‘The Answer … is Yes and No’: John Banville, Henry James, and The Ambassadors

Abstract

Late twentieth- and early twenty-first century fiction has witnessed a surge of interest in Henry James, his life and works. Most of these recent Jamesian (re-)engagements are concerned with the body, with James's (still) questionable homosexuality, or with his direct involvement in the literary marketplace. John Banville's 1984 novella, The Newton Letter, is a literary forerunner of this renewed preoccupation with James and Jamesian concerns in contemporary fiction. Differing from more recent novels such as Colm Tóibín's The Master (2004) and David Lodge's Author, Author (2004), Banville's engagement with James does not centre around the portrayal of sexuality or accrued literary/monetary capital. Rather, Banville follows James in his concern with unstable and indeterminate meaning. This essay establishes that indeterminacy through an investigation of the novella's rich textual and intertextual archive. Hitherto critics have commonly assumed the novella's intertextual centre to lie in the works of Hugo von Hoffmanstahl and Wolfgang Goethe. By uncovering its composition history and studying the unpublished materials relating to the project, this essay demonstrates Banville's ongoing engagement with Jamesian concerns, most importantly with tropes of reading and/or writing, and the construction of subjectivity through these tropes.