Response: Writing Culture and Henry James

I find myself somewhat bewildered by Ross Posnock’s characterization of my work, as a species of a form of inquiry he identifies by turns as New Historicism and as cultural studies. Admittedly the problem of defining the relations between these practices is vexatious, but Posnock’s larger notion of their designs—as dominated by analogical thinking and a “lavish sense of triumph amid the wreckage of the aesthetic” (if troubled by a certain “guilty conscience” about it)—doesn’t account adequately for my relation to either. In fact, my primary interest in reading James is not unlike Posnock’s own, insofar as we both aim to provide a more nuanced account of the relation between aesthetics and politics as ongoing cultural activities. More specifically, I argue that the literary itself—or rather, the widely varied performances comprehending that sphere in turn-of-the-century Anglo-America—is a crucially important site of cultural formation in its own right, in and through which distinct racial feelings, entangled with the pursuit of taste, “culture,” and national identities, evolve. To argue this by reading James is, in fact, to follow Posnock, who has done more than any recent critic to break the aura of inert formalism in which James has long been enshrined. It is also to work, on a larger scale and with an alertness to historical context, to preserve the aesthetic as a meaningful category of experience, reception, and response.

Given my interest in the shapes that determinedly literary gestures, institutions, and habits take, Posnock’s positioning here turns out to produce something like the baneful effect he ascribes to cultural studies. While his revaluative pragmatism inveighs against depending on a “caricatured notion of aesthetic value,” it finally empties the literary as a field of practice of certain charged, historically salient marks and intentions. His response (or rather, his challenge) suggests, as does his monumental work on James at large, that the latter’s signature project of “de-idealization”—on which Posnock’s strong claims to the meaningfully social energy of James’s performances turn—is carried out in James’s autobiographical writings and in The American Scene. In these latter texts, Posnock implies, ironic forms of “self-confess[ion],” freed from the dead letter of merely literary conventions, can emerge.

The drawing of this margin, to the unintended but consequential exclusion of some of James’s most pugnaciously aestheticized fictions and statements of literary doctrine, begs a crucial question about the relation of cultural activity conducted under the sign of the literary to other modes of culture-building in this era. Here, Posnock is far closer than I to New Historicism, at least that of Walter Benn Michaels, famously declaring that “the only relation literature as such has to culture as such is that it is part of it” (Michaels 27). Given his overriding interest in James’s contestation of the abiding, and powerfully American, notion that “integrity . . . inheres in subjectivity,” Posnock can—and indeed must—dismiss the salience of the literary as a historical category, with its own fine performative distinctions, its own generic and social resonances, altogether. There is no “outside” to the dialectic of abjection and power, to the invitation to estrangement; there are no meaningful boundaries between such modes of address as the autobiographical, the novelistic, and the social. The result, I would argue, is a too-sanguine erasure of the affective-cum-institutional force of specific, and specifically literary, forms and gestures, themselves functioning with remarkable power in this moment of cultural redefinition as a “zone” of myriad forms of social “uncertainty.”

Too, Posnock’s reading of my reading of James’s reading of otherness, as the grounds of a “major ethical claim on behalf of James,” obscures my commitments on behalf of politics, as here circumscribed. Somewhat disingenuously, but nonetheless aptly, Posnock asks how “one is to judge James’s relation to African Americans as they are depicted in The American Scene” (emphasis mine). It is precisely James’s relation to protocols of “depict[ion]” that interests me—and precisely as a way of thinking about the cultural force of such engagements...