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LIONEL TRILLING
its power is to be attributed to the intransigence of his imagination
but also the extraordinary esthetic success which Kafka consistently
achieves. Esthetically, it seems, it is impossible for him to fail. There
is never a fault of conception or execution, never an error of taste,
or logic, or emphasis.
As
why should there be? An imagination so
boldly autonomous, once it has brought itself into being, conceives of
nothing that can throw it off its stride. Like the dream, it confronts
subjective fact only, and there are no esthetically unsuccessful dreams,
no failed nightmares.
The dream, it need scarcely be said, plays its part in the imagina–
tion of Hawthorne too, and most markedly in those of his works which
touch us most deeply. But it is obvious that the "spontaneous, per–
emptory, and obligatory nature of dreaming"5 manifests itself far less
in Hawthorne than in Kafka. Over Hawthorne's imagination the
literal actuality of the world always maintains its dominion. This
must be kept to the forefront of our understanding of Hawthorne,
even though we go on to say that he made it his characteristic enter–
prise to represent the moral life as existing beyond the mere pragmatic,
to show it to us as a mystery, as being hidden, dark, and dangerous,
and as having some part of its existence in a world which is not that
of our ordinary knowledge. This other world, in which the presence
of divinity
is
to be dimly apprehended, interpenetrates the world of
material circumstance, and, in doing so, provides the quotidian and
actual world with its most intense significances.
When Hawthorne
is
successful in suggesting the interpenetration
of the two worlds, he affects us profoundly. But we cannot fail to be
aware of how readily his belief in the other unseen world can be
checked by his sense of this world's actuality and intractability, how
often it falls short of being spontaneous, peremptory, and obligatory.
James's violent dislike of allegory and emblematic devices make him
unduly harsh in condemnation of the flaming celestial A in
The
Scarlet Letter;
he judges the scene to be "not moral tragedy, but
physical comedy." This is extreme, but we all agree to the principle
of his objection and recall how much too often Hawthorne gave
occasion for its being made. "Roger Malvin's Burial" may serve as our
5. I take the phrase from the remarkable "Studies on the Psychopathology of
Sleep and Dreams" by Charles Fisher, M.D., and William C. Dement, M.D.,
in
The American Journal of Psychiatry,
Vol. 119, No. 12, June 1963, p. 1163.
