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Book Reviews Volume 32:3, 1989 TWO ON JAMES George Bishop. When the Master Relents: The Neglected Short Fictions of Henry James. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988. $39.95 Roger Gard, ed. Henry James: The Critical Heritage. 1968; 1976; repr. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986. $59.50 THE PROLIFERATION OF JAMES SCHOLARSHIP AND CRITICISM in the twenty years since the initial publication of Roger Gard's collection documenting the early reception of James's fiction is aptly illustrated by the title of George Bishop's new book. When the Master Relents: The Neglected Short Fictions of Henry James not only implies the existence of a formidable "critical heritage," but claims to be in some ways a book about the creation of such a heritage. As his title indicates, Bishop takes as the focus of his short study "a handful of short fictions by Henry James" that have in common only "the simple fact that they have been consistently and thoroughly ignored." His purpose in bringing together these "neglected" stories is not to urge their admittance into the James "canon," but to demonstrate the ways in which these stories challenge the assumptions and criteria by which that canon has been established to begin with. "The criterion tacitly employed in the production and maintenance of the James canon," Bishop argues, "is intimately related to and dependent upon the notion of Henry James as the Master." This notion compels critics because it asserts an author whose "master-texts" both allow and authorize "the act of interpretation," even, indeed, "an infinitely repeating critical discourse." The texts of James that have been canonized, then, are those that give unbounded power to the interpreter and therefore authorize and justify critical activity. Those texts of James that "seemingly refuse to allow the room for critical maneuverings of any kind" would thus "comprise by definition that residuum that lies outside the canon." If Bishop proceeds somewhat circularly to choose for analysis those texts that have, in fact, been excluded from the James canon and then to demonstrate that they are, indeed, texts that "seemingly refuse to allow the room for critical maneuverings of any kind," he nonetheless sometimes manages to open those texts in some valuable ways. What emerges from his study is another James (though not necessarily, as Bishop contends, a new or wholly unacknowledged James), a James who inscribed texts that resist mastery and authority , texts that have therefore remained outside the James canon. 372 Book Reviews Volume 32:3, 1989 Bishop establishes in his introductory chapter the ways in which James "textualizes the functions of the Master," that is, the ways in which, by inscribing the "Master" in his texts, he "allows commentary to proceed, to be repeated." In instances where James "operates as Master," he seemingly allows and authorizes "the repetition of criticism ," which has ultimately resulted in the defining of a James canon. Bishop's illustrative case is "The Figure in the Carpet," in many ways the instance par excellence of a text canonized because of "the multiplicity of readings that it authorizes and provides a site for." The noncanonical , "neglected" texts, by contrast, are ones in which James deprives the reader of such a critical foothold by refusing to operate as Master. Some of the "neglected" short fictions Bishop analyzes are wellchosen to support his arguments, others rather less so. His discussion of the seldom read "Glasses" (1896), for example, convincingly delineates the similar difficulties confronted by that text's narrator on the one hand and the reader of the text on the other. Juxtaposing biographical details and material from James's Notebooks to the story (as he does throughout his study), Bishop suggests the ways in which James, during this experimental period after his failure in the theater, was exploring the nature of textual authority. And Bishop opens up in even fuller and more fruitful ways the almost universally neglected "The Third Person" (1900) and the "unfinished" "Hugh Merrow." His close analysis of complex and complicated texts that do in fact seem to engage the issue of textual and interpretative authority represents the greatest strength of Bishop's study. But not all of the texts he chooses accommodate his focus...

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