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Collin Meissner
Ph.D. in Literature Program
University of Notre Dame
EXCERPT
"The awful modern crush"
Capital Crimes in Henry James
Toward the end of his very last completed work of fiction, the
short story "A Round of Visits,"
(1) Henry James gives voice not just to the dividend of
horrors returned to American mercantile culture, but to the ultimate
human consequences paid to a single-minded attention to the
appalling ravages of "business." As the story rushes towards it's
denouement, the protagonist Mark Montieth, an aesthetically inclined
expatriate recently returned to New York under the pressing need to
investigate the embezzlement of his "small fortune," unexpectedly
comes to understand the true cost of business in the moments leading
up to his friend's suicide. Montieth has been making the rounds, so
to speak, not so much searching for answers to the situation of his
plundered "fortune" but in search of a sympathetic ear, a human
being with whom he can share his burden. Much to his frustration,
the two women to whom he turns for solace offer nothing: Mrs Folliot
on the one hand laughs off his situation as something almost banal
and counters it with a story of her own loss of ten thousand at the
hands of Montieth's embezzler Phil Bloodgood, and Florence Ash, on
the other, altogether prevents Montieth from speaking by regaling
him with the narrative of her separation from her ineffectual
husband. The women, Mrs. Folliot and Florence Ash, are important
only insofar as they stand as representative embodiments of absence,
absence of the deeper moral and human grain that enables one to
demonstrate the capacity for empathy. Indeed, Mrs. Folliot steps
over Montieth's sad narrative with an invitation that the "poor
dear" lunch with her "crowd... all great Sunday lunchers," an
experience Montieth finds perhaps more horrifying that the emptying
of his bank account. "Manners," he finds, were absent, "They didn't
matter there-nobody's did" (902). These early failures of Montieth's
produce in him a "state of mind" struggling through the bewilderment
of confusion, "loss and betrayal." Torpor and acedia would be the
correct terms of application. He's been psychologically broken, as
Richard Lyons has summed up, through "the loss of a sense of a human
community occasioned by the betrayal of his hopes for sympathy in
his visits to his friends" (206). But this is not quite right, or
not quite as severe an insight as James intends. The loss of
community is disconcerting, even destabilizing for Montieth, and
James wants his readers to feel a sense of shame on his behalf; but
more than the sense of loss and betrayal, James foregrounds the
virtual incapacity for human connection, as though somehow what used
to make human beings acknowledge, recognize and respond to needs in
others has been erased from the collective consciousness and opened
a terrifying abyss between self and other and even between self and
self.
This distinction between Montieth's sense of loss and the deeper
sociological causes is a crucial one. James's oeuvre is chock full
of solipsistic, even cannibalistic characters, individuals who draw
their energy from others but offer little in return. Anyone familiar
with The Portrait of a
Lady would quickly think of Gilbert Osmond as one of the most
recognizable of characters of this type. Indeed, one could say this
is how James characterizes Europe. But Mrs. Folliot and her circle
have become something less than human not because they don't care,
but because they can't. And why they can't has, in James's dismayed
assessment, everything to do with the coercive effects of business
interests in every aspect of an American culture which he lamented
had been willingly "consecrated by ... the commercial at any cost."
(AS 77). Mrs.
Folliot, Mrs. Ash, Phil Bloodgood, et al, join a cast of
characters from James's late fiction and give collective voice to
what James saw as the new "American postulate," that of
Active pecuniary gain only-that of one's making the
condition so triumphantly pay that the prices, the manners, the
other inconveniences, take their place as a friction it is
comparatively easy to salve, wounds directly treatable with the
wash of gold. What prevails, what sets the tune, is the American
scale of gain, more magnificent than any other, and the fact that
the whole assumption, the whole theory of life, is that of the
individual's participation in it, that of his being more or less
punctually and more or less effectually "squared." To make so much
money that you won't, that you don't "mind," don't mind
anything-that is absolutely, I think, the main American formula.
(AS
236-37)
The fourth phase of James's fiction takes issue with this
postulate of commerce, not in a naive reaction to business per se, James was very aware
of the importance of commercial activity, but out of an urgent
concern that commerce's invisible hand was no longer just at work
behind the scenes, but now had so firm a grip around America's
throat that it was choking the life out of its citizens. One of the
consequences was James's recognition that America was suffering from
an absence of community, or, rather, that America had somehow
generated a culture which was characterized by an incapacity of
human beings to connect in any but the most banal or most brutal of
ways. As an artist James understood the need of bringing these
insights to his audience's attention. But "A Round of Visits" pushes
the audience even further, holding before it an inescapable
recognition of its own condoned complicity with the forces which
have both aborted the notion of human community and effectively
pulled the trigger of the gun which sends the bullet through Newton
Winch's head. For James, Newton Winch's suicide is nothing less than
murder. For James, that murder was inevitable. For James, that
murder could not be erased by "the wash of gold." And for James,
being an artist meant forcing his jaded audience to recognize and
then accept its collective guilt.
This is a serious charge. I've argued elsewhere that upon his
return to America in 1904 James was shocked at the impression of "an
entire nation squandering a tremendous opportunity by cashing in its
potential for the immediacy of gain" ("What Ghosts" 243). In Edel's
words, James's return to America was brutalizing, hoping to find a
culture actualizing the promise he saw apparent as a young man, he
was confronted instead by a way of life "founded on violence,
plunder, loot, commerce," and a country whose "monuments were built
neither for beauty, nor for glory, but for obsolescence" (5:324).
This impression brought James to the inevitable realization that
America had mortgaged the opportunity to develop a "living cultural
heritage" for "the figure on a cheque presented in demand for cash,"
to borrow from another late story, "The Jolly Corner" (711). To this
extent America had become the embodiment of what James's
contemporary Georg Simmel called a money-culture, a culture in which
the divide between the objective and subjective sides of an
individual is complete and where human community is governed solely
by the discourse of capital and human relations are reduced to a
cash-nexus exchange. For both James and Simmel, the immediate
consequence of a money-culture is registered in the violent
foregrounding of apersonal and amoral modes of being which are
themselves built upon an absent foundation since the money which
drives the culture has moved from being a means to initiate
commercial and perhaps even civic interaction to being prized as the
end itself. In terms of the effect on the possibility of a human
community, or a more than purely individual or even accidental
notion of empathy, the erosion of a culture's foundational values
presage by the elevation of money is devastating-even the amorality
and apersonality is invariably relativistic. As Simmel explains, by
its very nature money deploys itself "in continuous self-alienation
from any given point and thus forms the counterpart and direct
negation of all being itself." (511). The inevitable sterility of
this kind of culture, at least from the point of view of Jamesian
aesthetics, let alone the kind of human community Mark Montieth
searches for on his round of visits, cannot but gainsay even the
most modest appeals for an attention to the living civilizing value
of art and the positive effects these qualities might have on the
individual human being. In words which could easily be drawn from
the liner notes to a volume containing James's late New York
stories, Simmel's explains how "Money has provided us with the sole
possibility for uniting people while excluding everything personal
and specific" from life itself (345). [Ziff 268 here?]
Critics have long noted James's seemingly ubiquitous attention to
the manipulative force of money in his work. Viewpoints vary from
one extreme to the other, that James was a genteel esthete who lived
off of an inheritance and as a result understood nothing of the real
material challenges of modern life, or that his fixation with men of
business such as Christopher Newman and Adam Verver betrays a latent
interest in getting into the corporate game but a fear also of its
intensity and immediacy. Whatever the view, there is a general
consensus summed up by Jan Dietrichson in a study of The Image of Money in the
American Gilded Age that James continually "brings to light
what money can mean in human lives, demonstrating how the presence
of it is needed to attain what seemed to him life's real goal, the
enlargement of consciousness and enrichment of the imagination,
while, if human selfishness and predatory greed come into play, the
possession of it may become an insuperable obstacle in the path of
the idealistic person seeking to reach this goal" (73). Think here
of Isabel Archer, for instance. Her idealistic goals are not only
crushed under the weight of her sudden inheritance, but the vast sum
makes her the victim of Osmond's predatory designs. In this novel
the immediate and long term consequence of money is the exchange of
freedom for bondage.
One of the most interesting recent studies examining the role of
money in James is Robert Pippin's Henry James and the Modern Moral
Life which argues that the struggle for personal ownership or
independence, or even individual determination is the central thesis
of James's work. For Pippin, everything in James comes down to the
strangely interanimating relationship between freedom and money, the
ultimate need of the latter to guarantee the former despite the
inevitable tendency of the latter to imprison the former. Again,
The Portrait of a
Lady should come to mind here. As Pippin explains, if the
"minimal or negative condition of liberty is the power to avoid
(relatively) subjection to the will of others, then what makes that
possible in this society is capital. But that answer is also rather
drastically hedged, since James realizes that the conditions for
achieving such a necessary starting point distort and shadow what it
makes possible" (174). Now to some extent this is well traveled
critical ground and does not, as Pippin admits "amount to a profound
answer on James part" (175). But it is only where James begins. It
is true, Pippin argues, "that money makes possible what James is
really interested in, and that James often rushes quickly to that
topic: the cultivation of a kind of understanding, imagination,
taste, awareness, felt life, that amounts to the fullest achievement
of freedom and so the achievement of what amounts to the modern
highest good." However, the "freedom at issue does not involve the
exercise of will, the absence of constraints, or the satisfactions
of interests and desires" which the mere acquisition of capital can
easily assuage. Rather Pippin argues convincingly that freedom along
the lines James shows Lambert Strether achieve is what James's
fiction works toward. "Strether's liberation," Pippin suggests,
"involves an expanse of understanding, and so, finally in his life,
a greater capacity both to take account of others better, and just
thereby, to be himself" (175).
Indeed, this is exactly what one of the most memorable passages
in all of James exclaims. I'm referring, of course, to Lambert
Strether's encomium for the lived life in The Ambassadors. We recall
how in this scene Strether almost assaults Little Bilham with the
adjuration that whatever else one does one must be sure to live,
"Live all you can; it's a mistake not to," and then follows that up
with the remark that "It doesn't so much matter what you do in
particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that
what have you had?
(132). This is powerful advice, especially in light of James's
concerns that modern culture, with its singleness of "pecuniary
purpose," systematically undermined the development of a level of
autonomy and self understanding which could allow one to look back
over his or her life and confidently say that it reflected, even in
some way, his or her own (AS 111). We should bear in
mind here the specific passage from The American Scene where
James poignantly remarks that the crises in American culture and the
corrosion effecting individuality and freedom is precisely because
in America, "what prevails, what sets the tune," rests on the belief
that "the whole assumption, the whole theory of life, is that of the
individual's participation in it, that of his being more or less
punctually and more or less effectually "square." James's insight is
devastating in pointing out how the American commercial engine's
capacity to be so influential relies on a lethal combination of the
willing and unwitting participation of the country's citizenry. In
effect, James felt he returned to America to witness a massive sell
off, or more specifically, embezzlement on a monumental scale.
For James then it was impossible to speak of freedom when freedom
itself had been so completely sold and the individual "more or less
effectually 'squared'"in the deal. Once again Simmel's more direct
explanation is helpful in coming to understand James's position.
Pure exchange economies, such as that James believed American had
become, rely, according to Simmel, exclusively on money to "tie
being and owning together" since "ownership" provides an
"opportunity for the Ego to find its expression in objects." To
speak of freedom then, at least of the sort James had in mind, is to
have nothing to say since the "self" had been overwritten and
replaced as an identifying marker by the "object." More specifically
yet, conversation about freedom was especially emptied of meaning
since the operative forces of a money culture work to ensure that
"each human fate can be represented as an uninterrupted alternation
between bondage and release, obligation and freedom," and that "what
we regard as freedom is often in fact only a change of obligations"
(321, 283). To turn to a well known example from James's fiction one
might think again of the apprehensions Isabel Archer feels at the
responsibilities conferred by her having unexpectedly inherited a
large fortune. Freedom, as we've seen, is the one thing she never
gains. In the case of "A Round of Visits," when Montieth moves from
person to person in search of an individual who might just
acknowledge his pain, let alone extend him the comforts of empathy,
he comes up empty each time because "sympathy" and "empathy"require
provisions for self-worth, civic responsibility, and subjective
freedom which had effectually been drowned in "the wash of gold."
This I take it is what James lamented when he decried the American
aim "To make so much money that you won't, that you don't "mind,"
don't mind anything" (AS 237). Stories like "A
Round of Visits" or "The Jolly Corner," or "Crapy Cornelia" become
then the fictional embodiments, or the fictional twins of the
impressions James documented in The American Scene. In
fact, with these late stories the line between fact and fiction is
so completely blurred that one would be hard pressed to say where
the one ends and the other begins. Understood in terms of Jamesian
aesthetics, or in terms reflecting James's theory of art, the
elision of difference between the "restless analyst" of The American Scene and the
protagonists from the late New York stories elevates the living
quality of James's art just as it heightens and actualizes the
intensity of his public horror at a nation corrupted through a
devotion to crass materialism (AS 11). As Larzer Ziff has
recently argued in his Return Passages, a book on
American travel writing, James turned an altogether different eye on
America with The American
Scene. He saw a county devoted "to the systematic elimination
of whatever is not new rather than the nurturing of continuity, so
that a sense of the past-of tradition, shared manners, inherited
values-is ruthlessly obstructed." As a result, America was, in
James's opinion, "less complete than ever" and had "made a shambles
of those vestiges of its past needed to anchor a society in danger
of being dashed into fragments" (Ziff 268, 281). James then brought
that same vision to his fiction and presented characters like
Spencer Brydon, White-Mason, and Mark Montieth who, like James, were
aghast by the disturbing vison of an entire society "dancing," to
use James's words, "all consciously, on the thin crust of a
volcano."
I mention above that James's story "A Round of Visits" levels a
serious charge against his audience, that Newton Winch's suicide is
more precisely the audience's act of murder. "A Round of Visits" is
a powerful example of the how James used art to address civic
concerns. While American culture itself is on trial in this late
short story, just as it is throughout James's fourth phase, so to is
that culture's individual participants. If Simmel is correct that a
money-culture divests humanity of its essence, the need for personal
struggle James continually advocates takes on even greater
significance. In the late New York stories like "A Round of Visits"
what James returns to again and again are the consequences which
ensue when one resigns ownership of his or her life and allows
money, or the pursuit of money to become the sole measure of
success. In remarking on James's unfinished novel The Ivory Tower Jan
Dietrichson comes to a conclusion which can cover the focus of
James's entire late fictions. These works "reveal how money when
misapplied, when made by a huge society the prime object to be
pursued, is apt to make the individuals living in that society
suffer in their personal lives as well as jeopardize the stability
of the framework of accepted moral values without which no society
can adequately function" (95). With the fourth phase of his career,
James relentlessly drew attention to this negative side of money's
influence and changed the tone and style of his fiction in an
attempt to articulate the social cost of American's mercantile
pursuits. What's particularly notable in this stage of James's
career as a fiction writer is both the fiction's unmitigated and
almost unrelenting brutality as well as its dire sense of urgency
and horror. Even the hyper-refinements of the late prose style can
be understood as James's attempt to confront, aggressively, his
American audience. At this point his prose shimmers with elaborately
constructed similis and metaphors piled high above the page but
which come crashing down at the merest attempt at interpretation.
His sentences often stretch past all reasonable breaking points and
in the span open up between their beginning and end, between their
very words treacherous holes and spaces into which most readers
inevitably plummet. And when they're not pushed to an attenuated
extreme, they simply stop in mid flight and let meaning fall into
empty space. The end of "A Round of Visits" is a good example. Here
sentences begin and are repeatedly interrupted by long, complicated
narrative intrusions which have the effect of so magnifying the
tensions of the scene that one's interpretive focus is quite
overcome. And just at the moment the actual dialogue resumes, James
ends it with the vagueness of a dash and question mark. James once
said of reality that it represents the "perception of the things we
cannot possibly not
know, sooner or later" "Preface" 1063). The unfinished sentences,
interpolation, dashes and question marks which dominate the late
fiction eventually come down to something like that. The point here
is that the style of prose James created for his late fiction is
itself meant to function as an animating twin of that fiction's
content. That is, when Newton Winch, for example, places a revolver
to his head and pulls the trigger, his resultant "disfigured" face
is mirrored by a prose itself so shot through with holes that
meaning itself became disfigured, emptied out. To that end, the
fourth phase is characterized by an unrelentingly description of
America as a vast corrosive engine in which terms like "sympathy"
and "empathy," and even "humanity" dare he say, have been so ground
in the mills of commerce that at the turn of the century, in
America, in New York, it wouldn't be going too far to say that they
had been emptied of all real meaning and no longer had a place. For
James it was not so much that America had become a world in which
aesthetic values or sympathies, or even recognitions had been cut
adrift, no, James's horror was at a recognition more bleak and
profound, that the corrosive effects of mercantile culture had
virtually extinguished the notion of "humanity" itself. This is what
James's wanted his audience to face on the round of visits he
published as his final short stories.
I began by saying how Mark Montieth undergoes a tonic shock, of
how he comes face to face with the palpably real and human cost of
American commercial culture. One of Montieth's functions in this
story in addition to being a representative of James's critical
voice is as a figure of the potentially redeemed reader, someone who
is brought to the edge of an abyss and then hauled back, but only
after witnessing what might have been. To this extent Montieth is a
reincarnation of Spencer Brydon from the "The Jolly Corner." Brydon,
we recall, is also a lately returned genteel expatriate who finds
himself aghast at how the whole of New York had been "reduced to
some vast ledger-page, overgrown, fantastic, of ruled and
criss-crossed lines and figures" (699). Like Montieth, Brydon
undergoes a tonic shock, but for Brydon the shock is a confrontation
with a disfigured ghostly version of his self, but that self which
might have been had he decided to stay on in New York and cultivate
an incipient zeal for business. The confrontation between Brydon and
his successful buccaneering other is important in the context of
this argument as what Brydon comes to see is the image of mercantile
success and its consequences in the disfigurement and horror of his
ghostly other.
The hands, as he looked, began to move, to open; then, as if
deciding in a flash, dropped from the face and left it uncovered and
presented. Horror, with the sight, had leapt into Brydon's throat,
gasping there in a sound he couldn't utter; for the barred identity
was too hideous as his, and his glare was the
passion of his protest. The face, that face, Spencer
Brydon's?-he searched it still, but looking away from it in dismay
and denial, falling straight from his height of sublimity. It was
unknown, inconceivable, awful, disconnected from any possibility--!
(725)
That James denies Brydon voice at this moment of recognition, or
that he goes so far as to say the moment defied or exceeded the
capacity of language is his way of heightening the scene's
intensity, of course, but it's also his way of showing how commerce
itself has muted or denied language any voice save the mercantile.
And the immediate consequence for Brydon also shows James once again
using the content and actions of art to demonstrate for his audience
his belief that when a culture condones as normative the conversion
of others to objects as being the invariable outcome of all personal
relationships, a similar reduction of self inevitably occurs. While
Brydon is not completely innocent of the relentless pursuit of
capital, he's unprepared to meet the real thing. The collision
between the two is almost lethal for Brydon.
[The face] came upon him nearer now, quite as one of those
expanding fantastic images projected by magic lantern of childhood;
for the stranger, whoever he might be, evil, odious, blatant,
vulgar, had advanced as for aggression, and he knew himself give
ground. Then harder pressed still, sick with the force of his shock,
and falling back as under the hot breath and the roused passion of a
life larger than his own, a rage of personality before which his own
collapse, he felt the whole vision turn to darkness and his very
feet give way. His head went round; he was going; he had gone.
(725-26)
What James calls attention to in the veritable erasure of Spencer
Brydon's subjectivity and the unmistakable aggression of his ghostly
other is both the ruthlessness of character untempered commercialism
produces and how its sole focus on perpetuating itself inevitably
consumes, when left unregulated, everything which comes before it:
art, culture, life-it's all grist for the mill. However, despite the
attempted erasure depicted in this scene, the story as a whole winds
up being singularly unique in James's canon, for the hero awakens
from this collapse to find himself cradled in the arms of a woman
who loves him either way, or loves both of him. Surprisingly, the
story ends with every indication of a happy marriage, but on two
plains. James, as I've mentioned, was no bohemian naif; he
understood completely the interanimating relationship between the
aesthetic and the material, each, he believed, formed half of a
larger whole. And while James gave precedence to the aesthetic,
within his work one can always find acknowledgment of the material
conditions which assist in the production of the aesthetic. "The
Jolly Corner" exemplifies this relationship. While Spencer Brydon
suggests he finds New York's culture of commerce appalling, his
companion, Alice Staverton gently reminds him that he's enjoyed the
luxury of that conclusion and of a life which has allowed him to
avoid getting involved precisely because of New York's commercial
zeal. Brydon's life of indolence in Europe has been paid for out of
rents he's collected from his New York properties. As Alice
explains, "In short, you're to make so good a thing of your
sky-scraper that, living in luxury on those ill-gotten gains you
can afford for a while to be sentimental here" (...). The sharpness
of Alice Staverton's insight is important as it clears James from
the charge that he was purposefully blind to the aesthetic's
dependence on the more crass economic conditions of its production
and dissemination and forces his audience to acknowledge that "the
freedom to be highminded and aesthetic is it itself purchased at the
price of concession somewhere (Bell , 280).
The end of "A Round of Visits" is not nearly so hopeful. While
the path Montieth takes from his hotel to Newton Winch's apartment
shows Montieth undergoing a total transformation from a passive
individual in need of and seeking sympathy to an active agent
bestowing the fullness of empathy upon another whose need he not
only recognizes, but attempts to fulfil, he comes to this position
by indirection. To this extent, the metamorphosis of Montieth's
understanding of human need is interesting in its own right and
reveals, once again, the nature and content of Jamesian morality,
what Robert Pippin has argued as "the nature of our affirmative,
meaning-constituting dependence on others, and what we owe them in
light of that link" (175). But this is a moral character one must
actively seek to acquire and aggressively fight to maintain. But so
too is it the moral character James shows had been so happily sold
earlier in the story. For his part, Montieth achieves this state of
being for two reasons, the first being that he's largely been out of
the world, and the second because he's been made to live through its
absence. The embezzlement which brings Montieth into being, so to
speak, and the empathy it eventually elicits, is James's way of
foregrounding the inevitable consequences of an unchecked or
unregulated commercial culture. Montieth's empathy has, somewhat
ironically, been embezzled from him. After all, he finds himself
unexpectedly giving away the very thing he had been seeking. The
shift in focus here is important because it reveals active agency
working against passive reception. That is, given the circumstances
Montieth is able to strike against the cultural grain and overcome
commercialism's dehumanizing effects by drawing on a capacity deep
within himself, perhaps even submerged, and touch the humanity of
the other in the very way he feels the need to be touched.
But "A Round of Visits" is no "Jolly Corner." The story's tragic
end is James's sharpened and final point. What Montieth's discovers
in a moment of horror-stricken recognition is how far beyond the
stabilizing values of humanity and empathy American culture had
drifted and why:
He inexpressibly understood, and nothing in life had ever been so
strange and dreadful to him as his thus helping himself by a longer
and straighter stretch, as it were, to the monstrous sense of his
friends "education." It had been, in its immeasurable action, the
education of business, of which the fruits were all around them. Yet
prodigious was the interest, for prodigious truly-it seemed to loom
before Mark-must have been the system. (922)
The consequence of that "immeasurable action" is measured by
Newton Winch's death. For James, Newton Winch's moral integrity had
been so destroyed by the brutalizing effects of a culture devoted to
commerce that his only option for growth is to commit suicide. It's
not without some horror and irony that James believed Newton Winch's
only opportunity to rage against his situation and to wrest some
measure of freedom lay in the silence of his extinction.
But James is anything but silent here. He speaks instead about
how the conditions of freedom rest in an understanding that
"freedom" itself, as Pippin eloquently states, "cannot be achieved
alone, that the achievement of free subjectivity requires a certain
sort of social relation among subjects, and that this relation of
mutuality and reciprocity is highly sensitive to social
arrangements" (Pippin, 172-73). As Pippin argues, understanding of
this sort is understanding of a moral nature and depends on our
willingness not only to open ourselves to others, but to accept the
limitations of self determination as an act of self determination.
For James, only direct action of this kind could recover ownership
of the self in a culture consumed by greed and drowning in the "wash
of gold." While Winch's suicide was hardly the answer James
advocated, it was the conclusion he saw. In other words, while James
presents innumerable dangers associated with self exposure, his
fiction shows even greater dangers which ensue in not allowing one's
self to be exposed. And when Montieth replies to the officer who
remarks that he "might have prevented it," the suicide, with "I
really think I must practically have caused it" he fairly reaches
the level of the sparagmos, taking on the "sins" of the culture
(923-24). But so to does he become a manifestation of the redeemed
self who exerts positive human energy in rising above the "awful
modern crush" to act selflessly, above the thought of material
reward ("Jolly Corner" 700). In this Montieth's exposure is to be
seen as the priceless or non quantifiable reward of human community.
How one manages this degree of exposure in a world where all
boundaries have dissolved and beliefs become undependable, and how
one comes to terms with the consequences of personal judgement in a
world where control over what constitutes either "personal" or
"judgement" was increasingly overwritten by the larger narrative of
capital is the disturbing thesis governing James's New York stories
and exemplifies their contemporary importance. As Pippin has so
eloquently argued, "Inside the social world James creates, one has
no other choice bu to try to make sense of what one is doing. A Life
plan cannot... have the point, implications, and claims on one that
it does, just by being the kind of life it is, by playing a role
within a fixed social order" (172). Leaving aside any other
considerations about the value of James, his attention to the
manipulative dynamics of material pursuit and personal relations and
the consequences of such dynamics on individual freedom is a strong
argument for continued and increased study of his work.
Unfortunately, James attained neither the audience he hoped nor
the one he warranted and the message of the New York stories went
largely unheeded, despite being reincarnated by T.S. Eliot in his
WasteLand. Even so,
James remained committed to his belief in the "high and helpful,
and, as it were, civic use of the imagination" through art (FW 1230). His final and
unfinished work of fiction, the novel The Ivory Tower affords,
even in it's incomplete state, James's most bleak and depressing
image of a culture consumed by a lust for money. Here the
deification of the banknote with it's imprimatur "In God We Trust"
becomes absolutely self-referential-the God is the note itself. The
text's biblical overtones are unmistakable and absolutely
secularized. The narrative is filled with some of the most
unprincipled characters in James's canon, most of whom are quite
literally dying or ready to kill for their God. Of one of them, the
dying Abel Gaw, his daughter has occasion to describe him as
"perch[ed] like a ruffled hawk, motionless but for his single
tremor, with his beak, which had pecked so many hearts out, visibly
sharper than ever, yet only his talons nervous; not that he at last
cared a straw, really, but that he was incapable of thought save in
sublimities of arithmetic" (IT 6). In Gaw, the
corrosive effect of capital is absolute. The individual has been
desicated, erased, eclipsed, extinct. All that remains, James
reveals, is the banknote, as his daughter sagely explains:
That's what we mean...when we talk of [money]-for of what else
but money do we ever
talk? He's dying, at any rate...of his having wished to have more to
do with it on that sort of scale [twenty millions]. Having to do
with it consists, you know, of the things you do for it-which are mostly
very awful; and there are all kinds of consequences that they
eventually have. You pay by these consequences for what you have
done, and my father has been for a long time paying....The effect
has been to dry up his life.... There's nothing at last left for him
to pay with. (IT 141)
As the last image from a canon of such remarkable range and
breadth, this hollowed out and grimacing shell is truly terrifying.
It was around this time, in the midst of composing his late
fictions, that James wrote in a letter that a lifetime of
reflections had brought him round to one conclusion, that being "the
huge absurdity and grotesqueness of things," of "the monstrous
perversity of evil," That was January 31st, 1908. James
would live until the 28th of February, 1916. He would see
much more between these years.
1. published in the English Review between
April and May of 1910 and later published in the volume titled The Finer Grain, |
