Review Essay: Henry James and Modernism

If the age of high theory is over, its reverberations are everywhere evident in the two volumes under consideration, which draw on considerable theoretical acumen to situate Anglo-American modernism in psychic and cultural contexts. These volumes by Timo Müller and Maud Ellmann have much else in common: both conduct thoughtful examinations of the work, primarily the fiction, of several major modernist writers and pay particular attention in their readings to what Ellmann calls "the tangled nature of the self, caught in the nets of intersubjectivity and intertextuality" (1).

Müller's project is particularly programmatic in its intentions: he situates the works of James, Joyce, and Hemingway in relation to what he sees as the decline in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of stable and hierarchical sources of identity and their replacement by "the new conception of the self as relational and inherently unstable" (12). Arguing that this new conception of the self is visible particularly early in literature, he invokes the concept of literary field as theorized by Pierre Bourdieu to suggest that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the field of high literature developed a new degree or autonomy, or at least self-conscious independence from other social fields, with Flaubert and Baudelaire as crucial precursors of this trend. Thus he writes, "the beginnings of modernism, and of the literary field as an autonomous formation, are to be found around the turn of the twentieth century" (12). Henry James, in this schema, is the pioneer in Anglo-American fiction who promulgates the notion of literature as autonomous, while Joyce and Hemingway, responding to James and later developments in modernism, such as the innovative literary strategies of Eliot and Pound, manifest literary modernism in its full flowering. Müller's original contribution to this not entirely unfamiliar narrative is to emphasize the importance in the work of these writers of "self-writing" and, in particular, the aspiration toward a quasi-objective examination of characters, who, it is argued, often reflect aspects of the author's self: "there is a powerful strand in modernist fiction that does away with the identifactory self of the nineteenth century and installs in its stead the self-as-object, analyzed more or less scientifically through a detached, objective narration and situated, explored, and validated only in its relations to other selves" (14). Of course, Müller knows that many modernist texts are notable for using narrative strategies that foreground the subjectivity of characters, sometimes to a dizzying degree, but he insists that this produces an effect upon the reader that is conducive to an objective examination of what is represented: "the unmediated rendering of the characters' subjective thoughts and perspectives requires an analytical reader and makes the text as a whole more objective" (20). But the nature of the author's examination of the self through his writing is hardly unconstrained. Indeed, Müller suggests that frequently the subtext of the author's self-writing is his effort to position himself in relation to the literary field itself, to indicate a posture or a position-taking for his own creative efforts in relation to the options available in the literary field.

The theoretical framework Müller painstakingly outlines is certainly thought-provoking and raises issues germane to the very essence of the modernist achievement. In his discussion of Henry James, Müller sees his work as developing a growing awareness of the relational and unstable nature of the modern self and of stable access to knowledge, exploring these novel modern selves through the various literary experiments of the middle period, and finally developing in the late fiction a fully developed response "which proposes and applies an objective conception of the self as the answer to the [modernist] epistemic shift" (94). Like many critics of...