Cornelius CROWLEY, «Partial Portraits of James the Traveller», Viatica [En Ligne], N°HS3, Mis À Jour Le : 17/02/2020, URL

Pour citer cet article : Cornelius CROWLEY, «Partial Portraits of James the Traveller», Viatica [En ligne], n°HS3, mis à jour le : 17/02/2020, URL : https://revues-msh.uca.fr:443/viatica/index.php?id=1138. Les articles de la revue Viatica sont protégés par les dispositions générales du Code de la propriété intellectuelle. Conditions d’utilisation : respect du droit d’auteur et de la propriété intellectuelle. Licence CC BY : attribution. L’Université Clermont Auvergne est l’éditeur de la revue en ligneViatica. Partial Portraits of James the Traveller Cornelius CROWLEY CREA (EA 370), Université Paris Nanterre Abstract:The aim of the article is to offer a less solemn and less frontal perspective on the Jamesian opus by way of his travel writing, a practice inevitably seasonal and occasional: the jottings of a tourist or traveller. There emerges a renewed sense of the Jamesian relation to the world, to time and to place, in terms of the responsiveness to things seen. Experience is an affair of circumstance and chance, art an adjustment to and an honouring in words of the occasionality of life, travel in time. Key words: Henry James, expatriation, travel, travail, occasional writing Résumé : L’objet de l’article est d’offrir une perspective moins frontale sur l’œuvre de James, en partant des écrits suscités par sa pratique du voyage. Ainsi peut-on aborder l’œuvre de biais, par ces écrits saisonniers que sont les notes appelées par le voyage, le lieu visité. Ainsi émerge la relation au monde, au temps et aux lieux, qui est au fondement de l’œuvre de James. L’expérience du monde est une affaire de circonstances. Et l’art une affaire d’ajustement à cette modalité aussi occasionnelle qu’indépassable de la vie. Mots-clés : Henry James, expatriation, travail, voyage, écriture de circonstance Partial Portraits is the title of a book published by Henry James in 1888, bringing together essays on his peers in the art of fiction. “Partial,” because for James all portraits, in painting or writing, are undertaken from a specific angle or point of view. “Partial” also, because the portrayal can only achieve its degree of completion by way of what it chooses to leave out, through the operation which he repeatedly refers to as the necessary “foreshortening,” raccourci, in the representation of what is there to be taken in, from a particular angle and moment in time.1 Raccourci can in turn be retranslated as “short-cut,” thus taking us back to travel and to travel writing. The traveller who writes is not a native of the place visited. The claim to be counted as a contributor to the genre is conditional on the absence of familiarity with or rootedness in the place depicted. As a corollary, the sketch thus written is not primarily intended for those native to the place. Henry James displays the credentials of a travel writer of the epoch of liberal intercontinental exploration, writing for a largely anglophone and in the beginning an American readership of things seen in continental Europe and in Great Britain, though not in Ireland. And if he also writes as a travel writer in his native place, this is due to the still to be explored immensity of America and, much later, is an effect of his European “expatriation,” the existential and enabling condition of estrangement that is crucial to his way of seeing and taking things in. Of Ralph Touchett, the narrator of The Portrait of a Lady indicates that “He wintered abroad, as the phrase is; basked in the sun, stopped at home when the wind blew, went to bed when it rained, and once or twice, when it had snowed overnight, almost never got up again” (1995 45). The indications are consistent with the nineteenth century possibilities of curative travelling, south to the winter sun, upwards to the alpine sanatorium. The sentence that follows takes us inwards, sketching the dispositions of this invalid traveller, suggesting what he draws on to survive the ordeal of estrangement and thus bear things as they fall out: “A secret hoard of indifference—like a thick cake a fond old nurse might have slipped into his first school outfit—came to his aid and helped to reconcile him to sacrifice.” The viator is here kitted out with a curiously Dickinsonian viaticum, a frugal treasure of “indifference” or lack. My intention is to offer a series of “partial,” facetted notations of James as traveller and writer. We could also add: of James the reader or, in the most elementary sense, James as a human alive, travelling, writing, reading, till the death. This will not produce any overview of James the traveller. What is evident today, when we dip into the textual immensity of the Jamesian oeuvre, is the extent to which the qualification James the Master is a misnomer. The opus is a formidable and open-ended non-totality, its incompletion determining the ongoing and reiterated partiality of our responses. The “Sublimely Ridiculous” In November 1872, James published his essay “A European Summer: From Chambéry to Milan.” He is unimpressed by Chambéry, which “as a town, however, affords little premonition of Italy (2016 102). He notes the engineering exploits, the compression of time and space, anticipates the “mysterious delights in entering Italy whizzing through an eight-mile tunnel” (101). He is equally unimpressed by Milan, a city not “distinctly Italian,” stating that “[t]he long Austrian occupation, perhaps, did something to Germanize its physiognomy.” James here remains predictable in his Keatsian aspiration to the “warm south”; consistent also in the resistance to the Germanic world he would keep to the end, to the years of the Great War. So far, nothing to contradict the expectations of a polite anglophone readership. There follows a shift to another plane of vision and response in writing, an exhilaration stemming from the observer’s engagement with the relics of S. Charles Borromeo in the Cathedral: This holy man lies at his eternal rest in a small but gorgeous sepulchral chapel, beneath the pavement of the church, before the high altar; and for the modest sum of five francs, you may have his shrivelled mortality unveiled, and gaze at it in all the dreadful double scepticism of a Protestant and a tourist. The Catholic Church, I believe, has some doctrine that its ends justify at need any means whatsoever; a fortiori, therefore, nothing it does can be ridiculous. The performance in question, of which the good San Carlo fit les frais, as the French say, was impressive, certainly, but as great grotesqueness is impressive. […] [T]o form an idea of the étalage, you must imagine that a jeweller, for reasons of his own, has struck an unnatural partnership with an undertaker. The black, mummified corpse of the saint is stretched out in a glass coffin, clad in his mouldering canonicals, mitred, crosiered, and gloved, and glittering with votive jewels. It is an extraordinary mixture of death and life; the desiccated clay, the ashen rags, the hideous little black mask and skull, and the living, glowing, twinkling splendor of diamonds, emeralds, and sapphires. Whatever may be the better opinion as to whether the Church is in a decline, I cannot help thinking that she will make a tolerable figure in the world so long as she retains this capital of bric-a-brac, scintillating throughout Christendom at effectively scattered points. You see, I am forced to agree after all, in spite of the sliding shutter and the profane exhibitory arts of the sacristan, that the majesty of the Church saves the situation, or made it, at least, sublimely ridiculous (110-111). Point of view is reflexive, the illumination operates both inward and outward. James begins by acknowledging the partiality of his stance: the “double scepticism of a Protestant and tourist.” From Christopher Newman and Henrietta Stackpole to Waymarsh in The Ambassadors, there are numerous variations on the persona of the Protestant tourist abroad. Here, in representing his own stance as an American tourist, James adds an additional turn of the screw. The result is a condition of outer and inner, subjective and civilizational, undecidability, evident in the qualification of the relation between the tourist and the spectacle: a “grotesqueness” “impressive,” a situation “sublimely ridiculous,” an effect of the “unnatural partnership” between jeweller and undertaker. At this point, the normative position of Protestant scepticism is irreversibly unmoored, as it will be for Lambert Strether. For the young Henry James, the exposure of an American Protestant consciousness to European spectacle is in no sense a source of regret at having hitherto “missed out” on opportunities and spectacles. The décalage is productive of insight and exhilaration. James the tourist acknowledges the capacity of the Church to elaborate a remarkable show, devised from “an extraordinary mixture of death and life.” While he is charmed beyond the posture of Protestant scepticism, this does not involve the espousal of an antimodernist Catholicism, in the Italy of the 1870s. The posture is infinitely beyond the stance of any “double scepticism” or any regressive dogmatism: it is the concomitant of a delectation in the various spectacles of the world which, like the more local and frivolous illusions of the Parisian stage, are the fabrications concocted in the interests of a work of civilizational management, which James takes in with a coldly lucid anthropological eye, acknowledging that an institution such as the Catholic Church has no choice, if it is to maintain the display and the conviction thus generated, but to carry on with its spectacular tricks. A Jamesian perspectivism, far beyond the stability of any progressive, rationalist disdain, might be Nietzschean.

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