"The Deepest Depths of the Artificial": Attacking Women and Reality in "The Aspern Papers"

In “The Art of Fiction,” Henry James tells us that we should strive to make ourselves people “on whom nothing is lost” for “the effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement” (167). What is one’s “duty” in trying “really to represent”? (173). As Martha Nussbaum puts it, James’s characteristic “ellipses and circumnavigations” of language and thought work to convey not truth but “the lucidity of his characters’ bewilderment, the precision of their indefiniteness” (149). In the end, the greater the narrative ambiguity the clearer the sense of a fundamental truth, just out of reach. “The Aspern Papers” (1888 “The Aspern Papers” (1908) enacts in a particularly dramatic way James’s problem of knowledge: as the devious editor/narrator moves closer and closer to the truth he hopes the papers of long-dead poet Jeffrey Aspern will reveal, the reader finds that “truth” grows more and more elusive, for the narrator’s notions about reality and those conveyed to his reader are really quite opposite, centering on how the word is or is not made flesh. In this tale of the “publishing scoundrel,” the poet Aspern, and the two women who guard “The Aspern Papers,” “the word” and “the flesh” are gendered values that reveal a rupture in reality. Through his metaphorical conquest of the female body and its attendant spaces (the house, the garden, the cabinet), the narrator homoerotically hopes to penetrate the truth about his idol, to find the words that will resurrect the idealized Aspern to “reality.” Yet “The Aspern Papers” is about a relational model for knowledge; it repudiates singularity as a mode by making the singular conquests of the narrator laughable, lonely, and tragic. As in “The Beast in the Jungle,” truth in “The Aspern Papers” lies where—in whom, that is—the protagonist least expects to find it, and it comes too late.

The narrator’s polarizing of word and body, male and female, could be described through a Lacanian model (particularly as extended by theorists of écriture féminine) that defines the Word (the literal) as a “masculine” value and the Unconscious (“babble”) as a prelinguistic “feminine” state. But James’s work sharply resists Lacanian theorizing: in “The Aspern Papers” the literal is the realm of the female body, and the male body is, in contrast, unreachable, undefinable, and unsayable. The story’s attempts at reality interrogate art and its engendered nature. Which is “real” in the story? That is to say, which, for James, is art: woman in her actuality or man in his elusiveness? The dynamics of language and sexuality in this story recall Hawthorne’s experiments in The Blithedale Romance and elsewhere as they reenact the anxieties about authorship Hawthorne and James typically address directly in their prefaces. But “The Aspern Papers” dramatically engenders and sexualizes these authorial anxieties.

James tells us in his preface that it was easy for him to recover the impulse behind the writing of “The Aspern Papers.” The “seeking fabulist” was like Columbus finding San Salvador: the idea for the story was placed by Nature “to profit” by the “fine unrest” of the explorer of literary history “because he had moved in the right direction for it—and also because he knew, with the encounter, what ‘making land’ then and there represented” (NT v). James relates the story of Jane (“Claire”) Clairmont, half-sister of Shelley and for a time the mistress of Byron. James heard that she was still living in Florence and had been pursued by a fanatical admirer of Shelley, who hoped to obtain her papers. James’s project attempts to recover her, the poet and his poetry, the last century, Italy itself. But Italy James calls “the great historic complexity” where “penetration fails”; we only “scratch at the extensive surface” and “hang about in the golden air” (vi). And so, he continues, “I delight in a palpable imaginable visitable past—in the nearer distances and clearer mysteries,” a “common expanse” that is “firm and continuous...