The Subverted Gaze: Hawthorne, Howells, James and the Discourse of Travel

THE SUBVERTEDGAZE: HAWTHORNE,HOWELLS,JAMES AND THE DISCOURSE OF TRAVEL Eric Samy The stereotype is the word repemed without any magic, any enthusiasm, as though it were natural, as though by some miracle this recurring word were adequate on each occasion . ... Nietzsche has observed that "truth" is only the solidification of old metaphors. So in this rt·gard the stereor;pe is rhepr,·sent path of "rmth,"the palpable feawre which shifrs the im·ented omammt to the canonical, constraining form of the signified. 1 Roland Rarthcs H-eneed a critical theory of guidcbooks. 1 Paul Fussell American representations of European travel in the latter half of the nineteenth century reveal a problematic tension between pleasure and anxiety. While the inscription of travel originates in the pleasures of visual engagement with an old and richly suggestive culture, the descriptive focus on "place" is often disrupted or postponed by a dilatory articulation of generic constraints which preclude a prompt, original or accurate rendering of the object of the touristic gaze. Traditionally, the travel sketch has been regarded as a leisurely, amateurish mode of discourse intended to "involve the mind in the eye's delights," and which "served as a critical exercise that activated and sharpened the discriminating eye."3 While Thomas A. Pauly correctly insists that the literary sketch privileges "a calculated incompleteness" and "a tentative mode of perception," critical inquiry into this complex genre needs to go further in examining travel writers' anxious awareness of the limits of, and ohstacks to, reprcsenlation. 4 One way of approaching these limits is to recognize that, generally, travel writing occupies a gap of hesitation between competing imperatives: objective description of the touristic site must be supplemented hy subjective or appreciative response. This dualistic intentionality, itself a source of 288 Eric Savoy conflict, is made more problematic by the constraints which operate in all species of autobiographical narrative. Quite simply, autobiographical composition arouses the writer's fear that his or her language and the events that the language denotes are clearly distinct entities; as Paul de Man argues, "the ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretative process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide." 5 Another way of making this point about the inescapable differance of autobiographical writing, its ontology, is Louis A. Renza's assertion that the gap between the "life" of the signifier and the life being signified is such that "the autobiographical enterprise occludes the writer's own continuity with the 'I' being conveyed through his narrative performance. "6 One might justifiably argue that anxieties arising from the dubious correspondence between text and experience, although particularly operative in autobiographical travel narratives, arc by no means exclusive to it, but are indeed the conditions that post-structuralist theory detects in all acts of writing. What is required, then, is a more precise, more generically and historically specific theoretical paradigm to account for the prevailing tendency of late nineteenth-century travel writers to undermine the authority of both the gaze itself and its inscription. In order to do this, the critic must first of all situate lhe American travel essay relatively late in the evolution of the genre and, secondly, resist the prevailing academic tendency to view travel \Vriting as a transparent or immediate mode of discourse that delivers what has recently been described as "a directness of vision," a "self-sufficient visual impact," a reminder of "the power of the actual."7 The commentary on the Italian travel writing of Ha\\1:horne, Howells and James in the latter part of this essay traces what Wordsworth calls "a strange half-absence": the punctual grasp of Italy is displaced by the \\Titers' recognition of cultural alienation, by the refusal of the Italian scene to disclose its secrets, and most importantly, by the burden of prior travel writing, the completeness of which pre-empts or forecloses the possibility of original inscription. 8 The discursive expansion of these anxieties produces two types of deferral, which become a recurring compositional pattern; the active rendering of Italy is deferred in direct proportion to the writers' rather passive deferential gestures to earlier texts. In theorizing about...