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James Studies (changes)

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• Introduction by Peter Rawlings
  • Compares on p 2 “social and moral intensities of English novelists…and the formal self-consciousness of French writers…pulled in two directions: towards the (mainly French) world of art with its increasing devotion to form and technique, and the morally intense world of his American context…with those powerful residues of Puritanism.”
  • p 2 “protean reach…and chameleon-like nature of his texts in the jungle of always endangered, and mutating, species of theory” (the theory he speaks of is the growing late 19th c and early 20th c reflexive and transatlantic theories of lit going on around James AND after his death
  • James influenced the New Critics with the organic approach. He was popular with structuralists like Todorov. Important Book: John Carlos Row’s 1984 The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James. Always been important for close reading; recently for Sheila Teahan and Eric Savoy. Has interested gender and queer theory (Leon Edel, Sheldon Novick, Colm Toibin).
• Sheila Teahan, “Mastering Critical Theory”
  • James has contributed directly to “phenomenology, Russian formalism, New Criticism, Anglo-American narrative theory, queer theory, and deconstruction” 11
  • Responses to James, esp The Turn of the Screw are “strikingly incoherent and incompatible” 25
  • Future of James studies? Queer formalism: queerness on the “registers of style and rhetoric” more than in over sexuality 28
  • James’ criticism is heterogeneous, doesn’t add up to a simple singular theory of lit **”radical redefinition of the central subject of fiction as consciousness itself” 12 (phenomenological). Books represent not plot but “representation of a mental construction” NICE PHRASE or “dramas of consciousness” 13, “impressionist”
  • Portrait of Lady preface: the house of fiction, with a million windows with watcher in each (possible POVs 13)
  • In LCEL critic should be “one of the people on whom nothing is lost” (does Strether do this?)
  • He wrote hundreds of essays on American, English, European authors
    • Important ones: The Art of Fiction 1884 (complains that until now English lit “no air of having a theory, a conviction, a consciousness of itself behind it” but that having theory would be “fertilising;” novel isn’t moral or immoral but rather should be interesting and give “a direct impression of life,” a good work is one where difference between form and content breaks down, parts of novel like plot and character all bleed into each other so that the novel is living organism, singular – me is this a body without organs?), The Science of Criticism 1891, The Present Literary Situation in France 1899, The Future of the Novel 1899
    • this stuff made Woolf say that James does write modern novels not class novels
    • poststructuralist: writer doesn’t have direct relation to the work b/c the works “go forth into the desert,” belief that “deviations and differences” are his “terms of cognition,” always knew the impossibility of his prefaces (of really getting to know his art) b/c their insights multiply exponentially, and eventually he mused he would gather his prefaces together and give THEM a preface 16. Teahan notes that his prefaces also invent the artistic process, not just reflect or recall it. “Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eterntally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so” qtd 17 (Roderick Hudson preface) He gets the contingency. All the prefaces are recursive, says Teahan. He calls Roderick Hudson a “safe paradise for self-criticism” (cool, his own watering hole)
  • 19 talks about “chiasmic inversion” of writing spaces and narrative spaces – interesting for my Portrait of a Lady preface stuff.
  • Richard Hocks says “history of James criticism is also, in part, the history of modern criticism, with labyrinthine corridors of methodology, cultural analysis, and hermeneutical bias” in his Henry James and Pragmatistic Thought
  • History of James Criticism
    • Phase one: directly after his death. Formalist interest in late novels, prefaces, consciousness, aesthetic ethics. Ex: Percy Lubbock (1921 The Craft of Fiction).
    • Phase two, 1930s-60s: New Critics follow Lubbock; each work has organic unity. R P Blackmur, Rene Wellek, F O Matthiessen (coined “major phase” for James’ final novels, celebrates James’ cosmo), F R Leavis (prefers earlier works and says that later works are too much “technical elaboration” and he “lost his full sense of life” wow in Leavis’ The Great Tradition) are the first generation. Next generation is Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction (subtilizes the idea of point of view; Laurence Holland The Expense of Vision emphasizing the ambiguities and complexities.
    • Seventies: structuralist and narratologist works (Todorov, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan), class and gender too
    • Eighties: overtly theoretical
      • The Political James: has early proponent in 1951 Lionel Trilling said that The Princess Casamassima and The Bostonians have “social observation” and “moral realism” but gets really started in 80s with Jameson’s P’unc (James’ perspectivism is “a protest and a defense against reification” and “furnish[es] a powerful ideological instrument in the perpetuation of an increasingly subjectivized and psychologized world;” Foucauldian Mark Seltzer (Henry James and the Art of Power shows narration as surveillance); Lacanian Donna Przybylowicz (Desire and Repression talks about “oscillation” between social critic and self-reflection).
      • John Carlos Rowe, 1984 The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James: showed James as a theorist as well as showing the theoretical nature of existing James criticism; Rowe sees feminism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, Marxism, phenomenology, reader-response theories being dramatized in James’ novels.
    • Post-Rowe, late 80s until now: gender, sexuality, class, race are huge and important; New Historicism (Sara Blair, Jonathan Freedman, Wendy Graham) 24. Ppl defending James against charges of apoliticism, ahistoricism. Lots of deconstruction: very de Manian: Deborah Esch, J Hillis Miller, Julie Rivkin, Eric Savoy, Jonathan Warren.
      • The Turn of the Screw, for example, highlights interpretation and reading in a way that makes it fair game for criticism, and its plot began (James says in his preface with a “withheld glimpse” and a “shadow of a shadow” – Teahan says James “places his cards on the table – face down” 25). Shoshana Felman says that the Turn of the Screw is a hermeneutic trap James lays for the reader.
    • Future criticism: lots of non-fic criticism, esp b/c of the letters being published in full; close reading (2004 conference by Teahan and Eric Savoy called Henry James and New Formalisms) but not in the old formalist way (for example queer formalism: Ellis Hanson says queer theory is about “a story that changes with every telling….and that figures the very incoherence…of language itself”)
• Peter Rawlings, “Narratives of Theory and Theories of Narrative: Point of View and Centers of Consciousness”
  • Rawlings is mad about the traditional love for James’ supposed “centers of consciousness.” Rather, James cares about voice. James does not love “restricted points of view” 4, but rather “pragmatism, phenomenology, perspectivism, and British empiricism” that was alive in James’ day.
  • James famously didn’t like Walter Besant’s dictim that fiction should have “conscious moral purpose” and be directed by “general laws” and subordinate narrative description and prioritize dramatic aspects instead. Fiction for James is “a personal, a direct impression of life” in The Art of Fiction and “a novel is a living thing”
  • James DOES NOT have systematic theory of points of view. James DOES NOT allow ppl and events to appear independently. Critics say James loves a single dominant perspective (the central intelligence theory), and they are wrong. Instead, Rawlings says that the narrator IS important in the story. James’ theory of fiction was ad hoc and flowing and complex, not simple.
    • Critics have narrative of James’ development where the loud narrative or authorial voice is gradually diminished, with help from his experiments in theatre. Yet in fact James said that even dialogue (which these critics privilege) must be “constituted and presented” “by another method” qtd 39 and says that the author’s voice can never be entirely eliminated. Wings of Dove preface speaks of “successive centers,” and Reverberator’s speaks of “rotation of aspects” qtd 40. James has formal variety b/c he creates each method specifically for each idea, that is (in Spoils of Poynton preface) “the logic of the particular case”
  • Says James is “firmly in the empirical tradition, James believes that there is no world beyond experience” and perspective is an epistemology, not just a technique of writing. He talks about Willie van Peer and Seymour Chatman’s 2001 collection New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective, with its focus on the vertiginous, shifting micro-perspectives found by micro-analysis of tiny bits of text, shows that James’ works are not monolithically voiced 44.
  • Pragmatism: James’ points of view dramatize limitation of each person’s perspective. Karl Pearson, Henry Adams, Nietzsche. Wm James also believed nothing existed apart from a perspective, one that can’t encompass the whole pluralistic “restless universe” but does have “partial superiority” b/c of that specific position. Pearson said things-in-themselves are useless. Concepts can only be known within “their unfolding consequence in sensory and perceptual life” – this is Richard Hocks’ def of pragmatism qtd p 47.
    • Adapts Sylvia Adamson’s argument that the Puritan consciousness is all about self-examination and self-humbling, is transitive b/c the self is both object and subject; he uses it for Strether, to show Strether is anti-social, anti-moral, not sympathetic. (The painting The Ambassadors by Holbein is the most famous example of Renaissance single perspective painting, 49, called anamorphosis). Whereas Maisie is perfect example of being sympathetic, of considering others’ views.
    • Believes The Ambassadors to be available through ideas of pluralism or pragmatism, not through relativity. “All views are valid; but all art partial” 51. He believes Strether’s mono point of view is “disaster.”
  • Quote from Ambassadors: “since his very gropings would figure among his most interesting motions”
• Julie Rivkin, “The Genius of the Unconscious: Psychoanalytic Criticism”
  • Psychoanalytic critics of James: Edmund Wilson, Shoshana Felman, John Carlos Row, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Eric Savoy. 59
  • Future of James studies? Psychoanalysis for poco and global James studies
  • History of Psychoanalytic James
    • 1. Edmund Wilson’s 1934 The Ambiguity of Henry James essay on Turn of the Screw being about sex repression
    • 2. Shoshana Felman’s “Turning the Screw of Interpretation” responds to Wilson, is Lacanian. 1977. We are caught into making reader-effects by the text: like the characters, we are constantly trying to ask for meaning, for truth, but we only get to signifiers (ie the letter), a chain of them. Transmission itself is the interesting thing that happens (not meaning discovery).
    • 3. John Carlos Rowe’s chapter on psychoanalysis and turn of screw: repression is class- and gender-based.
    • 4. Dennis Foster does Zizek (psychoanalysis and Marxism): pleasure working in capitalism. Foster says “there is a problem with what James’ characters want, particularly when they want neither love nor money” qtd 63 b/c they don’t like what you are supposed to like (says Rivkin “the socially normalized objects of desire”) and they go to perverse desires, Foster says, which are about older drives (primary drives). Foster on ambassadors “Advertising, by convincing us that our own needs are real, provides the alibi for the enjoyment we derive from the simple act of consumption. We know, but we never act on this cynical knowledge, for to live with such knowledge is to abandon the fantasy that we will find the object of desire, that we will ever know what we want” qtd 63 this is from Sublime Enjoyment, Foster’s book. We begin to find pleasure in consumption itself, not the fulfilment of a need. Advertising gives consumption pleasure.
    • 5. Kaja Silverman’s reading of Ambassadors in Male Subjectivity at the Margins: climax is Freudian primal scene, Strether is at margins of sex again (watching Chad and Vionnet). Eve Sedgwick hates this insulting idea of what James is about (ie Silverman puts James in infantile position, one of shame and repression) and puts him in heterosexual frame.
    • 6. More queer psychoanalytic: identification, desire, and subject formation. (Butler: in Rivkin’s words, “the self is formed out of others, and the relationship to those others is one of mimesis.”) Desire comes from imitation, not from within ourselves (Michael Moon on James). Eric Savoy on James says that once you adopt a coherent identity, you moourn for what you have given up in order to do so.
  • Rivkin’s analysis of Ambassadors: Does Strether become like Chad b/c he desires Vionnet, or does he desire Vionnet b/c he wants to be like Chad? (Identification, being like someone, versus desire, wanting to have someone.) Mediation of desire. “a space of psychic possibility” is opened up b/c it’s not determined which is Strether’s real feeling, were “different narratives and identities are possible” and this new spaces is called “Paris,” says Rivkin 69.
    • She sees the theater scene (sees Chad for first time) and the painting scene as oppositions. One begins Strether’s desire for Chad or being Chad and the other ends it.
• Priscilla L Walton “Reconceiving Feminism, Gender, Sexuality Studies”
  • Gert Buelen “Henry James’ Oblique Possession” wants to find a queer James w/out asking for a same-sex erotic relationship. More about sexual identity. He looks at when you understand yourself and feel in control of yourself but only b/c you give in to an erotic force (human or non-human) outside yourself. Less about submission, however, than tension and the dissolution of dichotomies such as master/slave, homo/hetero, where identity (both your own and the other’s) is continually reconfigured or in question. Walton reads Washington Square as showing oblique possession where Catherine Sloper’s acquiescence to Morris gives her “demonstrations of self-possession and agency” 92 b/c she can give in to Morris which makes her defy her dad, or she can give in to her dad and gain the identity of the Good Daughter. She surrenders to Morris to get away from her dad, and surrenders only if he accepts her as she is. She thus finds herself.
• Eric Savoy, “Entre chien et loup: Henry James, Queer Theory, and the Biographical Imperative”
  • Queer formalism: close reading. James can in this way open up queer theory to make it less certain. Metaphors slip and slide into other registers, ephemeral, avoids being a rigid identity
  • Edmund White’s The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction was begun with James’ “The Pupil.” In it, Pemberton is “suspended, perpetually, between excess and insufficiency” 102.
  • Better to say that James’ works are queer in sense of Sedgwick’s book Tendencies, not homosexual b/c the homosexual identity hadn’t been invented at the time. Non-normative.
  • Wendy Graham, 1999, Henry James’ Thwarted Love is Foucauldian b/c she situates him in “discursive frameworks” of his day qtd 108. James was writing all about libidinal energy and sex.
  • Eric Savoy tries to take deconstruction’s suspension of the referent without having deconstruction’s “excessive aporia;” he speaks of “broad registers” 118
  • Quotes Foucault “it is through sex—an imaginary point determined by the deployment of sexuality—that each individual has to pass in order to have access to his own intelligibility” qtd 119 and that is why “the importance we ascribe to it, the reverential fear…”
• Kevin Ohi, “Belatedness and Style”
  • Queer formalism is a NEW formalism
  • Doesn’t like the pervasive belief that the indirection of James’ work is a reflection of his private life that he “diffused, postponed….sublimated, obscured” b/c of avoiding gayness 126 (bad biographical readings)
  • The Ambassadors: Kevin Ohi, Julie Rivkin, Mary Cross, Sheila Teahan, says Ohi, “suggest that” the plot of Ambassadors should “be understood in relation to the linguistic practices of James’ text” 127. Ohi says this means “effect of style on a project of representation”
    • Note: Queer critics see Strether as having queer but belated potential 141
  • Quotes Deleuze “He Stuttered,” as saying “style—the foreign language within language”
  • Ambassadors as aesthetic recompense for belatedness, Most critics see Strether as a figure for James himself, and his lack of mimetic representation as a figure for his inhibition or loneliness – these ideas “allow critics to avoid the complications of the anti-mimetic understanding of the representation it embodies” 127
    • Ppl who do it well: Julie Rivkin, “The Logic of Delegation in The Ambassadors” (delegation as Derridean supplement). Sheila Teahan says that Strether is “deviation…a phenomenon internal to the narrative itself” and not about failure. Mary Cross says it’s a “story of signifiers” as Strether searches “for names” 127. Leo Bersani “displacement of dramatic pressure from novelistic event to the verbal surfaces of narrative” in his essay “The Jamesian Lie” qtd p 128.
  • Kevin Ohi himself: “Strether’s relation to ‘life’ is most interestingly a linguistic, and not a psychological, question.” again, too much bio lets you ignore complex style. Ambassadors is anti-mimetic. The question of Strether is: “living up, as it were, to James’s style” 129. Strether missed “a missed experience of mediation” (rather than missing unmediated experience) “a series of refused reifications or nominalizations” (THIS WOULD BE GREAT FOR D AND G) rather than about lossed content.
    • He quotes 153-4 Gloriani’s garden lecture “Still, one has the illusion of freedom; therefore don’t be, like me, without the memory of that illusion.”
    • Belatedness: you need to know that you are missing out on freedom or desire or whatever. Belatedness is realizing your loss late. “Chad knows how to live because he delegates his life.” 131 b/c it’s mediated. (The quote from Ambassadors that proves it: “he ‘put out’ his excitement, or whatever the emotion the matter involved, as he put out his washing” 355-6.) Chad too becomes “inadequate to his own life” 132 not good enough.
    • Perceiving loss becomes the aesthetic experience 133
      • The Lambinet “he would have bought” 380-1 (I should use as an example of the virtual – me: perhaps the vicarious IS the virtual for James) Ohi notes “possession is more perfect for his not having bought it”
    • Repletion through loss 135: the Lambinet coming to life. He does a great formalist reading of it. 136 he realizes that Chad “was none the less only Chad” 408 so that makes his original epiphany deflate (that Chad was different). The river scene calls into question the ability of representation and aesthetics to compensate for loss. Although he notes that it’s not mimetic, it’s not verisimilitude, that moment of discovering the couple. (138 Remember that advertising is representation for profit.)
  • Losing Miss Gostrey, he loses her aid for clarity, for comprehension. Strether’s life is all about “temporal disjunction,” of being late 139: aesthetic development IS belatedness. He reads Sedgwick on New York prefaces as being late for life meaning that you get to have the “spell” of reading and rewriting 140
• Clair Hughes, “Scene and Screen,” compares failure of his plays to popularity of the films
  • She goes against the Edel-led cult saying that the plays failed
  • She wrote a book called Henry James and the Art of Dress
• Victoria Coulson, “Prisons, Palaces, and the Architecture of the Imagination”
  • Looks at the architecture of writing, which for James is represented through a series of prisons. James sees author’s imagination as constrained. Eventually he tries to look at the non-architecture of mobile women, the sea, the portmanteau
  • James’ writing has parallels with the architecture theory of his day: 19th c architectural theory (“that Gothic buildings were creaturely, sympathetic, and able to shape the emotions and judgments of their inhabitants” 171) (Philippa Tristram says that Palladian style was seen as masculine and authoritarian, but the Gothic as female and accommodating) as well as building imagery in literature.
  • She says Austen’s architecture and the architecture of Mansfield Park (the house) are disciplinary, force conformity and stability.
  • 173 “This is not to say that Victorian Gothic abjured the exercise of power; on the contrary, church-builders chose the Gothic because its vividly engaged aesthetic mode drew the churchgoer into a poetent drama of anguish and investment” (then she quotes from Hersey on the Gothic church as “penitential appliance”)
  • James letter to Wells “it is art that makes life, makes interest” qtd 173 letter on 10 July 1915. JAMES AS POMO: in Art of Fiction says that experience is “never limited, and it is never complete” qtd 174
  • Utopian potential in James: Freedman “utopian potential” where his “utopian project” is “projects the making of social value through and well beyond the nineteenth-century nuclear family” 6-7 in intro to the Cambridge Henry James; Tessa Hadley calls James’ “erotically polymorphic” imagination outside of homo/hetero in her book HJ and the Imagination of Pleasure 2002.
    • Counter-utopian critics: Peter Rawlings 2004 says it’s troubled b/c his art is very complex, decay everywhere, sadomasochistic. Donna Prsybylowicz says that the late novels show “egotistical and self-enclosed” aestheticism so that the “freedom” is just feeling superior in her book Desire and Repression. So finally Coulson says “The haven, the refuge, the asylum confesses itself a true utopia, a nowhere, and stands revealed instead as the acceptable face of the prison.” 175 MUST QUOTE THAT. B/c she notes that at the end of PL, Isabel is delivered back to Osmond through Gardencourt.
  • House of Fiction metaphor in the Art of the Novel. Coulson calls it a prison-house b/c James says “mere holes in a dead wall…not hinged doors opening straight upon life” but each hole has eyes or binoculars with “unique instrument” of each new perspective looking on “the human scene” (those are JH’s words). Coulson: “it is a nightmare of punitive individuation”
    • Sara Blair reads the PL preface as HJ being just as imprisoning of Isabel as Gilbert Osmond is. Stephanie A Smith says the same thing.
    • Mark Seltzer: HJ’s techniques of representation are complicit with “social regimes of mastery and control that traverse these works…art and power are…radically entangled.” qtd 177; it’s from 13-4 HJ and the Art of Power. Writing is a technology of power. Alfred Habegger’s HJ and the Woman Business shows how HJ appropriates American women’s fiction – James was warring against women.
    • 1929 Georges Bataille’s essay “Architecture” he says “The taking of the Bastille is symbolic of…the animosity of the people against the monuments that are their real masters” qtd 178
    • Coulson speaks of James’ buildings being “killing machines;” quotes from PL “Mrs Touchett seems to pride herself on the fatal efficacy of the Palazzo Crescentini “in which three people have been murdered” (PL 28) COOL. Aaron Betsky says “Just by the act of differentiation and coordination involved with any act of construction, you will produce an object that will be owned and that will reproduce existing social relations (190)” and all architecture is “an act of violence” qtd 179. Building Sex
    • Coulson: “steady pathologization of symmetrical forms” in HJ 179. She quotes James on Balzac as he admires Balzac’s control and mastery as he creates a big rambling gallery with portraits he controls.
  • Art of the Novel “beguile the reader’s suspicion of his being shut up, transform it for him into a positive illusion of the largest liberty” Art of the Novel 39. Coulson analysis the imagination as a prison (for Maggie Verver and for Isabel and in Princess Cassa)
  • Mark Mc Gurl? is suspicious about James’ class politics, thinks that the late style is really a “strategy of enhanced class exclusion” DEFINITELY HAVE TO TALK ABOUT THIS “Social Geometries: Taking Place in Henry James.” B/c he talks about the problems with mass culture invading spaces through popular reading. Mc Gurl? calls it “the prison house of social representation.”
    • Coulson also says that “fantasy’s….ultimate powerlessness to do more than grant a temporary stay in the great good place” (She summarizes the 1900 story that’s an asylum/monastery where exhausted rich ppl are sent to when they want to give up on modernity.) She notes that there is no social mobility but rather vacancy, using a quote from Princess Cassamassima where there is a “curious pavilion” that “offered rest and privacy a refuge from sun or shower” but it’s realy just for tools and another one is covered up, an uncomfortable sofa, dampness…just there to house the superfluous, the “dislocated” 183 where all the things look like something else. She concludes that it seems that “significant form is just another name for repression.”
    • However: Homeless women do okay. Seas are different than architecture and there’s a lot of water imagery in HJ (water can’t be confined, Coulson says). Luggage allows mobility but is strapped to.
    • Elizabeth Grosz “representation of space” as “a correlate of one’s ability to locate oneself as a point of origin” book Architecture from the Outside “The anchoring of subjectivity in its body [in space] is the condition of a coherent identity, and, moreover, the condition under which the subject has a perspective on the world, becomes a source of perceptions” 38, 37 but qtd 186. Mark Wingley on identity theory BEING space theory. Gert Buelen on James in Galerie d’Apollon is “centrality of subject-object relations gives way to a veritable spatialization of desire” – in the Oblique Possessions essay
• DAVID MCWHIRTER HAS AN ESSAY CALLED HENRY JAMES POSTMODERNIST IN HJ STUDIES
  • 207 “Mc Whirter? suggests [that] the positioning of a historically aware James in a postmodern camp needs to be qualified in view of our growing awareness of modernism as a period in which writers took highly divergent paths in their responsiveness to modernity and history” and James was a part of that. (James s modernis interlocutor: De Koven?, Haralson)
• Gert Buelens and Celia Aijmer, “The Sense of the Past: History and Historical Criticism”
  • The body and time 200. Susan Griffin, The Historical Eye.
  • Historicize James by talking about changing attitudes about psych and philosophy
  • J Hillis Miller argues that Aspern Papers is about never knowing the past, Enacting History in Henry James book. Then think about Beast in the Jungle, says Buelens and Aijmer, where the guy waits and waits for some crazy Event that doesn’t end up happening; and it’s a denial of romance plot chronology beginning, middle, end etc. Instead, it’s all chance and accident, no progression.
    • Also, ghost stuff questions time flow: 205 mentions Derrida and the spectral as undoing binary past/present and presence/absence: haunting “more powerful” as an ontology than the mere here/not here that we normally live by. In Specters of Marx. (Bonus: the text itself is a kind of ghost.) T J Lustig in Henry James and the Ghostly sayas that Turn of Screw was “swarm of surrogates and replacements” 126 qtd on 206 (readers and writers, ghosts)
  • Joseph Beach, The Method of Henry James, 1954 says James’ “mechanics” of fiction is great but that he doesn’t mean to be “suggestive of the machine age” xiv qtd on 206. Buelens and Aijmer say this reminds them of formalism and New Criticism, but I say we can do this D and G style.
  • Terry Eagleton accused James of not paying attention to history, but Posnock’s Trial of Curiosity says James categories are “open to change and revision in a nonpossessive direction” 83. Agnew says James is interested in growth of consumerism. (At this point, Buelens and Aijmer accuse Strether of becoming a better consumption “as the novel progresses” 199 but I say he stops at the place where HJ says he must: at consuming ppl – Gostrey.)
    • Sara Blair, Kenneth Warren say that James is historical b/c of social issues. John Carlos Rowe says that the “other henry james” in his book of that title “struggled with changing attitudes toward gender, sexuality, class, and ethnicity in his own times” which makes him “precursor of our postmodern condition” (xii, 195).
  • James is not nostalgic, isn’t about collective memory, isn’t about historical grand narrative (that’s postmodern, SAYS ME) 207. James witnessed decline of Victorian historicism. Modern challenges see personal interpretation at heart of history (not just fact). Novelist too interprets the past.
  • Washington Square’s time, says Bell, doesn’t make sense, doesn’t add up; superfluity of signifiers of time cannot add up to coherent chronology.
  • They want to marry formalist and historicist readings of James
• Tamara L Follini, “A geometry of his own: Temporality, Referentiality, and Ethics in Autobiographies”
  • looks at passages in James that are “episodes that dramatize the intensification of an individual’s grasp of his or her life history” which give you “heightened awareness of the passage of time” 212 (VERY GOOD FOR ME) and “sometimes likened to a fall from innocence.” Maisie, Isabel
  • James creates an incoherent version of his life through his life-writing. He was concerned with the ethics of biography. 225 b/c intertwining of time, narrative, knowledge
  • John Carlos Rowe speaks of James’ sociability xxiv in his foreward to Henry James New York Edition (ed by Mc Whirter?)
  • Criticism on the autobiography stuff influenced by postmodern theory on autobios not being about telling the past put creating it and the present at the same time. Mc Whirter? says that James’ Prefaces did not have Victorian sage authority claims. But Follini suggests that the 19th c IS in force in these works…but so is modernism, so James has multiple temporalities at work. NICE. Peter Rawlings on American Scene says he’s using post-Kantian concepts of time (time is subjective).
    • Charles Fiedelson “the genetic power of ‘romantic’ over-reaching…which will conclude with the power of the ‘real’ to subsume it once more” 111 in his “Henry James, History, and Story” essay.
    • Fictions in Autobiography by Paul John Eakin: James’ autobio insist on foregrounding composition of the autobio b/c of “some imperative drama of consciousness going forward in the present” 57. Ross Posnock says that there is no “unified stability” in James’ autobio 177 (qtd 222) and makes James critique American individualism (wow). Andrew Taylor, Henry James and the Father Question, talks about James “infinitely revisable self” 59
    • Jessica Benjamin’s “intersubjectivity: “individual grows in and through the relationship with other subjects” qtd 223. Susanna Egan individual “forced into reappearance by interacting with another” qtd 223. Nancy Miller says, the other “provides the map of the self (14)” qtd 224
    • James says “in proportion…as we see life without rearrangement do we feel that we are touching the truth” LC 1:58) that’s in the Edel edited literary criticism by HJ.
    • Michael Moon “the daring and risky weirdness, dramatic uncanniness, erotic offcentredeness, and unapologetic perversity” of James’ writing qtd 224
  • Posnock: James thinks boundaries between people “less as a barrier and more as a locus of response and exchange” 170. So we are questioning the Author Master James nowadays. Jane Tompkins writing about Notes of a Son and Brother says that that Jamesian I is “defined primarily in terms of an extraordinary faculty of appreciation that puts him in sympathetic touch with the ‘otherness’ of those around him” 681-2. Similarly, Tony Tanner says that James “almost the whole of James’ ethics” is between “lust to possess, make-over, appropriate” versus “wonder at, yearningly admire, gratefully appreciate” (hm, what would this say about Vionnet in Ambassadors?)
  • Stylistic silences in James’ work: Millicent Bell said he used “circumlocution and implication” because he wanted to “deny responsibility for the way life had turned out.” James Cox calls the “qualification” of James’ style something that is about retreat, avoidance. 231 Paul John Eakin says his vagueness shows his “involuntary confusion of his earlier self” NOT ME I SAY PLANE OF IMMANENCE. J Hillis Miller says that it’s from a kind of knowing that is “that blind bodily material kind that cannot be narrated” but only known by experience “History, Narrative and Responsibility” his essay about Aspern Papers. Follini says that the “convoluted stylistic modes” of late autobio ””testify to an enactment of patience…that resists the impositions of form while repeatedly risking self-exposure”
    • James says in The Middle Years (autobio) “any act of acquisition [could be] fallacious if unaccompanied by that tag of the price paid in personal discomfort” 560
• Pierre A Walker and Greg W Zacharias, “Editing the Complete Letters of Henry James”
  • They are in progress b/c only 25% of James’ letters have been published. Their new edition has a couple of volumes published…right now they’re up to the 1870s and still publishing from U of Nebraska.
• Collin Meissner, “Talking about Money: Art and Commerce in America”
  • Simmel-inspired essay about money hollowing out culture
  • From NOtes of a Son and Brother “The ‘career of art’ has again and again been deprecated and denounced, on the lips of anxiety and authority, as a departure from the career of business, of industry, and respectability, the so-called regular life.”
    • Americans Abroad, a HJ essay for The Nation, HJ says “Americans in Europe our outsiders…not only…politically and geographically; we are out of it socially” because “the only great people that is exclusively commercial” qtd 263. In The American Scene, James argued that democracy was conflated with commercialism, so that identity was all about “active pecuniary gain.” He believed 1878 that democracy and commercialism were symbiotic – not by 1907 with American Scene. Meissner says that James’ sensitivity to the decline of democracy for commercialism makes him important for today’s world. 264
  • Alasdair Mac Intyre? “James is concerned with rich aesthetes whose interest is to fend off the kind of boredom that is so characteristic of modern leisure by contriving behavior in others that will be responsive to their wishes, that will feed their sated appetites” 24 in his book After Virtue. Peggy Mc Cormack? “all Jamesian fictions operate as exchange economies” qtd 265 BUT ME: I SAY JAMES SHOWS US HOW TO ENJOY IT. Jean-Christophe Agnew also writes about commercialism being important for James’ aesthetic, as his changing relationship to consumerism changes his artwork and his last works are what they are b/c they have “complicity in the commodity vision” qtd 265: so that James begins by critiquing capitalism but ends up internalizing them for his aesthetics, sums up Meissner conveniently.
    • Meissner says that the “market metaphors” he uses are capitlist as the objects are alienated “quite literally” so they can “accumulate…as resources, as capital,” such as characters who are ”’invested with attributes’” and even the language itself “that transforms active verbs into passive participles and participles, in turn, into nouns” so that “their properties or characteristics” are what “take on a life of their own” instead of the person or object itself. That’s on Agnew 97 “The Consuming Vision of Henry James” He says this about The Golden Bowl. that’s cool but what about Ambassadors?
  • Meissner says that James’ autobio is a process of “accounting” in monetary terms his own life 266. There is so much more attn being given to James’ autobio. Notes of a Son and Brother shows that James was embarrassed as a kid that his dad wasn’t a businessman but “What we wanted to do instead was just to be something, something unconnected to specific doing, something free and uncommitted” qtd 267
  • 269 intensification of capitalism in America was felt keenly when he returned to the US in 1904. his last short story, “A Round of visits,” in 1910, shows the cost of business centered life: no one connecting with each other “the virtual incapacity for human connection” says Meissner.
  • Ross Posnock’s The Trial of Curiosity “reveals a writer who never strayed from civic and cultural analysis” says Meissner 270. Work has been done like this by Richard Salmon, Leland Person, Eric Haralson, Robert Pippin, Peter Rawlings.
  • Richard Salmon, Henry James and the Culture of Publicity, about the Ambassadors “it is already possible to witness the process by which the world of advertising is offered to consciousness as the horizon for a new social totality…the form of the commodity spectacle is inscribed both within the projected world of James’ fiction and in the projection itself, saturating even the spaces from which it is signally excluded” 177 VERY NICE BUT I DON’T LIKE THE TOTALITY STUFF B/C IT IS ALWAYS ON THE LEVEL OF CONSCIOUSNESS FOR JAMES
  • Another American Scene Quote “one’s making the condition so triumphantly pay that the prices, the manners, the other inconveniences, take their place as a friction it is comparatively easy to salve…with the wash of gold. What prevails, what sets the tune, is the American scale of gain, more magnificent than any other, and the fact that the whole assumption…is that of the individual’s participation in it, that of his being more or less punctually and more or less effectually ‘squared.’ To make so much money that you won’t, that you don’t ‘mind….” 236-7 of AS but qtd 271. So now we can’t connect to each other, says Meissner. Money has 273 become an end in itself.
  • 273 on Robert Pippin’s Henry James and Modern Moral Life: James is concerned w/relation between freedom and money. To avoid subjection, you need capital. “The freedom at issue does not involve the exercise of will, the absence of constraints, or the satisfactions of interests and desires….Strether’s liberation involves an expanse of understanding, and so, finally in his life, a greater capacity both to take account of others better, and just thereby, to be himself” 175 in Pippin’s book.
    • Pippin again “freedom cannot be achieved alone, that the achievement of free subjectivity requires a certain sort of social relation among subject, and that this relation of mutuality and reciprocity is highly sensitive to social arrangements” 172-3
  • Simmel qted 274 “ownership” “ties being and owning together” “opportunity for the Ego to find its expression in objects” – Meissner compares this to James’ “Hotel World” stuff about NY in American Scene. Qualitative differences disappear says Simmel, homogeneous, “the correct subjective reflection of a complete money economy” he says in Metropolis and Mental Life
    • Reading of “A Round of Visits” and the story’s hotel, called The Pocahontas, which has “the bustle of the market” as well as the “nursery and the playground” “a complete social scene in itself, on which types might figure and passion rage and plots thicken and dramas develop, without reference to any other sphere, or perhaps to anything at all outside.” qtd 274
• John Carlos Rowe, “Henry James and Globalization”
  • Dislikes the shadow of Van Wyck Brooks who did James crit in 1920s. Says James has lots of global cultural capital.
  • 1990s saw spurt in interest in James perhaps b/c “refreshing alternative to the superficiality of modern culture” 283, but also b/c he has so many contradictions that he’s endlessly interesting and b/c he saw so many technological and cultural changes in his lifetime and so do we, esp b/c of globalization (so he helps us understand our own pomo globalized world). James shows the “US will-to-power” in European spaces 289
  • He grew up in a cosmo and international household and milieu. He was confused by modernization, just as we are today. Rowe says James’ cosmo has been commodified by academics and mass media, yet James resisted “the incipient commercialization of the aesthetic process” 298
  • James’ Stuff style about as Daisy proto-high-mod Miller (Peter 289-90. Rawlings 291 uses Madame his Merle term about p expats 9) “We’re mere parasites, crawling over the surface; we haven’t our feet in the soil”
  • “James’s celebrated historical consciousness thus takes the long view of the history in which nation states have emerged and claimed discrete and and competitive authorities only by ignoring their common origins and motives.” 293 “The most provincial settings in Henry James often turn out, weirdly, to be the most transnational.”
    • 293 Daisy ignores history of Chillon: read Byron’s “Prisoner of chillon,” look at the shrine to “medieval Swiss peasant revolts” that helped to create American and French revolutions
  • James’ style as proto-high-mod (Peter Rawlings uses his term p 9)
  • 295 “Living elsewhere is sometimes just parasitic tourism, sometimes mindless worship of the past, occasionally an emancipatory experience of your own freedom. In part, these rare moments of liberation are the consequence of alienation, such as James’ feminine protagonists experience from the outset of their fictional journeys. When it accomplishes such magical transformations, such alienation depends on the character’s recognition of the social constructedness of all human values and relations—a radical relativism that allows the character a moment of vision outside her conventional role.” His example is Milly comparing herself to London prostitutes which for Rowe is showing cosmo identification
• 296 Cosmo for James is understanding other cultures AND moral laxity or an ability to be whoever you want socially and sexually