More on Henry James

The Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 11,No. I, Spring 1980 Moreon HenryJames CharlesR. Anderson. Person, Place, and Thing in Henry James's Novels. Durham,N.C.: Duke University Press, 1977.308 pp. Sh!L)mtth Rimmon. The Concept of Ambiguity-The Example of James. Chu:ago:The University of Chicago Press. 1977.257 + xiii pp. Peter Buitenhuis D.mtelJ. Schneider. The Crystal Cage: Adventures of the Imagination in the fo t1Cm of Hen~r James. Lawrence: The Regents Press of Kansas. 1978. 189+ vii pp. "They offer us another world," Henry James once wrote of novelists, "another consciousness, another experience that... makes us face, in the return to the inevitable, a combination that may at least have changed." He was talking about the capacity of the great writer to change the way that we view experience after we turn back to life from the vicarious experience of the printed page. James himself offers one of the supreme example of a novelist who has this effect on the reader, which is why he continues to challenge the critic to give some account of how he has been changed by what has been read, and to try to explain the processes by which that change may have been effected. These three critics have tried to do this in very different ways; each has attempted to re-interpret the work from different critical points of view. From the time of Edmund Wilson's famous essay in 1940, the concept of ambiguity has been central to the study of James's fiction. Yet the fact remains that no-one has, up to this point at least, taken it seriously. Many critics have asserted James's ambiguity and then gone on to show that what he really meant was this, that or the other interpretation. Reading the interminable explications of The Turn of the Screw, for example, one could cheerfully assent to Susan Sontag's view and wind up against interpretation altogether. 104 Peter Buitenhu,s Shlomith Rimmon of the Hebrew University is the first critic to take the idea of ambiguity in Henry James at its face value. On the dustjacket of her book is one of those designs that E. M. Gombrich has made familiar to us in the pages of Art and Illusion-one which, looked at for some moments takes one form and then, suddenly, changes to another. The design does not change; our perception of it does. Using this as the figure for her book, Rimmon shows through painstaking analysis that this is what happens in the truly ambiguous tales of Henry James. They have two meanings that exist intrinsically in the text; one is exclusive to the other. both are plausible. So, read one way, The Turn of the Screw shows that there are no ghosts, but only hallucinations of the governess. Read the other way, the novella reveals that there are indeed ghosts and that thev are in league with the children. · In order to set about proving the radical rather than the apparent ambiguity of James, Rimmon has provided an elaborate introductory section to her book consisting of two parts: "Ambiguity: The Formative Principle," and "Ambiguity: The Concrete Realization." This section is fraught with references to structuralism and to Chomskyan grammar, and it is full of tables and mathematical formulae. To me, this section seems quite beside the point. The reader would be well advised to skip it and proceed to the second section, "The Ambiguity of Henry James." The actual analyses of "The Lesson of the Master," "The Figure in the Carpet," The Turn of the Screw and The Sacred Fount which the second section contains seem to make little use of the conceptual framework supplied by the first. In essence what Rimmon has brilliantly done is to have shown how James, with what she calls single-directed clues and double-directed clues. creates in the reader's mind one or other interpretation of the events of these stories. There is in effect, she maintains, no final interpretation. There is and is not a Lesson of the Master; there is and is not a Figure in the Carpet; there are and are not ghosts...