Silence in Henry James: The Heritage of Symbolism and Decadence (review)

Abstract

John Auchard. Silence in Henry James: The Heritage of Symbolism and Decadence . University Park and London: Pennsylvania State U P, 1986. 182 pp. $20.00. Recent criticism on Henry James has associated him with Continental writers outside of nineteenth-century Realism. James has been viewed as a writer verging on Modernism, specifically connected with the literary currents of Decadence , Symbolism, Impressionism, and even Existentialism. John Auchard's book follows this critical tendency, arguing in a schematic fashion that James's use of silence in his novels represented a rebellion against nineteenth-century Positivism. Auchard views silence as a measure of response by which James's characters confront the materialistic phenomenal world. Auchard traces in representative fiction of James's three periods a progression of silent exchanges and of certain correlatives of silence such as absences, gaps, voids, and even ghosts. He argues that these manifestations of silence reflect a movement of consciousness from a rich potentiality associated with Symbolism to a certain Existentialist void related to an ultimate awareness of "non-being and non-expression" (156). In attempting to characterize the silence he perceives as Symbolist, Decadent , or Existential, Auchard makes vast generalizations that bypass the mystique and temper of those attitudes. He rightly treats silence as a psychological method in James, but he does not take into account the full range of poetic and philosophical states that are specifically connected with the literary movements he names. Instead, he categorizes the silences in terms of negative or positive effects . He identifies formative silences in early works such as Roderick Hudson and The American, ambivalences of silence in The Portrait of a Lady, and a dialectics of silence offered by later works such as The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl. He labels any so-called "extra-sensory" or "spiritual" perception as Symbolist. In particular, Auchard singles out Milly Theale from The Wings of the Dove and discerns in her spirituality and avoidance of outright statement a so-called Symbolist consciousness that is eventually rarefied into the extreme of Decadence or non-participation. With regard to The American, he sees in Christopher Newman's exposure to the silences of Qaire de Cintré in her secluded cloister an initiation into Symbolist mysticism. The equivalences Auchard makes fail to take into consideration the climates and écriture of the respective movements. As we know, Symbolism was a literary movement with quite specific stylistic characteristics and metaphysical attitudes: the cult of the dream, the suggestion of mood by objective landscapes, the evocative musicality of language, and the preoccupation with time's passage. In Auchard's hands, Symbolism becomes loosely associated with fictional characters ' retreats from the material world and from the concreteness of explicit language. Although James's characters do indeed make flights from reality, Auchard is making a rather large literary-historical leap in calling these escapes Symbolist. Auchard's bibliography in fact lacks the basic references to critical work on Symbolism that would enable him to recognize the distance between James and this literary movement. Seeking to establish links to Symbolism, Auchard locates certain "pregnant silences" (88), which he finds close to the expressions of silence introduced by Review of Silence in Henry James 75 Maeterlinck and Mallarmé. He is aware of the secular mysticism that the Symbolists adopted and attempts to make that the basis of the strongest connection. But in drawing parallels with James, Auchard seems to be off base in seeing specific similarities between Mallarmé 's aesthetic of suggestiveness and the mystery of the symbol (drawn from "Crise de vers") with what James more generally expressed as the novelist's sensitivity in "The Art of Fiction." After all, Mallarmé was not a novehst but a poet suggesting mood by die incantatory capacity of words; such mystique of setting and tone is not present in the terse exchanges of James's characters. Although Auchard uses a descriptive rather than judgmental definition of Decadence (an interpretation that in fact has already been made by others), his citation of the well-known statements on Decadence by Symons, Baudelaire, Gautier, and Huysmans is not appropriately applied to James. To consider, for example, Gilbert Osmond in The Portait of a Lady as comparable...