The Rhetorical Logic of Henry James (review)

Sheila Teahan’s purpose, in The Rhetorical Logic of Henry James, is to “theorize from a rhetorical perspective the familiar Jamesian thematics of renunciation” (9) and to present “the Jamesian reflective center as a rhetorical, rather than a phenomenological, structure” (13). To this end she studies seven of James’s novels (ranging from Roderick Hudson to The Golden Bowl) as well as his prefaces, notebooks, and other critical writings. Her foundational premise is that “the central intelligence” of a James novel “cannot be extricated from the narrative it claims to organize” (2) and that the “destruction or effacement of the central consciousness” (3) cannot fully be accounted for in mimetic or thematic terms but can only be understood as a result of the work’s “rhetorical logic” (9). She attempts to prove for each novel that the central consciousness functions not only constatively but performatively, bringing into being aspects of plot and characterization.

Teahan approaches this performative function by investigating “the relation between figurative language and causality” (16). Three characteristics of the James canon are relevant to this investigation. First, there are many inconsistencies between on the one hand what James planned for his novels and how he described their narrative workings in the prefaces and elsewhere, and on the other hand how the novels actually work—in particular, the fact that none keeps wholly true to the “germ” that inspired it, to the “straight path” of narrating. Second, many of James’s central characters are destroyed or effaced, a fact that can be connected with James’s techniques: “While the central consciousness entails a self-imposed limitation or restriction of perspective, the scenic method is grounded in a deliberate renunciation of ‘going behind’” (144). Third, both the scenic method and the center-of-consciousness method can blur the distinction between what a character knows and what a narrating voice can tell, thus bringing into question the standpoint from which the actual narrating emanates.

By working with the figural “dimension” of “narrative determination,” Teahan is able to offer some fascinating and challenging suggestions about James’s “rhetorical logic” in the novels under study. For instance, of Strether she writes that his “compositional inventiveness gets out of control,” that he “aspires” but is unable “to follow a straight path in his capacity as center of consciousness,” and that as a “reflective center” he also generates “narrative ramifications” (98–100). By this she means that there is a “narrative logic that holds him accountable for the events he represents” (103). Similarly, the “compositional premise” of The Princess Casamassima “virtually demands [Hyacinth Robinson’s] annihilation” (35). This annihilation is figured in the narrator’s final withdrawal “from Hyacinth’s ‘consciousness,’” leaving that character’s “unrepresented crisis of conscience” an “indeterminate blank” (36).

Teahan’s longest chapter is on What Maisie Knew, which she terms “the exemplary Jamesian center of consciousness novel” (39). She argues that “although the narrator claims merely to report Maisie’s knowledge, he is in fact deeply implicated in its construction” (39). The phrase “‘what Maisie knew’ designates a symbiotic and asymmetrical narrative relation in which her knowledge depends on its articulation by the narrator” (40). The novel’s concluding shift to the scenic method “necessarily abandons the pretense that ‘what Maisie knew’ exists prior to its articulation by the narrator” (56). The novel demonstrates an “undecidable oscillation between constative and performative theories of language, between the avowed narrative scheme outlined in the preface and the text’s performative praxis,” especially its “overwrought, even surreal figurative language” (56, 65).

The rich promise of Teahan’s approach, however, suffers from an apparent lack of grounding in narratological analysis. Her index reveals J. Hillis Miller and Paul de Man as the most-often-cited critics (seven and four references, respectively); the bibliography does not list Gérard Genette, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Dorrit Cohn, or even Wayne Booth, all of whom have important things to say about the rhetorical functioning of narrating voices. At the very least, Teahan should have drawn on...