Sunday, April 26, 2009

State or Community?

I must admit Berlant left me a little confused. Not only her writing style, but her understanding of Hawthorne's work seemed to me a little stretched. That being said, I found her approach to The Scarlet Letter fascinating, in many ways, and her close reading of the novel - reflected in the numerous page references, was impressive. I was probably one of the only students in class who had to prepare for Berlant by reading Hawthorne? and, unfortunately, I didn't find the time to delve sufficiently into the work to challenge Berlant properly. Despite this limitation, there is, in particular, one aspect of her reading that I thought was a little too ambitious on her part.

She intended to give a gendered and post-nationalist (or whatever we should call it) reading of the Scarlet Letter and in this I think she succeeded. The Law (capital 'L') as a masculine domain, and the feminine counter-memory... all that was convincing. In particular I thought her understanding of little Pearl as the Anima of the protagonist was interesting. I, for one, was quite surprised that Hawthorne chose to give his herione a daughter rather than a son - think of the uncountable instances in stories, myth, and fiction, where the zyzygies father/daughter and mother/son appear! I too thought that Hawthorne probably attempted to forge a closer unity between the parent and the child by his choice of gender than what is common in narratives with mythic potention, such as The Scarlet Letter. Berlant seems to agree.

Berlant quite early posits her agenda: she wishes to give an account of a national fanstasy, meaning, the process by which "national culture become local" (p. 5). To me this sounded identical to the sociological project of the now-not-so-famous French marxist thinker Louis Althusser. In one of his most discussed concepts of 'interpellation', Althusser seeks to establish the process that makes subjects out of individuals, such as when a police officer shouts out "hey, you!" This is an ideological marker in that a political system is embodied in the very act of calling out to a specific subject. There is, in Althusser's mind, no ideology without subject, and no subjectivity without ideology. Isn't this something of the same Berlant seeks to achieve in her reading of Hawthorne??

If it is, I can only say that this was not exactly what I got away from reading The Scarlet Letter. My impression was how an early puritan community in the New World was fumbling a little bit in the dark in trying to forge out a political system out of what was hitherto exclusively religious practice and belief. Of course, with catastrophic consequences for Hester Prynne, but still not exactly a well-ordered and carefully crafted legal expression. Dimmesdale, and the other characters, I felt, were insecure, doubtful, and so forth - not exactly suitable candidates for ideologicla interpellation.

Berlant, on the other hand, seemed to draw a close association between the State (capital 'S') and the letter 'A' emboridered on Hester Prynne's bosom. Numerous places she equates the punishment inflicted on Hester with the "State" (for instance, p. 32; 69; 94; 97, to mention but some very few). Again, I didn't feel the presence of a unitary and coherent state system, or a utopian vision of nationality when reading Hawthorne as Berlant suggests. Do Americans read Hawthorne differently than me, perhaps??

-- Alexander

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