A Familiar Strangeness: American Fiction and the Language of Photography, 1839-1945

TWO: Resembling Oneself: James’s Photographic Types

71 chapter two Resembling Oneself James’s Photographic Types admiring the Capitol building in 1905, Henry James noted that he had for company “a trio of Indian braves, braves dispossessed of forest and prairie.” The men were dressed, he recounts in The American Scene, “in neat pot-hats, shoddy suits, and light overcoats, with their pockets, I am sure, full of photographs and cigarettes.” This odd inventory leads to an even odder comparison: James proposes that the modern dress of the Native Americans “quickened their resemblance, on the much bigger scale, to Japanese celebrities, or to specimens, on show.”1 Like exhibits in a World’s Fair, the men are regarded by James as if they were permanently on display—a condition, needless to say, with which turn-of-the-century Native Americans were not unfamiliar. But what the comparison attempts to demonstrate, despite its insistence Capt. Spaulding (Groucho Marx): I used to know a fellow who looked exactly like you by the name of Emanuel Ravelli. Are you his brother? Ravelli (Chico Marx): I am Emanuel Ravelli. Capt. Spaulding: You’re Emanuel Ravelli? Ravelli: I am Emanuel Ravelli. Capt. Spaulding: Well, no wonder you look like him. But I still insist there is a resemblance. Ravelli: Heh, heh, he thinks I look alike. the marx brothers, Animal Crackers 72 Chapter Two on visibility, is the essential unknowability of the men: James is no more able to recognize them as individuals than he could recognize a Japanese celebrity. James’s insistence on seeing the Indian braves only in terms of spectacle is itself an example, ironically enough, of the very process of historical erasure The American Scene continually laments. According to James’s appalled account, Washington D.C. is symptomatic of the nation as a whole in its devotion to a kind of ceaseless forgetting. And, as James recognizes, the Native Americans he reduces to the level of specimens are the most noticeable victims of this historical amnesia. In his quasi-photographic metaphor, the men with whom he shares the Capitol steps “project as in a flash an image in itself immense, but foreshortened and simplified”; an image, rather tautologically, of the self-erasing movement of American history itself. James imagines this image “reducing to a single smooth stride the bloody footsteps of time. One rubbed one’s eyes, but there, at its highest polish, shining in the beautiful day, was the brazen face of history, and there, all about one, immaculate, the printless pavements of the State” (364). American history thus presents to the discerning observer a shining blank face—a blankness reflected in the enigma, as James sees it, of Indian braves reduced to the inconsequentiality of photograph-carrying tourists.2 The camera’s role in what James sees as the State’s principal business —the interminable removal of the marks of the past—is suggested, somewhat paradoxically, by the use of the term “printless” to describe the vacant surfaces of the government buildings and historical monuments that surround him. What Washington lacks are the prints made by time; what has produced this absence, James’s image seems to suggest , are prints made by the camera. For not only do the photographs he imagines filling the pockets of the Indian braves not count as a record of the past, they actually work to hasten its loss. This is the lesson of a number of episodes in The American Scene similar to James’s epiphany on the Capitol steps, all testifying to his bewilderment at “the constituted blankness” (30) of his home country.3 This blankness extends even Resembling Oneself 73 to historic Richmond, a place where, James laments, “there were no references.” The “pathetic poverty of the exhibition” (282) on display at the Richmond Museum is not only proof of this strange deficiency, it also seems even to be responsible for it: “The sorry objects about were old Confederate documents, already sallow with time . . . together with faded portraits of faded worthies, primitive products of the camera, the crayon, the brush” (283). The Civil War photographs that supposedly inspired Stephen Crane to write The Red Badge of Courage leave James unmoved, his only consolation the dawning of the idea that in many ways defines The American Scene: that the failure of Richmond—and by extension America—to refer to its past is precisely the form in which that past is preserved. In continually...