Play Is the Thing: Affect and Affordances in Alice, William, and Henry James

Abstract

Play Is the Thing:Affect and Affordances in Alice, William, and Henry James Jane F. Thrailkill Literary scholars have argued that the mid-1890s were a turning point for Henry James's fictional technique, marking a period when his fiction eschews the encounter with physical places and persons for the "bodiless" realm of the modern novel of interiority (Kurnick 3). Virginia Woolf is among these observers. Commenting on James's story "The Friends of Friends," in which a character continues to serve as the story's focalizing consciousness even after she dies, Woolf writes, And yet—does it make very much difference? Henry James has only to take the smallest of steps and he is over the border. His characters with their extreme fineness of perception are already half-way out of the body. There is nothing violent in their release. They seem rather to have achieved at last what they have long been attempting—communication without obstacle. (289–90) The more rarified the consciousness, Woolf suggests, the less palpably present is the corporeal being. More recently, Kristin Boudreau has suggested that ghosts in James figure "disembodied consciousness" (44).1 Indeed, embodiment itself can look like a problem for the dramatizing of consciousness. One can point to James's stint as a playwright and the disastrous premier of Guy Domville in 1895. Biographer Leon Edel is characteristically astute describing how the actors, encumbered by their costumes, props, and mannered lines, broadcasted unscripted embarrassment that yielded awkward humor. The lead actress became "unnerved" with what one reviewer (a young George Bernard Shaw) called her "Falstaffian make-up" and struggled with her costume, "a voluminous skirt of black satin over a panier crinoline of huge dimensions" and "an enormous [End Page 212] hat" (GD 93). The face of the lead actor, a man known for his striking good looks, twisted into a crooked smile that "displayed his nervousness" (Edel, Life 149). A tipsy scene involving a potted plant projected "the sobriety of desperation" (95). A moment meant to be poignant—the lead crying out, "I am the last, my lord, of the Domvilles!"—generated a quip from the audience that in turn triggered an explosion of laughter: "It's a bloody good thing y'are" (96). Guy Domville's dispiriting opening night provided a case study in Henri Bergson's body-based theory of humor: that when the living flexibility of the human spirit stiffens into awkward poses and forms the comic spirit is unleashed. "The laughable element" for Bergson "consists of a certain MECHANICAL INELASTICITY, just where one would expect to find the wide-awake adaptability and the living pliableness of a human being" (5). Clothing for Bergson is exemplary of social forms that turn people into automata or marionettes, beings whose "very litheness … seems to stiffen as we gaze" (17). A case in point: when a young Henry James met William Thackeray, the novelist made fun of the boy's too-tight blazer. In A Small Boy and Others Henry recalls, "My sense of my jacket became from that hour a heavy one" (57). Clothing, Bergson urges, provides a deeper allegory: the "heavy" human body is to "the soul" what "the garment was to the body itself—inert matter dumped down upon living energy" (25). Keying off of Bergson, this essay examines how James in his writings about children foregrounds the affective and bodily components of thinking. Play names the activity by which children come to "mind" the world through "active repetition and experimentation which 'mentally digest' novel situations and experiences" (Reilly 80). Important for this discussion is the idea of affordances, which is a way of viewing things in the environment under the aspect of use. Affordances are essentially pragmatic: they can be seen as invitations to do something, an implicit, material call to (inter)action.2 The point is that we can kinetically engage aspects of the environment to serve a variety of needs and that embedded in the material world are potentialities with which we can improvise. When the improvisation tips away from practical effects and toward autotelic affects, the behavior becomes aesthetic: the zone of art, of play, and of sheer human vitality. In what follows...