Henry James's Last Romance: Making Sense of the Past and the American Scene (review)

Beverly Haviland poses a question that preoccupied Henry James as well: how can we make sense of the past in—and for—the present? Focusing on The Sense of the Past, The American Scene, and The Ivory Tower, she places James in conversation with his parents, his contemporaries (Peirce, Veblen, DuBois, Riis), and later thinkers on the subject of how the past and present relate. Interested readers should turn first to Haviland’s epilogue, which characterizes more clearly than her introduction her argument and her aims. Here is her pitch for metonymy as a “methodological trope” (212); her celebration of James’s “triadic semiotic practice” (213), which disrupts binary oppositions between past and present, black and white, male and female; her own introduction of “third terms” (the writings of Derrida, Freud, Bataille, Appiah, and Lacan) to break interpretative stalemates between James and his contemporaries; and her therapeutic agenda, as she joins with James to foster “a society in which it is meaningful to live and to love” (215) by reviving the social and critical art of conversation.

Haviland has come, as James would say, late in the day; she characterizes her book as the product of “such a long time” (ix) and “so many years” (xi). Although she frames her argument in terms different from those of Ross Posnock, Kenneth Warren, or Sara Blair, the project of historicizing James’s own historiographic practice is no longer new. She works hard in her introduction to create a sense of urgency, but her efforts feel forced, as when she diagnoses an epidemic of “Jacobophobia” (12) whose sufferers include not only Maxwell Geismar, Mark Seltzer, and Alfred Habegger, but also F. O. Matthiessen, Irving Howe, Alan Trachtenberg, and John Carlos Rowe. With ‘phobes like these, who needs ‘philes?

If the answer is Henry James, he has found his ideal reader in Haviland, who is bent on refuting every recorded criticism of his work. In defense of his often-noted refusal to place himself, even for a moment, in the position of the black Southerners he meets, she remarks: “Just as he does not resort in his fiction to authorial omniscience, James did not pretend to be able to understand the experience of the Southern black, to see the world from the African-American’s point of view” (124). But if James’s principled refusal to “resort” to omniscience is to be applauded here, why is Haviland so impressed by his adoption of another radically alien perspective, when James “speaks from the outraged position of the native Americans” (58)? For all her interest in the transformative possibilities of conversation, Haviland’s impulse is to silence those who question James, even at the cost of her own argument’s coherence.

But if her devotion to James is sometimes blind, it also sustains Haviland through some imaginative readings. Her first section, “Making the Last Romance,” deals with The Sense of the Past, which James laid aside in 1900 and resumed after The American Scene. She compares the relationship between Nan and the time-traveller Ralph to that between psychoanalyst and analysand, enacting the ideal transference which allows Ralph to break with the repetitive cycles of past experience and meet the present social world. Haviland argues that the writing of The American Scene triggered a parallel breakthrough in James himself, and her use of transference as a model here anticipates her more extensive claims about the therapeutic nature of The American Scene.

In her second section, “Civilization and Its Contents,” Haviland characterizes The American Scene as “diagnostic rather than prescriptive” (53), but she comes to argue that James is on a “therapeutic mission” (57), and that The American Scene “was intended to remedy” (59) the continual effacement of the American past. This argument depends on the existence of readers who might have benefited from James’s therapy, and while we are all analysands now, Haviland’s individual readings derive their...