Rethinking Subjectivity after Postmodernism: The Many Faces of Henry James in the Contemporary Literary Imagination

ABSTRACT

The early 2000s have confronted the literary world with a plethora of fictions responding to the person, life, and legacy of Henry James. Seeking to explain this phenomenon, previous studies have focused almost exclusively on biofictional James novels (Lodge, Tóibín), highlighting their supposed potential for invoking the author after Barthes without offending postmodern sensibilities. This article challenges this faith in the reconciliatory potential of biofictional “returns,” arguing that their life-writing frame remains inhibitive to their project. By contrast, works evoking James by interrogating his stylistic legacy (Banville, Hollinghurst, Ozick) manage a return of the subject that is uniquely compatible with a postmodern critique of humanist subjectivity. By examining each text’s distinct approach to James, this article demonstrates that representing the author’s subjectivity as clusters of stylistic choices and aesthetic sensibilities offers a productive way of working through the creative stasis of postmodernism. In turning to James, these fictions mobilize a modernist aesthetic that postmodernity declared impossible, thus replacing a lack of faith in the sign with renewed optimism for the potential of particular aesthetics and of formal coherence. Thus, they suggest distinct possibilities for overcoming a postmodern “crisis of representation” without rejecting its theoretical and formal legacies.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for the support of the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes, for the thought-provoking comments and generous advice offered by David James and Ralf Haekel, and especially, for the exceptional and intellectually stimulating guidance provided by Michèle Mendelssohn.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For a comprehensive list of James-inspired novels, see Bethany Layne’s “The Turn of the Century: Henry James in Millennial Fiction” (178–79). For pre-2000 James-inspired fiction, see Adeline Tintner’s Henry James’s Legacy: The Afterlife of His Figure and Fiction.

2. See David Lodge’s The Year of Henry James (2006) for his own reflections on the extraordinary coincidences that might have prompted the simultaneous occurrence of so many James-related fictions.

3. J. Russel Perkin, for example, compares the novels by Lodge and Tóibín with regards to their success in appropriating the master’s influence to their own “literary universe” (125).

4. Wai Chee Dimock has likewise argued that Bloom’s model does not capture the essence of this phenomenon. Drawing on Bruno Latour’s actor-network-theory, she suggests the alternative of longer, “cross-stitched” networks of influence to describe the reciprocal effects of “hosting” and “infecting” she observes (738–53). However, my contention is that while the looser conception of her framework seems adequate, her rhetoric of parasitical hosting is unduly pessimistic given the ambition and diversity of these projects.

5. Seán Burke’s much-cited study refers to the “iconoclastic and far-reaching form of antisubjectivism” (Death and Return 13) prompted by poststructuralist critique which simultaneously challenged traditional concepts of authorship. Roland Barthes’ radical decentering of the author in his influential essay “The Death of the Author” replaces the coherent authorial self, whose subjectivity is the originator of creative productions, with an author who is merely the by-product of systems of linguistic signs. Thus, writing is declared the “destruction of every voice, of every point of origin,” a “neutral, oblique space where our subject slips away” (Barthes 142). This is viewed as participating in a broader impersonalizing tradition, resulting in a “reduction ad absurdum” of its principles (Burke, “Introduction: Reconstructing the Author” xxiv, his emphasis).

6. Kaplan speculates that as fictions, they could manage to both “satisfy the epistemological terms of [the author’s] banishment and the psychological demand for his return” (72). Laura Savu identifies this James as a “softened” authorial presence, and Bethany Layne highlights that “biofiction re-situates the author as a construction inferred from literary discourse,” making him an “unstable presence, continually mutating as different novelists assemble and reassemble his textual remains” (Savu 25–26; Layne, “Turn” 182).

7. Perkin proposes that James’s status as man of letters makes him a protagonist uniquely compatible with postmodern sensibilities through a combination of heroic and anti-heroic moments (117), and Savu highlights the desire to demystify the narratives established by the self-fashioning of writers like James or Virginia Woolf (26).

8. Max Saunders, for example, identifies a formative shift in the Paterian “imaginary portrait” of the late nineteenth century, arguing that it “loosened the bond” between picture and referent, privileging notions of the continuously evolving, uncontained self above mere verisimilitude (516–17).

9. There is at least a sense, perhaps stronger in Lodge than in Tóibín, that the genre’s hybridity does not actually seek to challenge the stability of historical fact, but rather that the impulse to probe the inner workings of consciousness demands “the novel’s techniques for representing subjectivity rather than the objective, evidence-based discourse of biography” (Lodge, Year 8, 31).

10. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s influential queer reading of James in Epistemologies of the Closet. See the biographies of Fred Kaplan and Lyndall Gordon for more recent biographical studies exploring James’s sexuality.

11. My thinking about the elegiac dimension of author fictions is inspired by Daniel Hannah’s discussion of this mode (see Hannah 72).

12. For discussions of this theme in James, see Sabiston and Ramalho de Sousa Santos.

13. See Mitchell for insight into this discussion.

14. These are concerns which postmodernists, as Hans Bertens reminds us, in fact inherited from their modernist predecessors (183).

15. That this is a controversial claim is illustrated by the many feminist and postcolonial defenses of the subject that emphasize the significance of its discursive position illustrate (e.g. Ozick, “Demise” 432–33; see Miller; Gilbert and Gubar).

16. My translation. The original German reads: “Schwarze Milch der Frühe.” Ozick also cites the poem in the epigraph to The Shawl.

17. My translation. In the German original: “[…] nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch.”

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes.

Notes on contributors

Julia Heinemann

Julia Heinemann has recently been awarded the MSt English (1900-present) from Exeter College, University of Oxford, and is currently completing a second master’s degree at the University of Göttingen before pursuing PhD research. Her research interests include theories of subjectivity, modernist aesthetics – especially with regard to their ethical and political efficacy – and postmodern epistemology.