Postmodern James

DAVID MCWHIRTER, ed., Henry James's New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 333, $39.50.

McWhirter's collection of essays takes on the long-awaited task of situating the twentyfour volume New York Edition (1907-09) and its author within a cultural/historical framework, which, to great advantage, takes in both sides of the Atlantic. Superbly forwarded by John Carlos Rowe and intelligently and usefully introduced by McWhirter, this mostly fascinating critical enterprise easily establishes itself as a must for Jamesians and a valuable read for anyone concerned with narrative theory and/or the history of the novel.

That is not to say the book is free of disappointments. J. Hillis Miller's cameo appearance, a four-page essay on "The 'Grafted' Image: James on Illustration," adds up to a lackluster comprehension of an incredibly rich problem-namely, the Alvin Langdon Coburn photogravure frontispieces, each of them made in collaboration with James. According to Miller, James deals with his fear of Coburn's photographs taking over his text (the way Cruikshank's etchings "obliterated" the Dickens of James's youth) by making sure the photos bear no direct relation to the stories but operate as "types" or "ideas." "Each photograph would thereby be kept subsidiary to the text, posing no danger of overwhelming it" (141). This same-old take on the frontispieces is still true in the narrow sense, but it does nothing to show how Coburn's photographs work with James's narratives as image-texts; nor is any mention made of the complex connection between the photos and the prefaces. With more constructive results, Ira B. Nadel's essay on "Visual Culture: The Photo Frontispieces to the New York Edition" stakes out the history of James's relation to photography in general and to Coburn in particular, paying informed attention to the dynamics between photo-aesthetics and early modern commodity culture. Here, though, we are left to ponder the highly debatable conclusion that at bottom the frontispieces are meant to add material substance to James's style, in order to win back an American audience he had lost in pursuit of high art. If the essays on the frontispieces are less than stellar, then, as James said, the images speak for themselves (103), and to that end McWhirter has included reproductions of all twenty-four of these rarely seen photos.

Of the remaining dozen essays, ranging from Julie Rivkin's excellent analysis of James's revision to the ever incisive Martha Banta's thoughts on James's "aesthetics of refusal," two stand out as particularly important. Paul B. Armstrong's "Reading James's Prefaces and Reading James" considers the relation between the Prefaces and the fiction from the standpoint of memory and desire-these latter arguably the key words in James's aesthetic lexicon. "Doubled relations proliferate in the various temporal screens deployed by these complex acts of recollection-consciousness doubling back on itself in the memory of earlier events and intentions, revision doubling back on the original creation it preserves by changing, or the consciousness of the writer of the prefaces doubling back on the experiences of rereading and revising by reflecting on these recent but still past events" (131). Armstrong shows how these "deferrals" are dramatized in the fiction, as for example in the famous recognition scene in The Ambassadors, where Strether discovers Madame de Vionnet and Chad alone in a situation that can be interpreted in terms of desire only when Strether remembers the scene several hours hence. Likewise, the reader of any given volume will defer "future acts of interpretation" until the novel or tale doubles back on its preface. When this happens the reader's experience is the same as Strether's, only now the retroactively discovered intimacy is between preface and fiction. Which is to say that the prefaces are involved with rather than ancillary to the narratives they simultaneously anticipate and memorialize. By this same logic one might be lead to say that in all of these "acts of recollection" James allegorizes deferred action, the resubjectification process that doubles back on the primal scene and the origin of desire. From here on, in my estimation, the prefaces and the novels and tales (along with the frontispieces) ought to be read in Armstrong's transgressive terms: as hybridized text they negate the modernist law of pure form and thereby constitute a postmodern New York Edition.

In an earlier and by now notorious essay on "The Beast in the Closet," Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes James's aesthetic in terms of "fisting-as-ecriture." In her present essay, on "Shame and Performativity Henry James's New York Edition Prefaces," she extends her reading into two related areas, which can be generalized as (first) shame and the inner child and (second) picture and scene as performativity. I will not elaborate on Sedgwick's ground-breaking analysis here, except to extend the logic of deferred action, which is central to Sedgwick's argument as well as Armstrong's. If the primal scene is the origin of desire, it is also the origin of shame. We might remember, for instance, that the infant Wolfman reacts to the sexual excitation of watching his parents copulate by defecating (this, according to Freud, is a common response to the primal scene). The pain of the stool passing in his bowels causes the little Wolfman to cry out, which causes his parents to freeze, their scandalized gaze locked on the eyes of the self-exposed voyeur. As Lacan says of such moments, "when are these sounds heard? At the moment when ... [a] gaze surprises him in the function of voyeur, disturbs him, overwhelms him and reduces him to a feeling of shame."

As Kaja Silverman and others have suggested, it is this shameful tableau vivant that James's subject recollects in deferred action. It is here, too, in this suddenly petrified moment of perception, that Sedgwick's notion of Jamesian performativity plays out in the way "'picture,' as a descriptive... principle of composition, inflicts on 'scene' as a performative one," resulting in what James is happy to call "deviation" (222). Sedgwick says of those bearing witness to these Jamesian events that such an audience is "offered the privilege of sharing in his exhibitionistic enjoyment and performance of a sexuality organized around shame" (229). In the prefaces especially, shame is mixed with "the smell of shit ... the smell of a cherished identity performed through the process of turning inside out" (235). This inversion, or "queerness," informs "one's relation to one's own past as a relationship, intersubjective as it is intergenerational" (215). But again, the missing link here is that it is deferred action that returns the adult to the originary site of shame (and performativity) and there re-introduces her to her be-shitted, voyeur-turned-inside-out exhibitionist inner child. These primal visitations always mark what Lacan describes as a "turning point where the subject restructures himself." In short, deferred action further constitutes a postmodern New York Edition.

Among other contributions-several of them lively and provocative, all of them substantial and valuable-there are essays from Jerome McGann, Alfred Habegger, and Michael Anesko. McWhirter rounds off the collection with three useful appendixes: a "Bibliography and Publication History of the New York Edition"; a "Chronological List of Secondary Works on the New York Edition"; and Ira B. Nadel's extremely valuable compilation, "Henry James, Alvin Langdon Coburn, and the New York Edition: A Chronology."

GEORGE SMITH, Maine College of Art

Copyright Novel, Inc. Spring 1997
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