Wait for it: The Pleasures of Jamesian Style in The Wings of the Dove and Italian Hours

We read fiction with pleasure in mind. When I first encountered The Wings of the Dove (1902) I found that, as I read, I couldn’t take enjoyment from any of the usual places: the narrative was unhurried, the vocabulary strangely unobtrusive, the sentences endless, and the plot elusive. I struggled to draw tangible conclusions. This was fiction that did not care about my need as a reader for narrative closure, but after reading, and rereading, I found that there was pleasure to be taken from The Wings of the Dove, that this pleasure was everywhere, that it was the very fabric of the novel, and that I had to be patient to take it: I had to wait for it. Reading The Wings of the Dove and Italian Hours (1909), there are times when James’s style of writing can feel like an ongoing project designed to rewire the workings of a reader’s pleasure. In doing so, James reinvigorates our understanding of the innate eroticism present in the acts of reading and writing. This short essay identifies and explains some of the most noticeable aspects of the erotics of Jamesian style as it appears in two of his works and demonstrates how this erotics forces his readers to take pleasure in the deferral of pleasure.

Perhaps what is most striking to me about the erotics of Jamesian style, as I conceive it, is the plain ordinariness of the suggestively sexual within it. In both The Wings of the Dove and Italian Hours, the tonalities of James’s prose shift from urgent, to languid, to teasing, to frothy, to knowing, to nasty, but, even at their most psychologically sinister, pleasure is always present, waiting for the right reader to come along. The erotic is a principal component of Jamesian style that the reader must take a complicit pleasure in order to take any enjoyment from reading his work. An expectation of a certain kind of reader, a reader that luxuriates in style for style’s own sake on James’s part, offers one explanation for what Leo Bersani describes as “the at times staggering thinness of meaning in James’s late novels” (212). And what many unhappy readers of James might refer to, less fondly, as the “inconceivable boredom” of reading him (Shattuck 10). James uses this phrase to describe reading Marcel Proust, but, for him, this “inconceivable boredom” is “associated with the most extreme ecstasy which it is possible to imagine” (Shattuck 10–11). This swooning response from James the reader is one instance among many of James the writer setting narrative inaction against the breathless pleasures to be discovered in style.

The inconceivable boredom that James finds in Proust finds a counterpart in the endless waiting that critics have remarked on in The Wings of the Dove. Diane Elam documents the sheer amount of waiting in James’s novel and traces its implications for temporality and the nature of the act of waiting itself in her essay, “Waiting in the Wings.” Waiting in James both confounds and is defined by the temporal, but, while waiting is inextricable from temporality, it seems to me that to confront this problematizing, postponing, aspect of James’s writing in temporal terms only is to miss what Jamesian waiting might want. Bersani identifies the “Jamesian tendency to extract all events, as well as all perspectives on them, from any specified time and to transfer them to a beforeness or an afterwards in which they are de-realized in the form of anticipations or retrospections” (211–12). The “tendency” that Bersani puts his finger on, this proclivity to meddle with linear temporality, is tightly tied to erotic anticipation, to teasing, to a climaxless rhythm of deferred and diffused excitement in Jamesian style. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick includes an entry taken from James’s 1905 notebooks in a footnote to Epistemology of the Closet. Sedgwick reads this passage as “an invocation of fisting-as-écriture” (208), but the following extract, which forms the first half of Sedgwick’s long quotation, illuminates the extent...