Oedipa Bartleby In the Cage & The Princess Casamassima: "a dirty intellectual fog"

[Nushra MohamedKhan]

So, something that I lurked here about Oedipa, perhaps representing a
young Thomas Pynchon and his possible then and ongoing now stuggle to
write, and how his last, and the awaited seem to suggest a Jamesian
struggle with existential postmodern "detecitve narrative" or "quest
narrative" and the fear of discovering, recovering, failing to
communicate an aethic identity reminded me of an article I read back
in graduate school and so I looked it up.



The Princess Casamassima: "a dirty intellectual fog"

Collin Meissner

The Henry James Review 19.1 (1998) 53-71

World was in the face of the beloved--,
but suddenly it poured out and was gone:
world is outside, world can not be grasped.

Why didn't I, from the full, beloved face
as I raised it to my lips, why didn't I drink
world, so near that I could almost taste it?

Ah, I drank. Insatiably I drank.
But I was filled up also, with too much
world, and, drinking, I myself ran over.
--Rainer Maria Rilke, The Sonnets to Orpheus

In one of his fits of reflection Hyacinth Robinson finds himself
fumbling "blindly, obstructedly, in a kind of eternal dirty
intellectual fog" which has cast a vague cloud over what he sees as an
"irresistible reality" (281). What one comes to see through the "fog,"
James suggests, is how much what we take as reality is actually a
secondary and incomplete version constructed by the epistemological
systems we invariably use as forms of mediation between what is and
how we understand what is. The important work of perception then,
James argues throughout The Princess and other texts, is to remain
open to one's impressions as impressions, to never confine experiences
within the artificial strictures of an interpretive system such as an
aesthetic or political apparatus. His novels, The American or The
Portrait of a Lady or The Ambassadors, like The Princess Casamassima,
challenge our unreflective reliance on the bedrock evidence of
empiricism by forcing us to examine why we feel comfortable with our
experiences. In forcing a confrontation between the reader's
interpretive routine and Hyacinth Robinson's sense of things, The
Princess takes away the ground on which interpretation [End Page 53]
normally occurs. A conceptual rift appears in which the reader is cut
loose from the coerciveness of interpretive paradigms and forced to
make his or her way through the political and aesthetic experiences of
the text individually.

The consequences for The Princess Casamassima, for the novel as a
genre, and for critical examinations of fiction are profound. In
foregrounding and exposing the hermeneutic failure that seems to be a
default mode in almost every act of perception, James allows the
individual and the aesthetic to escape into an incredibly wide and
powerful freedom which can bring one up against the very boundaries of
reality. The event of this interpretive renegotiation reinvests the
notion of subjectivity with some measure of critical force because it
shows how the subject is socially constituted, but shows too how the
subject, through its participation in the world, is also open to
individual changes and developments. The artist's challenge, James
indicates over and over throughout his fiction, is to embrace this
task, which includes rendering oneself susceptible to the almost
overwhelming force of perception such openness introduces. The
dangers, James also shows, are multiple: think of the narrator of The
Sacred Fount or the anonymous young woman in the London telegraph
office in the novella In the Cage. In these instances James shows how
indistinguishable the compositional nature of interpretation is from
fiction and how easily it can become pathological. The Princess
Casamassima, to some extent, is the site on which James faces the risk
and danger associated with interpretation and explores what those
risks and dangers mean to us as well as what they say of the artist
who faces them head on at every moment of every day. Not surprisingly,
the novel shows Hyacinth Robinson's tragic failure just as it sharply
defines James as particularly unique and successful.

The preface to The Princess Casamassima invites us to read Hyacinth
Robinson's experience as an approximate representation of the youthful
Henry James's initiatory encounter with the London world. But while
Hyacinth demonstrates the passion of a Jamesian figure, he falls far
short of the sublimity. 1 Nevertheless, James's invitation to regard
Hyacinth as representative of himself raises a larger autobiographical
question: how is Hyacinth, a hyperaesthete, actually like James? And,
what's more interesting, how is he not? Hyacinth Robinson doesn't just
approximate James's sensibilities; he also embodies everything James
felt he'd outgrown as an artist. A child-like romantic, Hyacinth is a
shadow of a former James, a shadow James wanted to dissociate from his
present figure. In other words, James uses Hyacinth as a vehicle
through which he can dissociate himself from what he believed were the
negative aspects of aestheticism which had, he believed, erroneously
attached themselves to his work in his audience's mind. Jonathan
Freedman reminds us of James's concern when he notes that while James
went to great lengths to register "overt condemnation" of
aestheticism, his work betrays what inevitably must be seen as a
"covert sympathy with the means and ends of the self-conscious British
'aesthetic movement'" (136).

While the similarities between the Jamesian artist and Hyacinth are
multiple, the differences are more telling. As an artist figure
Hyacinth is rendered futile, an impotent copyist and aesthete
characterized by the proliferation of impressions whose numbers
overwhelm but whose substance is ridiculous. [End Page 54] Indeed,
James's most sustained early description of Hyacinth's consciousness
is a parodic version of the figure of sensibility whose mind thrills
and throbs with sensations, but lacks the faculties with which to
order and interpret the received impressions. And while readers of
James and Pater would be quick to point out the important connection
between James's description of Hyacinth as one who privileged the
"impression" as a principal component of experience and Pater's
similar conviction, so too would they note the relationship is
superficial at best. Hyacinth's "impressions" are escapist, without
formative substance and ultimately without epistemological value.
While Hyacinth may play at being one of those on whom nothing is lost,
he is also, James and Pater would agree, one of those by whom nothing
is produced, one who suffers under a surfeit of impressions which
"asphyxiate" and leave behind no lasting, contributive value.


. . .

By allowing the real to burst through Hyacinth's elaborate defenses,
James is able to show how the abundance and complexity of experience
cannot be contained through ordering systems such as politics or
aesthetics. Furthermore, James shows the challenge of representation
the artist must always confront in any attempt at creation. Since the
world always presents itself as a mirror to art, the artist's chore,
James says, is not merely to capture that image--as a Naturalist--or
to duck it--as an Aesthete--but to make it more clear by offering a
point of view which documents the drama of a "perspectival realism"
(Rowe 188). Such a distillation of experience can be successful only
if the artist actively collects, forges, and shapes a representative
work which not only gives the impression of life itself, but makes
life seem understandable to the reader through the protagonist's
hermeneutic struggle. This is James's victory in The Princess. The
artist could be a "man of action in art," one who presents life in the
form of a possibility only art can yield. "In terms of his later
career and subsequent writings," argues John Carlos Rowe, James finds
through The Princess "a means not just of overcoming the imposing
threat of literary naturalism but also of transuming the 'romance'
that earlier he had feared would overtake him."

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