Joshua Malbin

When I taught writing, one of the main things I wanted my students to learn was how to steal. If you can’t steal from other writers you’ll never go anywhere. Ask Shakespeare.

This inaugurates what could be a regular series of posts discussing moments, scenes, or turns of phrase worth ripping off. It may or may not be limited to books. Today’s victim: Nathaniel Hawthorne.

They are practised politicians, every man of them, and skilled to adjust those preliminary measures, which steal from the people, without its knowledge, the power of choosing its own rulers. The popular voice, at the next gubernatorial election, though loud as thunder, will be really but an echo of what these gentlemen shall speak, under their breath, at your friend’s festive board.

In case there’s anyone in the world who cares about spoilers for The House of the Seven Gables, I’ll put my brief discussion below the fold.

The scene occurs late in the book. Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon has vomited blood onto his shirt and collapsed dead in the house’s front parlor. Clifford and Hepzibah Pyncheon have fled. We are led to believe this is because Clifford murdered the Judge. Although he has made it quite clear that the Judge is dead, Hawthorne has carefully avoided saying so directly.

The Judge has not shifted his position for a long while, now. He has not stirred hand or foot–nor withdrawn his eyes, so much as a hair’s breadth, from their fixed gaze toward the corner of the room–since the footsteps of Hepzibah and Clifford creaked along the passage, and the outer door was closed cautiously behind their exit. He holds his watch in his left hand, but clutched in such a manner that you cannot see the dial-plate. How profound a fit of meditation!

What follows is a whole chapter of irony. One after another the narrator describes what were to have been the Judge’s errands for the day and declares himself amazed that the Judge would miss them.

Pray, pray, Judge Pyncheon, look at your watch, now! What, not a glance? It is within ten minutes of the dinner-hour! It surely cannot have slipt your memory, that the dinner of to-day is to be the most important, in its consequences, of all the dinners you ever ate.

Because it was at this dinner, we learn, that political machers (in the Puritan) were to have picked the Judge to run for governor. The chapter even has the ironic title “Governor Pyncheon.”

This goes on, and on, and on. The Judge sits there a full day. In the middle of the night he is visited by the ghosts of all his ancestors, stretching back two centuries to when the House was built on stolen land. The chapter ends when someone finally opens the door the following morning.

There are a few things to notice here. The first is the basic device, copied many times since Hawthorne, of making time pass by marking all the things the character should have been doing at hour X. (“I looked at my watch. It was past the time for me to pick up the kids from the sitter.” etc.) In order for the reader to feel time passing, the Judge must sit still for many pages. Something needs to fill those pages. Another method would be to describe the little that goes on (the sun creeps across the room, flies buzz), but unless you want to describe noises from the street and it’s a busy street, this can only takes up a matter of paragraphs. Hawthorne does all of these things too–a fly buzzes on the Judge’s face and the narrator wonders why he doesn’t brush it off, his watch ticks loudly until at last the spring unwinds and it stops–but there’s a lot more to fill the pages besides.

(This is not to dismiss what fills the pages, I just don’t want to get bogged down talking about themes instead of mechanics.)

The second is that Hawthorne also lets us feel time passing by shifting to present tense from past only for this one chapter.

Finally, when Hawthorne does have the ghosts appear, he denies using them, which allows him to have his Gothic element both ways:

This fantastic scene, just hinted at, must by no means be considered as forming an actual portion of our story. We were betrayed into this brief extravagance by the quiver of the moonbeams…

And, of course, by the portrait of the patriarch of the Pyncheon dynasty, who glowers over the whole book, from beginning to end. Even when you’re not technically writing with fairies or ghosts, you can  have magic. In fact, you can’t avoid it and have a story with an actual plot. As Calvino writes (in Six Memos for the Next Millennium):

…the moment an object appears in a narrative, it is charged with a special force and becomes like the pole of a magnetic field, a knot in the network of invisible relationships. The symbolism of an object may be more or less explicit, but it is always there. We might even say that in a narrative any object is always magic.

You might as well use it rather than trying to fight it.

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