SPEAKER_03 0:00

Once more, for it is hard to be finite upon an infinite subject, and all subjects are infinite. By some people, this entire scrawl of mine may be esteemed altogether unnecessary, inasmuch as years ago they may say, we found out the rich and rare stuff in this Hawthorne, whom you now parade forth as if only yourself were the discoverer of this Portuguese diamond in our literature. But even granting all this and adding to it the assumption that the books of Hawthorne have sold by the 5,000, what does that signify? They should be sold by the 100,000 and read by the million and admired by everyone who is capable of admiration.

SPEAKER_04 0:54

Okay, welcome everybody to Pequad Pond. Today we are using the royal we, it's just me, Meg, but we are interviewing one of the sparkling stars of uh the romantic academic scene, the Dr. Mark Noble, um, who is going to help us parse the dedication to our beloved Moby Dick, which is uh dedicated to someone called Nathaniel Hawthorne. We are here to learn who is this person? Why did he warrant pride of place at the beginning of this thing? What's fun to know about this relationship? Who's out there? What could we read next? What is the tea, etc.? So um, Mark, I would love to kind of hear who are you? We've met, but for the audio space. And then how did you kind of come to love this time period? And kind of what interests you most about that space as a reader in 2026?

SPEAKER_00 2:01

Yeah, fascinating question. Thank you for having me. This was fun. Um, so yeah, I work on 19th century American lit. I think I came to American Romanticism in graduate school as people do through their comprehensive exam reading list. I thought I'd uh sort of work on uh later texts as I got started, uh and sort of got pulled into the early uh US writing uh and this sort of moment um in the 1830s, 40s, and 50s that began to fascinate me. And I got a job in which I was assigned uh to teach Moby Dick among other materials from that period, and have been sort of obsessed, in particular with the pedagogical challenge of bringing Moby Dick into focus over several weeks uh in front of a group full of undergraduates. Um my interest in Thoreau and Thoreau's and Emerson's uh journal writing, in particular and science writing from the 1850s, sort of deepened my understanding of this literary scene a little. I don't tend to work too much on like a biographical uh scholarship, but there's a certain coterie of thinkers here, including Melville and Hawthorne, that um one can't but kind of sort of become interested in uh as a scene. Um uh that or one can't but be interested in the scene that surrounds their work.

SPEAKER_04 3:19

Yeah. Almost like the beats, kind of in a way, like the ideas that they all knew each other and were writing in response to what the other was writing and deference or in competition to, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:30

Some rivalries, some cranky personalities, and some sort of arduous uh attachments here and there that become sort of intriguing. Um we're focused on the dedication to Hawthorne.

SPEAKER_04 3:43

Indeed, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think the uh dedication it it's an interest it's interesting because I think most Americans know then would see the name Nathaniel Hawthorne and go, oh, he wrote the Scarlet Letter, which we may or may not have been forced to read in high school. I feel like that's one of the sort of archetypal, I had to read this in high school and it was against my will. And then if we did read it, or if we didn't read it but we just know about it, it kind of ends there.

SPEAKER_00 4:12

Yeah. All right, let's start with Hawthorne then before Melville meets him in 1850, I suppose. So unlike Melville, Hawthorne's a sort of more established New England figure. Um famously changes the spelling of his last name to distinguish himself from his, what was he, great-grandfather, great-great-grandfather, who presided over the Salem witch trials um at the end of the 17th century.

SPEAKER_04 4:36

And Hawthorne carries That's high New England gothic, though.

SPEAKER_00 4:39

It is, right. Hawthorne, you know, like throughout his life, he carries this sort of anxiety uh or sort of guilt uh about that legacy. And then you have the Scarlet Letter, along with several of the short fiction, several pieces of short fiction set uh in the 17th century, kind of address uh that we talk a little about the like. So unlike Melville, who you know spends his youth uh running around, Hawthorne's kind of anchored to Massachusetts and sees himself, I think, uh, as a kind of literary star in the making. He publishes his first novel, which is sort of like a campus novel about his college life in 1828 anonymously, and it's sort of a failure that compels him to shift to writing short fiction. Uh, the tales written in the 1830s and 40s, for which he's most famous, and which we often teach when we're not teaching a Scarlet Letter. So, like young Goodman Brown or The Minister's Black Veil. Uh he collects those into two really well-regarded collections. Uh the first twice-told tales is published in, I'm gonna get some of these details wrong probably, but I think 1837 and Mosses from an Old Manse, then in 1846. They're fantastic, weird, kind of challenging tales. The thing I often say in classes is that like there's an allegorical, uh, sort of moral to the story aspect of Hawthorne's tale writing that can be sort of deceptive in curious ways. Um it'll often seem like, say, at the end of the story, like the birthmark in which a kind of pseudo-scientist uh kills his wife while trying to remove this sort of one blemish uh on her physical appearance, uh, revealing that said blemish is sort of intrinsic to her or tied to her soul in some sort of way. And the story we're in with is kind of moral about the hubris of like scientific overreach, while at the same time lacing the story with a series of other like sort of subtler stranger elements. Uh the birthmark stands for femininity or menstruation in some uh sense that the story hints at but never quite delivers. Or maybe it's actually most interested in a kind of question about how the surface and depth relation that the sort of pull the you know flaw out of the body idea might operate or whether it's reliable. So often in Hawthorne's tales, there's this kind of moral slash counter moral relation that uh I think must have been part of what provoked Melville. We see a lot of that similar kind of like ambivalence or ambiguity about how meaning happens uh in Melville's writing in the 1850s. Uh Hawthorne publishes The Scarlet Letter, then, so technically his second novel, but the his the first novel he publishes uh with his own name, and the first novel that's really that he writes that you know achieves any success, in March of 1850. Uh and it causes a bit of a stir in and around New England. It's slightly scandalous for its accounts of sexuality, uh, as you know if you've read it. Uh and it's sort of like subtler critiques of Christianity. He then continues writing novels throughout the 1850s, the Blythale romance and the House of Seven Gables, which follow, are more complex. Um, maybe not quite as like gorgeous and lyrical as the Scarlet Letter, but richer uh in their accounts of American social life. He decamps to England for a post offered to him after the election of his friend Pierce in 1852, uh, and then spends most of the latter half of the decade uh in Europe. Uh publishes his last novel, The Marble Fawn, uh, in 1860. So it's really two bodies of work for me, thinking about it, certainly as a teacher. Uh, these four major novels, all written during the 1850s on the one hand, and then this sort of varied uh and complicated body of short fiction uh compiled across a series of collections on the other hand.

SPEAKER_04 9:02

He has all these um themes that sound like they would be really kind of popular today, like the inside mirroring the outside, a story sort of like where the allegory is like, oh I tried to whatever, like fix my nose and then turn it like my soul dying. But it seems like because he was writing in kind of that like allegorical fashion, where it's it seems like that, oh we get it if like this is easy, quote unquote easy to teach, then that would make it kind of less fashionable to like our contemporary readers, whereas if like maybe now we're kind of more interested in authors who really layer it on like deep ambiguity or like the theme is kind of harder to get to, is a little more popular now. That might be some of the reason why he's kind of maybe thought of as more like stodgy, perhaps unfairly, but it sounds like he was doing odd things narratively in kind of the way that we think um when we think of um, you know, the way that some of these authors were innovating writing, not just writing interesting stories, but like the way that they wrote was strange, he seems to kind of be led um not quite led into that club of like cool kids that's sort of like the enlightenment or the romantic era in America. But um, do you think that that's that's fair, like aesthetically? Is there a strangeness where if we like that in other places we could find that in his stories as well?

SPEAKER_00 10:32

Yeah, I mean, among literary critics, Hawthorne's doing fine. I think he gets about the respect he probably deserves. I don't know about the wider readership. I I undergraduate students enjoy these tales, but they need to be pushed uh to sort of to think critically about what lies beneath the surface, or certainly but beneath the sort of didactic claims that the tales often seem to be making. So we like the minister's black veil is a good example and easy to summarize quickly. It's like it's the late 17th century, uh, or something it's not specific. Uh, and Parson Hooper shows up one day wearing a veil over his face and freaks out all of his parishioners, who then spend the rest of the story gossiping about what it signifies. So he must be, in other words, representing a specific sin that he committed, some adultery uh or some you know hidden truth. Even his fiancee begs him to remove the veil and he keeps refusing. At the end of the story, he's on his deathbed, um, and they're they're once more imploring him to lift the veil and confess his sin, whatever the veil is meant to signify. And he has this famous moment, he looks around the room, it's just like I see a veil on everyone's face. Uh and then when I realize someday, and you know, hypothetically, that we've all sort of removed our invisible interior veils and you know healthily buried our souls to one another the way a Christian congregation uh is supposed to in the 17th century in New England, then the veil will no longer have served its purpose. So it's like kind of like the camera turns at the end of the story onto the crowd and reveals the veil has been a kind of teachable moment the whole time.

SPEAKER_04 12:02

Are we not all wearing veils?

SPEAKER_00 12:04

Right. You know, it's like New England congregationalism in in the sort of earlier colonial period, uh, and then to a different degree, the sort of in the early decades of the 19th century, which Hawthorne's raised, and is sort of grounded in this idea that the community has a sort of transparency about it. Um, you're admitted as a full member of the church uh by way of this elaborate process in which you do confess all of your sins to the congregation as a whole. Um, which even sometimes reads like a little bit of like cognitive restructuring. Uh, it's weird. And so Parson Hooper is illustrating that that's a sort of a conceit to which we don't really hold, or it's a kind of hypocrisy uh intrinsic to social relationship in this scene. What's and that's the sort of didactic claim the story makes. I think what's interesting about reading it carefully, and Hawthorne is sort of a really deft sentence writer who will lace the whole thing with these little complexities and strange elements, it's like it's not really clear this is a good heuristic practice that the minister is is is offering. It doesn't actually address its problem, no one really ever understands him. Or maybe the question that often comes up, as suggested maybe similarly in the birthmark, is about whether symbols or signs of things on the outside of, let's say, the body in this case, can actually signify adequately, can teach us or show us uh something true about what's hidden or what can't be revealed or what is typically concealed, certainly in our social lives. And the story then, I think, like a lot of these tales, doesn't really arrive at a kind of discernible moral or truth claim about that problem so much as kind of stage it in ever more vexing ways. But within the allegorical container of the short tale, that at least structurally seems like it's pointing to a specific kind of I don't know, moral imperative or claim about uh how life happens. I keep finding these in these tales, right? This sort of official moral of the story, and then upon closer examination, or with one spends a little bit of time in a classroom kind of talking about what we think, you know, uh a kind of counter-moral or underlying element. It seems to me, having read a lot of Melville, that he must have enjoyed uh or been drawn to that kind of intermixture of the sort of dubious and the didactic, or the illuminating and the enshrouding elements uh of Hawthorne's story and the refusal to kind of neatly separate them.

SPEAKER_04 14:42

It sounds like you're you said that um like Hawthorne's stories were kind of scandalous, it seems like, because people did understand them versus kind of the the momentum of Melville's kind of like oeuvre, which is that he kind of became scandalous because people couldn't understand him and eventually just stopped publishing things. So it's interesting to sort of hear you talk about these things of kind of like I'm recognizing as themes across both of their bodies of work, which is nothing, or or what some of which seem to be kind of like um, can we trust the outside to be accurately representing what I could learn about a person's inside? Um but the ways they wouldn't have been up doing them um rhetorically were so seemingly different than um it might take a while to kind of arrive at that point. That's very true. But the men themselves were indeed interested in some of those themes. Is that um are those kinds of things that you see in other writers of the time as well? Was that kind of an anxiety of the middle of the 19th century? Like that we are all so veiled, this is causing problems. Like, do we see this even outside the relationship between these two writers?

SPEAKER_00 15:56

Yeah, that's a really interesting question. I see a similar sort of technique for managing uncertainty about like surface and essence in Margaret Fuller's writing. Um Hawthorne owns some of his owes some of his success to Fuller's endorsement of his uh work in the early 1840s. I think in a lot of ways they do both draw on the sorts of questions and philosophical orientations that New England, uh, so-called transcendentalism uh and its sort of Lyceum circuit that uh Hawthorne Marswell participates in uh developed. Um I do think there's a kind of philosophically, there's a sort of spiciness to this uh play with form and allegory in Hawthorne that I don't think is terribly common. Um allegorical tales that seem to be staging something like the limits of allegory itself or coming up against their own uh sort of representative uh boundaries. It's hard to locate writing from this period that's as formally experimental as Melville's, um, while you know similarly engaged uh with these questions. I do think looking at Hawthorne's later novels, uh, we do find a kind of like more familiar formal uh shape uh that would have looked like uh other materials from the period. Melville, though, throughout the 1850s, just gets weirder and weirder uh until by the end of the decade um he's writing things that basically no one really can sort of comprehend or grasp or or locate uh in any specific tradition.

SPEAKER_04 17:39

Still a problem, yes.

SPEAKER_00 17:39

And it was you know it would be left to the 20th century to sort out um what was going on, certainly after you know 1855. Hawthorne was more famous uh by the time they met, never as famous as he thought he should be. Um conservative politics, uh unfortunate views about uh women writers of the period. Um he's sort of often described as sort of brooding and shy and melancholic. Um but I think one gets the sense both from his own correspondence and those descriptions that like also quite full of himself. So there's this story about their meeting in the summer um August, uh I think it is, of 1850, uh, in which Melville and his wife Lizzie and a handful of other sort of literati, Oliver Wendell Holmes, uh, the poet Sarah Morwood, uh, with whom Melville might have also had a relationship uh in the following years.

SPEAKER_02 18:43

Oh.

SPEAKER_00 18:43

Um Cornelius Matthews is there. Um Hawthorne arrives, uh, and Melville's editor and publisher, uh Everett Dykink. Hawthorne arrives without his wife, um, so then for like a week of like partying and picnicking in the Berkshires uh with friends. And as the story goes, Melville's immediately smitten. Um The Scarlet Letter so has appeared in March of the same year, but my understanding, uh, looking back to biography is that Melville had not read The Scarlet Letter at this point, um, and had read some of the short tales published um in 1837 and 1846. And the story goes, they're off on a picnic, the group, and the uh thunderstorm compels Melville and Hawthorne to sort of uh hide out in a cave or on some cliffs for several hours, uh, at which point they bond. And some of the prose would suggest Melville actually just really swoons over this older, handsomer, somewhat more famous, uh and I think even more sort of spicily melancholic um writer.

SPEAKER_04 19:50

It's very yes, kind of Byronic almost, like the thunderstorm, the cave. That's just what happens in the Berkshires, who knows?

SPEAKER_00 19:57

Yeah, I assume that's what happens in the Berkshires. Sounds like it anyway, certainly in the 1850s.

SPEAKER_04 20:02

Yeah, it fits in kind of the puzzle piece in my mind of the thing they can have. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 20:06

Melville then is given a copy of Mosses from an Old Manse, um, the 1846 story collection by Hawthorne. And then like two weeks later, a review appears, published by Diakane, which it's like a 7,000-word uh account of how Hawthorne is basically Shakespeare uh for the US. Uh, and so a lot of the sort of best quotes, I suppose, um, describing Melville's affinity for Hawthorne, the person, uh, can be pulled from this review. I honestly don't think it's a terribly effective review or like great account uh of those tales, mostly just it's so gushing uh page after page uh about Hawthorne's genius. Uh and we can jump to that maybe in a minute. The the story then unfolds where this is a really pivotal moment in Melville's life. He's maybe, I don't know what portion of the way through Moby Dick at this point, but it's in it's been developed. Um and I think at this point he's got a somewhat sort of happier ending in mind, or maybe a more conventional uh sort of novel. Uh and there are suggestions that Hawthorne, uh, along with Moorewood, uh, sort of pushes him to the darker, stranger uh version of Moby Dick with which you're familiar. Moby Dick is then published about a year later in September of 1851. And of course, famously, uh, Melville expects it to be successful, uh, and it's not. Um Hawthorne claims to like it, um, but it's not well reviewed. In that intervening year, uh, and shortly after meeting Hawthorne, uh Morwood, and others in the Berkshires, Melville decides to uproot his family from Manhattan and move out there. So this is like a big jump to the suburbs, I mean, really, the distant exurbs uh from Manhattan. He borrows against his wife's inheritance. Swife's the daughter of the Massachusetts Supreme Court Justice, Lemuel Shaw. And they buy a little homestead in the Berkshires. Six miles, five miles, something like that, from where Hawthorne lives. So there's been a lot of critical speculation that Melville's like actually leaves New York City, moves to the country to be near Hawthorne. Ironically, then Hawthorne leaves a couple years later, claiming he never liked living in the Berkshires, and he's off to go on this adventure to Europe. But they do spend some time, and there are ten letters in Melville's handwritten to Hawthorne, which are quite arduous in some cases. My read on that correspondence is that Hawthorne's a little less into the relationship, but they certainly do seem to admire each other and their work. So there's this really interesting set of questions, I guess, there, knowing that story about how much Hawthorne's influence shapes Moby Dick. Millville does read The Scarlet Letter uh in the uh next year or so, uh, as I recall. Uh but my interest has always been in how some of those tales might offer the the text he was reviewing, right, during that year when he was also writing Moby Dick.

SPEAKER_04 23:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:18

Might offer kind of analogues to or ways into moments in Moby Dick uh that resonate with them. And then I think really that's the end of their relationship. They correspond a little throughout the 50s. Um Hawthorne returns to the US in 1860 or 1861, uh, I can't recall right. Um as the war breaks out. Uh and I don't think beyond that, there's a whole lot of correspondence between them. Um a lot of scholarship, though.

SPEAKER_04 23:47

Yeah. We would fill the gap for sure.

SPEAKER_00 23:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 23:52

He seems to dedicate the book to him less about the things he had written and more about the person that he is, but more about the person that Homethorne is to Melville. But it does sound like you were talking that maybe reading the things that he wrote, sort of at least those early works, then um seem to like open um Melville's kind of like aesthetic mind to the possibilities of having that like stranger, darker ending or like more um rhetorical weirdness, even if Pomphone himself didn't necessarily write those. I think a lot of people um who are writers could thump could point to like one or two um other novelists or would have you that just kind of like, oh, I didn't know you could do that. And you don't necessarily copy that thing, but then that just sort of like the giddiness of realizing that you can talk about the um things in like the stranger when you're gonna go over to left or right, and um, your own work kind of opens exponentially as a result. Um, so yeah, I mean, maybe our our biggest question would just be well, why did he dedicate this giant thing to him? Um at least um at the moment he was incredibly personally important to Melville.

SPEAKER_00 25:12

Yeah, it's a fun puzzle for that reason. There's a lot of sort of juicy biographical material to chew on. I was reading rereading this review of uh Monsters from an Old Man's this morning, thinking I was gonna find more of the kind of critical insight on Melville's part that would lead me to a kind of clearer sense of here's the here's the way this story influences this moment of Moby Dick or something like that. Uh, you know, in a way I'm glad it's not there because that's you know gives me work to do or you know, us work to do thinking through the religion. Um but there are moments in that review which is just very odd uh in several ways that do kind of maybe point in the direction of certain features of Moby Dick that um the podcast is gonna work its way through in the coming weeks. Um there's this weird element uh in the uh use of a pseudonym. So the the review is called Hawthorne and his mosses, appears in the middle of August of 1850. Um not by Melville, by a Virginian spending July in Vermont, which is a strange appellation. Melville's not a Virginian. Um they weren't spending time in Vermont, um, so it's just an odd pseudonym.

SPEAKER_04 26:27

He's gotta hide himself.

SPEAKER_00 26:28

And it's maybe this was Everett Dyking protecting Melville at some level. Um maybe this uh was Melville kind of trying to mess with Hawthorne or remain anonymous.

SPEAKER_04 26:37

Um maybe he just liked the alliteration.

SPEAKER_00 26:40

But it opens with this just like blazoned to Hawthorne's personhood. It's just it's weird how gushing uh uh he is. Even, you know, in reviews in the 1850s uh did sometimes look like this. Um this one, though, seems uh particularly affectionate. He describes Hawthorne in the opening as a my a man of a deep and noble nature has seized me in this seclusion. Uh, as described in the experience of reading the book, his wild witch voice rings through me, or in softer cadences I seem to hear it in the song of the hillside birds that sing in the larch trees at my window. And he goes on this is a sh, you know, a collection of short stories that doesn't really begin discussing in any kind of detail for another thousand words or so. He spends about half of the review on Shakespeare trying to align Shakespeare's reputation, Shakespeare's body of work, with Hawthorne's emerging reputation. Hawthorne's produced one novel at this point.

SPEAKER_04 27:40

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_00 27:41

And maybe, you know, 40 tales. Um. And then returns later in the review to an account of how a kind of um darker side to Hawthorne's work uh animates uh his attachment to it. And it's there that I feel like maybe we get a sense of how this response to those tales or certain elements of their uh composition uh and allegorical framing might have been animating Melville's thinking. Um then he turns back the end of the review to sort of more of the uh gushing account uh of how Hawthorne should become or must become uh a kind of signal American writer uh who would stand uh for American fiction writing in the way that Shakespeare would stand for the English canon uh in the imagination of the American 1850s. A little ironic in some ways because it's maybe more like Melville, who becomes that figure uh when he's recovered in the 1930s and 40s by literary critics. Um he very much positions Hawthorne uh in that way throughout this review. So yeah, I don't know, I'm not sure what I think about the sort of literary merits of his reading of, or the critical merits of his reading of Hawthorne, um, but his enthusiasm is clearly on display in a way that borders on Ishmaelian at times that I find kind of fun.

SPEAKER_04 29:11

Yeah, I like thinking about him as like a young writer sort of discovering his taste, discovering um sort of the tendrils of what he likes to read, and then sort of the like reverberations in his own work about how he wants to write about the stuff he wants to write about. If we were to read the whole novel with these kind of like Hawthorne tinted glasses, do we think we would see a lot? Or is it mostly we just have to believe us that he read Hawthorne stuff early on and was influenced by it, but he wrote it in a completely different way?

SPEAKER_00 29:48

I mean, let's try out a few examples, maybe. Um one of the stories in Moss is from an old mance that Melville acknowledges in the review, and which is, I don't know, maybe one of the better stories. Um, is this Rappuccini's daughter? I don't know if we read this uh together in the past or not. I can't remember.

SPEAKER_04 30:08

Does this have the plant monster in it?

SPEAKER_00 30:10

Yes, and it's a relatively straightforward plot, which I'll I won't spoil the end of, it's not really necessary. Um protagonist is a medical student who moves to town and rents an apartment overlooking a beautiful garden, um, which contains a mysterious beautiful woman. Uh we learn over the course of the story that the both the garden and the woman are poisonous and corporeally uh sort of tainted, and that the the beauty and the poison uh are inextricable from one another.

SPEAKER_04 30:41

Uh sounds like a hawthorn joint. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:43

It's a sort of Garden of Eden allegory. It's certainly playing with gender norms uh and politics and anxieties about sexuality. Um and you know, to track the allegorical significance of the story or its so-called moral, we'd read through the end. Um I might have to spoil that actually, I don't know. But here's a passage that's like really interesting, right? So that sounds Melville with respect to its interest in a kind of ambiguity about where the truth resides, or how meaning and truth are organized in and by a corporeal body. Um Giovanni's looking down at the garden and sort of noticing gradually it's gradually dawning on that something's odd. Um, and eventually the poison will contaminate him as well. But he's trying to understand what the feeling he has means, I guess, and how it coordinates with the mysterious elements uh that he's observing. So whether or not, this is uh Hawthorne, Beatrice possessed those terrible attributes, that fatal breath, aside, she she breathes on things and they die. That fatal breath, the affinity with those so beautiful and deadly flowers which were indicated by what Giovanni had witnessed, she had at least instilled a fierce and subtle poison into his system. Breaking again. Poison right here is is literal, um and it's this sort of figurative poison that is infatuation. Um it was not love, this is Hawthorne again, although her rich beauty was a madness to him, nor horror, even while he fancied her spirit to be imbued with the same deignful essence that seemed to pervade her physical frame, but a wild offspring of both love and horror that had each parent in it, and burned like one and shivered like the other. Giovanni knew not what to dread, still less did he know what to hope, yet hope and dread kept a continual warfare in his breast, alternately vanquishing one another, and starting up afresh to renew the contest. Blessed are all simple emotions, be they dark or bright, it is the lurid intermixture of the two that produces the illuminating blaze of the infernal regions. So, on the one hand, I think they notice is like this sentence writing technique feels like a lot of the moments in Moby Dick and in other prose from the early 1850s by Melville, um, in which the sort of like you know, full investment uh in an elaborate, romantic, kind of almost like Baroque uh sentence craft takes the stage. Hawthorne's really, I think, a master of that uh in this period. Melville pushes uh that technique, I think, further. Uh a use the use of the word lurid in that last phrase, intermixture of the two, uh the light and the dark, feels to kind of like a Melvillean move uh to make the philosophical claim a little sexier. Uh it's distributed throughout the body or understood as a corporeal or physical uh problem or experience. I think the difference starts to come into focus when one thinks about how in Hawthorne these kinds of questions, can you tell the difference between love and dread when the two experiences mingle? Or is that mingling, in fact, the experience we're trying to name? In Hawthorne, those kinds of questions are usually framed, as they are in this story, by some kind of, as we suggested, like tale structure or social organization that frames the moral or ethical quandary, um, as the later novels uh would suggest. At the same time, there's this fascination with the question of like how bodies mean, or what makes a person legible uh in any sense, whether the signs on the outside of the body, in other words, as we were suggesting earlier, can be read as indices of what's beneath or what's hidden or what's true. So the stories want to frame that question in Hawaii. I think Melville takes a similar set of questions. Can the features of the body's whale be read adequately? Yeah, right?

SPEAKER_04 35:07

Yeah, I was gonna say there are two very famous bodies, and Willby Dix, the white whale, and then Ahab with his leg. Right. So clearly that's something he's interested in studying for the whole book. Yeah, I take the Andqueg, I suppose, in his tattoos. Sorry, yeah, go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 35:22

That seems right. Kuiqueg's tattoos, the body of the whale, Ishmael's body, the body of the Pequad in a way, like so full of signifiers and elements that want to be discerned and read, corporealized but also interpreted. I think Melville takes this kind of like hermeneutic challenge, this problem with interpretation. Can we read our own experience, our own feelings, the signs on other people's bodies, the signs that are other people's bodies and experiences, the things they say and write? Yeah. Can we see through them to some, I don't know, lower substrate?

SPEAKER_04 35:55

Or is that folly? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:57

Yeah. Or when we try to do that, do we rather reveal, I don't know, a larger problem with interpretation or understanding that links all these bodies? Yeah, that's cool. You know, I think Hawthorne develops for Melville a kind of way of posing this question that a novel like Moby Dick then pushes past the range in which Hawthorne would consider that question posable or answerable. So that as you guys will uh no doubt sort of encounter, there's so many moments in Moby Dick in which like bodies bleed out of and into one another, in which the sort of corporeal limits and boundaries that one's trying to discern or use to discern what might lie beneath the surface lead to an even weirder intermixture to use Hawthorne's term of elements corporeal and non-corporeal, physical and non-physical, human and non-human. Um I guess I feel like there's this staging of a problem with how we read and understand what the things we see, touch, feel, signify, developed by Hawthorne in these short tales, uh, and then pressed by Melville into a more avant-garde and experimental mode in Moby Dick. But that's kind of my take on it. And that's really not what Melville thinks he's saying when he's reviewing Hawthorne so enthusiastically in 1850. But he does kind of notice this darkness. Um, in spite of all the sunlight on the hither side of Hawthorne's soul, this is back in that review, the other side, like the dark half of the physical sphere, is shrouded in a blackness, ten times black. But this darkness gives more effect to the ever-moving dawn that forever advances through it and circumnavigates his world. Whether Hawthorne has simply availed himself of this mystical blackness as a means to the wondrous effects he makes it to produce in his lights and shades, or whether there really lurks in him, perhaps unknown to himself, a touch of the puritanic gloom, this I cannot altogether tell. I that question seems like a useful way of characterizing uh Hawthorne, if not the sort of deepest, but it really does seem to characterize elements of Melville's thinking in the 1850s, in which the question about like how much leaning into the darker elements, let's call them, uh, on display in Moby Dick uh reflects a kind of like state of things, uh a kind of, I suppose, dark romantic or gothic attachment uh to the uh version of the world in which a monster is always about to jump out of the ocean and bite your leg off. Um on the other hand, the sense that that kind of gothic performativity is a technique or a device for revealing something, say about the social world, um, or maybe sort of elements of character uh the novel wants to explore. And I think in the case of Hawthorne's writing, for the most part that's the case. Uh Gothic aesthetics, for instance, uh have a kind of use value for interrogating early US history uh or colonial American history, for thinking about social relationship, um, religious doctrine, uh, politics, and so on. Melville is interested in all of that, as as you'll see. He also, though, I think has a kind of I don't know, philosophical intensity uh that pushes this Hawthorne technique uh to different places.

SPEAKER_04 39:48

Yeah, it sounds like this is so interesting. Like, it sounds like um citing some of this review that he wrote is less about just the stories and more about how thrilling it was for him to read Hawthorne as like a portal into this it's sort of like this like wormhole, and then you come out the other side and you know um Yeah, so it sounds like when you're so when you're saying that for Humphrey if we kind of think that um obviously there are differences, but there is kind of like a soup that they're both interested in. And for Hawthorne, the best way to write about that, the most useful way, the thing that had tropes that interested him in, the kind of characters he could do, kind of that allegorical like bow at the end, was in these shorter capital G, like gothic tales. He's kind of like the recognizable thing, the strong sense of place. He knew his neighbor would understand the story, like those things interested him as the best container for the way to talk about all the stuff about bodies, et cetera. And for Melville, somehow in the like mechanics of his mind, that would not necessarily happen to the next person, the person next to him, but for him, reading those stories, he said, the best way to talk about these things for me is to go and write this the novel that we're reading, which just because it's so much bigger, gives us more room, sort of more breathing space to talk about the bodies and the what are the risks of interpretation. We got we start to be able to have options, like we see this interpretation's consequences, and then 50 pages later we get to say this different consequence, and we aren't quite so tied down to the neatness of like what must happen to Joe Giovanni in 30 pages, and then it has to end. Because we get this sprawling work, and parts of it become like a poem, and parts of it become a textbook, and parts of it become a play, and parts of it become like a song or like a Shakespeare monologue. He is able to attack it in different ways that were not necessarily interesting to Hawthorne, but um, they're kind of writing out of these same instincts that for us, hundreds of years later, is so fascinating, and that we can read, look at all the different ways that these men wanted to attack this problem. And can it be interesting for us as writers and readers to kind of think about what are all of our options if we're all interested in the same thing?

SPEAKER_00 42:18

Yeah, that's really well put. I think that's right. I mean, I think, yeah, Hawthorne would never have imagined that he could write a novel that sprawls the way Moby Dick does, or that is sort of formally unconstrained. And I think the formal constraints on the tales are in a part are in a lot in a large part like their engine, right? Or what makes them like gives them their shape and logic, or makes posing these sorts of philosophical questions.

SPEAKER_04 42:46

It can be really good to like force yourself to write a story that ends in 10 pages, like that has different requirements, that has different pleasures. And I could see, you know, it could be really difficult for a writer who likes to do that to say write a 600-page novel. That would break down. It might not necessarily be good.

SPEAKER_00 43:05

That's a great like creative writing question, program question for your that you're you know, it's more in your wheelhouse than mine. You could locate moments like I'm suggesting, the lurid intermixture of light and dark, for instance.

SPEAKER_04 43:19

To get me there in 30 pages versus three.

SPEAKER_00 43:21

Right, and locate that in Moby Dick and ask, like, as a writer, to what degree does the the shape of the tale enforce um attention to certain techniques or constrain your options? And then why does Melville just eschew all such constraints, or at least appear to, um, as he develops Moby Dick? Um, which is really, you know, try anything, or even like the sort of concept of the anatomy as a literary device or technique, right, taking apart the whale chapter by chapter, um, would not have seemed, I think, to Hawthorne a plausible like device or structure um for for storytelling. So there's something about something I think you know about Melville's formal experimentation that doesn't have an obvious antecedent or or inspiration. But there is a kind of mood that we're describing that does feel very much like of its literary moments and attached to the kinds of vibes uh one gets from those mosses and old from an old man's uh and twice told tales stories. I do think, you know, we're focused really here on 1850, on this moment in the summer where they meet, and then what happens in the following year. Hawthorne moves out there to the sorry, Melville moves out of there to the Berkshires to be near to Hawthorne, maybe, or maybe to be near to Moorewood. It's not really clear. Um and this is a pivotal kind of moment for him. He's still, I think, in 1850 entertaining the idea that he'll have success with Moby Dick. Um Type and Oumu didn't make him a ton of money, but they were critical successes. Uh, this was the first two novels. White Jacket and Redburn didn't quite land uh in the ways he'd hoped, but were also sort of well reviewed. Um the idea here was that Moby Dick was going to bring Melville back to the sort of status that the publication of Type P had suggested he might achieve. Um it's plausible that if he'd composed a more recognizable thing, um, that if he'd I mean, you know, adhered to some of the constraints that Hawthorne understood novels to require of novelists, uh, that he might have had that success because of the sort of maritime adventure.

SPEAKER_04 45:38

Yeah. Because there was yeah, there was clearly an audience for sort of the subject the um them thematic sort of um subject matter.

SPEAKER_00 45:46

Signs of cannibals, signs of sex, wailing. Um but hot stuff. I think, you know, a lot of you'll you'll get to this, I suppose, at some point, but you know, a lot of the early reviews of Moby Dick didn't get past the homoeroticism in the chapters, uh, in the early chapters. A lot of the reviews didn't get past the sort of sense of the formal disarray that one gets when kind of flipping through the text rather than reading it carefully. Um and so it's this pivotal moment in Melbourne's career, and he never really recovers. His following novel, Pierre, is even more of a disaster for all sorts of other reasons. There's some amazing short fiction uh written during this period: Bartleby the Scrivener, Benito Sereno, the Piazza Tales, Incantatas. Um those two they don't look a lot like Hawthorne tales. They're sort of not governed by predictable structures, or when they do have a structure. Um a story like The Paradise of Bachelors and The Tartarus of Maids is like a diptych structure. Um, it's still even puzzling how to think about the tale as a story, or how to think about the narrative elements. It feels modernist or avant-garde, you know, even when Melville's writing short fiction as well. So I don't know, it's like Hawthorne seems like he arrives in Melville's life as Moby Dick is in, you know, being composed, and at this kind of pivotal moment uh in his personal life leaves quite a mark uh on Moby Dick, or at least that's the invitation is to find that mark. Um and then I think they sort of part ways, uh both artistically uh and personally, after this uh moment that's been written about so much in which they're hiding out together in a rainstorm.

SPEAKER_04 47:34

The most important rainstorm in American literary history, probably.

SPEAKER_00 47:39

Certainly one of the better picnic dates, I guess.

SPEAKER_04 47:41

I guess, yes. So, yeah, it sounds like there's a there's a lot there. I was going to sort of ask um if there are anything that um a Melville reader would really enjoy reading of the Hawthorne works if she has never dipped her toe there before. Is there anything that like as the library expands, a person might be surprised to learn again if the only thing that they know Hawthorne from is just like the the reputation of the Scarlet Letter or if they've seen Easy A starring Mistone?

SPEAKER_00 48:22

I think everyone should read The Scarlet Letter. It's so funny. I was like, I found it tortuous in high school when they made me read it. Um I mean, I can't really remember that adolescent epistemology well enough to sort of think of think of why that would have been. And then I had to encounter it in graduate school, uh, and I dreaded it, even having read Hawthorne at that point, uh, and was struck by just how gorgeous that novel is. Like it's really an astonishing, like beautiful, sort of troubling um short novel that gets sort of pre-seed, like sort of we we uh we anticipate it too much. Um although those adaptations are are great as well. So I definitely check that out. Certainly for a sense of like how style operated too in 1850, uh, for these uh US writers thinking themselves as Capital R romanticists.

SPEAKER_02 49:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 49:20

And then I think I would probably go to the Mosses from an Old Man's collection that Melville reviews in 1850. I think there too you'd find a handful of stories that pull into focus this thing we've been kind of trying to tease out of both Hawthorne and Melville's thinking uh in this period, which is a question about how representation happens or what art is supposed to do relative to this question about surface and depth or appearances and then the deeper hidden truths beyond or beneath appearances. So, in that collection, the birthmark is a good kind of intro story. Uh Rappuccini's daughter, which we discussed, I think, uh sort of builds uh that question. And then some of the more specific this question, the stories that seem to be more explicitly about art, Drown's wooden image, uh, is a sort of Pygnalian um rehashing. And then the um artist of the beautiful uh is a disturbing uh and weird story um about how art happens. Um, and the and then in that story like that, which I once summarized about a guy who invents a mechanical butterfly, um, which is so beautiful and lifelike uh that it sort of troubles the boundary between engineering and artistry.

SPEAKER_04 50:33

Oh, cool, kind of uncanny. Well, lastly, I might, unless you have anything, um do you have anything else you kind of want to?

SPEAKER_00 50:41

I would say that Hawthorne, just for one last point, too, is rarely anywhere close to as funny as Melville is in Moby Dick. And that's that'd be an interesting comparative point to sort of draw out while reading them too. I mean, it's not that there aren't moments in Hawthorne that are um sort of wickedly hilarious, um, but they just, especially in those first like 20 or so chapters, which you're in the middle of uh now, uh in Moby Dick, but really throughout, there's just a sort of like hilarity to Moby Dick. Um and I would I always wondered what Hawthorne thought of that, you know, or like what any of these, this sort of like um group that surrounded Melville uh thought about the humor and the sort of playfulness uh of Moby Dick. It's not that the Hawthorne tales aren't playful, they're just constrained, I think, by an attachment to sort of conventional form or formal conventions, and there's a conservatism, I guess, about Hawthorne's like story construction that conceals a sort of, as Melbourne put it, like ten times black or whatever, darkness um or anxiety and uncertainty. But he's just sort of rarely as experimental and and well playful uh as Moby Dick often is.

SPEAKER_04 52:05

Yeah. It sounds like maybe he was not, yeah, he was just not maybe a hilarious person.

SPEAKER_00 52:10

No, I think yeah, he's pretty moody. Um I mean they both they both were. Melville has this um, well, certainly in Boby Dick uh and elsewhere in the early 50s, um I don't know, this unusual uh sense for how like comedy might play within a narrative structure that doesn't rely upon the comedy exactly or isn't built around it. Um that's just something to trace in Bobby Dick that for which I I I don't see a like many analogues in this period. Um so we'll see what you guys think about.

SPEAKER_04 52:47

Yeah, that's yeah, that's an interesting point. I was like you were saying earlier that like Melville was comparing was trying to maybe force this um analogy between Hawthorne and Shakespeare, but to us now it's sort of more Melville, who we could think of as sort of obviously not a one-to-one, but also like Shakespeare in his tragedies. I think he like invented the idea of like comic relief of like we're doing you know the most horrible things you've ever seen, and then like the police officer comes in and there's a break in tension and in sort of like um you can almost think of some of the formal changes to be moments of like humor where he may um where you can kind of see the you know the writer, the the hand of God come in and sort of say, and now we're going over here, and like that has to be kind of funny. Um sort of thinking about like moments in songs where you think that there's like a kind of a joke at work. Yeah, I think that's interesting. Um, yeah, Melville definitely, um, both in his use of like irony, where you think of like kind of like high culture, but also he was capable of kind of like going low and just making like a goofy joke.

SPEAKER_03 54:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 54:01

Whether or not we like laugh out loud at them that we can recognize that he's making a joke and kind of just appreciate that. We're kind of the rhythm again, like you were saying, of this long novel. We need that to ebb and flow, or it's gonna feel like a slog. And it seems like he um is largely, and again, as the as the pod moves through this, we'll be able to be a little more specific, but like moments of lightness tempering, that's really huge, at least Shakespearean novel of like high tragedy, you know, the set by the people who are doing it to themselves, but also like we have moments where just like the sailors are funny, and why do that? Because he can, and that makes it more fun. Yeah, and it's um it's helpful sort of the the rhythm of for the rhythm.

SPEAKER_00 54:46

I do wish I could ask Hawthorne that. Like, what does he think about you know, putting on the whale's penis as a coat and then making a sort of joke about religious vestments out of that, right? Or Queequeg doing obstetrics on the sinking head of the whale. You know, just like the moments in which the uh the the chapter will invite this kind of philosophical reflection or or depth that's constructed out of, you know, the re that is a reflection on its elements, on what's happening, right? As Keyquake is diving after uh the sinking head of the whale. But then Melville will shift into this humorous or ironic mode that feels like it's taking suggests the chapter is taking itself less seriously than it also invites. Uh that lurid intermixture, I guess, of sort of gravity uh and levity in Boby Dick is something that would be really interesting to see a writer like Hawthorne or Margaret Fuller or someone sort of like take on uh or try to explain. But I suppose that's our job now.

SPEAKER_04 55:50

That is our job. That is our job. So my last question, um, because I'm obviously reading this book again very slowly, but I know what's coming. You have taught it many, many times, are gearing up to possibly do it again. Um I was just kind of wondering, as you hit this book over and over, and there's so much to it, and you can talk about something different every time. Um what is your favorite part of Moby Dick to revisit? Is there a do you have kind of like a pet theme that you like to turn over, or kind of like your own sort of obsessive bent about this novel that's about having an obsessive bent?

SPEAKER_00 56:32

You guys need to pick one moment one moment? That's hard. I love this. Was it chapter 44? Um so right after the like the the whole period, you're gonna get I'm spoiling things that are coming up in the podcast.

SPEAKER_04 56:49

That's okay.

SPEAKER_00 56:49

That's okay. So there's this one amazing day on board the Pequad that begins in the morning with the famous quarter deck speech, in which Ahab sort of summons the crew to his mission, uh, and ends with a the same day, which is so eight, nine chapters, um, ends in chapter 44 with Ahab starting from his sleep uh in the middle of the night. And there's this fascinating description that's been read many times by various critics, of how the body and the soul are sort of becoming unyoked from one another, that Ahab's monomania, already stayed up too late uh studying charts, trying to find Moby Dick in his wailing charts, has sort of like driven an internal thing, an essence of the self, an inner volition or driver to sort of exit the body. Um, or at least that's one way of reading it. And then you've got sort of the story of this happening to Ahab. He he flies from his bed as though his like soul were on fire. Um, and then you've got Ishmael's kind of take on it or reading of what it means. Uh, and those two things are sort of overlap, but are also maybe a little bit at odds. Um and it starts to highlight this fascinating question about where are the kind of boundaries and limits that fashion the individual self or maybe even just the corporeal thing that is the body, uh, you know, where those actually lie and how like really stable andor permeable they might be. From that moment, at the end of that amazing long quarter deck day, which I would suggest kind of reading as a thing, like a chapter 36 to 44, have this kind of like pivotal start the clock element to them to them. Um reading though, both forward and backward of the novel from that moment has really helped me kind of like trace fascinating slippages or accounts of corporeal elements, the whale's body, again, the body that is the ship, Ahab's body, etc., Kuiquake's body. Um I guess they that helps me track a kind of playfulness in Melville with a question about like where the boundaries uh and limits uh of the self really lie, and then how much we can, if we look carefully, take apart a body like the whale's body, uh, start to discern uh the sort of degree to which we kind of bleed into one another, um, or in which the the world is comprised of things that appear to be discrete elements, right? Um, but are in fact a kind of like indiscreet mix or lurid intermixture, as Hawthorne would have it. Um corporeal elements. So I like have come to sort of see chapter 44 as this kind of moment that offered me a kind of interpretive lens on a lot of those others. Um I've also been really interested lately in like the labor politics of the Pequods world. Um, you'll get to a moment uh in which um Ahab raises a gun on Starbuck because Starbucks insisting they stop their pursuit of Moby Dick to preserve some of the wealth they've uh collected. Uh and that leads to that's another kind of interesting moment I think that leads to a series of questions about how like the laboring bodies on board the Pequod uh or organized and constituted, what it means that Ahab's able to sort of uh perform this kind of totalitarian, you know, uh offer this kind of like a authoritarian model of how the Pequad should be organized around his volition, uh his own.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:33

Right, right, but only by consent of the workers, you know, all under this kind of imaginary society on the boat. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:40

Exactly. Starbuck, on the other hand, has a kind of market-driven understanding of what the whole thing means. Um and the contest between those, well, maybe kind of like political economy, Starbuck versus political theology, Ahab, um seems to me to kind of spin out from that moment uh in which the confrontation between them comes to you know gunpoint. Um and that too seemed like a cool moment to then track backward and forward in the novel and see what we think about you know what Melville might be thinking or saying about political economy in the 1850s, um, using the Pequot as a kind of microcosm uh for modernity.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:19

Yeah, yeah. And that Starbuck and Ahab thing returns with the musket in one of my favorite chapters, which will take us like three years to get to, but when he has that like um monologue when Ahab is asleep and Starbuck is like I can end all this right now. Oh, that's so good, but yeah, that's one of my favorite parts in like almost any book. That's that's really that's really remarkable. Um something to look forward to. Well, I think we have done something amazing here today, which is to kick off a Humathorn renaissance. It's gonna happen and it's gonna be shocking. We're gonna have a a Humathorn Autumn, is my prediction. Um Thank you so much for for joining me today and lending your wisdom, your interpretation to this interpretive task, and we'll only know in time if we've destroyed part of our symbols by trying to understand something. But at least today, I think uh I think we had a good time.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:24

That was really fun. Thanks for having me. Um I'm a random, let's do it again.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:32

You've been listening to the Pequot part with Tristan Babel Marquise, Meg Van Cher, and Johnny Wallace. Our music is by Lost in the Loop with Sound Engineering by Lauren Ayton. The show's I'm at work is by Delaney Garrett, and Tristan is on the synth. We want to say a big thank you to all of our supporters on Patreon. You can join them over at patreon.com forward slash peakwodplub for bonus content and for opportunities to help us keep the show running in chip shape condition. Ratings and reviews also really help us out, so if you enjoy the show, please do express your thoughts and metaphysical yearnings in the review section wherever you're listening to the show. Tell your friends, tell your fellows, tell the white whale on whom you're monomanonically urged to be revenged. It all helps.