Toward an Ethics of Cultural Acts: the Jamesian Dialectic in "Broken Wings" David Golumbia, University of Pennsylvania There can be little doubting James's fascination with aesthetics, especially with considerations of literary form and prose style. Yet exactly what that fascination comes to with regard to James's broader artistic goals seems less clear. Certainly his position is unlike that popularly associated with Pater, Wilde, and the other Aestheticist and Symbolist writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; whatever the slogan "art for art's sake" might mean precisely , it is clear that James shares neither its apparently overt resistance toward moral value in art, nor its apparently complete abandonment to ornate style (however his detractors might disparage James's late writing style).1 Indeed, the relationships between James's concern with ethical questions or moral imperatives, on the one hand, and his formal and stylistic goals on the other, have been difficult to characterize precisely. This difficulty, it seems clear, informs much critical writing on James. Studies that seek to systematically isolate the formal details of James's aesthetic, whether from his fictional or critical writings, often become tangled in a variety of ethical issues.2 And those that seek to isolate ethical ideas find problems just where they attempt to motivate either formal details of the fiction or stylistic comments in the criticism.3 The reason for these problems seems straightforward: in James, issues of aesthetics and ethics are closely tied together. The reader is never entirely sure whether to read "The Turn of the Screw" as a complex narrative device or as a parable about the governess's The Henry James Review 15 (1994): 152-69. © 1994, The Johns Hopkins University Press Toward an Ethics of Cultural Acts 153 manipulation of her "innocent" charges—whether to read "The Figure in the Carpet" as an experiment in ambiguity and self-reflexiveness, or as a heavily ironic or sinister tale of obsession, murder, and inhuman coldness.4 The solution to this conundrum, I will argue, involves what can best be characterized as a dialectic of aesthetics and ethics (in which each term of the opposition both depends upon and is defined by the other), though I will be able to do little more than sketch such a configuration here.s Whatever else can be said, James is clearly and persistently interested in issues of both form and function, and the dividing line between these issues seems pale at best. Even textual features that need to be viewed mostly in their moral light (such as the end of The Portrait of a Lady), as well as those that seem to call for primarily formal consideration (the sitters in "The Real Thing" or point-of-view in The Sacred Fount), demand consideration from the other perspective. In this argument, I use "aesthetics" to encompass what have been thought of generally as James's formal and stylistic goals. Of course a broader meaning of that term would include all of James's goals in composing his fiction and thus would obscure the dialectical issues at the heart of this investigation. I will thus use the term aesthetic to refer primarily to considerations of literary form and prose style; the term ethical to refer to the whole universe of considerations of human action and societal norms (thus in a generally Marxian form, rather than the more narrowly constrained sense of contemporary analytic ethics); and the term artistic to encompass the entirety of James's goals in composing fiction, including, at least in principle, those outside of both the aesthetic and the ethical. To James, I will argue then, for a work to be wholly artistically successful it must fulfill a number of interrelated aesthetic and ethical goals. The relationship between these two sets of standards is highly mediated, so that two related sorts of problems easily occur: it is both difficult to isolate the standard that motivates a given textual detail, and not possible to abstractly state the relative importance of the two sets of goals. As an example I will discuss James's "Broken Wings" (1900), not only because of its relative brevity, simplicity, likeness to much of James's...