Henry James and the Abuse of the Past (review)

In Notes of a Son and Brother, Henry James famously described the circumstances surrounding the injury that apparently disqualified him for service in the Union Army. In 1861 or 1862 (accounts vary), a small fire (James styled it "a shabby conflagration" [AU 415]) broke out in Newport, Rhode Island. James, still a teenager, joined the efforts of several other volunteers, who struggled desperately to operate a rusted, jerry-rigged engine. Awkwardly wedged in the corner where two high fences met at a sharp angle, James toiled away, pumping mightily to coax the recalcitrant engine into action. In the process, as a result of the cramped position he had held for "twenty odious minutes" (414) James suffered what he elliptically referred to as "a horrid even if an obscure hurt" (415). James's account, no less than the event and the injury itself, has fueled endless debates over the precise nature of the hurt, the actual circumstances under which he incurred the injury, its physical and psychological consequences, the reasons for James's vagueness about the incident, and the uses (both practical and creative, conscious and unconscious) to which he put it.

Peter Rawlings's Henry James and the Abuse of the Past refocuses attention on James's "obscure hurt" and its historical context, the Civil War, organizing four substantial, densely packed chapters around this event to which James, no less than his biographers, "returned compulsively" (xi). Yet Rawlings's study neatly sidesteps the by-now-tedious questions of what, where, when, why, and how, in order to explore the epistemological dimensions of James's persistent linking of the personal and the national wounds and the ways in which James's writing deploys public and private pasts in aid of literary ends. In so doing, he reclaims this episode in Jamesian biography from the psychoanalyst's couch and uses it as a point of entry into the complex web of social, scientific, and aesthetic thought in which James's work is enmeshed. The project of the book is ambitious, its intellectual sweep extensive. Ranging widely across James's oeuvre but alighting chiefly on stories, sketches, and essays that have received relatively little attention from critics, Henry James and the Abuse of the Past situates James's creative response to time, history, and the past with respect to contemporary theories of psychology, historiography, philosophy, and linguistics.

The "telling feature" of James's account of his injury, according to Rawlings, is its "utter obscurity" (xii), a "seminal" quality (xiii) that unleashes an entire "discourse of obscurity" (67) that drives much of his fiction. Indeed, James's writing partly "depends" (xiv) upon the production, proliferation, and perpetuation of obscurity in order to "[divert] the gaze" from "a potential abyss of meaninglessness in a world of appearances for which there is no corresponding reality" (xv). Obscurity—indirection, convolution, ambiguity, irony, and indeterminacy, as well as secrecy, silence, or omission—is a contrivance, Rawlings clarifies, that arises from James's preoccupation with "what can, cannot, and must not be said" (xviii). Henry James and the Abuse of the Past probes the ways in which James's fiction "encrypts" (xv) aspects of his private life and masks anxieties about public exposure of private matters. Throughout the study, Rawlings relentlessly pursues James's response to the unutterable, the unnamable, the inexpressible, and the impenetrable. Facts, he argues, "demand to be abused, reversed, and even perverted, if anything worthwhile is to ensue" (44). Consequently, the "abuse of the past" becomes in James's hands "an art of fiction and the framework of an autobiography" (67–68).

James's "principal epistemological tenets," Rawlings contends, are "the elements of secrecy, concealment, and ignorance" that also "control his senses of the past and . . . determine his attitude towards written history" (xiii). James emphasizes "what is not, rather than what is" (xiii), what cannot be represented, rather than what can be represented. Distrustful of claims to objectivity and fearful of facts no less than "facts about facts...