Analogy and the Inscrutability of Reference

It was not the picture, the poem, the fictive page, that seemed to me a copy; these things were the originals, and the life of happy and distinguished people was fashioned in their image.

—Henry James, “The Author of ‘Beltraffio’”

“The tremendous force of analogy” (JC 712) makes Spencer Brydon preternaturally alert in “The Jolly Corner,” and it is just to analogy that he is alert: his ghostly double is a figure “like him” (730, italics reversed) but not him. Not him because, “spectral yet human” (724), the double is not anyone at all. He has a million a year yet fails to exist. He’s both an embodiment of analogy itself and a spooky representation of analogy’s resistance to embodiment. Because Brydon and Alice Staverton both have seen him (in a fugue, in dreams), they end up having each other. Shared reference to the phantasmally elusive underwrites their bond.

Such shared reference is what counts as happiness in James, and, as “The Jolly Corner” indicates, it has two moments. The first is the ghostliness or intangibility of what’s being referred to, so that the community (usually a community of two, the couple) that can refer to it at all shares the prestige granted by the ability to perceive something so elusive. (Such an ability is necessarily their secret, since no one can know of it without knowing what they’re referring to and so possessing that ability as well.) The second moment is a consequent deprecation of the secret referent as compared to the shared sensibility of those referring, who appropriate the subtlety of the referent for themselves or as the substance of their relationship. The referent becomes an object, trivialized compared to its perceivers’ reciprocally demonstrated acute alertness and high perspicacity.

“The Jolly Corner” outlines this paradigm pretty straight-forwardly. James’s other work, especially his late writings, explores many more-or-less complicated variations of this basic theme. The end of “The Jolly Corner” (“he drew her to his breast” [731]) recalls the end of The Golden Bowl and the fact that the Prince and Maggie finally and fully understand what she has done, and finally and fully reduce Charlotte (like Brydon’s double) to a mere referent which they can abandon or supersede. Charlotte failed to make and share just such a dismissive reference with the Prince, who now marvels to Maggie: “‘She ought to have known you. . . . She doesn’t know you now,’” and continues, “‘She not only doesn’t understand you more than I, she understands you ever so much less’” (GB 565). Charlotte’s final supersession comes with the Prince’s last line: “‘See? I see nothing but you’” (580).

Merton Densher, on the other hand, refuses Kate Croy’s materialistic reduction of Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove, or rather he refuses her attitude (wonderfully subtle though it is) to the intensity of attention he and Milly have secretly shared. Kate seeks herself to share with Densher an act of supersessive reference—to do to Milly what Maggie does to Charlotte—but because her goal is material (the spoils of Theale) she is bound to fail. Densher wants love without reference; his relation to Milly finally consists of the supersession of reference. Similarly, in The Ambassadors, Strether is shocked and disappointed by the fact that Chad doesn’t share his sense of Madame de Vionnet or of what their relationship should be. Chad’s caddish assurance that “‘I’m not a bit tired of her’” continues to imagine Madame de Vionnet as a referent and not another subjectivity; what she and Strether share is consequently beyond Chad who becomes another avatar of Brydon’s double. And The Sacred Fount, in wonderful self-parody, presents the parasite-host relation the narrator imagines among the couples as a kind of grotesque literalization of the lessons in subtlety that Maggie and Milly and Madame de Vionnet teach to those who have ears to hear and a mind to share their subtlety.

Now if I’m right that in “The Jolly Corner” James names analogy as the force that makes possible...