{"id":91298,"date":"2015-10-26T20:09:54","date_gmt":"2015-10-27T00:09:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=91298"},"modified":"2015-10-29T13:38:24","modified_gmt":"2015-10-29T17:38:24","slug":"a-cataract-of-ruin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/10\/26\/a-cataract-of-ruin\/","title":{"rendered":"A Cataract of Ruin"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hawthorne\u2019s scariest story<\/i>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Thomas Cole, A View of the Mountain Pass Called the Notch of the White Mountains<\/i>, 1839.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cEven his bright gildings,\u201d Herman Melville once wrote of Nathaniel Hawthorne, \u201cplay upon the edges of thunder-clouds.\u201d This was in \u201cHawthorne and His Mosses<\/a>,\u201d an 1850 appreciation in which Melville reputed\u00a0the notion that Hawthorne, fifteen years his senior, was merely \u201ca sequestered, harmless man\u201d:<\/p>\n

\n

this great power of blackness in him derives its force from its appeals to that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin, from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free \u2026 At all events, perhaps no writer has ever wielded this terrific thought with greater terror than this same harmless Hawthorne \u2026 this black conceit pervades him, through and through.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In the reductive churn that comes with canonization, this \u201cblack conceit\u201d seems to have washed off Hawthorne\u2014Melville\u2019s nickname for him, \u201cthe Man of Mosses,\u201d hasn\u2019t exactly stuck. We have better Moss People: your Poes, your Lovecrafts, your Shelleys and Stokers. Hawthorne, the thinking goes, is too puritanical to be truly spooky. (Imagine the groans you\u2019d get from reading a bit of The Scarlet Letter <\/em>around a late October campfire.) But his story \u201cThe Ambitious Guest<\/a>\u201d is scarier than anything in Poe, and its dark romanticism makes no recourse to haunted houses, death masques, black cats, supernaturally sustained heartbeats, or any other genre trope. It\u2019s just about a weary traveler and a nice family who open their home to him.\u00a0<\/p>\n

(NB: If you haven\u2019t read \u201cThe Ambitious Guest<\/a>,\u201d do so before going any further, because I\u2019m about to ruin it for you.)<\/p>\n

\u201cGuest\u201d first appeared in The New-England Magazine<\/em> in 1835; it\u2019s hard to imagine that any magazine would touch it today, and not just because it contains such phrases as \u201cpertinacious fancy\u201d and \u201cmountain nymph.\u201d In its strident allegory and anticlimax, it breaks almost all the storytelling conventions we\u2019ve come to cherish, or at least to believe we should cherish. Its characters are sketched-in at best; its foreshadowing is eye-rollingly bad; the few details it offers are often extraneous; and it has nothing in the way of a narrative arc. It\u2019s a flat line that drops off at a ninety-degree angle.<\/p>\n

Its Netflix synopsis might read thus: \u201cWhen a stranger visits a family at a quaint New England mountain pass, they all die in an avalanche.\u201d<\/p>\n

Or: \u201cAfter a candid discussion about their dying wishes, a modest family and their \u2018frank-hearted\u2019 guest are buried alive in a freak landslide.\u201d<\/p>\n

Or: \u201cAn anonymous\u00a0man announces his intent to make a name for himself, only to perish suddenly in circumstances that doom him to be forgotten.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

The Man of Mosses: Hawthorne, ca. 1860.<\/p><\/div>\n

Not, in other words, something you\u2019ll want to add to your queue. There\u2019s no way to describe the swerve of its ending without turning it into a cheap punch line\u2014which is, in effect, the best thing it has going for it. Once you know the ending, the horror in the story is in its accretion of ironies. Hawthorne sets it up too perfectly; every element is overdetermined. He takes pains to make this family so kind<\/em>: the old woman wipes a chair with an apron for her guest, the little child holds out its arms to him. He takes pains to make their home so precarious<\/em>: it is literally, he tells us, \u201cin the bleakest spot of all New England,\u201d and avalanches arrive with such regularity that the family is in the habit of holding their breath at the sound of them. And he takes pains to make their calamity so needless<\/em>: they\u2019re given at least two chances to avoid death, first when they nearly leave the home to visit a nearby brook, and second, most devastatingly, as the avalanche descends:<\/p>\n

\n

The victims rushed from their cottage, and sought refuge in what they deemed a safer spot\u2014where, in contemplation of such an emergency, a sort of barrier had been reared. Alas! they had quitted their security, and fled right into the pathway of destruction. Down came the whole side of the mountain, in a cataract of ruin. Just before it reached the house, the stream broke into two branches\u2014shivered not a window there, but overwhelmed the whole vicinity, blocked up the road, and annihilated everything in its dreadful course. Long ere the thunder of the great Slide had ceased to roar among the mountains, the mortal agony had been endured, and the victims were at peace. Their bodies were never found.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In a sentence like \u201cTheir bodies were never found\u201d\u2014that\u2019s where Melville\u2019s Man of Mosses resides. It\u2019s the kind of cackling kiss-off that puts Hawthorne alone among his peers. Who else would refuse to name a protagonist whose defining feature is his desire to \u201cbuild his monument\u201d? These\u00a0are narrative strategies we take to be bad manners in an author; Hawthorne doesn\u2019t seem to care about his characters or his readers. Few fiction writers, even your dyed-in-the-wool metafictionists, make use of this kind of cosmic irony\u2014but when it\u2019s done well, as it is in \u201cGuest,\u201d it\u2019s at once bitingly funny and legitimately unsettling. To read \u201cGuest\u201d is to watch Hawthorne play a very wanton God: he creates a cast of characters with only the mildest of imperfections and then, just as we\u2019re settling in, he kills them all.<\/p>\n

Hawthorne is remembered\u00a0as a moralist\u2014but what, really, is the moral to be drawn from \u201cGuest\u201d? That a cautious traveler should conduct avalanche drills early and often? That bad things happen to (mostly) good people? \u00a0That none of us knows when death will come, so none should make any plans? That it\u2019s sinful to desire renown, because God will smite you and perhaps some innocent bystanders, too? That it\u2019s wrong to be vain\u2014as is the grandmother, who has already laid aside some fancy graveclothes for herself\u2014because no one can choose the expression on his face when God strikes him down? That mountainous\u00a0nineteenth-century New England was no place to raise a family?<\/p>\n

All of these, however upright and Christian, feel laughably insufficient given the story\u2019s protracted setup and its terse, grisly end. \u201cGuest\u201d feels too precision-tuned to be so didactic. Its\u00a0overkill is what makes it scary: it\u2019s a machine-tooled memento mori, written by someone\u00a0immured\u00a0in Innate Depravity.\u00a0There are stories, I\u2019m sure, that conjure death with more psychological acuity, more creativity, and more skin-crawling particulars. But none will make you come away feeling as\u00a0exercised and trivialized as you do at the end of \u201cThe Ambitious Guest.\u201d Reading it reminds you that you\u2019re as insignificant as the pine branches the family tosses into the fire.<\/p>\n

Dan Piepenbring is the web editor of <\/em>The Paris Review.<\/p>\n

Update, October 29: An astute reader points out that I neglected to mention Hawthorne\u2019s inspiration for the story: an 1826 incident known as the Willey Family Tragedy<\/a>\u00a0in Crawford Notch, New Hampshire, in which a family was buried in a landslide, having abandoned their home, which remained unscathed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hawthorne\u2019s scariest story. \u201cEven his bright gildings,\u201d Herman Melville once wrote of Nathaniel Hawthorne, \u201cplay upon the edges of thunder-clouds.\u201d This was in \u201cHawthorne and His Mosses,\u201d an 1850 appreciation in which Melville reputed\u00a0the notion that Hawthorne, fifteen years his senior, was merely \u201ca sequestered, harmless man\u201d: this great power of blackness in him derives […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[19950,8618,19951,2186,10672,71,1146,4083,9036,512,7607,5014,19064,15867,7845,19949,20000],"class_list":["post-91298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-american-writers","tag-christianity","tag-cosmic-irony","tag-death","tag-dying","tag-fiction","tag-halloween","tag-herman-melville","tag-horror","tag-irony","tag-nathaniel-hawthorne","tag-new-england","tag-puritanism","tag-scary-stories","tag-short-stories","tag-the-ambitious-guest","tag-willey-family-tragedy"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhy \u201cThe Ambitious Guest\u201d Is Hawthorne\u2019s Scariest Story<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"October 26, 2015 \u2013 Hawthorne\u2019s scariest story.\u201cEven his bright gildings,\u201d Herman 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