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Technologies of vision in Henry James's what Maisie knew
Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Summer 2001 by Britzolakis, Christina
The creative and critical writings of Henry James invest heavily in optical tropes. Of these, the most familiar is, perhaps, the narrative "point of view" itself. A famous passage in the 1908 preface to The Portrait of a Lady (1880) likens the novel form to a house with many windows, at each of which stands "a figure with a pair of eyes, or at least with a field-glass" (xxx). For James, here, the novelist is above all a spectator, located within the privacy of an edifice figuratively breached by "apertures" which connect him visually with the "human scene." The trope of the many-windowed house of fiction seeks to ground fictional form in what is termed, a few lines later, "the posted presence of the watcher" (xxxi). Yet this apparent conflation of rhetorical structures with optical metaphors-a recurrent move in James's theoretical writings-masks a displacement, within the governing ocular trope, from the "pair of eyes" to the "field-glass," which enhances the powers of the unaided eye and magnifies the object of the gaze. To render the authorial observer dependent upon an optical device is to define narrative point of view as a technological prosthesis.
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The critical history of James's texts has been dominated by a preoccupation with point of view as a means of access to the psychology of an individual subject, obscuring the extent to which, for James, as Sharon Cameron has argued, consciousness is "disengaged from the self ... reconceived as extrinsic, made to take shape-indeed, to become social-as an intersubjective phenomenon" which no longer "add[s] up in realistic ways" (77, 21). This untethering of consciousness from the subjectivity of an individual, and its repositioning within a relational field, is a necessary byproduct of the new social, spatial and visual conditions of the turn-of-the-century metropolis. While the Jamesian project has always been seen as a "modernizing" one, aspiring to no less than the redefinition of the novel in aesthetic and technical terms, recent work, by Mark Seltzer, Ross Posnock, Sara Blair, and John Carlos Rowe, has begun to place it in a dynamic, rather than purely formal, relation to modernity, identifying an urgent concern with the cultural transformations brought about by technology, urbanization, and mass culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This essay seeks to extend these insights by exploring the complex cultural adjustments that condition the most influential part of James's legacy: his innovations in fictional perspective. James's formal strategies-his raising to a higher power of narrative "technique"-model newly self-reflexive forms of subjectivity in fiction. The rise of a Victorian mass "visuality," whose impact has been analyzed by, amongst others, Jonathan Crary and Nancy Armstrong, can supply some of the historical parameters within which these newly reflexive forms of fictional subjectivity can be explored.
My argument will focus on What Maisie Knew (1897), a text that has often been seen by critics as an "experimental" precursor of modernism at the level both of structural innovation and in its concern with problems of epistemology.1 Its filtering of the narrative through a relatively delimited center of consciousness or point of view constitutes a stylistic turning point in the James canon, announcing the increasingly anti-mimetic late style and locating the author at the limit of the realist project. As I shall argue, it also constitutes a key moment in the refinement, specialization, and elaboration of a technique of fictional looking devised to negotiate the shocks of urban modernity, a technique which itself comes increasingly to define that modernity.2 If What Maisie Knew places at its center the question of representation itself, it also imbricates that question with processes of spectacle and commodification specific to the emergent discursive order of the late nineteenth-century imperial metropolis. The novel's investment in spectacular forms of performance and display addresses the industries of the image that were dynamically reshaping urban experience, even as its perspectival reinvention of novelistic "technique" sublimates the succession of optical technologies that, from the mid-century onwards, dominated mass cultural production.
In What Maisie Knew, James's essentially pedagogical concern with visuality-i.e., with the cultural construction of visual experience-is announced by the dominant trope of the phantasmagoria or magic lantern show. The metaphor of phantasmagoric projection operates as a sign for the problematic nature of the novel's realism, for its "scenic" structuring, and for its ambiguous relation to popular culture. It is mobilized by the semiology/aesthetics of childhood perception, and conditions the narrative deployment of the reflective center. Through the use of a child's consciousness as "register of impressions" (Maisie 24), James's experiment with point of view proposes a new fictional optic, which, far from being a mere instrument of psychological realism, seeks to forge a narrative machinery for the symbolization and negotiation of a perceived crisis of cultural authority. In the course of my reading, one particular aspect of this crisis-the contestation of ethnic and sexual identities within metropolitan space-emerges as pivotal. The "scenic" strategies that the text puts to work in the production of this metropolitan urbanity, notably its recoding of the fictional child, must be seen as part of the racially inflected "dialect of modernism" to which Michael North has called attention.
