Signifying in the Ivory Tower

Abstract

Signifying in the Ivory Tower Wendy Graham My paper focuses on the homologies James forges among business, personal, and aesthetic interests through the lexical strategies of his late fiction. Slogging away at the uncanny reverberations of the term “interest,” page by page, until curiosity and cupidity are rendered virtually synonymous, James’s linguistic fun is the medium of the message that there is no escape from capital but death: [Mr. Gaw] conformed in short to his necessity of absolute interest—interest, that is, in his own private facts, which were facts of numerical calculation altogether: how could it not be so when he had dispossessed himself, if there had even been the slightest selection in the matter, of every faculty except the calculating? (IT 7) In his notes for The Ivory Tower (1914), James reviews the pitfalls he faced in The American Scene (1907), the apprehension that he was out of his depth explaining financial instruments, codicils to wills, amortization of principal and the like: “Enormous difficulty of pretending to show various things here as with a business vision, in my total absence of business initiation” (IT 216). James disparaged the crudity of new wealth in The American Scene by cataloging the material pomp and show of Newport and the Jersey shore: “houses and their candid look of having cost as much as they knew how” (AS 11). Similarly, The Ivory Tower casts a jaundiced eye on “The enormous preponderance of money. Money is their life,” as an axis of community and identity among the denizens of Newport (84). The Ivory Tower supersedes the fact-finding or constative dimension of the earlier work through its improvisation of a middle ground between “the motions of matter and the states of consciousness”—“the most heterogeneous objects we know,” according to Georg Simmel (132). James’s text resurrects the repressed social dimension of the market, in which individuals misconstrue a trumped up “exchange value” as a true measure of a commodity’s production costs and utility—as inherent in the [End Page 68] thing itself. James demystifies commodity fetishism starting with the fetish value of money. Just as a social compact allows money to function as if it were material wealth, rather than its envelope, James’s fictional Newport revolves around the activities of confirmed and reputed millionaires, reminding us that a collective delusion structures the real social activities of men. The performative dimension of James’s late unfinished novel is a perpetual demonstration of the absolute identity, from a functional viewpoint, of language and money within a conceptual framework: “for of what else but money do we ever talk?” (IT 105). Figurative language enables comparisons between things that are qualitatively different, cannily summarized by the phrase, “a treasure of consciousness” (36). Money reconciles the incommensurate aspects of commodities, ignoring qualitative differences in order to streamline the exchange of property: “A definite amount of money can thus determine or measure the value of an object, regardless of whether money and the valuable object possess any identical quality, and so regardless of whether money itself is valuable” (Simmel 133). (Eggs cost $3.00 a dozen; ribbons cost $3.00 each; therefore, a dozen eggs = one ribbon.) Money and language are placeholders of value, symbols without substance. Unwilling to mount a mimetic representation of the financial sector, James resorts to a “symbolic mode of analogical correspondences” between types of human activity in the novel, sweeping aside the ground of reality in favor of rhyming semiotic contexts (de Man 222). The paradoxical assimilation of rhetoric and commerce does not result in a “category mistake,” however, as James does not haphazardly misrepresent the facts pertaining to one category in terms appropriate to the other (Ricoeur 148). He forges a rapprochement between the two through the mediation of the sign, a third term that points to something other than a descriptive reference or literal meaning. The referential function of narrative is suspended throughout, as the reader struggles with the ambiguity of the message and the polysemy of favored terms. The text foregrounds “stereoscopic vision”—the ability to hold two different points of view at the same time (154), all the while urging symmetry between either side of the...