James's Prefaces

ELT 41 : 4 1998 James's Prefaces John H. Pearson. The Prefaces of Henry James: Framing the Modern Reader. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997. vii + 168 pp. $28.50 HENRY JAMES wrote a series of long, ruminative prefaces to the novels and tales he included in his New York Edition, published between 1907 and 1909. He claims in the first preface that, taken together, all eighteen prefaces "represent, over a considerable course, the continuity of an artist's endeavor, the growth of his whole operative consciousness" (Preface to Roderick Hudson). In his final preface, he maintains that the prefaces have been "an earnest invitation to the reader to dream again in my company and in the interest of his own larger absorption of my sense" (Preface to The Golden Bowl). John Pearson positions his argument in The Prefaces of Henry James between these two declarations of intent. In six carefully argued chapters , Pearson demonstrates that James uses the story of his operative consciousness as a means of preparing his reader for the prefaced texts. "Through the agency of the prefaces," James reinvents himself "as the model reader who leaves a track through the novels and tales that other, future readers—modernist readers—will follow." Other critics have made simüar arguments about the prefaces, most notably Paul Armstrong in the collection of essays edited by David McWhirter, Henry James's New York Edition (1995). Unique to Pearson's study, however, is his effort to analyze in detail a representative range of strategies by which James tries not merely to guide or to educate the person reading his work, but instead to create a reader who can properly understand and appreciate it. Central to Pearson's approach is Roland Barthes's definition of the text as a "'methodological field'" that diminishes the distance between reading and writing by "'joining them in a single signifying practise.'" According to Pearson, the prefaces accomplish this "diminution of distance " by treating the prefaced texts as the object of the "idealized and authorized reading which they present." The reader is encouraged, manipulated , even indoctrinated by James's efforts to adopt the terms of James's "writerly reading." At the same time that he poses as his own ideal reader, however, James needs to establish "formal boundaries" around the novels and tales. He must position himself in proximity to the aesthetic world of his fiction without intruding upon or violating that world. Pearson's first chapter ("What's In a Preface? What's In a 496 BOOK REVIEWS Frame? What's in It for Henry James?") accordingly provides the theoretical basis for our understanding of the prefaces as the frame or "semiotic border" to the prefaced texts. The prefaces "are the only semiotic realm," Pearson claims, "where James's motives could unite in a single discourse that would at least attempt to fulfill his desires." In order to clarify the various understandings and expectations James's brought to this semiotic realm, Pearson turns in Chapter 2, "The Politics of the Preface," to a brief history of prefaces and frames in literature and art. Pearson provides in the next three chapters a detailed examination of the strategies by which James creates the ideal reader through the use of the preface as frame. A summary of these chapters cannot do justice to the complexity of Pearson's argument and the intricacy of his reading in Chapter 3 of the prefaces to The Aspern Papers and The Awkward Age (and the novels), in Chapter 4 of the prefaces to The Wings of the Dove and What Maisie Knew (and the novels), and in Chapter 5 of the preface to the ghostly tales (and the tales). But it can highlight some of the more important features of these chapters, both individually and collectively, and create a sense of the care that has gone into their composition. Chapter 3, "Tales of Origin and James's Aesthetic Memory," addresses the tales of origin that in nearly every preface established James's authority as both the creator and the ideal reader of his work. Here Pearson argues that, by drawing on "aesthetic memory," James suppresses the knowledge of the actual origins of...