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Chapter 5: Social Values: The Marxist Critique of Modernism and The Princess Casamassima
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Chapter 5 Social Values The Marxist Critique ofModernislTI and The Princess Casamassi1na History is u!hat hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis, which its "ruses" turn into grisly and ironic reversals of their overt intention. But this History can be apprehended only through its effects, and never directly as some reified force. - Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act It hurts, but is it Art? -Andy Warhol, on being shot by the model Viva IN THE FIRST CHAPTER, I argue that the significance of the diverse approaches to Henry James lies less in the claim for his enduring genius than in the particular uses to which each of those approaches might put such "genius," "originality," or "decadence." This theoretical use is ultimately social and cultural analysis; such analysis may well begin with the institution of academic literary criticism and the particular traditions and canons sustained by such an institution. The pluralistic reading of Henry James (or any "major" author) actually deflects our attention from these very concrete theoretical uses, because such pluralism would celebrate the transhistorical ideal of the Author. Even if such an ideal rests on an old and tiresome clichethe desire of the author for immortality, for some escape from the constraints of time, society, literary traditions - the notion remains significant insofar as it has served as a powerful assumption in many of the most sophisticated literary theories. I begin Chapter 2 with this same literary will to power as my subject ; I describe that will as an abstract "modernity" many consider fundamental to the literary function. 1 James's invention of a provincial and myopic Hawthorne that he might supersede with his own modernism may well be nothing more than a bit of literary wish fulfillment , one more testament to an author's neurosis. James's Hawthorne would be forgotten were it not that it exerts such enormous and diverse influence on modern critical judgments of Hawthorne as well as on modern theories of American literary nationality. My adaptation of Bloom's anxiety of influence is designed to show how naive our customary assumptions about literary transmission and development are, insofar as those assumptions depend upon conscious borrowings and styles. Bloom helps us understand better not just the secondary effects of psychic repression in the production of literature, but the extent to which repression is one of the fundamental resources of a literary function. Nevertheless, there is a crucial limit to Bloom's method, which is built into the very system of tropes and motivates our effort to remap Bloom in terms of the sexual struggles that are both James's central literary themes and his own psychobiographical daemons. The question of woman governs the third chapter, but it is posed first in the second chapter and in both of its parts. The problem of woman posed by Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter becomes for James the problem of art; as our reading of The Aspern Papers in Chapter 3 indicates, [3.229.123.80] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 11:56 GMT) The Marxist Critique of Modernism I49 James's confusion of woman and art is only in part to be understood as his defense against woman. In even more explicit terms, I argue that James's transumption of Trollope (and the Victorian novel that Trollope's death would seem to "end" for James) involves James's own defense against the fear that his literary authority might become the triviality of the "scribbling tribe" of popular women writers. Made to serve James's own conception of his genius, the "femininity" that he claims for his own imagination is always a displaced "androgyny" that he would identify as the protean quality of the "modern author." Indeed, one of the ways in which the Marxist indictment of literary modernism is justified is in its persistent critique of the author's transformation of sociohistorical problems into esthetic issues. In terms of his own anxieties of influence, both literary and familial, James risks just this sort of estheticism. The question of woman is posed, then, both by Bloom's essentially limited oedipal model of literary influence and by James's own willful misreading of the "feminine" as an aspect of his own authorial identity, as a modality of his own oedipal anxiety. That limitation marks the closure of studies in literary influence (as it might mark the boundary of psychobiographical approaches), demonstrating what they cannot...