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Marie-Odile SALATI, « E Trope of Passage in English Hours», Viatica

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Marie-Odile SALATI, « E Trope of Passage in English Hours», Viatica Pour citer cet article : Marie-Odile SALATI, « e Trope of Passage in English Hours», Viatica [En ligne], n°HS3, mis à jour le : 14/02/2020, URL : https://revues-msh.uca.fr:443/viatica/index.php?id=1213. 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. The Trope of Passage in English Hours Marie-Odile SALATI LLSETI (EA 3706), Université Savoie Mont Blanc Abstract:This article suggests that the English Hours travel essays written in the 1870s were the crucible in which James perfected his technique of literary representation. Focusing on progress across space and tropes of liminality, the study highlights the presence, as of 1872, of the scenario of ghostly vision which dramatizes the shift from observation to reflection in the author’s fiction. It also shows how the 1877 essays mirror the novelist’s ethical concerns as he was working his way towards a poetical rendering of prosaic urban modernity. Keywords: Henry James, representation, realism, liminal space, spectrality Résumé : Cet article aborde les essais des années 1870 publiés dans English Hours comme le creuset dans lequel s’est élaborée la technique de représentation jamesienne. En analysant le parcours spatial et les lieux liminaux, il fait ressortir la mise en place, dès 1872, du scénario de vision spectrale figurant le passage de l’observation à la réflexion par le langage dans l’œuvre fictionnelle de l’auteur, et dans les récits de 1877, l’ouverture d’une voie permettant de concilier le prosaïsme de la réalité urbaine moderne et les exigences éthiques de l’art. Mots-clés : Henry James, représentation, réalisme, espace liminal, spectralité In May 1872, approaching the age of thirty, Henry James set off to Europe for the avowed purpose of escorting his sister Alice and her chaperone, their aunt Kate, but with a view to outstaying his companions in order to make a name for himself as a writer (Edel, 1978 62-63; Horne 49-50). His intention was to produce travel essays, and he promptly wrote his first sketches as he toured the English countryside from Liverpool to London before moving on to France and Italy. He did not broach the subject of the capital city until after he had taken permanent abode there, turning out a new batch of essays in 1877, at a time when he was launching his career as a novelist. It is these two series of English travel writings of the 1870s, later published in English Hours (1905), that I will be mainly interested in here, because they were produced prior to or simultaneously with the author’s first engagement with novelistic fiction.1 Although James makes light of his observations in his prefatory note, because they “had sprung from an early stage of acquaintance with their general subject-matter,” being therefore “outlived” for all their “fine freshness,” the work is not to be dismissed as a minor scriptorial venture (1993 3). As the novelist-to-be attempted to consign his travel impressions, he was at the same time grappling with issues of literary representation which would be at the heart of his concerns throughout his career, having so far applied his perceptive abilities mostly to critical reviews. He was now engaging with the material world of daily experience and with the task of imparting what he saw in aesthetic terms, of transforming observation into the reflective process that informs representation in his fiction. Building on Richard Anker’s anatomy of James’s mimetic process in Le Principe spectral de la représentation, I would like to show that the essays from the 1870s recording the author’s English excursions served as a crucible for perfecting his approach to representation, offering metafictional insight into the problematic translation of scene into narrative and its attending anxieties. Travel may be read metaphorically as providing evidence of the mimetic process, understood in the sense of representation (Anker 20-21), since the accounts of James’s walks around the visited sites record both the referential person’s physical exploration of places and the reflecting subject’s endeavours to render an absent scene present. I propose to focus more specifically on the notion of passage and its different interpretative possibilities as a trope,2 since the act of representation as it will be studied here involves a passage from the material world under observation to the abstract world of meaning, which is figured in the text by elements of liminal space. Passage is also related to the idea of making connections, which was a major concern of James as a novelist, as he explained in retrospect in the preface to Roderick Hudson.3 If the task of the writer was to bring out relations conducive to meaning, besides translating scene into language as mentioned above, there were other connections that the young American visitor was anxious to make. He also needed to build bridges between his homeland and his adopted country after his Atlantic crossing, between himself and his English roots, which comprised both his Irish ancestors and the language he relied on for his artistic achievement, therefore between the alien observer and the Anglo-Saxon writer. Leon Edel has traced the complex evolution of this negotiation over time in his article “The Three Travellers in English Hours.” Finally, it was necessary for the author to relate satisfactorily to the sooty industrial city which he had elected to reside in because of the unprecedented social material it afforded him as a painter of manners. Driven to London after a disappointing one-year stay in Paris amidst the aesthetically uncongenial Naturalist circle of his French fellow-writers, he was confronted with the challenge of finding a passage in order to rise from the prosaic world of the modern city to the poetry of art. Taking the trope of passage as my main thread, I propose to highlight the narrative anxieties which Henry James wrestled with as he tried to unravel his travel impressions of England, anxieties which were intimately related to the question of literary representation. I shall first examine English Hours as the crucible in which the novelist’s scenario for dramatizing the process of representation was elaborated, focusing on the multiple occurrences of what Richard Anker has identified as a kind of “primal scene” in James, a recognizable structure that established itself in the 1872 essays. Reflecting on the scenes encountered on his English trips also led the writer to think up his own specific answers to the issue of the realist representation of the world, towards which he was working his way at the beginning of his fictional career. One of the passages I shall be dealing with therefore is the transmutation of the prosaic modern world into the poetical vision of art, which appeared as a major concern in the 1877 writings and which will be studied in the light of James’s critical assessments of the French Naturalists at the same period, relying for that purpose on an analytical reading of the river trip to Greenwich in “London at Midsummer.” Finally I shall examine the later 1888 essay “London,” which James significantly chose to place at the onset of the 1905 collection, so as to bring out its highly emblematic character as it conflates the imaginative patterns discussed in this paper and thus encapsulates the representational issues tackled by the author. The Crucible In his book Henry James. Le Principe spectral de la représentation, Richard Anker isolates a recurrent scenario throughout the novelist’s writings, which he reads as the key to an understanding of that author’s logic of representation. What these scenarios dramatize is the process of what Anker calls a “specular turn” by means of which an observed place or situation presents itself in a visible, albeit often ghostly, form as a reflection of its idea. Initially haunted by an uncontrollable play of tropes, which underwrite this presentative or, better perhaps, representative process, vision ultimately occurs in James as a mimetic supplement to the linguistic faculty of the subject. This is why voice is so often curiously lost or suppressed in intensely visual experience, the presentation of the idea occurring at the very moment when the linguistic faculty breaks down, a failure which, Anker argues, is evidence of a radical discontinuity between language and representation in the Jamesian creative process. Taking as a starting point the narrator’s encounter with May Server in The Sacred Fount, Anker further explores the spectral scenario in other fictional works like “The Turn of the Screw” and “A Jolly Corner,” tracing it back to the second of the author’s English travel essays, the description of Haddon Hall in “Lichfield and Warwick,” dated 1872 (Anker 376-381). What he refers to as the “primal scene” of representation in James displays the same elements again and again: typically a secluded spot at dusk; an inscription or a verbal statement that figures the presence of the traveller’s linguistic faculty; the sound and the circular motion of birds, more often than not in sight of a tower and other suggestions of spiraling movements, signaling the tropological structure of the speech process; the apparition of a human figure, which provides the specular basis of reflective consciousness, enabling the “reflector” to gain a degree of mastery over the uncontrollable tropological effects.4 Incidentally, as noted by critics, Jamesian landscapes in the travel writing are singularly devoid of the human figures which, in the fiction, serve as the basis of the specular turn.
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