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The Henry James Review 25.1 (2004) 112-114



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Dennis Flannery. Henry James: A Certain Illusion . Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000. 245 pp. $79.95.

Dennis Flannery's subject feels like the right one for the present moment. After the flood of forms of criticism suspicious of the power of writing to persuade, it is time for a reinterrogation of "illusion," that magic in art which makes us forget for a moment (or complicatedly half forget) about the paint surface, the crude stage, the black print on white pages in a book. We imagine (or half imagine) that what we see represented is actually "real." There is so much to debate about the particular aptitude of the novel form, right from its beginnings, for creating this illusion of "real life" for the reader. Flannery is right, too, to point out how the good work of even the most skeptical of critics tends to depend upon "a primary and impassioned response to the text's. . . illusionistic impact" (7). He wants to reconnect contemporary criticism with "an aesthetic admiration for the overwhelming" (8), to reawaken an appreciation of illusion as aesthetic success. James himself of course was all his life engaged, both in his novelistic practice and explicitly in his critical writing, in exploring the techniques and implications of novelistic illusion; Flannery finds a number of illuminating and suggestive formulations in James's own words. [End Page 112]

This is only half of Flannery's argument, however. Ambitiously, he wants to make a relationship between the illusionism that is the novel's medium and the illusions that are its message and subject: he calls these two "the representational and the performative" aspects of illusion (14). In a sequence of readings, he defines the various performative illusions the characters generate and respond to: Mrs. Penniman's romancing in Washington Square ; Strether's dream of the French countryside via the Lambinet painting in The Ambassadors ; the pursuit of Vereker's chimerical "figure in the carpet"; Milly's dove-likeness (an illusion she half collaborates in, half resists, and finally uses to have her "revenge," as Flannery sees it). What he wants to do is to save novelistic ("representational") illusionism from being understood as mere technique or mere effect. He proposes a relationship at the deepest metaphoric level between the techniques and effects of illusionism in the novel and those larger processes outside the novel through which we see life, interpret it, and act in it. He writes, for instance, that novelistic "illusion is revealingly analogous to the process of generic categorisation and to groupings based on racial, sexual and gendered practices" (60) and that "gender, like illusion, is partially a mistake, but a mistake which has an intensely structuring effect on the world" (37).

In its working out of this central idea Flannery's book is complex and partially persuasive. It is a shame, though, that the second part of the argument ends up taking up more space than the first; there is much more here about the rather overfamiliar theme of "performative" illusion as it operates in the world of the characters than there is about representation and mimesis and the suspension of disbelief. Flannery often raises the issue of James's representative illusionism, but he doesn't explore how it is effected in much detail, although there are interesting suggestions in places, for example at the opening of the chapter on The Wings of the Dove , which describes the "use of the language of temporal duration to achieve the illusion that [the novel's] characters are people with an historical reality who experienced events that actually happened" (167). Flannery points out James's preference for the visual when he wants his reader "to experience events from the perspective of any one physical sense" (167).

It is in the work on the late story "The Velvet Glove" and on The Wings of the Dovethat the intersecting themes of the book come together most effectively; because of that, the writing in these chapters seems more fluent and more eloquent. Flannery responds with enthusiasm to the playful excesses...

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