James, Pleasure, Power

The Henry James Review Spring, 1984 Smith, Mary D. "Downstairs from the Upstairs : A Study of the Servants' Hall in the Victorian Novel." Diss. Harvard 1966. Todorov, Tzvetan. Poétique de la prose. Paris: Seuil, 1978. "Walter." My Secret Life. Abridged. New York: Ballantine, 1966. White, Allon. The Uses of Obscurity; The Fiction of Early Modernism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. James, Pleasure, Power by Mark Seltzer, Cornell University To pose the questions of "the literary" and "the political" together is also to open questions of difference and resistance, in part because of the virtuaUy automatic and still dominant conception of "the Uterary" as an oppositional or counter-discourse. Such a conception of "the literary" as subversive , liberating, and resistant works to guarantee an absolute antinomy between the literary and the political domain. To take a recent and significant instance, John Carlos Rowe, in Through the CustomHouse , appeals throughout to what he sees as the violently disruptive and subversive character of literary discourse. Rowe takes as his governing premise what he caUs "the subversive impulse of literature in general" and endorses the "general conception of literary language as a violation of the normative ." Not surprisingly, this model of the literary as fundamentaUy subversive goes hand in hand with a model of power as fundamentaUy repressive. Hence for Rowe what literature exposes are "the various repressions at work in different cultural codes," and what the literary performs is a "subversion of the normative that liberates the social signified." There is certainly nothing unusual about this critical scenario. One might say that a governing tendency of even the most politicaUy conscious recent literary theory has been to protect an essential difference between literary and political practices. Whether the difference between the literary and the political is founded on an "irony intrinsic to the literary" that decenters and undoes structures of power, or on a "critical difference" that must be repressed in any (therefore necessarily illegitimate) exercise of power, or on an "arbitrariness of the sign" taken to entail the repressive arbitrariness of any enforcement of power and meaning (terms that tend toward synonomy in this account)—however this antinomy has been theoreticaUy posited, what aU these accounts of a literary difference rely on is an intrinsic opposition of literary resistance and social practices of regulation. It is this scenario that I want to question here. What I want to clarify are the ways in which the insistence on a literary difference may in fact function as part of, and end up reaffirming, the very structures of power that the literary and literary theory are imagined to subvert. It is not merely that, as Michel Foucault has argued, the view of power as essentially negative and repressive "covers" for the "positive" and "productive" resources of modern tactics of regulation, but also that modern apparatuses of regulation operate through what might be caUed a management or deployment of difference. Regulative practices , according to Foucault, not merely tolerate but require resistances, require discourses apparently opposed to them, but in fact part of a larger deployment of power. From this point of view, the assertion of literary autonomy or subversiveness may appear not as a haven or escape from power but rather as part of the deployment of that power. To adapt Foucault's formulation , "the irony of this deployment is in having us believe that our 'liberation' is in balance." The example of Henry James is a parVolume V 199 Number 3 The Henry James Review Spring, 1984 ticularly rich one to consider here since James has been read as the exemplary type of the "nonpolitical" novelist. James's novelistic and critical practice has been appropriated to support an essential opposition between aesthetic and political claims. The novel is above aU, in this criticism, the genre of love and freedom, and the art of the novel and the subject of power are seen as absolutely incompatible. But I want to suggest that if the Jamesian text advertises a radical incompatibility between art and power, that text finaUy teUs a different story—a story of power told as a story of love and freedom. Such a paradoxical economy of love and power defines the double...