Friday, October 5, 2012

The life of happy and distinguished people was fashioned in their image - Henry James, against aestheticism

Henry James was an aesthete, or so I think of him.  How interesting to read his stories that attack aestheticism.  “The Author of ‘Beltraffio’” (1884), “The Aspern Papers,” and even The Spoils of Poynton (1897), the novel about furniture, are humanist critiques of the tendency to turn art into a belief system.  This is not a welcome message at Wuthering Expectations, but a critic must take the texts as they are, and these texts are warnings against the dangers of what the narrator of “Beltraffio” calls “the gospel of art.”

The clue in “Beltraffio” is that the narrator aestheticizes everything he encounters, going far beyond the author he is visiting.  The Ambients live in an entirely ordinary suburban cottage, but the narrator distorts it into something else:

There was genius in his house too I thought when we got there; there was imagination in the carpets and curtains, in the pictures and books, in the garden behind it, where certain old brown walls were muffled in creepers that appeared to me to have been copied from a masterpiece of one of the pre-Raphaelites.   That was the way many things struck me at that time, in England – as reproductions of something that existed primarily in art or literature.   It was not the picture, the poem, the fictive page, that seemed to me a copy; these things were the originals, and the life of happy and distinguished people was fashioned in their image.

The curious transformation I mentioned yesterday of the sister-in-law into a serpentine Sibyl also has a suspiciously pre-Raphaelite sound to it.  Reality is just a reproduction of art.

The best trick of “The Author of ‘Beltraffio’” is that the radically anti-aesthetic position held by Mrs. Ambient turns out to be so destructive that the narrator can imperfectly conceal the damage done by his equally radical ideas.

The narrator of “The Aspern Papers,” the biographer, is a narrower, colder, older fellow, less obviously drowned in Paterian ideology.  Even amidst the obvious temptations of Venice he does not reduce everything to art, perhaps because he has become obsessive about one specific category, the poetry and life of Jeffrey Aspern.  He merely contorts everything touching his poet, especially the old woman who he once loved:

They come back to me now almost with the palpitation they caused, the successive states marking my consciousness that as the door of the room closed behind me I was really face to face with the Juliana of some of Aspern's most exquisite and most renowned lyrics…  Her presence seemed somehow to contain his own, and I felt nearer to him at that first moment of seeing her than I ever had been before or ever have been since.  (Ch. II)

Aspern becomes more real, Juliana less, and Juliana’s unworldly niece Tina* barely qualifies as a person, untouched as she is by the great Aspern.** The great trick of “The Aspern Papers” is that Juliana has her own ideas and schemes, and so, possibly, does Tina, who may be a quite different kind of idealist.  Rub the clashing interests and beliefs together and a story pops out.

James has a whole series of stories about writers stretching over most of his career: “The Figure in the Carpet,” which I read long ago, “The Coxon Fund, “The Lesson of the Master,” too name a few.  Perhaps this would be a good Jamesian theme to pursue as I continue my exploration of James while avoiding his greatest masterpieces.

*  Or Tita.  I read James’s 1908 revised version, so Tina.

**  Unless she is Aspern’s daughter, a wonderful bit of irony with no support in the text, something I found discussed in the footnotes (p. 225) of The Tales of Henry James by Edward Wagenknecht (1984).

26 comments:

  1. Fascinating. I'd never considered James in this light - the most refined of aesthetes warning against the dangers of aestheticism. Whom was he warning? Himself, perhaps? ''Twere to consider too curiously to consider it so.

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  2. Himself - a plausible guess. It would not surprise if James had also run into these young, wide-eyed Paterians and post-pre-Raphaelites and thought something like "Yeah, I love art and beauty and all that too, but you guys are nuts!"

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  3. I don't know how James viewed the creative process during the bulk of his career, but if you read the introduction to The Ambassadors you can see plainly that James saw writing as a lot of work, difficult work done by an individual focused on his craft and only able to approach his intended vision, not truly ever make it real in the world. There's no romanticism of art or artists there, or in any of the essays of his (that I've read) about writing fiction.

    It's also possible that James saw in himself all of these traits (I'll bet he'd call them weaknesses) and was mocking himself in these stories. There's a lot of mockery in James; some gently done and some less gently. Do you know the story about the old guy who sets up an altar to his dead friends? James treats a certain brand of religion there the in much the same way he treats worship of art in these stories.

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  4. The author in "The Author of 'Beltraffio'" is allowed some speechifying by James, most of which is close to a paraphrase of parts of his seminal "The Art of Fiction" essay, which, hmm hmm hmm, was published in the same year.

    And the part that is not stolen from real-life James is exactly what you say, an attempt to talk the narrator down from the Romantic ledge. E.g., what you, youngster, see as perfection is agonizingly imperfect.

    I do not know that clearly relevant story. "The Altar of the Dead," I presume.

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  5. I need to re-read 'Beltraffio.'

    "Altar of the Dead," yes, that's the very one. Tangential connection to the running theme you have going here.

    Excellent series of posts. Why haven't you read The Ambassadors yet?

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  6. Have you seen The Ambassadors? It's so long. 500 pages or something. What's the matter with these novelists? Who would ever read that? Who has time? It's crazy.

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  7. The Dover edition is just over 300 pages, and not in tiny type, either. We have a 1960 Riverside edition that's 345 pages. But yes, it's late James, so the pages each count for two of anyone else's. But still. It's such a good book.

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  8. The Oxford & Penguin probably add 150 pages of notes and textual variants and so on. A copy of that Dover edition is in this house somewhere.

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  9. The Dover has James' introduction, which is well worth reading. The Riverside has 40+ pages of notes at the end, but I haven't read them yet.

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  10. 'Unless she is Aspern’s daughter, a wonderful bit of irony with no support in the text'

    Concealing bastard children, as nephews [see Kipling's The Gardener] or neices or younger siblings [Camille Manet] or adopted children [Maud Gonne], happened quite often in the nineteenth century, so perhaps James felt ho more need to emphasise the point than he would havw done discussing a pope's nephew.

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  11. Now how to we resolve the question? Perhaps a table: the proportions of legitimate and illegitimate nieces who lived abroad with their American aunts.

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  12. ...except that the purpose of the exercise was to conceal ths proportion of 'nieces' and nieces who lived abroad with their 'aunts' or aunts. Would a knowledgeable contemporary of James reading of an elderly single lady living with a niece have wondered more than we do?
    I meant Suzanne Manet above.

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  13. What would a knowledgeable contemporary like the narrator of the story think? Why doesn't he wonder?

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  14. He's no judge of the situation. His awareness is limited by his own duplicity and desire, and he assumes that he's the only liar in the villa.

    When I get the time, I'm going to dig through JSTOR and try to find contemporary reactions to the story.

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  15. I want to be clear: I think Tina as the poet's daughter improves the story. But we need something in the text to attribute the idea to James.

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  16. Wagenknecht in the footnotes:

    "Jacob Korg... seems to stand alone in the view that there were no Aspern papers [ha ha ha, yes, outstanding!], but he pioneered the idea that Tina might be Juliana's daughter rather than her niece..."

    Relevant paper is "What Aspern Papers? A Hypothesis," College English, 1961-2.

    Later papers by Robert C. McLean and Constance Hunting develop the idea. The latter argues that Tina is in fact Juliana's niece, and also the daughter of Aspern. Good stuff!

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    1. 'The latter argues that Tina is in fact Juliana's niece, and also the daughter of Aspern.'
      Well, that's going a bit far. My own guess is that we are supposed to wonder whether Tina might be Juliana's and Aspern's daughter but not to be certain. That's only based on James's taste for uncertainty and complications though.

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    2. James plants the seeds of the idea in the reader's mind when he has the narrator talk about how he imagines Juliana having had torrid love affairs. There is also no discussion anywhere in the story of Tina's parentage. Where are the missing mother and father? They're right there, already on the page.

      No papers at all! That is good.

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  17. Scott, you are a born deconstructionist. Should I be on the lookout for this sort of thing when your novel comes out? (The Astrologer, March 2013)

    It is likely wise, as A. Nonymous suggests, never to underestimate James's taste for uncertainty and complications. What is the figure in the carpet supposed to mean?

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  18. Thanks for the plug! Let's just say that I believe in the power of foreshadowing and the weight of what's-not-said. The Astrologer is mostly just riffing on Shakespeare, though. I've read it too many times so now it all seems like surface. There is a good scene on a beach.

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  19. Reviewed but not yet published, but seems relevsnt to the question of 'nieces' and nieces and aunts and 'aunts': http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/HistoryWorld/?view=usa&ci=9780199977802

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  20. If I come across a copy of the book, I will look for James in the index.

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  21. The Aspern Papers was based on Claire Clairmont, half-sister to Mary Shelley and mother of a daughter by Lord Byron which makes it more likely that Tina is- or could be- Juliana's niece.. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1996/apr/04/an-affair-to-remember/?pagination=false

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  22. No, not more likely. Stick to the text, please!

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  23. Stick to the text with Henry James, where what isn't in the text is so important?
    A further complication- is James's preface, written about twenty years later than the story, which makes the reference to Claire Clairmont part of the text? If a writer lived over a hundred years ago is it possible to stick to the text- just the text- and understand them

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  24. Right, A. Nonymous, we use what is outside of the text to understand what is in the text. Word meanings change, etc. Now, take what you have got from outside and go back to the text.

    The character can be based on Claire Clairmont, yet not be Claire Clairmont. Can we assume the character had an affair and child with Lord Byron? Or does a fiction writer make changes, keeping some things and discarding others? What guide do we have to what was kept and what discarded? Just one.

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