The Turn of the Mind: Constituting Consciousness in Henry James

Modern Language Review, The, July, 2000 by Peter Rawlings

The Turn of the Mind: Constituting Consciousness in Henry James. By ADRE MARSHALL. Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses. 1998. 280 pp. 35 [pounds sterling].

Henry James's Last Romance: Making Sense of the Past and the American Scene. By BEVERLY HAVILAND. (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture) Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 1997. xv 275 pp. 35 [pounds sterling]; $54.95.

Enacting History in Henry James: Narrative, Power, and Ethics. Ed. by GERT BEVERLY. Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 1998. xv 215 pp. 35 [pounds sterling]; $54.95.

J. Hillis Miller, in an essay whose cautious, exploratory mode is generally typical of Gert Buelen's impressive collection, suggests that 'James excels in putting the reader [...] on trial' (p. 195). If so, Adre Marshall resists arrest with relish in a hectoring book that bristles with arrogance. Her subject is proclaimed as the whole of 'human consciousness as depicted in Henry James' (p. 13); in practice, The Turn of the Mind rehearses ad nauseam Dorrit Cohn's familiar, even quaint, taxonomy of psychonarration, quoted monologue, and narrated monologue. Marshall's oft-vaunted refinements of Cohn, 'imputed monologue' and 'backward speculation' (p. 17), do not yield particularly innovative readings of her principal texts: Roderick Hudson, The Portrait of a Lady, and The Golden Bowl. The relentless energy is for a kind of anatomical sublime, a murdering to dissect, which is starkly at odds with the nebula of 'consciousness'.

Marshall's contours are those of Percy Lubbock, Joseph Warren Beach, Wayne C. Booth, and a raft of other critics: The Golden Bow! is the culminating narrative in James's development from the authorial swamps of the eighteenth century to the dry land of figural narration. Roderick Hudson is a 'quasi-figural' (p. 75) narration whereas, in The Portrait of a Lady, the movement from 'authorial to figural narration', and the increasing deployment of a 'central reflector' (p. 105), microcosmically enact James's technical bildungsroman at large. Increasingly, Marshall asserts, the narrator disappears as James's texts offer their interpretative guidance in the guise of a thickening imagery (which gives Marshall yet another opportunity to indulge in her passion for inventories) largely carried in narrated monologue. This book's naive account, with its positive preference for the so-called 'figural' over the 'authorial', can be contested every centimetre of the way. If, for example, Marshall believes that James's 'hypothetical observer or suppositious observer' emerges in The Golden Bowl (p. 149), she needs to look again at the opening of The Tragic Muse. Furthermore, and even more scandalously given its gross claims, this book entirely overlooks G. P. Lathrop's anticipations of major elements of James's narrative repertoire in his Atlantic Monthly articles. Marshall's readers, and her countless examiners (judging from the parade of her degrees on the dust jacket), have clearly failed to encourage a less strident dogmatism and insensitive fervour.

Marshall's irritation at the extent to which 'modes of representation of consciousness [...] are difficult to pin down' (p. 42) is not shared by Beverly Haviland, who detects in James, quite rightly, an abhorrence of all things rigid, reductive, and suffocatingly systematic, especially when attempting to make sense of the past. Haviland's focus on The American Scene, together with David McWhirter's essay in his collection, supports Buelen's contention that this is 'at present one of the hottest texts in James studies' (p. 166). The preoccupation in Henry James's Last Romance is with some of the texts of what McWhirter and others have called the 'fourth phase' (Buelens, p. 149): these include, in addition to The American Scene, The Sense of the Past (tellingly, unfinished), and The Ivory Tower.

Haviland's emphasis (and James's, she believes) is on 'how important it is for the future of society to relate the past and the present so that they are, as it were, on speaking terms' (p. xiii). This is congruent with Buelen's championing (in his own essay on The American Scene) of Bonnie Honig's palliative of relaxing 'the propensity to polarization' (p. 170). Both writers tackle the perennial issue of James and racism in The American Scene, using his encounter in the Confederate Museum as one point of ambulation. For Buelens, James's failure to identify with the 'African Americans' (who were being lynched in their hundreds at the time of his visit) can partly be explained by his consistent investment in loss rather than gain: the black Americans appeared to have gained; the South had lost. Beyond this, Buelens sees James as allowing the Virginian to 'enunciate [...] violence [...] in a safely contained, staged, verbal context' (p. 181), this being an imperative for a 'literature' whose role is that 'non-violent enacting of history' on which 'the future of democracy depends' (p. 188).