In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Now Advertising: Late James
  • Bill Brown

This talk argues that the status and role of objects in James’s late fiction figures a transformation of the status of the object within advertising both in Britain and the United States. More specifically: the absent object in James’s work—the missing thing, the occluded referent, the unrepresented, the unsaid—shares something of the fate of the object in, say, the most avant-garde advertisements, which abandon any exacting focus on the product itself (the details of its composition or its utility) in order to emphasize the scene, the general impression, the experience, or perhaps the “aura,” in a non-Benjaminian sense . . . the magical glow that accompanies some object, the cultural penumbra that comes to obscure the object as such. To make this argument I’ll focus on The Ambassadors and rely, when it comes to the history of advertising, on two well-known accounts, one by Raymond Williams and one by Richard Ohmann, supplemented by images from the advertising archive that illustrate the point and provide some sense of how a British and American readership would have witnessed, however unconsciously, the advertised object slipping to the margins of the illustrated page.1 Because, of course, the new advertising strategies inhabited a transforming market, one radically re-conceptualized during the nineteenth century, I’ll also say a few words about how neoclassical economics came to shift its focus from the object (that is, the product) to the subject (that is, the consumer) and from the social to the individual. My point is not to confirm that a “consuming vision implants itself at the heart of James’ fiction”; nor am I working to settle the “disagreement over the author’s complicity with objectification” (Agnew 87; Piper 105). Instead, I simply mean to draw attention to a kind of de-objectification within two distinct cultural fields, the synapse between the two provided by James’s novel itself.

All told, then, whereas Fredric Jameson considers the theorization and implementation of Jamesian “point of view” to be a “historical act” protecting against reification “yet serving as a powerful ideological instrument in the perpetuation of an increasingly subjectivized and psychologized world” (221), I want to imagine the occultation of the object in James’s fiction as a more minor yet significant “historical act,” one that fits awkwardly within a less familiar narrative: a narrative not of the [End Page 10] subject but of the object. This is a narrative wherein, to borrow Lukács’s formula, “the character of things as things” disappears (92). Lukács ascribes this disappearance to the saturation of society with the commodity form, but the character of things as things had already faded, quite profoundly, within aesthetic theory (within the Third Critique) and far more noticeably in what came to be called modern art. And indeed, it is hard not to be struck by the persistence of the “dematerialization” hypothesis from, say, Georg Simmel (whose seminars and lectures Lukács attended) to Jean Baudrillard to Friedrich Kittler to any number of critics of new media who complain, as the archeologist Colin Renfrew has, that our “engagement with the material world” has come under threat and that “physical, palpable material reality is disappearing, leaving nothing but the smile on the face of the Cheshire Cat” (185–86). Can James’s “historical act” shed light on what I’ve come to regard as the “melodrama of besieged materiality” (Brown “Materiality”)?

Missing Objects

During my previous work on James I was struck, as other readers have been, by how The Spoils of Poynton, a novel so centrally about things, pretty well does without them. Although two objects become conspicuous—a “great Italian cabinet” in the red saloon and the Maltese cross, described as “a small but marvelous crucifix of ivory, a masterpiece of delicacy” (71, 73–74)—Poynton is mostly characterized by homogenizing accounts of its resplendent luminosity: “the shimmer of wrought substances spent itself in the brightness; the old golds and brasses, old ivories and bronzes, the fresh tapestries and deep old damasks threw out a radiance” (58). The material mise-en-scène is more auratic than artifactual, and the fire with which...

pdf

Share