Two on James

ELT 42 : 2 1999 unusual and thought-provoking study of the ways Doyle mirrored British masculinity in the Holmes stories for four decades. Edward Lauterbach ______________ Purdue University Two on James Sara Blair. Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation. New YorkCambridge University Press, 1996. 259 pp. $49.95 Henry James: The Shorter Fiction (Reassessments). N. H. Reeve, ed. New York: Macmillan, 1997 χ + 208 pp. $49.95 SARA BLAIR'S Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation could be seen as a paradigm of literary critical practice here at the ebb of the twentieth century. Blair describes her own approach, at least as she conceived of it when she began her project, as combining "poststructuralism and the (then) new American studies." Poststructuralism , cultural studies, race (and its inseparable twin, gender): all the literary-critical signs (or signifiers) of our times. These remarks are not meant to disparage Blair's approach; the critical methods privileged by the academy today are no less valid—or tendentious—than those of by-gone days. And while Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation manifests many of the strengths of modern-day criticism —including a thorough command of subject—it also bears, here and there anyway, certain of its characteristic weaknesses. Blair posits an "other-than-canonical James," one who engaged and often appropriated popular culture while simultaneously establishing himself as the high priest of high culture; she rejects, then, the privileging of "the popular as a unique site of both cultural resistance and identity formation," arguing, instead, that modernists like James—and one might also include, though Blair limits her discussion to James, writers such as Eliot, Joyce, and Lawrence—participated in the messy business of negotiating the terms, and terminology, of racial and national identity. Blair writes: "At large, I argue two claims: that texts over the range of [James's] career productively negotiate the race thinking and nationbuilding habits and institutions of emergent modern Anglo-America, in varied Victorian, gilded age, fin de siècle, and late capitalist formations; and that his 'mixed' performances of what has recently come to be studied as whiteness—that is to say, constructions of American and AngloAmerican masculinity, gentility, and a putative Anglo-Saxon racial iden216 BOOK REVIEWS tity—not only register but extend the range of available responses to American racial history in his moment and in our own." Blair begins by considering the numerous travel reviews and essays that James wrote between 1865 and 1875, many of which are concerned with "national cultures and characters and texts of leisure or anthropological expedition." I often found myself, however, more interested in the books that James wrote about than his reviews or Blair's analysis of James's reviews. That at least is my reaction to the following: "In taking up The Last Journals of David Livingstone in Central Africa, from 1866 to his Death. Continued by a Narrative of his Last Moments and Suffering ... James avails himself of a signal opportunity to mobilize the instability of whiteness as a resource for defining a distinctive style— intentionally Anglo-American, 'cosmopolite,' and modernist—of culture building." More generally, and not surprisingly, Blair attaches more importance , at least for her purposes, to these "virtually untreated" reviews and essays than previous critics have, and while many of these pieces do offer glimpses into James's thinking on these matters, their very form precludes the possibility of a long, steady look. Chapter two focuses upon a somewhat more substantial, if still slight, work, James's 1883 essay "Anthony Trollope." In this well-known essay, James chastises Trollope for not taking the novel seriously enough; interestingly , if oddly, Blair explores the racial implications of James's disapproval : "Criminalizing Trollope's literary excess as an affront to the implicitly sacralized potential, destiny, and character of Anglo-Saxon racial energy, he thereby raises the stakes for literature as an arena for cultural formation and performance." In this same chapter Blair also considers, at some length, "Recollections of the John Brown Raid," the feature essay in the periodical where James's essay originally appeared. Here, as well as elsewhere, Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation...