James and Modernism: Some Further Interventions

Abstract

Paul B. Armstrong. The Phenomenology of Henry James. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1983. 242 + xiv pp. Stuart Hutchinson. Henry James: An American as Modernist. New York and London: Barnes & Noble; Vision Press, 1983.136 pp. Janet Holmgren McKay. Narration and Discourse in American Realistic Fiction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983.212 + x pp. William Stowe. Balzac, James and the Realistic Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. 203 + xviii pp. Edward Wagenknecht. The Novels of Henry James. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1983. 329 + vi pp. The question is, what is there left to write about Henry James? If we listen to John Carlos Rowe in his Henry Adams and Henry James (1975), there is still left the job of translating our perceptions of James into the idiom of our own moment. Rowe is strongly seconded by some phenomenologists who propose an end to speculation about James and a beginning, through some scientific method, of finding out the final truth at last. Ruth Bernard Yeazell's Language and Knowledge in the Late Novels of Henry James (1976) certainly lights a path to new explorations and promulgates a study often hinted but never so fully seen when she chastizes those who wish to "moralize the text" in seeking refuge "in the distinctions of another, more epistemologically stable world" (p. 11). Others, variously, have also touched some important and productive Jamesian motifs recently: Peter Brooks in The Melodramatic Imagination (1977), interestingly cognate with Yeazell in his demonstration of both Balzac's and James's focus on the melodramatic as an imitation of bathos but as arising from "the desacralized remnants of sacred myth" left in the wake of the French Revolution; Stephen Donadio in Nietzsche, Henry James and the Artistic Will (1978) where Nietzschean will stands between weak man and chaos; Strother Purdy in The Hole in the Fabric (1977) who sees clearly how the "progressive breakdown in stability and fixity" of our concept of the universe has cut us loose from our sense of the absolute authority of the cosmos in defining the significances of objects and systems and who thus provides a gloss on the epistemological instability of the environment of James's late novels in much the same sense as Yeazell has presented it. Nor do the editors of the recently founded Henry James Review believe that James studies to date have exhausted the values of his work.