A Review Note

The faults of Ultimately Fiction are less faults than limits. They stem from its being a first book, a young book, a short book. A virtue is that Ultimately Fiction seems designed to be the predecessor of a history of literary biography as an evolving art form. Petrie knows the materials for such a history; with more hard thinking about the issues involved, Petrie should be able to give us such a history—a "biography" of literary biography. Panthea Reid Broughton Louisiana State University A Review Note Money Talks: Language and Lucre in American Fiction, ed. Roy R. Male (Norman : Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1981, $14.95), presents a collection of essays previously assembled in Genre that explore the persistent economic themes and monetary semiotics in American fiction. Edgar A. Dryden's "The Image in the Mirror: The Double Economy of James's Portrait" (pp. 31-49), reviewed by Albert von Frank as a Genre article in this issue of HJR, bears especial mention for the connection Dryden builds between the action of James's The Portrait of a Lady and the concerns of its preface. Working out the implicit logic in James's economic metaphors for the artist's situation, Dryden finds an interesting contradiction that may mark one of the insistent forces behind James's writing. The clear condemnation in PL of Gilbert Osmond, together with the contrast between Ned Rosier's and OsmoncPs attitudes as collectors and suitors, sets up what Dryden sees as an opposition between those who prize the inherent worth of things and those whose only concern is exchange value. Hence the aesthetics and economics underlying the action of the novel seem to parallel James's insistence in the preface to PL that the consumers of novels inevitably debase the currency (the artist's vision) they use. It is better to write novels than to read them. Thus far James seems on a consistent gold standard of the imagination. But here Dryden takes another tack. Representation, to James "the most fundamental and general sign of the novel," is not the pure transmission of the thing itself—its inherent worth—but an imaginative act rooted in experience. And "experience" for James is "our apprehension of what happens to us as social creatures" (Pref. to The Princess Casamassima, emphasis added). Hence, Dryden concludes, "the source of that 'power* [in representation] is the figure of the other": it is after all not inherent worth but exchange value, though of a purer currency, that the novelist must seek. Dryden reminds us that "selves, for James, are not accessible to one another in direct or obvious ways," and it is Isabel Archer that most reminds us of this truth. Her early ideal of pure experience and pure vision, her scorn of complicated interpretation, lead to a disastrous marriage, but in losing that purity she gains a moral vision; James presents her moral triumph in the second half of JPL^ as an act of informed, interpreting vision, a reading of Osmond's carefully hidden character and intentions, Pansy's danger, and her own miserable state. Seeing Isabel's achieved state of awareness as a version of the novelist's ideal, Dryden concludes that "the painterly model" of representation "is partially subverted by a paradigm of textuality," a codedness and need of interpretation inherent in the social mediation of everything the novelist gets through language. [BC] THE HENRY JAMES REVIEW 208 SPRING, 1982 JOHNS HWk l\S *\ The Expense of Vision Essays on the Craft of Henry James Laurence B. Holland with a new essay on The American Scene foreword by Richard Poirier "One of the most important and complete critical studies of Henry James's major fictions. This work is not an ordinary critical study; it combines intellectual sophistication with clarity , comprehensiveness, and superb organization ." — John Carlos Rowe, University of California, Irvine "I know of nothing that more intelligently inquires into-the problematic relationship of [James's] most important novels to the larger questions of form — fictional, cultural, social — in the Prefaces— One of those rare critical works that is wholly worthy of its great subject. " — from the foreword by Richard Poirier "Holland's book still stands as the most...