False Positions: The Representational Logics of Henry James's Fiction (review)

It has become modish to fret over the proliferation of material produced on Henry James, especially in other critical camps. There are at least three ways of countering this kind of anxiety: one is to reflect on the dizzying extent to which James, as a textual site, has the seemingly infinite capacity to generate engagements; another is to stress the way in which James scholars have always been in the vanguard of those seeking to apply the theoretically innovative, constructively revising it in the process. The third is to recognize that, amidst the plethora of books and articles on James, there is, here and there, work of outstanding quality. Whatever the caveats and quibbles, there are certainly grounds for including Julie Rivkin’s book in that illustrious group.

At the center of Rivkin’s analysis is the issue of “representation,” especially as it ramifies into the formal, linguistic, social, and political. The argument of the book is that Jamesian “centers of consciousness” (2), as apparent repositories “for meaning and truth” (3), are anything but: they inhabit siege-like textual environments where the ever-shifting focus is one of “displaced agency and intermediaries, of deputies, delegates, and substitutes” (2). Rivkin’s analytical parameters are established, in part, by a Derrida who argues that “the representative or delegate, then, can have no singular or proper identity” (4). “‘False positions’ are the effect of a representational logic” and their “thematic frequency is a product of the same impasse of delegation that characterizes James’s compositional method” (5).

One can argue, of course, that James is the victim of posterior constructions of his so-called “centres of consciousness,” especially the reductive systematization of Blackmur’s preface to the New York Edition prefaces, and the work of Percy Lubbock and Joseph Warren Beach, among others. What is being deconstructed here is less a concept residual to James, more one grafted onto his position in the flurry of Modernist and New Critical appropriations of what appeared to be a conveniently malleable corpus of theoretical tenets. It is important to recollect, I think, that tellingly, The Tragic Muse, refers at one point to actions performed “parenthetically and authoritatively” (72). In line with this, it no longer seems plausible to invest to any extent in some kind of disappearance-of-the-narrator hypothesis in the later Henry James. Undeniably, these texts are in the business of concealing authority, of displacing it in the nebulae of characters, narrators, and author. Ultimately, however, James’s texts defeat characters seen as rivals to prevailing structures and authority, especially those with creative, imaginative, proclivities (witness the foundering of Maisie, Nanda, Strether, Kate Croy, and the rest), and the prefaces deny the reader any access to those vitalizing processes of composition without which the intentions, aims, the very teleologies of each text, remain entirely enigmatic. This kind of inaccessibility fabricates absent processes and constituents, one of which is the notion of a “centre of consciousness.” James is the first deconstructor of that concept, textually and para-textually, but inevitably, Rivkin can be seen as needing to ascribe an ownership and coherence to such compositional devices to allow for ensuing deconstructive delights.

Rivkin’s first chapter concentrates on “Nona Vincent,” “The Private Life,” and “The Middle Years,” suggesting that “problems of composition and technique generate the relations that constitute a social medium” in tales where “the writers and artists seem to live out the compositional imperatives of their artistic activity” (9). At issue is the question of why so many of James’s “tales of writers and artists” are frequently “tales of ghosts and the supernatural” (13) (the converse also being the case). Plato and Derrida come into play here as the book adopts the familiar perspective of the ghostly way in which writing no longer requires authorial presence.

Chapter 2 posits that the renunciation around which The Ambassadors eventually revolves has to be seen in terms of a “representational logic” and that the “international theme” can...