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The Preface As Stage: the Theatrical Trope and the Performance of Authorial Identities in the Nineteenth Century

The Preface As Stage: the Theatrical Trope and the Performance of Authorial Identities in the Nineteenth Century

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2017v70n1p265

THE PREFACE AS STAGE: THE THEATRICAL TROPE AND THE PERFORMANCE OF AUTHORIAL IDENTITIES IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Geraldo Magela Cáfaro* Universidade Estadual de Montes Claros Montes Claros, MG, BR Abstract his explores references to the theatre in prefaces by Charles Dickens, Nathaniel , and . Particular emphasis is given to the way these authors employ igures such as stage manager and dramatist to reach their and project authorial images. he igures in question are historicized and discussed in light of the concepts identiied by the terms performative and theatre of images and the argument proposed is that references to the theatre tensions between self-display and self-concealment, as well as between the assertion of authority and its subversion and fragmentation in nineteenth-century prefatory writing. Keywords: Preface; heatre; Authorship; Performance; Nineteenth Century

Critics and authors in general have oten resorted than the and a more popular form of to spatial such as threshold, doorstep, and entertainment. Although the genre is the underlying vestibule to refer to prefaces and other introductory instance of authority in most cases, this authority is best matter. While these metaphors illuminate the role perceived in a host of igures and theatrical elements prefaces have traditionally played in ofering a transition evoked by preface . he two main igures I shall to the books they antecede, an analysis of other spatial be concerned with in my readings are the stage manager metaphors may show how these texts also served as and the dramatist. I shall also give particular attention loci of enunciation and platforms for self-fashioning to the stage, the controlling of this essay and and the performance of authorship. his is the case of one of the loci of enunciation for preface speakers to the theatrical trope used by authors in the nineteenth perform authorial roles. he idea of authorship as century. his trope foregrounds the performative performance has been frequently used in analyses aspect of authorship and bears witness to the authors’ of the authors under consideration. In my readings painstaking search for legitimacy and authority. By of the prefaces I draw from studies such as Mario examining examples from Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Ortiz-Robles’s (2011); Joseph Litvak’s (1992); and Eve Hawthorne, and Henry James, I shall argue that Kosofsky Sedgwick’s (2003). In addition to helping references to the theater in these authors’ prefatory in the analysis of authors such as Dickens and James, writing reveal tensions between self-display and Litvak and Sedgwick ofer, respectively, the historical self-concealment, as well as between authorial self- and theoretical bases for my discussion of the theatrical fashioning and the fragmentation of the author into trope in the prefaces. he two main concepts I shall diferent selves. be working with are the performative and the theatre he authority of the theater in the nineteenth of images, the latter of which I draw from Reinaldo century stemmed from its being a much older Marques (2012).

* Professor of in English at the Department of Comunicação e Letras from the Universidade Estadual de Montes Claros (Unimontes). His research interests include nineteenth-century , comparative literature, , and authorship history. His email address is [email protected]

Esta obra tem licença Creative Commons 266 Geraldo Magela Cáfaro, he preface as stage: the theatrical trope and the performance of authorial identities...

In Caught in the : heatricality in the Nineteenth- take on “performativity,” especially in century (1992), Joseph Litvak contends and J. Hillis Miller, inds a “dislinkage precisely of that nineteenth-century by Jane Austen, Charles cause and efect between the signiier and the world” Dickens, and Henry James destabilize the “distinction (Sedgwick 7). here is also in de Man, as Sedgwick between a society of spectacle and a society of notes, the possibility of seeing the relationship surveillance” (ix). he nineteenth century, according between the performative and its reference as one to Litvak, was marked by a “fall from the theatricality of “torsion” and “mutual perversion” (7). Given the of eighteenth-century culture into the world of odd nature of the prefaces being examined, turned domesticity, subjectivity, and psychology, whose both to the reader and to the “inmost me” of the intimate, personalized scale, far from providing refuge speaker, all of the above perspectives are pertinent to from surveillance, installs it…” (ix). But as he goes on the analyses. In this light, the “mutual perversion” of to add, the nineteenth-century texts he examines are performativity and reference is especially productive theatrical (albeit less overtly than in the eighteenth when it comes to looking at the images convoked by century) because they are caught in the Foucaultian the authors in their texts. web of “vigilance and visibility – of looking and being Reinaldo Marques indicates an alternative way looked at” (x). Notwithstanding the fact that Litvak in which to understand the “mutual perversion” of deals mostly with novels, I see prefatory writing in the performativity and reference when he writes about the period as a product of the same “fall from theatricality” roles played by authors in modernity. Instead of focusing and the privatization of culture. Moreover, the pattern on single acts or utterances, he treats the author within “vigilance/visibility” is largely applicable to the general the scope of a multiplicity of igurations disseminated use of the preface as a means of control, self- through media technologies. As he explains: “the promotion, and performance. is broken into several igurations: … fragments My immediate source for using terms such of life disseminated in interviews, , chats as performance, performativity, or, more aptly, and reports” (61). he author disseminated in this performative, is Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Touching way is, as are all of us, part of a “theatre of images,” Feeling: Afect, Pedagogy and Performativity (2003). As an array of scenic identities mediated by countless the author puts it, “‘Performative’ at the present moment supports such as “photos, blogs, twitter, facebook, carries the authority of two quite diferent discourses, orkut, youtube, podcasts” (sic 60). As Marques goes on that of theater on the one hand, and of speech act theory to note: “Dissociated from the empirical personage, and on the other” (7). Still according to the author constitutes itself as a discursive strategy, Sedgwick, whereas the theater is associated with the thus signaling the existence of discontinuities between extroversion of the actor’s performance, the speech act discourse and the real, which problematizes the testiies to an introspective movement of the speaker of identities and symmetries” (65). Also persuasive in (7). his is because in J.L. Austin’s theory of speech acts, Marques’s text is the argument according to which the performative is characterized as being an utterance condition of “subject-image” is what guarantees the always in the irst-person, singular, present, indicative. aterlife of authors. Although the authors I discuss had In Austin’s taxonomy, performative is distinguished access to fewer media for disseminating their images, from constative, a type of utterance whose function is they were aware of the need to become icons to survive. to describe events. By , performative is linked Dickens’s, Hawthorne’s, and James’s world was already with the act which the verb is meant to perform in a world of words, images, performance, and wide real situations of communication; that is, “I promise” circulation. heir prefaces, in particular, evidence the promises, “I apologize” apologizes, “I declare” declares. need to constitute “theaters” and to perform roles in Where Austin sees a linkage between signiier (the accordance with their ambitions, times, and an ever performative verb) and the act, the deconstructive expanding literary market. Ilha do Desterro v. 70, nº1, p. 265-274, Florianópolis, jan/abr 2017 267

he “theater of images” adds a diferent level of the stage manager ten years before: irst in an “Address interpretation to “the performative.” Not restricted to to Readers” appended to series Number 10 (January, speech acts or to theatrical performance, it can refer 1837) of the Pickwick Papers; and later in his “Editor’s to a whole range of activities, behavioral patterns Address on the completion of the First Volume” of and interventions. In this sense, it can be read along Bentley’s Miscellany (June, 1837). It is worth adding Stephen Greenblatt’s self-fashioning, which “invariably that, although the stage manager is absent from the crosses the boundaries between the creation of literary 1847 preface to the Cheap Edition of Pickwick Papers, characters, the shaping of one’s own identity, the the theatrical analogy is also present there. In what experience of being molded by forces outside one’s follows I shall deal exclusively with the two authorial control, the attempt to fashion other selves” (3). hus, prefaces accompanying the novel: the Address to series authorial performance, one of the means by which self- Number 10 and the 1847 Preface to the bound volume, fashioning processes are made public, is seen as a result both of which are reproduced in the Clarendon Edition of both intentional impulses and unconscious forces. edited by James Kinsley. Authors fashion themselves in and through their choices I reserve some space here, before reading the of images, representational spaces, tones, narratives, prefaces, for a few words on the relationship of but they are also fashioned by history, location, and by Dickens with the theatre. According to Simon Callow, the systems of signs and cultural references they share Dickens’s was oten regarded as theatrical by with society as a whole. his contemporaries (xi). Before becoming a novelist, Dickens had taken part in several amateur , Dickens and Hawthorne as Stage-managers had written his own plays, and continued to perform later on in life with his reading tours. What is interesting “Before the Curtain,” William Makepeace to keep in mind with regard to Dickens and the theatre hackeray’s introduction to Vanity Fair (1848), is is the way he fashioned himself as a performer and the a plausible point of departure for a discussion on several roles he created for himself in his career. the theatrical trope in nineteenth-century prefatory he Preface to series Number 10 of the Pickwick writing. his iconic text was published at the end of Papers contains a formula Dickens would use in the novel’s serial run in 1848 and called attention for its several subsequent prefaces (including the one to conluence of author and “manager of the Performance.” the irst series of Sketches by Boz (1836), published his theatrical persona mediates between the world of a month later). his formula consisted of the use the “fair” – which extends to that of the readers – and of a third person voice, a deferential , and the the puppet show standing for the novel. As an outside celebration of the success and popularity of the series. observer, he sees the fair with condescension and In the preface, Boz starts by promising not to prolong “melancholy,” and ater introducing the audience to the the story beyond the previous estimate of twenty contents of the story, he thanks them for welcoming his numbers. He also refers back to the ictional device of “show,” bows to “his patrons,” and “retires” before the the papers of the Pickwick Club – which he kept under curtain rises (5). As Joan Stevens explains with regard his supervision – to maintain interest in the numbers to the theatrical analogy and the serialization of Vanity to come. He then ends the piece with the theatrical Fair: “he novel, like an established play, has been metaphor hackeray adopted in Vanity fair: making regular appearances; its author may well have a sense that the characters are an acting company and With this short speech, Mr. Pickwick’s Stage- he their stage manager” (291). Despite the popularity Manager makes his most grateful bow, adding, on behalf of himself and publishers, what of Vanity Fair and its introduction, hackeray was not the late eminent Mr. John Richardson, of the irst Victorian writer to use the theatrical analogy. Horsemonger Lane Southwark, and the Yellow As Stevens observes, Dickens had used the image of Caravan with the Brass Knocker, always said 268 Geraldo Magela Cáfaro, he preface as stage: the theatrical trope and the performance of authorial identities...

on behalf of himself and company, at the close of every performance – author’s. Figuring the reader as a friend was a common “Ladies and gentlemen, for these marks of your tactic in Dickens’s prefatorial self-fashioning. In turn, favor, we beg to return you our sincere thanks; the situation sets the scene for Dickens to perform his and allow us to inform you, that we shall identities through an account of origins. keep perpetually going on beginning again, regularly, until the end of the fair.” (882). In this account, he appears as a “man of three-and- twenty”, twelve years before the present address. He In this passage, the image of the stage manager is narrates how the publishers ofered him the chance to reinforced by the reference to the famous itinerant write something to be published in “shilling numbers,” dramatic showman, John Richardson. While the associated in the author’s mind with the material and the speech make the dramatic efect seem “carried about the country by pedlars, and over some more concrete, they disrupt the unity of the authorial of which I remember to have shed innumerable tears, voice and make “Boz” appear as a ventriloquist. before I served my apprenticeship to Life” (884). he “Performative” here operates on two registers: that shits to an even earlier time when Dickens of role-playing (Boz appearing as Richardson) and was possibly a child and a reader of the stories that of a speech act in the Austinian sense: the speaker made him cry. Everything is magniied and intensiied: “begs,” asks for permission, and promises to ofer his growth is depicted as “apprenticeship to Life” and more performances to the public. With a formulaic the reader sheds tears over the books he reads. speech and the reference to Richardson, Boz selects a Dickens’s appeal to emotions continues in the next contemporary and popular form of entertainment, and paragraph in which he tells the story of his becoming thus aims to reach larger audiences. an author with the publication of his irst sketch in a he formality of the address ventriloquized by magazine. he passage is introduced in a suggestively Boz contrasts with the liberty conveyed through the theatrical manner and the display of feelings and image of the “friend taken by the button” in the preface reactions gains prominence as the narrative unfolds: to the Cheap Edition. Dickens opens his preface with the following words: “An author who has much to When I opened my door in Furnival’s Inn to the communicate under this head, and expects to have managing partner who represented the irm, I recognized in him the person from whose hands it attended to, may be compared to a man who takes I had bought two or three years previously, and his friend by the button at a heatre door, and seeks whom I had never seen before or since, my irst to entertain him with a personal gossip before he goes copy of the Magazine in which my irst efusion in to the play” (883). he passage is reminiscent of – dropped stealthily one evening at twilight, with fear and trembling, into a dark letter-box, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “he Rime of the Ancient in a dark oice, up a dark court in Fleet Street Mariner” (1798), in which an old grizzled sailor – appeared in all the glory of print; on which approaches a young wedding-guest and starts telling occasion by the bye, – how I recollect it! – I his story. In both cases, the story-teller stands in the walked down to Westminster Hall, and turned into it for half-an-hour, because my eyes were way of another performance (the play in Dickens’s so dimmed with joy and pride, that they could preface and the wedding in Coleridge’s poem), thus not bear the street, and were not it to be seen displacing the “stage” and turning it to himself. Also there. (884). noteworthy in the passage is that the stated purpose of the address is not initially to express intent, deine he dramatization of the moment is conveyed through a theory of art, ofer dodges for criticism, or any of the feelings (“fear and trembling”) and through the functions listed by Gérard Genette. he author “seeks to repetition of the adjective to describe the place where he entertain,” a role associated with the ictional/theatrical had deposited his “hopes of future fame:” “dark letter- universe. he theater-goer, however, stands at the door box,” “dark oice,” “dark court.” Dickens interrupts of the heater, and he hears the story as a friend of the the narrative with an exclamation: “how I recollect!”, Ilha do Desterro v. 70, nº1, p. 265-274, Florianópolis, jan/abr 2017 269

which adds to the theatrical efect of his account. And instance of performance is notable in the opening lines if the mere of emotions is not enough, he of that preface: “It is now seven or eight years (so many, ends by rendering those feelings visible: “my eyes were at all events, that I cannot precisely remember the so dimmed with joy.” he passage additionally shows epoch) since the Author of this Romance last appeared Dickens’s sense of “being looked-at” –“[my eyes] were before the Public” (853). he author’s “appearances” not it to be seen there” – one of the characteristics of refer to Hawthorne’s previous prefaces, “addressed the Foucaultian “vigilance/visibility” pattern which nominally to the Public at large, but really to a character Litvak articulates with nineteenth-century theatricality. whom he felt entitled to use far greater freedom” (853). As Mario Ortiz-Robles remarks in “Dickens Ater expressing disappointment at never having Performs Dickens” (2011), “the prefaces can be “encountered” this character, he mentions that he wrote said to stage a curious conluence of history-of- for him/her despite being completely ignored by “the the-book narratives with those of the construction- great Eye of the Public.” Although this great “Eye” of-the-subject by virtue of their performativity” is unequivocally linked with the reader in the text, it (474). As he writes further on in his essay: “he could also be brought to bear on the experience of a ictionalization of Dickens in the prefaces thus theater-goer witnessing the author’s “appearances.” becomes a disiguration of Dickens the author he impulse to go public seen in the preface insofar as it is a deliberate attempt to transform to the Marble Faun is at odds with a more private the author into a character, the agent into an actor” tendency found in this text. he author superimposes (476). I would add that this disiguration happens the epistolary over the theatrical, thus creating a clash by virtue of a multiplicity. he several personas, between the public and private realms and enhancing narratives, and roles enacted by the author (stage even more the resentment which is at the heart of the manager, reader, child, friend) are engulfed in address as a whole: the “theatre of images” Reinaldo Marques has described and show how Dickens’s prefaces Unquestionably, this Gentle, Kind, Benevolent, transform authorial address into an opportunity Indulgent, and most Beloved and Honoured Reader, did once exist for me, and (in spite of for performance. the ininite chances against a letter’s reaching Hawthorne also created his own “theatre of images” its destination, without a deinite address) duly in the igures of guide, host, decapitated surveyor, received the scrolls which I lung upon whatever obscure man of letters, and displaced national author. wind was blowing, in the faith they would ind him out. But is he extant now? In these many Although Hawthorne was prone to dramatize his own years, since he last heard from me, may he not authorship in the prefaces just as Dickens had done have deemed his earthly task accomplished, in his, his tactic was based more on self-deprecation and have withdrawn to the Paradise of Gentle than on self-celebration. Lacking the conidence Readers, wherever it may be...? If I ind him at all, it will probably be under some mossy (and popularity) of Dickens to approach his readers grave-stone, inscribed with a half-obliterated more directly, Hawthorne opted instead to thematize name, which I shall never recognize. (853). the diiculty of the relationship between author and reader, a diiculty largely rooted in his resentment over he author inally accomplishes his vengeance on not having enough readers. His use of the theatrical the reader; he has consigned him to the same place trope in the preface to the Marble Faun (1859), thus, of obscurity as the one he occupies as a writer. he is motivated less by a it of extroversion than by his antagonism between author and reader suggested in the clinging to a formal and distant form of address to passage is tinged with jocularity, but it is still capable of compensate for his failures to establish an intimate maintaining the tension between both parties and of contact with the reader in the model of Dickens’s stance. contributing to the dramatic efect of the address. Still, his awareness of prefatory writing as a special 270 Geraldo Magela Cáfaro, he preface as stage: the theatrical trope and the performance of authorial identities...

homas R. Moore comments on the tensions as a theatre, the book’s dominant image” (247). he created by Hawthorne in his prefaces in “Poses in immediate subtext of he Blithedale Romance is indeed the Prefaces: A of Oppositions” (1994): Shakespeare’s As you Like it; the rural community of “Hawthorne’s strategy in the prefaces – his double the novel is compared to the Forest of Arden and their purpose – is irst, to address both his popular audience members with the banished Duke and his party. and a more discerning readership. But second, and he theatre aligns with the “neutral territory,” more important, his purpose is to employ the dialectical another image Hawthorne uses to defend his theory tension created by his rhetoric of oppositions to say of the Romance in “he Custom-House: Introductory what he could not say outright” (74). Moore also notes to he Scarlet Letter” (149). In both cases, Hawthorne that Hawthorne used his “rhetoric of oppositions” when insists on the disconnection of iction from reality he was writing “outside the parameters – and masks and guides the reader towards the adoption of a of iction” (74). Hawthorne’s rhetoric of oppositions “picturesque” view of the situations described. In the can alternatively be understood as pointing to a lack preface to the Blithedale Romance, he shows hints of the of deinite reference in the prefatory discourse (the perception he would express more clearly in 1859 with “mutual perversion” of performativity and reference I regard to the place of he United States in afording mentioned earlier on); in such case, Hawthorne would elements conducive to producing that “picturesque” not be writing as if he were “outside the parameters of efect. he passage I quote comes immediately ater the iction” because the ictive – as an intentional act which reference to the “theatre:” selects and appropriates elements from other referential ields (Iser xiv) – is already at play both at the threshold In the old countries, with which has and in the main text. long been conversant, a certain conventional privilege seems to be awarded to the romancer; Hawthorne makes a diferent use of the theatrical his work is not put exactly side by side with trope in his 1852 preface to he Blithedale Romance. nature…. Among ourselves, on the contrary, Still, just as the theatrical in the former preface marks there is as yet, no Faery Land, so like the real a distance from his intended “real” reader, in the latter world, that, in a suitable remoteness, none cannot well tell the diference, but with an this distance is marked in relation to the historical atmosphere of strange enchantment, beheld or “real” elements serving as immediate points of through which the inhabitants have a propriety comparison for the story. Naturally, Hawthorne cannot of their own. (633). disavow the relationship completely: he based his of utopian socialism on his own sojourn in the Brook As in the preface to he Marble Faun, Hawthorne Farm community in 1841. he novel also features idealizes the “Old Countries” in which writers one of Hawthorne’s few irst-person narrators: Miles supposedly have more freedom to do as they please in Coverdale, a bachelor poet whose misanthropic nature representing reality. In what seems to be an example of and self-doubt parallels Hawthorne the prefacer. In the bad faith, however, Hawthorne shits the attention from preface to the novel, Hawthorne writes: “… his present the writer to the “” which contains in itself the concern with the Socialist Community is merely to qualities that place it at a remove from nature. establish a theatre… where the creatures of his brain may Hawthorne’s theatre, thus, shows his attempt to play their phantasmagorical antics, without exposing control the reader, his images before the public, and the them to too close a comparison with the actual events social threats he encountered in his times. But while of real lives” (247). he theatrical analogy reinforces staging authorial surveillance, he also reveals fragility in the proximity between the author and Miles Coverdale. relation to the elements that imposed constraints upon As Brenda Wineapple notes: “Hawthorne’s irst-person his imagination, literary production, and autonomy. narrator… believes he can best hold himself together he “neutral territory” he inds in the stage allows him, by holding himself apart and conceives the world despite that fragility, to imagine himself as merging Ilha do Desterro v. 70, nº1, p. 265-274, Florianópolis, jan/abr 2017 271

with the stories he creates and transforming himself decades of the nineteenth century. In their respective into spectacle before “the great Eye of the Public.” Prefaces, the theatrical analogy acquires special signiicance and illuminates aspects of James’s authorial Drama and Dramatist in Henry James’s Prefaces self-fashioning. One of James’s purposes in the Preface to he he Prefaces to Henry James’s Awkward Age is to respond to criticism for his overuse are some of the most prominent examples of authorial of dialogue in the story of a young girl coming of age performance in literary history. Not only was the in in de siècle English society. Ater acknowledging his Edition conceived as a monumental “act” and an emulation of the style of the French writer “Gyp,” an authorial statement, but the texts abound in analogies emulation he did his best to dissimulate, he reproduces to the theatre. In these texts, James oten appears as his publisher’s grim verdict with regard to the novel’s the “dramatist,” a igure analogous, in its prefatory reception – “I’m sorry to say the book has done nothing use, to Hawthorne’s and Dickens’s stage managers. to speak of” (108). Next, he sets about to giving himself But James also plays the roles of actor and spectator of the “reward” denied him, a reward rooted in “the his own autographical dramas as he tells them in the singular interest attaching to the very intimacies of the Prefaces. James’s stage is as ambiguous in its seeming efort” (109). What follows is a of this efort extroversion as Hawthorne’s, and the uses which it into the vocabulary of architecture. In contrast with serves are related not only to his afective involvement the Preface to , the evoked space with the of the works but also to his is not the space of domesticity, but rather something theory of the novel. more akin to a ballroom or a stage, as the following he epithet “dramatist” is one of the most pervasive passage shows: “…amusement deeply abides, I think in substitutes for “author” in the New York Edition any artistic attempt the basis and groundwork of which prefaces. Its frequency is perhaps only comparable are conscious of a particular irmness. On that hard ine to “painter” and “adventurer,” and it needs to be loor the element of execution feels it may more or less understood in relation to James’s sustained obsession conidently dance…” ( sic 109). A couple of lines later, with the theater. As Leon Edel notes in Henry James: he writes: A Life (1985), much of James’s autobiography is dedicated to “detailed recounting I was thus to have here an envious glimpse, in of nights at the play – pantomimes viewed in early carrying my design through, of that artistic rage and that artistic felicity which I have childhood, old theatrical billboards with their lurid ever supposed to be intensest and highest, the synopses of the plays and picturesque names of the conidence of the dramatist strong in the sense stage folk, excursions to the theaters of New York and of his postulate. he dramatist has very to build, later of London and Paris” (31). Among the many is committed to architecture, to construction at any cost…. his makes the active of his performances he saw were “hastily cobbled up versions basis immense, enabling him… to advance of Dickens’s novels, the very names of whose characters undistractedly, even if not at all carelessly, into – the Scrooges and Pickwicks, Oliver Twists and Paul the comparative fairy-land of the mere minor Dombeys –assured full house” (31). But by the time anxiety…. I rejoiced by that same token, to feel my scheme hold, and even a little ruefully James wrote the prefaces to the New York Edition, the watched it give me much more than I had theater had come to be associated with failure as well, ventured to hope. (110) as his play Guy Domville “was howled of the stage” at its premiere in 1895 (Sedgwick 38). he Tragic Muse In this passage, the role of “dramatist” conflates with and he Awkward Age (volumes V and VI in the New those of actor and spectator (let alone architect). The York Edition) bear witness to the strong inluence of speaker “builds,” moves in his projected stage, and the theater in James’s novelistic production in the last “watches” his performance in retrospect. Assuming 272 Geraldo Magela Cáfaro, he preface as stage: the theatrical trope and the performance of authorial identities...

several roles helps James convey the sense of control attention to his authorial presence in the prefaces is at he has over the many phases of the composition odds with the image of detached master he projects. process. The reader is supposed to “watch” this We may ind a better of this exhibition of control and recognize the author’s effort contradiction in the preface to he Golden Bowl. James and engagement with his métier. At the same time, explains that the “central consciousness” is actually a he/she may have a more vivid perception of this effort “deputy” for the “creative power otherwise so veiled and through the figurative rendering of this engagement. disembodied” (327). he use of this deputy, someone in As John H. Pearson argues: “James fashions himself the story who can give the reader a more direct access to just as he has created characters in the novels and the the events described, was one of the touchstones of the tales by forming a central consciousness upon which type of criticism practiced by new critics following in the world is reflected and then revealed to the reader” the footsteps of James, such as Richard P. Blackmur and (43). By extension, the passage shows that the world Percy Lubbock. he concept of central consciousness that gets reflected is also the writer’s “consciousness,” was a clever intervention in the literary ield of the time that is, central consciousness and world converge in and served James in his efort to superimpose literary the Prefaces. modernity over the Realist novel of the previous James stretches the limits of the theatrical generation. What the Preface to reveals, metaphor as he shits the focus from “the dramatist” to however, is that James maintains the belief in “the his ictional creation. His object in he Awkward Age majesty of authorship” despite seeming to go against it: was to be thought of as illuminated by “lamps,” each of “It’s not that the muled majesty of authorship doesn’t which “would be the light of a single ‘social occasion’ in here ostensibly reign; but I catch myself again shaking it the history and intercourse of the characters concerned, of and disavowing the pretence of it” (sic 328). and would bring out to the full the latent colour of the he principle of dissimulation, evident in the scene in question and cause it to illustrate, to the last Preface to the Golden Bowl, is repeatedly exposed in drop, its bearing on my ” (110). Each of these other prefaces. I quote another passage from the preface lamps would correspond to an “Act” in the play, that to he Tragic Muse: is, a separate section in the novel. his method would, eventually, allow the story to tell itself without any If the art of the drama, as a great French interference from the author or “dramatist.” In other master of it has said, is above all the art of preparations, that is true only to a less extent words, once the curtain rises, the author is nowhere to of the art of the novel, and true exactly in the be seen, even though he has already performed his own degree in which the art of the particular novel act before the audience. comes near that of the drama. he irst half of A similar idea is expressed in the Preface to he a iction insists ever on iguring to me as the stage or theatre for the second half, and I have Tragic Muse. According to James, the “triumph” of the in general given so much space to making the artist – otherwise called the “charm-compeller” – is to theatre propitious that my halves have too be strictly attached to the work he performs or creates oten proved strangely unequal. hereby has (96). his position raises doubts about the status of the arisen with grim regularity the question of artfully, of consummately the fault prefaces and the authorial statements they mediate. If and conferring on the false quantity the brave the “triumph” of the artist were evident in the work, the appearance of the true. (86). author wouldn’t need to strive so hard to justify it in these texts. his is complicated by the fact that James Here James accounts for the lack of balance in his suggests, right at the outset, in the Preface to Roderick tripartite division in he Tragic Muse, a division based Hudson, that “the private history of any sincere work… on three diferent cases or characters in the story looms with its own completeness in the rich, ambiguous (Miriam Rooth, Nick Dormer, and Peter Sherringham). aesthetic air” (4). hus, the efort he makes in drawing he theatrical metaphor in this context takes on a Ilha do Desterro v. 70, nº1, p. 265-274, Florianópolis, jan/abr 2017 273

diferent function from the other situations examined him. he act of revising the old works also triggers a so far. Still, the rationale behind the conception of series of reactions which the author displays in graphic the irst half of the novel resembles that of “building,” and erotic terms. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick brilliantly which I examined in the Preface to he Awkward Age. traces some of the erotic undercurrents in James’s New he result is that the building, by contrast with the York Edition. In her chapter “Shame, theatricality, and latter preface, threatens to weigh down on the body of queer performativity: Henry James’s he Art of the the work as a whole. he author comes to rescue the Novel” (from the aforementioned Touching Feeling) safety and harmony of the architecture, but this rescue these erotic undercurrents get mapped around a is performed ater the construction. number of lexical occurrences of sexual resonance, James might have failed to achieve the organic such as “fond,” “issue,” “center,” “glove,” among others. unity so crucial to his reputation as a novelist, but in he critic’s argument is that “tuning in” to these the Tragic Muse he delivers one of his most successful lexica, which are closely related to James’s intimate heroines, Miriam Rooth, who also serves as a point involvement with his younger selves, his works, and of comparison with the author. It must be noted that with the act of “reparenting” them in he New York the “triumph” of the artist I have discussed above is Edition, gives readers access to James’s eroticism “not as a reference to both the actress and to the dramatist. superior, privileged eavesdroppers on a sexual narrative Additionally, Miriam Rooth exerts strict control over hidden from himself; rather, it is an audience ofered her public image while forging “private” identities the privilege of sharing in his exhibitionistic enjoyment to satisfy her audiences, an attitude that antedates and performance of a sexuality organized around the practice of contemporary celebrities and that shame” (54). he shame Sedgwick identiies in James’s parallels James’s careful manipulation and selection rendering of his early stories as immature or monstrous of his personal experiences in the prefaces. hus, the is, thus, one of the means of self-display in his prefaces. senses in which James’s prefaces engage performativity Although James’s “theatre” is more multivalent are various: irstly, they create spaces in which both and less formulaic than Dickens’s and Hawthorne’s, authorial and actorial performance can be thematized it is also dependent on afect, play, audience, and a and enacted; secondly, they dislocate the empirical tradition. Underlying the theatrical analogy in the texts author and foreground the disconnection of reference examined above is the belief in authorship as a “drama” and discourse; thirdly, they evoke the authority of the to be performed before the reader. In the nineteenth theater and “invent” literary modernity; and lastly, century, this drama served to coordinate positions, they participate in the phenomenon of the promotion establish authority, and disseminate “images” of the of private life, a phenomenon intimately related to author in a context marked by a growing number of Reinaldo Marques’s “theatre of images.” Still, one last readers and the proliferation of media and technologies. aspect of James’s performativity has not been fully Asserting one’s authority in the literary ield involved, articulated here: the ways in which the author relies on paradoxically, denying that authority at some moments, afect in his accounts of the processes of creation. which is in consonance with the tension I referred to Afect is as important an aspect of James’s prefatory at the beginning of this article. Tension, as we have discourse as it is of Dickens’s and Hawthorne’s, and in the seen in the analyses, is expressed through oppositions, three authors’ texts one gets a sense of the relationship antagonism, contradictions, conlicting roles and between diferent modes of afect (pride, resentment, speciic modes of afect. Clearly, the multiplicity of pleasure) and the theatrical. But the expression of images the author sends out is at odds with the way they afect takes on unprecedented variety and intensity in are oten canonized; instead of coherent unities, what James’s collection of prefaces. Notably, the author oten we have are discontinuities and shiting identities. But inds solace for his failures in the recollection of the the prefaces studied do more than simply show patterns “excitement” the adventure of composition aforded of dissimulation, theatricality, and manipulation; they 274 Geraldo Magela Cáfaro, he preface as stage: the theatrical trope and the performance of authorial identities...

James, Henry. he Art of the Novel. New York; London: C. are also registers of historically speciic systems of Scribner’s Sons, 1937. Print. belief and of personal, individual experiences which, Litvak, Joseph. Caught in the Act: heatricality in the as Greenblatt has astutely formulated, oten blur Nineteenth-century English Novel. Berkeley: University distinctions between life and performance (3). of California Press, 1992. Print. Marques, Reinaldo Martiniano. “O Arquivo Literário e as Notes Imagens do escritor.” Orgs. Eneida M. de Souza, Eliana 1. See Gérard Genette’s Paratexts: hresholds of da Conceição Tolentino, Anderson Bastos Martins. O Interpretation (2). Futuro do Presente: Arquivo, Gênero, Discurso. Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 2012. 59-89. Print. 2. My translation. “O escritor se decompõe em diversas igurações: ... fragmentos de vida disseminados em Moore, homas. R. “Poses in the Prefaces: A Rhetoric of entrevistas, depoimentos, bate-papos, reportagens.” Oppositions.” A hick and Darksome Veil: he Rhetoric of Hawthorne’s Sketches, Prefaces, and Essays. Boston: 3. My translation. “fotos, blogs, twitter, facebok, orkut, Northeastern University Press, 1994. 73-99. Print. youtube, podcasts.” Ortiz-Robles, Mario. “Dickens performs Dickens.” ELH 4. My Translation. “Dissociado do personagem empírico, 78.2 (2011): 457-78. Print. o autor se constitui então como estratégia discursiva, indiciando a existência de descontinuidades entre Pearson, John H. he Prefaces of Henry James: Framing the o discurso e o real, que problematizam o jogo das Modern Reader. University Park: Pennsylvania State identidades e simetrias.” UP, 1997. Print. 5. See Chapter 9, “he Functions of the Original Preface,” Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Afect, Pedagogy, in Paratexts: hresholds of Interpretation (196-237). Performativity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Print. 6. All citations are to the Collected Novels of Hawthorne’s works published by the Library of America. Stevens, Joan. “A Note on hackeray’s ‘Manager of the Performance’.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 22.4 (1968): 7. Henry James’s autographic Prefaces to the New York 391-97. Print. Edition were posthumously collected in a single volume by Richard P. Blackmur, entitled he Art of the hackeray, William Makepeace. “Before the Curtain.” Novel (1834). All citations are from the 1837 edition of Vanity Fair: A Novel without a . London: Penguin, the collection. 2002. 5-7. Print. Wineapple, Brenda. Hawthorne: A Life. Alfred A. Knopf: References New York, 2003. Print. Callow, Simon. Charles Dickens and the Great heatre of Recebido em: 12/07/2016 the World. New York: Vintage Books, 2012. Print. Aceito em: 24/08/2016 Dickens, Charles. he Pickwick Papers. Ed. James Kisnley. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1986. Print. Edel, Leon. Henry James: A Life. New York: Harper & Row, 1985. Print. Genette, Gérard. Paratexts: hresholds of Interpretation. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Print. Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1980. Print. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Collected Novels. New York: he Library of America, 1983. Print. Iser, Wolfgang. he Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1993.Print.

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