Literary Pornographies: Henry James's Politics of Suppression by Catherine Vieilledent, Université - Paul Valéry "L'Honnête femme η'a pas de roman": this is the original germ for "The Story In It," a short tale which was eventually published in 1902. In die Notebooks , James developed die phrase denying respectability to the heroine in literature in these terms: "either it's not a 'roman' or it's not honnête. When it becomes the thing it's guilty; when it doesn't become guilty it doesn't become the tiling" (NB 267). A year later, when James returned to his "germ," his angle of approach had changed and displaced die epigram: the second entry clarifies his complex relation to die tradition of French realism and to the issue of morality and sexuality in fiction. The crux of the matter lies in die novelist's reluctant involvement in the dilemma of realism (tantamount to inescapable guilt) and romance (meaning untried innocence) and his attempt to find a true alternative. This passion for teasers and dichotomies is not new to James; it is in fact central in all his writings dealing with "die international comedy" despite his confessed dwindling of interest in 1888: "I aspire to write in such a way that it would be impossible to an outsider to say whetiier I am at given moments an American writing about England or an Englishman writing about America" (LHJ). The novelist tiien may well declare himself possessed by "demon antidiesis" but his real ambition is to blur die oppositions. The Notebook entries show him compelled at first by the ingenious turn of the attack: in the Preface to Daisy Miller, he again agreed tiiat the dignity of art was to assert its superior demands and resist the moral stereotypes voiced by die "indigenous interlocutor." James's impulse was to confront die pious fallacies of the "common," understand British, reader and die hypocrisy of the Anglo-Saxon novel, still so dependent on popular romances. This is the gist of the early essay entitled "The Art of Fiction," a subde plea against the arbitrary limitations imposed on the genre: "Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints" (AF 388). Between the two Notebook entries of May 8tii, 1898 and February 15th, 1899, however, James changed viewpoint and adopted a more cautious and relativistic stance. In a way, the novelist reverted to die "'Anglo-Saxon' clinging to die impossible diesis," as he puts it in die Notebooks (NB 275-76), and now asked the question: between scandalous adultery and naive respectability, may diere not exist an innocent romance, some sort of "small scared subjective relation"? The twentieth-century reader may put it anotiier way and ask whetiier, after 186 The Henry James Review all, all literature is not pornographic, and a number of contemporary writers, Robert Coover for example, would decidedly answer "yes." Henry James, in his own century, was trying to escape die either/or formula and elude the second convention represented by the cynical bias of the French realist. "The Story In It" then was written as a narrative denial to the epigram which roughly translates as "the honorable woman cannot have [her] novel." The many connotations of the word "roman" in French (a piece of literature but also a fantastic romance and, possibly, an imaginary adventure) embody die whole question of fictional modes (romantic v. realistic) and national divisions; in die story itself, two representative characters have it out witii each other and repeat the scene which James evokes in his preface. Paul Bourget, the likely though unnamed friend, had met a reader's criticism of his heroines, with these observations: . . . ladies who respected diemselves took particular care never to have adventures; not die least little adventures mat would be worth (worth any selfrespecting novelist's) speaking of. There were certainly, it was to be hoped, ladies who practised mat reserve—which, however beneficial to diemselves, was yet fatally detrimental to literature, in die sense of promptiy making any artistic harmony pitched in the same low key trivial and empty. A picture of life founded on die...