Fire, flutter, fall, and scatter: a structure in the epiphanies of Hawthorne's tales.(Nathaniel Hawthorne)(Critical essay)

Lyrical epiphanies are typically the creative center, the imaginative climax, of Nathaniel Hawthorne's tales. But although his imagery has been clarified in various ways, no one has yet attempted to define a pattern that can unite Hawthorne's focal visionary moments and show its implications. (1) Hawthorne's epiphany pattern shows a form and dynamism of experience deeply rooted in this prose poet's psyche. (2) My method of analysis, a systematized, supplemented refashioning of Gaston Bachelard's phenomenology of elemental reverie (to be explained shortly), focuses on the form of the epiphanic experience as given in the texts of the tales. That formal structure, though richly varied, can be summed up as a cluster of four image-motifs: fire, flutter, fall, and scatter. It is a "descendental" moment of passionate, though always ambivalent, (3) fullness yielding to sudden disintegration.

With an inevitability suggesting unconscious origins, this vivid pattern of oneiric force repeatedly overwhelms, first with joy and then with disillusionment, Hawthorne's habitual, conscious concern with subtle moral distinctions. A Hawthorne epiphany, involving a scenario of startling and rapid collapse, brings in the motif cluster with a dreamlike insistence; the image pattern can arise apropos of nearly anything, and it may be seen by anyone, regardless of supposed moral standing. The narrator-persona may experience it, or else a major or minor character or a group or crowd. Mad scientist or guileless merrymaker, devoted craftsman or Faustian criminal--ministering maiden, ambitious youth, royalist or rebel--any perceiver or imaginer may see, undergo, or precipitate the fall and scattering. Yet the "descendentalism" of Hawthorne's epiphanic imagining does not show a merely dismissive response to our imaginative impulse to "transcend." Hawthorne may at first appear simply to rebut Emerson's Transcendentalist efforts to posit a trustworthy ideal or guiding principle (oversoul, spiritual laws, self-reliance): he certainly counters this uplifting tendency with a contrasting, downward-minded dualism. But without the initial creative-destructive or euphoric-ominous energy of fire, the motive power for an imaginative human life would seem inaccessible for him. The epiphanic descents and dispersals vary in mood and meaning--tragic or tragicomic, madly triumphant, whimsical, absurd, nightmarish, retributive--but all feel as fateful and unexplainable as being in a dream. An epiphany of Hawthornean hallucinatory power resembles a waking dream, arising as by dream logic. The epiphanic motif cluster is a pattern that morphs, as in the dream realm of Morpheus, from character to group to narrator within the body, or corpus, of the tales. (4)

The epiphanic formula I find in Hawthorne has psychoanalytic implications. It is very like the Lacanian "persistence of the letter," especially as developed by Lacan's disciple and systematizer Serge Lemaire. The chain or cluster of linked images in a dream, Freud had noted, gains visionary power from the intense emotional investment in its motivating, animating thought: "the psychical intensity of the elements in the dream-thoughts has been replaced by the sensory intensity of the elements in the content of the actual dream." (5) Looking in one of Freud's own dreams for "crossroad words" indicating an intense emotional juncture, Lemaire finds "botanical, monograph, yellow, and finally the series pick, rip, tear." Generalizing further on the basis of more data, Lemaire finds a recurrent identity-formula: "the desire to pluck (pflucken), to tear away (ent-reissen), to reveal (enthullen)," bespeaking a desire "for a movement that goes beyond, a desire almost freed from the fascination of the object," shown by "hundreds of examples in Freud's work" of the "wish to transgress, in the literal sense of going beyond." (6) Analogously, in the dreams of his client Philippe, Lemaire finds another recurrent personal chain of signifiers that provides an analytical key or identity-formula for this imaginer: "Lili--thirst--beach--trace--skin--foot--horn." In Lemaire's view "the description of these singularities outlines something like the proper essence of each individual in his or her most intimate self" (7) (emphasis added).

The methodology of another psychoanalyst, Norman N. Holland, helpfully converges with that of Lemaire. Using Robert Waelder's "principle of multiple function" and Heinz Lichtenstein's "identity theme" concept, Holland notes, for instance, that the pioneering imagist H. D. "became the poet of hard, cold classicism," of "bristly pine trees and hedgehogs," in a "cosmic strategy" contrasting these life forms with imagery of "floods crashing and breaking" and "fantasies of a fiery world destruction." (8) We may formulate H. D.'s identity theme in crisp Lemairean fashion: hedgehog--bristle--pine--flood--fire.

In depth psychology, imaginings arise from the transformed remembrance of pleasures submerged into the unconscious, but Lemaire stresses in addition the "reciprocal relation of jouissance," or nostalgically idealized preconceptual oneness-feeling, and "the letter," or metonymic chain of intense replacement-images. Repressed pleasure may engender the "letter" or dream image-cluster, but this imagery in turn leads back to jouissance "in a movement of transgression of the literal articulation." (9) In other words, the dream image, or in my own literarily based research the epiphanic pattern, in part conceals the submerged forces of balked desire but through its ungovernable intensity also leads dramatically back to them. In this sense, too, Hawthorne's relentless repetition-plus-elaboration of his fire-flutter-fall-scatter is the paradoxical presentation of a fall that refuses to stay fallen: fiery glow and aery tremor, in each epiphany, make the metonymic imagination rejoice and thus may help justify emotionally to Hawthorne the less pleasant half of the dream image cluster, thereby stimulating ever-new elaborations of the pattern.

Lemaire finds it imperative to "avoid" any "closed explanation" (10) of dream-formulas such as he finds for Freud and for Philippe, and the same caution may be prudently applied to Hawthorne's epiphany pattern. Hawthorne's descendental motif cluster may well point to the feared/desired loss of the adoration he enjoyed among mother and sisters in a female household. But for my purpose, detailed biographical correlative data are not essential. Yet a couple of preliminary orienting exhibits, with strong autobiographical links, dramatize the Hawthornean dream logic underlying the pattern's recurrence.

"The Devil in Manuscript" points to autobiographical dream content as it shows us the narrator's visit to his alter ego or fantasized double, a writer with the flatteringly Shakespearean sobriquet of "Oberon." (11) Immediately we behold the two of them "seated by a great blazing fire, which looked so comfortable and delicious that I felt inclined to lie down and roll among the hot coals" (11: 170). (12) Yet the Hawthornean Oberon, troubled by having embodied in his literary work "the character of a fiend, as represented in our traditions and the written records of witchcraft," has resolved to "burn the manuscripts, and commit the fiend to his retribution in the flames" (11: 171). Fire is as infernal and retributive as it is comfortable and delicious. So is literature, perhaps: seventeen rejections of his manuscript have pushed Oberon toward disgust with his paper progeny. Writing even his best work has been but a "fever fit," yet his "ideas were like precious stones under the earth," a subterrene glow, and often "a delicious stream of thought would gush out upon the page at once," a sexually pleasant release of heat, one may feel--though immediately he cools it with an analogy of "water" (11: 174). Waking reality seems to mock the "dream" of creation, yet when Oberon prepares to toss the documents into a flame blazing "like Nebuchadnezzar's fire" (11: 175), we recall from the Book of Daniel a site of miracles, not mere destruction. As the fire gathers force, ambivalences accumulate: