A.-C. Le Reste

Intertextualizing The Princess Casamassima: Realism and Reference(s) by Anne-Claire Le Reste As Hyacinth strolls about Medley, we are told that “[h]is whole walk was peopled with recognitions” (PC 301)—which is just how readers making their way through The Princess Casamassima are likely to feel. Tintner and Edel called it “James’s ‘library’ book” (79), and it is indeed, in Brodhead’s words, “the most variously and visibly derivative of all his novels” (144)1—a text peppered with references to writers and books, hints scattered along the path, ready to be picked up, glaring defiance at critics. Thus Hyacinth recalls reading out to Pinnie “the works of Dickens and Scott” (153), and sees a character in Madeira Crescent which makes him think of Mr. Micawber (417, 477). It is probably a different kind of literature that is referred to when we are told about Pinnie’s “conviction that [Hyacinth] belonged, ‘by the left hand’, as she had read in a novel, to an ancient and exalted race” (58). Is he acquainted with these works? One might think so, since Lady Aurora’s manners remind him of “that ‘best breeding’ which he had seen alluded to in novels portraying the aristocracy” (266), and Sholto’s “romantic chambers”, “somehow of Bulwer’s novels” (232). We know at any rate that at fifteen he read the “essays of Lord Bacon” (114), and probably a lot more, for he finds himself discussing “the Ruskinian theories of Venice” with Lady Aurora (427), and Schopenhauer with the Princess (329, 394). French literature features prominently in his private library, consistently with his belief that “he look[s] like a Frenchman… like one of those he had read about in Michelet and Carlyle” (102). At the theater, he muses that “[b]eing whistled for by a princess” is “an indignity endured gracefully enough by the heroes of several French novels in which he had found a thrilling interest” (188). He is disappointed that Lady Aurora’s shelves do not boast the works of “certain members of an intensely modern school, advanced and scientific realists,” although she does “possess a few of Balzac’s novels” (264). While in Paris, he recalls “his study of the French novel” and has “a vague sense of fraternizing with Balzac and Alfred de Musset” as he sits at Tortoni’s (380). He sacrifices to local color by reading the works of Leopardi in Venice (395), but back in London, his moments spent with the Princess by the fire at Madeira Crescent evoke “the idea of the vie de province, as he had read about it in French works” (482). However, it is in that very room that he reads Browning’s Men and Women out loud to the Princess (487), for when it comes to poetry, he rather favors his British heredity. Audley Court, the name of the Muniments’ neighborhood, makes him think of Tennyson, and he later offers the Princess a new-bound edition of his poems (254). At Medley, he drinks a liquor that “remind[s] him of some lines in Keats—in the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’” (300), while the Princess, who remains uninterested in poetry, calls his attention to “a story of M. Octave Feuillet” in the Revue des deux mondes (307). Consequently, she immediately appears to him as “a sudden incarnation of the heroine of M. Feuillet’s novel” —while the way she addresses her cook reminds him of how “the three Musketeers spoke to their lackeys” (308). Still at Medley, Madame Grandoni reads “a French book, in a pink cover” (319, 352)—quite different undoubtedly from the “volume of heavy work on Labour and Capital” that the Princess later reads at Madeira Crescent (448). As for the Princess’s literary references, they are usually rather vague, as she tells Lady Aurora that her “being there alone in [her] great dull house, with all [her] charities and devotions” is “like something in some English novel” (432). There’s also the tantalizingly unidentified genre referred to by the Princess, when she describes Hyacinth’s vow as “too absurd” and “too vague,” “like some silly humbug in a novel” (485). Not to mention, of course, the many volumes 1. Brodhead singles out The Princess as being particularly allusive, but he also underlines that James’s novels are in general organized “from a master,” quoting Washington Square (Balzac), The Portrait of a Lady (Eliot), and The Bostonians (Hawthorne). He then concludes that “the novel becomes, in James’s hands, a form written in continual awareness of a fixed set of literary precedents” (117). Because The Princess has been considered as James’s most “realist” novel, I will try to examine the implications of such an acute “awareness” on the strategies of representation at work in the novel. Le Reste, Anne-Claire. “Intertextualizing The Princess Casamassima : Realism and Reference(s)”. EREA 3.2 19 (automne 2005): 19-32. <www.e-rea.org> that Hyacinth handles as a bookbinder, and which he appreciates, like Poupin, with a sharp lettering on the back (115), indirectly drawing attention to the materiality of the book we are holding as readers—an aspect that is further emphasized by Hyacinth’s stated wish to write himself, to become a maker of books in both meanings. If, in Levine’s words, realism “seems intent on burning libraries,” then it would appear that The Princess is one of these realist novels that is not trying to “avoid the implications of its own textuality” (9).2 No wonder then, that the reception of the novel has been characterized by “a solid round of influence hunting” (Lee 109). The preface, written twenty years later, accentuates the intertextualizing temptation, as it seems to consist partly in an exercise in literary name- dropping. James mentions Shakespeare, Cervantes, Balzac, Fielding, Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, George Meredith, George Eliot, Jane Austen, “old Dumas”, Zola, and Trollope, yet without acknowledging them as influence, contrary to what he did, for instance, in the preface to volume XVI of the New York Edition, in which he stated that the origin of “Paste” consisted in “the ingenious thought of transposing the terms of one of Guy de Maupassant’s admirable contes” (FW 1242). Let me first clarify my use of the word “intertextuality,” a term which, as Walker notes in his own avowedly intertextual reading of The Princess, “can mean anything and everything” (xvii-xviii). I will be using Rifatterre’s definition as “the perception, by the reader, of relationships between one work and others that have preceded or followed it,”3 since I will be focusing on the overwhelmingly intertextual reception of a novel which has consistently been considered as James’s epitome of realist writing. Thus what I mean by “intertextualizing” the novel is reading it with, or against, other texts, but I will narrow down Rifatterre’s definition, as critics mostly did, to works anterior to The Princess, i.e. to references viewed as influence.4 This includes both the study of sources, such as Tintner’s—characterized by Walker as a “biographical view”—and Walker’s own emphasis on the effects of intertextuality on the reader, a theoretical perspective which he defines as “more concerned with how to read a text than with … how James’s text came to be written” (149), although, as I hope to show, both approaches are deeply linked by the search for buried meaning through the summoning of prior texts. 2. The Portrait of a Lady (1881) is in many respects another “library book,” although here James rather pointedly declines to give names, at least in the original version. The references to Eliot and Browning in chapter 4, for instance, were added for the New York Edition. Those mostly unnamed books also remain strikingly unread—most characters seem to use them for composure rather than for entertainment or instruction. Isabel herself is repeatedly portrayed, as in chapter 19, “with a volume to which her attention [is] not fastened” (402). It thus comes as no surprise that, although Isabel is supposed to be so “literary” (746), Ralph leaves her the furniture of Gardencourt, “exclusive of the pictures and books” (790). 3. “L’intertexte est la perception, par le lecteur, de rapports entre une œuvre et d’autres qui l’ont précédée ou suivie” (4, emphasis added). Kristeva, who defines intertextuality as the dynamics of all texts and opposes it to the static aspect of the intertext as object, focuses more on the links between “écriture” and “parole” than on the reader-text relationship as such (Séméiotikè 54). As for Genette, he emphatically denies the validity of such a relationship, writing that he is not interested in tracking down, in a work of fiction, the partial, localized, elusive echoes of any other work, whether posterior or anterior, because such an attitude would grant the hermeneutic activity of the reader a part that he finds “hardly bearable”: “Je puis également traquer dans n’importe quelle oeuvre les échos partiels, localisées et fugitifs de n’importe quelle autre, antérieure ou postérieure. Une telle attitude aurait pour effet de verser la totalité de la littérature universelle dans le champ de l’hypertextualité, ce qui en rendrait l’étude peu maîtrisable; mais surtout, elle fait un crédit, et accorde un rôle, pour moi peu supportable, à l’activité herméneutique du lecteur—ou de l’archilecteur ” (19, emphasis added). 4. I will thus exclude the body of works studying the relationship between James’s novel and other texts—often posterior to the writing of The Princess—from a comparative angle that does not focus on how the interaction between both text creates meaning for and in James’s novel, but rather on similarities and differences between the novels in question concerning a specific point.

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