Historicizing Henry James

The Henry James Review Spring, 1984 an institution, acts as a relay of social practices of regulation, and relays them the more effectively in its very claim to stand outside of and to oppose these practices. The double discourse of the novel is supported precisely by the notion of an essential difference between the art of the novel and the subject of power; it is the deployment of this difference that the Jamesian art of power displays. And the notion that the literary, necessarily and in principle, provides a haven or escape from power has become, in modern society, one of the ideological supports of that power. This is to suggest, finaUy, that the theorizing of a literary difference may be part of the same ideology of power—a theoretical rewriting of the very arrangements of power that literary theory imagines itself disowning and subverting. NOTES ^Several passages of this paper are drawn from my Henry James and the Art of Power (Ithaca: CorneU University Press, 1984) and are reused mission of the editors. here with the perHistoricizing Henry James by Michael Sprinker, State University of New York, Stony Brook To be speaking at the centenary of the Modern Language Association about the impact of contemporary critical theory on the interpretation of Henry James marks the distance traveUed by the discipline of English studies since the end of the nineteenth century—when James himself was yet in the first third of his nearly halfcentury long writing career. At the same time, it testifies to the continuity between the practice of interpretation regnant at the founding moment of our discipUne and some of the most recent forms of interpretive practice. The Foucauldian reading of The Golden Bowl outlined by Mark Seltzer , the lecture symptomale of the same novel sketched out by Mimi Kairschner, and even Bruce Robbins's somewhat more conventional historicizing exegesis of The Turn of the Screw—aU three papers would scarcely have been imaginable within the hegemonic forms of interpretation in English studies until comparatively recently. One need only survey the history of the interpretation of James's texts (as Bruce Robbins does for The Turn of the Screw) to see that what has largely been repressed in aU but the most marginal of Jamesian criticism (MaxweU Geis mar and Van Wyck Brooks, for example—interestingly, both negative assessments of James) has been just those questions of the poUtical and social subtexts of James's fiction that constitute the topic and the occasion for the papers presented at this session. One nearly invariant feature of critical practice in English studies for most of the last hundred years has been its capacity to manage or displace the political and social determinants of literary texts by means of various aestheticizing strategies, its power to push the political, as Fredric Jameson has said, genuinely into the unconscious. To the extent that aU three papers in this session break with the conventional repression of politics in Uterary studies—and a fortiori in James criticism, which remains, even now, largely in the shadow of Blackmur, Matthiessen , and Edel—they perform a valuable and indeed pathbreaking function in the discipline, which is no longer quite the same field of study it was even fifteen years ago, much less in 1883. Nevertheless, as Bruce Robbins suggests , most (perhaps all) of the forms of interpretive practice that now vie for power and authority within literary criticism, including the very ones exhibited in the three papers presented here, share a broadly similar set of commitments with just those forms of reading and interpretation Volume V 203 Number 3 The Henry James Review Spring, 1984 they seek to displace. Literary criticism would seem, on this account, to resemble closely that homeostatic system that Mark Seltzer claims is characteristic of Jamesian narrative and of the system of emergent social institutions the narrative imitates and helps to reproduce. If we accept Mimi Kairschner's contention that the repressive apparatus of the Jamesian text is complicitous with the ideology of the bourgeoisie in the era of monopoUes and conspicuous consumption , then it is difficult to see how literary criticism can arrogate to itself the privileged position of being outside of bourgeois...