Not Noticing, Infallibly: The Critical Liaisons of Henry James, French Decadence, and Honoré de Balzac

Abstract

Henry James published nearly a hundred articles on French literature, yet he rarely commented on its decadent doyens. After several early essays on Charles Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier, he turned a public cold shoulder to their fin-de-siècle progeny. Scholarship on Jamesian decadence has thus remained largely separate from discussions of his French criticism. This essay brings together those traditions by linking James’s sidelining of figures like Joris-Karl Huysmans and Pierre Louÿs with his concomitant volte-face on Honoré de Balzac. James’s late essays, I argue, creatively misread Balzac as pseudo-decadent, transmuting him into a mediating object for James’s coy, critical liaisons.