Telling in Henry James: The Web of Experience and the Forms of Reality 1501309005, 9781501309007

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Telling in Henry James

Telling in Henry James The Web of Experience and the Forms of Reality Lynda Zwinger

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

N E W YO R K • LO N D O N • OX F O R D • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway 50 Bedford Square New York London NY 10018 WC1B 3DP USA UK www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 © Lynda Zwinger, 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Zwinger, Lynda Marie. Telling in Henry James: the web of experience and the forms of reality/Lynda Zwinger. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-5013-0898-7 (hardback) 1. James, Henry, 1843-1916–Criticism and interpretation. 2. Narration (Rhetoric) 3. Language and languages in literature. I. Title. PS2124.Z95 2015 813’.4–dc23 2015008542 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-0898-7   ePDF: 978-1-5013-0900-7   ePub: 978-1-5013-0899-4 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

For Tenney, Zasha, Noa, Gidette, Ari, Isaac, Jake, and AnYi

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Contents Acknowledgments

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Introduction 1 1 Henry James on Telling 7 2 The Europeans in the House of Fiction: “a foreigner of some sort” 23 3 Morganizing the Body of “The Pupil” 41 4 The Silver Clue Fish in The Golden Bowl 67 5 In the Vestibule of “The Jolly Corner” 85 6 Telling on Henry James 115 Works Cited Index

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Acknowledgments My intellectual debts are too many to list here. Many of them are made clear in the course of the following pages. My deepest debts are to friends and colleagues and coconspirators who, over the years of this project, were the life of my mind. You know who you are. Thank you. Acknowledgment is also gratefully made to venues in which versions or portions of Chapters 2 (World Literature and China in the Global Age), 3 (Modern Fiction Studies), and 5 (The Henry James Review and The International Journal of the Humanities) appeared.

Introduction

Henry James scholarship presents the effect of a limitless, far-flung, and intricate web. The work of Henry James figures largely in succeeding waves of literary studies, from the 1940s to the present, from so-called author studies to examinations of the metaphysics of the thing. This is no surprise, as James’s writing accommodates theoretical, cultural, and historical positions taken by scholars writing not only on James himself, but also on pretty much any other literary critical, cultural, or theoretical concern intersecting in any way with James’s literary presence, historical era, genres, and cultural milieux, however broadly or narrowly defined. When we teach courses located within the range of James’s textual and historical reach, whatever our object (or even discipline) might be, a James text or two frequently rounds out or anchors our syllabi. With all the intense scrutiny of James over the last several decades, is there really room for one more approach, one more angle, one more new twist? Telling in Henry James proposes that while the agendas of scholarship change over time, necessarily morphing our approaches to literature, we can never with reason assume that we have already “done” all the close reading we need to do. And indeed, the James academic community has generally continued to ground its arguments, however far-ranging and theoretically based, in James’s prose as well as in its theoretical, cultural, and historical contexts. Those who study James are well aware of the often uncanny connections and interchanges the prose somehow extends outside of itself. What I hope to foreground here, in a series of exemplary readings, is one of the corners, if not a cornerstone, of James’s house of fiction. My way of reading was brewed in the kettle of pre- and post-structuralist phenomenology and formalism,  Lacanian and

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post–second-wave feminism, psychoanalytic literary theory, and the burgeoning and polymorphously directional fields loosely gathered under the rubric “queer theory.” The readings in the chapters that follow pay attention to the sheer fun of James’s wit and verbal dexterity, to the cognitive tune-up offered by the complexities and nuances of his precise and rhythmic (and indeed, algorithmic) syntax, and to the complex and contradictory contrapuntal impact of the language on the page, tongue, and ear. Beginning and ending with a key passage from James’s own literary criticism (the “Trollope rebuke”), this book proceeds from an early novel experimental enough not to have been chosen by James for inclusion in the New York Edition (The Europeans), to a short tale written in the “Middle Phase” of the 1890s (“The Pupil”), to a “late novel” which is arguably James’s greatest achievement in the genre (The Golden Bowl), and thence to a later tale which may well present a compendium of all that James set himself to accomplish in making fiction an art (“The Jolly Corner”). “Henry James on Telling,” Chapter 1, posits that James’s fiction does not offer itself fully to taxonomies and genealogies, the necessary tools of any analysis. Grounding itself in an analogy James deploys in the monumental, mid-career essay, “The Art of Fiction,” this chapter takes as central James’s lifelong practice of exploring and exploiting to its fullest what he saw as the then-immanent potential of the novel to become an art form with the stature of the art of painting. The analogy James uses in “The Art of Fiction” is that of the “finest silken threads of a spider-web,” “catching every air-borne particle,” converting “the very pulses of the air into revelations.” The spiderweb is capacious, trapping and enmeshing all manner of matter—resembling in its abstract yet concrete way the artist upon whom “nothing is lost,” who will succeed in transforming this genre into a form of art that will reveal the glint and glimmer of the “immense sensibility” that is the spiderweb of “experience,” understood as transpersonal, trans-objectal,

Introduction

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trans-temporal (“Art of Fiction,” 388).1 Chapter 1 presents an exemplary reading of a passage in “The Turn of the Screw” to demonstrate that the oddities and apparent accidentals of language in James’s fiction are precisely the foreign objects that provide the reader access to the spiderweb upon/within which plot, characters, narratives, narrators, things, bodies, ethics, and queernesses are suspended. Chapter 2, “The Europeans in the House of Fiction: ‘a foreigner of some sort’ ” analyzes James’s deployment of the figure of “foreignness” to argue for James’s self-conscious critique and revision of the nationalistic project of the American domestic novel. James’s story of the European inhabitation of a New England dwelling projects his art of the novel as a “foreign house” of fiction. The now-foreign New England dwelling figures, in turn, James’s exploitation of the essential foreignness of narration itself, via foreign things, foreign manners, foreign cousins, foreign marriage plots, and, finally, the inescapably foreign presence in the novel that tells and makes it art. In Chapter 3, “Morganizing the Body of ‘The Pupil,’ ” attention to the “dirt” in the text reminds us that when we say that “The Pupil” has sexuality “in” it (as opposed to being part of a mix which adds up to sexuality) we do so at least in part because we know that James’s sexuality had to go somewhere. What we lose in this transaction is what cannot be found on the page but is there when we read rather than decode: a Jamesian telling of sexuality which is more culturally critical and politically astute than any narrative our theoretical and critical labors have yet produced. As Kaja Silverman and others have contended, James writes a marginal masculine subject, but as this tale allows us to see, one that is only as marginal as the next guy. This is the shimmering web on which is suspended the public fiction that James’s text morganizes (a nineteenth-century locution which means to assassinate secretly in order to prevent or punish 1

See Sharon Cameron, who revolutionized James studies with her study of thinking and consciousness in James’s fiction as an intersubjective phenomenon.

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disclosures). The disclosure that “The Pupil” does not prevent with its assassination of the boy who could not quite disavow enough seems to be that disavowal can position virtually anybody in an apparently (which is always good enough for cultural work) heterosexual circuit. The on-again, off-again tutor Pemberton’s queerness, with its ambivalences, its hesitations and retreats, its angst-ridden reluctances, is easily and smoothly accommodated by the dominant sexuality narrative which is not all this story tells. Starting with a return to the problematically taxonomized pulses behind the limiting labels—the narrative, the narrator, the voice of the “author,” the voice of the actual living, breathing, speaking, dictating historical writer—Chapter 4, “The Silver Clue Fish in The Golden Bowl” presents each in its own way as another mote suspended in the web of experience that is the novel. For we see the typographical tracings, we read the written filigrees of language (“as who should say”), and we could, at a second (aural) glance, hear something else. That something else is that which adds nothing in particular to the plot, story, even to the figuration. But it is there, and it does add. In The Golden Bowl the importance of form is asserted and reasserted with each added layer of language. Lovely language is infested by unlovely and perverse particles, by the perverse imp making pointless arse jokes, dancing and cackling, pushing us off the cliffs of propriety and into the unmentionables (not always coterminous with the un-sayables or even the unspeakables). When we move from the “silver clue of consciousness” to the “silver fish” infesting these sea-damp pages, we find traces of the importance of the de-formed, the anti-form—the monkey-flung poo of words-become-things, the vulgarly entertaining perversity inherent in words in all their inglorious, uproarious physicality, however noble and ennobling the forms they de-form may be. Eric Savoy has dubbed Spenser Brydon the “figure in the closet,” a figure “who is recuperated only to serve simultaneously as an

Introduction

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impossible identification, an impossible repudiation,” whose story “calls into question the site of authentic identity and the very possibility of attaching it to a nominal sign.”2 In Chapter 5, “In the Vestibule of ‘The Jolly Corner,’ ” I read this as a useful description not only of Brydon’s particular genealogical/archeological gyrations, but also of the Jamesian project in general. First, third, and, for that matter, second person pronouns are indeed central to this perverse, queer, unruly story with its looping and loopy disavowal of person, tense, and syntax (identity, time, and chronology). The first paragraph of the story reveals a second preoccupation at least as peculiar as the first. We find there an insistence on numbers; numbers condense the narrative elements of identity, time, and chronology: they function as markers of priority in the naming of pronouns (the first person pronoun is indeed the “first” in importance), of placement in time (any number is a narrative), and of chronology (I am “I” now, because I was who was born fifty-six years ago). All the numbers in the first paragraph fold back into the paradoxical and disavowed (present because disavowed) story told here of a time that is not exclusively (the) present, and an “I” that cannot be coterminous with itself. The most telling, perhaps, particle caught in the spiderweb of “The Jolly Corner” is the oddly emphasized, widely gaping “vestibule,” in which Brydon experiences both death and rebirth—the vestibule not only of his remembered childhood in the jolly corner but also “a small triangular space placed at the upper part of the vulva.” The final word of the tale, “breast,” sheds a nonlinear and lurid light on the silken threads of the spiderweb of James’s art of fiction. In conclusion, Chapter 6, “Telling on Henry James,” returns to the matter, the dirt out of place, anatomized in Chapter 1 as it revisits an essay that is more or less contemporaneous with “The Art of Fiction.” In this essay, and in “Anthony Trollope,” we find a passage rebuking 2

“Subjunctive Biography,” (254).

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Anthony Trollope for a moment of direct address in Barchester Towers.3 I take these passages as particles caught in the different but always entangled spiderwebs of James’s theory of fiction and our theories of James’s theory, reading them as tracing Henry James’s transformation of “the narrator” of a novel to the spinner of the web of experience in which the forms of reality are caught—as, that is, revealing the very pulse of the air that reveals James’s theory not of fiction, but of the art that is fiction.

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The rebuke is something of a locus classicus in work on the novel, both writers, and narrative theory. The second time the passage appears, in Partial Portraits (1888), it is often read as a softening and even a partial apology for the version that appears in an earlier, more stringent review of Trollope’s work (The Century 1883). For a fine introduction to the general critical conversation, see Roslyn Jolly’s magisterial 1993 Henry James: History, Narrative, Fiction.

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“Yes, look, look,” she seemed to see him hear her say, even while her sounded words were other— —Henry James, The Golden Bowl . . . the doctor’s testimony does not substitute itself for the patient’s testimony, but resonates with it, because, as Freud discovers, it takes two to witness the unconscious. —Shoshana Felman Henry James offers his reader countless descriptions, analogies, and tropes for his conception of the kind of fiction he spent his life inventing. From houses, to fishing, to bookworms, to out of body experiences, within the fiction and without, James seems never to have tired of looking for “the right indications for sounding, the right implements for digging”1 to help the attentive reader (and, for that matter, himself) to grasp his view that it is not the case “that a novel is a novel, as a pudding is a pudding” (“Art,” 376). This book takes as centrally useful one of the analogies in “The Art of Fiction,” written in part as a response to Walter Besant’s overly prescriptive essay on the “rules” for novels.2 In this passage, James movingly testifies to the immensity of his own project, to the passion of his

1 2

Preface to “The Pupil.” James’s essay was originally published in Longman’s Magazine in 1884. In addition to the wonderful clarity this essay offers us as to James’s almost giddy sense of what he will be able to make of the art form he here defends, its publication records the ambitious intentions James makes good on over the next three decades.

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determination to get life itself, somehow, into—onto—the pages of his fiction: Humanity is immense and reality has a myriad forms; the most one can affirm is that some of the flowers of fiction have the odour of it, and others have not; as for telling you in advance how your nosegay should be composed, that is another affair. It is equally excellent and inconclusive to say that one must write from experience; to our supposititious aspirant such a declaration might savour of mockery. What kind of experience is intended, and where does it begin and end? Experience is never limited and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web, of the finest silken threads, suspended in the chamber of consciousness and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when the mind is imaginative—much more when it happens to be that of a man of genius—it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations. (“Art,” 388)

This passage, it seems to me, has much to offer a reader thinking about how to characterize and work with Henry James’s “theory” of narrative, a theory, as we know, that is simply, in fact, James’s practice. We can see here, for example, why it has never been possible for literary critics to settle James’s work conclusively on one side or the other of the “realism/romance” divide: his working definition of “reality” is vast and capacious, and his approach to representing that reality has much in common with Chairman Mao’s famous aphorism, “Let a thousand flowers bloom,” as opposed to the less famous remarks of Walter Besant, James’s fictional interlocutor in this essay, who appears to have been advocating for conventional arrangements composed of a limited selection of flora. The passage uses its figures as argument rather than as illustration, taking the reader from assertion to figure to sensory impression to analogy, from the vastness of the cosmos to the particularity of embodied experience to the uncanny

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mixed figuration of the invisible yet palpable air surrounding that body—which houses the imaginative mind of the man of genius—as possessing a pulse. The “immense” and “myriad” matter of fiction cannot be limited to a definition of “experience” merely located in the individual, man of genius though she may be3: it is unidentifiable, illimitable, unending, infinite. It is “an immense sensibility” like that available to the spider which, in its much smaller world, uses its web to extend its “sensibility” to an intimate awareness of the “myriad forms” that define, by contact, the extent and reach of its universe. Just as the faintest “pulse” of the air will tell a tale to the occupant of the actual spiderweb, so every “air-borne particle” caught in the “finest silken threads” of the “huge spider-web” that is the “very atmosphere of the mind” will be converted by the writer into “revelations.” James declares here his guiding conviction that fiction can be a form of art upon which, like its creator, “nothing is lost”—no particle, no dust mote, no pulse of air—all of it can be present, all of it must be included, and this all becomes, as it is read, the “all” of the reader’s life experience as well. Experience is “never limited and never complete” and reality has “a myriad forms.” From a commonsense view, the descriptive phrases seem reversed. Shouldn’t “experience” have forms and “reality” be unlimited and incomplete? What is the difference between James’s use of the words “experience” and “reality” in this passage? Experience, being the spiderweb, has literal forms of reality snagged in it, all of which solicit the awareness of those upon whom nothing is lost, both the writer and the reader; this awareness is the art. Fiction is the art of losing nothing, James asserts, and particles of reality, a congeries of miscellaneous detritus, are suspended in the web of experience. This conception of the relation of experience to reality is the reverse of 3

“The young lady living in a village has only to be a damsel upon whom nothing is lost to make it quite unfair (as it seems to me) to declare to her that she shall have nothing to say about the military” (388).

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commonsense perspective, which posits that reality is a prior datum from which we select our experience (or from which our experience is somehow selected or foisted upon us). In James’s figure, which is the Jamesian equivalent to argument, reality does not take priority— it is neither prior to nor more real than experience. By this account we can also infer that no particle of fiction takes priority over the web of words it presents to our awareness. Thus, character, plot, story, figure, objects, time, chronology, and narrative are equally presented to us as foreign objects adhering to our experience of the fiction; none of it should be lost on us, but no single object is equivalent or especially privy to the spiderweb tout court. When Shoshana Felman uses the verb “resonates with” to particularize the relationship of the testimony of doctor and patient, she is registering the contributions psychoanalysis has made to our understanding of experiences, realities, and stories. Freud, like James, grants recognition to the detritus of the unconscious and the unacknowledged, asserting its value in the process of identifying the experience, known and unknown, of the individual; further, as Felman notes, Freudian analysis discovers and depends upon the assumption that a truth need not be available to a speaker in order to be addressed (“Education,” 24). We can recognize that Felman’s remarks apply equally to James’s fiction, which always tells us both more and less than seems to be presented by its narrator (narrative, narrative voice), offering, as it inveterately does, multiple, and often contradictory, reading (in)directions. As Eric Savoy puts it: “James’s narrative never coincides with ‘story’; there is always the residue of the unresolved or undisclosed, which is precisely what makes his fiction compelling” (254). This study focuses on James’s multifaceted and innovatory exploration of the non-synonymous relation of narration to fiction, of the ways in which texts produce, inhabit, and absorb the reader while remaining alternately and also simultaneously a foreign and yet

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domesticated inhabitant of the reader’s mindscape.4 On the levels of story, character, material object, consciousness, language, and word, James, over a long and prolific lifetime as an experimental writer, conducted a tough-minded and exhaustive investigation of fiction, of the potentially endless capacities of the fictional machinery he inherited from novelists before him and exhaustively transformed for the novelists who inherited his work. “Fictional machinery” is an unhappy locution, and I do not intend to try the reader’s patience with it often. I need something unlovely to break myself of the habit of substituting the words “narrative” and “narrator” for the entirety of what delivers the fiction to me. These words can become, I would argue, as loose and baggy as James once remarked Dickens’s novels were. “Narrative” and “narrator” are among the particles in the web; they are neither spider nor the web itself. They do not preexist the other forms of reality cohabiting the threads of the web, and they do not present those items to our awareness— they are themselves presented. None of the currently available critical nomenclature completely describes all of the characteristics of the fictional machinery. In fact, even the most basic and thus most capacious critical terms tend to obscure if not render invisible much of the perversity and heterogeneity of Jamesian fiction, pre-naming and thereby limiting what can be said about all of what we see and hear when we read James: motiveless, naughty jokes like naming a character “Assingham,” for instance, are difficult to recuperate and include in analyses which deploy taxonomic labels that cannot factor in such anomalies—which are in fact designed to filter them out. Terms like “narrator,” “narrative voice,” and “point of view,” useful though they may be in certain arenas, are nevertheless and fundamentally 4

My use of this word has no other motivation than my desire to avoid the use of “mind,” “self,” “subjectivity,” “identity,” and “agency.”

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inherently anthropomorphic: it is therefore not possible, I would argue, to deploy them without treating them as a figure for a purpose-driven author, and thus, in turn, narrowing our awareness to textual elements that conform to a lurking but active analogy to a single person uttering the text. “Narrative voice” of necessity conjures a more or less human possessor of vocal cords. “Narrator” does not improve the situation much. J. Hillis Miller, one of our best and most prolific narrative theorists and close readers, for example, in the course of entertaining the possibility that the narrator of “The Aspern Papers” may be “that notorious personage, the ‘unreliable narrator,’  ” remarks, “James may be speaking to me, ironically, through gaps and lapses in the narrator’s language” (emphasis added, Conduct 14). The term “narrative,” in its suggestive passivity, inherently fails to account for the active and visible ways in which this element of James’s texts works, on the page and in the reader. “Narrative level” implies a layer that remains distinct from the rest of the text, whereas a cardinal feature of the Jamesian text is its messy permeability—riotous barrages of only subliminally noticed ill-assorted figures of speech, tropes introduced by the narrator repeated or echoed in words spoken by characters and vice versa, narrators invoked as such during the course of the story who nevertheless cannot with certainty be located as the point of origin of the story, narratives posing as linear which in fact depend on and from “timelines” resembling nothing so much as an untidy mix of what psychoanalysis calls  angstbereitschaft and nachtraglichkeit.5 Frustration with this possibly inherently anomalous (or at least, incompletely nameable) textual element may drive us to the manufacture of more labels (I have been known to insist, only halfjoking, that a graduate seminar use the term “narratizer” to unsettle 5

Nachtraglichkeit refers to an occurrence acquiring intelligibility (and thus a “place” in a narrative) only after succeeding occurrences confer it; angstbereitschaft is the state of getting ready to have been surprised.

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the assumptions the other vocabularies smuggle into discussions). In a similar vein, Miller remarks wryly of Gerard Genette, “One of the best of what I once called ‘canny’ critics, . . . a synecdoche for the small army of narratologists who have continued to work in the same region of descriptive intelligence”: Genette is admirably inventive in finding or inventing names for the complexities of narrative form: prolepsis, metalepsis, analepsis, ellipse, analipse, diegesis, metadiegesis, and so on. The barbarity of these terms makes it unlikely that they would be adopted universally and so freeze into a machinelike system.  .  . . On the other hand, by naming features of narrative not often seen, they lead to a recognition of how complex an apparently simple novel or short story actually is. (On Narrative 48–49)

Taxonomies, by definition and however they are first developed, are a kind of inevitable (pre)organizing of what is seen—and therefore what can be seen—and so, necessarily and inherently, omit whatever might fall into the interstices of naming. Mary Douglas, in Purity and Danger, focuses on this interstitial matter in her investigation of ritual behaviors developed by cultures to deal with the unnamable and the multicategorizable detritus left out of account by any system of ordering.6 Her analysis provides terms without a long history of use in literary theory: borrowing her concept, if I can think of a peculiar and apparently unmotivated textual detail as “matter out of place,” as, essentially “dirt,” I can pay the kind of simultaneous attention that James’s spiderweb/particle analogy demands. Narrativizing, by its nature, creates excesses and vagaries of signification, and textual meaning is always made, to 6

Douglas argues that sacred rituals arise from the fundamental cognitive hygiene that dealing with such data entails; I would argue that in James, the interstitial matter, the matter out of place, also gives rise to narrative and textual anomalies that are as often flippant and risible as they are sacred. See Chapter 3, for instance.

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underscore the point, in and by the process of intense, intimate exchange and negotiation that is reading. —Eric Haralson Schools of criticism and theory, modalities of organizing texts and reading approaches, approaches to defining the task of the literary scholar, and analytic vocabularies and terms of art—all produce (and in the producing, expel), in addition to order and productive lines of analysis, anomalous and ambiguous matter. Once any classification system, no matter how responsive and complex, is deployed, the polymorphous experience of reading a literary text is tamed, transformed from an unruly mass of unmappable and incommensurate cognitive and affective responses, to an object still complex, perhaps, but parseable even so. We need such systems. But we also need to resist them even as we use them, taking careful account of the “matter out of place” that is displaced by our analysis. The best technology to use in the course of this healthy resistance is close reading (in the course of its vicissitudes in the academy, it has been given other names as well). Close reading is a tool that can be used to see the anomalies and ambiguities, the detritus floating in the wake of literary analysis. In this book, I turn to close reading to engage such questions as: What is left out of account when a given vocabulary (system, taxonomy) functions as reading glasses, so to speak? How does that residue affect the work of the text and the work of the reader? More specifically, what, in the narrative in hand, functions as other to it? I am not proposing a return to the glory days/bad ol’ days of “high” theory—all too often seen as merely a complicated game of verbal Jenga (pull out this piece and the whole text/enterprise falls down). Nor am I stuck in the bad ol’ days of the mostly excoriated New Criticism, sometimes seen as just another term for close reading, a technology it used in the pursuit of ideological projects

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most of us no longer share. My methodology, insofar as I have one, basically comes down to attention, a tool of all analytical inquiry, but the attention I am most interested in is unruly attention—“oh look! a shiny thing! and over here! another one!”—which is a useful counterpoint to received critical and theoretical wisdom, and more importantly, a necessary complement to both middle-distance reading (reading to find out what happens and what the text/ author is up to) and long-distance attention (reading to figure out where a text/author/genre fits in larger textual, literary, or cultural taxonomies). It is my working hypothesis that close-in reading grounds and enhances the other two, but that as a tireless taxonomy generator, the study of literature has by no means outgrown its need for continued, sustained close-in attention to what Mary Douglas calls “dirt,” and what James’s arachnoid analogy might call the “pulse of the air,” which will, of course, carry literal dirt to any waiting web. Dirt, matter out of place, is to be understood metaphorically; it is the paradox, ambiguity, and disorder necessarily produced by any system of order; it therefore, to a significant degree, enables order. Whatever kind of literary criticism or theory we practice, the object we are studying as well as the work we produce is a system of order, and, as such, leaves all kinds of telltale dirt behind (which is to say on or within it). This study attends, then, to such dirt, the complex stew of the “notstory” language of James’s texts, Eric Savoy’s “residue.” The ubiquitous heterogeneity of James’s machinery is what makes it Jamesian; the insufficiency of available narratological labels to encompass the entire narrative machinery (or even the most important moving parts) reveals this heterogeneity by default even as any given, chosen term smoothes and homogenizes the text, occluding the very theoretical issues James lays active hands upon. What interests me, as the succeeding chapters will make clear, are the incongruent, peripatetic, and eruptive textual gestures lying outside homogenizing

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labels—the gestures, that is, by which James addresses or manifests the complexities of telling.7 There is “telling,” and there is “what tells”: these terms do not come close to coinciding with “narrating” and “narrator”—nor with any other pair of terms that might at first glance seem to do the same work. Throughout this study, I will focus on textual elements that both encompass and exceed “narrating” thereby producing telling language.8 The experience presented to us in “The Turn of the Screw,” for example, of reading the transcription of (the manuscript of) the hearing of the reading of the story of the governess introduces foreign matter of all kinds that is occluded, even if momentarily, when we compress it all into the word “narration.” If we can keep all the planes of this multihedron present in examining the origin(s) of the governess’s story, we can see that the reader may be less a narratee than the very screw of narrative itself, moving recursively but not steadily or unidirectionally into the text, along the spiraling edges of the reading positions of Douglas and the frame-narrator/narrator/ reader/“I” (and the “I” in the story who is not “I” in the frame) as it burrows deeper into the anomalies of an ever-receding origin and a refusal of any determinable, structured-by-narrative story. While, for instance, Douglas opens “the faded red cover of a thin old-fashioned gilt-edged album” he has received from a woman now “these twenty years dead” and begins “to read with a fine clearness that was like a rendering to the ear of the beauty of his author’s 7

8

“Telling” is for me an attempt to find a term inclusive of all textual elements that induce the reader to receive the full “impression” of James’s texts; the term has been effectively put to use in other contexts as well. Notably, “telling” is a prominent thematic throughout James’s writing and is used by critics and theorists of all stripes, unavoidably even, in the course of discussing Jamesian prose. See, for example, Rita Charon’s essay which provides a reading of James’s narrative style as a particularly effective transmission of affective and ethical connection between reader and text, analyzing the utility of such an approach to narrative/telling in clinical settings: “James’s revelations about the consequences of telling of self and of other and the equipment necessary to absorb and honor that telling add new knowledge and perspective to the tasks of the patient and the would-be healer” (415). Even in his nonfiction, James is as elusively allusive as he is analytical and straightforward.

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hand,” the reader is looking at a reproduction of what the first person frame-narrator heard that night via “an exact transcript of my own made much later,” made by reproducing the album which has come into the frame-narrator’s possession—but on the level of narration alone can also be, grammatically, a transcript of the actual words he had heard years earlier in/as Douglas’s reading (since only after we are informed that the words we are reading are “an exact transcript” are we told that Douglas sent him, years later, the governess’s album).9 There is a resonance between the narrative asynchronies in the diegesis and those experienced by and for the reader of these introductory pages. We see, as well, a blurring of grammatical taxonomies and a lava flow of verbal synesthesia: Douglas’s reading is simultaneously a verb and a metaphor (both reading out loud and performing the reading)—“a fine clearness” pointing to excellence in timing, cadence, pronunciation; that clearness transforming via simile to a bloody business that is also a musical or dramatic performance (“rendering”); which delivers to a physical part of the body and to its function (“rendering to the ear” is “hearing”), the sight (yes, the sight is delivered to the ear) of the dead woman’s (author’s) hand (the physical version of which is reported to be beautiful and once held warmly by the splendid young bachelor who thus initiated the contract that eventually provided the matter of the tale) which is at one and the same time the particular shapes of the marks her pen (in her hand) made on the page which, finally, we do not see (or read). “The story will tell,” I took upon myself to reply. . . . “The story won’t tell,” said Douglas; “not in any literal, vulgar way.” When Douglas says the story will not tell in any “literal, vulgar way,” he, in that moment, is literally and vulgarly telling his interlocutor a thing

9

And we are told it in syntax as tricky as my attempt to imitate it, though James, of course, does it much better.

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of great importance: the kind of exchange they are having in words alone, considered as transmission of information, is not the kind of exchange the story is about to have, has been having, with the reader. In “The Reality Effect,” Roland Barthes discusses the kind of textual detail I would place in the category of “telling” and that Douglas might classify as not telling in any “literal, vulgar” way. Discussing the aspect of narrative we call “description,” Barthes asks: “Is everything in narrative significant, and if not, if insignificant stretches subsist in the narrative syntagm, what is ultimately, so to speak, the significance of this insignificance?” (231). “Description,” for Barthes, is posed over against the “trajectory of choices and alternatives which gives narration the appearance of a huge traffic-control center, furnished with a referential (and not merely discursive) temporality” (231). A crucial characteristic of the Jamesian narrational machinery is precisely its insistence throughout on withholding the usual referential signals, while open-handedly strewing “insignificant” textual items that seem to come from and go nowhere. Prior to the final scene of “The Turn of the Screw,” which does not tell us that the governess kills Miles, the narrative performs a feat of “description” prestidigitation that unsettles what might remain of any putative traffic-control system regulating the turns sexualities continuously take in the telling of this tale. The governess (we think) is giving us (maybe) an account of a significant moment: He was discernibly trying to take for granted more things than he found, without assistance, quite easy; and he dropped into peaceful silence while he felt his situation. Our meal was of the briefest— mine a vain pretense, and I had the things immediately removed. While this was done Miles stood again with his hands in his little pockets and his back to me—stood and looked out of the wide window through which, that other day, I had seen what pulled me up. We continued silent while the maid was with us—as silent, it whimsically occurred to me, as some young couple who, on their wedding journey, at the inn, feel shy in the presence of the waiter.

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He turned round only when the waiter had left us. “Well—so we’re alone!” (226–27)

The questions posed at the (at our) beginning of the story (Whose story is it? Where does it come from? Where is it going? How many tellers are there?) have been interwoven throughout our reading with wandering flashes of hints and tonalities of inappropriate and disturbing sexualities. Here, these glimpses take a turn to the fully fleshed simile (“as some young couple”) glancingly narrated into a story (“on their wedding journey”) to bring us face to face, momentarily, with a convergence of all prior lights and flashes of intimations of sexualities. We are face to face with it, as Miles is face to face with the same window through (or in?) which, the governess notes, she had earlier confronted “what pulled me up.” The “what” here, in the place and course of her reflection, is apparently (apparitionally) Quint, who (which?) has already stood in the place of the governess’s desire on their first confrontation (“Someone would appear there at the turn of a path and would stand before me and smile and approve” [135]). Whose desire is at play when the governess places herself and her charge in a honeymoon suite (that is not there, that is not told)? The story “tells” sexuality even less than it tells whether the ghosts are real; yet whatever we think about those ghosts, we all count on there being, at the very least, non-ghostly sexuality in there somewhere. The telling sign that Miles the child can be (is being) narrated into a heterosexual narrative (vis-a-vis the governess) as easily as a homosexual one (visa-vis Quint) is that transsexual housemaid: she is troped as a waiter as easily as Miles is disavowed into a wedding night.10 By the mere touch of that locution the maid turns; the female domestic becomes a male waiter. The governess stands in the place of the innocent, trembling 10

As Deborah Esch and Jonathan Warren note in the Norton edition, only in the first serial publication did the maid remain a maid (93). Clearly, then, this is not a slip of Henry James’s (dictating) tongue.

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bride. The child Miles becomes the suave cohabitant of the governess’s bridal chamber. And we are forced to participate in the scandals— rhetorical, sexual, narrational—that the passage and the story turn out by turning on one, single, unattributable word. The maid/waiter is Barthes’s unnecessary detail, insignificant only from the point of view of any prior point of view. Whether we read the word as the governess’s slip in writing or memory or thinking, as an instance of mistranscription, as a telling detail of the way the governess’s mind and desire actually work—whether conveyed to us by the (actual) narrator or the reader in the narrative (Douglas) or the transcriber of that narrative or the reader of Douglas and the narrative (“I”) or by the un-locatable, polymorphous narrational machinery—it is always both integral and excessive to the story, to the narration of the story, and to the trajectory of the plot. It is a telling detail because it is an unnecessary/insignificant one—but James gives Barthes’s reality effect one more turn of the screw. As the waiter shows us, James’s tell can be not much more than a bit of foreign matter, owning to no particular origin, and/but also usable in any number of origin stories. Henry James’s many decades of writing fiction were devoted to his lifelong experimentation with narration. His project was to produce on the page the entirety of the experience of telling. Telling not simply the story, but telling the process of telling the story, telling the experience of being told, telling the characters’ sense of their place in the telling, telling the characters as both telling and told, telling the sense of the audience’s hearing and seeing the telling, telling the times of the telling and of the being told. James often attempts to figure for the reader his campaign to capture the elusive and essential experience of narrative via peculiarly grouped clots of tropes: for instance, John Marcher “ ‘burns’ on occasion” in the preface that concludes by noting that writing is like following a recipe which produces “fumes  .  .  . of twenty more ingredients than I had consciously put in.” While

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Marcher’s “burning” is connected in the next moment to a child’s game, the verb connects both in turn to the cooking analogy which, in turn, picks up another thread dropped along the way, echoing the phrase “most tormentedly to burn” which invokes an entirely different network of associations and interpretive narratives at the same time the reader (and the character and the narrator) is burning with the desire to “read his lifelong riddle,” which the preface notes wryly “naturally involves a climax,” and which, more wryly still, witnesses to Marcher’s (and the text’s) status as “the man in the world to whom nothing whatever was to happen” (7). Just so, Henry James’s narrative is the place in the world where nothing whatever also “happens”—or, better, where, when “nothing whatever” “happens” the narrational machinery is telling, via textual matter perhaps not consciously put in but contributing nonetheless to the fumes. Uncanny, foreignness is within us: we are our own foreigners, we are divided. —Julia Kristeva In her meditation on foreignness, Julia Kristeva asserts that Freud’s unconscious domesticates what is strange in the human psyche, integrating “within the assumed unity of human beings an otherness that is both biological and symbolic and becomes an integral part of the same” (Strangers 181). The “other scene” inhabiting us affects us in countless ways, often producing behavior or reactions we consider strange, even foreign to ourselves—foreign, at any rate, to the story we tell ourselves about our selves, foreign, especially, to the story that we are our selves. This other scene strews fragments of real life tells— the “Freudian slip,” the nonsensical dream, the unacknowledged and displaced hostility wreaking violence on our own bodies instead of those of our enemies, the disavowal of unacceptable and yet known truths—that both underwrite and subvert the stories of coherence and intentionality we tell ourselves about self and other. The unconscious,

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the foreigner within, refuses to fully accede to the categories of order, the cultural inventions we produce in order to leave untold the telltale dirt produced by the insufficiency of our stories of our domestication in life and self. This is the “matter out of place” that calls on us to read it carefully, attentively, slowly. It is the attention paid to these oddments that enables our ability to see the silken threads of Henry James’s fiction, which like any other kind of art is not “about” something; it is something. And just as a psychoanalytic lens can enable us to read the inassimilable evidence of the constitutive strangeness within human subjects and institutions, so a close reading of textual elements that are in excess of the hitherto and hopefully catalogued operations of narrative can locate the figurative and unaccountable foreign matter that flout our narrative taxonomies and defy aboutness, and, in so doing, and not in any literal, vulgar way, tell all. There’s a sense in which what I am arguing is a way of reading that treats words on the page the way, say, thing theory treats things or the New Materialists treat materiality: in each reading a word functions as the oddity in a fiction considered from the point of view of narrative. It is an unnecessary detail, a bit of extraneous matter floating conspicuously in the web of the text, matter out of place, dirt. From the word “foreign” in The Europeans, to the half-buried word “morganized” in “The Pupil”; from the word “ass” in The Golden Bowl to the word “vestibule” in “The Jolly Corner”: these repetitions are not the artful signals of coherence and unity found in the reading practices of the New Criticism, but they are notwithstanding important moments in a close reading practice. They are the unassimilable signs, the foreign objects breaking the plane of fiction considered only as narrative. They are samples of the kind of material demarcating the extent of the reader’s own web of experience—or, rather, they will, being caught in the text’s and the reader’s spiderweb, inhabit and construct the piece of art the reader makes of the text when nothing is lost upon her.

2

The Europeans in the House of Fiction: “a foreigner of some sort”

One day, in 1877, the editor of Atlantic Monthly, William Dean Howells, asked Henry James a simple question. Could he not just, just once, end a story, cheerfully, you know, with a marriage? James, being a reasonable artist, returned a cheery acquiescence. Yes, yes, look look, I seem to see him hear him say: here is what I will do for you. I suspect it is the tragedies in life that arrest my attention more than the other things and say more to my imagination; but, on the other hand, if I fix my eyes on a sun-spot I think I am able to see the prismatic colors in it. You shall have the brightest possible sun-spot for the four-number tale of 1878. It shall fairly put your readers’ eyes out.1

Howells’s plea was for compensation to his readers for the lugubrious endings of, among others, Roderick Hudson and The American, which had been serialized in Atlantic Monthly throughout 1875 and 1876. Expanding his already capacious affirmative, James continues: The idea of doing what you propose much pleases me; and I agree to squeeze my buxom muse, as you happily call her, into a hundred of your pages. . . . I will lace her so tight that she shall have the neatest little figure in the world. It shall be a very joyous little romance. I am afraid I can’t tell you at this moment what it will be; for my dusky fancy contains nothing joyous enough: but I will invoke the jocund muse and come up to time. I shall probably develop an

1

Quoted in (Edel, Facsimile 104–07).

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idea that I have, about a genial, charming youth of a Bohemianish pattern, who comes back from foreign parts into the midst of a mouldering and ascetic old Puritan family of his kindred (some imaginary locality in New England, 1830), and by his gayety and sweet audacity smooths out their rugosities, heals their dyspepsia and dissipates their troubles. All the women fall in love with him (and he with them—his amatory powers are  boundless); but even for a happy ending he can’t marry them all. But he marries the prettiest, and from a romantic quality of Christian charity, produces a picturesque imbroglio (for the sake of the picturesque I shall play havoc with the New England background of 1830!) under cover of which the other maidens pair off with the swains who have hitherto been starved out: after which the beneficent cousin departs for Bohemia (with his bride, oh yes!) in a vaporous rosy cloud, to scatter new benefactions over man—and especially, woman-kind! (xx)

Thus Henry James—or, rather, Henry James’s letter, or, rather still, what Henry James’s letter told Howells—tells us a story that is not there, even as it does not tell us the story that is. For, having offered to put out Howells’s readers’ eyes and to virtually strangle his muse, our agreeable author then declares his intention to tear up the tarmac of New England history in the service of as smarmy a story as any Hello Kitty laden Facebook meme. In the end, some of the muse’s stay laces are cut, the story comes in at ninety-one magazine pages, and while one courtship ends lugubriously with its dark lady banished to Europe, the Atlantic Monthly reader (and she is us) was rewarded with no less than four marriages (though one of them is post- and, therefore, anti-climactic). The savage undertone of James’s sketch of the fiction that would become The Europeans: A Sketch, together with its strange, rather frantic exuberance, makes its way into the novel with the rest of the plot machinery. While it stops well short of enucleation, the narrative fulfills the rest of the promises James makes to Howells and to

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himself, adding to his plot the clever, charming, Eugenia, Baroness Münster, sister to the “charming, genial youth,” who has been named, appropriately, Felix Young. Together the siblings, the children (and grandchildren) of American expatriates, journey to America to seek their fortunes in their ancestral land: A narrow grave-yard in the heart of a bustling, indifferent city, seen from the windows of a gloomy-looking inn, is at no time an object of enlivening suggestion; and the spectacle is not at its best when the mouldy tombstones and funereal umbrage have received the ineffectual refreshment of a dull, moist snowfall. If, while the air is thickened by this frosty drizzle, the calendar should happen to indicate that the blessed vernal season is already six weeks old, it will be admitted that no depressing influence is absent from the scene. This fact was keenly felt on a certain 12th of May, upwards of thirty years since, by a lady who stood looking out of one of the windows of the best hotel in the ancient city of Boston. (1–2)

Not immediately suggestive of a light-hearted Shakespearean comedy ending in Hymen’s appearance and marriages all ’round is it? The “grave-yard” (and a narrow one at that) occupying the heart of the indifferent city is not a propitious trailer for a romantic love story. Moreover, the setting of the scene proceeds by negations: “indifferent,” “at no time,” “not at its best,” “ineffectual,” “no depressing influence is absent.” The atmosphere, far from prismatically colored, is gloomy, mouldy, funereal, dull, depressing, thickened, frosty, and replete with drizzle. The sly invocation of the “blessed vernal season” recalls the conspicuously ebullient tone of James’s (apparently) enthusiastic acceptance of Howells’s candid plea. If this is the beginning of what James had promised to deliver, we are going to need more help than staring at the sun could provide us. The novel was a success, both in America and in England (James writes to Elizabeth Boot in October 1878 that it “is succeeding here

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quite brilliantly” [Harden 57]). But shortly after the last number was published, we find Henry responding to his brother William’s “painful reflections” thereon. While Henry acknowledges the novel’s “extreme slightness,” he asserts that William judges “these things too rigidly and unimaginatively, too much as if an artistic experiment were a piece of conduct, to which one’s life were somehow committed”; in contrast, he himself, “being ‘very artistic’ ” is motivated by a “constant impulse to try experiments in form,” in the production of which, he says, he prefers avoiding the risk of “wasting or gratuitously using big situations.”2 So, granting the “slightness” and perhaps even a certain hackneyed quality to the basic romantic comedy plot elements (sophisticates vs. rustics, prudence vs. impetuosity, old vs. young, series of comic misunderstandings played out under the looming threat of the patriarchal no/nom, i.e., “picturesque imbroglio”)—granting all this, in what sense might this text be considered “an artistic experiment”? How does it reflect a “constant impulse to try experiments in form”? Surely, the basic plot devices, the characters, the “mise en scène” as the Baroness (that lady we saw just now feeling the absence from the scene of no depressing influence) will put it to the brother we have not met yet, are not by any stretch of the imagination “experimental,” any more than are the nicely paired dichotomies on offer as the story goes on. I think a productive answer lies in that double-voiced letter to Howells: the matter of the letter is an acceptance of Howell’s assignment; the style of the letter indicates that James plans to profit by taking it as a challenge, an experiment: Can he find a way to be Henry James while presenting the paying public with a romantic, picturesque, sunny, wedding-capped story?3 2 3

(Letters, Lubbock vol. I 69–70). Earlier in the Howells letter, James declares that he understands that the readers need this kind of pap, but that that does not mean he is the one to give it to them.

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A great writer is always like a foreigner in the language in which he expresses himself, even if this is his native tongue. —Gilles Deleuze The words “foreigner” and “foreign” appear twenty-seven times in this short novel. Various forms of “stranger”—the English version of the French version of “foreigner”—appear forty-three times. At least seventy-one different foreign words and phrases are used, many multiple times, all but two of them French—the exceptions are Italian, “Andiamo!” and “Sicurissima!” We find, in the course of the novel, foreigners, foreign cousins, foreign manners, foreign tongues, foreign words, foreign objects, a foreign house, a foreign marriage, people who have been to foreign places (and people who have not), a French bedstead, and words pronounced in the “French manner” (“French” being a virtual synonym for “foreign” in the narrative)—for example, “relations” “was one of a certain number of words that the Baroness often pronounced in the French manner” (105) (“type” is another).4 Additionally, individual English words are frequently “estranged.” Artist, amateur, morganatic, Bohemian—are all words the New England characters find it impossible, repeatedly, to understand.5 Colloquial phrases are misunderstood by the foreigners and their misunderstandings are misunderstood by the natives:

4

5

And of the foreign words, some are italicized and some are not; other italicizations occur as well in the novel. Absent other evidence one must assume that the choice to italicize particular words was James’s (the Penguin edition of the novel conforms to the Atlantic Monthly serial version in this regard). The editor of the 2008 Penguin edition of The Europeans points out that Gertrude’s lack of familiarity with “Bohemian” is historically correct (which would mean James is narratively incorrect). We might want to remember, however, that James announced his intention to play havoc with its historical setting; a similar moment in the history of reading this novel occurs in the contemporary review written by Thomas Wentworth (!) Higginson when he points out that the horse-cars of the first chapter predate the historical introduction of that mode of transportation by about a decade.

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“There is a clever woman under your hand. My sister.” “Your sister—under my hand?” Mr. Wentworth repeated. (88)

In fact words themselves, even in non-foreign sentences, are “foreignized”: “She spoke, somehow, a different language. There was something strange in her words,” frets Mr. Wentworth (56). Inasmuch as the definitional field of the word “foreign” includes the senses “unfamiliar, strange, not oneself,” this ubiquity of freefloating foreignness echoes J. Hillis Miller’s contention in Literature as Conduct that the free indirect discourse narrator is a ghostly, unseen presence which can in turn conjure more ghosts.6 In The Europeans, similarly, it seems that any noticeably foreign matter seems uncannily to conjure more foreign matter, or to make something foreign more so, or to make something domestic reveal its already-existing capacity to be or to become foreign. Bracketing the many versions of the figuratively foreign are not one but two vaguely geographical “foreign” loci: Europe and China (with a brief mention of Cairo thrown in for good measure). In between is Boston, and more particularly, an “ancient house—ancient in the sense of being eighty years old” (15) on the outskirts of Boston. The domestic space of our hereditary-Puritans-turned-present-dayUnitarians shows the traces of the mundanity, in the merchant class, of exotic, “Oriental,” foreign trade: a visitor arriving at the “large square” Wentworth house is greeted by “wide open” doors and windows which “admit the purifying sunshine,” but first, more liminally, by “a piazza on which several straw-bottomed rocking-chairs and half a dozen of those small cylindrical stools in green and blue porcelain, which

6

Apropos of free-floating foreignnesses, one of the things I cherish about the Penguin edition of The Europeans is that the admirable preface written by the English editor seems to take Rhode Island to be an actual island. (179)

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suggest an affiliation between the residents and the Eastern trade, were symmetrically disposed” (15).7 That this “affiliation” is an old and thoroughly domesticated story, both the Yankee symmetricality and the narratorial “those” attest, as does the homely interior’s “white wainscots” and “old-fashioned engravings, chiefly of scriptural subjects, hung very high” (19), punctuated by “an engraving in one of the parlours” of a “very pretty portrait of the Empress Josephine”—a foreign element among the Biblical portraits—which Gertrude, for “mysterious reasons,” which the narrator does not tell, will briefly expect her newly arrived female European cousin to resemble. We are introduced to this quintessentially New England house as the younger of the two Wentworth daughters, having managed to get rid of Mr. Brand, a Unitarian minister and the family-approved suitor she does not want to marry (she “refuses to understand him”—perhaps anticipating Isabel Archer, who cannot understand Unitarianism either),8 wanders in an “agreeable sense of solitude,

7

For relevant, and fascinating, tales of the early and ongoing nineteenth-century New England mercantile inmixing with the country of origin of those cylindrical stools, see Johnson. See especially the fascinating tale of Samuel Shaw’s hybridizing intervention into the Asian art and craft of porcelain making. Wishing to present his friends at home with a suitable souvenir, Shaw special orders “Oriental” tea sets:



 I wished to have something emblematic of the institution of the order of the Cincinnati executed upon a set of porcelain. My idea was to have the American Cincinnatus, under the conduct of Minerva, regarding Fame, who, having received from them the emblems of the order, was proclaiming it to the world. For this purpose I procured two separate engravings of the goddesses, and elegant figure of a military man, and furnished the painter with a copy of the emblems, which I had in my possession.” (Kendall, “A Question of Character,” 54)



S haw’s special order has resonances with another porcelain tale in the same volume: the British replication of Chinese porcelain with its “British-designed Willow Pattern” which “pleased American consumers” aesthetically and was successfully marketed via a bogus “pseudo-Chinese tale” about the origins of the pattern (Haddad, “China of the American Imagination,” 61). James’s joke might remind us of the early and sustained interest taken in the foreign and yet domesticated religion, Hinduism, by Unitarian Transcendentalists. See “Unitarianism and Early American Interest in Hinduism,” Christopher Walton. http://www.philocrites. com/essays/Hinduism.html.

8

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of having the house to herself ”—which solitude, “of which I have spoken” asserts the narrative, “always excited Gertrude’s imagination.” The narrative goes on to confide to the reader that Gertrude herself “could not have told you why, and neither can her humble historian” (19–20). “Her humble historian” has not, unlike, say, Thackeray’s storyteller in Vanity Fair, introduced himself to us: he simply pops up in that sentence, joining the myriad of foreign things appearing in other sentences, pre-performing the scene in which Felix pops up from the pages of the book Gertrude will be reading. For this big open empty trusting house with its unprotected, innocent daughter wandering through it, harbors other foreign elements in addition to its welcoming stools and decorative royal French consorts: “I” and “you,” which is to say, Gertrude’s historian and you. (Or me.) We—you (or me) and it— are both present in and absent from this space that does not exist, yet does, in “some imaginary locality in New England 1830.” The contention that Gertrude could not have told us/you why the empty house excites her and neither can “her humble historian” conjures a chatty yet slightly edgy pair of relationships: one between you and said humble historian; the other between the humble historian and the character. The novel is well populated with gestures like this one, gestures that remind us that our companion and guide is neither a character nor a subject but is, like Gertrude’s new cousin, “a foreigner of some sort” to the business, diegetic and non-diegetic, of the novel. That phrase comes from the novel’s first contact, as it were, between an “American” and a “European.” Having finished her meandering through the empty house, Charlotte Wentworth settles on the portico (the “piazza”) with the Arabian Nights tale, “Prince Camalrazaman and the Princess Badoura.” After reading for “a quarter of an hour,” she looks up from her book to see “as it seemed to her, the Prince Camalrazaman standing before her” (20). “A  beautiful young man . . . making her a very a low bow . . . appeared to have dropped

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from the clouds,” and after recovering a bit from her “extreme surprise,” Gertrude rises “without even keeping her finger in her book.” This “mysterious visitor . . . had so much the character of an apparition” that his introducing himself as her cousin not only fails to anchor him to the very local ground upon which he stands—for Gertrude, we are told, that announcement “seemed to complete his unreality” (20). The mysterious visitor resolving itself into a visiting cousin from Europe, one Felix Young, hitherto only a vague piece of family lore about the Wentworths having “relations in France,” Gertrude, “vaguely trembling” and “deeply excited,” invites “this handsome young man,” “engendered by the Sabbath stillness for her private use” into the house: “She had never in her life spoken to a foreigner, and she had often thought it would be delightful to do so” (22). Felix asks if she is not afraid of him; Gertrude replies, simply, that they are not afraid “here,” whereupon Felix exclaims how right they are. In French. Having never before “heard so many words of French spoken,” Gertrude experiences “something of a sensation” as they make their way into the parlor, where Felix tells her his name and a bit about their mutual . . . relations. “Your father’s family didn’t like [my mother’s] husband. They called him a foreigner; but he was not. My poor father was born in Sicily, but his parents were American.” “In Sicily?” Gertrude murmured. “It is true,” said Felix Young, “that they had spent their lives in Europe. But they were very patriotic. And so are we.” “And you are Sicilian,” said Gertrude. “Sicilian, no! Let’s see. I was born at a little place—a dear little place—in France. My sister was born at Vienna.” “So you are French,” said Gertrude. “Heaven forbid!” cried the young man. . . . He began to laugh again. “I can easily be French, if that will please you.” “You are a foreigner of some sort,” said Gertrude.

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“Of some sort—yes, I suppose so. But who can say of what sort? I don’t think we have ever had occasion to settle the question. You know there are people like that. About their country, their religion, their profession, they can’t tell.” (22–23) . . . She had never heard of people like that; she wanted to hear. “Where do you live?” she asked. “They can’t tell that, either!” said Felix. “I am afraid you will think they are little better than vagabonds. I have lived anywhere— everywhere. I really think I have lived in every city in Europe.” Gertrude gave a little long soft exhalation. (23)

Felix and Gertrude continue their chat, during which Gertrude serves a glass of her father’s famous madeira (“Felix .  .  . wondered why he had been told that there was no wine in America” [24]) and a “huge morsel” of the cake her sister had designated to be for the use of the unwanted suitor. She eagerly listens to what she considers to be the “darkly romantic tale” of the life of his sister Eugenia, whose marriage to the non-reigning prince of Silberstadt-Shreckenstein is in danger of being annulled, and enthusiastically learns a new word, “morganatic,” a word that retains a power throughout the novel to fluster and fascinate the rest of the family. Later in the novel, we will find that Boston society finds a typically Bostonian way around it. While “it had become a tradition in Boston circles that the highest charity, as regards [Eugenia’s mother], was to think it well to forget her, and to abstain from conjecture as to the extent to which her aberrations were reproduced in her descendants,” (56) “in its natural aversion to suppose that [morganatic] meant anything less than absolute wedlock, the conscience of the community took refuge in the belief that it implied something even more” (74). Gertrude, like the “small cylindrical stools” on the family piazza, is herself a “foreigner of some sort” in her domestic circle. She is given to restlessness, exhibits a susceptibility to excitement, and possesses

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a capacity for enjoyment. She knows a French word, “soubrette,” and wants to know a lot more. She has been a subject of continual anxiety for her sister, her father, and Mr. Brand, the Unitarian minister, her family’s solution to her “strangeness” (the plan of which everyone but Gertrude approves is that he will retrieve her from the brink and marry her into propriety). The rest of the family, once home, will regard the coming of the Europeans with “a singularly joyless and inelastic satisfaction,” viewing the additions to their domestic circle “as an extension of duty, of the exercise of the more recondite ­virtues”  (41). (They like this, by the way—it is their way of having fun.) Their attitude toward Gertrude is similar; she has always been for them an object of watchful anxiety, “a peculiar girl, but the full compass of whose peculiarities had not been exhibited before they very ingeniously found their pretext in the presence of these possibly too agreeable foreigners” (41).

The Little Chalet on the Prairie A few days after meeting their American cousins, our Europeans settle into a small white house adjacent to the Wentworth home. The decision to offer their relations this accommodation, the narrator tells us, is arrived at after a day of “domestic colloquy .  .  . in the course of which the two foreign visitors were discussed and analyzed with a great deal of earnestness and subtlety” (40). Here, the narrator addresses you (me, us) directly: “If you had been present, it would probably not have seemed to you that the advent of these brilliant strangers was treated as an exhilarating occurrence . . . this was not Mr. Wentworth’s way of treating any human occurrence” (40). The narrative here establishes our absence, invokes our presence, and offers us a shortcut to a sense of “knowing” these characters that impliedly is just as good as our having been there. Our not having

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been there is of course a condition for the presence of the narrative in the first instance—why else would we need the services of a narrator? By the same token, the narrative addressing us here, positioning us as absent then, inscribes us as present now. The net effect is that we are drawn in from outside the text, an effect that will extend over the arc of the story until the next such gesture is made. And need we remind ourselves that one of the definitions of “foreign” is “outside”? So even as we come to understand the Wentworths’ (except for Gertrude) rather xenophobic stance toward “human occurrences” like the Europeans (and by extension like you, me, and the narrator too), we also come to share the narrative’s ironic sympathy for them. The Europeans’ “sudden irruption” into their lives “required a readjustment” of their sense of responsibility, and they are charmingly willing to try to make that readjustment. “It will be very interesting. It will be a place to go to. It will be a foreign house.” “Are we very sure we need a foreign house?” Mr. Wentworth inquired. “Do you think it desirable to establish a foreign house— in this quiet place?” (44)

Acton laughingly points out that this sounds as if Mr. Wentworth anticipates “the poor Baroness opening a wine-shop or a gaming-table.” Gertrude, no strategist she, offers any number of non-Wentworthian advantages to such an arrangement: she will have a boudoir, she will breakfast in bed, she will speak French to them. Finally, despite his real fear that “these occurrences” will “be an occasion for excitement” for Gertrude (a fear she confirms when she avows that she is “excited already”), Mr. Wentworth announces, “ ‘I shall keep them in the other house’ ” (46). Robert Acton, who has been advocating for this outcome, compliments Mr. Wentworth on the generosity of this gesture. At this point, the narrator asserts its presence on the page by informing us that it gave Mr. Wentworth pleasure to know himself as,

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and to know others know him as, a liberal person, “and this pleasure is the only palpable form of self-indulgence with which the narrator of these incidents will be able to charge him” (48). Acton’s joke is not far off: the house will be where Eugenia’s gamble will be played out. Eugenia and her French maid (who is decidedly not a soubrette) proceed to provide the “pitifully bare” house with draperies, portières, shawls, “anomalous draperies,” “curious fabrics, corresponding to Gertrude’s metaphysical vision of an opera-cloak,” and “pink silk blinds in the windows.” This “copious provision of the element of costume” prompts Charlotte to almost offer to help her finish unpacking, while Gertrude, responding to their “most romantic intention,” “secretly ask[s] herself: ‘What is life, indeed, without curtains?’” and “appear[s] to herself to have been leading hitherto an existence singularly garish and totally devoid of festoons” (49). Eugenia, in fact, is herself an uncanny crystallization of our “humble historian”: she has initiated and orchestrated the pilgrimage to America, she foretells (pre-writes) their first meetings with the Wentworths, and, having written, on the spot as it were, herself and her brother as lost waifs to be taken in, has acquired a potential passage in or into the Wentworth family history. Her little foreign house is her setting, and will help her “play havoc,” as James promised his tale would do, with the narratives of and about life that preexist her arrival there. Her mise en scène will stage, supplement, explain, and enable her to figure in a romantic comedy much like the one James proposed to Howells, the romantic comedy she wishes to use to overwrite the previous narratives she has figured in and no doubt orchestrated—the tragedy or maybe melodrama of her near-seduction and subsequent sketchy morganatic marriage. Her setting secured, she proceeds to tell (retell, un-tell) her story in her own tongue. Late night visits from an increasingly if warily enamored Acton are set in her drawing room, where Acton lounges, “not quite so relaxed as he pretended,” always playing with one of several fans “with long ribbons of different colors

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attached to them,” and always engaged in “vigilant observation” behind “his air of being much at his ease” (70). The feelings of suspense, interest, and excitement generated by his continued attempts to read her are, the narrator intervenes again to tell us, carried off by his “taking, still superficially, the humorous view of Madame Munster” (71). Hedging her bets, like any good gambler, Eugenia adds a subplot, which is directly explained to us by the other foreign element in her story: She had come four thousand miles to seek her fortune; and it is not to be supposed that after this great effort she could neglect any apparent aid to advancement. It is my misfortune that in attempting to describe in a short compass the deportment of this remarkable woman I am obliged to express things rather brutally. I feel this to be the case, for instance, when I say that she had primarily detected such an aid to advancement in the person of Robert Acton, but that she had afterwards remembered that a prudent archer has always a second bowstring. Eugenia was a woman of finely-mingled motive, and her intentions were never sensibly gross. (104–05)

So she adds the very foreign, very European narrative of the femme d’un certain age tutoring the beautiful, rich young man in the ways of the world. But Eugenia’s European tales of intrigue and romance just will not work out right, somehow, and her hole card devolves into what Richard Poirier calls “a ‘closet scene’ full of New England clumsiness” (133)—Acton returns from a trip sooner than expected and his wee hours’ call on the Baroness traps Clifford in a room with no exit out of which he emerges at exactly the wrong moment in the intimate tête-à-tête Eugenia and Acton are not quite having, resulting in the complete collapse of her story-in-progress. Eugenia decides to pack up her “properties” (166) and debark for Europe: She appeared to feel justified in generalizing—in deciding that the conditions of action on this provincial continent were not

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favourable to really superior women. The elder world was, after all, their natural field. The unembarrassed directness with which she proceeded to apply these intelligent conclusions appeared to the little circle of spectators who have figured in our narrative but the supreme exhibition of a character to which the experience of life had imparted an inimitable pliancy. (168)

Defeated but unbowed, the Baroness sets sail for foreign parts—the territory of later foreign/ized marauders like Mme. Merle, Maria Gostrey, Fanny Assingham, Kate Croy, Charlotte Stant—leaving Robert Acton “a very restless and irritated mortal,” still living in the house his dying mother is confined to, a setting which echoes the narrow graveyard at the heart of the indifferent Boston of the first sentence of the novel. His punishment for being unable to rise to the occasion of Eugenia’s tale is his consignment to, his continued imprisonment in, the Howellsian clutch of happy-ending-marriages: the duller sister to the Unitarian minister, the almost-ensnared brother to the priggish local rich girl, “and Robert Acton, after his mother’s death, married a particularly nice young girl” (169), perhaps to be reincarnated on the heels of this novel as Winterbourne, who will understand Daisy Miller no better than Acton understands the Baroness Münster, but who will be allowed to take refuge in the never seen arms of the foreign lady in Geneva in whom he takes a great interest.

Playing havoc with the foreground The poor Baroness is a James character trying to narrate her way out of a Howells story: her New England cousins are Howellsian through and through. They are, in the main, treated affectionately by the novel, and, for that matter, by Eugenia’s story as promulgated by Eugenia herself. They are as simple as they look and sound, and they are as

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mystified by the Europeans as Howells was by James. Howells’s request for a straightforward marital dénouement mirrors the Wentworthian reaction to their strange cousins. They find themselves addressed by “the strange, bold words of a talkative young foreigner” (153), and their reaction, for the most part, is a failure to recognize that those words, uttered in their tongue and by the tongue of a kinsman, evokes a tale they see no need for and cannot understand. James’s understanding of comedy is Shakespearean to the extent that it ends with an expulsion. Readers often see Eugenia as the one expelled, but that is a mistake. The Baroness, on the level of plot, is simply going home from a sojourn in a foreign land, having tired of the friendly but simple natives. It is Gertrude, whose love of excitement, language, and festoons flares up as an uncanny return of the dead renegade mother of Felix and Eugenia, who is expelled, but happily, and, more uncannily still, from the domestic scene and the marital fate that apparently awaited her at the beginning of the story, choosing the fate chosen by the mother of the man she has chosen. Gertrude is a more successful reader than her new sister-in-law is a writer: having read Felix into the tale of “Prince Camaralzaman and Princess Badoura” on the day they first met, she succeeds in reading herself into it as well: escaping her imprisoning father (he does not lock her in a dungeon room as the fathers of the titular characters do their children, but he does try to tie her to a Unitarian minister), becoming the “twin” of her Prince and her Prince’s sister (we remember that Gertrude accidentally introduces Felix to her family as the Prince of SilberstadtShreckenstein that first day), and joining him in romantic wanderings to foreign lands. Gertrude has always harbored the strange and peculiar desire to “enjoy” life rather than meet its responsibilities, and when the foreign language she has been longing to “speak” all her life rides into town, as it were, she hitches a ride with it back out of Dodge. Just as The Europeans, then, presents the reader with two differently foreign tale-tellers, the novel can be thought of as presenting a

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version of the narrative Henry James promised to William Dean Howells which thoroughly estranges it from the request for simple gratification of what readers want. Like the Baroness, this story, under James’s hand, presents a language foreign to the one it speaks: There were several ways of understanding her: there was what she said, and there was what she meant, and there was something, between the two, that was neither. (129–30)

The “something between” is that which is foreign to and inextricable from the telling. Henry James’s “experiment in form” answers the question I posed at the beginning of this chapter: can he find a way to “faire la toilette” of the house of fiction in the allegedly domestic but foreign (to James) language Howells wishes him to speak? Henry James, hitherto purveyor of the lugubrious, accepts his editor’s request as a challenge. The resulting “experiment” manifests in the anomalous draperies provided by multiple “traditional” happy endings, each of which turns out to harbor something foreign to that convention. Presenting itself to the public as a romantic, picturesque, sunny, wedding-capped story, The Europeans exploits the essential foreignness of telling itself. Just as foreign objects—the blue and green porcelain stools, the portraits of foreign consorts, the anomalous draperies of foreign sexualities, the Unitarian minister who wants life to be a Howells novel—lurk within and yet also constitute the domestic, so the italicized and the non-italicized foreign languages that comprise our “own” language tell us that we are indeed, as the English title of the French book written by Julia Kristeva (whose first language is neither) would have it, “strangers to ourselves.” So, finally, the answer to the question his editor asked James is “yes.” James could, just once, write a story with a happy ending (albeit with a smirch of lugubriosity). All he had to do, apparently, was to take a Howells story and add three foreigners.

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Morganizing the Body of “The Pupil”

I didn’t describe to you the purpose of it. . . . I described to you . . . the effect of it—which is a very different thing. —Henry James, The Sacred Fount One always knows enough in order to occupy the minutes during which one exposes oneself in the position of the one who knows. —Jacques Lacan1 Henry James’s tale “The Pupil,” “Henry James,” the literary/cultural text, and a usefully cheesy 1991 buddy flick, The Last Boy Scout (dir. Tony Scott), make a queer combination, in all senses of the word. Each of these three texts tell the reader what is there via what is not: (1) “Henry James” was queer (but had no sex); (2) The Last Boy Scout’s buddies talk queer (but have no sex—with each other anyway); and (3) Henry James’s “The Pupil” is queer (but has no sex—but it does have the sexuality Henry James’s sex would have had had he had any.) Most often read as a story focusing on the pedagogical relationship therein depicted (the crucial questions in this reading usually being who is responsible for the death of the boy pupil and in what register the problem of that death is staged—moral, ethical, sexual), the germ of “The Pupil,” as Henry James tells it in the preface to the 1908 edition, is a traveling companion happening “to speak to me of a wonderful American family, an odd, adventurous, extravagant

1

Felman, “Psychoanalysis and Education” 242.

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band.” James speaks not only of the small boy and his “subject[ed],” “beguiled,” “unremunerated, yet after all richly repaid” tutor, but insistently and passionately of the family Moreen: We referred ourselves, with our highest complacency, to the classic years of the great Americano-European legend; the years of limited communication, of monstrous and unattenuated contrast, of prodigious and unrecorded adventure. . . . The most extraordinary things appear to have happened, during that golden age, in the “old” countries—in Asia and Africa as well as in Europe—to the candid children of the West, things admirable incongruous and incredible, but no story of all the list was to find its just interpreter, and nothing is now more probable than that every key to interpretation has been lost. . . . The Moreens were of the family then of the great unstudied precursors—poor and shabby members, no doubt; dim and superseded types. (xvii)

James’s invocation of the public space—the space of monstrous and extraordinary learning, of international intercourse as the school of hard knocks—prefaces a story which may seem at first or second glance to be one mired in the private parts. Even money, the most promiscuously public of all private affairs, pretends to be simply a private, personal, familial interest. Take, for instance, the first encounter Pemberton—the beguiled and yet richly repaid—has with the family; his initiatory skirmish, that is, with Mrs. Moreen: “The poor young man hesitated and procrastinated: it cost him such an effort to broach the subject of terms, to speak of money to a person who spoke only of feelings and, as it were, of the aristocracy” (167). Pemberton is refined enough to know that money is vulgar, that people of breeding and “class” do not speak of it directly; he is necessitous enough, however, to have to manage somehow to do it. But in this first power struggle with the lady of the house he cannot quite bring it up and he certainly cannot leave it alone. Just at the moment he thinks he is about to “sound that note,” his prospective pupil comes back into the room, and the poor young man is defeated again—as he had also

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been when the boy had been sent out of the room by his mother in the first instance: When Mrs. Moreen bethought herself of this pretext for getting rid of their companion Pemberton supposed it was precisely to approach the delicate subject of his remuneration. But it had been only to say some things about her son that it was better a boy of eleven shouldn’t catch. They were extravagantly to his advantage save when she lowered her voice to sigh, tapping her left side familiarly, “And all overclouded by this, you know; all at the mercy of a weakness—!” (167)

We have here a number of “delicate subjects,” introduced to us in the story’s first two paragraphs: there is the young man himself, a delicate subject, for whom good taste and proper behavior loom large; there is the little boy, who is the delicate subject of a confidential communication between this “large affable lady” and her prospective employee; Mrs. Moreen’s “delicacy”—her own and that which characterizes her conversational maneuverings—which will soon reveal itself to be factitious if not completely strategic; and then we have the delicate subjects of money, class relations, taste, illness, sexual difference, and power relations. All of which endlessly circulate in an overarching disavowal operation: each delicate subject picking up and then passing on to the others, as the negotiations and exchanges of the participants continue, the phallic value (or the phallicism that is value) that itself never stays put.2 The most frequent instance of this cultural sleight of hand is the carousel-like substitution of money for Morgan for money for Morgan that is only the most visible effect of the interlocking chains of disavowal (by which I mean to designate a value projection which then justifies behavior which can be described with the “I know, but all 2

My understanding of money as it connects to theoretical issues like disavowal and the fetish has been greatly enhanced by the essays in Apter and Pietz, as well as Tenney Nathanson’s Whitman’s Presence.

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the same . . .” formula). As money is the entity that in its movement in the real world most resembles what I am arguing is the characteristic structure of any sexuality narrative—that which is there only by virtue of what is not—it is not surprising that the “delicate subject” which has often most interested readers of this story is that of the relationship between Pemberton and his pupil Morgan Moreen. In 1945 Clifton Fadiman alluded, delicately, to that connection: Its roots reach deep into the dark soil of their emotional underlives. The conventions of his day (which James, through his subtle magic, both obeyed and evaded) prevented him from making any more explicit the perfectly unconscious homosexual love—of a type that could never ripen into overt action—binding Morgan and Pemberton. Yet we feel it, and perhaps with added force just because it is touched upon with such delicate restraint. (272)

The perfect unconscious Teaching, like analysis, has to deal not so much with lack of knowledge as with resistances to knowledge. Ignorance, in other words, is nothing other than a desire to ignore. —Shoshana Felman, “Psychoanalysis and Education” Note that Fadiman’s “perfectly unconscious” has a lot in common, rhetorically and defensively, with Leslie Fiedler’s insistence that his homoerotic buddy pairs are “innocent” of the downright sexual.3 This observation anticipates a whole decade of buddy flicks, of which 3

See Wiegman’s brilliant critical and/but sympathetic analysis of Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel for the definitive discussion of the buddy couple’s racial as well as sex-gender configurations: “Fiedler’s critical reading thus encodes the very specular feature that interracial male bonding in the cinema of the 1980s came to rely on: the use of the dark brother as a vehicle for forging a singular and monolithic account of masculine ‘subjectivity’ ” (160).

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The Last Boy Scout strikes me as neither more nor less than a kind of Cliff ’s Notes summary. The Last Boy Scout is, like James’s short story, a tutor text of masculinity. The weary, disillusioned white guy (who saved the president and was once a public national hero) teaches the virile yet defeated (by his own personal weakness—drugs) African-American football player all about—well, all about what Michael Warner tells us the Boy Scouts were invented to teach the boy, and by no great extension, the nation: how to be a real man, how to build the male body and mind to manhood rather than allowing it to succumb to effeminacy. The film is yet another Fiedlerian cross-race, psychologically crossgenerational, homosexually panicked homoerotic idyll expressive of how guys can pat butts and still be exemplary American men who, however glibly they talk it, do not do it. But this not-doing-it is what the film has in common with James’s story and with James criticism, the recent and salutary queering of Henry notwithstanding. The late nineteenth century may have seen a shift in the definition of “homosexual” from an adjective for acts to an identification of a person, but the late twentieth century remained at least officially adamant that the private act is a without-which criterion for the public label. Thus no matter how many clues and cues the dialog gives to the (alleged) contrary, those indices end up providing—not just providing in fact, but guaranteeing—an account of sexuality that is strictly hetero. These buddies say things to one another like: “Say, man, you ever play ball? You got a good build.” “What’re you, a fag?” “No! Just tryin’ to break the ice.”

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And: “Where you goin’?” “To the bathroom, O.K.? Y’wanna come? The doctor said I shouldn’t lift anything heavy.” “I’ll pass.”

And: “Hey Flash. Rescue attempt?” “Blow me.”

And the story provides us with no indication that they are particularly ambivalent toward, tormented by, or even a little bit reflective about their “real” sexuality. This despite the fact that Jimmy has just racked up his second dead woman and that Joe has found his best friend in his wife’s closet and endures language from his pubescent daughter that ought to make a sailor blush. The Fiedlerian tutor text and its sons and grandsons teach masculinity as a not-doing (it). Queer theorizing of Henry James has in common with this line of American identity stories and with traditional and even homophobic criticism of James the same aperçu: this James didn’t do it too. When we “know” “sex” (even with academic fudgings) without knowing (it)—a sort of Truebloodian moving without moving—what is it exactly that we are doing (or not)? If Henry James was queer/gay but did not do it; if Bruce Willis is queer/ straight but does not do that—which of these fictions is not teaching us how to be (or, for some of us, how to temporarily and fantasmatically occupy the positionality of) the homosexually panicked sort of straight subject, hero of song, story, and a lot of Republican-littered action films? What I would like to suggest is that James’s tutor text wants to queer more than the pedagogic, more, even, than the (allegedly) private scenes of sexualities of any flavor. Kaja Silverman, for example,

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takes James (and by a slightly suspect extension, his fiction) to be “an almost hyperbolically marginal male subject” (157).4 I read “The Pupil” as one of many Jamesian fictions which demonstrate that in fact, as other conversations in our business would have it, the margin is the center. In Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (a book without a subject—or object, for that matter—index, an absence that makes the subtitle something both more and less than a metaphor), Judith Butler has occasion to establish various indices of the senses in which she uses specific terms. One such index: I use the term “intentional” in a specifically phenomenological sense. “Intentionality” within phenomenology does not mean voluntary or deliberate, but is, rather, a way of characterizing consciousness (or language) as having an object, more specifically, as directed toward an object which may or may not exist. In this sense, an act of consciousness may intend (posit, constitute, apprehend) an imaginary object. Gender, in its ideality, might be construed as an intentional object, an ideal which is constituted but which does not exist. (283fn11)

This fairly capacious concession to the vagaries of objects depends upon its stabilizing of the subject—that entity which produces the 4



I say “slightly suspect” because Silverman’s attempt to get away from biographically grounded readings of a writer’s sexuality is finally unsuccessful from the point of view of the kind of reading I am advocating here. Her analysis is grounded in a “desire” which must be allegorically posited by her reading on behalf of the characters (173). At the same time, while taking care to separate James from his characters, she takes the prefaces as straight communication from the real James. It is not clear to me, finally, that postulating an “authorial fantasmatic” is sufficiently far away from the old Freudian criticism habit of psychoanalyzing authors.   Silverman’s value as a theoretical thinker is significant; I must add, however, that her rather invidious implication that James readers who precede her have not done their homework properly—“and here, too, I would argue for a greater attentiveness to James’s language” (173)—suggests that as a literary critic she might perhaps benefit by attending to her own admonition. Literary critics from the beginning have attended to James’s language, and sexuality has been a part of the academic Jamesian conversation since its birth in the thirties.

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“act of consciousness,” itself a neatened-up, stabilized, delimited event. Whatever might be the case in the discipline of philosophy, in literary studies we have available a significant corpus of work which argues that in fact subject, object, desire (I use these terms to stand in for words like “directed toward,” “posit, constitute, apprehend,” “constituted”), and scene/narrative (“an imaginary object,” “an ideal . . . which does not exist”) are all, at the best, slippery, unstable, unreliable tropes in a messy and always ambiguous discourse. Bodies That Matter is a heroic, even a stunning, project which has in countless ways contributed to the radical rethinking of gender, bodies, and “sex,” currently intended, if you will, by a part of the body academic. What I want to argue here, however, is that it is precisely in the arena of sex and sexualities that discourses like philosophy, history, even literary theory for that matter, are only supplementarily helpful. Sex, sexuality, narrative—what is on the page, in the mind, stuck in the spiderweb of nonindividual, cultural experience, is not even the half of it.

Henry James was queer and did not do it Sexuality is not, however, the “text’s meaning”: it is rather that through which meaning in the text does not come off, that which in the text, and through which the text, fails to mean, that which can engender but a conflict of interpretations. —Shoshana Felman, “Turning the Screw of Interpretation” This epigraph from Shoshana Felman’s still unsurpassed study of James needs, for my purposes, a slight amendment: the step she takes from text to meaning is precipitate. I would therefore rephrase slightly: sexuality is that which in the text fails to appear and through which the text cannot but be read. The text that is “Henry James” in

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the literary critical canon exemplifies my point. Back when James was straight, but not very good at it, James’s sexuality was what wasn’t there—because sex was what wasn’t there. A nice synopsis of the point of view I am talking about can be found in Leon Edel’s Henry James: The Untried Years: “This is all Henry tells us of the ‘obscure hurt’ and it is a queer tale—queer since he has mingled so many elements in it and at the same time thoroughly confused us about the time sequence. . . . The details, as given by Henry, are meagre; and they bristle with strange ambiguities” (emphasis added, 175).5 Edel thus begins a recounting of a story that was for years a staple in traditional James criticism. Edel focuses lovingly on the adjectives James deployed in his own references to the incident (intimate, odious, obscure, horrid) and describes the impact of such Jamesian ellipses on the developing James industry: In the April-June 1934 Hound & Horn issue, devoted entirely to Henry James, Glenway Wescott reported it almost as a fact: “Henry James, expatriation and castration. . . . Henry James it is rumored, could not have had a child. But if he was as badly hurt in the preCivil-War accident as that since he triumphed powerfully over other authors of his epoch perhaps the injury was a help to him.” Stephen Spender quotes this passage in The Destructive Element [1935] and suggests that “Castration, or the fear of castration, is supposed to preoccupy the mind with ideas of suicide and death.” . . . Mr. Spender, however, does have a second thought and adds in a footnote: “The rumour of castration seems exaggerated and improbable, but it seems likely that James sustained a serious injury.” F. O. Matthiessen in The James Family [1947], speculates that “since Henry James never married, he may have been sexually impotent.” R. P. Blackmur, in his essay in the Literary History of the United States equates James with the emasculated Abelard “who, after his injury raised the first chapel to the Holy Ghost”; so James, 5

The running title of this page of Edel’s book is A Queer Tale.

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he adds, “made a sacred rage of his art as the only spirit he could fully serve.” And Lionel Trilling [1950] suggests that “only a man as devoted to the truth of the emotions as Henry James was, could have informed the world, despite his characteristic reticence, of an accident so intimate as his.” (175–76)

That there is nothing there is the triumphant refrain of this melodramatic narrative of Henry James’s (non)sexuality. The narrative has the additional compensation, not incidentally, of allowing all these critics to feel superior to a writer who is, on a purely textual level, quite possibly rather threatening to those who take their narrative making in the unmodified Bloomian variety: he wrote amazing stuff in amazing amounts, but/because he could not “do it” (this story also bears a rather stunning resemblance to the nineteenth-century medical theories about the effect of intellectual activity on women’s ability to reproduce). Now that James is gay a similar narrative obtains. Let’s start, as so many of us gratefully do, with Edel again: “From all appearances, James .  .  . never made love either to a woman or to a man.  .  . . He had ended up with a personal aloofness which probably shut him into auto-eroticism” (“Introduction,” Letters xv). David Kirby concurs: “Henry’s sexual behavior will also continue to fascinate scholars since sexuality takes so many forms (mostly indirect) in his fiction yet was so noticeably absent from his personal life” (60). As does Richard Hall, who prefaces his remarks by announcing with perhaps less regret than triumph that truth sayers rarely earn “accolades” from “cultural commissars” and the “vast array of James scholars” (25). The sex Hall’s Henry James probably did not have is much more provocative than the sex Edel’s did not: It is with genuine regret, then, that I feel impelled to call attention to the difficult, emotional and perhaps incestuous relationship that Henry James maintained with his brother William .  .  .

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a relationship I believe that does much to account for Henry’s lifelong sexual inactivity.  .  . . To what extent it was acted upon physically is now less important than that it be recognized for the powerful force it was, blocking not only the adult realization of his passions but that of his fictional characters until his latest work. (25; 28)

Curiously, Hall declares James’s inactivity despite his own assertion that James “took particular pleasure in destroying his intimate papers in order to thwart biography.” (25). In Fred Kaplan’s biography, the back cover of which reprints the Philadelphia Inquirer’s pronouncement that “Kaplan . . . gives us the plainest, clearest picture yet of James’s sexuality,” we find: He also had no doubt about what men did in bed together. Homosexual activities were widespread but muted, private, disguised, mostly out of the public eye. . . . James had had, at least since his Paris days, a dim sense of his own homoeroticism, which his position, his personality, his background, and his culture all gave him every incentive to repress. He knew that aspect of his sexuality indirectly, in his idealizations of the beauty of the male body and of male friendship. He had good reason for doing so, including the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which made even private, consensual homosexual acts punishable by two years’ imprisonment at hard labor. He could speak of having fallen in love, as he did with Joukowsky, as he was to do with numbers of men later in his life. But verbal passion did not imply for him physical action. He had no desire to challenge his inhibitions, let alone society’s. (300)

But if we look at the narratives with which James’s particular time and circle were conversant, we will find that “idealizations of the beauty of the male body and of male friendship” are not only or even necessarily substitutes for homosexual activities. To the contrary, in Henry James’s moment they could be read as indices of a lived

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relationship to the sexuality these idealizations help to tell, as John Addington Symonds’s work on what he called “Greek love” attests: It would appear that the lover was called Inspirer, at Sparta, while the youth he loved was named Hearer.  .  . . The lover taught, the hearer learned; and so from man to man was handed down the tradition of heroism. . . . The Lacedonian lover might represent his friend in the Assembly. He was answerable for his good conduct, and stood before him as a pattern of manliness, courage, and prudence. (25–26)6

The only hard evidence Kaplan can cite for his conclusion are James’s remarks about Wilde’s flamboyant and gratuitous self-exposure, remarks that are pretty clearly in the nature of stylistic censures.7 More obviously: Kaplan gives us ample understanding of why James might have wanted to be particularly careful—two years of hard labor might well have had a deterrent effect on James’s willingness to leave evidence behind. Absent further data I would say that this is as far as we ought to go if what we are after is the historical James. Michael Cooper offers us a reading of Henry James which bears a great resemblance to Kaplan’s: James, as we shall see, viewed his privacy as sacrosanct, so it is no accident that he represents his offer of “communion” with Fullerton as a masochistic surrender to the domination of a sexualized gaze. Psychologically too bound up by what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls “male homosexual panic” to give his physical body to his beloved disciples, James instead generously allows the initiated to roam behind the wall of his reserve. (68)

6

7

Symonds wrote this treatise in 1873 while working on his Studies of Greek Poets. Ten copies were printed privately in 1883. “The Author of ‘Beltraffio,’ ” a James story generally taken to be “about” Symonds, was first sketched in James’s notebooks in 1884, according to Edel, Henry James: Selected Letters 287n2. “It is the squalid gratuitousness of it all—of the mere exposure—that blurs the spectacle,” James wrote to Edmund Gosse (Selected Letters 290).

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Cooper’s reading is far more sophisticated than much of the traditional James establishment was able to be with respect to queer issues; there is still a tinge of that same compensatory gesture rendered so obvious in the more traditional criticism by now-abandoned critical vocabularies. (“It was perhaps only when writing, when losing himself in the complex emotions and situations of his created characters, that he allowed guiltless ardor to wash freely over his psyche” [Cooper 75].) I am not entirely sure how an unequivocally (albeit inactive) gay James can be homosexually panicked, as I understand Sedgwick’s notion to be tied to the heterosexually identified component of a given subject’s identity. It also seems to me that the superior position taken by such a gesture will inevitably result in a flattening out of the account of the complex sexuality we can otherwise locate in James’s fiction. Far from being the simple repository of James’s own unacted sex acts, James’s fiction anatomizes the key structures of sexuality per se—how it is constructed, policed, exchanged, perpetuated as well as where and how the dominant fictions of hetero-familial sexuality are most vulnerable to deviation and perversion (in fact, there is never any successful “reprosexuality” there).8 Finally, the kind of analysis we find in these arbitrarily chosen passages,9 in its assumption that no (biographical) text means no sex, perpetuates the kind of reading that Eve Sedgwick has characterized as “code cracking”: “To have succeeded—which was not to be taken for granted—in cracking the centuries-old code . . . would also have been to assume one’s place in a discourse in which there was a homosexual meaning, in which all homosexual meaning meant a single thing” (204). Sedgwick goes on to argue that we should try to “discriminate the possible plurality of meanings behind the unspeakables” of her

8 9

This is Michael Warner’s useful phrase. I am not discussing here the vast array of work on James and gender, which undoubtedly adumbrates its own particular sexuality narrative.

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specimen text, “The Beast in the Jungle.” Sedgwick’s reading of that story is supple, intelligent, and attentive to the historical context in which she argues we must place it, and it does yield a plurality of homosexual meanings. I would argue however that reading a story to find meanings is essentially the same operation as reading it to find meaning. Sedgwick’s reading, focusing on a single thematic (John Marcher’s secrets), cracks a code. As a necessary consequence, it leaves the telling out: cryptography is a one-to-one translation; one goes from point A to point B. Reading is messy, layered, distracted, peripatetic; it goes from point to figure to relief map to point again. It never yields meaning, but something more like a sonographic trace, an echo, the pulses of air (to return to James’s trope in “The Art of Fiction” with which we began). Not that code cracking is not occasionally icing on the cake (or file baked into it) when James’s fiction is being read. Take the curious and gratuitous detail of Morgan Moreen’s using a Greek-German lexicon to do his translating homework. A textual clue to homosexuality? Why not—Greece being understood by Henry James’s cohort to represent a kind of place of origin; Germany being the country of Krafft-Ebing, inventor of the very term “homosexual.” But what we necessarily miss if we stop there is the telltale effect of that which is not there (as opposed to that very visible, in fact quite obtrusive dictionary). Sedgwick quite rightly and very movingly declares that depriving people of the right to name their sexuality is “a terribly consequential seizure” (26), and I am prompted by that position to ask: What are the consequences of depriving James of the choice to not name? We lose the power of the gesture, the glint of an “airborne particle” shimmering in the “silken threads” of the spiderweb of experience—a web we occupy with the text as we are enmeshed in its telling. We lose the full weight of the anatomization of the sexuality represented in and somehow also by a text like “The Pupil.” Granted, it is politically important to recognize and decode textual red flags like the Greek-German lexicon, or the

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kid gloves as read by Michael Moon,10 or the pedagogical matrix itself. But what we miss if we declare nothing more there to see is that which Leo Bersani admonishes us to look for: If queerness means more than simply taking sexuality into account in our political analyses, if it means that modalities of desire are not only effects of social operations but are at the core of our very imagination of the social and political, then something has to be said about how erotic desire for the same might revolutionize our understanding of how the human subject is, or might be, socially implicated. (73)

Indeed James himself admonishes us again and again to precisely the same end. Apropos, for example, of the narrative of his “odious injury,” James offers us a reading strategy that echoes precisely his approach to all things fictional and sexual: he notes, provocatively, that the doctor who examined him responded with a “comparative pooh-pooh,” thus establishing “the strange fact of there being nothing to speak of the matter with me” (Edel, Untried Years 174). An exact description, nicely enough, of Morgan Moreen’s complaint. A full readerly openness to what is not there to speak of might point us to the pervasive presence of the mechanism of disavowal in “The Pupil”—a mechanism we might otherwise dismiss as an ahistorical fib of psychoanalysis, or as a privileged mechanism of a particular sexuality. James’s tale insidiously suggests to the contrary that disavowal is all there is—that it is a fundamental component 10

Moon’s astute remarks about Mrs. Moreen’s gloves are to be found in Spillers. His use of the term “disavowal” in this essay quite often seems to be misplaced, however. Such passages as “conduces most of us to disavow our insider’s knowledge of sadomasochistic pleasures most of the time” (142) call for the verb “deny” rather than “disavow.” In any event, Moon identifies his reading as a “high-intensity translation or decoding” (152). Staying in that register results in Moon’s arguing that “James in ‘The Pupil’ produces his perverse plot almost undiluted by normalizing or heterosexualizing measures” (152). Whereas my reading, as I hope to make clear, argues that the story offers for our reading pleasure, perverse or not, a narrative precisely of “heterosexualizing measures” and of how well they work in even the toughest of cases.

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of not only sexualities per se but also of the policing mechanism of compulsory heterosexuality as a cultural formation, one which works to make people look like they are heterosexually positioned. Both the patriarchal family, which James clearly places “in history” (as we say) in the preface, and traditional masculinity are represented in “The Pupil” through, in James’s words, “little Morgan’s troubled vision of them as reflected in the vision, also troubled enough, of his devoted friend” (“Preface” xviii). One persistent textual sign of trouble in both realms offers itself in the story’s conspicuously repeated refrain, “man of the world.” We have here a story of something less than fifty pages in which this phrase is used twelve times—three times in the plural, referring to both Mr. Moreen and his elder son; eight times in the singular, referring to Mr. Moreen; and once, singularly enough, referring to Mrs. Moreen: “Mrs. Moreen herself took to appealing to him as a man of the world; she said, ‘Voyons, mon cher,’ and ‘my dear man, look here now’; and urged him to be reasonable.” (187). And the importance of the phrase (one is almost tempted to name it as one of those “lost keys” of interpretation, but the wary reader of James knows better) is underscored by its status as the very last words of the tale. And yet, the phrase is another tell: its frequency alone disqualifies it as the message in this bottle. Pemberton, with his unswerving faith in the bourgeois proprieties of good taste, is in the unenviable position throughout his sojourn in the bosom of the Moreen family of having those proprieties used—gracefully and graciously—against him in the most material of circumstances. The young man is seduced into an engagement increasingly against his own interests (and never quite on his own terms) precisely by the “cosmopolite” and worldly allure of the “great Moreen troupe”: Their supreme quaintness was their success. . . . Wasn’t it success to have kept him so hatefully long? Wasn’t it success to have drawn him in that first morning at dejeuner . . . so that he utterly

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committed himself, and this not by calculation or on a signal, but from a happy instinct which made them, like a band of gipsies, work so neatly together? . . . He was still young and had not seen much of the world. . . . He . . . felt a glow of joy . . . rise from the apprehension that living with them would really be to see life. . . . Their initiations gave their new inmate at first an almost dazzling sense of culture. (172–73)

But these initiations turn out to be those of the “man of the world,” associated by the increasingly initiated Pemberton with, for example, Mr. Moreen’s “ribbon of a foreign order bestowed . . . for services. . . . For what services [Pemberton] never clearly ascertained” (171), and with Ulick Moreen’s invocation of “support mainly at the club, where Pemberton guessed that it was usually served on green cloth” (172). This same “man of the world” position, which mimes the class status and tradition Pemberton reveres, at the same time enables this gentleman who is not one to put the rather pompous tutor in the wrong—even when he is in the right: He was conscious of its being a house in which the surface of one’s delicacy got rather smudged; nevertheless he had preserved the bloom of his scruple against announcing to Mr. and Mrs. Moreen with publicity that he shouldn’t be able to go on longer without a little money. . . . Mr. Moreen now listened to him, as he listened to every one and to every thing, like a man of the world, and seemed to appeal to him—though not of course too grossly—to try and be a little more of one himself. Pemberton recognised in fact the importance of the character—from the advantage it gave Mr. Moreen. He was not even confused or embarrassed, whereas the young man in his service was more so than there was any reason for. (181)

The “man of the world” is one who manifestly does not represent the traditional masculine virtues of straightness, nonduplicity, forthrightness—he only looks as though he does. The character

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enables Mr. Moreen to act the patriarch—“He assured his young friend that the matter should have his very best attention”—even as he is thereby enabled to shirk the patron’s responsibilities and shift them to his “man of the world”-like consort: And he melted into space as elusively as if, at the door, he were taking an inevitable but deprecatory precedence. When, the next moment, Pemberton found himself alone with Mrs. Moreen it was to hear her say, “I see, I see”—stroking the roundness of her chin and looking as if she were only hesitating between a dozen easy remedies. (181)

The Moreens locate themselves at a rift in the dominant fiction. Theirs is a family that looks and acts like a patriarchal family, founded firmly on the ground of classic masculinity. But what it does in fact is mime, uncannily, all of the beliefs and attributes of the dominant fiction while in substance, by that fiction’s lights, it is fatally flawed. This story, however, suggests that the fiction itself is similarly and inevitably flawed. The Moreen family cannot manage to engage in exogamous exchange with the cohort they look as though they belong to; they cannot operate socially or economically without the maneuverings and orchestrations of the wrong parent—Mrs. Moreen, who does her best in the power vacuum left by her husband’s frequent absences (as well as in his presence). The oxymoronic phrase, “man of the world,” points to the disavowed reality of the queerness (that is, bogusness) of manliness, and, finally, of the place in the world to which, in their particular ways, both Pemberton and the Moreens aspire. Paradoxically, it is the pressure of Pemberton’s deep investment in the apparently “natural” (to him anyway) proprieties abrogated yet imitated by the Moreens that reveals the imbrication of such standards of delicacy and taste in the vulgarity of the motivating pressure of mere money. What distinguishes Mr. Moreen from another retiring

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and modest patriarch, Adam Verver? The difference lies in what the one wants and the other has—“means.” The delicacy which forbids so much as mentioning “money” rests precisely on having it. That the assumption of that delicacy (in the guise, say, of being a man of the world) also enables one to merely pretend he has it—that is the insupportable horror Pemberton discerns in the Moreen family fiction: “He had simply given himself away to a band of adventurers. The idea, the word itself, wore a romantic horror for him.” (182). Pemberton is helped to his revelations by Morgan, his pupil of the “queer [manly] delicacies”: “Even when this truth became vivid to their ingenious inmate he remained unconscious of how much his mind had been prepared for it by the extraordinary little boy who had now become such a complication in his life. Much less could he then calculate on the information he was still to owe the extraordinary little boy” (183). Pemberton is determined to “finish” Morgan (much as the governess of “The Turn of the Screw” is determined to “save” Miles), to instill in him proper behaviors and perceptions—how, for example, to seem to address one’s mother when one speaks to her, or what may and may not properly be discussed between tutor and pupil. The factitious disavowal of the money-based economy of love in the tutorial relation, which Pemberton lays allegedly reluctant hands upon, serves both the familial and the pedagogic perversities Pemberton and Mrs. Moreen trade in and on: “If I stay on longer it must be on one condition—that Morgan shall know distinctly on what footing I am.” Mrs. Moreen demurred. “Surely you don’t want to show off to a child?” . . . “That leaves me more free,” said Pemberton. “To poison my darling’s mind?” groaned Mrs. Moreen. “Oh your darling’s mind—!” the young man laughed.

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She . . . swept out of the room with the desperate concession: “You may tell him any horror you like!” (189)

Pemberton’s portentous rectitude, paradoxically again, is precisely what enables his less than (or more than) straightforward relationship with Morgan. The more he assures himself that he “owes” to Morgan the real reasons for his always imminent departure (which he will take the moment an opportunity offers), the more he penetrates into the gray borderland between the erotic and the pedagogic: He was partly drawn on and partly checked, as for a scruple, by the charm of attempting to sound the little cool shallows that were so quickly growing deeper. When he tried to figure to himself the morning twilight of childhood, so as to deal with it safely, he saw it was never fixed, never arrested, that ignorance, at the instant he touched it, was already flushing faintly into knowledge, that there was nothing that at a given moment you could say an intelligent child didn’t know. (192)

Of course, what an intelligent child—especially perhaps a Jamesian child—“knows” is a function of who and what it is in presence of. Morgan is poised between the fictions and alibis of his family and of his tutor. For his family’s benefit, he is obliged to disavow their lack of phallic rudders—“Why people didn’t want them more he didn’t know—that was people’s own affair; after all they weren’t superficially repulsive, they were a hundred times cleverer than most of the dreary grandees, the ‘poor swells’ they rushed about Europe to catch up with” (196). For his “friend’s” benefit, he is obliged to avow that lack: “If his father or brother would only knock some one down once or twice a year!” (197). From the increasingly intimate relationship with his pupil—fueled as I have suggested by his increasingly oppositional status to the Ultramoreen world—Pemberton is rescued by a more remunerative

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engagement—to coach an opulent youth for his exams. Although he is more or less tricked into leaving this post and returning to the Moreens, Pemberton’s stint in a proper (which is to say, monied) family girds his resistance this time to all the Moreens: This episode of his second sojourn in Paris stretched itself out wearily, with their resumed readings and wanderings and maunderings. . . . For the first time, in this complicated connexion, our friend felt his collar gall him. . . . He could neither really throw off his blighting burden nor find in it the benefit of a pacified conscience or of a rewarded affection. He had spent all the money accruing to him in England, and he saw his youth going and that he was getting nothing back for it. It was all very well of Morgan to count it for reparation that he should now settle on him permanently—there was an irritating flaw in such a view . . . the conception that . . . he must show his gratitude by giving him his life. But the poor friend didn’t desire the gift—what could he do with Morgan’s dreadful little life? (209)

Note that as Pemberton waits “in a queer confusion of yearning and alarm” for the crash, other things are also queerly confused: Pemberton is here revealing that he too operates on the basis of the degraded market-economy principles all of his social convictions hold to be too vulgar for the proper gentleman. Morgan is here placed as a genuine Moreen—holding, with his family, that his company alone is worth the price of his upkeep, and blithely discounting, like his family, ways and means altogether. More tellingly perhaps, Morgan is apparently conceiving of himself as offering loyalty and friendship on the ennobled principles his tutor has been, precisely, tutoring him in. And Pemberton is irritably contemplating the result of his pedagogical success. Why/how is this sexuality? How is it we “know” that “The Pupil” is about sexuality and we do not “know” that homoerotic buddy flicks are? Part of the answer has to do with disavowal: what we think we

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“know” about “The Pupil” disavows what it is really “about.” We look for the expression of the sexuality we say James never bodily expressed, and so what we find is representation of gender/sexuality systems. The story, like most of the rest of James’s fiction, is an investigation of sexuality—of its roots, gnarled and gnarly as they are. This is how and why we know what we do not know, in life as well as in Henry James. As Freud pointed out—and remember that he was investigating sexuality as well as investigation itself (and these two projects are always mutually implicated in the James corpus as well)— investigation is sexuality, and vice versa.11 Poised between his family and his tutor, Morgan faces the insupportable contradictions engendered by the cultural and psychic disavowal he must perforce embody: the disavowal of the absence of phallicly underwritten virtues in the Moreen family and in the ostensibly alternative precepts of his teacher. At the moment when this impossible space converges on him, Morgan is indeed, as Pemberton sees with “horror, by Morgan’s own stricken face,” “beyond their wildest recall” (214). In this Medusan moment, Morgan’s “queer little conscious lucid look” has found at last nothing there to see (190). The shattering of the family and phallic fictions—his inability at the last to countenance these masquerades—causes Morgan’s “weak organ” to fail (214). Mr. Moreen, “after the very first [takes] his bereavement as a man of the world” (214). That the tutor does just this as well we might infer from how his bereavement registers after the fact. Pemberton can carry on, despite the detritus of history—“a lock of hair . . . the half-dozen letters,” the “few tangible tokens” of what he almost learned, was in danger in fact of learning (but instead chooses to disavow) (172). The precarious status of the fictions he continues to live by (which turn out to be perfectly compatible if not complicit with those the Moreens 11

See, for example, “On the Sexual Theories of Children.”

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do not live by) is consigned to the account of fiction tout court: “Today, after a considerable interval, there is something phantasmagoric, like a prismatic reflexion or a serial novel, in Pemberton’s memory of the Moreens” (172).

“The strange fact of there being nothing to speak of the matter . . .” Repeatedly to ask how certain categorizations work, what enactments they are performing and what relations they are creating, rather than what they essentially mean, has been my principal strategy. —Eve Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet The family James writes is a family that exists only if one sees what is not there, only if one does not say what is there to be seen . . . an operation obverse to James criticism and oblique to the Fiedlerian homoerotic straight story. The painstaking analysis of the “dominant fiction [which] not only offers the representational system by means of which the subject typically assumes a sexual identity, and takes on the desires commensurate with that identity, but forms the stable core around which a nation’s and a period’s ‘reality’ coheres” offered us by Kaja Silverman is always already (as we used to always say, already) in James’s fiction—which must be read with as much care and thoroughness as other (less narrative, less complex) theories of identities, sexualities, and states. But with this crucial difference: James writes a marginal masculine subject, but one that is only as marginal as the next guy. This is the narrative behind the public fiction that James’s text morganizes—a nineteenth-century locution which means to assassinate secretly in order to prevent or punish disclosures. The disclosure that “The Pupil” does not prevent with its assassination of the boy who could not quite

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disavow enough, seems to be that disavowal can position virtually anybody in an apparently (which is always good enough for dominant cultural purposes) heterosexual circuit. Pemberton’s queerness, with its ambivalence, its hesitations and retreats, its angst-ridden reluctances, is easily and smoothly accommodated by the dominant sexuality narrative. As are the buddies of the 1990s tutor text. When we say “Henry James” had no sex, we enable a narrative which has erotic appeal—not for nothing do we call the latest, hottest critical trends “sexy”—and (perhaps therefore) which makes our critical enterprise essentially a cryptographic one. When we say that “The Pupil” has sexuality “in” it (as opposed to being part of a mix which adds up to sexuality) we do so at least in part because we know that James’s sexuality had to go somewhere. What we lose in this transaction is what cannot be found on the page but is there when we read rather than decode: a Jamesian telling of sexuality which is more culturally critical and politically astute than any narrative our theoretical and critical labors have yet produced. Who is to say, as well, that when we perform such literary electron microscopy we are not somehow being complicit with the cultural text-making machinery that brought us, say, The Last Boy Scout? Can we know that we are not seduced by the promise proffered in the final image of the newly reconciled-to-his-wife-Joe and his pal/student/partner Jimmy walking away from Joe’s wife and daughter and suburban front yard off into the sunset (or wherever it is buddies go off into these days), that in these nineties, unlike James’s, we can, if we talk the talk and walk the walk, in fact eat our beefcake and have it too? Knowing the “truth” of sex, cracking the code of a narrative—these operations carry an undeniable though difficult to locate erotic charge. And even those of us who know we cannot know (“James had—well, exactly that which we now all know that we know not” [Sedgwick 196]), proceed nevertheless as though we did (“I know, but all the same . . .”).

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Thus we continue: The general adventure of the little composition itself—for singular things were to happen to it, though among such importunities not the most worth noting now—would be, occasion favoring, a thing to live over; moving as one did, roundabout it, in I scarce know what thick and coloured air of slightly tarnished anecdote, of dim association, of casual confused romance; a compound defying analysis, but truly, for the social chronicler, any student in especial of the copious “cosmopolite” legend, a boundless and tangled, but highly explorable, garden. (“Preface” xvi)

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4

The Silver Clue Fish in The Golden Bowl

The narrative, the narrator, the voice of the “author,” the voice of the actual living, breathing, speaking, dictating historical writer: each in its own way is another mote suspended in the web of experience that is the novel. For we see the typographical versions, we read the written filigrees of language (“as who should say”), and we could, at a second (aural) glance, hear something else, the something else that adds nothing in particular to our critical narratives of plot, story, and the figurative. But it is there and it does add. The Golden Bowl is a story about a father and daughter who are very close and (or but) who get married—the daughter to an Italian prince, the father to an American pauper—only to be deceived by their quasi-incestuously adulterous but beautifully behaving spouses, and who (the father and the daughter) successfully separate their lives (and their spouses) from one another without the aid of screaming, crying, private detectives, lawyers, or guns. That’s, of course, only one way to summarize it. There are other ways: a rich imperialist American buys everything in the world including an Italian prince for his daughter and a beautiful though penniless friend of his daughter’s for himself and everybody suffers the consequences but the imperialist wins in the end as all imperialists always do. Or, the selfish and naïve super-rich father and his daughter are temporarily deceived by their bought and paid for clever and worldly spouses who are the heroes of True Love and Passion, but ultimately and tragically the far less interesting pair of spouses are

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able to forever separate the true lovers and condemn them to lives of marital boredom if not despair. Or it is a story of the necessity of responsibility and morality; or a story of the economies underlying the consumption of people and artifacts and of people as artifacts; or it is a story of incest and its redemption .  .  . or not. Of adultery and its redemption .  .  . or not. Of the enduring and ever-reverberating result of any action— taken, spoken, thought of, or figured; or, not-taken, not-spoken, not-thought-of, or not-figured, but effecting enduring and everreverberating results anyway.  “Yes, look, look,” she seemed to see him hear her say, even while her sounded words were other— —The Golden Bowl The Golden Bowl is one of the great monuments of the novel in English. It’s huge. It’s deep. It’s long. And, as it is a novel of about six hundred pages focused mainly on conversations performed and inferred between and among only six characters, the names of those characters necessarily appear on the page with great frequency. One of those characters spends more time than any of the others in colloquy—real, imagined, and inferred—with each of the other characters in turn. The name of that character is a multiple dirty joke. Fanny Assingham. There’s “Ass.” (Or Arse). There’s “ham.” And then there is “Fanny,” a lovely transatlantic cant term, for “arse” on the American side and “cunt” on the British. And her husband’s name is Bob Assingham. As in bob-tailed nag. So that is two characters out of the six main characters. One-third of the main occupants of the page are schoolyard-snigger-worthy. We can see the egregious puns as we read; we can hear them on our iPods, courtesy of audible.com. And we can remember that Henry James “wrote” The Golden Bowl out loud—he spoke it to his amanuensis, Miss

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Mary Weld, who simultaneously typed it on a Remington typewriter, a process she compared to accompanying a singer on the piano (Kaplan 465). So, during the course of writing this novel, James had to say—he chose to say, out loud—the words “Fanny” and “Assingham” literally hundreds of times, even without counting revisions and corrections. Whether he did so without snickering is not, I think, recorded. In the preface to The Golden Bowl, James expresses sympathy for the “systematically bewildered and bamboozled” reader who, in “his really quite swindled state,” is cheated out of “that fullest experience of his pleasure which waits but on a direct reading out of the addressed appeal.” James goes on: The highest test of any literary form conceived in the light of “poetry”—to apply that term in its largest literary sense—hangs back unpardonably from its office when it fails to lend itself to vivavoce treatment. . . . The essential property of such a form as that is to give out its finest and most numerous secrets, and to give them out most gratefully, under the closest pressure—which is of course the pressure of the attention articulately sounded. (35)

It would appear, then, that we are to, in fact, “sound it out.” Read it out loud, at least in your head. Assingham, Assingham, Assingham. Fanny. Fanny. Bob. Fanny. “Principino” too. That just sounds dirty. Even his own grandfather thinks so: “In the way of precious small pieces he had handled nothing so precious as the Principino, his daughter’s first-born, whose Italian designation endlessly amused him” (144). “Taking it in hand”: in which we grapple with dirty jokes and graphics When, in the preface, we first come across phrases like “taking it in hand,” we are more likely than not, at first, to suppress—or try

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to suppress—any impulse in the direction of an intrusive, nascent snigger. But then we keep seeing (hearing) more, everywhere: The springing of such fruit from his seed. (23) I nevertheless affect myself as having held my system fast and fondly, with one hand at least. (20) Under the first touch of the spring my hands were to feel themselves full. (31) He just now fingered it a good deal out of sight. (270) “It’s the sort of thing in you that one feels—or at least I do—with one’s hand.” (137)

James has convictions about a writer’s obligations to his readers apropos of his “pledged honour on the question of repaying” the “confidence” he has invited the reader to repose in him: The ideally handsome way is for him to multiply in any given connexion all the possible sources of entertainment—or, more grossly expressing it again, to intensify his whole chance of pleasure. (It all comes back to that, to my and your “fun”—if we but allow the term its full extension; to the production of which no humblest question involved, even to that of the shade of a cadence or the position of a comma, is not richly pertinent.) (34–35)

Readers just wanna have fun? No, they want to have “fun.” The quotation marks are themselves a way to have it, to embrace “the shade of a cadence”: as we will see (or hear), words set off by inverted commas, words printed in italics, words in foreign languages, are signals to our eyes, just as puns, infixed phrases of no particular meaning (“as who should say,” “as might be”), oxymorons, synesthetic figuration, and dirty jokes are signals to our ears, that something else is here to hear. Words Just Wanna Have “Fun” In Henry James at Work, Theodora Bosanquet, James’s amanuensis for the last eight years of his life, left us a description of James’s dictation

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style which makes it clear that these textual details were all quite deliberately placed: The experience of years had evidently taught him that it was not safe to leave any word of more than one syllable to luck. He took pains to pronounce every pronounceable letter, he spelt out words which the ear might confuse with others, and he never left a single punctuation mark unuttered, except sometimes that necessary point, the full stop. (34)1

Volume 1 of the novel is titled “The Prince,” and the first sentence hands him right over to us: The Prince had always liked his London, when it had come to him; he was one of the modern Romans who find by the Thames a more convincing image of the truth of the ancient state than any they have left by the Tiber. Brought up on the legend of the City to which the world paid tribute, he recognized in the present London much more than in contemporary Rome the real dimensions of such a case. If it was a question of an Imperium, he said to himself, and if one wished, as a Roman, to recover a little the sense of that, the place to do so was on London Bridge, or even, on a fine afternoon in May, at Hyde Park Corner. It was not indeed to either of those places that these grounds of his predilection, after all sufficiently vague, had, at the moment we are concerned with him, guided his steps. . . . (43)

With the canny “If,” and an italicized “imperium,” the narrator turns contemporary England into ancient Rome. One of those “foreign” words that seem to be almost English, “Imperium’s” italic quality mimes the Prince’s own status as an opportunity for translation never fully achieved: A sobriety that might have consorted with failure sat in his handsome face, constructively regular and grave, yet at the same 1

Henry James at Work; correction of “or” to “of,” above, is mine and proves James’s point pretty handily.

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time oddly and, as might be, functionally almost radiant, with its dark blue eyes, its dark brown moustache and its expression no more sharply “foreign” to an English view than to have caused it sometimes to be observed of him with a shallow felicity that he looked like a “refined” Irishman. (emphasis mine, 44)

Contradictorily, and at the same time exceeding the simple dichotomy of contradiction, the Prince’s face finally strikes the English view as like that of the more or less domestic foreign population—but less— or is it more?—Irish than the general run of the Irish. “Refined” and “foreign” are both in quotation marks. The Prince’s foreign-ness cannot be fully expressed by the word “foreign”; his visual “Irish-ness” needs qualification by a qualifier which is further qualified by the graphic signal of the inverted commas, which insist on and undermine the refinement thereby added. The reader cannot tell, “as might be,” how to translate these accessorized words on the page: they thus join the ranks of many “tropes l’oeil” in this novel. “Can’t tell” The “international” is one of James’s oldest (which is to say one of his youngest) themes. And while we may feel superior to poor Gertrude of The Europeans, who has “never heard of people like that,” we are no more able than she is to find a word that “tells.” Our Europeans might well both be and not-be Americans/Italians/“refined” Irishmen. For it is not the “foreignness” that tells, that is the “tell,” but, rather, that which is somehow in excess of the language that is not telling. “Che!” In a little Bloomsbury shop, Charlotte and the Prince, indulging in the first of what will be apparently many illicit hours together, come across the titular golden bowl (which is, be it noted, first presented

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to the reader by the presiding “antiquario” in, in fact, the titular case: “My Golden Bowl” [116], he says to them, introductively). As it happens, Charlotte has made the long expensive arduous journey back from America in order to spend these particular unfettered hours with the about-to-be-married Prince under the guise of coming to visit her good friend Maggie, who is who is about to marry him, and the shop transforms itself rather quickly from a potential stash of wedding presents to the scene of increasingly intimate intercourse between them—Charlotte and the Prince, that is. Having this conversation in front of a witness during an excursion that they are “not to speak of ” is something of a risk, and so “it was a comfort to [Charlotte] that their foreign tongue covered what they said” (116). Their tongue covers foreign terms of endearment (cara mia, caro mio), offers and refusals of offers of a “small ricordo,” references to their “other time,” and the quality they  have dubbed  “old-Roman”—which is to say, partaking of a certain je ne sais quoi and emblematized at this point by a parti­ cularly Italian princely shrug. They’ve been speaking Italian, for Charlotte has “a strange sense for tongues” (78); the Prince, in the old times, had “more than once felt  .  .  . on her lips .  .  . a perfect felicity in the use of Italian” (78). We have learned earlier that the Prince’s English has “no note of strangeness . . . either for lip or ear” and that he finds it “convenient” for the “greatest number of relations,” including, “oddly, . . . his relation with himself—though not unmindful that there might still, as time went on, be others, including a more intimate degree of that one, that would seek, possibly with violence, the larger or the finer issue—what was it?—of the vernacular” (45). On the one hand, or should I say, taking it in one hand, these details tell us that we have to do with international, polyglot, brilliant, charming worldly creatures—an Italian prince! his beautiful

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paramour! That we are given such details also tells us, less directly but nonetheless certainly, that foreign-ness and eroticism and other pleasures of the text will characterize their part of the plot (and their plotting of their parts). They are polyglot—exotic from the American point of view in that alone. The Prince has felt Charlotte’s lips—oh yes—and their perfect felicity with Italian? Well, he is (the) Italian, right? We know what to do with readings that produce rhetorical or subtextual supplementation to the obvious thematic concerns of the text. About the “fun” stuff, we are not always so sure. What are we supposed to do with the “what was it?” interruption? What does that tell us? What about the unresolved oxymoronic alternative of “larger or finer”? Is there a joke in “his relation with himself ”? (Much later in the novel, the Prince will be the butt, as it were, of an “accidental”  double entendre, when he mistakes Maggie’s use of the plural, “relations,” for a reference to the number of times he has had relations with Charlotte rather than to the number of kinds thereof). So, are we to infer that he could get “more intimate” with himself? Is there any way to picture or to hear someone getting “violent” about “seek”ing the vernacular? And about the issue of the vernacular . . . what would the vernacular’s issue look like anyway? Should there not be some kind of ratio applicable to whatever is figurative in this language that will help tell us what it means? Is it not supposed to somehow tell us? Meanwhile, back on Bond Street, Charlotte and the Prince have reached something of an impasse: they have not found the gift that they are not actually looking for and neither will accept a ricordo from the other that cannot, anyway, refer to anything that can be told. Then the shopman, for Charlotte, momentously broke silence. “You’ve seen, disgraziatamente, signora principessa,” he sadly said, “too much”—and it made the Prince face about. For the effect of the momentous came, if not from the sense, from the sound of his

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words; which was that of the suddenest sharpest Italian. Charlotte exchanged with her friend a glance that matched it, and just for the minute they were held in check. But their glance had after all by that time said more than one thing; had both exclaimed on the apprehension, by the wretch, of their intimate conversation, let alone of her possible, her impossible, title . . . (118)

It is the sound of the words with which the antiquario breaks his silence—not the sense—that stuns our erstwhile chatty enough pair into their own momentary silence: “The sound of his words” produces the effect of the momentous. His words have meaning, that is, in excess of their meaning.2 The Prince and Charlotte reassure one another, still wordlessly, that “it didn’t, all the same, matter,” and the Prince breaks his silence: “You’re Italian then, are you?” But the reply came in English. “Oh dear no.” “You’re English?” To which the answer was this time, with a smile, in briefest Italian, “Che!” The dealer waived the question—he practically disposed of it. (118)

Investigating the sound of the shopkeeper’s words, the Prince surmises he is Italian. The answer to his first inquiry, “Oh dear no,” “reads” like something an English person would say—that is, with the Prince, we “hear” a British accent in looking at that anglicized polite disclaimer. Wrong again. You cannot, after all, tell by the sound—which is both missing from and excessive to the words on the page—what or who the shopkeeper is, any more than he, with his “signora principessa” could answer for who or what Charlotte is. And then there is “Che!” The word that means “what” or “how” exceeds its grammatical status when read out, when sounded—especially 2

For admirable discussions of the shop scene from angles different from mine but in harmony with the basic principles herein, see Miller, Conduct, and Cameron, Thinking.

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with an exclamation point to point it out—and then it means “Not at all!” and tells us . . . nothing. Which is telling. On Translation Nicola Bradbury argues that James’s liberal use of foreign phrases conveys “signals of effort and the grace of hesitancy” (142). Her reading connects James’s deployment of foreign phrases to the principal concern of all his criticism: the relationship of donnée and treatment: the germ of the artist’s idea, gifted to his imagination, and what by hard labour he can make of it paying due attention to precisely what it requires. This is the primary aesthetic negotiation which underlies every exploration of the balance of power— gendered, economic, international, or linguistic—in James’s fiction. What it demands is a delicate counterpoint of capacity and incompetence . . . of “intelligence” and “bewilderment.” (144)

Thus, for Bradbury, the shards of other languages, as also the visual noise of italics and inverted commas, the repetitions of empty phrases, are, finally, closely linked to the spacious thematics of Henry James’s writing. Bradbury’s analysis assimilates and thus domesticates the insistent strangeness, the very palpability of James’s inveterate use of interpolated foreign phrases, to a dialogical give-and-take of doubt and interpretation, of the “concealment and betrayal” that are both narrative and thematic as well as language and style concerns in James. That would appear to cover all the contingencies. But (there is always a but) in finding in or assigning to such gestures a textually congruent meaning, their perverse otherness is erased: the sound of the words, the sight of typographic noise like italics and quotation marks, the filled, yet empty space of the meaningless stock phrases. And butts. Assingham. Assingham. Assingham.

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The Butt Abides The preface to The Golden Bowl includes an extended meditation on the illustrative quality necessary to “poetic” prose: We have but to think a moment of such a matter as the play of representational values, those that make it a part, and an important part, of our taking offered things in that we should take them as aspects and visibilities—take them to the utmost as appearances, images, figures, objects, so many important, so many contributive items of the furniture of the world—in order to feel immediately the effect of such a condition at every turn of our adventure and every point of the representative surface. One has but to open the door to any forces of exhibition at all worthy of the name in order to see the imaging and qualifying agency called at once into play and put on its mettle. (35)

Let’s return to the shop on Bond Street and open its door as the antiquario opens “a receptacle to which he hadn’t yet resorted” and extracts a box. He opens it, places it on the counter, and takes out a “drinking-vessel larger than a common cup, yet not of exorbitant size, and formed, to appearance, either of old fine gold or of some material once richly gilt” (118). This object, a gold-surfaced crystal goblet, he announces as: “My Golden Bowl,” “and it sounded on his lips as if it said everything” (118). And if it did not say everything there, literary scholars have been trying to make up for it ever since. The thing is in the title, after all. It’s golden. Mysterious. Obviously symbolic. And it has a nicely readable flaw as well. It infects the very language of the entire novel: characters are always drinking out of little cups of observation, or having crystalline cognitive movements, or feeling smooth round surfaces or some such while the narrative is constantly bristling with the applicable homonyms (gilt/guilt). It has been read as “standing for” the symmetries, asymmetries, themes, anti-themes, characters,

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communities, fates, loves, desires, ambitions, failures, virtues, vices, stylistics—of and in the novel. Discussions of its literary provenance trace it to Ecclesiastes, to Blake, to a gift made by King George I to the original owners of James’s beloved Lamb House, attributes of which origins are then collated with the interpretive scheme at hand. There are also terrific readings of the novel which frankly admit, make a virtue of, not understanding the damn bowl at all. A particularly nice version of this is Hillis Miller’s gloss on the possible connection to the Ecclesiastes verse, “Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken . . .” (Eccl. 12:6), apropos of which he says “I confess I cannot see a clear connection” (243), though he lays claim for himself to verse 12, “of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh” (243). Narratively, the bowl is equally intransigent. It is the improbable reason that Maggie’s suspicion that her husband and her stepmother are having an affair is confirmed. That the plot device is improbable is underscored by the poor Prince’s plaintive characterization of it as “the sort of thing that happens mainly in novels and plays” (459): the antiquario, having sold the bowl quite profitably to an unsuspecting Maggie four years after the Prince and Charlotte had refused it, and knowing that Maggie intends it for a gift to her father, visits Maggie to confess to its flaw, in the course of which visit he sees and recognizes pictures of the erring sposi and spills the proverbial beans. The bowl is as flawed narratively as it is for every other purpose: the Prince cannot understand what the shopkeeper’s motive could possibly have been, and Maggie herself realizes that the event does not really provide one. So the bowl works pretty well with any number of interpretive approaches, though it may be a bit too much a “bowlus ex machina” for some tastes. But what happens if we consider it only in its function as “furniture” as the preface advises us to remember to do? Our “fun,” remember, is there declared to rest on that, on “our taking offered

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things . . . as aspects and visibilities” [emphasis mine]. If we take this more literally than figuratively, we are being asked to think about what the thing looks like rather than what it tells or does not tell us. A canny salesman and a pretty good reader in his own right, the shopkeeper leaves it to the “important object . . . to produce its certain effect” (118). It appears to be solid gold, but is not—though it will be impossible for anyone to scrape the gold off since it has been applied by a process lost in time. The shopkeeper asserts that it is “a perfect crystal” and then equivocates: “If it isn’t I think I can promise you that you’ll never find any joint or piecing” (119). Simple but singularly elegant, it stood on a circular foot, a short pedestal with a slightly spreading base, and, though not of signal depth, justified its title by the charm of its shape as well as by the tone of its surface. (119)

This is what the bowl looks like before Fanny Assingham has her way with it—for it is Fanny Assingham who reduces the bowl to its final status as a dirty joke. After Maggie explains what she takes to be the bowl’s significance, Fanny “dash[es] it boldly” to the “fine and hard” marble floor. And she “flush[es]” with the effort as Maggie “flush[es]” with “wonder” (448). The Prince walks in on them. Fanny leaves. Leaving her husband “to take account of the flagrant signs of the accident, of the incident, on which he had unexpectedly dropped” (450), Maggie cleans up the aftermath. She picks up the pieces and puts them on the mantel, in the “conspicuous place” she had put it to begin with; it is broken into such well-defined pieces that “if there had been anything to hold them” it “could have passed for uninjured” (450). “As there was however nothing to hold them but Maggie’s hands .  .  .” she leaves them “thus before her husband’s eyes” (450). The bowl has split into three parts: the two halves of the bowl itself and the “solid detached foot”—a short cylindrical column with a slightly spreading base.

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And here I wish I had recourse to one of the pointing finger icons Samuel Richardson put to such good use in the third edition of Clarissa. Failing that, please, dear reader, take a moment and sketch in the margins of this page, a visual rendition of the description above. And that is not even the worst of it. When the bowl breaks, it is loud and sharp. It makes a “crack!” because of its crack. The word “crack” appears, as you might guess, more than once in the novel. Some of the more notable and noticeable appearances acquire emphasis by repetitions in the stichomythic dialogues James is so given to. We hear the word sounded often and well: “Why it has a crack.” It sounded, on his lips, so sharp, it had such an authority, that she almost started, while her colour rose at the word. (123) . . . “Per Dio I’m superstitious! A crack’s a crack—” . . . “Thank goodness then that if there be a crack we know it! But if we may perish by cracks in things that we don’t know—!” (123) “The treacherous cracked thing you wanted to palm off on me, . . . But I feel this an occasion,” he immediately added, “and I hope you don’t mean,” he smiled, “that as an occasion it’s also cracked.” . . . “Don’t you think too much of ‘cracks’ and aren’t you too afraid of them? I risk the cracks,” said Charlotte. . . . “But as to cracks,” the Prince went on—“what did you tell me the other day you prettily call them in English? ‘rifts within the lute’?” (292) “It’s of value, but its value’s impaired, I’ve learned, by a crack.” “A crack?—” . . .

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“And cracked, under the gilt, as I say, at that.” . . . Here, thumbing the singular piece, weighing it, turning it over and growing suddenly more conscious, above all, of an irresistible impulse, she presently spoke again. “A crack? Then your whole idea has a crack.” (446–47)

The word “crack” is much repeated at short intervals in these conversations; the sound of this word that means a sound, is underscored and emphasized, encouraging us to have some “fun” with it. According to the “Dictionary of Slang and Colloquialisms of the UK,” current definitions of “crack” include: 2. The vagina. 3. Between the buttocks. 6. Women, viewed as sexual objects. Offens. The OED backs it up, offering not only the obsolete but still resonant, “woman of broken reputation; a wench, a prostitute,” but also, and similarly obsolete and resonant: “the breaking of wind.” The Silver Clue James intends to fulfill his self-declared obligation to “multiply in any given connexion all the possible sources of entertainment.” But we must do our part as well. Reading, especially reading James, cannot, if it is to produce our “fun,” be done passively. James invites us to use and abuse the words on the page every bit as much and in every one of the ways that he himself does. In the preface to this color-conscious novel, “silver” is mentioned twice. The first: “the silver clue to the whole labyrinth” of the poet’s consciousness is the “taste of the poet” (30). As John Irwin has pointed out: “A clue is literally, then, a ball of thread, and its common metaphoric meaning (as a hint to solve

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a mystery) is a function of the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur” (177). The labyrinth we need “the taste of the poet” to wend our way through, if not out of, is language. The second appearance of the word “silver” in the preface appears in a sentence about the process of “re-perusal,” the “prime consequence” of which “is a sense for ever so many more of the shining silver fish afloat in the deep sea of one’s endeavor” (34). “One’s endeavor” is, of course, revision—“re-perusal”—of every bit of language on the page of all the works selected for the twenty-four volumes of the New York Edition. Re-perusing “silver fish” invoked in the book we hold in our hands and more pointedly in this prefatory discourse about the many dimensions of the words in books, alerts us to the kind that are not “afloat in the deep sea,” but are, rather, the “pest of all book lovers, the ‘silver-fish’ or ‘silver coloured book-worm,’ ” a little insect fond of damp places (OED). We are enjoined, invited, seduced by word, sentence, passage, and page to taste every bit of what the language of the novel offers us, can be made to offer us. We are to hear and savor the cracks— wise and otherwise—along with what we consider, conventionally at least, weightier matter. Some of what there is to see and hear and taste is hardly the stuff of grand mythic discovery; some of it is just, perversely, funny little bugs. Imps and Monkey Poo Edgar Dryden, in “The Imp of the Perverse: Metaphor in The Golden Bowl” closes with a reference to the mirror James invokes in “The Future of the Novel”: “Till the world is an unpeopled void there will always be an image in the mirror” (124). Dryden adds: “And, as with all such images, it will be precisely perverse with the right and left directions of the original reversed” (124). What I have hoped to do here is to somehow get at that reverse image of the “precisely perverse.” Focusing on the vertiginous (and to some

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readers, annoying and even unreadable) abundance and excess of the oceans of metaphor in this novel, Dryden points to “its swirling, turning, oceanic quality, an excess that inhabits the language itself, so that it, perversely, more than the characters, performs the action.” This language of metaphor in The Golden Bowl is mirrored by the language that we are solicited to “take in hand”—not the reverse, but the silver backside of James’s mirror. The Jamesian perverse is not, any more than any other Jamesian trope, a simple dichotomy. Which is to say, the perverse image in the mirror is not non-perverse—it is a derangement, if you will, of the assumption of bi-directionality, of cozy pairs of opposites (perverse/non-perverse, sense/nonsense, legitimate reading of figurative language/what I just did). This perverse, and the perversion of the perverse, necessitate one another, but not in any logical or metaphorical way. They are coexistent, on the page and in the reader’s mind, eye, ear. They are not mutually implicative or dialogic; they do not harmonize or turn one into the other and back again. The tasty bits have no essential, thematize-able, homological relation to the other stuff, the good stuff, of the novel; they have nothing to do with the more or less orderly cascade of multiple “tiers” (to use Dryden’s figure) of circumlocuting metaphorical currents, syntactical labyrinths, narrative layerings. The “fun” stuff (to recur to James’s term) is random, excessive (even to excess), non-contingent linguistic detritus. The mirror image of the Imp of the Perverse, the silver clue to the perverse perverse, is a monkey flinging poo. In The Golden Bowl the importance of form is asserted and reasserted with each added layer of language. This lovely language is infested by the unlovely, by that perverse imp, dancing and cackling, pushing us off the cliffs of propriety and into the unmentionables (not always coterminous with the un-sayables or even the unspeakables). When we move from the “silver clue of consciousness” to the

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“silver  fish” infesting these sea-damp pages, we find traces of the importance of the de-formed, the anti-form—the monkey-flung poo of words-become-things, the vulgarly entertaining perversity inherent in words in all their inglorious, uproarious physicality, however noble and ennobling the forms they de-form may be. And this, all this, for no particular reason. Che? Crack! Principino. Fanny. Bob. Fanny. Assingham Assingham Assingham

5

In the Vestibule of “The Jolly Corner”

The archive: if we want to know what that will have meant, we will only know in times to come. Perhaps. Not tomorrow but in times to come, later on or perhaps never. —Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever

Mommy! I’m home . . . Kill Bill Vol. 1 introduces us to the Bride, who we first meet as a panicked, breath-sound voiceover, then as a terrified gore-encrusted face framed in a bloodied bridal veil.1 Someone, whose handkerchief is embroidered with the name “Bill,” speaks to her; we see his hand, her face, and the possibly Shakespearean handkerchief. Then, as she is struggling to say something, she is shot in the head by, presumably, that same hand. What we hear is, “Bill it’s your bab—” BAM! For the rest of this movie, the Bride, as a vengeful killing machine, will be, then, the alter ego of this Bride as pregnant body, a body with an other within, a body on the cusp of birth, life, death, and transformation to a corpse. Next, she erupts out of a four-year coma to the horrifying discovery that her baby is gone. Possessed by the absence of the one within, she starts on what she describes in the first minutes of Kill Bill Vol. 2 as “what the movies call a roaring rampage of revenge.” The Bride, whose name we will learn in Vol. 2, though her name is used but bleeped out in Vol. 1, pulls her purloined (but we do not 1

Quoted dialogue is from the two Kill Bill movies.

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know that yet) yellow “Pussy Wagon” over to a curb in a pictureperfect Pasadena family neighborhood. Within minutes a lethal catfight ignites between the woman whose maternity was torn from her unconscious body and the woman who was one of the assassination squad and who is now a mother herself. After a brief hiatus occasioned by the arrival home of four-year-old Nikki, the Bride, victorious, removes her knife from the body of the mother, telling the daughter: It was not my intention to do this in front of you. For that I’m sorry. But you can take my word for it, your mother had it comin’. When you grow up, if you still feel raw about it, I’ll be waiting.

This fight to the finish is not the Bride’s first kill in the story the film tells, but it is the first one we see—helpfully (or un-) labeled “2” by the inter-title just preceding our arrival in Pasadena. We do not know, when we see that number, what list it is part of, or even that it is part of a list. We are to know that hereafter. For that matter, it is no longer possible for me, since I have already been knowing it, to know when I first knew it. But I do know that when we get to the end of the film, which is where we finally see the list being written, then we will be able to say, “Oh. I was to have known, then, that that number 2 meant she was not number 1 in a series of 5 planned revenge killings, the first of which, which I saw second, was accomplished before the one I saw first. Which was second.” The fractured timeline resonates with similar fractures in the Freudian story of coming (back) to the already always construct of subjecthood. Angstbereitschaft is the process of getting ready to have been traumatized; nachtraglichkeit is the term which designates the process whereby significant events acquire their places in our histories only after a second event enables us to read back into them. These nonlinear elements in subjectivity construction have as their aim the stabilizing of our subjectivity even as they work to destabilize linear

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narrative and chronology. Additionally, they are among the elements that deny our proximity to the abject—traces of which lurk within the “I” which comes into being as the result of a violent movement away from the mother’s body and into language/subjectivity. And as Emile Benveniste has demonstrated, every “I,” which is to say every speaker who uses the pronoun “I,” posits a “you,”; and that “ ‘I’ is always transcendent with respect to ‘you.’ ”2 In other words, whenever we take possession of the pronoun “I,” we are repeating, in some sense, our triumph over the mother and her body, and disavowing the traces of that rupture lurking within that “I.” “I,” that is, is predicated upon our denial of the “non-I,” the mess that abjecting the mother’s body has left behind. This mother who is not one (that is, we think she is not one when she kills Nikki’s mother, but by the time she kills Nikki’s mother— by “the time” I mean the time in the diegesis, not in our watching of it—she has already sent Sofie Fatale back to Bill who has asked her, in our hearing but not in the Bride’s, if the Bride knows her daughter is alive, but we do not know that yet) is no longer two, and she is not about to forget it.3 Or let bygones be bygones. By the time this film is over, she will have brought us pretty much every conceivable variety of filmic abject in her “roaring rampage of revenge.” Displaced in space and time via the stuttering fractures of the films’ time “lines,” she becomes the other “I” we all suspect ourselves of harboring within, and her ruthless determination to return many bodies (five in particular, and others who just get in the way) to abject status embodies the root (route) of “revenge”: “to inflict injury in return.” When Bill shoots the Bride, he is “I” (recall his saying: “I’d like to believe you’re aware enough, even now, to know there is  nothing 2 3

“Relationships of Person in the Verb” (201). cf., Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One.

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sadistic in my actions”), and she is “you.” When she works her way through violence back to a repetition (with a difference) of this encounter, she succeeds in reversing the pronouns—she kills Bill. And by the time she gets there, she has embodied pretty much every available trope for the scary detritus the construction of subjectivity aims to cover up. The Bride’s revenge is not, as she points out to Vernita, “getting even,” which she defines quantitatively and mathematically: No. No. To get even? Even Steven? I would have to kill you, go up to Nikki’s room, kill her, then wait for your husband, the good Dr. Bell, to come home and kill him. That would be even, Vernita. That’d be about square.

It is, rather, about returning, re-turning, going back, reversing the I/you of the killer and the killed. Working back through the abject to arrive at pronominal transcendence, nontraumatized subjectivity, and the sentimental rather than the abject/murderous version of “Mommy-hood.” And, on another level, it is a fable of the “I” suspended in a form of reality, perverse as it may be (in this case, rendered so via Tarantino’s famously jokey, flamboyant timeline games); plot mechanisms echoing angstbereitschaft and nachtraglichkeit both distance us from and plunge us into the formless and violent abject territory that the mother’s body (or bodies, as it will turn out) metonymizes. I would like now to turn to another tale of return. Henry James’s “The Jolly Corner,” described in the preface in which he returns to it as his version of “the adventure-story”; dispensing with “pirates and splendid desperadoes” “because the spirit engaged with the forces of violence interests me most when I can think of it as engaged most deeply, most finely and most ‘subtly’ (precious term!). For then it is that, as with the longest and firmest prongs of consciousness, I grasp and hold the throbbing subject.”

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The form of I has no linguistic existence except in the act of speaking in which it is uttered. —Emile Benveniste The plot of “The Jolly Corner” can be summarized this way: a fiftysix-year-old man returns to New York, having been living as an expatriate for the prior thirty-three years, to look after his patrimony (two houses, one being converted to an apartment building). While the apartment house project is in process, he takes to wandering around, at night, in his other house, the one he grew up in, which is vacant and tenantless. The story tells us that he is doing so in order to meet his other, his unlived life—the one he would have had had he not left America at the age of twenty-three. He does in fact meet this life, apparently, embodied (well, prosopopeia’d) in an apparition who scares him to death (Brydon says this happens “literally,” but since he survives this “death” the reader usually takes it upon herself to read the death and the word “literally” as figurative).4 His revival takes place in the lap of the woman who has been the repository of his introspective, not to say (which is to say) narcissistic monologues not terribly well disguised (which is to say not at all well) as conversation between the present “I” inhabited by Spencer Brydon and the “you” he graciously positions Alice Staverton as inhabiting. Eric Savoy has dubbed Brydon the “figure in the closet,” a figure “who is recuperated only to serve simultaneously as an impossible identification, an impossible repudiation,” whose story, Savoy argues in his concluding paragraph, benefits from the queer simultaneity of identification with, and abjection of, the double traced in Stevenson’s “The Strange Case 4

The reader might also have fun deciding that Brydon #1 did indeed die and that Brydon #2 figures in the conclusion of the tale. Whether that would be reading the figures literally or figuratively is a question I cannot consider here, much as I would like to. For an acute meditation on James’s “literally,” see Teahan, and see also Esch on literalizing.

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of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”: like Jekyll’s confession that he was “radically both” (476), Spencer Brydon calls into question the site of authentic identity and the very possibility of attaching it to a nominal sign. Jekyll’s startling unbinding manifests ultimately as a case of pronoun trouble: “ ‘He, I say—I cannot say, I’ ” (478) spectacularly condenses the impulse to disavow and its failure, the lamination of first- and third-person pronouns.

Savoy’s theoretical stance is grounded in, among other fecund territories, Freud’s analysis of mourning and melancholia: Although there are few incontrovertible certainties obtainable in this strange text, it seems evident that the gothic narrative of “The Jolly Corner” explores the insidious reach of heterosexual reclamation as the occasion of profound terror. In order to chart the dimensions of this terror, I must consider, first of all, the particularities of Spencer Brydon’s “European” subjectivity, and, second, the odd circumstance that his ghostly, hypothetical “American” double is double-authored by Brydon’s melancholic response to an unlived life in conjunction with Alice’s equally retrospective heterosexual “script,” her mourning of an eclipsed heterosexual vocation. (1)

Savoy’s reading, to get to this conclusion, has meticulously threaded its way through murky rhetorical waters (of Jamesian origin), what Savoy calls “the mutually tortuous qualities of syntax, mood, and emerging trope” (8), to arrive at a queer jolly corner, one that refuses to perform a simple replacement operation (as in the swapping out of the dysfunctionally heterosexual James for the dysfunctionally homosexual James operation the James establishment has recently undergone, and, I hope, recovered from). All of which is to say that I want to declare my allegiance to the “identification” analysis Savoy presents. Savoy could not be righter. In fact, “call[ing] into question the . . . possibility of attaching it [I would add, any ‘it’] to a nominal sign”

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is a useful description not only of Brydon’s particular genealogical/ archeological gyrations, but also of the Jamesian project in general. First-, third-, and, for that matter, second person pronouns are indeed central to this perverse, queer story with its looping and loopy disavowal of person, tense, and syntax (identity, time, and chronology). The first paragraph of the story reveals a second preoccupation at least as peculiar as the first. We find there an insistence on numbers; numbers condense the elements of identity, time, and chronology: they function as markers of priority in the naming of pronouns (the first person pronoun is indeed the “first” in importance), of placement in time (any number is a narrative), and of chronology (I am “I” now, because I was who was born fifty-six years ago). All the numbers in the first paragraph fold back into the paradoxical and disavowed (present because disavowed) story told here of a time that is not exclusively (the) present, and an “I” that cannot be coterminous with itself. Like Kill Bill (the first and the second), “The Jolly Corner” begins in medias res. Spencer Brydon is talking to Alice Staverton, something he has been doing often, we are told, “for a couple of months now” (341). Their conversations are, for Brydon, a “resource,” a “comfort and support.” The two-month retrospective is not the only one we are made privy to. Before we are out of the first paragraph, we learn that Brydon has returned from an absence (first quantified as “more than thirty years,” then more specifically as “thirty-three, to be exact”). As it turns out, however, while we can know clearly enough how old he was when he left New York—twenty-three, and how old he is now—fifty-six, time is a question not so easily settled. It is thirtythree years, “unless indeed he were to reckon as he had sometimes, since his repatriation, found himself feeling; in which case he would have lived longer than is often allotted to man.”5 Using this calculus 5

One of the number games James is running here on the side surely includes an invocation of Jesus’s thirty-three-year lifespan, the Biblical resonance underscored by the phrase “allotted to man.”

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it would have taken a century—he says “repeatedly” to himself and to Alice Staverton—to pile up “the differences, the newnesses, the queernesses, above all the bignesses, for the better or the worse, that at present assaulted his vision wherever he looked” (341).6 The “great fact,” for Brydon, is the “incalculability,” since he “had supposed himself, from decade to decade” liberally allowing for change. It is not simply “the time” that is out of joint, as might have been expected of a post–American Scene story, but that time itself is incalculable, is not flowing in a smoothly directionally paced way. Peter Rawlings has argued for the importance of placing James’s “fourth phase” in relation to a “modern discourse of time and space” (276ff), citing such contemporary manifestations of that discourse as J. Ellis McTaggart’s “The Unreality of Time,” published the same year as “The Jolly Corner,” and the 1905 Einstein paper on the special theory of relativity, later expanded and published in 1916.7 Indeed the relativity of both time and space for Spencer Brydon is his first discovery upon his return, and the “incalculability” (341), not only of the “brilliancy of change,” but also of his own relation to it, is fundamental to any reading of the tale. As is also the first indisputable fact Spencer announces in the opening dialogue (a misnomer, actually, since it will be some time before we see any comment from Alice Staverton): “ ‘Every one asks me what I “think” of everything,’ said Spencer Brydon; ‘and I make answer as I can . . . putting them off with any nonsense. . . . For, even were it possible to meet in that stand-and-deliver way so silly a demand on so big a subject, my “thoughts” would still be almost altogether about something that concerns only myself ’ ” (341). We will be kept in suspense for some time about what that “something” might be, as the text interrupts the 6 7

Notice the marriage service echo. See Rawlings’s essay, “Grammars of Time in Late James.” These games with time, both scientific and fictional, reflect ironically, I think, on our tendency to taxonomize James’s career using chronological labels.

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flow with several pages of what we might call “back story” before it returns to the time this conversation is started. In the interim, verbs in the past perfect (“had come,” “had been,” “had given,” “had lived,” “had formed”) and the simple past (which is not simple, since these are interleaved with the other tenses), fill us in on Brydon’s attitudes about New York, his “property” (342), his deceased family, his childhood. It also takes us to his present—in the present of the story’s action—discovery in himself of a hitherto unsuspected capacity for business, which “amused, it verily quite charmed him” (343), with a bit of a side journey into the “if ” propositions (and there is “much virtue in ‘if ’ ”) which introduce us to his relationship with his “old friend” Alice (“If he knew his way” to her house better than to any other, “if he had formed” the habit of frequent visits, “if she were a fair young woman . . . or a fine smooth older one . . .” [344]) and some simple past verbs expressing her mode of living (confined within a small compass as compared to Brydon’s far larger economic and social vistas). And before we return to the interrupted opening conversation, we hear, via (free?) indirect discourse, of a remark made by Alice which, we are told, Brydon “was to remember . . . while the weeks elapsed” for “the small silver ring they had sounded over . . . most disguised and most muffled vibrations” that “had begun to be present to him.” (344). The silver tone moves those vibrations (“this particular wanton wonderment”) into prosopopeia (“it met him there”), thence on to a “quaint analogy which quite hauntingly remained with him” (344).8 The analogy is then transformed back into a prosopopeiac presence, as its ongoing life and growth in Brydon’s consciousness is presented concomitantly with Brydon’s and Alice’s stroll to his properties— although each element of this paragraph occupies incommensurate 8

Deborah Esch’s admirable essay anatomizes the trope of prosopopoeia in “The Jolly Corner” with particular references to Paul de Man’s work.

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parameters, or maybe zones is a better word, of time, the walk occurring in much less time than the growth of the figure, which— and who—we will be seeing again later in the story. The story in the story echoes the story of the story. James begins the (1909) preface to Volume 17 of the New York Edition (where some sources will still tell you the story first appeared) with two sentences that wash over us to the same effect the various time tricks of “The Jolly Corner” has on us. “The Altar of the Dead” forms part of a volume bearing the title of Terminations, which appeared in 1895. Figuring last in that collection of short pieces, it here stands at the head of my list, not as prevailing over its companions by length, but as being ample enough and of an earlier date than several. I have to add that with this fact of its temporal order, and the fact that, as I remember, it had vainly been “hawked about”, knocking, in the world of magazines, at half a dozen editorial doors impenetrably closed to it, I shall have exhausted my fund of allusion to the influences attending its birth. (1)

Although figuring last in a collection named Terminations, “The Altar of the Dead” and its also quite perverse “boy meets girl” plot, in this volume enjoys a rebirth. Thematically the story has other elements in common with “The Jolly Corner,” the publication history of which also yields to more Jamesian fun with fractured chronologizing: Such compositions as The Jolly Corner, printed here not for the first time, but printed elsewhere only as I write and after my quite ceasing to expect it. (11)

The coming together of the figurative action prosopopeia with the fractured time(s) of the story calls to mind Mary Ann Doane’s study of the emergence of cinematic time during the period in which “The Jolly Corner” was written. She concludes that the “relations between the nineteenth-/early twentieth-century epistemology of contingency

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and contemporary processes of digital and televisual imaging” both inscribe and produce “temporality in forms echoing, in many respects, those of earlier technologies of representation” (29), noting, further, that the “focus of archival desire in the cinema is an impossible one— the reproduction of presence” (24). Just as the cinema was pursuing this impossible goal, so too is Spencer Brydon, with the additional twist that he wants to reproduce the presence of a past that has not (had not) happened (yet), as evidenced by the invocation of the “magic lantern of childhood.” This pre-cinema technology progressed, Doane tells us, from the aim of “continuity in the simulation of movement” to a “photographic indexicality . . . an indexically based movement.” The index, Doane goes on, “harbors within itself a temporal tension” (219). While the indexical trace makes the past present, the deictic index (“here, now, this, that”) is “inextricable from the idea of presence” (219); it “hovers on the cusp of presence and pastness” and “always seems to be haunted by an aspiration to presence.  .  .  . The obsession with indexicality in the nineteenth century is a desire for revivification, for endowing the ‘dead’ past with life” (220). Brydon, then, has returned to his past and his dead, both embodied in the vacant house on the “jolly corner”: “His parents and his favourite sister, to say nothing of other kin, in numbers, had run their course and met their end there. That represented, within the walls, ineffaceable life” (348).9 It is a few days after these sentences are “uttered”—which is to say indirectly reflected through or from Brydon’s discourse (or perhaps Alice’s, or perhaps the spiderweb’s—or some uncanny combination of all of them)—that we return to the conversation, a directly quoted sentence of which begins the story. Brydon does not, he tells Alice, even try to answer the “too flattering curiosity” expressed in the question “every one” asks. He has only 9

And an ineffaceable and un-faceable face of a represented life will figure in the climax of this story.

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“one subject of thought,” “mere vain egotism,” “a morbid obsession,” and, “he affirmed the impotence there of any other source of interest, any other native appeal” (348). Just where is this “there” here? Grammatically, it goes back to the beginning of this paragraph which itself goes back (several pages) to the first line of the story—Spencer Brydon’s there, here, is on Alice Staverton’s hearth. Alice Staverton is one of the native appeals the impotence of which Brydon is affirming. It will not turn out to be another woman, another man, or even himself (not exactly, anyway) he is so exclusively interested in. This desire before which all others are impotent is the desire to track, pursue, corner, and confront the self he would have been, if his life story had not taken the turn that it took thirty-three years ago: “It comes over me that I had then a strange alter ego deep down somewhere within me, as the full-blown flower is in the small tight bud.” It is not that he wants to know what would then have happened. He wants to know who he would be now if he had not left “then.”10 “What would it have made of me, what would it have made of me?” (349); he wallows in a “rage of curiosity,” wondering “how he might have led his life and turned out, if he had not so, at the outset, given it up” (557). This is, then, the story of a “morbid obsession” with a disembodied other— Spencer Brydon’s “alter ego,” the “I” he thinks he might have been had he not been the “I” who thinks he might have been an other “I” .  .  . who wants to know his other. He/“I” is, pronominally and syntactically and in some twisted way chronologically, the homo sacer version (or is it vice versa?) of the Brydon whose ineffaceable face he will disavow at his (their) literal (figurative) death (rebirth).11 10

11

“Then” with its double function as marking consequence and position in time echoes the paradoxical life cycle attributed to Brydon’s “bud.” The Brydon of the present of the story could be the bearer of Agamben’s “bare life” of course, if we consider this Brydon as a noncitizen outsider of the world he inhabits in the story; the “figure” Brydon would also meet the sense of “bare life” in his function as that “set apart” from either governing regime—the one the returning (from Europe) Brydon thinks he has escaped by expatriating, or the one that that Brydon thinks he is governing now.

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“Good madam, keep your selfe within your selfe.” —Charmian to Cleopatra Readers parsing the location of Spencer Brydon’s “selfe”—both the one to be kept “within” and the one doing the keeping—or not doing it— have quite a task before them. Brydon’s “I”s are multitudinous. There is the “I” who posits Alice Staverton as its “you,” most obviously. The “I” who is surprised to find enough business acumen and construction site machismo “within” to best a job site foreman in an argument about blueprints (the “you” here is murkier, since the argument is a performance for Alice’s benefit). The “I” who is a “dim, secondary social success—and all with people who had truly not an idea of him” (352); the “you” here being the “Every one” who are/which is also the first word then of the story (but who are/is conjured for the entertainment of the “you” that is Alice, as well as the “you” that is us). Let us go back to the first sentence of the story: “Every one asks me what I ‘think’ of everything,” said Spencer Brydon, “and I make answer as I can. . . . For, even were it possible to meet in that stand-and-deliver way so silly a demand on so big a subject, my ‘thoughts’ would still be almost altogether about something that concerns only myself.” (341)12

A moment, I would say, of rare insight on Brydon’s part—every thought he has is about “myself ” that is to say himself—or, as it turns out, itself—despite (or because of) the fact that he spends much of the 12





The phrase “stand-and-deliver” invokes, of course, pirates, which James also does in the preface.  At any rate, odd though it may sound to pretend that one feels on safer ground in tracing such an adventure as that of the hero of The Jolly Corner than in pursuing a bright career among pirates or detectives, I allow that composition to pass as the measure or limit, on my own part, of any achievable comfort in the “adventurestory”; and this not because I may “render”—well, what my poor gentleman attempted and suffered in the New York house—better than I may render detectives or pirates or other splendid desperadoes, though even here too there would be something to say. [16] The story, to plunder a phrase and its riposte from “The Turn of the Screw” does and does not say the “something” here invoked.

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story standing-and-delivering them almost exclusively to Alice— always a Staverton, never a Brydon—the interlocutor who has spent thirty-three years waiting for him to return so that he can talk to her about himself, to install her into his syntax as the enabling “you” to his “I.” He found all things come back to the question of what he personally might have been, how he might have led his life and turned out, if he had not so, at the outset, given it up. And confessing for the first time to the intensity within [mine] him of this absurd speculation—which but proved also, no doubt, the habit of too selfishly thinking—he affirmed the impotence there of any other source of interest, any other native appeal. (348)

An insight Alice ratifies: “Oh you don’t care either—but very differently: you don’t care for anything but yourself.” (350)

Section II of this story devotes itself entirely to Brydon’s uncanny courtship and conjuration of .  .  . Brydon. Or a Brydon. A Brydon manqué. “a-Brydon.” Or maybe it is Brydon avant la lettre (in which case it’d be one of the letters he tells Alice he has once or twice “judge[d] best, for reasons, to burn .  .  . unopened” [349]—thus, incidentally aligning himself not with Merton Densher but with Kate Croy who is the actual epistolary arsonist in The Wings of the Dove). Section 2 begins just after Alice tells Spencer that she has dreamed of his “alter ego” twice, but then pulls back and resists, “for reasons of her own,” telling him anything about “the wretch” (Brydon’s term) or the dream. “ ‘I’ll tell you some other time!” (351), she says. “It was after this,”13 we are told, “that there was most of a virtue for him, most of a cultivated charm, most of a preposterous secret thrill” 13

“After” is another doubly plotted bit of dirt in this text’s spiderweb: a marker in time’s flow, and a word used to help designate purpose or direction.

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in his “obsession”: “Visiting the ample house from attic to cellar, making sure he was alone, he knew himself in safe possession and, as he tacitly expressed it, let himself go. He sometimes came twice in the twenty-four hours . . .” (351). “The moments he liked best were those of gathering dusk, of the short autumn twilight; .  .  . Then he could, as seemed to him, most intimately wander and wait, linger and listen, feel his fine attention, never in his life before so fine, on the pulse of the great vague place” (351). He “only wished he might have prolonged each day the deep crepuscular spell”; “he watched with his glimmering light; moving slowly, holding it high, playing it far,” “rejoicing . . . in the long straight chance or show . . . for the revelation he pretended to invite” (351–52). Oh, he goes through the motions of social life, but “project[s] himself all day, in thought, straight over the bristling line of hard unconscious heads and into the other, the real, the waiting life; the life that, as soon as he had heard behind him the click of his great house door, began for him, on the jolly corner, as beguilingly as the slow opening bars of some rich music follows the tap of the conductor’s wand” (352). What is the “first effect of the steel point of his stick on the old marble of the hall pavement”? It was the dim reverberating tinkle as of some far-off bell hung who should say where?—in the depths of the house, of the past.  .  .  . On this impression he did ever the same thing; he put his stick noiselessly away in a corner—feeling the place once more in the likeness of some great glass bowl, all precious concave crystal, set delicately humming by the play of a moist finger round its edge.  .  .  . The murmur of its rim was the sigh there, the scarce audible pathetic wail to his strained ear, of all the old baffled forsworn possibilities. (352–53)

He figures himself as trying to “wake them”; them as “shy.” He “yearn[s]” to make them take “form”; he has “tasted of no pleasure

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so fine as his actual tension”; he finds “himself holding his breath and living in the joy of the instant, the supreme suspense created by big game alone” (353). I quote so extensively here to give you a sense of the physicality, the palpability, of this section of the story—the sensuality, the coy off-color puns and images, the detailing of physical sensation, reserved for figuring Brydon’s pursuit of his “selfe.” The language of desire, captured and installed within the frame Brydon has carefully constructed—the house, the endless repeating circular loop of the present of the nights he steals from his ostensible “social” existence, the many doors in the corridors of his pasts, the pronominal framing of Alice—is not transitive. The “tight bud,” “prodigious thrill,” and “play of a moist finger” have no object that we can see.14 There is nothing there (yet) to see in fact, until Brydon conjures it up out of the garden of forking paths of his subjectivity. The apparition is the distillation of a possible Brydon that never happened but that can nevertheless be conjured from within; he “‘cultivate[s]’ his whole perception”: “he was bringing it on, bringing it to perfection, by practice; in consequence of which it had grown so fine that he was now aware of impressions, attestations of his general postulate, that couldn’t have broken upon him at once” (563). Brydon now becomes like nothing so much as a dog, or “monstrous stealthy cat . . . with large shining yellow eyes” (354) he has figured his pursuing “I” as being, chasing its own tail: “His only recourse then was in abrupt turns, rapid recoveries of ground. He wheeled about, retracing his steps, as if he might so catch in his face at least the stirred air of some other quick revolution” (355)—a revolution of, that is, “the poor hard-pressed alter ego” (354). Who will, as it turns out, indeed stage his/its own revolution—which, to make a long section short, for now, climaxes 14

So many puns, so little time. And all the puns, double entendres, and slightly off-color wordplay are, of course, instances of the many kinds and levels of “dirt” rendering visible the silken threads to be found and enjoyed in James’s fiction.

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in Brydon’s collapse in the vestibule (which, shockingly, “gaped wide” when he least expected it to).

“I was to have known myself ”: I as trope l’oeil Displaced, alienated, and un-parsed by any borders between times, tenses, and chronologies, recovering from his “death” in the no-longergaping vestibule, Spencer insists: “I was to have known myself ” (368). We are now, here, in the past future perfect. So it means that “from some point in the past (which is to say before now) something will happen in the future (which is after then, and maybe after now) which was to have been the past relative to now, now different because of . . .” In short, some kind of modal assumption or invocation occurs there, by which I mean here—something, as Webster’s entry on “modal” has it: “of, relating to, or constituting a grammatical form or category characteristically indicating predication of an action or state in some manner other than as a simple fact.” And indeed, it is not a “simple fact” that Brydon projects in haunting the “ego” of the “alter” life, “enjoying a consciousness, unique in the experience of man” (354). “People,” as the indirect discourse presumably emanating from Brydon muses, “first and last, had been in terror of apparitions, but who had ever before so turned the tables and become himself, in the apparitional world, an incalculable terror?” Having spent a month or so in a calculated pursuit of the “I” he has not become (the time and privacy for which he acquires by disappearing from his social “I”—which is not his Alice “I”—allowing his club and his hotel each to assume his presence at the other place, and Alice to assume . . . what she/you will), Brydon occupies a space neither here nor there as he pervades his ancestral manse. That’s where he is when he comes to the night on which will occur the face-off he has been soliciting, invoking, conjuring. He stands with his foot on his lowest stair and his hand on the banister of the first of four stories worth of

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stairs (he has been hunting, we are told, from “from room to room and from storey to storey”) and looks “up the staircase with a certainty more intimate than any he had yet known” and “argue[s]”: “He finally doesn’t like and can’t bear it, in the sense, I mean, that his wrath, his menaced interest, now balances with his dread. I’ve hunted him till he has ‘turned’: that, up there, is what has happened—he’s the fanged or the antlered animal brought at last to bay.” There came to him, as I say—but determined by an influence beyond my notation!—the acuteness of this certainty: . . . It marked . . . a prodigious thrill, a thrill that represented sudden dismay, no doubt, but also represented, and with the selfsame throb, the strangest, the most joyous, possibly the next minute almost the proudest, duplication of consciousness.  .  .  . He was already trying to measure by how much more he himself might now be in peril of fear; so rejoicing that he could, in another form, actively inspire that fear, and simultaneously quaking for the form in which he might passively know it. (356)15

The fear he is in peril of, needless to say, arrives. He sees, at last, a closed door he has not himself closed. Cornering his prey, Brydon is himself cornered. He has been titillating himself, proleptically parading his not-yet-necessary machismo before his own approving eyes. Night after night, he spends hours walking through dark corridors, opening doors to peer into empty but palpably (he hopes, he projects) occupied rooms. He opens the housedoor—nope, the ghost is not in the  vestibule. He puts himself in view of ghostly apparitions glimmering on thresholds of rooms—nope, not yet there either. He walks into rooms, walks out of rooms, walks back into the same rooms, walks up the stairs, walks down the stairs—dangles himself in front of the absent ghost as bait, retracts the invitation by 15

The pronoun “I” and its pronoun “my” (“as I say . . . beyond my notation!”) refers here of course to no one in the story and yet haunts it, reverberating with the rest of the pronominal abysses of the story.

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retracing his steps back out—plays fort-da with himself—the mirror version of fort-da:—now you (I) see me, now you (I) don’t, where “you” is the past future conditional Brydon (he who could say “I was to have lived your life”). it takes two to witness the unconscious. —Shoshana Felman Having at last achieved his aim, despite a belated attempt to renounce it when push appears to be coming to shove, Brydon and the “rigid yet conscious, spectral yet human” other finally come face to face, eye/I to eye/I: Horror, with the sight, had leaped into Brydon’s throat, gasping there in a sound he couldn’t utter; for the bared identity was too hideous as his, and his glare was the passion of his protest. The face, that face, Spencer Brydon’s?—he searched it still, but looking away from it in dismay and denial, falling straight from his height of sublimity. It was unknown, inconceivable, awful, disconnected from any possibility—! He had been “sold,” he inwardly moaned, stalking such game as this: the presence before him was a presence, the horror within him a horror, but the waste of his nights had been only grotesque and the success of his adventure an irony. Such an identity fitted his at no point, made its alternative monstrous. A thousand times yes, as it came upon him nearer now—the face was the face of a stranger. It came upon him nearer now, quite as one of those expanding fantastic images projected by the magic lantern of childhood; for the stranger, whoever he might be, evil, odious, blatant, vulgar, had advanced as for aggression, and he knew himself give ground. Then harder pressed still, sick with the force of his shock, and falling back as under the hot breath and the roused passion of a life larger than his own, a rage of personality before which his own collapsed, he felt the whole vision turn to darkness and his very feet give way. His head went round; he was going; he had gone. (364–65)

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We might ask what this perfervid horror is a response to. He has been pursuing an apparition for weeks, in a dark empty house, alone, and in the dead of night. His apparition shows up—that is scary, no question about it. It stands between him and the exit. Scary too. But it is a guy in evening clothes, not a slathering ghoul sporting a hockey mask. Ok, he is missing a couple of fingers—but they are not still gushing gore or anything. Where does the horror come from? Why is it so hideous that he or it does not look like Spencer Brydon? There are so many directions a gloss on this passage, standing alone, could take that we might, contemplating them, feel a touch of vertigo ourselves. For now, let’s take it in the direction of Kristeva’s theories of the abject, and from there to non-objectal desire and its desiring subject, the “deject.” There are lives not sustained by desire, as desire is always for objects.  .  .  . The one by whom the abject exists is thus a deject who places (himself), separates (himself), situates (himself), and therefore strays instead of getting his bearings, desiring, belonging, or refusing. . . . He includes himself among “his abjections,” thus casting within himself the scalpel that carries out his separations. (Powers of Horror 6–8)

Expecting a mirror image and seeing something entirely different would be pretty awful—imagine yourself in front of the bathroom mirror and seeing, say, the UPS guy—instead of you, that is, not behind you (that’d be another kind of movie). But Brydon is not in front of a mirror. He is in front of his alter ego, one that Alice Staverton recognizes as his when she sees him. So if he is seeing an “I” that is his, somehow, his swooning horror would make sense if his project has been in fact not Frostian (though it lends itself to the “road not taken” reading) but Kristevan; his desire has not been for an object, not even a narcissistic one (that is, it is not for himself, even configured as a parallel universe self), despite his having figured it so to himself. When Brydon awakes from his swoon, he will “wail”: “Where have I been . . . where have I been?” (368).

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This is, precisely, Kristeva tells us, the “deject’s” question: Instead of sounding himself as to his “being,” he does so concerning his place: “Where am I” instead of “Who am I?” . . . A deviser of territories, languages, works, the deject never stops demarcating his universe whose fluid confines—for they are constituted of a nonobject, the abject—constantly question his solidity and impel him to start afresh. A tireless builder, the deject is in short a stray. He is on a journey, during the night, the end of which keeps receding. (8)

In his strayings from the social scene of objects and desirings, and to the “crepuscular” scene of glimmerings, shadows, penumbra, and impalpable traces, Brydon experiences joy; he tastes pleasure, he enjoys a “unique” consciousness, feels prodigious thrills, knows “the violent shock of having ceased happily to forget,” endures immense revulsion, slams into horror, sickens with shock, and is assaulted by the “focused passion of a life larger than his own” (365): Jouissance, in short. For the stray considers himself as equivalent to a Third Party. . . . It follows that jouissance alone causes the abject to exist as such. One does not know it, one does not desire it, one joys in it [on en jouit]. Violently and painfully. A passion. And, as in jouissance where the object of desire, known as object a [in Lacan’s terminology], bursts with the shattered mirror where the ego gives up its image in order to contemplate itself in the Other, there is nothing either objective or objectal to the abject. It is simply a frontier, a repulsive gift that the Other, having become alter ego drops so that “I” does not disappear in it but finds, in that sublime alienation, a forfeited existence. Hence a jouissance in which the subject is swallowed up but in which the Other, in return, keeps the subject from foundering by making it repugnant. (9)

Kristeva says that abjection is experienced only if an other has “settled in place and stead of what will be ‘me’ ” (9). This other is not an object of identification or incorporation; it precedes and possesses “me,” and “through such possession causes me to be” (10). Brydon

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can deny that “that face” is his face, can refuse the figure to which he has given face (his prosopopeia materialized this presence), but he cannot himself face the possibility that this figure in fact conjures him; the face which is not-me is what makes my acknowledged face mine.16 “Thus braided, woven, ambivalent, a heterogeneous flux marks out a territory that I can call my own because the Other, having dwelt in me as alter ego, points it out to me through loathing” (10). Brydon insists, “I was to have known myself,” and his ability to speak this sentence speaks both to his loathing of the repudiated face of his figure and to the pronominal place the repudiation enables him to occupy.

Mommy, I’m home (Vol. 2) Throughout section I of “The Jolly Corner,” Alice Staverton, in her role as privileged interlocutor, offers the reader of the story a different Spencer Brydon (and thus a different Alice Staverton) from the one Brydon himself thinks he is invoking when he makes her the “you” to his “I.” Thus: It amused, it verily quite charmed him; and, by the same stroke, it amused, and even more, Alice Staverton, though perhaps charming her perceptibly less. (343) He had found himself quite “standing-up” to this personage over a failure on the latter’s part . . . she had afterwards said to him (though to a slightly greater effect of irony) that he had clearly for too many years neglected a real gift. (344) Thus Miss Staverton took him up. “In short you’re to make so good a thing of your sky-scraper that, living in luxury on those ­ 16

Here, we might remind ourselves of the classic Zen demand: “Show me your original face before your parents were born.”

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ill-gotten gains, you can afford for a while to be sentimental here!” Her smile had for him, with the words, the particular mild irony with which he found half her talk suffused. (346) Miss Staverton’s gaze again lost itself, and things she didn’t utter, it was clear, came and went in her mind. (348)

Her affection, that is, does not stand in the way of her possibly slightly jaundiced view of its object. More pointedly, her untold reading of Brydon haunts his readings. She knows more than she tells, and, what is more, does not tell “for reasons of her own” (351). She has not only intuited what Brydon is up to in his nightly hauntings of the jolly corner, she is way ahead of him: Her apparent understanding, with no protesting shock, no easy derision, touched him more deeply than anything yet, constituting for his stifled perversity, on the spot, an element that was like breathable air. What she said however was unexpected. “Well, I’ve seen him.” “You—?” “I’ve seen him in a dream.” “Oh a ‘dream’—!” It let him down. “But twice over,” she continued. “I saw him as I see you now.” “You’ve dreamed the same dream—?” “Twice over,” she repeated. “The very same.” This did somehow a little speak to him, as it also gratified him. “You dream about me at that rate?” “Ah about him!” she smiled. (350–51)

At which point, Alice refuses Brydon’s urgent request for more details—“ ‘Then you know all about him’. . . . What’s the wretch like?” (351)—and leaves her dream untold, her knowledge unshared, and us in the same position as Brydon—she will, as I said earlier, tell him (and us) “some other time” (which—is anyone surprised to hear—has not yet arrived)—left out, seeking satisfaction elsewhere, haunting “storey” upon “storey” in the house on the jolly corner.

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Spencer Brydon’s fantastic journey “back” (which is to say “in”) to the future of an unchosen past ends with his coming face to “face” with a face he insists on repudiating as not recognizably his own in the mirror of his own self-conjuring. He falls into Kristevan jouissance, into a petit mort. And in this story which has shown us Brydon discovering the architect within before he uncovers the rest of whatever is in there, the place where Brydon “dies” is insistently named.17 His “long person” is “stretched on his old black-and-white slabs”— the fondly remembered tiles of his childhood, the cold floor of the vestibule of his house, where the “hinged halves of the inner door had been thrown far back” so “that the vestibule gaped wide” to encompass “a figure which stood in it as still as some image erect in a niche” (363–64). The alter ego takes form in the vestibule. Brydon comes to his jouissance in the vestibule. He is reborn from his swoon in the vestibule. The word “vestibule,” as the scene of that rebirth, solicits a second glance, a more searching look. It seduces our eye, appearing four times in a story not particularly given to domestic architectural detailing in the technical sense. A vestibule is, of course, a passage between the outer door and the interior of a building. Two passages cited by the OED, will direct our attention to another interior: 1857 BULLOCK Cazeaux’ Midwif. 43 The vestibule is a small triangular space placed at the upper part of the vulva. 1883 DUNCAN Clin. Lect. Dis. Wom. (ed. 2) xvii. 167, I call them inflammations of the pudendum; but they are often called inflammations of the vulva, and sometimes of the vestibule. 17

The dying and dead yet alive and living Brydon recalls another bit of matter out of place in another web of experience: Pip, in Melville’s Moby Dick. Donald Pease, in “Pip, Moby-Dick, Melville’s Governmentality,” notes that Pip “surviving his own death by drowning” goes on to perform “the impossible act of forgiving the man who will have been responsible for the massacre of the Pequod’s crew” (339–40). While Pease’s essay addresses a set of theoretical and critical concerns different from mine, the kind of reading he is doing in this essay is, I think, entirely compatible with what I am arguing is Henry James’s conception of fiction and its reading.

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And when he wakes from his swoon of abjection, disavowal, repudiation, denial, Brydon finds himself “conscious . . . of tenderness of support and, more particularly, of a head pillowed in extraordinary softness and faintly refreshing fragrance” (354). Alice Staverton has “made her lap an ample and perfect cushion to him.” (354). Throughout the afternoon, he is pillowed and supported and attended by Alice, until he finds himself “no longer at the foot of his stairs—situated as these now seemed at that dark other end of his tunnel . . . on a deep window-bench of his high saloon, over which had been spread, couch-fashion, a mantle of soft stuff lined with grey fur that was familiar to his eyes and that one of his hands kept fondly feeling” (365). She has precipitated him into his search for his “might have been” I, the one she already knows and “likes”; now she faithfully attends on (if not haunts) his recuperation from his violent separation from it, his rebirth as it were: “I can only have died. You brought me literally to life.” . . . “And now I keep you,” she said. (366)

As Alice tells him how she has come to find him, Brydon “piec[es] together the parts of the whole prodigy” (367).18 She tells him that she has known all along that he had been coming in the night to the jolly corner, that she has known that he would see “him.” Brydon denies that “he” is, um, “him.” Humoring him, Alice agrees, but, tellingly, “it was as if, while her face hovered, he might have made out in it, hadn’t it been so near, some particular meaning blurred by a smile.”19 When he laments (or complains, or exults), “I was to 18 19

Brydon here becomes Frankenstein to his own monstrous (re)(un)birth. Like the face that has “killed” him, Alice’s face is one that Brydon cannot face because it is too close for comfort. Of course, hers is not the first face that hovers over Brydon’s in this crisis. James has the burlesque Irish “clanin” lady, Mrs. Muldoon (named in the English Review version, incidentally, “Mrs. Muldoody”), be the first person in Brydon’s reawakened vision.

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have known myself,” she lets him off his hook: “ ‘You couldn’t,’ she returned consolingly” (368). He couldn’t, but she can. “In the cold dim dawn of this morning I too saw you.” “Saw me—?” “Saw him,” said Alice Staverton. (368)

Here follows a bit more pronominal badminton: “At the same moment?” “Yes—in my dream again, the same one I’ve named to you. He came back to me. Then I knew it for a sign. He had come to you.” At this Brydon raised himself; he had to see her better. . . . “He didn’t come to me.” “You came to yourself,” she beautifully smiled. “Ah I’ve come to myself now—thanks to you, dearest. . . . He’s none of me, even as I might have been.” (368)

Alice then returns to her original formulation: “So this morning . . . you appeared to me.” . . . “How did you know it was I?” “Because, as I told you weeks ago, my mind, my imagination, had worked so over what you might, what you mightn’t have been—to show you, you see, how I’ve thought of you. In the midst of that you came to me—that my wonder might be answered. So I know,” she went on; “and believed that, since the question held you too so fast, as you told me that day, you too would see for yourself. And when this morning I again saw I knew it would be because you had—and also then, from the first moment, because you somehow wanted me. He seemed to tell me of that. So why,” she strangely smiled, “shouldn’t I like him?” (368–69)

Why indeed? It is Alice who first invokes, conjures, pronouns—the other Brydon into existence. Hers is the first mention of Brydon’s

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possible other life story, and it is her remark which initiates Brydon’s quest for “some strange figure, some unexpected occupant, at a turn of one of the dim passages of an empty house” (354). Together with her patient (re)birthing of the resurrected Brydon, Alice’s comfortable acceptance of and congress with the maimed and ravaged specter spawned by “the quaint analogy [that] hauntingly remained” (354) signals her proximity to the abject, underwrites her occupation of the maternal site.20 With her ageless presence—“that slim mystifying grace of her appearance, which defied you to say if she were a fair young woman who looked older through trouble, or a fine smooth older one who looked young through successful indifference”—and her association with his past—“her precious reference, above all, to memories and histories in which he could enter” (344), Alice defies time, tense and modalities—her uncanny and withheld knowledge, her speaking position, the object positions to which she lends herself—and spans abysses Brydon can only fall into. Her final gesture is to release Brydon from his maze of figuration, conditionals, modals—the disorderly chaos of time and tense into which he has collapsed—into the timeless embrace of the present tense of nonidentity with the abject and the perfect tense of reunion with the maternal body: “  ‘And he isn’t—no, he isn’t—you!’ she murmured as he drew her to his breast.” (369)

20

It was perhaps in a move not to overplay this hand that James removed the bath, retaining the baby, from the story. In the English Review version this sentence appears: “Her lucid look seemed to bathe him” (34). In the New York Edition version that sentence is replaced by this one: “Her look again was more beautiful to him than the things of this world” (575). It is commonplace to assert that the differences between the versions of the story are insubstantial—but as we, and James, well know, substance is in the mind of the beholder.

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In some way language puts forth “empty” forms which each speaker, in the exercise of discourse, appropriates to himself and which he relates to his “person,” at the same time defining himself as I and a partner as you. —Emile Beneniste There. All better now. Brydon puts their bodies into proper relation as Alice replaces and reconfigures the pronouns. Banished, for now, is the specter of the violent separation from which all “I’s” are wrested and from which no “I” completely escapes, since any invocation of the verbal form “I” invokes the detritus of the abjected “I.” But this gesture is itself a repetition of the one(s) by which Brydon opened the door of his jolly corner to begin with: to say “you” is to assert “I,” but each “I” has, each time, to assert itself as against the lurking “I,” the one that did not quite make it out of the carnage of separation, the abject within—that we look to mom, necessarily, to make all better, despite the lurking suspicion that a second look will reveal that it might be she, some part of her that is not gone from us, who lurks in the mirror. The last word of “The Jolly Corner” is, after all, its most maternal one (“breast”), and its last pronoun may well be its most unruly one. The whisper of mis-gendered body parts pulls us back, back into the place where this moment was to have been the future. Drawn to the breast after “literally” dying, returning to the vestibule of origin, reading a story published for the second time first even as the first printing is concurrently in process: Spencer’s ineffaceable disavowed spectral face concludes with a scene which echoes the promise/threat of repetition offered by the Bride, who returns from death to motherhood in the course of the films, to the daughter of the woman whose body lies between them on the kitchen tiles: “When you grow up, if you still feel raw about it, I’ll be waiting.”

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But how is experience constituted? In “Four Quartets” repetition takes the place of subjectivity. Repetition is an ingraining of experience, a making of it memorable. The poem establishes a store which can be drawn upon in a harking back that is seen as valuable, even as memory is not a static compiling. Memory is a repenetrating of experience thought to be understood. —Sharon Cameron The many repetitions and returns of “The Jolly Corner” tell the web of experience perhaps more successfully than any of the fictions I have discussed. Cameron’s verb “ingraining” recalls the “threads” of “The Art of Fiction’s” spiderweb of experience.21 What “The Jolly Corner” offers us is the most characteristic quality of the kind of experience James wants suspended in his fictions to catch the stray “airborne particles” of “forms of reality”: the web is impersonal, to purloin Cameron’s descriptor. While it is of course its own web and no other, it does not belong to any character, theme, context, or either the writer or the reader. It hangs in the chamber of consciousness created by all of these elements, but no more belongs to one of them than Brydon’s face, his lives, belong to him—to, that is, any particular “him.” The lifegiving breast of the spiderweb of experience the existence of which we can contemplate by virtue of the dirt, the matter out of place, snagged in its silken threads—this is the synesthetic, catechristic, unholy stew of Henry James’s art at its best. This, I can almost see him hear me say, is the art that fiction was to have been.

21

In Impersonality: Seven Essays, Sharon Cameron designates one use of the word “impersonal” to be “a penetration through or a falling outside of the boundary of the human particular” (ix). This could also be a description of the way James conceives of the relationships between and among the spiderweb of experience and the forms of reality adhering to it.

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The successful application of any art is a delightful spectacle, but the theory, too, is interesting. . . . —“The Art of Fiction”

Trollope “Anthony Trollope” was first published in 1883 in The Century, and then reprinted (with some revisions) in Partial Portraits (1888)—a volume of essays which also reprinted “The Art of Fiction,” first published in Longman’s Magazine in 1884. These essays have prompted major lines of inquiry and contestation in Victorian and nineteenth-century literary studies and in the history and theory of the novel and narrative, respectively.1 I am not joining either category of conversation here; rather, I continue my pursuit of the odd detail, the “dirt” besmirching the categories of order, the telling particle suspended with the rest of the matter in the silken threads of the spiderweb of the text. “Anthony Trollope” is an affectionate memorial tribute to the then-recently deceased writer, whose prodigious productivity was a signal part of the nineteenth-century literary landscape. “The Art of Fiction” outlines a capacious theory of fiction as art in a genial, witty, but sharply oppositional response to a public 1

These essays have spawned an enormous and enormously productive set of critical and theoretical conversations, which there is no need to rehearse here, as my particular interest in them is idiosyncratic and specific to the propositions I set forth in Chapter 1 and practice in the succeeding chapters of this book.

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lecture by Sir Walter Besant which proposed specific rules for those who would write the modern English novel (apropos of which, James remarks: “It is as difficult to suppose a person intending to write a modern English as to suppose him writing an ancient English novel: that is a label which begs the question” [PP 394]). Despite these differences the two essays intersect in a telling manner: in the course of the later essay James refers briefly to a pivotal point made in the earlier one.2 One might think of this relation in geometric terms, of each essay as a piece of a particular plane of James’s lifelong inquiry into all aspects of the literary. These planes intersect along a line I will trace here. “The Art of Fiction” is an essay which largely lacks or eschews available theoretical terminology for the complex object it is anatomizing; it relies instead on analogy, not only as illustration but as argument as well. In the course of a point about the “apologetic” stance of the novel expected by English readers and critics, a stance which is apotropaically aimed at the lingering remnants of the sense that fiction is somehow “wicked” (PP 377–78), James points out that just as “the canvas of the painter” is “not expected” to “make itself humble in order to be forgiven” (PP 378), so the novel must also refuse to make itself humble, must take itself seriously as “an attempt to represent life” (PP 378). James underscores both the point and the rhetorical device he deploys to make it by repeating it, with a difference: “The only effectual way to lay it to rest is to emphasise the analogy to which I just alluded—to insist on the fact that as the picture is reality, so the novel is history” (PP 379). How is it that the novel is history? As the picture is reality. What, then, does “is” mean? Probably “is like.” Is there an invisible “to” in the formula? As the picture is (to) reality, so the novel is (to) history? 2

It is “minor” when considered in its original setting—a brief moment in a long essay on Trollope; its afterlife, as noted above, has made it an important touchstone in a number of literary-critical and literary-historical conversations.

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Perhaps unhelpfully, an amplification is offered: “But history also is allowed to represent life; it is not, any more than painting, expected to apologize” (379).3 So the interlinked analogies propose that we consider painting, history, and fiction as arts that must “speak with assurance, with the tone of the historian” (379). Above all, novelists must not “have a habit of giving themselves away,” causing distress to readers “who take their fiction seriously” (379). As an example of a novelist encumbered by this habit, James points to Anthony Trollope (and to himself as the distressed reader): I was lately struck, in reading over many pages of Anthony Trollope, with his want of discretion in this particular. In a digression, a parenthesis or an aside, he concedes to the reader that he and this trusting friend are only “making believe.” He admits that the events he narrates have not really happened, and that he can give his narrative any turn the reader may like best. Such a betrayal of a sacred office seems to me, I confess, a terrible crime; it is what I mean by the attitude of apology, and it shocks me every whit as much in Trollope as it would have shocked me in Gibbon or Macaulay. It implies that the novelist is less occupied in looking for the truth (the truth, of course I mean, that he assumes, the premises that we must grant him, whatever they may be), than the historian, and in doing so it deprives him at a stroke of all his standing-room. (PP 379)

This passage is less explanatory than it is provocative. Where exactly, one might wonder, is the harm in an authorial aside referencing the fictionality of the events to a reader who is, after all, aware that she/he is reading a novel? And, as even without such an intervention, even a serious reader is certainly also going to be aware that the novel in her hands is not, however much truth it is telling, telling the same

3

The Longman’s version of the essay uses the verb “compete with” where this version uses “represent.”

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kind of truth as a history book would. Additionally, as the essay has within the last sentence or two assured us that history is present in this argument analogically only, what are real historians Gibbon and Macaulay doing here? While the reader might accept without much examination an analogy between history and novel, given that it was and is a pairing that subtends and produces a critical and theoretical conversation about the genre reaching back to the likes of Defoe and Fielding, the particulars of this analogy do not quite fit that category. Defoe and Fielding (and Trollope) write fiction. Gibbon and Macaulay, history. Each quest for “truth”—“(the truth, of course I mean, that he assumes, the premises that we must grant him, whatever they may be)” (PP 379)—does in fact play out on a different field. How is it that Trollope’s gesture has any analogical connection, then, to the hypothetical case of the historians making the same gesture in their texts? The line of contact James invokes involves a parallel but amplified passage in the earlier essay: I may take occasion to remark here upon a very curious fact—the fact that there are certain precautions in the way of producing that illusion dear to the intending novelist which Trollope not only scorned to take, but really, as we may say, asking pardon for the heat of the thing, delighted wantonly to violate. He took a suicidal satisfaction in reminding the reader that the story he was telling was only, after all, a make-believe. He habitually referred to the work in hand (in the course of that work) as a novel, and to himself as a novelist, and was fond of letting the reader know that this novelist could direct the course of events according to his pleasure. Already, in Barchester Towers, he falls into this pernicious trick. In describing the wooing of Eleanor Bold by Mr. Arabin he has occasion to say that the lady might have acted in a much more direct and natural way than the way he attributes to her. But if she had, he adds, “where would have been my novel?” (“Anthony Trollope,” Partial Portraits 115–16)

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Emphasizing the “make-believe” of the novel is, as we have just seen, one of the apologetic qualities James wants the novel to leave behind in claiming its rightful status as art. In these “little slaps at credulity,” then, Trollope is not writing from the point of view that he is “an historian” and that his narrative is a history, that there is a “truth” his fiction assumes, that there are “premises we must grant him” (all of which ward off, James tells us, the appearance of apology): It is only as an historian that he has the smallest locus standi. As a narrator of fictitious events he is nowhere; to insert into his attempt a back-bone of logic, he must relate events that are assumed to be real. (PP 116–17)

Notice the paradoxical ground, as it were, of this critique. To practise the art of fiction, you have to show that you assume your characters and events are real—but you cannot say so. James’s objection directs itself, then, at form: it is not, as some readers infer, that he inveighs against bumping up against the fourth wall, but that when it is done, it is to be done differently from Trollope’s back-slapping gestures: We need only mention (to select a single instance), the magnificent historical tone of Balzac, who would as soon have thought of admitting to the reader that he was deceiving him, as Garrick or John Kemble would have thought of pulling off his disguise in front of the foot-lights. Therefore, when Trollope suddenly winks at us and reminds us that he is telling us an arbitrary thing, we are startled and shocked in quite the same way as if Macaulay or Motley were to drop the historic mask and intimate that William of Orange was a myth or the Duke of Alva an invention. (PP 117)

The historical author Balzac and his historical tone are compared to two (also historical) actors and all three are in their turn compared to two historical historians (one American, one English, one of whom also wrote a novel masquerading as a memoir and a novel which called

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itself a romance).4 At first glance, this passage, in adding actors to the chain of analogies, muddles more than it clarifies. What underlying analogy links the work of actor, historian, and novelist? The real actor is playing make-believe. So is the real novelist. But the real historian is not, at least not on purpose. The key to the occluded analogy is “locus standi,”5 which refers not only to an actual place to stand and thus to point of view, but also, and here, crucially, to the legal concept of having a stake in the outcome, having skin in the game. To exhume the buried analogy, we must reach again to “The Art of Fiction.” James’s discussion of the art of fiction likens that art to a spiderweb suspended in the “chamber of consciousness” of the writer; it is this web and this suspension which the writer of fiction must convey, whole, to the reader, making sure that of the contents and context of that web “nothing is lost” of what “it takes to itself ” (388). So the novelist, like the actor and like the historian, must produce an object that includes the web as well as what it displays to us. That object is art insofar as that consciousness is transferred to it, insofar as it “competes”6 with the life it represents: the maker must ensure that all elements, to the smallest particle, occupy consistently the same plane of reality, of experience represented by that object as being in it (fiction, play, or history).7 So, since “Trollope” is not a character, the narrator, or a plot event, his personal pronouns do not belong in this particular web of silken threads. His plane of existence is a parallel one, at best, to his fiction, which is supposed to be a picture (another plane) in its own right, standing “there 4

5 6 7

John Lothrop Motley wrote a novel which pretended to be a memoir, Morton’s Hope, or the Memoirs of a Provincial, a second novel purporting, Hawthornianly, to be a romance, Merry Mount, a Romance of the Massachusetts Colony, a biography of a Dutch advocate, and two books of Dutch history. “standing-room” in “Art.” The verb used in the first published version of “Art.” Spilka contends that James’s motivation in revising “competes” to “represents” was the strong objection Stevenson took to that word in his “The Art of Fiction.” See, also, Arata for an excellent discussion of the contemporary conversation in which the essay took part.

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before you, in the honesty of pink and green and a gilt frame” (“AT,” PP 381). Trollope’s gaffe is not so much flaunting the necessary deceit of his craft as it is that he stands outside or to one side of the plane of his novel when he does so. Trollope’s “inartistic” intrusion might usefully be compared to James’s more “insidious” practice: There is our general sense of the way things happen—it abides with us indefeasibly, as readers of fiction, from the moment we demand that our fiction shall be intelligible; and there is our particular sense of the way they don’t happen, which is liable to wake up unless reflexion and criticism, in us, have been skilfully and successfully drugged. There are drugs enough, clearly—it is all a question of applying them with tact; in which case the way things don’t happen may be artfully made to pass for the way things do.8

It is not at all that the reader should never notice that she is reading fiction as she turns the pages of her novel, but that it is the author’s duty, his or her art, to provide more than the bountiful pleasures of make-believe. When the governess turns the maid into a waiter at an inn, who then remains the waiter upon serving the meal and leaving the room, our pleasure lies in our lack of awareness of the drug (the trope’s—any trope’s—uncanny persistence as alchemized character: a maid enters, is troped into an analogy, and a waiter leaves; neither returns). We do not notice it—we do not want to notice and we are wanted to not notice—though we may track it down later because on some level we actually have noticed without disrupting our own occupation of the spiderweb of this fiction. Its noninterference with our own suspension in that web makes our experience of it no more and no less real than “history.” For this, there not only must be no appearance of the author, slapping our backs and shockingly winking, but no screen or stand-in for him either. The “narrator,” or the 8

The preface to The American.

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“author,” or “Henry James” is, here, one of those “clumsy separations” which, James says, “appear to me to have been made by critics and readers for their own convenience, and to help them out of some of their occasional queer predicaments” which for the “producer” of the fiction can “have little reality or interest” (PP 393). The place from which the fiction emanates, or, better, in which it is suspended, is inferred from and included in the telling, an effect of the success of the fiction’s capture of the reader into its sticky silken threads, transforming that reader for a time into one of the “air-borne particles in its tissues” (“Art,” PP 388). In Henry James’s novels consciousness is detached from the idea of a self (from the idea of subjectivity) and detached as well from that of interiority. —Sharon Cameron

Cameron An endnote in Sharon Cameron’s brilliant Thinking in Henry James tells a story about a conversation Cameron and J. Hillis Miller had about the book that years later Miller, in Literature as Conduct (2005), will assert to be “one of the best ever written on James” (210). Cameron’s discussion of thought sharing, said Miller in their discussion, failed to include the crucial one “between the narrator and the characters.” Miller went on to point out, Cameron tells us, that her argument treats “James in relation to his characters as if there were no narrator” (177 n16). Cameron responds: This is perhaps because I see James as standing (albeit fictitiously) in an unmediated relation to his characters, almost as if in the novels—experientially, though of course not technically—the narrator becomes a screen for James’s direct identification with his characters. “Direct” obviously not in point of fact, but I think in point of effect. (177n16)

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Cameron goes on to explain that “the narrator, liberated from the authorial role imposed by the Preface, is free to voice James’s thoughts.” Her example is the narrator of The Ambassadors, with which “James’s voice” competes “for proximity to his central character” (my emphasis 177–8n16). The narrator “creates, enters into, shares Strether’s thoughts” while also being ironic about them. “Whereas James, despite the statements that profess distinction between himself and the narrator . . . is identified at once with his character and his narrator. And this identification threatens to intervene in, if not quite to override, the relation the narrator would typically have ‘alone’ with the character” (178n16). Cameron points out, for example, that James’s “unabashed advocacy” of Fleda Vetch in the preface to The Spoils of Poynton “is not commensurate with the narrator’s ambivalent presentation of her.” In contradistinction, The Bostonians is a novel without a preface, and thus “clarifies” by “departing from” what is for Cameron James’s “normative case”—that case being, evidently, novels with a preface— “with no Preface—with access to the narrator minus access to the author—readers have been uncertain about how to interpret that novel” (178n16). In the prefaces, James tells us things; in the novels, the narrator does: Cameron’s magisterial book proposes a revolutionary reading of Henry James’s inscription of consciousness, of the dizzying sharing of thinking among characters, narrators, and author, but rests, finally, on this first principle.9 Invoking these terms—narrator, author/ James—necessarily imports a preexisting priority for both author and narrator that pulls against Cameron’s groundbreaking attention to the 9

But not reader, though Cameron’s breathtaking reading of these interminglings certainly might remind her reader that James’s reader is to be found (lost) among them. Another way to think about this distinction is to read the James of the prefaces as a reader, writing his way of reading. They are not, that is, instructions about how to read the texts that follow, except as instances; rather, they are, each and taken together, instructions in how to read fiction, any fiction. James is not James-the-author here (or anywhere but in his study); he is James the reader he writes for, hopes for, and tries to produce.

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way in which “thinking”—the presentation of consciousness—in the Jamesian text pulls us away from such distinctions. And it is precisely the absence of such distinctions that Cameron’s study teases out of the Jamesian web; there is simply something inimical to any attempt to parse it outside its own vocabulary in those silken threads presented to us by the Jamesian novel. He had never for an instant doubted of the virtue, the value he would have called it in his esoteric sense, of this particular spot; which had originally given him, on the instant, under his first flush, the measure of a possible experience. —The Sense of the Past

Miller Sharon Cameron and J. Hillis Miller, while reading one another with great respect and mutual admiration, read James with and from very different theoretical and critical presuppositions, producing quite distinct accounts of James’s art. To oversimplify both magnificently complex and textually sensitive critical planes: “thinking” in Henry James is, for Cameron, a transpersonal consciousness unanchored in subjectivity or interiority deployed by the characters as well as the narrator/narrative voice of the fiction which powers (or is) the action, and it is in this that the strangeness of the Jamesian text inheres; the “speech act” in Henry James is, for Miller, a particular kind of language deployed by the characters as well as the narrator/narrative voice of the fiction that makes what it says exist, and it is in this that the strangeness of the Jamesian text inheres. While their planes of attack differ significantly, they end up saying very similar things about the fiction they are closely, carefully scrutinizing. J. Hillis Miller, in his magisterial study of James, Literature as Conduct, commends Sharon Cameron for having written both “the

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best and most brilliant essay so far written on The Golden Bowl” and a “fine chapter, the best I know” on The Wings of the Dove (284, 336n5). Miller singles out for particular praise the extent to which Cameron’s reading platform, her way of reading The Golden Bowl and The Wings of the Dove, “has the merit of recognizing that these novels are exceedingly peculiar, that something strange is going on in them” (284–85). Miller makes his admiration of Cameron’s reading very clear at several points, but nevertheless demurs when her extended examination of thinking in James crosses a line: Nevertheless, in spite of all the emphasis on the power of thinking in [The Golden Bowl], as in James’s other works, solitary, private thinking in itself is powerless. This is as true in The Golden Bowl as in The Wings of the Dove. Thinking does not, pace Cameron, have some spooky, telepathic effect, not even in The Sacred Fount. Thinking for James exerts influence over other people only when it has been “outered” in one way or another in words or other signs. (286–87)

From different directions both critics are working to take account, to tell, something about James’s art of fiction that repeatedly escapes the terms, however capacious, of attempts to articulate it. For there is, in fact, according to Miller’s reading as well, a “spooky telepathic effect”—it is just, for Miller, differently sourced. In a tour de force reading of The Sense of the Past, a fiction which was unfinished when James took it up from his past to project it into its future—a future James did not live to see (or tell)—Miller asks, in a subheading, “Where Is the Unfinished Part?”10 Miller can ask this question because he intends to discuss it using notes James dictated tracking his plan

10

It is perhaps worth noting here that this is also a question Cameron, from her different plane of analysis, could also address to this novel, to very different effect.

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for completing the novel, a procedure Miller predicates on the fact that the notes James compiled for The Ambassadors are accurately followed by that novel. The notes “are a precious account not only of James’s sense of the proprieties of literary form but also of the strange process whereby his stories, this one at least, ‘came to him’ ” (Conduct 323). Miller points out that in these notes, James does not sound like someone making believe, inventing action. Rather, the James of these notes “speaks as if that action has somewhere an ideal existence and his problem is to get access to the already-existing story, so he can write it down correctly, thereby transmitting it to his readers” (Conduct 323). It appears to me that no one can ever have made a seriously artistic attempt without becoming conscious of an immense increase—a kind of revelation of freedom. —“The Art of Fiction”

Zwinger The telepathy Miller finds in James, unlike that found by Cameron, is interior, though like that found by Cameron, it is not, or not exactly, subjective. Miller’s sense of excitement about his discovery intersects so nicely with James’s sense of excitement about his that I am going to indulge in a quite lengthy quotation here, apologetically repeating Miller’s apologetic choice for his lengthy quotations: For James, it is not at all a matter of making up the novel. It is a matter of getting to see clearly something that already exists and to which he alone, apparently, has access, by a species of telepathy: “I have it perfectly before me” (26:292) . . . “the more magnificent, upon my word, I seem to see and feel it” (26:295); . . . “there glimmers out, there floats shyly back to me from afar, the sense of something like this, a bit difficult to put, though entirely expressible with patience, and that as I catch hold of the tip of the tail of it yet again strikes me as adding to my action another admirable twist” (26:299); . . .

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“I seem to make out” (26:303); . . . and so on and on. A notation of this sort exists on almost every page, on through to such rhapsodic claims of vision as these five more I cannot resist citing: “Yes, yes, yes, I have it, I have it” (26:316); “I feel that my subject contains the exact, the exquisite rightness for this deep in its breast, if only I watch hard enough to see said rightness emerge—emerge as it were of itself and as from the operation of what surrounds it” (26:338); “in short what I see! I have it all, I possess it here, and now must give pause to this long out-ciphering” (26:349); or “There hovers before me a something-or-other in this, a finer twist still, a deeper depth or higher flight of the situation, which seems worth looking into, and which in fact already appears to open out a good bit before me as I consider it” (26:348). . . . This extraordinary cascade of phrases confirms that James, if his testimony is to be believed, did not concoct the action and characters of the Sense of the Past out of thin air. They existed, so it seemed to him, somewhere always already there. (324–25)

This novel that is incomplete was preceded by a complete sense of what it was to have become. Miller’s experience of this might also be called an effect of telepathy—the affective response to the joy of what, since neither of my exemplary readers call it this, I will call “awareness,” is transferred to him as he reads the traces of James’s awareness of the contents of his mind as he imagines James captured it—contemplatively, as a whole, fully rigged: a silken-threaded spiderweb so finely spun as to catch the very pulse of the air, a web on which (in which) nothing is lost, suspended without any purpose other than being, it is that which is translated to the pages of the notebooks, thence to the pages of the novel. That novel, that is, exists as a plane, like the slice of matter finely shaved for examination under an electron microscope. The web is the novel intended by the artist, before which, suggests James, we should stand as we stand before a painting, taking in all it offers, understanding it as a slice of the

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experience of the life of the mind of the artist as it ensnares events, images, figures, conceits, mistakes, verbs, pronouns. Only the particular words of any given fiction can transfer the representation of that experience (as James defines it) to the reader. There is no mechanism, no more or less transparent medium of conveyance—there is only this novel, this time. There is, that is, always something different enough about the cluster of language effects we have agreed to call “the narrator” or “thinking” or “telling” in each fiction that only a close, slow, careful unpacking of the words on those pages can constitute a transfer of the awareness of the experience of seeing or knowing it, can produce for the reader “the very atmosphere of the mind” of the artist that characterizes fiction as art; all the words, but more especially the words we do not expect to see in the places we find them, the words we do not expect to see used as they are, the words we see as repeated for no apparent reason, the words that are apparently only sounds or only time spans or only attention disruptions. In “The Art of Fiction,” Henry James urges us to see fiction as the art that can represent reality completely and utterly, one mind at a time, because that is, indeed, where reality is and only art, only the artist, can tell us that in such a way as to make us see it, or, better, to transfer it to us so that we too are suspended in its web. In “The Art of Fiction,” there is no “about-ness,” or novelists either, in the novel. The novel transfers the artist’s sensibility to the reader. That, I think, is the message of the accreted effect of the many tropes, figures, and analogies in the essay. This is precisely why Anthony Trollope’s “little slaps at credulity” loom so large for James. When Trollope inserts himself as novelist into his representation of the web suspended in his mind, he breaches its status as a singular plane of an awareness, a sensibility, captured in its completeness, and in doing so causes it to buckle and tear around his authorial eruption into it. Had he presented Mrs. Bold as having given way “as in such cases a woman should do” (291), thus changing the course of the novel, the events

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which would have necessarily followed would have been different events, the resulting “web of experience” would be different from the one represented by Barchester Towers as it exists now. It is the novel it is not because characters are told to do one thing rather than another, but because what they do in doing so is telling, and that telling is not mere reporting. Both Sharon Cameron and J. Hillis Miller try, in their very different but uncannily similar ways, to articulate the reader’s sense of sharing another mindspace, a process both describe in essentially telepathic terms. They get there sliding fast down the slippery slope of noticing weird things: the dirt or detritus left out by neat categories like “narrator,” “author,” “novelist,” even “Henry James,”11 and following where that attention leads. The reason they get where they are going is that for large sections of their analyses, they are not deploying the usual categories, or when they are doing so, they are roughing them up considerably by paying close attention to the words on the page rather than summarizing their meaning or searching for ideas they could be made to mean or reference. He had said to himself crudely and artlessly, “It’s Jacobean”— which it wasn’t, even though he had thought but of the later James. The intensity of the inference and the charm of the mistake had marked withal his good faith; the memory of which was to remind him later on of how everything still to come was then latent in that plot of space, and of how everything that had, was accorded and attested by it. —The Sense of the Past We have all, I think, with more or less enthusiasm issued explicit or implicit calls for a type of reading— proclaimed, like Ralph Pendrel, 11

For, after all, Cameron makes the James of the preface a different James from that of the novels, and Miller prosopopeias James’s notes for finishing his novel in the future into a James who somehow post-exists himself.

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“the virtue, the value .  .  . the measure of a possible experience” (Sense  62). Understanding the occlusive nature of systems and methods and terms of art does not free us from the necessity of it, and in any case I am not sure that it is possible to avoid using them—after all, as critics and scholars we have to have some way of telling too. Insofar as it is possible, with however great an effort it requires, and in the teeth of a lurking suspicion that I am committing a mistake less “charming” than Ralph Pendrel’s of successively mis-naming the ground upon which he stands, his locus standi, first as “Jacobean” and then as “later James,” I am advocating an approach whilst inveighing against systems. Taking a stance of suspicion toward the tools that make our task easier, or even doable, I am advocating for dirt and disarray, unintelligibility and ghosts, an eye for verbal excess. Refusing to visibly orchestrate a text by imposing oneself upon it from outside is what James asks Trollope to do, what he is urging “intending novelists” to do, and what, finally, readers, for their own fun, ought to allow themselves to do. Or, to put it in the incommensurate and yet telling words of the last sentence of “The Art of Fiction”: “Be generous and delicate, and then, in the vulgar phrase, go in!”

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Nathanson, Tenney. Whitman’s Presence: Body, Voice, and Writing in “Leaves of Grass.” New York: New York University Press, 1992. Pease, Donald. “Pip, Moby-Dick, Melville’s Governmentality.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 45, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 327–42. Poirier, Richard. The Comic Sense of Henry James: A Study in the Early Novels. New York: Oxford University Press, 1960. Rawlings, Peter. “Grammars of Time in Late James.” Modern Language Review 98 (2003): 273–84. Savoy, Eric. “Subjunctive Biography.” The Henry James Review 27, no. 3 (2006): 248–55. Savoy, Eric. “The Queer Subject of ‘The Jolly Corner’. ” The Henry James Review 20, no. 1 (1999): 1–21. Scott, Tony. Dir. The Last Boy Scout. Warner, 1991. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Silverman, Kaja. Male Subjectivity at the Margins. New York: Routledge, 1992. Spilka, Mark. “Henry James and Walter Besant: ‘The Art of Fiction’ Controversy.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 6, no. 2 (Winter 1973): 101–19. Available online: http://www.jstor.or/stable/1345427 (accessed May 17, 2014). Symonds, John Addington. A Study in Greek Ethics. 1928. Studies in Sexual Inversion. New York: AMS, 1975. Teahan, Sheila. “The Literal Turn of the Figurative Screw.” Arizona Quarterly 62, no. 3 (Autumn 2006): 63–82. Trollope, Anthony. Barchester Towers. New York: The Century Co., 1903. Walton, Christopher. “Unitarianism and Early American Interest in Hinduism.” Available online: http://www.philocrites.com/essays/ Hinduism.html (accessed January 2, 2013). Warner, Michael. “Introduction.” Fear of a Queer Planet, ed. Michael Warner. Special issue of Social Text 9, no. 4 (1991): 3–17. Wiegman, Robyn. American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Williams, Ioan, ed. Sir Walter Scott: On Novelists and Fiction. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1968. Zwinger, Lynda. Daughters, Fathers, and the Novel: The Sentimental Romance of Heterosexuality. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.

Index abject  87, 88, 104, 105, 111, 112 abjection  89, 109 Agamben, Giorgio  96 n.11 ambiguity  14, 15, 48, 49 angstbereitschaft  12, 86, 88 Apter, Lisa  43 n.2 Atlantic Monthly  23, 24, 27 n.4

disavowal  4, 5, 21, 43 n.2, 55 n.10, 59, 61, 62, 64, 91, 109 disorder  15, 43 Douglas, Mary  15, 16–17, 18, 20, 13 n.6 Purity and Danger 13 Dryden, Edgar  82, 83

Balzac, Honoré de  119 Barthes, Roland  18, 20 “The Reality Effect”  18 Benveniste, Emile  87, 89, 112 Bersani, Leo  55 Besant, Sir Walter  7, 8, 116 Bosanquet, Theodora Henry James at Work 70–1 Bradbury, Nicola  76 Butler, Judith  47 Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” 47, 48

Edel, Leon  49 Henry James: The Untried Years 49–50 Einstein, Albert  92 Esch, Deborah  19 n.10, 89 n.4, 93 n.8 The Europeans (James)  3, 22, 24, 72 Baroness character in  37–8 Eugenia in  35, 36–7, 38 Felix Young in  31–2, 38 foreign words usage in  27–8, 39 geographical “foreign” loci  28–9 Gertrude in  30–3, 38 gestures in  30 Mr. Wentworth in  34–5 plot 24–5 presence of narrative in  33–4 Robert Acton in  34, 35, 37 setting of novel  25 “slightness” of  26

Cameron, Sharon  113, 122–4, 125, 126, 129 Thinking in Henry James 122 Charon, Rita  16 n.7 close reading  1, 14–15, 22 clue  45, 54, 81–2, 83, 90 Cooper, Michael  52–3 Defoe, Daniel  118 deject  104, 105 Deleuze, Gilles  27 De Man, Paul  93 n.8 Derrida, Jacques Archive Fever 85 detail, unnecessary  20, 22 dirt  3, 5, 13, 15, 22, 68, 98 n.13, 100 n.14, 113, 115, 129

Fadiman, Clifton  44 Felman, Shoshana  7, 10, 44, 48, 103 “Psychoanalysis and Education” 44 “resonates with” verb, usage of  10 “Turning the Screw of Interpretation” 48 fetish 43 n.2 fictional machinery  11

138 Fiedler, Leslie  44, 45 Love and Death in the American Novel 44 n.3 Fielding, Henry  118 figurative  22, 28, 67, 74, 79, 83, 89, 94, 96 foreignness  3, 21, 22, 28, 39, 72 Freud, Sigmund  10, 21, 62, 90 Genette, Gerard  13 Gibbon, Edward  118 The Golden Bowl (James)  4, 22 bowl significance in  78–9 character names in  68–9 Charlotte and Prince in  72–6 “crack” word in  80–2 foreign words in  71–2 fun stuff in  74 “The Imp of the Perverse” metaphor in  82–3 importance of form in  83–4 language of  77–8 as “poetic” prose  77 preface to  69–70 silver clue in  81–2 story of  67–8 “taking it in hand” phrase in  69–70 words usage in  74–6 Hall, Richard  50–1 Haralson, Eric  14 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth 27 n.5 homo sacer 96 Howells, William Dean  23, 24, 26, 35, 38, 39 impersonal 113 n.21 “The Imp of the Perverse” metaphor 82–3 Irwin, John  81–2 James, Henry  1, 23, 39, 41–2, 46

Index “The Altar of the Dead”  94 The Ambassadors  123, 126 The American 23 “Anthony Trollope”  5–6, 115, 120 “The Art of Fiction”  2–3, 5–6, 7, 113, 115–16, 120, 126, 128, 130 “The Aspern Papers”  12 “The Beast in the Jungle”  54 The Bostonians 123 Cameron on  122–4 essays of  115 The Europeans, see The Europeans (James) experience of telling  20 fictional machinery  11, 15 foreign phrases, use of  76 The Golden Bowl, see The Golden Bowl (James) “international” themes in  72 “The Jolly Corner”, see “The Jolly Corner” (James) Miller’s view on  124–6 narration, relation to fiction 10–11 novel as history  116–18 “The Pupil”, see “The Pupil” (James) Roderick Hudson 23 The Sacred Fount  41 The Sense of the Past  124, 125, 129–30 The Spoils of Poynton 123 on telling  7–22 Terminations 94 “theory” of narrative  8 “The Turn of the Screw”, see “The Turn of the Screw” (James) use of words “experience” and “reality” 9–10 The Wings of the Dove 125 Zwinger on  126–30 Jenga game  14

Index Johnson, Kendall  29 n.7 Jolly, Roslyn  6 n.3 “The Jolly Corner” (James)  5, 22, 88 Alice Staverton in  91, 93, 95, 96, 98, 104, 106–7, 109–11 discourse of time and space in  91–2 homo sacer 96–9 Kristeva’s theories of the abject and 104–8 language of desire  100–1 last word of  112 plot of  89 preface in  88 pronouns in  112 prosopopeia in  94–5 repetitions and returns of  113 Savoy’s view on  89–91 Section II of  98–100 “selfe” of Brydon in  97–8 Spencer Brydon in  91, 92–3, 95–8, 97,101–2, 105–6, 107, 108, 111 “stand-and-deliver”  97 n.12, 98 trope l’oeil in  101–6 verbs usage in  93 vestibule 108–9 Kaplan, Fred  51–2 Kill Bill Vol. 1  85, 91 Kill Bill Vol. 2  85–6, 87–8, 91 Kirby, David  50 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von  54 Kristeva, Julia  21, 39, 104, 105, 108 Lacan, Jacques  41, 105 The Last Boy Scout (Scott)  41, 45–6, 64 literal  9, 15, 17, 18, 22, 69, 79, 81, 89, 97, 109, 112 Macaulay, Thomas Babington  117, 118

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Marcher, John  20–1 “matter out of place”  13, 13 n.6, 14, 15, 22, 108 n.17, 113 McTaggart, Ellis J. “The Unreality of time”  92 Miller, J. Hillis  12, 13, 122, 124–6, 127, 129 Literature as Conduct  28, 122, 124–5 mindscape 11 Moon, Michael  55 n.10 Moreen, Morgan  54 morganize  3, 22, 63 nachtraglichkeit  12, 86, 88 narrative level  12 narrative machinery  15 narrative voice  10, 12 Nathanson, Tenney  43 n.2 novels, rules for  7–8 Pease, Donald  108 n.7 perverse  4, 5, 55 n.10, 76, 82–3, 88, 91, 94 Pietz, William  43 n.2 Poirier, Richard  36 prosopopeia  89, 93, 94, 106, 129 n.11 psychoanalysis  10, 13, 41 n.1, 44, 56 psychoanalytic  2, 22 “The Pupil” (James)  3–4, 22, 41–65 “man of the world”  56, 57–8 mechanism of disavowal in  55–6 money in  43–4 Morgan Moreen in  42–3, 55, 56, 57–8, 60, 61, 62 Pemberton role in  42–3, 56, 58, 59–61, 62–3 “perfectly unconscious”  44–5 sexuality in  54, 61–2, 64 story of  41–2 queer  25, 41, 46, 48, 49, 53, 59, 61, 62, 89, 90, 91, 122 queerness  3, 12, 55, 58, 64, 92

140 Rawlings, Peter  92 Richardson, Samuel Clarissa 80 Savoy, Eric  4, 10, 15, 89, 90–1 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky  52 “code cracking”  53, 54 Epistemology of the Closet 63 Shaw, Samuel  29 n.7 Silverman, Kaja  3, 46, 47 n.4, 63 subjectivity construction, nonlinear elements in  86–7 Symonds, John Addington “Greek love”  52 synesthesia  17, 70, 113 taxonomy  14, 15 Teahan, Sheila  89 n.4 telling  16 n.7 Thackeray, William Makepeace Vanity Fair 30 Trollope, Anthony  117, 119, 120–2, 128, 129, 130

Index Barchester Towers  118, 129 trope l’oeil  72, 101–6 “The Turn of the Screw” (James)  3, 16, 59 final scene of  18–19 narration in  16–19 sexuality and ghosts in  19 Unitarian  28, 29, 29 n.8, 33, 37, 38, 39 vestibule  22, 104, 108, 112 vulgar  4, 17, 18, 22, 42, 58, 61, 84, 103, 130 Walton, Christopher  29 n.8 Warner, Michael  45 Warren, Jonathan  19 n.10 Wiegman, Robyn  44 n.3 Willis, Bruce  46 Zen 106 n.16 Zwinger, Lynda  126–30

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