Thrown into Reality

The current volume offers an always welcome and ever-needed rereading of Henry James for a wide, eclectic, twenty-first century post-modern audience comprising James scholars and students, specialists and newcomers alike. In his closing chapter on “Henry James in a New Century,” John Carlos Rowe virtually strikes the note of the volume, centered as it is not only on making sense of James’s subtle narratives and identities but also on pointing out the intricate connections and occasional contradictions of a new iconic figure: “He would not be at home in our postmodern, commodified, globalized world, but he helps us understand it” (216).

In the context of James’s “new celebrity” of recent years (1), and prompted by the need to re-address a convoluted history of critical reception and readers’ appreciation both during James’s lifetime and after, one of the most engaging aspects of this collection is that it is fully cognizant of a range of difficulties James poses for audiences, from his opinions about women in society (76) or views on racial, class, [End Page E-7] and sexual identities (144) to the sinuous prose and thoughts in which the characters are enveloped, an obstacle that has challenged readers from William James himself (170) to contemporary multi-taskers: “at the accelerated pace of modern urban life, in which we must multitask or perish … we have very little time to consider such earth-shaking matters as Christopher Newman’s complicated plan to take vengeance on the Bellegarde family” (2). The editors also consider, in a both serious and humorous vein, a perceived incompatibility between the Jamesian dilemmas and what we might call a contemporary Weltanschaung:

events in James’s fiction take too long to transpire for our contemporary world, where action is required. Today … Maggie Verver would take her child, by now sporting a more personable name than the “Principino,” ditch the whole cheating lot of them, her father included, and move into a smart flat in Chelsea, where she would manage her own antiques shop.

(3)

In fact, this volume attests to an essential dialogue that can be established between James and the postmodern reader (scholar or student), a dialogue spun over, in spite of, or maybe due to, this very chasm between experience and understanding. In part, argue the editors, “Henry James is historically important because he struggles in his fiction and non-fiction with social, psychological, cultural, class, gender, and sexual issues still pertinent in our contemporary world” (4). However, perhaps the most salient point is that Henry James is part of a shared genealogy: “his imaginative formulation of and solutions to these problems are not always applicable to our current situations, but they help us understand the genealogy of these issues and may explain why so many remain unresolved today” (4). What is more, the editors postulate in the Introduction, Henry James has grasped an over-arching modern predicament, what one might conceive of as a Heideggerian Geworfenheit: “Then there we are!” Lamberth Strether says as a final, inconclusive sentence to express his bewilderment and dislocation at the end of The Ambassadors. We are there, in the midst, thrown into being and reality, and only when we accept this existential predicament can we attempt to survive in what James’s friend Joseph Conrad famously formulated as “the destructive element” (8).

The contributions themselves might be read in view of the manner in which they shed light on various facets of the syntagm “thrown into being and reality.” In fact, the articles dwell on James’s own thrownness into a series of sometimes conflicting paradigms, representations, and issues that made up the complex fabric of his times and writings. Thus Kendall Johnson’s “Henry James 1843–1916: A Brief Biography” offers a view of what is seen as an “immensely networked life” (16) wrought with tension, indebted to a complex cultural and literary legacy (including that of Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, Hippolyte Taine, and Ernest Renan) contextualized by Charles Lyell’s concept of deep time and...