and the law.

She locates this tension in the problem of creating national unity that subsumes or assimilates local differences or idiosyncrasies. These fragmentary locations, or even individuals gain wholeness through participation (or, we could say, interpellation) in “an ‘Imaginary’ realm of ideality and wholeness, where the subject becomes whole by being reconstituted as a collective subject, or citizen” (24). This collectivity relates to “a larger simulacrum of wholeness” that she sees in the Statue of Liberty. The statue, she argues, functions as a “national dialectical image,” that “works in a utopian way to create multiple spaces that coexist in time despite contradiction, without threat of annihilation” (25). These contradictions occur in a similar space to the one that identify in the passage from my earlier essay: Dimmesdale’s awareness of his own indiscretions with Hester creates the space in his mind that allows him to begin questioning not only his spiritual beliefs, but the solidity of the objective world in which he lives. The permeability of the two worlds with respect to each other implies a kind of dialectical relationship, not unlike the way in which the law and utopian vision of America relate to each other. Berlant notices two possible readings of utopia: one that the nation is formed already as “utopia incarnate, the already realized fulfillment of the assurance of universal sovereignty postulated by Enlightenment political thought” or the other in which “an imperfect formation constituted by a promise for future fulfillment [is] imminently in the state of perfection but to be achieved within history” (32). The coexistence of these two possibilities seems to be where her use of the word fantasy is important, since it refers to the functioning of a system of thought that calls itself into being by making it seem as if it always existed; America was virgin land, but the natural promise of that virgin land was that its future form was always already contained within its natural form. The historical latency of this preformed identity is created after the fact of its own realization. In other words, cause and effect are inverted: the effect in the present day creates the space to read its own cause in the past. This movement effectively erases prior versions of remembering the past, clearing the space for this new narrative to supplant them. Like the readings we did at the beginning of the semester that discussed the nostalgic remembrance of something that did not carry meaning in its enactment but in its remembrance, this formation of Americanness identifies the promise of its present existence in the past, thereby securing the continuity of its future. The problem with the law in its relationship to this dual meaning is that it attempts to solidify the utopia of American – encode it legally. This role assumes a temporal freeze in which the unity of utopia exists in one form past and present. However, as she notes elsewhere, the power of national fantasy lies prominently in its ability to subsume difference. This assimilative function depends on adaptability to some degree, and the permanent encoding of national identity in law potentially stops this process. On the other hand, it is precisely this desire for stability and an encoded, mutually intelligible national identity that drives the assimilative process of change in the first place. What this tension means, I think, in the everyday lives of American citizens is something that shows up in Dimmesdale’s tortured attempt to find peace in his own liminal existence.

In the chapter on madness (3), Berlant describes a countercultural effect of the law (the letter of the law, as she puts it, playing on the meaning of Hester’s A). “For Prynne, Dimmesdale, and Chillingsworth,” she writes, “magical thinking takes on new forms of unreason: the state of law is a state of madness, in which juridical transfigurations of the body and the mind induce species of insanity” (100). This unreason emerges in Dimmesdale’s questioning the solidity of the objects surrounding him, but it also occupies the juridical space in which the solidity of the social order is constructed. Even though “the spaces beyond reason” are “images of how the law itself works to establish a certain reign of reason that locates reason’s antipode,” “they are also forms of counter-memory” (100). Therefore, while these moments of madness or insanity seem as though they point out a problem with the individual’s conception of time and space, they actually exist as fissures in the totalizing narrative of national fantasy. The tendency of the law is to assimilate them, making them become the images of the law that Berlant refers to in the quote above. However, they also have the potential to indicate that this kind of indirect challenge is not only possible, but, it seems, inevitable. Referring specifically to the way in which the national symbolic order is constructed around the image of the female body, she puts it rather succinctly at the end of the first chapter:
If one direction of Hawthorne’s refusal of the sunny Symbolic order is to construct an ever shifting set of terms within the context of the promised symbolic resolution that characterizes utopian thought, the other is that new models of political and everyday life are always being produced, even within the utopia of textuality. And so the still-colonized viewer of American history must do the same, seeing out of the corner of the hymen, like an asterisk, pointing her in another direction. (55, 56).

Even though Hawthorne’s writing works within the symbolic structures that it attempts to question, thereby feeding their subsumption of difference (locality or individuality), the exposure of different possibilities can also be valuable in itself. Like the protagonists of Deloria’s Indians in Unexpected Places, the citizen of Berlant’s America can find herself subjected to and also a subject of this utopic fantasy, but still discover meanings that evade the sanctioned version of reality. Therefore, Dimmesdale’s untruth that dissolves the reality of the universe is not necessarily reserved for a few, since the nature of national identity creates a space in which our lives are led, but does not determine the way in which we interpret them.

[Passages from The Scarlett Letter quoted from the Norton Critical Edition, ed. Leland S. Person, 2005].

-- Andy DuMont