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  • The Abysses in James Studies
  • Daniel Rosenberg Nutters
Leonardo F. Lisi. Marginal Modernity: The Aesthetics of Dependency from Kierkegaard to Joyce. New York: Fordham UP, 2013. 334 pp. $40.50 (hardback).
Dennis Tredy, Annick Duperray, and Adrian Harding, eds. Henry James and the Poetics of Duplicity. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2013. xxiv + 275 pp. $72.19 (hardback).

“Don’t tell me that—in this for instance—there are not abysses. I want abysses.”

—Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

If a [thing] is excessive for the imagination (and the imagination is driven to [such excess] as it apprehends [the thing] in intuition), then [the thing] is, as it were, an abyss in which the imagination is afraid to lose itself.

—Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment

For better or for worse, Kantian aesthetics still exert a tremendous influence on literary studies. Not only are Kant’s aesthetic formulations relevant to discussions of [End Page 92] judgment, beauty, genius, autonomy, and so forth, but Kant himself is also partially responsible for the birth of modern literature and critical conversation about that literature. His ability to theorize the mind and the role of the imagination provided a ground for the Western philosophical tradition, and the subsequent “flaws” within that system opened up a space for critical intervention and philosophical-artistic revision. The discrepancy between subject and object (that emerged out of the following question: how can the noumenal mind know itself?) is the dominant concern in literature of the romantic and modern periods and also a preoccupation in the corpus of Henry James. We are all aware of James’s obsession with consciousness and, despite whatever he might say, the philosophical (taken in the broadest sense) potency of his novels, not to mention the fact that he devoted much of his career, especially his work after The Golden Bowl, to understanding the profundity of his imaginative prowess, his national and artistic identity, his public and private persona, and, moreover, his place within his family’s legacy. Simply put: the questions of “representation” and “self-representation” pervaded the thought of Henry James. In his pursuit of these problems, James eventually discovered that any attempt at self-knowledge risks, as my second epigraph suggests, opening “an abyss in which the imagination is afraid to lose itself” (Kant 115). Where does one begin, then, to solve the riddle of the self? Although James cannot locate what Lionel Trilling would call a sincere self, he nonetheless, like Milly Theale, “want[s] [and loves the] abysses” that emerge in such an arduous search (see Trilling). The prospect that one might fall into an abyss—“lose” one’s self as Kant puts it—is a source of pain and anxiety, but, then again, it is what makes this world interesting. James’s entire legacy might be seen, arguably, as one splendid and successful attempt to cope with this existential dilemma.

The two books under review both, in their different ways, discuss James’s method of coping. Henry James and the Poetics of Duplicity, edited by Dennis Tredy, Annick Duperray, and Adrian Harding, translates the predicament I’ve outlined above into the notion of “duplicity,” while Leonardo F. Lisi’s Marginal Modernity: The Aesthetics of Dependency from Kierkegaard to Joyce locates one specific kind of response in the tradition of Scandinavian thought and literature. Each of these books is a welcome addition to James criticism since each provides fresh takes on this central concern, helping to fill what might be considered a scholarly gap or abyss.

Henry James and the Poetics of Duplicity frames the theoretical problems under consideration in such a way as to demonstrate the wide-ranging implications of what might be considered a rather narrow epistemological topic. “If one thing is certain,” Dennis Tredy writes in the volume’s introduction, “it is that figures of ‘duplicity’ abound in the writings of Henry James” (viii). These “figures,” he continues, “are key literary and rhetorical strategies” that account for “the distinct ways James used duplicity as a multi-purpose representational tool” (viii, ix). As the introduction eloquently sketches out, duplicity can refer to unreliable narrators, unreliable critical interpretations, deceit within a novel’s plot or a character’s dialogue...

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