NEWSLETTER #56 - aisna

AISNA Newsletter 56, p. 28
Hawthorne especially enjoyed the company of men who led active lives, who trafficked in
politics and business. He would have liked to lead more of such a life, and fancied himself in his
custom-house days as a “son of toil” as he boarded ships and spoke to sea-captains about their
voyages and their cargoes. Brenda Wineapple is quite right when she remarks that “Hawthorne
held on to his government job [as measurer of coal and salt at the Boston Custom-House] not just
because he needed the money or because the country ignored its artists… but because he liked it.”
Hawthorne’s campaign biography of Pierce and his editing (and probable ghost-writing) of
Bridge’s naval adventures along the coast of Africa gave him the illusion that he had stitched
himself into the fabric of history. Men of stature regarded him as a trustworthy ally in spreading
their fame. Commodore Matthew Perry—under whom Bridge had served—called upon Hawthorne
in Liverpool, during the winter of 1854, to beseech Hawthorne to write the epic story of his
triumphant voyage the previous year to “open” Japan to the West. “He was good enough to say that
he had fixed upon me, in his own mind, for this office,” Hawthorne wrote in his journal, “but that
my public duties would of course prevent me from engaging in it, I spoke of Herman Melville.”
Perry, alas, did not want the disreputable author of Typee romancing Japan, and did the job himself.
Hawthorne did in fact play an indirect part in the opening of Japan, though he could not have
known it. If Commodore Perry’s gunboat diplomacy opened Japan to Western trade, it was the
work of two Salem men of the next generation, the scientist Edward Sylvester Morse and the art
historian Ernest Fenollosa, who contributed more than anyone else to the cultural opening of Japan.
Morse, a zoologist who became the world’s expert on Japanese ceramics and architecture and was
the longtime director of the Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem, arrived in Yokohama in 1877. He
carried in his pocket, as a reminder to notice things, a journal entry from Hawthorne:
Begin to write always before the impression of novelty has worn off from your mind,
else you will be apt to think that the peculiarities which at first attracted you are not
worth recording; yet these slight peculiarities are the very things that make the most
vivid impression upon the reader. Think nothing too trifling to set down, so it be in the
smallest degree characteristic. You will be surprised to find, on re-perusing your
journal, what an importance and graphic power these little peculiarities assume.
Morse’s account of Japan made such a vivid impression on New Englanders like Henry
Adams, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and Percival Lowell that they were determined to travel to Japan
and see what he had seen. Morse, through his writings and lectures, was largely responsible for the
“Japan vogue” in Gilded Age New Engand. Morse enlisted Fenollosa, a recent granduate of Harvard,
to join him at Tokyo Imperial University and teach political science and Western philosophy.
Fenollosa became enamored of Japanese art and literature instead, and his papers and translations
made their way to Ezra Pound, Fenollosa’s literary executor. Oddly enough, the meaning of Japan for
Fenollosa resided in a smile—the “quiet mysterious smile” of the Buddha and his followers—
reminiscent, he thought, of the Mona Lisa.
Wordslingers: The Western as Genre in Contemporary American Fiction
Marc Chénetier
President, EAAS European Association for American Studies
Professor of American Literature, Université Paris 7 Denis Diderot
Institut Universitaire de France
The real contemporary shooters aim at the genre by means of operations the formulaic cannot live
with. John Hawkes, Paul West, David Markson, Ishmael Reed, Robert Coover, and Gilbert
Sorrentino will serve here, though Richard Brautigan's The Hawkline Monster, Jerome Charyn's
Darlin' Bill, Brian Evenson's "Contagion", William Gass's "The Pedersen Kid", Percival Everett’s
God’s Country and others could have provided relevant illustrations.
To set off what they do, I must explain what Cormac McCarthy doesn't quite. When Grady