Jamesian Historiography and The American Scene

Jamesian Historiography and The American Scene by Donald Wolff, Eastern Oregon State College It is a real question whetiier or not James had a sense of history at all. In 1963 Maxwell Geismar spent close to five hundred pages demonstrating the way James's historical understanding was sublimated to his sense of the past, the way fantasy was consistently substituted for history in order to serve an essentially aristocratic and conservative ideology. More recently, Mark Seltzer has argued with infinitely greater sophistication that James, complicitous with the very forces of modem history, ensures the political status quo by maintaining the opposition between art and power. Seltzer's James, not unlike Geismar's, conspires witii the dominant modes of power to ensure art's continued separation from political, and therefore historical, realities. At first glance, this view harmonizes with T. S. Eliot's dictum that James "had a mind so fine tiiat no idea could violate it" (quoted in Wellek 216): it stands to reason tiiat an author who resists ideas is incapable of historiographical reflection. According to René Wellek, however, Eliot meant that James studiously avoided philosophical rigidity in any form (216), and therefore it can be said James's resistance to ideas does not necessarily mean he was unable to think historically, even tiiough historiography can be philosophical rigidity projected to a universal scale. For such rigidity, James substitutes an inductive historical consciousness, remaining hypervigilantly open to various interpretations of human action, past and present, individual and social. In dramatizing such a consciousness , where new structures for the understanding of human action are constantly employed only to be abandoned, James creates a kind of intellectual vacuum into which all sorts of philosophical systems can intertextually rush, dialogically coexisting without resolution, without die coherence demanded by traditional philosophical historiography. What he loses in formal coherence, he gains in dialogical representation. In dramatizing this historical imagination confronting a recalcitrant present in The American Scene, James both writes history and thinks about the writing of history, writes history in and for itself, as Hegel would say (White 100-101). We might reasonably expect to find Jamesian historiography most clearly The Henry James Review 13 (1992): 154-71 © by The Johns Hopkins University Press Historiography in The American Scene 155 displayed in The American Scene, which recounts James's impressions of America in 1904 during his final visit to his homeland after a twenty-year absence. As James confronted fin de siècle America, he was forced to compare it with the America of his past and to wonder about its future. James used his reactions to situate himself historically and to tiiink about the unfolding of history, employing not only Hegelian but also Tocquevillean metahistorical tropes to frame his responses. Still, Jamesian historiography remains maddeningly difficult to explicate because The American Scene is one of James's most complex texts. His chosen method of presentation, in which one impression of the country succeeds another, produces a constantly shifting point of view, each shift itself presented in ironic detachment. To complicate matters further, the American scene presented an alien face to die prodigal autiior. It provided none of the material with which James was used to working and necessitated a revaluation of his theory of fiction, which he had hoped to employ in converting die raw material of his American experience into artistic order. In the end, James's impressions of America are determined by a complex amalgam of his poetics, politics, historiography, and taste, but there is not enough space here to work out the intimate connections among all these elements, not to mention James's sense of his own place in history, both social and literary. Before embarking upon that journey, it is first necessary to demonstrate that James had die sense of history that I claim. I In The American Scene, James practiced a literary form that might be called rhetorical historiography. The book approximates Hegel's "conceptual history," which focuses not only on the cultural life of a nation but also uses tiiat material to speculate about the future, about the direction of history in general (White 101). But unlike traditional historiography, James did not commit to a single...