Henry James

A Certain Illusion

Denis Flannery

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351930918
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft

The success of a work of art, to my mind, may be measured by the degree to which it produces a certain illusion; that makes it appear to us that we have lived another life, that we have had a miraculous enlargement of experience. Henry James A concept of 'illusion' was fundamental to the theory and practice of literary representation in Henry James. This book offers readings of James' fictional and critical texts that are informed by the certainty of illusion, and links James' mode of illusion with a number of concerns that have marked novel criticism in both the recent and not-so-recent past: gender, publicity, realism, aesthetics and passion, cults of authorial personality, the narrative construction of the future, and absorption. Flannery addresses each of these concerns through close engagement with particular texts: The Portrait of a Lady, The Tragic Muse, The Wings of the Dove, and some other less familiar texts. Although cognizant of debates that have raged around James as he is read both by 'radical' and 'traditional' critics, this book's primary focus is on the specific nuances of James' texts and the interpretive challenges and pleasures they offer.

CHAPTER ONE
A Certain Illusion

The success of a work of art, to my mind, may be measured by the degree to which it produces a certain illusion; that illusion makes it appear to us for the time that we have lived another life – that we have had a miraculous enlargement of experience.

Henry James

Cher Maître,

Vous m’avez permis de Vous envoyer mon livre. Le voilà. Il a la qualité d’être court. lia été vécu ... Rien de si facile comme de raconter un rêve, mais il est impossible de pénétrer les ames de ceux qui écoutent par la force de son amertume et de sa douceur. On ne communique pas la realité poignante des illusions!

Joseph Conrad¹

What, for Henry James, was illusion? Why should the consideration of illusion be important to a reading of his work? What place, however buried, resisted or partial, could illusion have in the many critical agendas and practices which circulate today? This book does not set out to provide answers to these questions but it does set out to read Henry James informed by them. They provide a context for a journey through some of James’s work from The Portrait of a Lady to The Golden Bowl, and slightly beyond. Many books have been written on James which take a similar route and many continue to be written.² To pretend to add to their number on grounds of utter originality would be, at the very least, a mistake. Rather the very existence of so much work on James and, in a small way, the existence of this book provide reiterative evidence that James is a writer whose cultural impact has been enormous, a writer who is never totally absent from the practice of teaching and writing about literary texts even when those practices do not explicitly concern him, and one who is certainly never far away when those practices are evaluated and debated.

If we think about some of the major sea changes in literary studies, be they the formation of a Great Tradition, a certain notion of modernism, the American Renaissance, deconstruction, gender studies and queer theory – to name but a few – many of them have had foundational moments which have been readings or rereadings of Henry James. These moments have occurred within the work of early modernist critics, F. R. Leavis, F. O. Matthiessen, Shoshana Felman and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, all of whose work has had a major impact on critical practices, trends and debates and all of whose work amounts to careful, attentive and impassioned readings and reconsiderations of James’s output.³ Other critical practices, and critics, have also needed James for their formulation not as a writer who opens up new possibilities of interpretation and debate but as an object of repudiation.⁴ ‘What shall we say, then,’ Geismar intoned, ‘of a major artist who is all vision – or illusion, or enchantment, or magic – and has no recognisable life?’⁵ As if illusion and the three related terms he lists were somehow all inherently destructive and as if such a thing as illusion without ‘recognisable life’ were possible. James is, at times, almost a parody of the figure of the Dead White Male Author so tediously invoked in debates on the canon. He is, however, also the figure who has given an impetus, focus and energy to intelligent reformulations of the canon and of what it might mean to read its texts. James’s work has, therefore, not only matched and withstood but also quietly provoked many of the changes and upheavals in our strange subject.

The two quotations which begin this chapter encapsulate briefly this book’s own presuppositions about reading Henry James. The first comes from his 1883 essay ‘Alphonse Daudet’ and it makes illusion strikingly central: ‘the success of a work of art, to my mind, may be measured by the extent to which it produces a certain illusion’. While this sentence contains some predictably ambiguous aspects – what is a certain illusion? while success may be measured in terms of its production how can this measurement occur? – it is clear, even dogmatic, on the subject of how illusion and aesthetic success go hand in hand. James, therefore, constructs the idea of a novel without illusion as an impossibility. And I think it is important that he uses the word ‘illusion’, a term which combines both the sense of a perceptual error and an almost excessive representational success.⁶ This is both exemplary of and consistent with James’s ardently realist aesthetic as described by Tony Tanner: ‘from the start, James insists on the truth and reality of the novel ... on the nonfictionality of fiction’.⁷

Dogmatic in its insistence on the centrality of illusion, although frustrating for those seeking a cut-and-dried definition, James’s essay on Daudet is clear on its effect: ‘that illusion makes it appear to us for the time that we have lived another life – that we have had a miraculous enlargement of experience’ (PP, pp. 227–8). It is clearly possible, and important, to think of the illusionist possibilities of the novel in the nineteenth century in terms of analogies with the visual arts or with history, but in this quotation James goes beyond both analogies. The experience of literary illusion is presented as, to say the least, a radical transformation of the reader, providing him with another existence, producing an almost supernatural alteration in the reader’s life, mind and history. Later on in the same essay James makes some equations which reveal the socially problematic and dangerous aspect of this process, referring to ‘that illusion, that enlargement of experience, that miracle of living at the expense of others’ (PP, p. 228).

The second quotation comes from Joseph Conrad’s handwritten dedication of The Nigger of the Narcissus’ (1897) to James. The novel’s relationship to life, its autobiographical and historical reality are boldly asserted early in the dedication: ‘il a été vécu’. Conrad then goes on to use a striking phrase: On ne communique pas la realité poignante des illusions!’ In the dedication’s context this can mean firstly the poignant reality of a dream’s content, poignant because of its elusive though fascinating relationship to everyday life. In this context illusion and dream are nearly synonymous. Another reading is also possible. The poignant reality of illusion which Conrad obsequiously claims he has failed to capture can also be read as the reality not of an illusion’s, or even a dream’s, content but the reality of illusion as an event and a problem. Just as for James illusion is something which is achieved and something with far-reaching effects, so for Conrad illusion is both a question of access to a representational content and also something whose very poignant reality is a challenge to his novelistic ambitions, a phenomenon whose very reality he aspires, disappointedly, to communicate to James and his readers. In the same year Conrad, in a letter to Edward Garnett, highlighted a menacing, rather than elusive, aspect of James’s own success as an illusionist when he read The Spoils of Poynton: ‘The delicacy and tenuity of the thing are amazing. It is like a great sheet of plate glass – you don’t know it’s there till you run against it’.⁸ Here Conrad is participating, albeit metaphorically, in the very common equation of illusion and danger, an equation which James himself also made and exploited.

The word ‘illusion’ occurs throughout James’s career as a critic, from his early essays for The Atlantic Monthly and The Nation to French Poets and Novelists, to the Prefaces to the New York Edition and his 1914 essay on Browning. It is by no means confined to the 1880s, the period of ‘The Art of Fiction’ and the essay on Daudet. This instance is, however, both telling in itself and also occurs at a time when James was at both his most successful and most critical as a practitioner of novelistic illusion.

Contradictorily an indispensable and inevitable part of coming to terms with the nineteenth-century novel, illusion has also been frequently damned as theoretically naive or ideologically pernicious. For writers such as Gombrich and Christopher Cauldwell illusion was problematic because it was elusive. Gombrich pointed out that illusion was something which was intensely recognisable as it was impossible to monitor when it occurred:

Illusion, we will find, is hard to describe or analyse. For though we may be intellectually aware of the fact that any given experience is an illusion, we cannot, strictly speaking, watch ourselves having an illusion.⁹

In the 1930s Cauldwell made illusion problematic in a different way. For him, illusion was both a necessity and a danger. In Cauldwell’s work, illusion’s status necessarily derived from the equation he made between illusion and mimesis. He discussed, for example, ‘the illusion, the mimesis, which is the essence and puzzle and method of literary art’.¹⁰ Later on in the same book he went on to make another equation: ‘the route of illusion, of madness, of an unsocial and unconscious ego leading to a false conscious perception and therefore destructive behaviour’.¹¹ Historically the word ‘illusion’ bears connotations of derision, mockery, deception of the eye and deceptive appearances. In critical usage it can be used with with a revealing inconsistency which both betrays the heterogeneity and confusion of its origins and which echoes the extent to which James, among others in the nineteenth century, found it as troubling as it was enabling.

In the wake of deconstruction and critical theory, we live in an age of what has been called ‘mimetic pessimism’ which makes any discussion of something like novelistic illusion seem not only overfamiliar but almost embarrassing.¹² None the less, attempts have been made to recover the notions of illusion and magic in relation to mimesis. Michael Taussig, for example, while taking on board the virtues of constructivism also appeals ardently and, to my mind, wisely for a reawakening of ‘a sensuous sense of the real, mimetically at one with what it attempts to represent’.¹³ In a wonderful essay Elaine Scarry has developed the concept of vivacity. Scarry contrasts the ‘ordinary enfeeblement of images’, the inertness and elusiveness of persons and objects imagined as an act of will, with ‘mimetic content ... the figurai rooms and faces and weather that we mimetically see, touch and hear, though in no case do we actually do so’.¹⁴ Using the examples of Proust and Hardy, Scarry makes a compelling case for the action of literary texts as mimetic of objects, certainly, but only insofar as they are mimetic of the perception of objects. That mimesis, in turn, depends firstly on a contrast between fleeting images – the magic lantern on the wall of the young Marcel’s room in Proust, for example -and the solid wall onto which they are projected. The fleeting image in Proust’s novel could be said to produce the illusion of the solid wall, establishing solidity through contrast. Secondly, Scarry reads both Proust and the opening paragraph of Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles as containing implicit and powerful instructions to the reader in solidly and vitally constructing an imaginary scene. What Scarry calls ‘vivacity’ is part of what James calls ‘illusion’ and his explicit critical insistence on it in the essay on Daudet can be said to have as its parallel the implicit, and therefore powerfully productive, instructions to the reader which he gives, in say the opening paragraph of The Portrait of a Lady, to which the terms of Scarry’s analysis could easily and interestingly be applied. Despite the work of writers such as Taussig and Scarry and despite the fact that we also live in an age of manic postmodern mimetic efficiency, mimetic pessimism can be said, strangely, to prevail.¹⁵

More than problems of naivety, embarrassment, or a return to the sensual are involved in a certain awkwardness when illusion is discussed. There are more politicised forms of resistance to and questioning of illusion and related terms. Realism and illusion are equated, for example, with a repressive, misogynist logic of representation by Shoshana Felman in her reading of Balzac’s short story ‘Adieu’. An assumption has developed that to think of literary texts in terms of illusion is not only naive but repressive, ideologically dangerous, and almost a cause for shame, something which is more appropriate for eccentrics and poets than for theoretically informed readers.¹⁶ Few readers, myself included, and certainly few who were formed, however partially, in the explosion of theory in the 1980s would be prepared to admit to being so naive as to visualise the gorgeous Lambinet sequence in The Ambassadors or to gasp at one of the momentous occasions of discovery and recognition in The Portrait of a Lady, and to have gasped precisely because James’s text had managed to convince them, however temporarily and in the face of all evidence and all theorising to the contrary, of the reality of what it represented. What is now almost embarrassing to take on board about James is the extent to which his novels and stories are intensely successful examples of a common aspiration among writers of nineteenth-century fiction – the aspiration to make the reader respond to a text not as a written artifact but as a visual, historical and corporeal phenomenon. None the less, the failure to recognise this aspiration is surely obstructive if one wants to gain any sense, however critical, however analytic, of those texts at all.

A simple example of this aspiration and one with which James was very familiar is the opening sentence of George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859):

With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader. With this drop of ink at the end of my pen I will show you the roomy workshop of Mr Jonathan Bürge, carpenter and builder in the village of Hayslope, as it appeared on the eighteenth of June in the year of our Lord 1799.¹⁷

This sentence takes the material mode of writing and turns it into a concentrated object of visual, almost hallucinatory, contemplation and display. This reversal of the realities of writing with pen and ink – it is obviously through the dispersal rather than the compression of ink that writing is carried out – is made to stand for another level of novelistic aspiration, that from fiction to history. With the movement from writing to vision the reader is also moved back in history from 1859 to 1799. Both transitions aspire to a mimetically overwhelming effect on the reader and both work to bolster the novelist’s authority. Throughout James’s career as a critic the reader’s susceptibility to illusion is something he repeatedly assumes and on which he insists. In his 1864 essay on Sir Walter Scott he suggested: ‘to enjoy him we must become again as credulous as children at twilight’.¹⁸ This susceptibility is something which as late as 1910 he was to celebrate, albeit critically, in his story The Velvet Glove’. The gentle disparagement of Scott in the early essay, though, belies the extent to which this credulity is something demanded of themselves by James and his contemporaries, a credulity on which the status of the novel as illusion and, in the terms of the essay on Daudet, accompanying aesthetic success depend. As Michael Fried points out, this involves ‘making the reader visualise with special acuteness scenes and events which are not literally there on the page but which the letters, words, sentences, and paragraphs that are on the page somehow contrive to evoke’.¹⁹ It is strangely consistent with these ambitions and with this doctrine that the work of James and Conrad contains the image of Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady or Old Singleton in The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ staring at a book and unable to see those letters, words and sentences, either because of the enormity of other concerns or else reading with such intensity and labour as to suggest that something other than reading might be in process.

As a reader who was both irritated and enabled by deconstruction and someone who did precisely (and on occasion still does) so visualise and so gasp, I find that this presents a problem. Without this necessary but suspect credulity how can James be written about, or even read, at all? Furthermore, the most sophisticated of James’s more recent readers also find it necessary to comment on his texts in a way which advertises precisely such susceptibility and the possibilities it presents. The very plot summary of ‘Adieu’ with which Felman prefaces her reading of the story and, furthermore, the plot summary of ‘The Turn of the Screw’ with which she prefaces her wonderful essay on that text suggest that critiques which throw realism and mimesis into question on sexual-political grounds cannot take place without a primary and impassioned response to the text’s realistic and, on occasion, illusionistic impact.²⁰ Similarly, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in a comment...