Introduction: Hawthorne, Updike, and the Immoral Imagination

Summary

AT THE BEGINNING of one of his earliest sketches, “Sir William Phips” (1830), Nathaniel Hawthorne—John Updike's predecessor as chronicler of New England adultery—laments the fact that “few of the personages of past times … are anything more than mere names to their successors. They seldom stand up in our Imaginations like men. The knowledge, communicated by the historian and biographer, is analogous to that which we acquire of a country by the map—minute, perhaps, and accurate, and available for all necessary purposes—but cold and naked, and wholly destitute of the mimic charm produced by landscape painting.” We have the world of facts, historical and objective, but brute nevertheless, and then we have the world of art, life-giving and memorable, the stuff of the spirit. Hawthorne's schema here represents, of course, an upending of Plato's metaphysical hierarchy, wherein the world of ideas, the really real world, has no corporeal form, and the world as depicted by the arts is debased and debasing, a mere copy of the physical world, which is itself a mere copy of the ideal world. It is also a variation on Philip Sidney's vision of poetry, which lies halfway between philosophy and history, gaining its superiority from its liminality:

For the philosopher, setting down with thorny arguments the bare rule, is so hard of utterance, and so misty to be conceived, that one that hath no other guide but him shall wade in him till he be old before he shall find sufficient cause to be honest…. On the other side, the historian, wanting the precept, is so tied not to what should be but to what is, to the particular truth of things and not to the general reason of things, that his example draweth no necessary consequence, and therefore a less fruitful doctrine.

In Hawthorne's analogy, the historian is a cartographer, and the world of mere facts that he sketches out is accurate but two-dimensional. The philosopher, on the other hand, carves the air, and his sculptures are much too abstract to do the bulk of humanity any real good. But the artistic imagination—the landscape painter of the sketch or the fiction writer who creates it—can abstract from the merely actual but keep things thick enough, as it were, to actually have an effect on those who encounter the result.