Chapter 1 - Fables of Autonomy in Late James

Summary

In James’s late tales, he offers a critique of his own procedures, raising to an absurd pitch one of his most characteristic structures of feeling: the determining power of an absent cause, as his characters contemplate something that is not only hidden from view but is constitutively unavailable for direct representation. This structure, I argue, is fundamentally about the veiled social relations of the all-dominating money culture James found in The American Scene. James’s work thus takes shape against the background of an economic world that is less represented than it is formalized as the very structure from which it seeks autonomy. If the “Beast in the Jungle” and The Sacred Fount offer the most negative version of this autonomy – works that fail to engage the world around them – The Golden Bowl tells a different story, consistently gesturing towards a series of determining social contexts it nevertheless withholds from the reader’s view. In this way, James shows us how the fine discriminations in which he is invested rest on a set of real-world determinations that his characters are constitutively unable to see.