How Did Nathaniel Hawthorne Writer Influence Modern Literature?

Nathaniel Hawthorne faced many challenges as a writer. Perhaps the greatest burden on his writing was the legacy of his ancestors in the Salem witch trials. This would be a tremendous weight for any writer to bear, and it would be one that would press Hawthorne to explore deeply meaningful subjects in his work. He struggled financially. Most of his work was rejected. Hawthorne continued to work hard and one day he produced ‘The Scarlet Letter’. Although it took him a while, the end was well worth it. Many of the stories he wrote contained deep meaning and criticized the social norms of the time in which he lived. Today many people, including myself, can appreciate Hawthorne’s writing because it showcases how art can come from places of great struggle and confusion, even of chaos.

There are many books that have been banned but then go on to become bestsellers such as ‘1984’ by George Orwell because it is a strong critique of governments. Another example is ‘The Scarlet Letter’ by Nathaniel Hawthorne. This book was removed from school reading lists because of its ‘questionable morality’. It is discussed in schools today because of its thought-provoking portrayal of the way that an adulterous woman was treated in a puritan community. An interesting note about this banned book is that it is about the silencing of women and was silenced. The story of Hester and her consequences are very real and relatable. They are messy and human and, in a society afraid of things it does not understand, the novel is even more relevant today in terms of issues of shame, women’s autonomy, and who gets to judge.

Influencing other writers to avoid certain ground in their work is perhaps the greatest impact of To Kill a Mockingbird. Written by a white author from the perspective of a white child in a small Southern town, many writers – white in particular – felt that such a powerful portrayal of racial ‎inequity had been written and that they could not match Lee’s work. Instead, they went on to write about other issues, often taking place in urban environments, focusing on the internal lives of Black characters rather than how they are perceived by whites, and using highly innovative structures to tell their stories. The novel affected Black writers differently, firstly because To Kill a Mockingbird brought attention to racial terror in the South on a national scale, and secondly because her perspective was white. While her work created space for such novels in mainstream literature, it also cast attention on the stories within the Black experience. The boom of the Black literary tradition from James Baldwin to Morrison to Ward could be seen as a compliment to and response to the work of a white writer who tackled issues of racial inequality in a Southern setting. Her work opened a door, but others walked through it to find different rooms.

There are many ways in which Geoffrey Chaucer’s Prolision to the Second Part of the Canterbury Tales and, above all, The Canterbury Tales have influenced novel writing in the centuries since. One major area of influence is the development of narrative and character. Novel writers have been greatly influenced by the simple yet effective technique that Chaucer and other medieval writers of vernacular employed. This is notably apparent in ‘The Canterbury Tales’ by which a group of pilgrims on their way to Canterbury tell stories, in each case a different tale, in which they themselves feature as characters, each story being told from the unique perspective of the individual storyteller. The use of vernacular English by Chaucer in the majority of his work also had a profound effect upon literature. By writing in the language of the common man of his day, he made literature more accessible to a larger number of people, which is still the objective of modern novelists. Many attempts are made to capture the exact tone and dialect of characters in a novel today. The famous writer is also remembered for the skill with which he combined humor with social commentary. A powerful commentator on society of his day, his characters are memorable because they are three-dimensional. Today’s novelists continue to be inspired by Chaucer’s work, nowable to draw on his legacy as they explore new narrative possibilities while striving to create more realistic and engaging characters.

Dazai Osamu’s work, especially ‘No Longer Human’, is like a conversation with someone who really gets it when it comes to feeling desperate and confused. Much of the novels content resonates strongly with me and I imagine with many other readers, as we struggle to come to terms with our own identity. This novel explores many of the same emotions and dilemmas that the protagonist Oba Yozo faces and can be a very tough read in places, but is also beautiful in places and often very poetic. It’s a reason why Dazai’s work has such a huge influence on the Japanese literary scene and inspires so many people to attempt to create art in its rawest form.

Just wanted to mention how astounding the amount of game narratives are basically “Dune by another name” i.e. tons of political backstabbing, savior type characters and wars over ecology. This has influenced the area of game narratives, way beyond simple adaptation. Items such as the resource which is to control the universe’s economy in particular have created a template for all sorts of stories involving various factions fighting over resources. This allows for very straightforward gameplay of player versus computer controls etc where the player has to gather resources to fight against other computer players (AI). However, that doesn’t mean that other books haven’t been equally as influential on the sci-fi game genre. A great example of a book that I believe may have had a huge influence on games such as ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ and ‘Deus Ex’ is William Gibson’s ‘Neuromancer’. The book is essentially the blueprint for the whole cyberpunk genre and many games and movies today are inspired by the themes and environments created in this book. The sprawl of the city, the console cowboy, the line between man and machine all are contained within the novel’s pages. Games are able to allow the player to explore these gritty high-tech environments in a completely new and interactive way. This type of influence is typically thematic rather than literal. The novel ‘Hyperion’ is structured in much the same way as ‘The Canterbury Tales’, in that each chapter is told from a different perspective, all set against the backdrop of a distant future where ‘Deep Time’ (effectively timeless) events are slowly unravelled by the characters. Games like ‘Destiny’ or the ‘Mass Effect’ trilogy have been influenced by this approach to story-telling. And by “influenced” I mean that they’ve been taught by the medium that these types of long-form stories can be just as deep and rich as anything found in print. The way that novels of science fiction can influence video games is that they can provide setting and concept for the game. However, to make an interesting game, the complex ideas of the novel must be turned into gameplay, such as developing character skills or building a base. So, while there is obvious influence from novels of science fiction, there is also clear mutation into something which can be played on a computer. The impact that ‘Ender’s Game’ has had on the Strategic/Tactical Space Combat genre cannot be overstated, bringing together a unique blend of high level Strategic thought and deep immersive storyline that is tailored around the command of a simulated interstellar war fought between the most gifted and naturally aggressive individuals in society, a fair representation of what esports could look like today. When I read ‘Revelation Space’ and the rest of the ‘Revelation Space’ universe, the largest influence on me was the world building and sheer amount of complex, rules-based technology and aliens that Alastair Reynolds had created. It set a new benchmark for game world design and it’s a big part of why codex entries and lore logs exist in many modern games – to allow players to delve deeper into the game world than just the main story. But Iain M. Banks’ ‘Culture’ novels have clearly had an influence on many games, even if not direct. The depiction of a post-scarcity society is certainly highly influential, and the extremely powerful and cantankerous AIs that exist within that society (such as the Ship Minds in the novels) have clear antecedents in characters like Cortana in the Halo series, and many other AI companions in space-based games. Some of the earliest visual influences on game environments were the descriptions of sprawling cities and alien landscapes in novels like Ken MacLeod’s Blindsight and Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama. While there are many influences on the environments in games like Dead Space and Prey (2017), concept artists and art directors have often pored over the detailed architectural descriptions of these science fiction novels to add depth and inspiration to the levels in their games. Influencing contemporary literature is something that games are increasingly able to do and the relationship appears to be reciprocal in a sense in that the many ambitious novels of today were seeded by the earlier influential works of the science fiction genre. We can see for example the influence of the corporate dystopian worlds of Philip K. Dick upon the very large and complex megacorps of the world of ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ and the ways in which the writer’s exploration of themes related to identity and to perceptions of reality have been able to be translated in to the games’ use of braindances or other perception altering drugs as mechanics that provide meaningful play within the game’s world. There's much more that could be said here, perhaps starting with the influence of military sci-fi novels such as Starship Troopers. Any thoughts on the matter would be appreciated. How have the Halo novels influenced (or been influenced by) the Halo video games?

For another example, let’s consider music. In the last 50 years or so, song lyrics have done more to keep this phrase in the popular consciousness than all novels combined. As I noted in an earlier post, we find this phrase in a wide array of musical genres: folk ballads, power metal songs, New Age music. The phrase has probably reached more people recently through songs like these than through reading words written by Keats or Shelley themselves. And, whereas those authors’ words were ‘whispered’ to readers in books, today the musical versions carry the phrase to audiences everywhere. In each of these genres the phrase conveys different emotions: melancholy in country songs, mystery in hard rock, freedom in New Age music. Thus today the phrase is interpreted largely by the media of popular culture, rather than by literature itself. Trying to follow the purely literary origins of this phrase would be to ignore the river in order to seek out the spring that supplies it. The river itself is where the phrase is living today.

I’d like to give a shoutout to H.G. Wells for laying the groundwork for dystopian fiction before Zamyatin nailed it. The Eloi and the Morlocks in The Time Machine (1895) create a pretty dim social dystopia based on class division that’s been horrifically taken to the extreme end. But it’s not a “society is a prison” story for the most part. The future is bleak and hopelessness is the theme. His other work, When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), is a full-on dystopia featuring a plutocratic oligarchy, brainwashing by mass media, and a population too apathetic to care about anything. It reads surprisingly modern. While Wells may not have created totalitarian futures, he did explore what the end of capitalism and social hierarchy might look like, and is definitely worthy of recognition for his influence before Zamyatin wrote.

I sometimes wonder if we are expecting too much from characters who are less than perfect in novels. Do they have to be redeemed of their flaws? Can’t they just be as they are: complicated, morally ambiguous characters who do good and bad things and are therefore not likable in equal measure? The demand for a neat redemption arc of flawed characters can create an unrealistic moral situation and reduce complex human nature to an unfair binary between good and evil. In reality, life is not a story. Some people are a mixture of good and bad and their value does not reside in their having turned into saints by the end of the novel. They can remain as they are and the reader can follow them on their journey of growth to learning to live with themselves the way they are.

While it is difficult to pinpoint the very first romance novel, it is widely accepted that Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, published in 1740, is one of the first true romance novels. Callirhoe by Chariton of Aphrodisias (c. 2nd century AD) and Tristan and Iseult (c. 12th century) were among the first works of literature to explore the emotions of love and the longing that often accompanies it. Many of the characteristics that have become synonymous with romance today originated with these groundbreaking works, which continue to influence the genre to this day.