The Politics of Henry James
Each great writer acquires an image that owes its energies to certain felt airs and essences associated with his creative imagination. The cut and quality of that imagination, its character and code, its reach and ambit, finally determine its dynamics. The image is uniquely answerable to such a dialectic; it sustains itself through a certain "chemistry" of effects, and, at times, through a certain aesthetic "mysticism." In short, it attains, en route, an unmistakable ambience. Considered thus, Henry James figures to the responding imagination as a writer of such rare refinements, subtleties and felicities as to become in the end a kind of vintage wine to be taken in slow, measured draughts. To be sure, his fastidiousness has in some later tales a distressing aspect, and his "transcendence" a false ring, but where the Jamesian imagination is true to its inner energies and does not let the human situation turn cold or abstract or static, the compact between reader and writer has the quality of a shared dream. Its ceremoniousness has a purposive aspect; it becomes a kind of aesthetic tender. The "great good place" holds and compels.
Beyond Post-Modernism: The Sense of History in The Princess Casamassima
Hugh Kenner opens his 1972 "history book," The Pound Era, with Part One, entitled "Toward the Vortex," and Chapter One, signed "Ghosts and Benedictions," thereby announcing the approach his discussion of a new era will take by reference to what lingers (ghosts) and what bids farewell (benedictions) from the preceding period. And whom does he poise almost ludicrously at the vestibule of "modern times"? His opening sentence tells us: "Toward the evening of a gone world, the light of its last summer pouring into a Chelsea street found and suffused the red waistcoat of Henry James, lord of decorum, en promenade, exposing his Boston niece to the tone of things."Â·1
Marxism and Historicism
onslaughts on these three concepts have rarely been mounted. Still, the work of the Tel Quel group, Barthes, Derrida, Baudrillard, Lyotard, and others, presupposes this polemic at the same time that it contributes locally to this or that aspect of it; while the most systematic statement of the repudiation of historicism has been made by Foucault (in The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge), and the most systematic statement of the repudiation of interpretation is expressed in the Anti-Oedipus of Deleuze and Guattari. All of these statements, however, presuppose a more basic master text, namely, Althusser's Reading Capital, which, owing to its explicitly Marxist framework, is probably less familiar to American readers than other texts in French theory today. Althusser's attacks on Marxist historicism and on classical hermeneutics (which he calls expressive causality) are therefore basic reference points in what follows, even if we cannot here engage Althusser's fundamental work directly.' As for interpretation, I can only assert here what I will argue more systematically in another place,2 namely, the semantic priority of Marxist interpretation over the other interpretive codes which are its rivals in the theoretical marketplace today. If indeed one construes interpretation as a rewriting operation, then all of the various critical methods or positions may be grasped as positing, either explicitly or implicitly, some ultimate privileged interpretive code in terms of which the cultural object is allegorically rewritten: such codes have taken the various forms of language or communication (in structuralism), desire (as for some Freudianisms but also some post-Marxisms), anxiety and freedom (in classical existentialism), temporality (for phenomenology), collective archetypes (in Jungianism or myth criticism), various forms of ethics or psychological "humanism" (in crit