It’s been decades since I
read The House of the Seven Gables by
Nathaniel Hawthorne, so I decided it was time to read it again. The first thing
in the book to pique my interest was not the story, however. It was Hawthorne’s
preface, where he gives several insights into his writing philosophy.
When I first started
attending writers’ critique groups, I was struck by the number of people who rejected
suggestions for enlivening their fiction simply because “it didn’t happen that
way.” I wanted to scream, “It’s fiction! It doesn’t have to have happened that
way!”
Hawthorne must have felt as
I do. In the following passage, he defines “romance” and “novel” differently
than we do today, and his 1851 language needs careful reading. Still, the point
is clear: it’s okay to depart from the truth if it makes the story more
interesting.
When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be
observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and
material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he
professed to be writing a Novel. The latter form of composition is presumed to
aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable
and ordinary course of man’s experience. The former—while, as a work of art, it
must rigidly subject itself to laws, and while it sins unpardonably so far as
it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart—has fairly a right to
present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer’s own
choosing or creation. If he think fit, also, he may so manage his atmospherical
medium as to bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows
of the picture. He will be wise, no doubt, to make a very moderate use of the
privileges here stated, and, especially, to mingle the Marvelous rather as a
slight, delicate, and evanescent flavor, than as any portion of the actual
substance of the dish offered to the public. He can hardly be said, however, to
commit a literary crime even if he disregard this caution.
In my opinion, another
mistake that many authors make is to shout their moral at readers. I ignore the
shouts and pay the most attention to the whispers. It’s okay to be explicitly Christian
or anti-war or environmentalist, but you don’t need to tell me that in every
other sentence. Again, Hawthorne must have felt the same way.
When romances do really teach anything, or produce any
effective operation, it is usually through a far more subtle process than the
ostensible one. The author [Hawthorne] has considered it hardly worth his
while, therefore, relentlessly to impale the story with its moral as with an
iron rod,—or, rather, as by sticking a pin through a butterfly,—thus at once
depriving it of life, and causing it to stiffen in an ungainly and unnatural
attitude. A high truth, indeed, fairly, finely, and skilfully wrought out,
brightening at every step, and crowning the final development of a work of
fiction, may add an artistic glory, but is never any truer, and seldom any more
evident, at the last page than at the first.
We can always learn from
the writers who came before us, and Hawthorne is no exception.
__________
The photograph of Nathaniel
Hawthorne was taken by Matthew Brady in the early 1860s. It is in the public domain
because of its age.
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