Henry James, the “Maison Buglese,” and Dirty Hands», Viatica
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Pour citer cet article : Greg W. ZACHARIAS, «Henry James, the “Maison Buglese,” and Dirty Hands», Viatica [En ligne], n°HS3, mis à jour le : 14/02/2020, URL : https://revues-msh.uca.fr:443/viatica/index.php?id=1181. 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. Henry James, the “Maison Buglese,” and Dirty Hands Greg W. ZACHARIAS Creighton University Abstract:Henry James’s description of the appearance and behavior of traveling businessmen in the Hôtel de France section of “En Province” in A Little Tour in France is unusual, and appears to call attention to a recurrent and haunting anxiety on the part of the author that he might resemble these businessmen more than he liked to admit. The article explores James’s apparent identification with the itinerant businessman and the strategies he devised for distancing himself from them. Key words: Henry James, travel writing, shame, theatricalizing otherness. Résumé : On peut être frappé par le traitement inhabituel que Henry James réserve à l’apparence physique et au comportement des voyageurs d’affaires de l’Hôtel de France dans l’essai “En Province” de A Little Tour in France, anomalie qui indiquerait une hantise récurrente de l’auteur d’être beaucoup plus semblable à ces individus qu’il n’aurait voulu le reconnaître. L’objet de cet article est d’analyser la façon dont James semble s’identifier avec ces représentants de commerce et d’examiner les stratégies qu’il déploie pour s’en distancier. Mots-clés: Henry James, écrits de voyage, honte, altérité, théâtralisation Language as Symbolic Action and Soiled Hands Henry James’s travel writing is about far more than the descriptions of places he enjoyed and/or found interesting—though there is plenty of that; it offers another way, in addition to his fiction, autobiography and letters, to see how language functions in his representation of the drama of life. As he announces in his travel essay on Turin, “[t]o travel is, after all, to go to the play, to attend a spectacle” (James, 1995 106). In narrating the drama, the “play,” the “spectacle” of travel, James includes himself. As Kenneth Burke pointed out, those like James deploy language and thus writing as a mode of living. Burke calls such use of language “symbolic action,” through which one works out problems of living by means of idiosyncratic systems of meaning. Thus language serves those writers as “equipment for living” (1973; 1966, esp. 29-30). This short article attempts to show how James’s narration of his visit to the Hôtel de France in Narbonne, a visit which stands out for its strangeness, dramatizes an aspect of his life that troubled him, and with which he seems to have been working to come to terms. The narration of the travel essay in which he visits the Hôtel de France shows James confronting an “Other” aspect of himself as a professional writer that also confronted him in other dramas of his life. The symbolic figure or the dramatized gesture that I point to are versions of sordidness, including soiled hands and other figures of dirtiness and disgust, that constitute an important part of the travel essay I examine as well as James’s autobiography, letters, fiction, which I use as context to understand James’s meaning. Recent discussions about James and Otherness begin for me with Sara Blair’s Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation and its analysis of James’s “representation of the theatricality of culture itself” (2).1 James’s travel writing could be read as a good instance of such representation, or of what the author calls the “spectacle” of the places he visits and narrates in his writing on travel and tourism. Blair frames James’s narrative method so that his theatricalized descriptions can be more easily read in racial, ethnic, and economic terms. Such terms are important for considering the ways Otherness functions in James’s travel writing, as well as his letters, autobiographies, and fiction. According to Blair: James constructs a literary “internationalism” through which definitively national and racial feelings, aspirations, and characterologies are elaborated and considered. [...] I also argue that the literary sphere itself, and the widely varied performances comprehending that sphere, is a crucially important site of racial formation, in and through which distinctly American, Anglo-Saxon, and ‘Anglo-Saxon’ racial feelings, entangled with the pursuit of taste and the cultural good, evolve. (3) Blair’s description of “Jamesian ‘internationalism’” is matter of “widely varied performances,” which appear in James’s travel essays and other writing. Likewise, as in James’s other writing, the travel essays show “the complexity of James’s racial figures, which tend to hover between metaphor and historical fact” (Blair 5). Such representation of “metaphor” with “historical fact” describes James’s way of romanticizing the real, of converting the empirical into the symbolic through figurative language and other narrative tactics. In addition to complicating racial figures, James complicates those indicative of class. Jonah Siegel also takes up James’s representation of cultural difference. Siegel enables us to see how James’s narrative representation of cultural difference operates symbolically as Kenneth Burke’s notion of equipment of living. Like Blair, Siegel investigates the particular way James romanticizes the real, or, in James’s vocabulary, “dramatizes” it with symbolic language. The sites of Siegel’s analysis are James’s museum scenes. What takes place in those museum scenes is similar to what Blair discusses as theatricalization and what James calls dramatization. By locating his analysis in the museum, a location created for and read by tourists, Siegel brings us closer to particular narrative strategies in James’s travel writing than Blair could through her study. Siegel explains: Two motivating fantasies tend to be at stake in the art romance: the encounter with the ideal creator and the force of material and contingent experience. Yet, in spite of the longing toward the real that seems to underlie both these aspirations, texts in the tradition are characterized by repeated and flamboyant recourse to the artificial. [...] The most concrete museums instantly become emblematic in Henry James, sites at which to represent a crucial ever-negotiated relationship between a self desperately aspiring for culture and a world of culture the self cannot avoid. (16, 17) Important for Siegel in James’s representation of the museum, as in other sites of Jamesian representation, especially the travel writing, is “the intricate affiliation between romance and the foreign,” which includes the exotic, the different, the Other, through which James can attribute figurative, symbolic meaning (85). The similarity between Jamesian representation, “dramatization,” tourism, the Jamesian struggle with Otherness, and the museum, all key concepts for my discussion, appear in James’s famous account of the “Dream of the Louvre” in A Small Boy and Others (346-349), which Siegel discusses (134-138), and which exposes James’s struggle with the Other within himself. In the “Dream of the Louvre” sequence, James’s narrator recounts his own dream of himself, alone in “the Galerie d’Apollon,” where he confronts and forces away the “awful agent” that threatens him in the place that stands for “Style” (348, 346). Mastering the spectre of Style, then, enables James to feel able to control the threats imposed by the loss of self- identity. It is important that for Siegel James “pursu[es] his own ghost” (138) in the Dream of the Louvre (and other James works, such as “The Jolly Corner” via Spencer Brydon’s confrontation with the ghost of the “awful” elements of himself) because those scenes highlight the relation of James’s sense of self and Other, in which the Other becomes an emanation, a ghost, in other words a haunting part of the self. The dynamic between self and the (foreign) Other that Siegel and Blair explore is also present in the drama of James’s travel writing. The motive for class Othering in James could be a version of “Anglo-Saxon panic,” which Alex Zwerdling explains as the dominant race’s response to immigration in the later nineteenth century. The argument indicative of the panic that results from one’s confrontation with the Otherness of oneself is familiar. Zwerdling offers Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s poem, “Unguarded Gates” as an example (47). James’s representation of what he saw during his travels, and his peculiar way of including ghosts of himself in the romanticized form of that travel experience (see Zacharias), as well as class, ethnic, and racial Othering, would be features of his narrative strategy. In short, that which James Others through the theatricalization of experience he also often identifies, “feels,” or perceives as part of himself. Thus through James’s staged representations of people and places, he implicitly and explicitly represents himself and the symbolic Other as ghosts of his imagination from which he distances himself and by which, then, he defines himself. Just as Spencer Brydon’s ghostly hallucination is an Othered part of his imagined self that he must confront symbolically in order to resolve personal psychic tension, and just as James’s symbolic confrontation with his ghostly Other in the Dream of the Louvre is reputed to have enabled him to overcome an episode of depression (James, 1987 318), so does James’s dramatization of his visit to the Hôtel de France offer an example of how James’s symbolic language reveals the presence of personal tensions and his efforts to confront and overcome them.