"The Aspern Papers": The Unvisitable Past

120 The Henry James Review intimately interrelated, the narrator squanders both the aesthetic and the sexual potential of his quest; moreover, he loses the chance to discover his true identity or to overcome its division by uniting editor and (the answer to the Sphinx's riddle) man. Let me end by drawing art, sex, and money, land and sea, Aspern and the narrator, sublime self-possession and violent self-division, into one last vortex. The early paragraph in which the narrator recaUs Aspern's sexual charm yet insists that he was not a woman's poet concludes as foUows: "'Orpheus and the Maenads!' was the exclamation that rose to my lips when I first turned over his correspondence. Almost aU the Maenads were unreasonable and many of them insupportable; it struck me in short that he was kinder, more considerate than, in his place (if I could imagine myself in such a place!) I should have been." The matchless Orpheus joined the quest for the Golden Fleece and played for Jason and the Argonauts, who rowed to the rhythm of his song when nearly overwhelmed by a violent sea. Later, he saved the men from the Sirens by drowning out their fatal music with his own. A demigod whose art combats the liquid fury of the waves and temptation of the female, he becomes the passionate lover of Eurydice, whom he loses to the realm of the dead. In his final role, that of the solitary wanderer, he devotes himself exclusively to his lyre and scorns the women whose passion he arouses, until a band of Maenads—frenzied, female Dionysians—tears him limb from limb, flinging his body parts into the river whose course his music had had the power to change. "The Aspern Papers" narrator rows his gondola up to the "dead waU" of the Bordereau palace in quest of a closely guarded treasure. He thinks that he understands the form and the boundaries of his object, but when he acknowledges what he calls "my desire to possess myself of Jeffrey Aspern's papers," the reflexivity of his language (an insistent device in the tale) suggests that what is most profoundly at stake is self-possession. At the end, Miss Tita's desperate proposal and "flood of tears" produce in the narrator what, in the preface, James's own incautious "immersions" in the "too numerous, too deep, too obscure, too strong" impressions of Italy are said to produce in himself: "a troubled consciousness that heaves as with the disorder of drinking it deeply in." The narrator renounces the papers in order to save himself from immersion in a union with Miss Tita. But then, in one last significant reflexive phrase, he resolves: "I would not unite myself and yet I would have them." With these words, the narrator sentences himself to the fate of Orpheus, for, in a sense, the unified self and the possessed papers can only be one and the same. And, while the narrator is not literaUy dismembered, the tale does end with the disintegration of "The Aspern Papers." An abstract and undefined entity until the final page, this correspondence assumes physical substance only when it is broken up into many separate pieces of paper and then rituaUy destroyed (in the words of Miss Tita, words the narrator's last utterance mechanically repeats) "one by one." Mlllicent Bell—"The Aspern Papers": The Unvisitable Past James's prefaces to his revised fiction in the New York Edition of 1907-1909 constitute curious "framing" second thoughts. These self-interpretive comments sometimes extract an original intention only partiaUy evident in the stories they introduce, sometimes even add a perspective which gives prominence to a theme Selected Papers on Henry James 121 that is only subordinate—when it is not even contradicted—by the story standing alone. Sometimes they even quite neglect to mention what the reader of the story might identify as its salient idea. And yet the distortions of the preface, if one may caU them that, disclose latencies in the prefaced fiction that one would not otherwise have perceived; we find ourselves reading not one but two stories, both perceptible, now, in the original text. In no...