Holographic Hawthorne

Abstract

Holographic Hawthorne Dan Clinton (bio) I. Fixing the Image In The Marble Faun, Nathaniel Hawthorne describes his heroine Miriam’s emotional reserve as a kind of optical illusion: “She resembled one of those images of light, which conjurors evoke and cause to shine before us, in apparent tangibility, only an arm’s length beyond our grasp; we make a step in advance, expecting to seize the illusion, but find it still precisely so far out of our reach.”1 The metaphor is halfway to disenchantment; the magical “conjuror” is debunked despite his effective manipulation of “images of light.” Miriam’s suitors must be disenchanted as well. Hawthorne models this conceit on the magic lantern, [End Page 413] a device that projected images onto screens or smoke with concave mirrors.2 Hawthorne’s figurative language also projects a passing fancy as a seemingly palpable thing but distances the reader with a simile, acknowledging the “arm’s length” between representation and its imagined objects. Hawthorne’s simile draws on the myths of credulity attending new media, such as the spectators who supposedly fled from the Lumieres’ train, yet his conjuror’s dupes are too hasty to force sympathy or to seize material impressions. The confusion between objects and images stands in for the more subtle difference between sense perception and intuition. The desire to seize the conjuror’s hologram echoes the aspiration of photographers. The Marble Faun refers only once to photography; Hilda, an especially sensitive copyist, explains how she managed a “genuine copy” of Beatrice Cenci’s famous portrait despite strict rules forbidding easels in the gallery: “I had no resource but to sit down before the picture, day after day, and let it sink into my heart. I do believe it is now photographed there” (65). Hilda’s sympathetic eye becomes a camera modernizing the sentimental conceit of writing on the heart and recalling Hawthorne’s first written remark on the daguerreotype, in a love letter to Sophia Peabody: “I wish there was something in the intellectual world analogous to the Daguerreotype … something which should print off our deepest, and subtlest, and delicatest thoughts and feelings, as minutely as the above-mentioned instrument paints the various aspects of Nature.”3 Hilda’s heart operates as that very instrument. The Marble Faun follows a group of expatriate artists working in Rome. Miriam, Hilda, and Kenyon are joined by Donatello, a carefree Italian count. Miriam finds herself stalked by a figure known only as the Model. His undivulged history with Miriam puts her at his mercy until Donatello impulsively hurls him to his death from the Tarpeian Rock. Afterward, Hawthorne explores how this act transforms the characters, but this plot accounts for a notoriously small proportion of the book, which otherwise amounts to a fictional tour guide of Rome, a commentary on its own backdrop, accessing the arts through narrative.4 Despite the novel’s focus on the visual arts, optical devices like the camera appear only in figures of speech.5 Instead, Hawthorne frets that professional copyists have become too impersonally mechanical. Copyists who focus on a single painting are described as “Guido machines, or Raphaelic machines” (59), while the assistants who translate clay models into finished sculptures become “some nameless machine in human shape” (115). The sculptor’s assistants let him sculpt “with a word” [End Page 414] and “without the necessity of his touching the work with his own finger” (115). The camera is another such instrument, as Hawthorne observed in The House of the Seven Gables when the daguerreotypist Holgrave plans to “misuse Heaven’s blessed sunshine by tracing out human features, through its agency” (46). The sun performs the labor of inscription in place of the artist’s hand. According to Holgrave, the sunshine captures moral insights that escape the painter’s eye, revealing the hidden character of his sitters where conscious artistry flatters, just as in The Marble Faun the artist’s hand registers sympathies and intuitions that escape the conscious mind. In The Marble Faun, sympathy has replaced the camera. Unlike the sculptor’s assistants, therefore, Hilda represents “a finer instrument, a more exquisitely crafted piece of mechanism, by the help of which the spirit...