The Classic – Frank Kermode

This chapter of The Classic written by Frank Kermode, analyses the roles of past and present
in Nathaniel Hawthorne's novels. To fulfil his purpose, he cross examines Hawthorne’s
novels, The House of the Seven Gables, The Scarlet Letter and The Marble Faun.
The essay begins with Kermode explaining Hawthorne’s vision of past in light of cultivated
uncertainties, instead of inherited uncertainties. Kermode opines that Hawthorne had a
modernist sense of future whose relation to the past was far more ambiguous than ever
before, which makes his own moment typical of a transition from one structure of society
and one system of belief and knowledge to another, in which the past and its types must be
transformed.
The essayist then traces the etymology of ‘type’. He states that the word was derived from
the Greek tuptein which meant to incise or inscribe. For centuries it was believed that God
had provided two books; the Bible and Nature. Both these books were believed to be
inscribed by divine hints; plants bore a sign indicating its use, just as history revealed God’s
will to men. When printing came into being, each character printed was called type. These
types were engraved using an instrument called ‘puncheon’ and tapped with a mallet or
maul. Kermode identifies that the family names of characters in Hawthorne’s The House of
the Seven Gables were derived from these terms; the Pyncheons and Maules. The word
‘type’ had various other uses like the photographer’s Daguerreotype, which were basically
silver plates, sensitized by iodine, exposed to light and developed by exposure to mercury.
Kermode further goes on to examine the names of Hawthorne’s principal characters in The
House of the Seven Gables, and proposes that Hawthorne was brooding on past and present
types. Holgrave, being a modern version of the name Maule, stood for a present and a
future which would disown mysteries and uncertainties.
Later, Kermode moves on to describe the lack of genetic connection between the species of
successive strata, as explicated by Louis Agassiz, a pupil of Cuvier. Agassiz had rejected the
theory 'origin of species' and asserted that the mechanisms of heredity were badly
understood and that qualities both good and bad are dropped as well as acquired and the
process ends sometimes with the degradation of the type and the survival of the unfit,
rather than the fit. Even in the case of sexual selection, fine progeny were often the offspring
of weak parents and vice versa. The types could no longer be regarded as divine inscriptions,
as parts of mystery both stable and divinely systematic.
However, Kermode suggests that Hawthorne was indifferent to Agassiz complicating the
older typologies. The proof is the names used by Hawthorne in the novel; Pyncheon, Maule
and Holgrave, all alluding to the aspects of the word ‘type’. A similar hint is in the ‘Pyncheon
hens’ of the novel. They are birds that degenerated, parallel to the decline of the Pyncheons.
Kermode argues that the concept of Pyncheon hens was borrowed by Hawthorne, from the
Natural History of Buffon. Buffon, in his fourth volume had used the domestic hen to
illustrate his thesis. He had affirmed that domestication caused the bird to diminish in size.
The Pyncheon hens were pure specimens of a breed transmitted down as heirloom in the
Pyncheon family. It was said that while in their prime, they had attained the size of turkeys.
However, like the Pyncheons of Old and New World had no connection, the hens which were
now the size of pigeons, had also degenerated. This was akin to the degeneration of many
noble races, probably as a consequence of the strictness to keep the races pure.
Kermode has written that the types inscribed in the novel are shifting, unstable, varying in
force, to be fulfilled by the determinations of the reader; in strong contrast, then to the old
Puritan types. The text implicitly declares that the modern classic is not like the book of God
or the book of Nature, or the old accommodated classic, of which the senses, though
perhaps hidden, are fully determined, there in full before the interpreter. In the making of it,
the reader must take his share. The palpable changes in society, history and art had made all
typologies problematical. In The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne deals with the
same. Kermode remarks that, God may have inscribed the world with types and it is the
reader who should make sense of the inscriptions by his own imaginative collaboration. In
the book, text and reality do not have an enantiomorphic relation. The text continually
questions its own references, for the types with which it is inscribed are of very uncertain
provenance and meaning. The types of the book of God has grown ambiguous. The text
undercuts traditional interpretations in the light of what it calls ‘modern incredulity’, in the
light of the refined present and its lost certainties. The past grows obscure and the
interpretative light falls differently, from the imagination and not from the heaven.
Next, Kermode observes The Scarlet Letter, also authored by Hawthorne. The child born out
of sin in the novel, ‘Pearl’ is continuously associated with mirrors and reflections, which is a
type. She is an oxymoron embodying ‘native grace’, also proposed as witch-child, child of
misrule etc. She plays her part in enforcing the submission of Dimesdale and not only enters
to the old family of grace, but also disappears to the old world. Hester her mother on the
other hand is a type of something to be sorrowed over and looked upon with awe, yet she is
also a prophetic type, as she is the shadow of a future woman free of old law. At the end of
the novel, Hester’s A takes the place of the old armorial bearings on the tomb which is
regarded as Kermode by a new type, a new-world-type, to be interpreted by the imagination
by the reader in the place of fixed senses of the old.
Finally, Kermode moves to the last novel of Hawthorne, The Marble Faun and declares that
Hawthorne saw Rome, the eternal city in The Marble Faun as the Sibylline recipient of a
grievous boon of immorality yet also as the centre where the eyes of every artist bowed.
According to Kermode, Hawthorne’s double vision ofRome is remarkable. Rome was the
centre of perpetual Empire, monument of a bygone past, artistic, classic and closer to us and
the world’s cathedral. But it was also the Rome that was like a long decaying corpse, filled
with grime of corruption and perverted Christianity; the Rome of malaria and foul air. By the
end of his career, Hawthorne had rediscovered Rome as timeless yet existing in the aspect of
time, says Kermode. Rome is both beautiful and sinister. The contrast is continued in the
characters of the novel too.
In Hawthorne's world, meanings do not stay where an observer has put them: in time
ambiguity becomes instability; species are confusingly represented by anomalous
individuals; progress and degeneration compete as historical processes. Such is the vision
Kermode finds behind Hawthorne's deliberately perplexing narratives, and it points the way
to an epoch in which criticism cannot rely on objectively "real" meanings to evaluate literary
classics. Kermode concludes by stating that in our day the genuine "classic" literary value
must be a loosely structured, multi-significant inclusiveness, an ability to encompass a broad
variety of interpretations. Unlike the old classic, which was expected to provide answers, the
modern classic poses a virtually infinite set of questions.