Victims of Metaphor in The Wings of the Dove

I

Poststructuralist accounts of The Wings of the Dove, particularly Derridean ones, have stressed James’s concern with problems of representation, of the relation between fiction and meaning. They take the view that James’s textual sophistication implies a kind of representational skepticism fundamentally in accord with their own theoretical assumptions derived primarily from Derrida. I will argue, however, that Wings in fact offers a powerful critique of those assumptions. Derridean readings of the novel exploit the ambiguous role of Milly, the rich, attractive American girl, whose impending death motivates the elaborate deception that gives the novel its narrative thread. Milly’s role as the present/absent center, as this fiction’s heliotrope, seems to enable not only James’s text, but also the text within it: Kate’s plot to win Milly’s inheritance. Derrida’s discussion of the heliotrope in “White Mythology” (207–71) implicitly underwrites these kinds of readings, for it is there that the process to which Milly is subject is most forcefully theorized.

Derrida proceeds by demonstrating that Western metaphysics’ desire for total mastery (to say the one thing, the only thing it can say, and not speak the nothings of the sophist [248]) depends on the suppression or sublimation of original “sensuous” meanings for the construction of “intellectual” abstractions that, despite the sublimation, rely on the ostensible authority of their empirical origin. This process of metaphor Derrida calls “usury,” an image used to link the process of wearing away (erosion of the sensual) and “profit” (the philosophical gain won in exchange for that process). Derrida himself endorses the view of metaphor as a “displacement with breaks, as reinscriptions in a heterogeneous system, mutations, separations without origin” (215), but his position is derived from that which he deconstructs. He claims that “metaphor (or mimesis in general) aims at an effect of cognition” and that “the ideal of every language, and in particular of metaphor, being to bring to knowledge the thing itself, the turn of speech will be better if it brings us closer to the thing’s essential or proper truth” (247). The foundation of Western thought as well as its account of metaphor depends on this literal meaning at one with its natural origin.

Derrida’s deconstruction of this view of metaphor turns, in part, on his account of the heliotrope. He first isolates the sun as the primal literal object of philosophy, the securing origin of all metaphors guided by the ideal (sun as origin of the metaphor of seeing for knowing), and demonstrates that this first “literal” meaning is in fact thoroughly metaphorical: “There is only one sun in this [Aristotle’s] system. The proper name, here, is the nonmetaphorical prime mover of metaphor, the father of all figures. Everything turns around it, everything turns toward it” (243). But once the proper name is available for metaphorical transformation, “alien names” can be introduced, as indeed can “negative additions” which may deny the origin its proper attributes, and

this procedure can be pursued and complicated indefinitely. . . . No reference properly being named in such a metaphor [the alien name], the figure is carried off into the adventure of a long, implicit sentence, a secret narrative which nothing assures us will lead us back to the proper name. The metaphorization of metaphor, its bottomless overdeterminability, seems to be inscribed in the structure of metaphor, but as its negativity. As soon as one admits that all the terms in an analogic relation already are caught up, one by one, in a metaphorical relation, everything begins to function no longer as a sun, but as a star, the punctual source of truth or properness remaining invisible or nocturnal.

(243–44)

This “carrying off,” Derrida argues, is the inevitable though repressed consequence of the metaphysical conception of metaphor. The absolute literal foundation of metaphor—the first literal “standard” against which the detours and deviations of metaphor are intelligible (the heliotrope)—is itself metaphorical, and so the “origin” is already “caught up” in an “analogic relation.” Metaphor is not grounded in literal truth, but in fact precedes truth, generates it.

Derridean readings of The...