450
PARTISAN REVIEW
Hawthorne hold up his end of the dialogue? What did Melville think
of Hawthorne's intellectual reticence? The complication of their
thought is surely as important in their friendship as the relativity of
their sexual stance. In sophistication and depth, language and form,
Pierre
is a far greater novel than
The Blithedale Romance.
Even in
despair, Melville's wit always crackled with an ironic hilarity. Whereas
Hawthorne's conceits have a tendency to creak, especially in
The
B lithedale Romance.
With the same evidence that Miller exploits, one
could argue that Melville outgrew Hawthorne, that Hawthorne in his
silence was trying to think of something to say, that Melville in short
was not betrayed or abandoned, but sorely disappointed. That it was
Hawthorne who saw in Melville's beauty the icon of Orpheus, who
feared the risk of the song, but who nonetheless furtively signaled: be
my friend of friends. Which Melville generously encouraged. Melville
did need Hawthorne. Before 1850 he had subsisted on a steady diet of
Duykincks. As a writer Hawthorne was a peer. He had looked into
places Melville knew. But he also cautiously tended his reputation.
When, much older, the two writers tramped around the sand dunes on
the English coast, little had changed. Hawthorne laconically records
that Melville is still alit, still hammering away at the knot binding free
will
to
foreknowledge. Presumably Melville again did most of the
talking.
What Miller slights in his biography, the writer thinking, is
carefully respected in John
T.
Irwin's
Doubling and Incest!Repetition
and Revenge.
Irwin collapses several Faulknerian novels, principally
The Sound and the Fury
and
Absalom, Absalom!,
into a single
Faulknerian meditation on narcissism and revenge. History is Maule's
Curse for Faulkner: sons choke on the blood of their fathers, the
oedipal deadlock repetitively engenders incestuous brothers and sisters,
a succession of violence, and that is the substance of Faulkner's perfect
understanding of the darkness of history. But Faulkner, Irwin argues,
also considered in his structuring of time and passion the image, if not
the possibility, of sacrifice. Irwin's close reading of this widespread
Faulknerian meditation appropriates a series of theoretical models,
Freud and Rank on incest and the double, but it is his interpretation of
Guy Rosolato's discussion of the different politics involved in the
Isaac/ Jesus sacrifice that makes his reading of Faulkner truly specula–
tive. Faulkner constantly ponders the significance of Christ in his
fiction, the meaning of sacrifice as the resolution or pseudoresolution
of the oedipal curse, the repeated fall of man. And that finally is Irwin 's
subject in this book, the nature of sacrifice, the severance of the knot.
