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Late Henry James: Money, War and the End of Writing

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Late Henry James: Money, War and the End of Writing LATE HENRY JAMES: MONEY, WAR AND THE END OF WRITING by EZRA NIELSEN A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Literatures in English Written under the direction of Myra Jehlen And approved by ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey OCTOBER, 2010 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Late Henry James: Money, War and the End of Writing By Ezra Nielsen Dissertation director: Myra Jehlen My dissertation, Late Henry James: Money, War and the End of Writing, revises the dominant account of Henry James’s late work by reading it as an urgent response to its contemporary history. I hope to show that the impenetrability of James’s late work articulated his increasing perplexity before alien and intractable historical developments. In my account, James’s notoriously dense and elusive late style is in fact a plastic, encompassing, indeed lucid effort to understand certain social and political transformations. James’s late writings might be described as evolving toward a Conradian view of history, a sense that the modern social order is inherently rapacious and violent. For instance, The Golden Bowl, James’s last major completed novel, is a fiction of moral, historical, and epistemological crises, intertwined in the form of an all-encompassing, tortuously convoluted late style. His old themes and their moral orders have evolved into ii their own exaggerated convolutions, indeed have developed into irresolvable moral contradictions. Money, ascendant and aggressive, seems increasingly to define and control the moral realm. The American girl (a perennial James type) has become almost monstrous; self-consciously wielding her money, she imposes an American innocence that now appears as a moral deformation, as a moral darkness. The argument of my dissertation, as I have just described it, is embodied as well in its method, a way of thinking, of reading, of writing, and of teaching literature. This method arises from the principle that literary objects are instruments of knowledge. Attending to the formal development of James’s late work reveals a rich epistemological horizon that encompasses nothing less than the historico-political world. iii Table of Contents Abstract: ii-iii Preface: 1-6 A Note on Method: 7-33 Introduction: 34-63 Chapter 1: Writers at the End of Time: Joseph Conrad and Henry James: 64-90 Chapter 2: Money and Morality: The Golden Bowl: 91-149 Chapter 3: The Return of the Novelist: The American Scene and Related Writings: 150-216 Chapter 4: The First World War and the End of Writing: 217-256 C.V.: 267 iv 1 Preface This dissertation shifted in a radical way in the process of writing and researching. I take this shift as evidence that my work has been a success. I began my dissertation with a proposal whose premise is that the notoriously knotty and elusive quality of Henry James’s late writing was an instrument of investigation. Critics often interpret this complexity as a retreat from the world; I proposed essentially the contrary, that their rebarbative density was a means of apprehending that world. I wanted to argue for James’s writing, and by implication the activity of literary writing as such, as an epistemological process rather than as an ideological means of suppressing latent political and historical content, as a decorative deployment of the play of language, or as the abstract articulation of certain philosophical systems. Literature does not invent arbitrarily, its formal unfolding an invention that also discovers. Following Myra Jehlen’s work I define the term form as the discontinuous apprehension of content (the continuous discontinuity of a work’s incarnation) across a temporal duration, a version, therefore, of time, time materialized in self-consciously shaped language. By forming, or through the exercise of form, a writer grasps more thoroughly the complexity that inheres in a given content, the content becoming what it is within its formal incarnation and nowhere else. Form is a continual doing, an ongoing revision, clarification, addition, correction—the evolution of knowledge. Thus, I suggested the notorious difficulty of James’s late prose, with its long, long conversations in which characters do not seem to conclude but to undergo a process of apprehension, its deixis, obliquity and ellipsis, its profusion of metaphors, its semi-colons and dashes, its subjunctive mood and ventriloquized speech, its dependent clauses and its 2 constant circling of its subject without ever seeming to arrive at a final formulation, were all ways of finding out about its subject. I began my proposal with a passage from James’s 1907 introduction to Shakespeare’s The Tempest where he writes of Shakespeare’s writing that, “It is by his expression of it exactly as the expression stands that the particular thing is created, created as interesting, as beautiful, as strange, droll or terrible—as related, in short, to our understanding or our sensibility; in consequence of which we reduce it to naught when we begin to talk of either of its presented parts as matters by themselves” (American Writers 1212). The form of Shakespeare’s writing was one and one with its content, the form a realization of the content’s limits and possibilities. My proposal held off from establishing a definitive argument because I believe that writing, including academic writing, is a process of discovery. I suggested as much in that document, insisting that I could only outline a method: “I am certain only that as I proceed this method will produce results.” The results came, and they came in the way discoveries often do, as a shock and a disorienting departure, but not as a rejection of the original route of my curiosity. I wrote a first chapter that described the anti-conclusive form of James’s late writing, the way, for instance, his novels end without resolutions because only by refusing conclusions could he leave his subject open. My dissertation radically changed after I wrote that initial, but now excised, chapter: if James wrote in an underdetermined way, I now realized, in the expectation of new evidence, these late writings tend toward closure, obliquity resolving into transparency (the ending of The Golden Bowl (1904), I came to see, was a moral crisis that emerges in tandem with a formal crisis of what one might describe as Maggie Verver’s morally ambiguous over- 3 resolution). My dissertation developed toward a concern with the breakdown of James’s late style of writing as it encountered a modern world that was the dissolution of the Nineteenth Century world he cherished. James was amazed Shakespeare had stopped writing with The Tempest, what he claimed was his greatest play. Later I came to think about how James’s own work would come to an abrupt end when, with the crash of Europe in the First World War, he would break off work on The Ivory Tower (written 1914, publ. posthumously 1917), never returning to fiction and despairing in his letters for the remaining year and a half of his life that he had lived to see the catastrophe of the war. James wrote in 1915 to Hugh Walpole that, “Reality is a world that was to be capable of this—and how represent that horrific capability, historically latent, historically ahead of it? How on the other hand not represent it either—without putting into play mere fiddlesticks?” (LHJ 2: 446). The quandary of the contradiction is irreducible: the war demanded an account and it remained unaccountable. That James’s writing collapsed in the context of the war, I thought, might suggest something that had been overlooked about the trajectory of his late writing. My dissertation argues this is the case, that James’s late writings themselves constitute an ongoing tragedy of four acts that includes The Ivory Tower. These writings understand the modern world as a tragedy and they themselves are a tragic formal reduction, the latter but one particular demonstration of the former. James’s culmination was also a crisis, and then a catastrophe. My four chapters take up in succession The Ambassadors (written 1900-01, publ. 1903), The Golden Bowl (1904), The American Scene (1907) and, last, The Ivory Tower and James’s war essays. In The Ambassadors James returned to the subject of America 4 after twenty years. Nothing in those two decades of writing—three naturalist-like novels, five years of failed plays and a handful of novels about English social life—suggests this event. James’s return to America is so obvious, so much a part of the narrative of his achievement, that we need to recall Ludwig Wittgenstein and take that obviousness as itself an object of investigation. The Ambassadors, a major part of my first chapter, suggests that in James’s return he began to understand his native country as forecasting the moral and economic darkness of modernity. America became for James a dark continent made dark by modern economic forces. I argue that Heart of Darkness and The Ambassadors might be read alongside one another, that they tell one another’s stories. Later, Colonel Bob Assingham in The Golden Bowl, who seems to be James’s response to Conrad, suggests the way in which money, war, and cruelty and license demarcate for James’s writing the limits of knowledge. One might say Conrad was a Jamesian writer in that his fictions, like James’s, dwell in the moment of understanding, the disjunctures of knowledge. But I would like to suggest the reverse: if Conrad became a Jamesian writer, James also became a Conradian writer—in his most formidable fictions, when his characters see farthest, they see into an oncoming moral and economic darkness.
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