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Relativism and the Expression of Value Judgments in Henry James's "The Next Time" - Critical Essay
Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1997 by Jose Antonio Alvarez Amoros
Although Henry James's tales of literary life form a sufficiently precise corpus within his fictional canon, they have never received the amount of critical attention usually bestowed on his longer narrative works. There is, however, one noted exception in "The Figure in the Carpet," which has been widely discussed from many theoretical perspectives and, more specifically, from positions that could be subsumed under the general heading of a poetics of literary relativism.(1) James's writer-hero narratives can be set apart from the rest of his production on evidence of two different types: first, on the authorial intention explicitly stated both in his notebooks and prefaces,(2) and second, on the thematic features and technical options of the tales themselves, that is to say, on the consistent presentation of the literary artist in conflict--at least metaphorically--with philistine society and on the marked tendency toward relaying the fictional world to the reader by means of a first-person marginal narrator-witness whose capacity for tackling this task is more often than not placed in doubt (Alvarez Amoros 10).
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So appreciated by James in his tales and so abhorred in his novels, it is precisely the technical choice of the first-person narrator-witness that acts here as the textual instrument of a much wider phenomenon--the relativization of fictional reality. This phenomenon can be looked upon as the novelistic counterpart of a general movement toward relativism characterizing the cultural context in which the Modernist revolution took place at the beginning of the twentieth century.(3) In the course of some thirty years, the nineteenth-century common-sense assumptions about the workings of the human mind, the laws of physics, the mechanisms of language and the actuality of the surrounding world were called into question by Freudian psychology, Einsteinian physics, Saussurean linguistics and phenomenological philosophy. But it is the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin who can be said to have inaugurated an era of relativism in the field of the humanities and, more particularly, in the study of the narrative genre. In line with Bakhtin's thought, the relativization of fictional reality is only one aspect of' the general philosophical principle according to which the self is not a substantive notion but a relational one.(4) Therefore, the self cannot occur in isolation: its existence is only conceivable in terms of its relation to the other; or, expressed differently, it is impossible to comprehend the essence of self unless we count on the inevitable interposition of the other.(5) This conception of the self as relation and not substance is fundamental in Bakhtin's philosophy of literature and most useful to describe the methods of perception and representation of reality in Modernist narrative. The emphasis on otherness does away with all solipsistic views of individuality and abolishes the Newtonian principle that there is a universal flame of reference, shared by everybody, whereby we apprehend the world. The indispensability of the other in the construction of the self originates phenomena usually referred to by means of memorable Bakhtinian coinages that have been translated into English as "outsideness" (Holquist 30), "surplus of seeing" (Clark and Holquist 71), "transgredience" (Clark and Holquist 79) and "exotopy" (Todorov 99). All of them underline the same basic principle: namely, that the self can only be known from an external perspective, i.e., in conjunction with the idea of otherness.
The concept of outsideness and its generating force, the dialogue between self and other, leads to the formulation of the law of placement, according to which "everything is perceived from a unique position" and, consequently, "the meaning of whatever is observed is shaped by the place from which it is perceived" (Holquist, Dialogism 21). This essential need for a specifically placed observer has immense repercussions on questions of narrative point of view, since it implies the rejection of pantopic and panchronic perspectives in favor of those limited by a concrete field of vision. It is no longer possible to resort to a universal frame of reference operating at a different and inaccessible level, and permitting the apprehension of all things in the same light. The frame, on the contrary, is tangible, unique. It forms a single unit with the object to be perceived, the true nature of this object arising from the permanent dialogue between itself and the conditions under which it is observed--a process that obviously results in an inevitable relativism. All experience is anchored to a concrete subject, and it is only valid for this subject, since "nothing can be perceived except against the perspective of something else" (Holquist, Dialogism 21-22). Reformulating this law with the structure of narrative transmission in mind, one might say that the world represented in a particular work is always a function of a specific point of view. If this point of view is modified, the represented world changes with it, and it is of the highest importance to realize that there are no grounds to claim ontological superiority for any version of the represented world. This is obviously the result of doing away with an a priori detachable frame of reference as an absolute guideline for judgment.
