The Last Phase: Henry James and the Psycho-Painterly Style

In the following remarks I want to sketch out three or four points that in the end might be brought together as a working thesis. In the first place I want to look at James’s Middle and Late Phases as a psychoanalytic-painterly style. My point here will be to suggest that the Middle and Late Phases precede the main themes of Freud and Lacan—namely, those that comprise the Law of the Father and deferred action. Secondly, I want to suggest that The Ivory Tower goes beyond the psycho-painterly fiction already established in the Middle and Late Phases. And finally, I want to take a good look at what I believe is James’s founding donnée. This last point will take us back to James’s early days in Paris and Newport, to the places and themes that make up The Ivory Tower. Here again the discussion centers on the psychoanalytic aspect of James’s painterly style. As I say, the hope is that together these points will bring us to a thesis, one that proposes a revolutionary psycho-painterly style for what I am calling James’s Last Phase.

For Lacan the Law of the Father is constituted in the primal scene and diffuses its Oedipal prohibitions into the farthest reaches of everyday language and culture, especially through deferred action. Thus, for example, Mrs. Ramsay promises her son James that there will be a visit to the lighthouse. “But,” Mr. Ramsay insists, “it won’t be fine” (Woolf 10). Out of the blue an individual happens into a situation or experience that so nearly matches the primal scene, that the repressed primal trauma is remembered—allegorically re-activated, as it were—and revisited upon the suddenly re-traumatized unconscious. Thus the young James Ramsay’s classic reaction to his father’s “no”: “Had there been an axe handy, or a poker, any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father’s breast and killed him, there and then, James would have seized it.”

Each recurrence of deferred action gives rise to a new understanding of the primal scene and yet another way of seeing oneself in relation to the Law of the Father. As such, deferred action becomes for Freud the ever-redefining moment of subject formation. This is so for Lacan as well—and perhaps even more so for Žižek. But for us the point is that it is not Freud, and certainly not Lacan or Žižek—nor for that matter, Woolf—who first theorizes deferred action. It is Henry James.

In The Portrait of a Lady, for example, we see Isabel come upon Madame Merle and Osmond unawares, framed in the doorway of the drawing room. At the sight of the two in private colloquy Isabel stops short, and, before the voyeuristic instant gives way to their notice, the image of the pair is concretized as a portrait in her mind’s eye, and a traumatic discovery is repressed in her unconscious. In the all night vigil that follows, Isabel’s memory of the picture brings the truth to the surface: no European gentleman would sit in the presence of a standing lady, unless they were married or otherwise intimate. As I have argued elsewhere, the painting that this image-text strikingly resembles and that James would have seen or at least heard about in Paris (it was a scandal) is none other than Degas’s The Bellelli Family (1861). Suffice it to say for the moment that in both cases, the scene is dramatized through a voyeuristic center of consciousness narrative point of view and, in both cases, the painterly representation of consciousness serves as the frame through which the unconscious is dramatized in the throes of deferred action and its effect—which Lacan calls resubjectification.

In The Ambassadors, we see something quite similar but far more developed along the psycho-painterly lines we are tracing. From the riverbank Strether spies two people in a rowboat. From his voyeuristic standpoint suddenly he recognizes Chad and Madame de Vionnet, and, in the next instant...