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The Ambassadors The Other Figure in the Carpet: Narrative Voice as an Indicator of Bourdieuian Heteronomy in Henry James's The Ambassadors by Aaron Donachuk A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Department of English Carletoa University Ottawa, Ontario August 15,2011 ©2011 Aaron Donachuk Library and Archives Bibliotheque et 1*1 Canada Archives Canada Published Heritage Direction du Branch Patrimoine de I'edition 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington OttawaONK1A0N4 OttawaONK1A0N4 Canada Canada Your file Votre r6f6rence ISBN: 978-0-494-83073-4 Our file Notre r6ference ISBN: 978-0-494-83073-4 NOTICE: AVIS: The author has granted a non­ L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive exclusive license allowing Library and permettant a la Bibliotheque et Archives Archives Canada to reproduce, Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public communicate to the public by par telecommunication ou par I'lnternet, preter, telecommunication or on the Internet, distribuer et vendre des theses partout dans le loan, distribute and sell theses monde, a des fins commerciales ou autres, sur worldwide, for commercial or non­ support microforme, papier, electronique et/ou commercial purposes, in microform, autres formats. paper, electronic and/or any other formats. The author retains copyright L'auteur conserve la propriete du droit d'auteur ownership and moral rights in this et des droits moraux qui protege cette these. Ni thesis. Neither the thesis nor la these ni des extraits substantiels de celle-ci substantial extracts from it may be ne doivent etre imprimes ou autrement printed or otherwise reproduced reproduits sans son autorisation. without the author's permission. In compliance with the Canadian Conformement a la loi canadienne sur la Privacy Act some supporting forms protection de la vie privee, quelques may have been removed from this formulaires secondaires ont ete enleves de thesis. cette these. While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires aient inclus dans in the document page count, their la pagination, il n'y aura aucun contenu removal does not represent any loss manquant. of content from the thesis. 1+1 Canada ii Abstract The thesis uses a bipartite methodology that combines Gerard Genette's narcological paradigm and Pierre Bourdieu's concept of cultural fields to offer a new reading of narrative voice in Henry James's The Ambassadors. It uses Bourdieu to position James within the literary field of late-nineteenth-century Britain. It locates the author in a position between the autonomous pole that signals "art for art's sake" and the heteronomous pole that is associated with established bourgeois values. It identifies James's autonomy and heteronomy at the textual level with Genette's concepts of narrative mood and voice, respectively. It thus illustrates the contextual significance of these narratological elements by identifying them as functions of the literary field. Whereas theorists since Genette have emphasized mood in James by ignoring these contextual factors, the thesis provides a re visionary reading that illustrates the importance of narrative voice within the textual economy of The Ambassadors by using this context- sensitive approach. iii Acknowledgments I would like to thank my professors at Carleton University - Professors Paul Keen, Travis DeCook, Andrew Wallace, and Janice Schroeder - for introducing me to many of the concepts that have been employed in this thesis. I would also like to acknowledge the outgoing English Graduate Supervisor at Carleton University, Professor Grant Williams, who helped facilitate this project when it was in its nascent stages. I am grateful to my thesis supervisor, Professor Barbara Leckie, for agreeing to supervise the project and for providing considerate guidance throughout the writing and revision stages. Finally, I would like to thank my partner Laura Hildebrand for being so encouraging. iv Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgments iii List of Illustrations v Introduction vi Chapter 1: Grasping the Thread: Toward an Elucidation of the Spatio-Temporal Structure of The Ambassadors 1 Chapter 2: The Dueling Dispositions of Late James and the Clinical Construction of Sustained Voluntary Attention 23 Chapter 3: Viva Voce, In Situ 57 Chapter 4: Saving the Present; or, Voice Per Se 86 Conclusions Ill Works Cited 118 V List of Illustrations Figure 1: French Literary Field in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century 26 Figure 2: Henry James's Literary Income: 1864-1915 39 vi Introduction This thesis will conduct a socio-narratological reading of Henry James's The Ambassadors. It will analyze narrative voice by situating the text in the contextualizing frame of the turn-of-the-century British literary field. It will consider voice as the textual trace of a narrato-authorial subject - the author's textual surrogate. This trace will be described using Gerard Genette's narratological paradigm, and will be represented by the image of a thread stretched through the entire span of the narrative text. Using the socio- narratological schema, it will figure the vocal thread as signifying the author's attempts to achieve bourgeois consecration according to Pierre Bourdieu's heteronomous principle. On the other hand, as a non-authorial entity that also structures the textual whole, the text's focalizing subject will be identified as the textual representative of James's struggles for autonomous (or purely artistic) consecration within the literary field. It will be argued that by structuring the text on the basis of these two subjectivities - one authorial and the other non-authorial - James attempted to achieve both heteronomous and autonomous consecration with the same narrative text. But due to a number of factors, including the stringent late-nineteenth-century requirements of the autonomous principle and the politics of twentieth-century Anglo-American and French narrative theory, the heteronomous authorial trace was both originally obscured by James and subsequently ignored by theorists. And while The Ambassadors is structured on these two bases, because so much work has already been done to describe the structuring element that is associated with the text's focalizing character (that is, under the headings of "point of view" and "perspective"), the purpose of the current thesis will be to vii highlight and explicate the dissimulated and under-analyzed vocal component of James's narrative text. Shlomith Rimmon describes an image that represents the approach that will be taken in this thesis. Rimmon prefaces her book on ambiguity in James with an image of an image - an image, in fact, of two co-present, mutually exclusive images - which she uses to illustrate the concept of literary ambiguity. Rimmon writes, There are visual tricks that constantly tease the eye and never let our interpretative faculty come to rest. A slight shift of perspective can turn a rabbit into a duck, an urn into two profiles, a group of white birds flying in one direction into a group of black birds flying in the other. How is an image capable of representing different objects at the same time, and what happens to our minds while watching it? (ix) Rimmon continues on to argue that some of Henry James's texts elicit a similar image. That is, they present to the reader two mutually exclusive, yet equitenable, interpretations, and are thus ambiguous in the strictest sense. But rather than attempt to resolve or ameliorate this ambiguity and identify the lone, "most true" interpretation of her chosen Jamesian texts, Rimmon develops a methodology that works to hypostasize ambiguity. As such, her schema serves as a means of settling questions that have persistently nagged Jamesian critics in the past, such as whether the ghosts in The Turn of the Screw are "real" or products of the governess's disturbed psyche. If one reads these Jamesian texts within the frame of Rimmon's methodology, both accounts are true, and the narrative is thus truly ambiguous. And when Rimmon illustrates, in the course of developing her methodology, what it means to put a particular textual proposition into an interpretative context, she once again reverts to the duck-rabbit image: "To use an viii analogy from the visual arts: it is equally likely that if we draw a duck pond or a rabbit warren around Gombrich's rabbit-or-duck figure, that figure will be grasped unambiguously as either a rabbit or a duck, depending on the visual context in which it appears" (60). While Rimmon uses this image to refer to the narratological contextualization of one of the text's sentences or propositions, the metaphor could be extended to describe her work as a whole: in the first (primarily methodological) half of her book, Rimmon cobbles together a hybrid "warren-pond" schema so that in the second half she can place the Jamesian text within this theoretical context, thereby allowing the texts' two mutually exclusive yet co-present interpretations to thrive in an environment hospitable to both. This thesis will be patterned on the same dichotomous model that balances the development of an interpretative context with the analysis of an object text. But rather than create an hospitable climate in which the text's ambiguities may flourish, the first half of this two-part thesis will set up a context in which two of the text's narratological aspects may appear with equal prominence. These two aspects are what Gerard Genette refers to as narrative mood and narrative voice. The critical and theoretical inclination to analyze James's works primarily in reference to the concept of point of view is well documented.1 Indeed, the scholarly communities that congregated around the Jamesian text throughout the twentieth century - the narrative theorists known as the Anglo- American Jamesians are indicative of this trend - tended to focus on what has been referred to as "restricted point of view" or "limited perspective" as the crux of Jamesian 1 For a succinct summary of this history, see either Basic or Amoros.
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