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146 The Henry James Review Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: ComeU U P, 1985. Seltzer, Mark. Henry James and the Art of Power. Idiaca: ComeU U P, 1984. Zwinger, Lynda. "The Sentimental GUt of Heterosexuality: James's The Golden Bowl." Raritan 7 (1987): 70-92. Sharon Baris—James's Pyrotechnic Display: The Book in Isabel 's Portrait Henry James has been claimed by post-modem critics as a progenitor of self-reflexive writing and dieory. J. HiUis MiUer admires James's explorations of "unreadabüity"; Tzvetan Todorov simüarly shows how James takes problems of uncertainty of language "further than had ever been done before or than has been done since." John Carlos Rowe, using James's works as a very measure of contemporary approaches to Uterature, entitles his book The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James. We can find in James's fictions, however, numerous examples of characters whose error is precisely a theoretical mindset, and James expressed his deep concern for supplying some "monument" to replenish what he calls the "absent things" in a world such as America where there are no tangible "palaces, no castles, nor ivied ruins." My goal today is to show James's effort to present a theoretics of representation that whtie recognizing self-reflexivity or contingency in interpreting texts, selves, portraits, yet acknowledges links to die factual, impinging world. It is in his Preface to The Portrait of a Lady, the novel that James once caUed his first important work, that the author states his desire to make an Ado not about nothing but about the very matters and mattering of Isabel Archer. To that end, as he continues to point out in the preface, he uses what he caUs a "pyrotechnic display" to emphasize the contradictions such portraiture invokes. In repeated scenes of crisis throughout the novel, James shows a young woman in a distinctive position: seated, holding a book in hand, she gazes away from its pages. Isabel Archer seems lost in subjective thought as she theorizes about the world, disregarding the existence of any given text upon her lap. Yet this same pose might weU present die opposite attitude toward that prominent book upon her lap. As she sits there (she's so "picturesque," we're told), she caUs to mind actual valuable paintings, as James reminds us, by Titian, Cimabue or others, thus causing us to see her and her book as part of our recognizably shared heritage. When the wider impUcations of these two alternatives, subjective thinker or culturaUy defined artifact, conflict, that struggle provides the very core of James's plot. James plays with the possibUities of what happens when the two coUide—or, even more oddly, converge—in Isabel Archer's portrait and her world. James's novel thus creates a pyrotechnic display fuU of what his preface caUs "contending lights" as an elaborate cultural pun, replete with aural and visual complexities. Such a pun, however, wiU be no joke for Isabel; it wUl, as her friend Harriet observes, prove to be the very opposite instead. When Isabel Archer initiaUy appears, chronologically speaking, in Albany on a rainy day some months before that garden scene in mid-summer, she is placed in a setting diat is highly characteristic: seated, a book in her hand, she averts her eyes from its pages as if thinking not of its message but of other times Selected Papers on Henry James, 1988-1990 147 and places. Here is a pose diat is to be repeated with varying backdrops—in other rooms or enclosed gardens—always witii a book in hand. On diat spring day in Albany, Isabel sits in a room witii a bolted "motionless portal"; though she awaits the announcement of her suitor Goodwood's arrival, this young American woman meanwhile dreams. Her mind, we are told, is a "vagabond" as she persists in romantic attitudes, complete with German thought. This is the portrait of Isabel as Emersonian transcendental tiiinker, and her mind leaps over the particulars of place and time, so that she feels an "elation of tiberty" though sitting still. She has "no wish to look out" beyond the covered windows...

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