Typical Tales of Paris: the Function of Reading in The Ambassadors

Typical Tales of Paris: the Function of Reading in The Ambassadors By Allen W. Menton, Cornell University Most studies of Paris and The Ambassadors focus on the historical Paris of the nineteenth century in order to understand the importance of that city for Lambert Strether. This emphasis on the empirical Paris, however, has obscured its "mythological" aspect—a mythology created by a body of nineteenth-century French literature about life in the French capital. At the same time, The Ambassadors is about a search for personal identity: Strether hopes to find himself in Paris. Specifically, he hopes to recover the "lost time" of his youth, a youth that he identifies with his first trip to Paris thirty years earlier. In the intervening years, the volumes of French literature that he has been reading since that trip have colored his view of the city so thoroughly that the Paris in which he hopes to rediscover his lost youth is largely a product of that reading—a literary and mythological Paris. To a great extent, Strether's Parisian experience consists of his efforts to live out the various literary types he associates with Paris. Towards the end of the novel, James figures Strether as "mixed up with the typical tale of Paris" (AM 315). While many critics have explored Henry James's debt to French literature and his special attraction to the city of Paris, few have explored these traits in his fictional creation Lambert Strether, a no less enthusiastic reader of French literature (if perhaps a less perceptive one). For example, critics more commonly look to Balzac's novel Louis Lambert as a possible source for James's creative vision than as a possible influence on Stether's sense of himself. Similarly, critics The Henry James Review 15 (1994): 286-300. © 1995, The Johns Hopkins University Press Typical Tales of Paris 287 tend to see James's references to the cathedral of Notre-Dame as a reflection of his transforming vision of Paris. We must point out, however, that for his character Strether the cathedral has already been transformed by a reading of Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris: "He had dropped upon a seat halfway down the nave and...was trying with head thrown back and eyes aloft...to reduce it to the convenient terms of Victor Hugo, whom, a few days before, giving the rein for once in a way to the joy of life, he had purchased in seventy bound volumes" (AM 173). We might even say that the full reality of the cathedral is too much for Strether: it overwhelms him (as does so much of Paris), and he can overcome this mental block only through the mediation of a familiar novel, which has the effect of reducing the phenomenon to a form he can more easily assimilate. The cathedral in which he hopes to find himself is in fact the mythical cathedral of Hugo.1 Indeed, The Ambassadors is full of references, allusions, and parallels to a veritable canon of nineteenth-century French writers who have contributed to the mythology of Paris. Strether filters his experience through many "typical tales of Paris" as he wanders through the spectrum of distinctly Parisian topoi: the bohemia of Miirger, the demimonde of Dumas fils, the Faubourg Saint-Germain of Gautier's aestheticist disciples, the "education sentimentale" of Flaubert, and the "vie de flâneur" of Baudelaire. In the final reckoning, however, he finds the "lost time" of his youth only when he turns his back on the Paris of literary mediation and begins to experience Paris directly, as plain old Lambert Strether. Unable to reach his own personal past through Paris, he ultimately connects to Paris through his personal past. It seems reasonable to assume that Strether has read at least some of the French books he brought back from his earlier visit to Paris. And, indeed, what else might Strether do with his leisure hours, hours not spent, as we know, in taking young women to the museum or the theater. Long before his return to Paris, Strether's view of the city has been shaped by Henri Mürger's Scènes de la Bohème (1854...