Palgrave Advances in Henry James Studies (review)

The hero of “The Jolly Corner,” Spencer Brydon, is confronted by his past and by the specter of what might have been. This happens despite his best efforts, despite the fact that “he had supposed himself, from decade to decade, to be allowing, and in the most liberal and intelligent manner, for brilliancy of change” (CS 697).

What will James criticism become if we allow for brilliancy of change, in the most liberal and intelligent manner? Palgrave Advances in Henry James Studies provides several plausible answers in thirteen essays by some of the foremost critics in the field. The volume is the latest addition to a series that includes volumes on Wilde, Joyce, Beckett, and Woolf, among others. And if James’s proto-modernist aesthetic connects him to these authors, then his impressionist aesthetic also connects him to these critics. Indeed, they expertly demonstrate that the task of Jamesian critics is to constantly form and reform their impressions in light of their suggestive subject.

The impression created by this collection is that Future James has much in common with Present James. The Jamesian figure we encounter in this well-designed annex to the house of criticism is not, in this respect at least, as startling as Spencer Brydon’s “unexpected occupant, at a turn of one of the dim passages of an empty house” (CS 701). But more on this later.

“James not only inhabited the house of criticism; he built it,” Sheila Teahan tells us in the collection’s first essay (13). Teahan proves an admirable guide to the foundations of this house: carefully considering James’s contributions to critical theory, presenting a concise account of the most important trends in thinking about James, and finally turning to “The Turn of the Screw” as a tale that exemplifies the history (and possible future) of James’s reception. Like several other contributors, Teahan singles out the prefaces as sites that expose the paradoxical nature of James’s own criticism: for instance, the preface molds and manages our reading of the work that follows it. It tells us what to think before we know what we are thinking about. James’s prefaces, therefore, “do not only rediscover intention and meaning, but invent them” (17) and present the reader with dramatized “moments of self-fashioning and retrospective falsification” (18). The locus classicus of this is the preface to “The Turn of the Screw” where, as Teahan notes, “James places his cards on the table—face down” (25). The preface, then, is like the tale itself: the more it tells us, the more we know but, perversely, the less we know for sure.

Gert Buelens and Celia Aijmer’s essay on history and historical criticism is also concerned with the nature and limits of knowledge. However, they propose that James concerned himself far more with the authority conferred by history than with epistemology. James did not want to recreate the essence of history or the past an sich but rather a “sensibility to a given, cultural fragment from the past” (195). The past is kinetic: for James, history becomes a “performance in the present, governed by action and desire” (200).

Peter Rawlings also subscribes to an idea of James as a master of fragments, rather than a master-builder. Rawlings contends that the idea of a systematized, fixed “centre of consciousness” and “point of view” is a distortion of James’s critical enterprise. Against the classificatory efforts of New Criticism, Rawlings vigorously argues that James did not vow “that all the action of a novel should be evaluated by a single superior mind placed in the center of the main dramatic situation” (Gordon & Tate, qtd. in Rawlings 37). James had no systematizing ambitions: he “neither offered, nor wanted to offer, any kind of consistent theory of narrative” (38). Rawlings’s objective in proposing such a view of James is to displace the commonplace teleology that sees James’s misadventure with Guy Domville as the catalyst for a narratological...