PARTISAN REVIEW
437
to older typology in its greater predecessor,
The Scarlet Letter.
But that
too is a bubble of fugitive typologies, consciously modern, carefully
unauthoritative, open to multiple interpretation because the modern
world is so.
The Letter itself is, of course, a type, variously engraved and sus–
ceptible to multiple interpretation. God may, as the characters of the
novel believe, have inscribed the world with types; inscribing this
world, the novel, with types is a much less certain proceeding. It is for
the reader to make sense of the inscriptions, by his own imaginative
collaboration. Once again, tradition is part of the chorus of voices that
confuse all relations between the words of the text and what they refer
to, much as the mirror distorts, and the armour, and the forest pool.
In such a book text and reality stand in no enantiomorphic relation;
the text continually questions its own references; the types with which
it is inscribed are of very uncertain provenance and meaning, for the
simple senses of the old typology and the old pneumatology are sus–
pended. " Indistinctness and duplicity of impression " are words appli–
cable not only to Dimmesdale but to the text itself, and Hawthorne
uses many means to enforce them. Here, then , is another work that
contemplates the ancient assumptions from over the threshold of the
modern; the old contracts between signifier and signified, between the
authoritative maker and the reader certain that there is a right inter–
pretation, are boldly broken. Such a text must continually draw atten–
tion to itself as something written, as open and plural, itself a type of
things to come, in a time when all books must be read with a
difference.
Chillingworth is a herbalist, expert therefore in the doctrine of
signatures, belonging to a time in which nature proclaimed, to the
scholar, its divinely-instituted structures and senses - a world, then,
very unlike what the intrusive voice in the text calls " the opaque sub–
stance of today." The types of the book of God have grown ambig–
uous. "Awful hieroglyphics" are written on the cope of heaven - as
our forefathers believed and tradition reports; but Dimmesdale inter–
prets them in a sense peculiar to himself. He alone, says the text, was
responsible for the reading. So with the text iself; the truths written on
its firmament are the responsibility of each reader. We proceed, as it
were, from truth to shadowy types. The letter itself varies in meaning;
the text undercuts traditional interpretations in the light of what it
ca lls 'modern incredulity', in the light of the "refined present" and its
