Between Communion and Renunciation: Revising The American

Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so. [. . .] Art would be easy indeed if [. . .] such conveniences, such simplifications, had been provided. We have, as the case stands, to invent and establish them, to arrive at them by a difficult, dire process of selection and comparison, of surrender and sacrifice. The very meaning of expertness is acquired courage to brace one's self for the cruel crisis from the moment one sees it grimly loom.

--Henry James, Preface to Roderick Hudson (FW1041)

In the space between the two endings of Henry James's novel The American--the first completed in 1877 for the final installation of a serial publication in The Atlantic Monthly and the second completed in 1905 for publication in Volume 2 of the 1907 New York Edition of James's collected works--James traces a path from the archaic blood ritual of communion sacrifice to the allegedly modern spiritualization of religious renunciation to the secular "crisis" of a more ethical mode of relationality. James's novel tells the story of an American businessman, Christopher Newman--"a powerful specimen" of the "national type" (18, 17)--who has come to Europe, and finally Paris, in 1868 "to pick up aesthetic entertainment" (AM1 301). ¹ Newman becomes engaged to the widowed daughter of an old, aristocratic French family, Claire de Cintré, née Bellegarde, only to lose her to the Carmelite convent when the family turns against the marriage and Claire proves too faithful to the family "religion" to resist its law. As James explains in his 1907 preface to the New York Edition of the novel, the story turns for him on how Newman, who has been characterized by the novel's narrator as exceedingly "good natured," will respond to this wrong. Having become privy to a Bellegarde family secret--a letter written by the deceased Bellegarde patriarch charging his own wife with his death so that his daughter may be married to a man of whom he disapproves (M. de Cintré)--Newman first contemplates revenge, but at the very end "give[s] it up," and "let[s] the Bellegardes go," by burning the damning document in the fire (AM1 308, 306).

The scenes that immediately precede and follow this little holocaust in the final chapter of the novel, I argue, show James to be working through the narrative motivations and mechanisms that create a spiritualized subject of renunciation, at the same time that he appears to be questioning the value of the moral community that would make this figure its cornerstone. Further, James's figuration of the renunciatory act--a figuration that is broadened and strengthened in his revisions--shows him to be questioning the purity of this ostensible (self-)sacralization. Far from upholding a spiritual "surrender" as the model of ethical relations, James seems more interested here in the traces of what remains after this process of self-divestiture takes place. As I will show here, the ethical relation exists for James not in the sanctity of the spiritual, but in the messy inter-spaces between self-preservation and self-surrender. We see this most clearly in the actions and interactions of the novel's characters who rehearse the rituals of communion, scapegoating, and self-abnegation, engaging in a kind of round-robin that distributes the roles of victim, sacrificer, and even deity, liberally and interchangeably. This narrative and figurative sacrificial cycle demonstrates that, in the "crisis" of ethical relations, no one comes away "clean."

In chapter 26 of The American, the final chapter of the novel, we find Christopher Newman engaged in what I read as a gradual "conversion" to the practice of renunciation. "[O]n the whole," we are told, "he fell into a rather reflective mood. Without in the least intending...