Notes on a Native Son: Henry James’s New York

But man will never be able to experience and ponder this that is denied so long as he dawdles about in the mere negating of the age. The flight into tradition, out of a combination of humility and presumption, can bring about nothing in itself other than self-deception and blindness in relation to the historical moment. Man will know, i.e., carefully safeguard into its truth, that which is incalculable, only in creative questioning and shaping out of the power of genuine reflection. Reflection transports the man of the future into that ‘between’ in which he belongs to Being yet remains a stranger amid that which is.

Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology

In “Henry James, (Post)Modernist?,” an account of the myriad and distorted shapes “our heterodox James” assumes on the Procrustean bed of high modernist, anti-Jacobean, and postmodern criticism, respectively, David McWhirter cannily redefines John Carlos Rowe’s vision of James as “a precursor of our own postmodern condition” (169). For McWhirter, the “socially engaged, often progressive, sexually aware, professionally savvy cultural critic” recovered under the aegis of postmodern James studies is “suggestively congruent with the new historical narratives and terms of cultural analysis that mark contemporary modernist studies” (169). The stakes in such a realignment of James with a modernism reconfigured as both detached from and engaged with history and social life are considerable, allowing us to attend to James’s annotated, as it were, experience of “a modernity marked by historical currents—the rise of consumerism and mass culture; the introduction of new technologies of transportation and communication; a transformed geopolitical sphere; new constellations of publicity and a changing literary marketplace” (181). McWhirter’s essay is a recipe not yet a meal. It is a clarion call to others to consider the possibilities, attendant upon modernization, of “being in the world,” as James understood them (177).

For Bill Brown, The American Scene (1907) is the quintessential text for understanding James’s intensive relationship with modernism and to modernity. In A Sense of Things (2003), Brown focuses on prosopopoeia, the personification of objects and the concomitant reification of persons, in The American Scene (178). Brown’s reading contradicts Sharon Cameron’s ingenious depiction of The American Scene as a text where objective reality is wholly subordinated to the activity of consciousness (182). Brown notices parallels between James’s disorientation at the absence of familiar objects and “stabilizing sites” in New York circa 1905 and Fredric Jameson’s “canonical depiction of the postmodern cityscape” (181). Jameson’s postmodern account of the “‘mutation of built space’ for which the human subject is perceptually unequipped” is, essentially, an “updated version” of Georg Simmel’s claim of 1900 that subjective culture has not kept pace with changes in the material world, leaving the individual in a “state of shock” (Brown 181). Analogously, Ross Posnock’s pioneering reassessment of Henry James’s position in the modernist pantheon aligns James with contemporaneous social scientists, Georg Simmel, Max Weber, and Walter Benjamin, rather than with late Victorian elites, who occupied themselves by bemoaning the declination of culture in an era of rampant democratization. In spite of his affinities with the “New England intellectual mandarinate” (145), James is a resolutely cosmopolitan figure in Posnock’s book, one who is open to mental as well as physical peregrinations. While embracing Posnock’s revisionist account of James as a less antiquated, less priggish, and less cautious figure, I want to apply some critical pressure to Posnock’s sense of James’s cheerful receptivity to what Benjamin calls the “shock experience” at the center of the individual’s encounter with the urban milieu (Illuminations 163). Drawing on Benjamin’s characterization of the poet-flâneur, Charles Baudelaire, as a “traumatophile” (163), that is, one who exults in the nervous fervor occasioned by contact with the crowd, traffic, and heterogeneous urban stimuli, I want to reposition James within the new modernist canon as one who anxiously and expectantly scarified his most tender sensibilities in pursuit of material. To this end, I must keep in play nostalgia, tradition, antimodernism, while...