Order and Design: Henry James's Titled Short Story Sequences (review)

196 The Henry James Review mind that Douglas knew and loved the governess, does another reader's response have a better claim to being a shared reading than that one? Peter G. Beidler Lehigh University Richard P. Gage. Order and Design: Henry James's Titled Short Story Sequences . New York: Peter Lang, 1988. 315 pp. $42.95. 'The dramatist has verily to build, and is committed to architecture, to construction at any cost," James wrote in discussing The Awkward Age. That quotation appears at least twice in Order and Design, since it is Gage's intention to blueprint the intricacies of Jamesian construction in the six titled short story sequences James so laboriously ordered and designed. A major portion of the book also deals widi volume eighteen of die New York Edition, which James compiled whhout benefit of an "evocative title" to coordinate thematic continuities. Gage is correct in saying that critics have ignored diese coUections as unified wholes because the story sequence, as a form, is something of a baffling entity. By necessity constructed more ambiguously than the novel, the story sequence is composed of interUnking "connections, associations, relations, and arrangements"(3). These elements are dispersed throughout otherwise unconcatenated texts to constitute structural, thematic, and dramatic unity, in much the same way that vertical supports and horizontal "resting places" constitute the skeleton of a bridge. Indeed, as Gage argues in his preface, James's own predilection for the bridge-builder-as-artist metaphor encourages us to read these story coUections not as aggregates of unrelated narratives, but as elements of a formal architecture obsessed with such principles as harmony, balance, and contiguity. Four of die six tided sequences (Terminations, Embarrassments, The Two Magics and The Soft Side) are dispensed witii in the first chapter. The organizational logic behind this plan is never made explicit, though one senses diat in analyzing these sequences Gage has ümited himself to exploring the impUcations of each collection's title. Thus Terminations is constructed around "a leitmotif of death and decay" (15), whUe Embarrassments deals with "epistemology and die problems of perception, apprehension and misunderstanding" (21). The Two Magics, a two-narrative collection including The Turn of the Screw and "Covering End," concerns obverse perspectives on die mystical. The Soft Side explores die theme of "personal identity and the difficulties and confusions that arise when people seek to know their own or someone else's identity in a profound way" (33). Gage's method of rooting out the meaning of the title in terms of each tale is a hit-and-miss proposition. For Terminations and Embarrassments, the paucity of ambiguity in those titles leaves us with critical pronouncements that seem rather obvious and belabored. The Two Magics, given a scant tiiree pages of attention, is dismissed far too rapidly, despite Gage's opinion that "two tales are insufficient to establish a sense of sequence" (31). Perhaps because it contains far more stories than either of the other three collections discussed in this chapter, The Soft Side is the only sequence discussed in which one begins to appreciate the craftsmanship of James's bridge-buUding principles. According to Gage, the sequence is composed of a dichotomous pair of sub-sequences: tales about "personal flight from die burdens of one's own identity" are contrasted with tales of a widened perspective that "treat the theme from the outside rather than the inside" (53). This formal balance is counterpoised by several subordinate themes, including the debates over aesthetics, die problems of epistemology, and die relationship of the individual to society. Each theme is an "arch" or "span" that, in James's words, "squares tilings and keeps them in a happy relation to each other" (43). Explication of diese happy relations occupies Gage's attention through the final three chapters. The Better Sort (chapter two) and The Finer Grain (chapter four) unbolt a massive labyrinth of themes, including renunciation and the foibles of individual Book Reviews 197 consciousness. The main strength of these chapters lies in the attention given to tales routinely ignored in James criticism. Again and again in Gage's writing, clauses like "little critical attention has been given" appear, certainly a subtle indictment of...