The Music of Becoming-American Ivana Cikes In his study Hawthorne, Henry James's oft quoted yet misunderstood passage concerning what American culture lacks for literary production, the flurry of negations can lead one to gloss over the statement made at the conclusion of the section. Here, James teases readers about what makes America, and being an American, so "liberating": The natural remark, in the almost lurid light of such an indictment, would be that if these things were left out, everything is left out. The American knows that a good deal remains; what it is that remains—that is his secret, his joke, as one may say. (35) The absence of "high civilization" is later explained to be supplemented by the "minute" and simple pleasures, sensations, and never-ending relations of life. In other words, James's conception of American culture, and consequently that which European "high civilization" could not experience or achieve due to its well-established traditions and social constructs, is a continual, fluid state of "becoming." This fluid, marginal self (Posnock 88) was not only James's preferred mode of narrative presence. It comprised for both William and Henry James the essence of freedom from the constraints of concepts, theories, "Ideas"—in other words, the social order as structured by language. Having returned to England from his American tour of 1904–05, Henry James began to finalize composition of a text from new and previous work, The American Scene, that conveys his musings on the country he had left twenty years earlier and that he now could revisit, through a pseudo travelogue, to comment on the developments of his nation and to convey his impressions of what had become of this Jamesian state of Becoming-American he and his brother had celebrated in their respective works. But the years after his American tour also led to a series of other non-fiction works, specifically those that would later be collectively known as James's autobiographies, begun after the death of his brother William in 1910, in which Henry revisits his [End Page 16] memories of the America of his childhood and early adulthood years. Although the two projects are separated in subject matter by many years, and the impetus for their respective compositions are distinct, their central concern with individual and collective memory, and the way these intermingling memories shape American national identity, remains at the forefront of each work. While it is tempting to leap towards the conceptions that informed the texts, taking a step back to explore the linguistic register through which James conveys his conception of American identity may provide us with a better understanding of how James creates a world that celebrates becoming while simultaneously revealing his insights on the reality of the American Scene—past, present, and future. If the essence of American identity relies on the play and celebration of "the more,"1 then the question of what linguistic register could capture the essence of what it means to be American may help reveal the linguistic power behind Henry James's autobiographies, particularly, A Small Boy and Others. While James's experimentation with different linguistic registers need not be mentioned, James's evocation of the senses—the sound, smell, touch of his childhood and present-day America—reaches what Philip Horne has argued taps into the poetic register of expression. Therefore, in line with this conference's focus on sound, my paper is concerned with how James's attempt to convey his America (its concept and its reality) evokes the senses in order to experience "the more" of identity that other forms of language cannot convey. In order to understand the use of this poetic register, I turned to the theory of lyric language as formulated by Mutlu Blasing in her seminal work, Lyric Poetry: The Pain and Pleasure of Words, where she proposes a contrasting interpretation to the well-established understanding of lyric poetry as the expression of the private emotions of individuals. She argues, instead, that lyric poetry resonates with readers/listeners due to its use of (or access to) the public power and realm of language. Applying this model of poetic language—and the register of (collective...
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Aug 20, 2021
Michelle Vong + 1
Open Access