(Re)Presenting Henry James: Authority and Intertextuality in the New York Edition

Selected Papers on Henry James, 1988-1990 137 be reproduced mechanicaUy as iUustrations to accompany another set of signs, the scriptural images of novels. Such a redupUcation of die real becomes, finaUy, "an aUegory of deadi" in BaudriUard's analysis: "From medium to medium, the real is volatifized, becoming an aUegory of death. But it is also, in a sense, reinforced dirough its own destruction. It becomes reality for its own sake." Reality for its own sake in "The Real Thing" is perhaps the narrative itself or the "memory" in the narrator's words: "I gave them a sum of money to go away, and I never saw them again.... But my friend Hawley repeats that Major and Mrs. Monarch did me a permanent harm, got me into false ways. If it be true I'm content to have paid die price— for the memory." The monetary transaction here, the "buying" of a memory, is reminiscent of the one envisioned by James in his visit to Mount Vernon, the uneven exchange of coins between the "pale Past" handing over to the "bloated Present" a fat purse and in return receiving only a sixpence. The splendid image of Mount Vemon is itself an aUegory of death but also a representation of "real" history. Referring to the beauty of the architecture, James describes it as "truly the great, white, decent page on which the whole sense of the place is written." For the narrator of "The Real Thing," the inscription of his tale may weU be the act of symbolic exchange that manages to evade, even if only temporarily, the "inexorable law of value" guarding the consumer society that leaves no room for gifts with no returns, for loss, for waste, for sacrifice. The tale is one of absence, of loss, perhaps even of ruin, but it is also, as James aptly caUed it, "the real thing." David B. McWhirter—(Re)Presenting Henry James: Authority and Intertextuality in the New York Edition Henry James's disappointment at the faUure of the New York Edition of his coUected works (1907-09) to seU or gamer any significant critical attention is weU known. Shortly before his deatii in 1916, the novelist described die Edition as "really a monument (like Ozymandius) which has never had the least inteUigent critical justice done to it." And while die vast and proliferating body of criticism devoted to James has often addressed the most salient features of the New York Edition, especiaUy its celebrated series of critical prefaces and the substantial revisions of earlier texts which it occasioned, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the edition itself as a text, and to the extraordinary, deeply ambiguous act of self-presentation diat it embodies. Recent James criticism (a virtual encyclopedia of die pluraUstic universe of contemporary literary theory) has found in the novelist's work a ready vehicle for current debates about canonicity, intentionality, authority, intertextuality, and literary value. Indeed, as John Carlos Rowe has suggested, "Henry James ... is an especiaUy appropriate figure for the study of die impact of contemporary theory on our ideas of the author ." The myth of the master created by James and reinforced by generations of his commentators has increasingly been chaUenged by critics who have sought, in various ways, to restore James's art to what he once caUed "die conditions of life," to the socio-political, historical, and personal contexts in which it was produced. 138 The Henry James Review But the New York Edition, arguably the central performance in the construction of that myth, has gone curiously untouched. Charles CarameUo, in a brief but important essay pubUshed in 1984, suggested the need for approaches to the edition that would acknowledge both James's desire to "monumentalize" his work and his awareness of "the moral flaws inherent in the act of monumentalizing ." Yet aside from Michael Anesko's analysis of the ways in which the conditions of the literary marketplace helped shape the ostensibly pure "architecture " of the New York Edition, Hershel Parker's research on the "sequence and significances" of James's "literary labors" on the edition, and some Umited explorations of die autobiographical dimensions of the prefaces, the assumption that...