Like the man said, Poetry is more philosophical than History. Not that we still care that much about philosophy: most people would agree with my post-Jesuit brother who defines it as that one thing with or without which everything else remains the same. Or poetry either, for that matter, as the enrollments in our English classes will testify: long lines for the American novel; for any period of American verse, not so much. But still we appear to take the point: literature— though Aristotle hardly had that concept— can scarcely afford to care about the over-determining details of one singular event; give us, if not the generalization, then at least the present application. Especially in a classroom situation: Hawthorne's once-famous “ambivalence” about his Puritans and his Revelers is more likely to generate enthusiasm than a cautious account of how his self-proclaimed “allegory” appeared in fact to assemble itself out of a series of footnotes to William Bradford.

But somewhat more is at issue than the limitations of our ever-more-distracted undergraduates. We too expect literature to offer us more than a contrived version of something that just happened to happen. Once. In a more or less endless list of events that mattered no doubt, but which probably could have been otherwise, and which in any event seem controlled by forces no longer in visible operation. Humanity may or not progress, but things change. History itself, we think, must do more than state the facts: find the connection or reveal the law; otherwise, life is just too short, the press of the present too insistent. And if history, then literature a fortiori. Hawthorne himself warns the tooliteral reader not to go looking for The House of the Seven Gables, and assures us that the writer of romance binds himself less to the facts of the local case than to the “laws of the human heart.” So what exactly does this moral essentialist mean by also insisting, as it has come to seem he most certainly does, that we attend to the historical references in so many of his best wrought tales? Where does he get off in loading his tales and sketches, and even his long-form fictions, with historical allusions that beg to be identified and that, often enough, lead us to some necessary historical pretext of the fiction in question?