Overt Relations: James and Modernism

James’s relation to modernism has been a strained and often fiercely contested matter ever since this literary movement’s burgeoning moments back in the early twentieth century. While the modernists themselves were in a tangle about whether to accept or reject James’s narrative innovations—often revealing, as Daniel Mark Fogel has shown, the anxiety of influence by the Master, who, according to Woolf, was “much at present in the air” as an “oppression” or an “obsession” (346)—the advent of New Criticism securely installed him within the cradle of modernism. I use the image of the cradle quite deliberately¹ to evoke the particular definition of modernism fostered—admittedly very differently—by the New Critics and the Marxists, one that saw modernism, triumphantly or lamentably, as a formalist experiment resulting in the autonomy and insularity of art from the socio-historical realities it had steadfastly rejected. James was identified as the high priest of such a literary orthodoxy—an identification engineered and maintained by James’s most prominent champions from Lubbock to Matthiessen to Edel. Consequently, James subsequently suffered as modernism was seen as increasingly irrelevant to historicist, poststructuralist, and gender concerns. As David McWhirter writes, “James began to look increasingly suspect, possibly even irrelevant, to feminist and historicist critics in the late seventies and eighties, precisely because he was a modernist of the old school—the modernist alienated from modernity” (171–72).

However, current shifts in modernist studies have challenged modernism’s presumed insularity and/or solipsism, examining both its form and themes in a dialectical relation to its socio-historical and cultural context. These studies have found their equivalent in the James criticism that, since the early nineties, has probed the issues of nation, politics, gender, sexuality, publicity, consumerism, finance, and new technologies that drove James’s literary development. In its Fall 2012 issue, the Henry James Review published a review essay by Kate Campbell on “Modernism and . . . with Henry James” showcasing three recent installments in the historicization of the Master, ones focusing on religion, immigration, and technology. The present review essay will show how, even when criticism deals with his philosophical or stylistic concerns, James has firmly become what McWhirter had envisaged in a 2004 essay: “a modernist within modernity,” “a subject of history, produced and shaped by” particular ideological, institutional, and cultural networks (179).

Challenging conventional understandings of modernism’s unrelenting and presumably alienating radicalism, Schoenbach’s insightful book aims at repositioning modernism within its social and institutional contexts via a philosophy that is traditionally considered as inimical to modernist avant-garde aesthetics: pragmatism. She draws original links between thinkers and novelists—Henry James, William James, Gertrude Stein, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and John Dewey—on conceptual/philosophic and stylistic levels, examining their shared preoccupation with habit, prediction, and embeddedness in social institutions and history. With its clearly argued, synthetic readings the book demonstrates that in their often contradictory philosophic and aesthetic preoccupations, William James, Holmes, and Dewey negotiated, by means of pragmatism, drastic change with regularizing stability in order to come to terms with the destabilizing socio-historical forces of modernity. As such, the book sees the role of Henry James and Stein within the modernist tradition as being one of profound social engagement. Moreover, despite its situatedness within the Anglo-American literary and philosophic tradition, Schoenbach’s book, with its epilogue on Proust especially, opens the road toward a consideration of an international context for the complex preoccupations of what she terms pragmatic modernism.

Schoenbach’s study deals not with the conflict between pragmatism and the avant-garde but with their important and to a large extent complementary roles in the development of modernist styles and thematics. Schoenbach takes her cue from revisionist critique, which argues against the Lukacsian version of modernism as solipsistic self-reflexivity, and from recent investigations of modernism’s interest in the ordinary and everyday (as in Liesl Olson’s Modernism and the...