The First-Person Narrators of Henry James

Abstract

THE FIRST-PERSON NARRATORS OF HENRY JAMES W. R. Macnaughton* It may seem almost presumptuous to suggest that, given the wealth of perceptive criticism and scholarship,devoted to the life and work of Henry James, there is any area of the master's activity which has been given short shrift. It is evident, however, that this is the case with the majority of the fifty first-person tales that he published between 1865 and 1901.' Certain stories, of course, (and the novel, The Sacred Fount) have received their share—perhaps more than their share of critical attention, "The Turn of the Screw" being an obvious case in point.2 Yet, despite the work of critics like Wayne Booth, many readers persist in regarding such stories ("The Aspern Papers" is another example) as sports in the Jamesian canon, and conclude that almost all of his narrators are only functions of his narrative method or mouthpieces of their creator.3 The most unfortunate result of these attitudes is that a number of good stories written throughout James's career remain uncriticized and unread. The concept of the "disinterested" observer—a staple of Jamesian criticism4—can be particularly misleading when applied without real discrimination to the first-person fiction: James's narrators are rarely "disinterested" either in the sense of being emotionally uninvolved in the actions which they describe, or able to judge these actions with anything approaching total objectivity. They frequently possess subtle biases, a fact which demands that the reader criticize the stories which he overhears, or at least scrutinize them carefully to decide whether dimensions exist which the narrators have left unexplored. In their excellent theoretical work, The Nature of Narrative, Robert Scholes and Robert Kellog assert that the first-person narrative situation is "ineluctably ironical" since it creates a potential disparity between the perspectives of the narrator, the other characters, and the audience; for the author, therefore, the control of irony becomes the principal technical problem.5 For the reader of Henry James's first-person fiction, "Professor Macnaughton teaches at the University of Waterloo. He has published on Melville, Howells, James, and Hemingway and is currently at work on a book on Mark Twain. 146W. R. Macnaughton the awareness of and response to irony becomes the most important factor in appreciating the richness and complexity of even some of the apprentice works. On first consideration, however, such conclusions would seem to fly in the face of James's own comments on and implied attitudes toward first-person narration. Certainly James's statements about the firstperson in his Preface to The Golden Bowl must be considered by any critic interested in James's narrators. When he discusses his handling of the Prince in the novel, for example, James says that he is "very nearly" a first-person narrator in effect—that, in other words, he is the "reflector ... in the clear glass held up to so many of the 'short stories,' " the difference being that the Prince is very much embroiled in the action. Again, in the same Preface, James mentions how "often" his narrator has been "but an unnamed, unintroduced, and (save by right of intrinsic wit), unwarranted participant, the impersonal author's concrete deputy or delegate, a convenient substitute or apologant for the creative power otherwise so veiled and qualified." Finally, he refers to his past practice of viewing his subject through some "more or less detached, some not strictly involved, though thoroughly interested and intelligent, witness or reporter" who contributes "mainly ... [a] certain amount of criticism and interpretation of it."6 It seems legitimate to relate these comments to those which he makes about his ficelle figures in the Preface to The Portrait of a Lady—they belong properly only to the "treatment of the subject"7—and to decide that his first-person narrators are analogous in their general function to the ficelles. In the light of such statements, one might acknowledge the cogency of the following assertion: "It is easy sometimes, to think the author of a book is ironic toward his narrator when he is not."8 One might also conclude that careful discrimination and an awareness of the possibilities of irony would...