Henry James and Me

Editor's Note: This occasional section of MLN is customarily reserved for retrospective, often revisionary comments on critical figures, documents, and issues from the past. The two pieces in this issue are, however, both retrospective and proleptic. In addition to this double rootedness in the past and orientation toward the future, they both also include strong personal, one might say, confessional elements.

Thus, in his rereading of Henry James's criticism, Simon During shrewdly observes how intimately the familiar formal burden of the "Prefaces" (the "scenic" method) is inflected by a confessional voice mediating between the originary "private" event and the artful "public" object. During argues that this "double structure" of the "Prefaces" also served James as a defense in the face of what the old Master sadly perceived as "a collective decline [after about 1890] in literary interest." But During then revises this valetudinarian stance toward a vanished past, arguing that what James has identified is in fact a new—and still continuing—change in the production and consumption of books: "What James construed as the waning of literary desire was, rather, a profound transformation of what we can call the institution of literature." In a brief survey, he relates this change to recent empiric studies of the commodification and professionalization of book production, marketing, and reception. Finally, this technical discussion leads subtly to the richly confessional part of During's essay, responding to the question why when he reread the "Prefaces" he found their autobiographical passages "so gripping." This was not because James's memories spoke directly to his, but "because they began to make the theoretical case that private relations to literature are relevant to criticism. . . . And, by extrapolation, not just writers' relations but also readers'." These relations lead to a retrospective summoning of the young Simon During in the Antipodes, on the brink of choosing a career (and reading matter); and, by a remarkable circumnavigation, this revisiting brings the reader back from the psychology of the young During to the technical creation of James in his "scenic" presentation of characters without depth, interiority, or "care of the self"—pure prolepsis.

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This year's harvest also includes a piece by Breyten Beytenbach that is "proleptic" in another sense: a passage from his book in the making (tentatively titled "The Intimate Stranger") that extends the notion of how writing can be both programmatic and autobiographical. While his account of a visit to Weimar and Buchenwald is certainly part of his agonized coming to terms with the horrors of the past, it is also evidence of his continuing development of the memoir form, which began with his own prison writings, Mouroir and The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist, and has extended through Return to Paradise (1991) and Dog Heart (1999). These books are stages in the evolution of a deeply personal, hybrid genre of autobiography, a form which is, in the words of John Coetzee, "part journal, part essay on autobiography, part book of the dead, part what one might call speculative history; it also contains searching meditations on the elusiveness of memory and passages of virtuoso writing."

The prefaces that Henry James wrote for his New York edition have been canonical ever since Percy Lubbock's 1921 The Craft of Fiction which popularized and systematized them. They are reputed to have played a key role in establishing modern fiction criticism—to put it simply, they are supposed to argue for the importance of form as against mimesis, sympathetic imagination and morality in writing and evaluating fiction. And, indeed, in intellectual historical terms, they transpose the Hegelian insistence on the primacy of the art object over its creator into attention to a particular narrative technique that James developed in his later novels. ¹ That technique, which James thought of as 'scenic,' allows stories to be organized around the presentation of discrete scenes, with a minimum of circumstantial commentary, and whose characters, against verisimilitude, speak an ornate, subtle idiom that came to be called 'Jamesian.' These scenes [End...