Representation and Ideology in "The Real Thing"

Selected Papers on Henry James, 1988-1990 133 Creativity, and Power in Henry James"; and die fourth, Sharon Baris' s, was given at a special session titled "Word and Image: Picturing Fiction," led by WiUiam Howarth and Jefferson Hunter.—DMF Susan Bazargan—Representation and Ideology in "The Real Thing" "The effect of solidity you reach is but perfume and simulacrum." —WiUiam James to Henry Jr. In the preface to Roderick Hudson, James writes: "The art of representation bristles with questions the very terms of which are difficult to apply and to appreciate; but whatever makes it arduous makes it, for our refreshment infinite, causes the practice of it, with experience, to spread round us in a widening, not in a narrowing circle." The questions and the terms James invites us to scrutinize in expanding the art of representation inevitably embrace ideological issues. His readers, however, have often been reluctant in engaging questions of an ideological nature in die study of the Master. And yet James's keen awareness of the tortuous interplay between ideology and representation, ideology and die artistic image, permeates his work. Symptomatic of such an awareness are his observations on America, so diat as a backdrop to my reading of "The Real Thing," I would like to pause briefly on a few passages of The American Scene, particularly James's essay on die city of Washington. One approach to this essay is to read it as James's analysis of me various images in which die city represents itself. Where does one locate the "real" Washington? One response, unsettiing as it may be, James offers is this: "[T]he national capital is charming in proportion as you don't see it." What one might see, or in this case hear, is Washington as the City of Conversation, as James aptly caUs it. But here the impression left by this configuration of the capital is that of an absence, of self-reference, or, at best, a simulacrum: "The spectacle [of the City of Conversation] as it at first met my senses, was that of a numerous community in ardent pursuit of some workable conception of its social self, and trying meanwltile inteUigently to talk itself, and even this very embarrassment, into a subject for conversation." Thus Washington seems not unlike "some big buzzing insect which keeps bumping against a treacherous mirror." At the more concrete level, the city represents itself in its splendid monuments : Mount Vernon, for example, has the commanding beauty, die "luminous stillness" of an autotelic image; and yet the "restless analyst" senses die "otiier": the bloodshed of history, the "grey eminence of poUtics" diat, as Jean BaudriUard says, is behind the seemingly autonomous image. What is not visible at Mount Vernon is, in James's words, "die slight, pale, bleeding Past, in a patched homespun suit, stand[ing] there taking die thanks of the bloated Present—having woundedly rescued from thieves and brought to his door the fat, locked pocketbook of which that personage appears the owner. The pocket-book contains, 'unbeknown ' to the honest youdi, banknotes of incredible figure, and what breaks our heart, if we be cursed widi the historic imagination, is the grateful, wan smUe with which the great guerdon of sixpence is received." James visited Washington during the month of January, when the active operations of power were in recess: "The season was over, the President away, 134 The Henry James Review the two Houses up," so that it was possible to lose oneself in die architectural landscape of the city, in "die great vistas of die avenues ... in a 'sylvan soUtude.'" But this image of rural tranquility is immediately quaüfied by the appearance of a "stray diplomatic agent," who, nevertheless, identifies the magnificent scenery as "the real Washington." Yet James remarks on the "fuU iUusion" of the enchanting scene, the "unsurmounted bourgeois character of the whole . . . screened and disguised." "Though I could," he says, "diplomaticaUy, patriotically pretend, at the right moment, diat such a Washington was the 'real' one, my assent had aU the whUe a stiU finer meaning for myself." While James, as usual, does not explicate the "finer meaning" of his assent, his remarks clearly provoke a...