Henry James's POV wobble

Does Fiction Need Ideas?

Hello friends—

Sometimes, when Adam and I gossip about writers we know or enjoy, we slip into a game of scandalizing one another by saying what our favorite books by those writers are, knowing that they’re a little off-label. Once, Adam told me that his favorite book by an American—with some caveats that I won’t recreate here—was East of Eden by Steinbeck. My friend Michael Cunningham novel is By Nightfall. I make no apologies. The heart wants what it wants. Anyway, after one of these sessions, I took to Twitter to ask people’s favorite off-label novel by a well-known writer. The thread was hilarious and I screamed more than once. I spent the rest of the night laughing. However, someone said The Princess Casamassima by Henry James and described it as “his only political novel.” This scandalized me. Not for the reasons you might think.

For one thing, I know multiple people whose favorite Henry James novel is The Princess Casmassima. One of my closest friends, Garth Greenwell, has thought very deeply about that book and while I don’t think it’s his favorite, he certainly admires it more than some people do. But I won’t put words into his mouth. No, that is not what scandalized me. What got under my skin is this description of it as James’s only political novel. This is simply not the case. I don’t mean in the sense of everything is political. I have no desire to change the definition of the term that I believe the person was working with. It’s simply the case that they are wrong even within their idea of the political—meaning, I think, as a novel that deals with a political plot and dealing with the machinery and action of politics and political thought in a direct way.

Of course, I thought of The Bostonians. For the next six weeks, I will be leading a seminar and discussion group about the novel for McNally Jackson, so obviously, it has been on my mind.  In the course description I wrote weeks before I asked Twitter this question, I described The Bostonians as a political novel. This seems rather obvious given its theme, subject matter, and plot. There is also the milieu the characters inhabit and the sharpness of James’s ironic critique of bourgeois “activism” and its limitations. The novel also presents one of the most prescient and subtle depictions of the ways that capitalism diverts revolutionary interests by means of co-option and commodification, turning revolutionary or activist impulses first into identity labels and then transmuting those identity labels into widgets to be traded in the commodities market.

The novel is also very funny.

I have been rereading the book and making my notes to prepare for class, and I was struck by an instance of what I call POV wobble—that is, an instantaneous violation in the sensibility that organizes and governs a given perspective in a work, but not one that destroys the integrity of the perspective. The instances in question concern the character Basil Ransom.

Basil is from Mississippi and is a veteran of the Confederate Army. He has gone to New York to practice the law and to make a fortune. At the start of the novel, he has come to Boston on business and has, as previously promised, paid a visit to his cousin, Olive Chancellor and her sister, Adeline Luna. Olive is rather hard-going, a zealot for causes and reform, which makes her somewhat the butt of the joke to her sister and somewhat to Basil too. She is a woman in search of a cause and would like one day to be a martyr. Basil is easygoing by contrast, and he views Miss Chancellor as morbid, meaning, I think, intellectual.

Olive has invited Basil to dinner, but is disappointed to find that she does not like him more than she does. He briefly contemplates trying to marry Olive—being that she is single, rich, and his distant relation—but he sees almost instinctively what a long, dark channel such a marriage would be for both of them, but mostly himself. He takes delight in trolling her, however.

After dinner, Olive invites and then tries to disinvite him from going to a salon of sort at Miss Birdseye’s apartments. Miss Birdseye is a Boston institution, an early abolitionist and flogger of causes. She is also the occasion for some of James’s most withering and hilarious observations about the cynicism that lurks in the hearts of some activists:

Since the Civil War much of her occupation was gone; for before that her best hours had been spent in fancying that she was helping some Southern slave to escape. It would have been a nice question whether, in her heart of hearts, for the sake of this excitement, she did not sometimes wish the blacks back in bondage. She had suffered in the same way by the relaxation of many European despotisms, for in former years much of the romance of her life had been in smoothing the pillow of exile for banished conspirators. Her refugees had been very precious to her; she was always trying to raise money for some cadaverous Pole, to obtain lessons for some shirtless Italian.

Anyway, they go to this salon to hear a famous feminist, Mrs. Farrinder, speak on the plight of women and women’s emancipation. There, they get a surprise lecture from a young woman named Verena Tarrant, daughter of a mesmeric healer and a socially ambitious mother from an old abolitionist family.

Verena gives “inspirational speeches” of a sort, meaning that she kind of just talks publicly in a winning and moving way about big issues—sort of like people on TikTok now—but without any actual learning or substance. James has a lot of fun contrasting people’s response to her in the moment and her submissive empty-headedness immediately after. Basil is the first to liken her to a vocalist or a singer.

It's this analogy that stood out to me. There are two instances of it. Basil first likens Verena to a singer when he says:

he contented himself with believing that she was as innocent as she was lovely, and with regarding her as a vocalist of exquisite faculty, condemned to sing bad music. How prettily, indeed, she made some of it sound!

We are naturally able to conclude what Basil makes of the content of Miss Tarrant’s speech—all this bad music—but this idea of “a vocalist of exquisite faculty” is very interesting to me because it seems to originate from outside of Basil’s realm of reference. It doesn’t sound like him, as we’ve come to understand him at this point in the book.

Later, he observes of Mrs. Farrinder, the famous feminist who previously refused to speak until Verena had spoken, so that she might expose her for being a sham if she didn’t deliver the goods, that the older woman recognizes Verena as a tool for the movement of women’s emancipation:

It was none of his business whether in her heart she thought Verena a parrot or a genius; it was perceptible to him that she saw she would be effective, would help the cause. He stood almost appalled for a moment, as he said to himself that she would take her up and the girl would be ruined, would force her note and become a screamer.

You might be thinking that these are perfectly wonderful instances of interiority. I would agree with you. Except.

Earlier in the novel, when Basil is looking around Olive’s very nice home, he observes:

The artistic sense in Basil Ransom had not been highly cultivated; neither (though he had passed his early years as the son of a rich man) was his conception of material comfort very definite; it consisted mainly of the vision of plenty of cigars and brandy and water and newspapers, and a cane-bottomed arm-chair of the right inclination, from which he could stretch his legs[…]he had never felt himself in the presence of so much organised privacy or of so many objects that spoke of habits and tastes. Most of the people he had hitherto known had no tastes; they had a few habits, but these were not of a sort that required much upholstery. He had not as yet been in many houses in New York, and he had never before seen so many accessories. The general character of the place struck him as Bostonian; this was, in fact, very much what he had supposed Boston to be.

We already know Basil to be educated, but provincial, lacking a refined artistic sense. There is something crude, but affable in him. Part of the novel’s delightful irony is juxtaposing the depth of Basil’s reading and erudition against that the superficiality of the cultured elite of the North. However, the irony cuts both ways, and while Basil might sneer (rightfully) at the hypocrisies of the intellectual elite, he does lack some crucial sympathy for the plight of women and those less fortunate. It’s a subtle and winning portrayal, I think, because both things are true of him at the same time. The reader is able to see gaps in Basil’s understanding that he himself is not able to see, and we like him a little more for it. He is imperfect, not a moral paragon. He is reasonable if somewhat out of sympathy with what we view to be right.

The POV wobble is minor, but it’s there, I think. One can easily imagine Henry James making sense of Verena’s plight through the analogy of the singer, and if the analogy had originated within the narrator of the novel, I wouldn’t have noticed it. But the narrator goes to great pains to attribute both instances to Basil himself. It is Basil making sense of this young woman as a vocalist. It is Basil who is making an understanding of her through reference to music. But…we already know that art is not the means by which he understands the world. It is not his primary seat of reference.

This is a man who learned German on a plantation in order to read the law, for whom literature was a secondary thought. The mode of his thinking is almost binary. He loves to divide people into two groups—the hard and the easygoing, women who remain unmarried because of this and women who remain unmarried because of that, etc—and he thinks very much like a lawyer. He is a great summer-up of others. It is most often the narrator who steps in to provide lyric language to Basil’s observations. It is the narrator who likens Olive to a skiff on the ocean when Basil notes her agitation. When Basil encounters Dr. Prance, a rare female doctor, he describes her thus:

She looked like a boy, and not even like a good boy. It was evident that if she had been a boy, she would have "cut" school, to try private experiments in mechanics or to make researches in natural history. It was true that if she had been a boy she would have borne some relation to a girl, whereas Doctor Prance appeared to bear none whatever.

It’s a wonderful observation, but one that points back to a realm of experience that coincides with things we know Basil has lived. Yet here is a perfect instance where Basil might have reached for a system of meaning from music or opera. Contralto, counter-tenor, castrato, etc. But he does not. Instead, his system of analogy goes back to schoolboy days. He makes sense of this odd, boyish woman through very prosaic and concrete means

In the second instance of the singer metaphor, Basil says that Verena will be ruined by Mrs. Farrinder. He is of course thinking that Mrs. Farrinder will rob Verena of all the freshness and spontaneity and spirit she’s just demonstrated, but the analogous ruin is that of the way that sometimes bad teachers ruin the voices of singers. It is a particularly operatic and (frankly) gay way of contemplating Verena’s fate.

The first time he likens Verena to a singer, you might forgive it. After all, he lives in New York and maybe goes to concerts, and maybe knows about a woman singing bad music. But, that to me also implies a degree of connoisseurship that we know is not really his bag. At least at this part of the novel. So to me it reads like a miscue.

This all might seem minor, but these sorts of things are what I think about when I read. Particularly when I read novels rich in consciousness and ideas. For my fiction workshop last night, I had my students read “The Intellectual Physiognomy of Characterization” by Georg Lukács, who has been having a bit of a moment in recent weeks. I will have you know that I have been ruining my life as a novelist by reading Lukács for the last six months. He is my realism father, even though he hates Zola with a mighty passion—daddies pls stop fighting.

Anyway, in the essay, he is making a case (or several cases) for the importance of ideas in fiction. More specifically, he is arguing that characterization is incomplete without ideologies (or worldview, weltanschauung). There are many reasons for this, and I don’t want to get into them here, but my very bad interpretation and takeaway from the essay is that a well-functioning realism requires characters to have some form of an intellectual life that is capable of engaging with, processing, and organizing the world in which they live. This intellectual life that is also an extension of their social life and their relations to the other people with whom and alongside whom they are in struggle.

It was interesting to refresh on The Bostonians after rereading this essay because from the very first page, the characters are talking and arguing about, well, ideas. Politics of freedom and emancipation. But critically—and for Lukács, this is of the utmost importance—their political ideas extend from their lived experiences and situations. Basil has a dubious view of new world orders because he has just been a soldier in The Civil War and seen his entire mode of life wiped out of existence. He isn’t resistant to Olive’s ideas and her liberal education just because. For Olive, female emancipation isn’t a mere project. It has all the urgency of life and death. Because she knows what it is—or she imagines she knows—to be at the mercy of someone else. They argue with the full force of their lives and their histories.

Mrs. Farrinder cannot give her big speech unless she has an opposition to draw her out. She needs the spark of inspiration that comes from an argument. Everyone else can’t provide it because they are all too in sympathy with her. Olive thinks of Basil, who is naturally opposed to Mrs. Farrinder, being a Southerner while she is an abolitionist. This is a handy illustration of some of Lukács’s points. This scene would not work if James had not carefully built up the intellectual physiognomy—the world view—of his characters.

One of my students asked an interesting question that scandalized me last night. They asked, how can you write a first-person character who does not think or talk much. My first thought was that you don’t write such a character. Such a character is unsuited for fiction and would be more at home in a movie or a reality TV show. But then it occurred to me that this impulse, this desire to capture the unblinking anesthetized state of the trauma victim is perhaps the chief impulse gonverning creative writers of a certain age today. Young writers used to be described as wanting to write like a TV show or a movie, meaning scripted dramas. Now they want to write like reality TV—formless, thoughtless, a sea of visual impressions loosely arranged under a wordless, pulsing score, everything randomized but utterly meaningless.

Lukács makes an interesting point in the essay about how fiction that retreats from ideas also retreats from its political potency. Characters who are naturally in sync with the issues and ideas of their time will naturally form situations that emerge from those issues and ideas, and they will argue and struggle with each other in a recreation of the social process. But characters who are divorced from the issues and struggles of their time will pass their days in the petty, mundane observations of the everyday. They will approach averageness, but not typicality.

I think that characters who do not think or talk very much are a result of technical flaws in the writing. Even Hemingway’s most addled characters occupied narratives of tremendous emotive and expressive capacity. When one retreats behind a wall of silence, that is not profound. That is just choosing not to write. The mind that turns wrenchingly and brutally from the thing it cannot bear to contain turns somewhere, surely, with equal force. Sublimation is a thing. You cannot reproduce trauma’s haunting omissions and gaps by simply not writing. You must reproduce the record in order to demonstrate that something has been lost.

Anyway, I am still thinking over that question of the first person narrator who doesn’t think or talk. My gut reaction is simply that is not a project for literature. Which isn’t to say that it’s not important or impossible to do in literature. I just wonder why you’d want to. But I will keep thinking.

My seminar is starting soon. I better go. I’ll talk to you soon.

B