Select Societies: A Review Essay

Studies in American Fiction281 Anyone studying Chopin or Wharton will find these bibliographies, which are efficiently organized and lucidly annotated, essential research guides to secondary material through 1973. Tufts UniversityElizabeth Ammons Select Societies: A Review Essay Rowe, John Carlos. Henry Adams and HenryJames: TheEmergence of a Modern Consciousness. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976. 254 pp. Cloth: $12.50. Both products of the nineteenth-century attempt to establish a native, unifying myth in place of abandoned European tradition, Henry Adams and Henry James found themselves essentially out of place in the twentieth century. For James, as John Carlos Rowe notes, America disregarded history; Adams felt it took no notice of us. Yet in their discomfortwith the notion of a meaningful correspondence between man and nature, both equally reflected a sensibility distinct from that of the romantic imagination which preceded them. Their attempt to come to terms with this breakdown of values, Rowe argues, led them to anticipate the modern emphasis on consciousness itself as a focusing activity, one which each came to see as a function or process rather than a static condition. Within the literary work, that process calls attention to the structures of its own linguistic composition, emphasizing its instability and resistance to any notion of completion. Relation replaces truth, or the approach to it through interpretation of a center of transcendental meaning. In thusredefiningthepast in terms of thepresent, Rowe drawsheavily on thelanguage of Structuralism, particularly in the work of Saussure and Derrida. Accordingly, Adams and James are found to reflect thedevelopment of a symbolic modewhich resists unity and attempts instead to hold various interpretations in suspension, frustrating the desire for fixed thematic definition. Words are given only a problematic correspondence to any reality outside their linguistic context. Exhausted values are revitalized by abandoning the search for a source of meaning and by a correlative deconstruction of habitual linguistic modes. Rowe is surely right in identifying a self-conscious concern with formalism as acentral modernist activity. He is far less convincing in his attempt to demonstrate that Adams and James felt the arbitrary nature of language to be the dominant means of engaging a fluid universe or that a successful adaptation to that universe must abandon the dream of unity. In separate, densely argued chapters, Rowe examines Adams' novels Esther and Democracy as well as MontSt. Micheland Chartresand theEducation, in each of which he finds the symbolic activity repudiating a unifying intention. Education is invalidated as a process leading to self discovery, and even the Virgin and the Dynamo do not constitute a dialectical opposition so much as establish complementary notions of absence. Rowe finds the prototype of the modern hero in Adams' manniken, who stands at the edge rather than the center of even his own experience. Similarly, James' inconclusiveness is judged the significant feature ofhis perception ofreality. In individual chapters focusing on The American Scene, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, and "The Beast in the Jungle," Rowe finds the symbolic intention to be the isolation of the individual and the expression of futility in his attempt to reclaim the past. Neither history nor social relations offer a dominant structureby means of which Adams orJames could organize experience. 282Reviews MiUy Theale's triumph, for example, is not, in Rowe's view, that she brings a compassionate humanity to those lives which earlier had found it inaccessible but that she confirms their condition of ceaseless change and the frustration of allsystems of orderthey struggle to impose on that change. Conversely, the mind which must define its own dynamic theory becomes destructive when it attempts to maintain the fiction of appearances. Rowe describes Maggie Verver as a false savior who, restricting the imagination of others, preserves her marriage only by emptying it of meaning. As these idiosyncratic interpretations suggest, Rowe's reduction of the modernist consciousness to a Structuralist perspective excludes thereciprocity that operates between the perceiving self and its environment. Ifthenaturalworldwas no longer informedby the spiritual, Adams and James could continue to discover meanings in a world of social relations or at least in the contrast between a past which sustained such relations and a present in which they became problematic. "Experience," James maintained in the...