James & Rhetorical Logic

ELT 43 : 4 2000 gleet into which they have fallen. Yet to recommend essays on the basis of their past neglect seems to be a faddish form of question-begging: some essays, like some poems and some novels, deserve all the neglect we can muster. Certainly Henry James on Culture will be of interest to James scholars, though nonspecialists will probably find only a few of the essays—most especially those related to gender and the American scene—worth the effort. Additionally, while Walker might characterize the collection of essays as "eclectic," emphasizing his thesis that "James performed criticism on a range of subjects," I see no reason why the words "assorted" or (to employ a more Jamesian word) "gallimaufrous" do not equally apply. My final criticism concerns Walker's attempts to refashion James after his/our own image; he argues not only that James should be seen as a cultural critic, but that he evinces a presciently postmodern conception of identity, adopting different personae to suit his rhetorical purposes, implicitly positing the self as "de-centered, fragmented , [and] heterogenous." This sounds more like Oscar Wilde than Henry James, a serious, weighty man who held the tortured transpositions of identity practiced by fin-de-siècle artistes in haughty disdain. James, inventive and complex as he was, preferred to be, often to a burdensome degree, himself. Just who or what that "self" was will continue to be debated among critics, and whether they agree with Walker that James should be read not only as a novelist but as a cultural critic, few who read Henry James on Culture will argue with the contention that James was that great good thing: a cultured critic. Jim Barloon Mississippi State University Meridian Campus James & Rhetorical Logic Sheila Teahan. The Rhetorical Logic of Henry James. 1995; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999. 176 pp. Paper $10.95 NAMED a Choice Outstanding Academic Book in 1996 and now reissued in paperback, Sheila Teahan's The Rhetorical Logic of Henry James investigates James's "theory and praxis of the center of consciousness ." This post-structuralist, deconstructive study works toward destabilizing James's favorite narrative method as an extralinguistic, psychological structure by emphasizing its linguistic and rhetorical performativity . Through insightful readings of seven of James's novels, including the three "master" novels of the late period, Teahan argues that each text "culminates in the narrative and thematic sacrifice of the character who embodies its representational ground and center." This is the 496 BOOK REVIEWS "logic" of James's theory and practice: the center, whether conceived as a character, a structuring principle, or a theory of meaning, simply cannot hold, so that James's novels inevitably reach both narrative and representational impasses. Teahan begins by analyzing "The Politics of Metaphor in The Princess Casamassima" because that novel best illustrates what she calls the "causal" relationship between plotting and narrative method. Provocatively , she claims that Hyacinth Robinson's suicide is the "consequence of his formal status as center of consciousness." Robinson is "genetically programmed" for suicide in the sense that his formal genesis as a character and "reflective center" "consigns him to a fatally repetitive series of linguistic errors, namely the metaphorical substitutions that confound his attempt to distinguish and reconcile the incompatible demands of art and politics." This is the pattern of breakdown and impasse that Teahan discovers in each of the other six novels she examines: James's narrative method and the character upon whom he centers responsibility for representation and understanding are inherently and fatally incapable of fulfilling that responsibility. James's attempt to fill an individual consciousness with experience or to center representation in a consciousness breaks down. Consciousness becomes saturated and its centeredness dispersed. Turning to "'What Maisie Knew and the Improper Third Person" in Chapter 2 (previously published in Studies in American Fiction), Teahan discovers the "exemplary Jamesian center of consciousness novel," as James himself probably recognized. By having the narrative depend upon the consciousness and knowledge of a child (Maisie) James selfconsciously established a "rhetorical disjunction between narrator and vessel of consciousness." The text's "foundational rhetorical strategy," which requires filling up Maisie's consciousness with "knowledge" that exists in some...