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I’ve been reading Sharon Cameron’s The Corporeal Self: Allegories of the Self in Melville and Hawthorne. Cameron’s book seeks to “examine a revisionary notion of identity and of the philosophical dualism that attends it” (1). The terms of this dualism “may be predicated as body and soul, one self and a separate other, the identity of one person at a given moment in time and space as distinct from the identity of the same person at a different temporal-spatial moment” (1).

…although the works with which I am concerned examine the body’s relation to the soul and the self’s relation to the outside world (and therefore seem to invoke yet again the double terms to which I have alluded), these works then posit a third term or entity which, neither body nor soul, neither one self nor another, knits the respective entities together. The third entity, moreover, while not being material–while transcending the corporeality to include the spirit that is “outside” or “within” it–is nonetheless bodily, sometimes manifesting itself as an actual “third” person. Thus, the body of flesh and blood is complemented by a markedly different corporeality that both encompasses and transcends it. In the works I shall discuss–Melville’s Moby Dick and Hawthorne’s tales–what stands behind the body is another, different body. (1-2)

“Allegory’s solution is to externalize the split between body and soul, which can be neither wholly united nor wholly pried apart” (133).

Thus, one consequence of allegorical projection is that it unites outside the body what will not be wholly united or separated within it. A second consequence is that meaning is not lost in the separation of body from mind or self from world. Indeed, allegory insists that it is precisely in the spaces made by these separations that meaning is found. Allegory, like life, promises a meaning it simultaneously withholds. But unlike life, it delivers its meanings. It does this first by displacing the split within the self to the outside world. It alternately delivers meaning by displacing the split between the self and the world to a sphere inside the self. (133)

Cameron suggests that “if allegory is the “literary” term for the process I have just described, part-object is … the psychoanalytic term for the same process” (82). The obsession with death in American fiction can be specified as an obsession with attempted completion. Cameron is putting Leslie Fiedler’s insight in Love and Death in the American Novel on psychoanalytic footing. If you like, fleshing it out a bit.

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I’m really taken with the new album. Maybe I’ll write more later. Right now I’m too busy dancing! The youtube vid above is the first single “Into the Nightlife.” An actual video for the song is forthcoming.

Here’s a young dapper Nathaniel Hawthorne:

Good looking guy, right? Here’s the picture for Hawthorne at Wikipedia:

Why choose this picture from the 1860s? Hawthorne dies in 1864, his last novel The Marble Faun is published in 1860. By the time this picture is taken, his corpus is behind him. Maybe there are house rules at Wikipedia about needing an actual photograph? I’m not trying to be ageist, here. It’s just that for an author as concerned with youth and beauty as Hawthorne frequently is to be made a period piece strikes me as inimical.

I could be wrong. In “The Artist of the Beautiful,” Hawthorne writes “when the artist rose high enough to achieve the beautiful, the symbol by which he made it perceptible to mortal senses became of little value in his eyes…” I realize I’m conflating Hawthorne’s opinion about his image with his fiction, and taking the narrator of his story at his word. These are problems. Nina Baym goes so far as to suggest that “At the core of ‘The Artist of the Beautiful’ is Hawthorne’s recognition of how inadequate a figure Owen [the protagonist of the story] is for the vocation he has chosen [watchmaker], how timid and shrunken his conception of art. The narrative belies the narrator’s claim for Owen’s artistic stature and calls for another kind of artistry than his” (Norton Critical Edition 431).

Baym argues as follows:

When the narrator brings the tale to a close with the assurance that ‘when the artist rose high enough to achieve the Beautiful, the symbol by which he made it perceptible to mortal senses became of little value in his eyes, while his spirit possessed itself in the enjoyment of the Reality,’ he claims a dignity for Owen Warland that the story will not support. The conflict here is directly related to Hawthorne’s own literary dilemma, for if Owen’s audience is faulted for its indifference to his art, so is he faulted for devoting himself to the realization of ideas that have so little connection to the life around him. (430)

I find the use of passive voice in the the last sentence suspicious. Exactly who, other than Nina Baym, is faulting Owen for the realization of ideas that have so little connection to the life around him? Baym blames Owen because his “impulse to attain the beautiful springs not from a desire to enrich life but from the need to escape it.” Again, enrich life for whom? The suggestion, I guess, is that the Beautiful only counts if other people’s lives are enriched by it. This move cancels the Beautiful as transcendent and personal. I’m unconvinced that Hawthorne recognizes Owen as inadequate to his vocation, and further that there is a contradiction present between the narrative and the narrator.

The bottom line, vulgar though it may be, is that Hawthorne, if we take Owen as his type, might not care a twit about what picture Wikipedia uses. But I do, and want the beautiful.

Ghost stories are typically about contested real estate. In film, the estate must visually represent what is at stake in the narrative’s conflict. Thus a particularly heavy burden falls to the production designer who must show the quality and character of the terrain at issue. The film’s credibility and coherence rest on visual foundations.

In Beetlejuice, Bo Welch admirably presents thesis-antithesis models for the contested home.

We begin with a nice Connecticut house upon a hill

and its model equivalent,

replete with a nice, if somewhat stylized couple

who quickly die.

Adam and Barbara’s vacation at home has thus turned into an eternity. This could be heaven, as Adam muses, except that the bourgies are moving in

and quickly take to home improvement.

Adam and Barbara can’t really leave, lest they contend with these guys:

So they try to take things into their own hands:

with no success, though they do befriend their adversaries daughter Lydia, whom Welch has done up as a perfect graveyard girl, or Robert Smith knockoff:

Unfortunately getting institutional help in the afterlife is much like seeking institutional help in this life, difficult or impossible. Welch washes the dead bureaucracy in a gaseous green:

No help. So Adam and Barbara turn to this guy:

Beetlejuice has an ulterior motive. He’s looking to get married.

The wedding is fortuitously interrupted and the families learn to live with each other. Barbara and Adam, who were possibly infertile in life, gain a surrogate daughter

who is clearly happier than formerly.

Death, it turns out, is just as human as life. Beetlejuice is a weird delight, to which, in large measure, we can thank Bo Welch for his credible textures.

This post is a contribution to the production design blog-a-thon.

The production design blog-a-thon begins Monday!

Today John Edwards endorsed Senator Obama for President. They look good together. Is this the beginning of a populist-progressive one-two?

Here’s the endorsement in Grand Rapids, Michigan:

I can’t strongly enough recommend the “best of the left” podcast, from whom I take the above image. The music is fantastic, the radio clips great, and the mixing of music and dry congressional testimony regularly rousing. Give them your love, your clips, or at least an ear.