Henry James and the Grammar of the Modern

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Henry James and the Grammar of the Modern by Mary Cross, University of Delaware We move In literature through a world of different values and relations, a blest world In which we know nothing except by style, but In which also everything Is saved by It, and In which the Image Is thus always superior to the thing Itself. —Henry James Part I Syntax as Technology Ezra Pound once remarked that "only after a long struggle will poetry attain such a degree of development, or, If you will, modernity, that It will vitally concern people who are accustomed, In prose, to Henry James." As the antennae of the race, he said, artists like James point the way by their struggle "to create means of communication" which would "recognize differences, the right of differences to exist, and'the Interest In finding things different." Pound admired James for his "searching analysis of things," his "rich, banked-up perception," his "concern for mental temperatures." For Pound, James's "subtly graded atmospheres" were "his subject": "If one were advocate Instead of critic, one would definitely claim that these atmospheres, nuances, Impressions of personal tone and quality are his subject; that In these he gets certain things that almost no one else had done before him." "We find no trace," he continued, "of such degree of awareness ... until the novels of [Wyndhaml Lewis and Joyce." That awareness was born of a language and a style which made James, for Pound and Gertrude Stein and a I I the other writers seeking to reinvent the terms of reality between the two wars, "simply the great true recorder." As Gertrude herself remarked, "The others all stayed where they were. It was where they had come but Henry James knew he was on his way. ... And so although they did In a way the same thing, his had a future feeling and theirs an ending." "Poetry must be as well written as prose," said Pound, who spoke of his "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" as "an attempt to condense a James novel." If Pound was learning his Henry James, so too were Proust and Joyce and Eliot and, eventually, Ernest Hemingway.' For James's modernity consists In just this, that he was able to devise a literary language which could truly record the "timbres and tonalities," the complex, subjective reality which was just then becoming the consciousness of a race of poets as It had already of painters. The lesson of the master for modern literatura was a style that worked like synecdoche to capture "multiple and multivalent reflections" of reality, to record In Its Intrlcate structures of language the density of psychological experience, and to give, by pattern and placement, by stress and repetition and fragmentation, a new awareness of the words upon the page, all apart from meaning.2 By a verbal artfulness which draws attention to the surface of the text, James's later style, In Its elaborately self-focusing design, foregrounds the language of literature. To the extent that It emphasizes syntax, word order and design, 1. "A Retrospect," In The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1954), p. 9; Pound, "Henry James," In The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, pp. 298, 324, 339; Stein, "What Is English Literature," Lectures In America (1935; reprint, Boston: Beacon Press, 1953), p. 52; Pound, Selected Letters, 1907-41, ed. D. D. Paige (New York, 1950), pp. 48-49, 180. 2. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (1946; rpt., Princeton: Princeton UnIv. Press, 1953), p. 551. THEHENRYJAMESREVIEW 33 FALL, 1981 his language liberates itself from mere reference to portray meaning in terms of its own associative patterning; it becomes a kind of abstraction. For modernism may be seen as basically a syntax--or perhaps, asyntax—an arrangement of parts, whether words or paint or musical notes, which challenges our notions of order and connection. By juxtaposition rather than juncture, by confrontation rather than synthesis, by fragmentation rather than completion of the pattern, the modernist syntax reflects a new order of consciousness, a sensibil ity that comes through primarily as a way of seeing something, transforming what has already been seen in a new way. So the...