Colm Tóibín's The Master: Biography, Recanonization, Biofiction

ABEI Journal

The aim of this paper is to make a reading of the novel The Master by Colm Tóibín, whose fictional time covers four decisive years in the life of Henry James, from 1895 to 1899. I will argue that, for once, it is James who is being watched from the perspective of a high window, the leit motif of the novel, only that instead of following James' gaze on the outside world, Tóibín enters the Master's consciousness. Hence, through the use of a central intelligence (The Master's acclaimed use of point of view) Tóibín turns James into the main character of his fiction in order to recreate those themes that most haunted him in his middle years: his frustrating experience in the theater with his play Guy Domville; the death of his parents and his sister, Alice; the suicide of his friend Constance Woolson Fenimore; his homosexuality; his not having participated in the American Civil War; being from a family of intellectuals, his having preferred fiction over history and philosophy.

2010

Journal of Modern Literature, 2007

This essay links the recent wave of interest in Henry James's private life as material for fiction—specifically, in Colm Tóibín's The Master, David Lodge's Author, Author and Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty—to James's conflicted, often queer responses to the private and the public. Tóibín and Lodge, in divergent ways, trace through James, the failed dramatist, their own ambivalences about biographical fiction's private-public play. For Tóibín, James's life and writing offer figures for the queer author's efforts to probe, complicate, and even conceal homoerotic desire. Lodge's novel remains haunted by a queer specter of James even as it places disembodied devotion at the centre of James's and the fictional biographer's art. While Hollinghurst's novel invokes James as a background presence, James's vexed attitudes toward publicity and privacy and his stylistic excess illuminate the novel's attention to the "guest" status of gay aesthetics in the heteronormative public sphere of Thatcherite Britain.

Colm Tóibín's biographical novel The Master explores the inner life of Henry James--so it seems. But as I demonstrate, the biographical novel is less interested in representing the life of an actual historical figure than in using the life of a biographical figure in order to project the author's own vision of life and the world. In this paper, I do an analysis of Tóibín's The Master. But, contrary to what scholars say, I argue that Oscar Wilde is the primary master of The Master.

The Henry James Review, 2013

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.

Life writing: autobiography, biography, and travel …, 2007

This presentation will situate the Autobiography in context, and subsequently show how it played a major part in establishing James literary reputation - a reputation that continues to this day. It will suggest that James wrote it at a time when his fiction had little popular appeal; the reissue of his popular works in the New York edition of 1908 had failed to cause much impact, while his later novels raised scarcely a critical murmur. The Autobiography tries to fix the self for all time; to put forth the idea that the autobiographer matters and that James' life is significant in the supposed order of things. With this in mind, James set out to create a work that would consolidate his reputation as a writer of distinction - someone associated with a difficult, resistant style of writing that frustrated general readers and opened him to claims of literary ancestorship by modernist and/or postmodernist writers and critics.

Literature Compass, 2005