The Other Henry James (review)

John Carlos Rowe. The Other Henry James. Durham: Duke UP, 1998. 238 pp. $17.95.

Few Jamesians have a knowledge of James's writing and of critical writing on James to match that of John Carlos Rowe; and The Other Henry James, Rowe's third book on James, is intellectually challenging, rousing stuff indeed. Rowe accomplishes several ambitious tasks: he places James's writing in relation to the socially committed critical theory of the Frankfurt school; he offers readings of a wide range of James's fictions which demonstrate Rowe's claims for their cultural awareness, their functioning as critique, in particular a "critique of bourgeois authority" (19); he deftly assesses the strengths and pitfalls of major twentieth-century approaches to James and advances a contemporary model of reading and teaching James that will keep him alive and vital in our postmodern, multicultural twenty-first century.

The central thrust of Rowe's argument is that James the aesthetic master is being (and should be) displaced by other Henry Jameses who differ from James the elusive, invisible artist whose formal achievements made him the darling of the New Critics and other formalist schools of criticism. These other Henrys have been emerging in a wide range of biographical writing and critical studies of James, and Rowe is generous in acknowledging the diverse influences on his work. In offering what is in part a synthesis of recent critical approaches, Rowe shows what happens to James when these approaches are brought together in dialogue. Other Henrys are conflicted and compromised by race, gender, and, above all, by sexuality, but their vulnerabilities serve to make them more telling in their portrayals of cultural processes and socialization than the elitist formalist who would resolve all tensions into a seamless aesthetic whole.

The critical dialogue played out in The Other Henry James echoes a debate staged in James's own criticism and highly self-conscious fiction. James was acutely aware of possible tensions between his aim to create aesthetic masterpieces and the job of the novel to represent the messy heterogeneity of "life." His tendency in his critical prefaces to speak of his works as maimed, deformed children rather than perfectly balanced, formed creations--children with whom he nevertheless enjoys a narcissistic relation--suggests that even if formalist aestheticism was an ideal for James, it was an ideal mainly betrayed or unachieved. Rowe argues that an understanding of James's biography will enhance our insights into his writing, but the author (or authors) Rowe resuscitates is a different author from that poststructuralist criticism set out to slay. There is no singular sign of Henry James unifying our understanding of his writing; rather, James is shown to have a dissonant and dialectical relation to his culture, writing, and even (perhaps most importantly) his own identity. James is "a product of his time and place" (83) even as he aims to stand apart from it, and Rowe shows that Jamesian insights frequently arise from this dual relation of implication in and alienation from the values of the Anglo-American ruling class. James might aim for a "cosmopolitanism" to underpin "his own narrative authority" (98), but this same cosmopolitanism is no neutral vantage point: it is fashioned by a Euramerican elite that crosses parochial national boundaries but whose high cultural values are tied to capital and power and influenced by discourses of race. Rowe sensitively shows how the cosmopolitan James reacts ambivalently to Jewishness in The Tragic Muse and to the "vast contingents of aliens" he describes, in his 1905 essay "The Question of Our Speech," as in need of learning the "discrimination and selection" which are intrinsic to "formed and finished utterance."

Rowe wants to lay to rest any embarrassment Jamesians might feel at the notion of James the "genius" whose formidable achievements paradoxically render him marginal as a conservative cultural artifact whose aesthetic modernism is irrelevant to our own democratizing, pluralist objectives. He does this in part by showing James to be a...