Time and Topography in The American

Time and Topography in The American by Edwin Fussell, University of California, San Diego The opening sentence of The American obligingly reads: "On a brilliant day in May, in the year 1868, a gentleman was reclining at his ease on the great circular divan which at that period occupied the centre of the Salon Carré, in the Museum of the Louvre."1 Perhaps the phrase "at that period" catches our eye; perhaps it does not. The sentence in question first came to the attention of the original Tourist Reader in June 1876, eight years later than the alleged time of action, and several thousand miles to the west of the Louvre, for in its first publication The American was available only in the pages ofthe Atlantic Monthly. "Why 1868?" that original reader might well have asked and might well have found an answer more easily than we, so much more distanced from the original text. Yet surely the pristine contemporaneity of that occasion can be recovered, not by retrospective denunciation of Christopher Newman's "political ignorance," but by recuperation of how the political climate of France was related to Henry James's inscription of a novel about an American in France, which James for the most part wrote while also living in France.2 The last installment appeared in May 1877. Five months after that, in October, the Nation printed James's review of Auguste Laugel, La France Politique et Sociale (1877), in which James wrote: "There are no people of any pretensions to liberal culture, of whatever nationality, to whom the destiny of the most brilliant nation in the world [not the United States] is a matter of indifference; and at a moment like the present, when she seems to stand at the parting of the ways and to be about to make a supreme choice between the habit of revolution and the experiment of tranquility. . ." (FW 472)—and there we may let the citation trail off, having found something of what we need. The "habit of revolution" versus the "experiment of tranquility," violence versus democracy, may serve as the rubric for all of James's fictional dealings with France—she has been the one, she is now the other, and how long will tranquility last? For The American, as a work by itself, we want something even more particular than that, as follows. In the despatches he was writing for the New York Tribune concurrently with installments oÃ- The American, James makes quite clear his uncertainty about the stability to date of the Third Republic, still slowly, painfully, and belatedly establishing itself after the disasters of 1870-71, the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune (PS passim). That was no reliable setting for a novel ambitiously titling itself with the author's own nationality and commencing to show itself in public during the centenary year of that nation's independence. For his fictive setting James wanted something more fixed; 1868 168 The Henry James Review gave him that fixity, for if there was one thing certain vis-à -vis contemporary France it was that the Second Empire was dead beyond recall. Even before the first installment of The American, James was describing, in a long essay-review of "The Two Amperes" (Galaxy, November 1875), just the kind of society he needed for his setting, "a society which by this time has pretty well passed away and can know no more changes. It is motionless in its place; it is sitting for its likeness" [emphasis added] (FW 11). But then 1876-77 James must be cunning about temporal details. The old Opéra Actively attended by Newman and the Bellegardes is not the new opera building now available to later Tourist Readers , but young Madame de Bellegarde may then aspire to a court appearance at the Tuileries. The new Opéra is described in the Tribune letters, the Palais des Tuileries naturally not. James's desire to have his Paris motionless in its place, sitting for its likeness to him, makes even more sense if we compare the Paris of The American with the Paris of contemporary guidebooks—these are invariably more conservative , at times almost hysterically so, these invariably...