12 posts tagged “henry james”
Hale, Dorothy J. Social Formalism: The Novel in Theory From Henry James to the Present. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
What did Henry James write after all? Did he perhaps write... nothing but an irresistible opportunity to demonstrate the theories of Merleau-Ponty and Derrida at ponderous length? No, Merle A. Williams, he did not.
Hale is as intimidatingly smart in print as she is in office hours. The book is very much a second-order theoretical affair; but if you happen to like theories about theories, and are interested in the seventies dethroning of Percy Lubbock or warnings about the overeager application of Bakhtin to anything within grabbing distance, this one is yours.
Oh hell, he makes a lot of claims that I had been wanting to make, in some version, and he makes them really well.
The specifics are as good as the generalities. Pippin lays out what Edmund Wilson misses in The Turn of the Screw, what Eve Sedgwick misses in "The Beast in the Jungle," what Martha Nussbaum misses in The Golden Bowl. Of course he doesn't answer all the questions he raises - they're big questions - but he's talking in the right terms.Although James, like many other late-nineteenth-century writers, understands his historical context as undeniably empty of the large moral frameworks and categories and typologies within which intelligible human engagement and understanding were formerly possible, it is still the case that the way his novels and stories work, come to engage and grip us, would not be explicable were he not to have succeeded in establishing something like the necessity, the practical unavoidability, of the moral categories his narratives call forth. While much of this moral dimension involves the importance of the possibility of one's actions being justifiable to those whom such actions affect (James's frequent word is being "squared"), the criteria of such acceptance or mutual recognition have nothing to do with natural law, the wisdom of tradition, the approval of the community, religious scripture or religious feeling, pure practical reason, the resolution of class conflict, or some benchmark like a phronimos, an experienced man of practical wisdom. In effect, all the major characters are walking a high wire with lots of normative turbulence but without any safety net, dependent wholly on each other and their own talk and negotiations and perceptions for balance. There is plenty of "high modernism" here, in other words, replete with absent gods, and so many other absent minor divinities like mankind, progress, and happiness or prosperity. Yet there is also no metaphysical boredom, no nihilism, no high-culture nostalgia (with America simplistically demonized as kulturlos modernity), none of the "secularized" Christianity of Dickens or George Eliot, not even Conradean stoicism, no symboliste new religions. The young - Milly Theale, Ralph Touchett - die innocently, unjustly, but no one raises any fists to God.... With James we have begun to settle down in the only wilderness left, "inside," but without a sense of teleological, progressive, developmental stages of success or any road map or goal; we have only the endless chatter and irresolution and revisions and re-revision of the later modern urban world. Even so, perhaps just because so, some sort of real tranquility is intimated, some moral tone in the late novels especially, in some way more than resignation, pessimism, or skepticism, is struck.
After some initial casting about, the motor for the plot resolves into an older man's offer of a healthy financial bequest to a younger man on the condition of a certain marriage taking place. The Tragic Muse had a similar situation, but this time around the matter is treated with a great deal more hesitation and indirection; for one thing, a point is made of never mentioning the sum, so that it joins Milly Theale's mysterious illness and Lambert Strether's mysterious manufactured item in the list of Crucial Jamesian Unspeakables. On the level of form, the strategy has something to do with modernist ideas of purity: factoring out the contingent. On the level of plot, it has something to do with complete terror of being conditioned by the material world.
This is a good way to read a Henry James play without reading a Henry James play. It's his first novel after five years spent in an unsuccessful attempt to conquer the theatre (Oscar Wilde, that unclean beast, had captured the public heart) and is taken from a scenario originally intended as a three-act play. James would pull this adaptation trick more than once, and the results could be pretty awkward, but this one has its merits; after a clunky first act (excuse me, "first book") designed to get the machinery going, the melodrama plays out with brio. The style betrays its origins - mostly dialogue, with interspersed sentences that read like stage directions, stitched together with periodic paragraphs of Jamesian introspection - but somehow it does serve as a forerunner (a "precedent," James calls it in his notebooks) to the late style. I need to do more work to figure out how.
See here on irresponsible psychologizing biography that turns the work into a code for the life; how many sentences do we need along the lines of "Maisie's confusion is James's own?" That quibble aside, it's a nice long readable & informative ground against which to place the figure of "one's" particular Jamesian interests, if "one" has particular Jamesian interests. The early chapters gave me the uncomfortable prickling feeling that I often get when reading about young writers; the later chapters calmed me with the sense of long life.
This has been getting recent attention in the TLS and elsewhere, so I'll just add that it's the rare book of literary criticism I would happily recommend even to people who aren't writing a dissertation on or otherwise obsessed with its subject. I like Brooks in general, and especially like him on James; there's also lots of fun stuff on French literature (even if one doesn't learn much new about Flaubert, the copious citations from Bouvard et Pécuchet are a delight in themselves). The last page also has an amazing biographical tidbit that I hadn't known about, and which I'd hate to spoil.
This one gave me a bad dream where I was running around the house screaming about the mediocrity of my own talent; but that's my problem and not the book's. Of all the meditations on art and life I've seen from James - or anyone, really - this is one of the best; it manages to treat the struggle and sacrifice of the vocation without lapsing into self-pity or cheesy Romantic notions of inner torment. The book contains both an aesthete and a working artist, but they aren't the same person; and at the end of the book, having served as a necessary goad, the aesthete vanishes ("like a symbolic personage"), leaving the artist his lot of daily work, not poetry but sober prose.
There are three or four other principal threads in the book, all done just as well - but I'm not such a pedant as to go through them all.
Aw crap, it's another masterpiece, and it will probably have to kick off my dissertation because I have no idea how to dispose of it in a paragraph. Notes to self:
- Vertigo of perspectivalism - struggle of book is to find a synthetic viewpoint - I doubt it succeeds
- Child's viewpoint foregrounds the architecture - makesa choice of POV etc into a clear conceit (in Elizabethan sense?) - the sort of thing modernist novels will also use as structural grounding. But to describe a child's mind is not yet to speak as a child does; James almost never throws his voice.
- Disinterested perception = lack of agency; looking at her own life with her nose pressed against a pane of glass
- A hermeneutic education - her moral initiation consists of learning to read signs; prior to that it's senseless to think of her as making choices. To read a sign means to translate the world into the late Jamesian style. (Late style as gloss on a text? We don't always get to read the text itself.) The ambiguity isn't skeptical - interpretations aren't inherently fallible, they're only more or less apt.
Then she understood as well as if he had spoken it that what he wanted, hang it, was that she should let him off with all the honours - with all the appearance of virtue and sacrifice on his side. It was exactly as if he had broken out to her: 'I say, you little booby, help me to be irreproachable, to be noble, and yet to have none of the beastly bore of it. There's only impropriety enough for one of us; so you must take it all. Repudiate your dear old daddy - in the face, mind you, of his tender supplications. He can't be rough with you - it isn't in his nature: therefore you'll have successfully chucked him because he was too generous to be as firm with you, poor man, as was, after all, his duty.' This was what he communicated in a series of tremendous pats on the back; that portion of her person had never been so thumped since Moddle thumped her when she choked.
This one is a real outlier and I am not sure what he was going for. A lot of it is making fun of those Boston feminists, which does not seem like a very nice thing to do, though the conservative Southern gentleman who's supposed to provide balance is no great shakes either. The ending does crank up the melodrama only to dissolve it in James's usual upsetting ambivalence, but it's not clear how much of the preceding we needed. I am sad to report that I kept getting distracted by marginalia from the previous owner, who apparently had been told it was a "novel about lesbians" and kept writing things like SEDUCTION and SUBMISSION in the margins, along with circling every single appearance of the adjective "queer." I'm surprised he or she didn't go on to other not-a-double-entendres like "toilet" and "ejaculated."
Simultan's sharp theory about Jane Austen is that those characters who violate ethical norms themselves suffer the most from it. Something like that principle is still at work in George Eliot; Gwendolyn's punishment for marrying Grandcourt is half Grandcourt himself, half her own conscience. James's characters, on the other hand, finds themselves in an ethical landscape that is losing its perspective and breaking up into a Cézanne painting. Our heroine Fleda is tempted by a moral transgression that would benefit everyone she cares about and injure no one other than some unpleasant people whom we hardly encounter in the book. The only thing holding her back is her own principle, and without a social canvas to back it up it's easy for that principle to look like perversity; all the more so since the scheme of values we do encounter most often is the aesthetic, and both James and Fleda are quite aware of the tie between aestheticism and the Hobbesian marketplace.
It should go without saying that Fleda maintains her integrity at the cost of everything else. Virtue for James is its own punishment, and in that respect his books are as black as Candide - but here no one is snickering in the gallery.Close to Fleda's present abode was the little shop of a man who mounted and framed pictures and desolately dealt in artists' materials. She sometimes paused before it to look at a couple of shy experiments for which its dull window constituted publicity, small studies placed there for sale and full of warning to a young lady without fortune and without talent. Some such young lady had brought them forth in sorrow; some such young lady, to see if they had been snapped up, had passed and repassed as helplessly as she was now doing. They had never been, they never would be, snapped up; yet they were quite above the actual attainment of some other young ladies. It was a matter of discipline with Fleda to take an occasional lesson from them.
