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The Jamesian Balloon: Romancing the Marketplace

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Ian F. A. Bell
Ian F. A. Bell
Affiliation:
Reader in American Literature in the Department of American Studies, University of Keele, Keele, Staffs. ST5 5BG, England.
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Extract

He has, I am convinced, one of the strongest, most abundant minds alive in the whole world, and he has the smallest penetration. Indeed, he has no penetration. He is the culmination of the Superficial type… here he is, spinning about, like the most tremendous of water-boatmen… kept up by surface tension. As if, when once he pierced the surface, he would drown.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 24 , Issue 3 , December 1990 , pp. 351 - 368
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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References

1 Wells, H. G., Boon (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1915), 102–3, 106.Google Scholar

2 Hutchinson, Stuart, Henry James: An American as Modernist (London & Totowa, N.J.: Vision Press and Barnes & Noble, 1982), 15.Google Scholar

3 Stevenson, Robert Louis, “A Humble Remonstrance,” Longman's Magazine (1884): reprinted in Smith, Janet Adam (ed.), Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson: A Record of friendship and Criticism (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1948), 92. James wrote to Stevenson after reading his “Remonstrance,” and Stevenson replied (a letter dated 8 December 1884) with an elaboration of his position: “People suppose it is ‘the stuff’ that interests them; they think, for instance, that the prodigious fine thoughts and sentiments in Shakespeare impress by their own weight, not understanding that the unpolished diamond is but a stone. They think that striking situations, or good dialogue, are got by studying life; they will not rise to understand that they are prepared by deliberate artifice and set off by painful suppressions” (reprinted in Smith, op. cit., 103). Stevenson gives here a clear version of one of James's major imperatives – his constant stricture against the confusions between the satisfactions of art and those of experience which so beset the realist claims for fiction.Google Scholar

4 James, , Preface to The Aspern Papers, in Edel, Leon (ed.), Henry James: Literary Criticism. French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition (New York: The Library of America, 1984), 1176.Google Scholar

5 James, , Preface to The American, in Literary Criticism. French Writers…, ed. cit., 1059, 1060.Google Scholar

6 Ibid., 1063, 1064, 1068.

7 Ibid., 1064.

8 Ibid., 1057–8. Gilmore, Michael T. has rightly asserted of the years from 1832 to 1860 that “The American romantic period was the era of the marketplace,” American Romanticism and the Marketplace (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1985), I.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Whistler, James McNeill, “The Ten O'clock,” in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (London: Heineman, 1890), 15.Google Scholar I find it interesting that a large part of James's critical reception has been beset by a version of this same misconception in its reliance upon what are assumed to be his experiential limitations. Westbrook, Wayne W. is exemplary of this reception when he writes: “Henry James's understanding of finance is blocked by a reserve that allows him to present it only in abstractions, never portraying the marketplace or the business-financiers as they really are,” Wall Street in the American Novel (New York & London: New York University Press, 1980), 43.Google Scholar There is nothing to be achieved in reading James as a failed Dreiser, and Westbrook misses the entire point of the “witness” James's fiction properly bears. Jamesian abstractions are precisely the most intimate effects of the marketplace upon human relations: it is precisely those abstractions which reveal the real history of the fiscal changes during the late nineteenth century, particularly in their display of the process whereby the advent of paper money engenders new practices of speculation and transaction – the new arts of power which are a permanent concern for the novels. In any case, and from another angle, it is simply wrong to see James in terms of such removal: as Mark Seltzer, Michael Anesko, and Stuart Culver have shown, James's project for the “art of fiction” in his essays and prefaces (unparalleled by any of his contemporaries) and his detailed involvement with the publishing world belong closely to the general social movement of professionalization during the late nineteenth century; see Seltzer, Mark, Henry James and the Art of Power (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1984)Google Scholar, Anesko, Michael, “Friction with the Market”: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar, and Culver, Stuart, “Representing the Author: Henry James, Intellectual Property and the Work of Writing,” in Bell, Ian F. A. (ed.), Henry James: Fiction as History (London & Totowa, N.J.: Vision Press and Barnes & Noble, 1984).Google Scholar

10 Agnew, Jean Christoph, “The Consuming Vision of Henry James,” in Fox, R. W. and Lears, T. J. Jackson (eds.), The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History 1880–1980 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 75, 73.Google Scholar Whilst agreeing substantially with Agnew's historical-materialist position, I want to interject a note of caution since we might be in danger of leaving the special “witness” to consumption which James's fiction affords as in itself too unproblematically mimetic. James would find it too comfortable to read the competing claims of realism and romance as being “in the balance.” Their competition is above all unsettling for him. A more formalist a-historical critic like Stuart Hutchinson, unwittingly perhaps, engenders a sense of what is at stake here in his rephrasing of the debate. Writing of The Bostonians (arguably, along with the Princess Casamassima, James's closest exploitations of the realist mode), he asks “When the bonds of a recently invented country are as indistinguishable as they are in The Blithedale Romance, The Confidence Man, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Bostonians itself, how can any artist be sure his own invention is the real thing?” and in pursuing his question, Hutchinson employs a revealing financial metaphor: “Nothing comes pre-packed in a sustaining historical and social shape to an American writer. Like Verena, the nation may take any shape. This blank cheque which is offered to American writers “partly” explains their almost inevitable problems with form, structure and perspective” (Hutchinson, op. cit., 45, 59). The issue here is that of counterfeit – the alarming fiscal instability that resulted from the bank wars of the 1830s, the concomitant debate over coined and paper money that continued through to the end of the century, and the epidemic of speculation and accelerated commercial development, all of which receive “witness” in Washington Square. Counterfeit comes close to performance: both rely on invention, variousness, and the dispersal of the unified self which are the great Jamesian subjects. The matter of trust in all its forms (financial, social, and aesthetic) is deeply embroiled in the general issues of representation which James's reworking of the Romance negotiates, and confidence, the antidote to counterfeit, becomes the one thing that is increasingly impossible in the world of display and gesture that is the marketplace. Vernon, John runs the risk of exaggerating the issue in arguing that “As long as paper money has existed, it has been tempting to suggest that all fiction (like all art) is counterfeit,” Money and Fiction. Literary Realism in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1984), 97Google Scholar, but his argument underlines the materially destabilized world James confronted. Faking and making are closely allied here, and, such are the distortions involved, we recognize that the issue is not that simple and a-historical matter of testing the “real” against the “counterfeit,” but of the criteria whereby we have more confidence in some counterfeits, or representations, than in others. Mr. Wentworth in The Europeans, for example, makes his money by conducting “a large amount of highly confidential trust-business” (note how the commercial vocabulary of the 1870s invests these key moral terms of the 1840s with a powerful ambiguity) and he exhibits a notorious distrust for that other form of counterfeit – Felix Young's offer to paint his portrait. How do we respond to that distrust? Do we haughtily dismiss Wentworth as a philistine, or sympathize with the limitations of his New England orthodoxies perhaps? That distrust surely belongs to the profession James outlines for Wentworth – to the uncertainties of counterfeit which are common to the affairs of both art and business. And those uncertainties point toward a world that is becoming alien where characters are obliged to operate within a more public arena, to perform at the behest of the changing social demands of a consumptive culture in the way that Eugenia, Madame Merle, Verena Tarrant, and Miriam Rooth perform. Vernon summarizes the general issue of the new reality well: “‘Realism’ does not refer to a phenomenon by which the novel suddenly opened its eyes and discovered reality. Rather, the novel in the nineteenth century was part of a general cultural shift that was creating the reality we see in fiction – creating a world in which individuals were forced more than ever to act publicly and conspicuously to fulfill their private ambitions and desires” (103). This performativeness is itself the paradoxical authenticity of the history witnessed by James's novels in that it is engendered by uncertainties which are read most productively in terms of economics. Where The Europeans and Washington Square are concerned, for example, we have two novels written during a space of two years, both of which choose their settings in the speculative 1830s and 1840s, a period whose fiscal disorder is recapitulated during the period of the novels' composition. That disorder is decisive for the counterfeit of art, as Neil Schmitz has noted: “When bullion is scarce and paper money plentiful, when the right ratio is disregarded, there is a subsequent disconnection of language from reality. A pathological condition appears in discourse, the need to inflate meaning and value,” “Mark Twain, Henry James, and Jacksonian Dreaming,” Criticism, 27 (Winter 1985), 158. Inflation underwrites performativeness, and the progress from Washington Square to The Europeans shows exactly this movement from the material disorder of financial speculation to its inevitable consequences in the displays of consumption. It is within this movement that the Jamesian concerns with representation and the self may most productively be understood.

11 Leiss, William, The Limits to Satisfaction: An Essay on the Problems of Needs and Commmodities (Toronto & Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1976), pp. 88–89.Google ScholarHorowitz, Daniel, similarly, has noted the agitation of consumption: “In a world where appearances and symbolism took on more weight than goods and experiences themselves, consumers became restless, anxious, and frenetic,” The Morality of Spending: Attitudes toward the Consumer Society in America, 1875–1940 (Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), xxvii.Google Scholar

12 James, , “Alphone Daudet,” in Literary Criticism. French Writers…, ed. cit., 239, 242.Google Scholar

13 Bersani, Leo, A future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 148.Google Scholar

14 “James's fiction is notoriously dense in… psychological detail, but it is remarkably resistant to an interest in psychological depth… the grounds for what we might think of as a ‘vertical’ motive (plunging down ‘into’ personality) eventually disappear from James's fiction” (Bersani, op. cit., 130–1). Broadly, I am in agreement with Bersani's position, but in stressing “surface” at the expense of “depth,” he runs the risk of privileging the former over the latter in a way that might distort what actually does go on in a James novel. We need to recognize also the more tensile procedure noted by Evan Carton: “James demands of art and of personal life both surface (formal definition and control) and depth (moral and emotional susceptibility). He also fears the dominion of each, and his effort to hold the two in a state of tension accounts for his distinctive critical tendency to cast matters of literary mechanics in intimate human terms and to depict the most affecting human situations as technical challenges,” “Henry James the Critic,” Raritan (1986), 130. Carton's formalism lacks the historical density we may persuade out of Bersani's argument. Nevertheless, we should remember that James's permanent hostility to schismatic perception (while maintaining the reconstructed accuracy of surface) would secure the realignment of the relationship between the two terms only within their new history – that of consumption's displays.

15 Bersani, , op. cit., 132.Google Scholar

16 Ibid., 138.

17 Bersani has extended this point to underline the psychology of the dispersed self that I take to be one of James's most decisive interventions in the aesthetics of fiction: “An imagination of the deconstructed, perhaps even demolished, self is the necessary point of departure for an authentically civilizing skepticism about the nature of our desires and the nature of our being… in the literary universe of partial selves… there is a greater likelihood of movements among different forms of desire and of being than in a world of fixed character structures. For what we call character is also a partial self. Its appearance of completeness, of wholeness, may be nothing more than the illusion created by the centralizing of a partial self. Such centralization involves both the organization of our desires into psychic structures and the expulsion of nonstructurable desires. Character, in short, is also a piece of a person; it has the factitious coherence of all obsessions. Only the mobility of desublimated desires preserves the mobility of being itself. An exuberant indefiniteness about our own identity can both preserve the heterogeneity of our desires and rescue us from the totalitarian insistence natural to all desire,” Bersani, , op. cit., 313–4. It is not difficult to see the relevance of Bersani's argument for the psychology and presentation of Jamesian character: what is equally important is to see this dispersed and mobile self as the product also of designs for selling – of the advertisements which effect consumption by their literal dismantling of the body and their playing upon the variousness of desire disengaged from any totalizing notion of the self.Google Scholar

18 Seltzer, Mark, Henry James and the Art of Power (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1984), 24.Google Scholar

19 Ibid., 169, 144. Cf. Greenslade, William, “The Power of Advertising: Chad Newsome and the Meaning of Paris in The Ambassadors,” ELH, 49 (Spring 1982), 99–122.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 Debord, Guy, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1973), paragraph 10.Google Scholar

21 James, “Alphonse Daudet,” loc. cit. 230. Robert Clark, in seeking a different kind of historical reading for James, understands his art of surface as his “characteristic elegance of suggestion” which resists the Eliotic “realistic” truth of fiction. Clark finds parallels in the “retinal effect” of the Impressionists and the Cubists' representation of “temporally discrete perspectives” in the “same plane” in order to place James within the “late nineteenth century shifts from realism to relativism” where there is a movement from a “transparent mimesis” to a “foregrounding of the techniques that mark out the aesthetic object as a distinct commodity.” But, he argues, these parallels also “mask an important peculiarity of James's work: what he represents is not the perception of an object-in-itself but the perception of a fiction,” “The Transatlantic Romance of Henry James,” in Gray, Richard (ed.), American Fiction: New Readings (London & Totowa, N.J.: Vision Press and Barnes & Noble, 1983), 108Google Scholar. The point is that this representation is not a “peculiarity” unless it is intended as a “singularity” – this perception is the very feature of James's most alert historicism since within the images whereby consumption reconstructs the experiential world, the “object-in-itself” can never retain such innocence. Nevertheless, Clark is right in his implication that James's fiction is very much a spatial affair because consumption itself relies upon space at the expense of time (the display and spectacle of commodities suppress always the history of their production). Georges Poulet's brief but dense pages on James recognize his spatial art as an act of suppression in its fear for the loss of the self amongst an “inexhaustible reservoir of memories,” a fear which occasions a specific tactic: “Instead of allowing memory constantly to enlarge and deepen the field of consciousness, James acts to restrain it, to give it limits. These limits are those of the present. Life is a surface affair.” Poulet thus argues: “The Jamesian novel, therefore, will most often be divested of the past. Its characters undergo an infinity of experiences and incessantly discover themselves in new relationships with each other, but these experiences and relationships are oftenest the direct effect of present junctures; they are a new disposition of beings that corresponds to their displacement. An affair of the surface, and not one of depth; a movement in space, and not one in time. Ordinarily the Jamesian character has little duration; or rather his duration is not composed, like that of the Flaubertian or Tolstoian character, of a temporal density; between his immediate existence and the depths of his mind stretch no thick layers of memories,” Studies in Human Time (New York: Harper, 1959), 350–1.Google Scholar But history is not only an affair of memory, of the past, particularly in an American context which is distinctly spatial. Frederick J. Hoffman touches on this when he claims that the “American self” has always been “a man in motion, a man occupying a space so long as it served him, and always aware that there were other spaces to inhabit.” Implicit here is the great Jamesian lesson of variousness, of the alternatives available for design and redesign in the sense that “historical progress is most satisfactorily described as a succession of events in which the self experiences space, knows it in the act of occupying it, and alters its form to adjust to the experience of knowing it,” “Freedom and Conscious Form: Henry James and the American Self,” Virginia Quarterly Review, 37 (Spring 1961), 269, 270–1. James in general, then, belongs to the singularly American tradition of history as space rather than as time, and within which resides the key notion of alterability. And to sketch broadly, this tradition is one of the reasons why the consumer society developed its origins and its practices so stridently and so rapidly in America rather than anywhere else.Google Scholar

22 The postmodernist notion that the unity of subject is wholly dependent upon a suppression of those others against whose difference it locates itself is a reworking of that decentering project so characteristic of American thought during the nineteenth century and achieving its apotheosis in Adams, Henry's claim that “The object of study is the garment, not the figure,” The Education of Henry Adams, ed. Samuels, Ernest (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), xxx.Google Scholar An excellent recent discussion of this project (although, oddly, it neglects any analysis of James) is Kronick, Joseph G., American Poetics of History: From Emerson to the Moderns (Baton Rouge & London: Louisiana State University Press, 1984).Google Scholar

23 James's earliest lesson in literary variousness came from the “latitude” proclaimed by Hawthorne's account of the Romance, and it was sharpened considerably by his acquaintance with Robert Louis Stevenson. His 1887 essay on Stevenson sets the Scotsman's “liberty” against the potentially “meagre” realism of the French: “The breath of the novelist's being is his liberty; and the incomparable virtue of the form he uses is that it lends itself to views innumerable and diverse, to every variety of illustration. There is certainly no other mould of so large a capacity. The doctrine of M. Zola himself, so meagre if literally taken, is fruitful, inasmuch as in practice he romantically departs from it,” “Robert Louis Stevenson,” in Smith, Janet Adam (ed.), Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. cit., 149.Google Scholar

24 Bakhtin, Mikhail, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Holquist, Michael, trans. Emerson, Caryl and Holquist, Michael (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 276.Google Scholar

25 James, , Preface, to Roderick Hudson, in Literary Criticism. French Writers …, ed. cit., 1041.Google Scholar

26 Bakhtin, , op. cit., 276–7.Google Scholar

27 Posnock, Ross, “Henry James, Veblen and Adorno: The Crisis of the Modern Self,” Journal of American Studies, 21 (04 1987), 37–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Consequently, Posnock claims, “What is natural for James is the act of representation, which made him from childhood onwards conceive life as a canvas to be embroidered, and human interaction a social text to be read and interpreted” (45–46). Posnock's careful deployment of domestic vocabulary here enables us to see that such textuality is not a choice for James, not a symptom of that removed artistry to which he has been so long condemned by commentators, but the very history through which he lived, the history of consumption's turning the world into the images, signs, and codes of spectacle. What James's art “represents” above all is a representation of this history.

28 Sundquist, Eric J., “The Country of the Blue,” in Sundquist, Eric J. (ed.), American Realism: New Essays (Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), n, 12, 14.Google Scholar

29 Peggy McCormack has provided a good commentary on this production of display, of characteristics: “Society immediately sets prices upon merchandizable assets such as physical attractiveness, mental acuity, culture, title, or money itself. Hence, despite their frequent lack of real jobs, James's characters do work, but the products of their labor are their social personae,” “The Semiotics of Economic Language in James's Fiction,” American Literature, 58 (12 1986), 541Google Scholar. McCormack's list omits manners, which arguably present the most expressive arena for consumption's reconstructions of the self: an invaluable foray into this question is Richard Godden, “Some Slight Shifts in the Manner of the Novel of Manners,” in Bell, Ian F. A. (ed.), Henry James: Fiction as History, ed. cit., 156–83.Google Scholar

30 Although it is concerned principally with the 1920s, some pertinent propositions on this issue are raised in Featherstone, Mike, “The Body in Consumer Culture,” Theory, Culture and Society, I (1982), 18–32Google Scholar. It is a mistake to assume that an analysis of consumer culture's effects upon literary techniques may only properly take the turn of the century as its starting-point. Halttunen, Karen's excellent Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1982)Google Scholar provides abundant evidence that the issues of self, authenticity, and performativeness foregrounded by consumption are urgent for a consideration of social and commercial manners from the 1850s onwards.