Beyond Post-Modernism: The Sense of History in The Princess Casamassima

Beyond Post-Modernism: The Sense of History in The Princess Casamassima by Martha Banta, University of Washington Hugh Kenner opens his 1972 "history book," The Pound Era, with Part One, entitled "Toward the Vortex," and Chapter One, signed "Ghosts and Benedictions ," thereby announcing the approach his discussion of a new era will take by reference to what lingers (ghosts) and what bids farewell (benedictions) from the preceding period. And whom does he poise almost ludicrously at the vestibule of "modern times"? His opening sentence tells us: "Toward the evening of a gone world, the light of its last summer pouring into a Chelsea street found and suffused the red waistcoat of Henry James, lord of decorum, en promenade, exposing his Boston niece to the tone of things."·1 Kenner must have it both ways. He initiates his examination of modernism by means of James's ponderous presence while also exclaiming, "Yet when we collect 1904's memorabilia it is James who seems to be absent" (PE, 20). The first filmed Western, the founding of the Ford Motor Company, Wright's flight, Poincarê* discoursing on the principle of relativity, and the activities of Fenollosa, Picasso, Pavlov, and Stravinsky were not, Kenner reminds us, recorded on "the Jamesian seismograph" (PE, 21). To Kenner, James was "the Novelist" of "Flaubertian invisibility" who never left "the House of Fiction" to go forth into the world. He was the man who believed that "to be sardonic about modernity " was "the best way to escape it" (PE, 22, 23, 25). Kenner, therefore, limits James to a pre-modern "tone," one whose regressive traits are at odds with the sharp sense of modernity that rushes into being past James's vague and sluggish form. Lionel Trilling has it otherwise. In his 1948 essay on The Princess Casamassima , Trilling firmly draws James into the circle of those possessed of "the liberal imagination" that forcefully continues to address concerns held by many of the greatest writers of the previous century. James's novel is made one with the new age through its understanding of "society as crowds and police, as a field of justice and injustice, reform and revolution."2 When Trilling takes up the specific instance of James's 1887 novel, he sees James recording a "social texture . . . [that] is grainy and knotted with practicality and detail. And more: his social observation is of a kind that we must find startlingly prescient." In no way does James figure for Trilling as a pathetic remnant from a tired past. Rather, James, is characterized as having been cut off from his 1. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1971), p. 3, hereafter cited parentheticaly as PE. 2. Lionel Trilling The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Viking, 1950), p~! 60~. The following quotations (from Trilling's essay "The Princess Casamassima") are also from page 60. THE HENRY JAMES REVIEW 96 WINTER, 1982 complacent contemporaries because of "the imagination of disaster" that made him view "life as ferocious and sinister."3 This actively critical imagination , Trilling states, "is what recommends him to us now." Trilling's James is not Kenner's ; not the novelist of exquisite sensibility who withdraws from history into the dense motes of the far distance. Trilling's James is placed full in the midst of our history by means of a particular mode of perception defined as "the experience of impingement." Kenner's James exists "before" that time Kenner designates as modern in its temperament. Trilling's James occupies whatever "now" the onflowing liberal imagination possesses as its own. At this point I want to examine where James stands in terms of modernism as tested on the pulses of Fredric Jameson, one of our leading theorists of the relation between fictional forms and the historical process. I wish to assess James's view of history and to locate _in_ history his acts as a creator of texts through specific reference to The Princess Casamassima. I propose to do this according to suggestions I shall extract from Jameson's 1979 essay "Marxism and Historicism" and the prologue to his book Fables of Aggresssion, also of 1979. In making use of Jameson...