Miroirs d'Outre-Monde: Henry James et la Creation Fantastique, and: Henry James ou le Sens des Profondeurs: Essai Sur les Nouvelles Fantastiques

The two books under review here share much in common: both are written by French scholars teaching at the Université de La Réunion and are published by the same publisher, L’Harmattan; both deal with the “fantastic” in the work of Henry James, using a more or less psychoanalytical approach. The scope of Geoffroy-Menoux’s book is quite ambitious. Her goal, she tells us in her introduction, is to study the fantastic tale of James in a socio-historical, cultural, and artistic context and thus establish, among other things, James’s relation to occultism and to the “New Psychology.” She also sets out to show how the fantastic tales relate, on the one hand, to the rest of James’s work, and, on the other hand, to the rules of the fantastic as genre.

This over-ambitious scope may be the reason why Geoffroy-Menoux’s analyses remain, on the whole, superficial and quite banal. Thus, after a brief discussion of the James family and its manifold neurotic disorders, Geoffroy-Menoux concludes: “Henry James expresses, both in his so-called realist works and in his fantastic texts, a fear of seeing the individual crushed under the weight of his biological and social heritage.” ¹ In support of this statement she gives the following two examples: “In The Princess Casamassima, published in 1886, Hyacinth Robinson does not escape the destiny for which his genetic heritage, passed on to him by his criminal mother, intended him,” and “Lady Barbarina” refers to “medical presuppositions of the time,” relative to “the mixing of races and its consequences for heredity and descent” (55–56). The statement about The Princess Casamassima is surely a gross simplification even of the plot of the novel, not to mention its portrayal of social reality and of an individual psychology. The second statement does not begin to explain why the reference to “medical presuppositions of the time” should be of interest to us.

Similarly banal and simplified statements punctuate (indeed, constitute) Geoffroy-Menoux’s book. Thus, we are told, “Nona Vincent,” is similar to “The Private Life” (in both, actors and dramatic authors appear) and can be seen as “the metaphorical (and liberating?) expression of the author’s anxiety about his change of profession [that is, his decision to become a dramatic author]” (115); “The Last of the Valerii” manifests James’s “affirmation of the primacy of art over the vulgar reality of life” (145); in “The Author of Beltraffio” the fantastic emerges from “the obsession with domineering femininity linked to an anxiety-filled image of sexual life, an anxiety which is denied, displaced, and masked by the avowable antithesis between marriage and art” (157).

As can be seen from these few examples, much of the analysis in the book is made in relation to the historical individual Henry James, and whatever textual analysis there is, is basically thematic. Obviously, there is nothing wrong in principle with either biographical or thematic interpretation. The problem is, rather, that the fantastic—the ostensible topic of the book—cannot be understood or defined in such terms. As Freud already indicated in his discussion of the uncanny, and as most theorists of the fantastic have shown, implicitly or explicitly, there are no themes which are intrinsically “uncanny” or “fantastic.” The fantastic, like the uncanny, is rather an effect and hence to understand it requires a, broadly speaking, rhetorical analysis. Thus Geoffroy-Menoux’s analysis fails to give a convincing account of the difference between the fantastic texts and the rest of James’s work, nor does it manage to account for the different aspects of a single work (such as, for example, “The Private Life” where important satiric and allegorical strains in the text modify its...