Dining with The Ambassadors

Dining with The Ambassadors By Jan van Rosevelt, University of South Carolina Henry James's fiction is, as Robert L. Gale notes, rich in figures of speech, with an "imagistic density [of] four images per one thousand words" (8). One of the few categories of imagery in James that Gale has not really addressed in his otherwise comprehensive work on figurative language in the fiction of James, The Caught Image, is that of eating or food. Neither is indexed by Gale, though he mentions in passing that one type of figure that a "more exhaustive examination.. .might turn up" could be that of food ( 197). An examination of The Ambassadors does not need to be very exhaustive to discover images of food or references to eating or drinking—by my (rough) count these occur over one hundred times in the novel. But it is not just the frequency of these appearances that gives them significance. If one looks at food in The Ambassadors with the aid of established psychological, sociological and anthropological concepts, patterns of meaning emerge. Food is important by itself; it is a "perceptible phenomenon, unique in the number of senses affected and in the intensity of affect" (Jones 262). Food is the means by which the individual reproduces herself, Mervyn Nicholson points out, as sex is the means of species-reproduction; thus the individual performs an "act of self creation daily" by eating (37). Audrey Richards puts it bluntly: "Nutrition as a biological process" she says, "is more fundamental than sex...the individual man can exist without sexual gratification, but he must inevitably die without The Henry James Review 15 (1994): 301-308. © 1995, The Johns Hopkins University Press 302 The Henry James Review food" (qtd. in Goody 15). It is impossible to separate eating and life for a "truly individual identity"; indeed, Judeo-Christian tradition identifies the origin of "self-consciousness and history" with "an act of eating: Adam and Eve's theft of forbidden fruit" (Nicholson 37). The act of eating is not only associated with knowledge, but also with the acquisition of knowledge, with shared insight, with the growth of individual consciousness. With the eating of the forbidden fruit came not only knowledge, of course, but also mortality as well. If eating is identified with life and creation, it also clearly involves a process of destruction. The existence of the eater requires that there be an eaten, and these relational roles are not always stable. The Ambassadors, which centers on the middle-aged Lambert Strether's trip to Paris in order to bring back his fellow American, the young Chad Newsome, is about life and knowledge, about the growth of consciousness. Strether becomes intrigued with the idea of the propagation of the individual's self-hood, fascinated by what he sees as the maturation of young Newsome. Oscar Cargill says that "the story of The Ambassadors is...of the growth of a man, belatedly, from innocence to maturity" (313). The Adam figure is Strether, rather than Chad, whose innocence has already been lost when the novel begins. If the novel is about the absorption of life, it is appropriate that the work is replete with metaphoric or depicted acts of eating or tasting. Many of the references to dining or drinking are dead metaphors or parts of tropes, as is the mention of Maria Gostrey's "appetite for news," or Jim Pocock's "healthy appetite" for sight-seeing. Certainly "some congruous fruit of absolution," "the cup of his impressions," or "he had settled his hash" do not refer to actual comestibles, but James's repeated recourse to such figures keeps that level of meaning alive (AM 240, 211, 172, 59, 315).l Many other references to eating or drinking are made in passing and seem to have little import outside of serving purely as atmosphere, being something that the characters do in the course of the novel. Clearly, however, as Nicholson says, "in life, eating is a routine necessity, but in literature eating is always a symbolic act" (38). Henry James was noted for his fondness of food and company. In reading Leon Edel's biography of James, one is struck by the aptness...