The Romance of Failure: First-Person Fictions of Poe, Hawthorne, and James (review)

334 The Henry James Review threat of war approaching "Within the Rim" of his horizon, James "searches visually for structures that will order an experiential world that threatens to disintegrate into chaos, dissolving with it the self formed by experience" (165), a disintegration that reaches its completion on James's deathbed, where "the boundaries of the self dissolve" (173). This short review cannot give a complete account of the complexity of Griffin's argument or her intricate and nuanced use of diverse sources, for The Historical Eye is a book for James specialists and deserves to be read by them for its original and intriguing insights into the labyrinthine mind of the late James. Jonathan Auerbach. The Romance of Failure: First-Person Fictions of Poe, Hawthorne, and James. New York: Oxford U P, 1989. 201 pp. $29.95. By J. Gerald Kennedy, Louisiana State University Jonathan Auerbach's compact study features Poe, Hawthorne, and James as exemplary figures whose experiments with I-narrators illustrate the complications of first-person fiction while charting the nineteenth-century shift from romanticism to realism. Invoking Emile Benveniste's concept of the first-person pronoun as an empty, unstable sign—a move that seems to signal a deconstructive strategy—Auerbach nonetheless counters poststructuralist claims about the death of the author by insisting on the author's intimate involvement in first-person narration, a point of view that, he says, typically "threatens to collapse the distinction between creator and creation" (8). He thus implicitly challenges Wayne Booth's sharp distinction between author (or "implied author") and narrator. Treating in detail a handful of stories by Poe, Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, and two novellas by James—The Aspern Papers and "The Figure in the Carpet"—as well as his late novel The Sacred Fount, Auerbach suggests that these diverse texts all deal with the problems of "how fictions come to be made and the relations between these fictions and the people who make them" (8). He sees the narrators in question as self-consciously preoccupied with the difficulties of telling a credible story and constructing a coherent sense of self, projects that (in his view) typically mirror the author's own creative struggle. Auerbach's title derives, presumably, from two sources: Northrop Frye's notion of the quest-romance, cited as the search of a "desiring self" for some "fulfillment that will deliver it from the anxieties of reality" (14-15), and Henry James's definition of the romance (in the Preface to The American) as "disengaged " experience entailing a "sacrifice of community" (22). From these sources Auerbach builds a loose concept of romance as "a kind of absence," an exploration —preeminently by American writers working in first-person narration—of an "inward, isolated symbolic terrain" (22). He launches his argument cleverly with Book Reviews 335 a discussion of Poe's "A Predicament," a burlesque in which the narrator—or at least her talking head—becomes detached from her body in a mishap that literalizes the split between the narrating self and the narrator-as-agent characteristic of first-person fiction. The I-narrator must succumb to failure, he insists, because of the constitutional opposition of these two roles. Within this breach or separation, Auerbach claims, we can nevertheless discover something about each author's approach to his work, which (in the careers examined here) involves "self-representation" (10) marked by "certain kinds of alienation, intimacy, and anxiety" that reflect finally on American culture and identity. With Poe, Auerbach finds the first-person narrator's conflict rooted in a compulsive need to deliver himself from the anxiety of anonymity, a problem often displaced upon an unknowable or threatening double. Poe's narrators stage what amount to "self-confrontations," acts of "mock self-destruction" (27) directed against counterparts, acts that permit each of them to assert an identity paradoxically through a self-betraying confession. While faulting Poe for "irrelevant detail" and "flimsy" plots, Auerbach delivers acute insights into "The Man of the Crowd," "The Black Cat," and "The Fall of the House of Usher." Without stipulating the implied biographical motives, he characterizes the last decade of Poe's career as a "quest for an authentic, inviolate identity...