Nietzsche, Henry James, and the Artistic Will (review)

Stephen DonadÃ-o, Nietzsche, Henry James, and the Artistic Will. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978. 347 pp. 15.95. Nietzsche, Henry James and the Artistic Will performs the highly valuable service of establishing distinct connections of sensibility and world-view between Nietzsche and Henry James, and as a consequence it will no doubt open up Important new lines of inquiry in future James studies. Having accomplished this service, however, Professor DonadÃ-o fails to provide any markedly new insights into the problems of freedom and the will in James's fiction, a benefit which ought certainly to have accrued from bringing the philosopher and novelist together, particularly if DonadÃ-o had carried out his declared intention of thereby "grasping the ... implications of the momentous shift in the ground of religious and aesthetic belief" which gave rise to modernism (p. 7). Although DonadÃ-o quickly dismisses the idea that James was directly influenced by Nietzsche, he provides considerable, ¡f not conclusive, evidence to demonstrate that some kind of indirect influence must have occurred. William James cites Nietzsche at length in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902); T. S. Perry reviewed Nietzsche in the North American Review in 1875; Vernon Lee wrote an article on "Nietzsche and the 'Will to Power'" for the North American Review in 1904; James's acquaintance Paul Bourget, the French psychologist, had met Nietzsche during the period in which Bourget's relationship with James was strongest. James, in other words, lived among and frequently conversed with writers and thinkers upon whom Nietzsche's impact was growing. In addition, DonadÃ-o notes the similarities between many of Emerson's transcendental notions and Nietzsche's theories of the will, and in this way argues that James would have been highly susceptible to, if he did not already share, many of Nietzsche's i deas. Drawing attention, however, to Nietzsche's declared admiration for Emerson's transcendentalism serves to bring James's own attitudes toward Emerson into question. That James wholly accepted Emerson's doctrines is dubious at best, and DonadÃ-o never really discriminates the various social, intellectual and moral elements in James's relationship with Emerson. Nor do James's relationships with his brother, T. S. Perry, and Vernon Lee necessarily warrant the belief that he would uncritically have shared their interests in the German philosopher. Nevertheless, James was certainly exposed to Nietzsche in many ways and would no doubt have reacted to this exposure. DonadÃ-o, however, is unable to clarify the specific character of this reaction because his critical method is to lay explications of passages from Nietzsche beside explications of passages from James (usually from letters or essays) and then to point to similarities with little analysis of the context from which these passages were taken and with hardly any analysis of how James's critical ideas were modified and expressed in his fiction. It surely is inaccurate to suppose that James's aesthetic and moral beliefs, not to mention his effect on modernism, could be adequately represented without such analyses. The positive effect, however, of Donadio's method is that a distinctly Nietzschean strain in at least some of James's thinking becomes evident. The major affinities DonadÃ-o notes in the two men's conceptions of the will are these: both believed that the assertion of the will in art is the only means for achieving the moral and aesthetic transcendence that assures absolute freedom and that is necessary for the creation of value in life; both also believed that this freedom represents the ultimate moral triumph because, to use Nietzsche's words, "morality is just as 'immoral' as any other thing on Earth; morality is itself a form of immorality." Although the aggressive assertion of will is often central to James's fiction, his notions of freedom, transcendence and morality cannot be called Nietzschean without considerable qualification. DonadÃ-o is not the first to suggest that James's characters, Isabel Archer for instance, frequently search for absolute forms of experience; the question is whether they find them, and about this much debate is possible. The answer cannot be derived from Nietzsche's metaphysics in any case, but can come 70 only...