Nietzsche Contra Derrida: Two Views of Henry James's "The Birthplace"

Nietzsche Contra Derrida: Two Views of Henry James's "The Birthplace" by Henry McDonald, Graduate Center, CUNY Henry James's 1903 story, "The Birthplace," is the tale of an elderly couple , Morris and Isabel Gedge, who realize a dream of a lifetime in being made caretakers of the birthplace of a great poet. The place is called Blackport-onDwindle , and tiie poet simply "Him"—references to both a place and an author James knew well, Stratford-on-Avon and William Shakespeare (Edel 149). On first learning that he has been appointed caretaker of this "enshrined Presence" (BP 478), Morris Gedge is exalted: "He felt as if a window had opened into a great green woodland, a woodland tiiat had a name all glorious, immortal, that was peopled with vivid figures, each of them renowned, and that gave out a murmur, deep as tiie sound of die sea, which was the rustle in forest shade of all the poetry, the beauty, the colour of life. It would be prodigious that of this transfigured world he should keep the key" (BP 464). The exaltation, however, quickly drops. The Gedges are to serve not just as caretakers but as guides for die tourists who flock to the site and Morris Gedge begins to feel tiiat "They. . . seemed to have got into die way of crowding Him out. He found himself even a litde resenting this for Him" (474). Echoing a theme of many of James's tales of the literary life, Morris perceives that the actual facts about the Poet's life are scant ("He covered His tracks as no other human being has ever done" 489) and are believed in mainly out of the failure of any real feeling or imagination for the poet's works. '"They [the tourists] want to see where He hung up His hat and where He kept His boots and where His mother boiled her pot. . . . None of Them care tuppence about Him. The only thing They care about is this empty shell—or rather, for it isn't empty, the extraneous preposterous stuffing of it" (499, 482). As caretaker and guide, Morris develops a bad conscience about his participation in what he now regards as a hideous and farcical spectacle: "he was on his way to become two quite different persons, the public and the private . ... He was splitting into halves, unmistakably—he who, whatever else he had been, had at least always been so entire and in his way so solid. One of the halves. . . was the keeper, the show-man, the priest of the idol; tiie other piece was the poor unsuccessful honest man he had always been" (486). Morris's bitterness and disillusionment assume their most extreme form when he declares: "It's all I want—to let the author alone. Practically. . . there is The Henry James Review 11 (1990): 133-48 01990 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 134 The Henry James Review no autiior, that is for us to deal with. There are all the immortal people—in the work; but there's nobody else. . . . There is no such Person" (501-502). Now, if all dus sounds a litde like a parable of poststructuralism—a deconstructionist 's dream—the reason, I try to show in this essay, is hardly accidental. Indeed, the story does not really need to be "deconstructed," for it belongs to a category of text that Paul de Man identified as doing tiie job on itself. For example , "The Birthplace" plainly mocks the notion of an intentional author existing outside his works of art. "There is no author," says Morris Gedge. "There is no such Person" (521). To believe such a notion, as James himself said of Shakespeare , is to perpetuate a "fraud" (Edel 145, 148). The notion of "the critic" gets a similar treatment in the story. Comparable to Jacques Derrida's pronouncement that "I am trying, precisely, to put myself at a point so that I do not know any longer where I am going" ("Structure" 267) is Morris Gedge's "rejoicing. . . in his ignorance," his finding "the attitude of a high expert, distincdy a stumblingblock " (503). Both artist and critic, in other words, seem to...