The Hideous Obscure of Henry James

The Henry James Review, 1981

Journal of International Social Research, 2016

The early twentieth century is usually dubbed the starting-point of modern literature, but prior to the 1900s a string of novels was written by Henry James in which a slight break with the previous narrative tradition can be starkly observed. The most significant elements which separate modern tradition from the conventional one include: "point of view, interior monologue, stream-ofconsciousness, fragmented narratives, extreme subjectivity and broken chronology" (Professor Grant Voth). In this study, I want to deal with these elements as developed by Henry James in the late 1880s to the last stages of his career. The first part of this essay will take into account why Henry James is usually seen as the major discoverer of modern novel (or at least the one whose roots can be traced back to him) and his main contribution to the genre and the second part would survey the characteristics described above at play within the two eponymous novels of this essay. At the end I would sum up the framework of my essay in a unified conspectus.

A Historical Guide to Henry James (edited by John Carlos Rowe and Eric Haralson), 2012

E-rea, 2012

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; paragraphing and capitalization follow the Library of America edition.] I SHOULD not have affixed so comprehensive a title to these few remarks, necessarily wanting in any completeness, upon a subject the full consideration of which would carry us far, did I not seem to discover a pretext for my temerity in the interesting pamphlet lately published under this name by Mr. Walter Besant. Mr. Besant's lecture at the Royal Institution--the original form of his pamphlet--appears to indicate that many persons are interested in the art of fiction and are not indifferent to such remarks as those who practise it may attempt to make about it. I am therefore anxious not to lose the benefit of this favourable association, and to edge in a few words under cover of the attention which Mr. Besant is sure to have excited. There is something very encouraging in his having put into form certain of his ideas on the mystery of story-telling. It is a proof of life and curiosity--curiosity on the part of the brotherhood of novelists, as well as on the part of their readers. Only a short time ago it might have been supposed that the English novel was not what the French call discutable. It had no air of having a theory, a conviction, a consciousness of itself behind it-of being the expression of an artistic faith, the result of choice and comparison. I do not say it was necessarily the worse for that; it would take much more courage than I possess to intimate that the form of the novel, as Dickens and Thackeray (for instance) saw it had any taint of incompleteness. It was, however, naïf (if I may help myself out with another French word); and, evidently, if it is destined to suffer in any way for having lost its naïveté it has now an idea of making sure of the corresponding advantages. During the period I have alluded to there was a comfortable, good-humoured feeling abroad that a novel is a novel, as a pudding is a pudding, and that this was the end of it. But within a year or two, for some reason or other, there have been signs of returning animation-the era of discussion would appear to have been to a certain extent opened. Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints; and there is a presumption that those times when no one has anything particular to say about it, and has no reason to give for practice or preference, though they may be times of genius, are not times of development, are times possibly even, a little, of dulness. The successful application of any art is a delightful

2008

Victorian Periodicals Review, 2010

Henry James in context, 2010

In 1996, I published a book-length bibliographical survey of Henry James studies. 1 It was organized around three key-terms that seemed to cover a lot of work, especially of the 1980s and 1990s: style, ethics, history-and especially the intersection of the three in a new understanding of what the historical means. When asked some ten years later to discuss recent James criticism for the present volume in the context of the evolving changes within literary and American studies, I find that the trend I saw as emergent back then very quickly became dominant. That is what John Carlos Rowe has aptly summarized in the title of one of his books as our scrutiny of The Other Henry James (1998)-the Henry James who ‗is valued because his hopes and worries still speak to us', because ‗the changes we have passed through are readable historically from James and his contemporaries to us'; not the Henry James who left us a ‗testament to some dubious universal truth '. 2 James studies up to the late 1970s were by and large what we used to call ‗liberal humanist' in orientation. What we meant by that was the proclivity for deriving from James's work general lessons for ‗Man'. A good example is the common reading of ‗The Beast in the Jungle', which held that John Marcher realizes too late in life that the big life-changing event he kept on waiting for had been under his nose all along: his true love was his dear friend, May Bartram. There was always a strong moralizing thrust to such readings: James's work was indeed a ‗testament to some dubious universal truth,' as Rowe puts it; and it was an object-lesson in how characters, and by natural, self-evident extension, readers, ought to conduct their lives, then as now. James himself, for liberal humanist study, fulfilled the idealized author function: he never married, because he was too dedicated to his muse. This so-called fact was documented biographically, at length, by Leon Edel, while Adeline 2 Tintner, in a similar spirit, shed encyclopedic light on the creative process, in particular its sources in what James could have been acquainted with. 3 James studies, from around the early 1980s, heavily participated in the theoretical turn away from such universalizing and, often, in the case of literary interpretation, flattening tendencies. And it seems to me that the manipulation of the theoretical screw has, in that quarter century or so, received, not one but at least two turns, bringing us to quite uncanny heights (or depths?) of Jamesian delight.

Writing and Victorianism, 2014

2007

PhD Thesis submitted to Aarhus University 2007