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How Henry James Regularized the Autobiographical Memory of His Father; Or, That Day in the Whorehouse By Paul S. Nielsen, Louisiana State University In the early stages of A Small Boy and Others (1913), Henry James undertakes to tell the story of the memorial experience of his father. There and throughout his autobiography, he summons memories to present consciousness in a narrative marked by the triumphal calls of an elder writer mastering the labor of recollection. By a close reading of an especially crucial parade of memory, I propose to show that a large part of James's purpose is to regularize the memorial portrait of the father and to make it consistent with the culturally dominant modes of masculine self-expression and identity. My paper is premised on the assumption that in any autobiographical narrative of the self, the representation of the father may be especially illuminating . If the autobiographical project is to design a self, then surely readers should attend to the figure of the parent, who may control and determine the autobiographer's sense of self. James makes this point himself when he represents his method of selecting memories: "I keep picking out at hazard those passages of our earliest age that help to reconstruct for me even by tiny touches the experience of our parents, any shade of which seems somehow to signify" (SB 41). The parade of memory I ask that we consider is organized by his recollection of his father taking him, when he was twelve, to Mathew Brady's studio for the famous portrait of father and son. To that memory have condensed other memories of accompanying his father on one of his visits to Mrs. Cannon's house. The Henry James Review 15 (1994): 190-98. © 1994, The Johns Hopkins University Press That Day in the Whorehouse 191 James cannot say explicitly what Mrs. Cannon's business is—in fact, the elder professional writer emphasizes that such knowledge was withheld from his small boy—but after much reflection I believe that my first impression was correct: Mrs. Cannon's is a brothel, or stands for the same thing in the narrating consciousness. I believe that it is in representation the scene of sexual exchange, and that James needs to believe that it was so in history as well. I believe that James's account of Mrs. Cannon's business and his family's patronage is an assertion of sexual regularism, and that the assertion was compelled from the loyal writing son by memories that have condensed to the father-son portrait. Those memories, as arranged and retold by James, trouble the loyal son's confidence in the paternal donation; they become suggestions that others may believe there is something other than normative sexual behavior at the heart of the family tradition. Conventional autobiographical theory has made it clear that autobiography should not be considered a simple account of a verifiable past but rather a complex narrative act executed in the present as a way of interpreting that past. James dramatizes the present struggle of recollection more than most autobiographers through his triumphal and distinctive exclamations of recollective mastery—"I recover the place itself" (SB 53), "I abundantly grasp" (SB 54), "I distinguish in the earlier twilight" (SB 31), "I rescue from the same limbo" (SB 31). The result is that in addition to the I-who-reside-in-history that all autobiographers create, James gives life to an I-who-remember. He creates what we may call a present recollective moment of unusual extent and provides unusually rich documentation of the present consciousness acted upon by all the anxieties and ambitions of the elder writer. I suggest that the Jamesian autobiographical text, which readers have so often thought to lack coherence, becomes significantly orderly when we recognize that the unacknowledged needs of the recollective consciousness often determine the sequence and relationship of memories of past events. Memories are quite often summoned not in accord with chronology but in accord with affective content.1 Before proceeding to the parade of memory, I should acknowledge some of the sources of my thinking. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has shown in her masterful essay "The Beast in...

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