Jamesian Inscrutability

The opacity of Henry James’s later prose is almost as legendary as the privacy with which he cloaked many of his friendships and relationships. As Lyndall Gordon observes in A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art (1999), James and Constance Fenimore Woolson made a pact to destroy their correspondence, and after Woolson’s death he bizarrely tried to sink many of her dresses in the deepest part of the Venetian lagoon, a scene to which I’ll return. James’s renowned sociability—his skill in cultivating useful social and literary ties—existed alongside, but never eclipsed, his profound love of solitude. With a gift for elusiveness similar to Gabriel Nash’s in The Tragic Muse (1890), he avoided becoming the subject of a biography in his lifetime.

James’s inscrutability might reasonably lead to caution among his recent biographers and critics; it might preempt the zeal with which we sort through James’s prose and letters, hoping to unearth a conclusive answer to the “riddle” of his art and life. In many respects, it has done neither. Our faith today in secrets makes it almost impossible for us to believe that James wasn’t layering his prose with allusions to a life he couldn’t stop representing. ¹ Indeed, the strength of this belief now lies in proportion to the narrative opacity that seems to thwart us, impeding our knowledge while goading us to produce the missing key—neurosis, misogyny, closeted homosexuality, and so on. The enigma of motivation in James’s work—encouraging the idea that we alone might perceive what others miss—always lurks behind the trope of secrecy. And so the suggestion that secrecy itself is the barely concealed subject of “The Figure in the Carpet” (1896) and other James tales doesn’t satisfy our interpretative itch; it exacerbates this itch. Somehow, it doesn’t seem enough to remark here that James represents privacy as an effect of concealment, and that in doing so he exults in betraying, rather than disguising, the subject’s self-ignorance. Yet critics resisting these insights nonetheless are stymied by their own presumptions. If James stopped representing his characters’ innermost being, rendering their conflicts and difficulties a surface phenomenon, this is arguably less because he was hiding something primal and mysterious and more because his notion of character—ultimately freed in his fiction from a conventional idea of depth—confronted a dimension of being that has no content.

Many of James’s critics and biographers have not caught up with his model of subjectivity. Reinscribing depth wherever they can, they catch only the curiosity—the drive for meaning—that James insisted is intrinsic to fiction and subjectivity (see “The Art of Fiction” 49–51). They end up, as did Maisie Farange, “flattening [their] nose[s] upon the hard window-pane of the sweet-shop of knowledge” (WMK 120). Here, I am in basic agreement with Millicent Bell, who remarked that James’s

biographers have suspected a history that does not surface in his unconfessional letters and remained invisible to his many acquaintances. And they have tried to tease out the sexual story we now feel to be so basic to the meaning of a life, if not, as Freud thought, the source of everything.

(3)

Bell considers Leon Edel one of the key instigators of this line of reasoning:

In search of the inner man, . . . Edel sought revelations in the novelist’s fiction which he tended to read, simplistically, as a transposition of life, thereby making a fiction of his own. And laying James on the psychoanalytic couch, he hypothesized buried tensions.

In James studies today, Bell claims, “the conviction is strong that few closets are really empty.” While I again agree with this last formulation, I am not persuaded by Bell’s suggestion that psychoanalysis is the cause of this difficulty. Indeed, I shall argue that psychoanalysis elaborates a very different perspective that refutes Edel’s and others’ claims about closets and secrets.

Critics of all stripes often hold Fred Kaplan’s Henry James: The Imagination of Genius (1992) responsible for advancing Edel’s argument to its next stage...