Henry James’s Europe: Heritage and Transfer ed. by Dennis Tredy, Annick Duperray, and Adrian Harding (review)

Offering an overall critical assessment of a collection of conference papers is never an easy task: multi-voiced volumes are frequently disparate, uneven, and hopelessly incoherent. Henry James’s Europe: Heritage and Transfer, however, has the merit of having performed an excellent selection of its contributions, effectively arranged in clusters that minimize dispersion and maximize a kind of dialogic coherence, where even dissonance functions to create interconnections rather than dissolve them. Grouped under six headings, the twenty-four essays collected in the volume cover a wide ground—from ethics to style, from intertextual to intercultural encounters, from authorship to textuality. These, however, do not exhaust its range: the volume literally reaches beyond itself, equipped as it is with an online supplement that hosts another eight essays.

The first grouping, “Ethics and Aesthetics,” examines the interconnections between Jamesian aesthetics and a number of moral, social, and economic concerns in a variety of keys. Literally proving the truth of the saying “the devil is in the details,” Jean Gooder’s essay takes James’s scattered mentions of the devil as its starting point. Highlighting the significance of the devil as a figure standing for expression and for unbounded intellectual freedom—a combination that is exactly the material of art—Gooder connects it to James’s endless probing of subtle, uncertain, and nuanced situations, such as those exemplified in The Awkward Age, where he stages the thin line between virtue and vice, propriety and impropriety, transfiguring moral confusion into analysis and expression. Roxana Oltean offers a renewed perception of the time-honored “international theme,” tracing the emergence of an ethics of globalization [End Page E-24] gradually developing through James’s works: from the oppositional geography of Europe and the U.S., predicated on their mutual unknowability and preparing a neocolonial relationship of conquest and assimilation (The American); through the mutual misreading evoked by the figure of anamorphosis in The Ambassadors; to the cosmopolitan encounter enabled by a Levinasian attitude of embracing the alterity of the Other. By offering The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl as exemplary instances of this ethical attitude, the critic revives, albeit in a new key, a traditional redemptive reading supplanted, over the last years, by a prevalent emphasis on the tensions and ambiguities that complicate these novels’ endings. The next two essays are centered less on ethics than on society and economics. Esther Sánchez-Pardo analyzes the transubstantiation of money as part of the operation of a prestige economy, in Thorstein Veblen’s sense, aimed at transforming social hierarchies of class. Drawing on Bourdieu to produce a valuable reading of the social dynamics of taste in The Ambassadors, the critic shows how wealth in the novel is displaced as tradition and mystified as taste. Aesthetic objects are seen as transcending material relations rather than as concrete embodiments of their owners’ purchasing power—an idealization that James undercuts by showing its operation in Strether and Madame de Vionnet. Finally, Eric Savoy focuses on speculation in futurity as the common ground between narrative economy, based on the circulation of the signifier, and economics itself, especially as displayed in the operation of derivatives: both entail a model of expectancy and a sacrifice of the present to the future, of which “The Beast in the Jungle”—a “cautionary tale about bad investments” (55)—is the perfect mirror. Following the same model of bad accounting that is responsible for financial crises, Marcher keeps refinancing his speculation by investing in the empty, catachrestic signifier that is the Beast, “a kind of junk bond” (56).

Section 2 of the volume, “French and Italian Hours,” offers a number of rereadings of James’s “international theme” that, like Oltean’s essay mentioned above, refresh our perception of this old-fashioned critical commonplace by using innovative lenses to view well-known texts or by focusing on hitherto ignored objects. One of such objects is James’s essay on “France...