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Henry James’s New York Edition Prefaces

For many, origins are suspect in part because they are, by definition, outside history. Outside it, they are also compromisingly inside it. As Gordon Teskey notes, in historical explanations, origins are inevitably provisional, having antecedents that make them “look like effects: the origin is always receding before us.”¹ In Teskey’s account of Milton’s decision, unprecedented in epic poetry, to treat—and to abide within—the origin, the author of Paradise Lost confronts not a historical event but the grounds of history as such. The ethical dimension of the question of origins is perhaps to be found here, in the paradoxical topography of origination, and in what resists being thought in the grounds of possibility of language and history—in the structure, in other words, that this book terms inception. (This chapter takes origin as its central term because it is closer to the preoccupations that I chart in Henry James—and to avoid a repeated periphrastic reference translating into my own book’s vocabulary what is more properly called origin in James.) The literary work’s confrontation with inception returns to this moment of possibility—to what appears as two different forms of origin. In the beginning one finds a merger of two related but irreducible instances: the origin of the work, and of the mind that ostensibly thinks it—different origins, and curiously difficult to disentangle (because they often prove mutually originating). Origins and their structure of internal heterogeneity, instantiating a history, or a consciousness, to which they nevertheless remain exterior, rhyme with the writer’s mutually originating relation to the work.

Origins and their internal heterogeneity are repeatedly confronted by James’s late writing. Personal origins, to begin with: his return to America in The American Scene or to his younger years in the three volumes of the autobiography. And the New York Edition prefaces: written for the reissue of (some) of his works, the prefaces, which arguably initiate criticism of the novel in English, are often framed by origin stories.² Straightforward anecdotal accounts of the origins of the works, however, are almost the exception in the prefaces, where, more often, the moment of origination is forgotten (“yielding to present research no dimmest responsive ghost of a traceable origin” [1206]), deliberately suppressed (“I recall with perfect ease the idea in which ‘The Awkward Age’ had its origin, but re-perusal gives me pause in respect to naming it.… I am half-moved to leave my small secret undivulged” [1120]), or lost in retrospect. “In the case of ‘Broken Wings’ (1900),” he writes, “I but see to-day the produced result—I fail to disinter again the buried germ” (1241). “Let it pass,” he writes of the group of stories about the writer’s life that includes “The Lesson of the Master,” “that if I am so oddly unable to say here, at any point, ‘what gave me my idea,’ I must just a trifle freely have helped myself to it from hidden stores” (1232).

The germ, at other moments, is found to have been always there. Thus, of the Tragic Muse, standing before him “a poor fatherless and motherless, a sort of unregistered and unacknowledged birth,” his “precious first moment of consciousness of the idea to which it was to give form” is present to him only as an “effect” of “some particular sharp impression or concussion”: “What I make out from furthest back is that I must have had from still further back, must in fact practically have always had, the happy thought of some dramatic picture of the ‘artist-life’ and of the difficult terms on which it is at the best secured and enjoyed, the general question of its having to be not altogether easily paid for” (1103); as he says later, “my original perception of its [my subject’s] value was quite lost in the mists of youth” (1105). Or, of “The Altar of the Dead”: “I consult memory further to no effect; so that if I should seem to have lost every trace of ‘how I came to think’ of such a motive, didn’t I, by a longer reach of reflexion, help myself back to the state of not having had to think of it? The idea embodied in this composition must in other words never have been so absent from my view as to call for an organized search. It was ‘there’—it had always, or from ever so far back, been there …” (1246). Likewise with The Wings of the Dove: “I can scarce remember the time when the situation on which this long-drawn fiction mainly rests was not vividly present to me” (1287). “The first perceived gleam of the vital spark,” he writes of “The Reverberator”; the origin is the perceiving of an origin that, presumably, precedes it (1194), so that, for example, “The Pupil” is recalled to have begun with the activation of an origin that, unnamed, is yet further back: “what it really comes to, no doubt, is that at a simple touch an old latent and dormant impression, a buried germ, implanted by experience and then forgotten, flashes to the surface as a fish, with a single ‘squirm,’ rises to the baited hook, and there meets instantly the vivifying ray” (1166). (This instance is also perhaps characteristic of a certain figural multivalence—as the seed becomes a fish, and the baited hook, not the instrument of a fish’s death but a “vivifying ray”; the fish flies free of itself as tenor, in other terms, and, caught, enlivens the idea it represents.) The glimpsing of a character—Christopher Newman of The American “rose before” him “on a perfect day of the divine Paris spring, in the great gilded Salon Carré of the Louvre”—is a “germination,” James notes in passing, that “is a process almost always untraceable” (1056). Earlier in that preface, James writes, “It had come to me, this happy, halting view of an interesting case, abruptly enough, some years before: I recall sharply the felicity of the first glimpse, though I forget the accident of thought that produced it. I recall that I was seated in an American ‘horse-car’ when I found myself, of a sudden, considering with enthusiasm, as the theme of a ‘story,’ the situation …” That situation poses questions that are, somehow, answered: “I remember well how, having entered the horse-car without a dream of it, I was presently to leave that vehicle in full possession of my answer” (1054). What is remembered is not so much the genesis as the moment when he noticed that it had occurred. “I shall not pretend to trace the steps and stages by which the imputability of a future to that young woman [Christina Light] … had for its prime effect to plant her in my little bookbinder’s path” (1098), he writes in the preface to The Princess Casamassima, of the character who first appears in Roderick Hudson.

When narratives of inception do appear, they are, at a cursory glance, deceptively simple, and present parallel accounts: of what occasioned an idea or story and, more often, of where James wrote them (locations that are rarely, if ever, the “settings” of the resulting texts). These latter are usually cast as memories of composition that come back to James as he rereads his works, and that originating scene, inaccessible, of course, to a reader, because never depicted in the text, hovers there, to be seen by the author—much like, as we will see, the inevitable new term in the revised text. There is, to my mind, no systematic account of the relation between the narratives of compositional situations and those of the germs that form the minimal ideas providing plot or character or situation. Thus, in the preface to The Portrait of a Lady, James moves from his memories of writing in Venice to a discussion of the structuring role of character in the origination of a novel—to characters’ “germinal property and authority” (1073). “There are pages of the book,” he writes, “which, in the reading over, have seemed to make me see again the bristling curve of the wide Riva, the large colour-spots of the balconied houses and the repeated undulations of the little hunchbacked bridges, marked by the rise and drop again, with the wave, of foreshortened clicking pedestrians. The Venetian footfall and the Venetian cry … come in once more at the window, renewing one’s old impression of the delighted senses and the divided, frustrated mind” (1070–1). The text, reread, calls back into view the scene of its creation—albeit with typical complication (the pages “have seemed to make me see again …”)—and that recovered scene thwarts the composition that has, of course, already occurred. At the time of composition, Venice embodies an excess that thwarts efforts to write it—too rich, and too interesting, it figures, as the limit case of the superabundant actual, the ways that the world exceeds containment by a text. Too suggestive, it overwhelms and divides the mind: Such places “are too rich in their own life and too charged with their own meanings merely to help him out with a lame phrase; they draw him away from his small question to their own greater ones; so that, after a little, he feels, while thus yearning toward them in his difficulty, as if he were asking an army of glorious veterans to help him arrest a peddler who had given him the wrong change” (1070). The multiple layers of incommensurate exchanges (the wrong change, the army of glorious veterans assigned a task demeaning to their glory, the incommensurate relation of this incommensurability to the exchange it purports to figure) thus stand in for the relation between art and life explored by these narratives of germination. (The writer in this figure is himself just such a dishonest peddler, exchanging Venice for its representation, and leaving the reader shortchanged.) In a perhaps characteristic structure, the apprehension of division is then unifying—or rather harmonizing; the “divided, frustrated” mind, remembered, is harmonized by the remembering mind—divided, therefore, between its present reading and its memory of the past—which is also to say that one’s divided attention turns out, in retrospect, to have been productive: “one’s book, and one’s literary effort were to be better for them. Strangely fertilizing, in the long run, does a wasted effort of attention often prove” (1071). The revising mind makes these discrepancies “fertilizing.” In the unrationalized interplay between these different forms of inception there is an implicit reckoning of the relation between life and art; confounding the inside and the outside of the text, the parallel narratives of origination figure that relation, and link it, I will suggest, to what James calls revision.

In the preface to Portrait of a Lady, the incommensurability of inside and out appears in the second term of what I have called an “unrationalized” relation: Turning to the origin (in a different sense) of the text, the preface explores the “germinal property and authority” of character—a discussion that, personifying character (giving it agency, and an originating power, over the mind that ostensibly imagines it), seems in various ways to depersonify the author. In the first place, the theory of fiction is given as a “quotation” from Ivan Turgenev—who sounds, in turn, remarkably like Henry James. (Turgenev, admired historical personage that he was, thus also appears as a personification of the “author’s” voice.) Notably, the origin once more disappears; as James has Turgenev remark, “As for the origins of one’s wind-blown germs themselves, who shall say, as you ask, where they come from? We have to go too far back, too far behind, to say. Isn’t it all we can say that they come from every quarter of heaven, that they are there at almost any turn of the road?” (1072–3).

This question of character leads James to the famous “house of fiction”; responding to the question of the “morality” of the work of art, James asserts that a subject is “moral” or “immoral” according to whether it is “valid” or “genuine,” or, in other terms, whether it is “sincere, the result of some direct impression or perception of life” (1074). That question links the (personified) author with the postulated, originating character insofar as the latter stands in for a locus of perception. The moral question turns out to be that of the richness of the “soil” of the author’s sensibility, “its ability to ‘grow’ with due freshness and straightness any vision of life” (1074). What James then calls the “high price of the novel as a literary form” comes from that sensibility’s individuality:

its power not only, while preserving that form with closeness, to range through all the differences of the individual relation to its general subject-matter, all the varieties of outlook on life, of disposition to reflect and project, created by conditions that are never the same from man to man (or, so far as that goes, from man to woman), but positively to appear more true to its character in proportion as it strains, or tends to burst, with a latent extravagance, its mould. (1074–5)

The “high price of the novel as a literary form” marks its value rather than its cost; the possible equivocation is matched by the slippery assimilation of novelistic form to the more specific relation of generalized reality or experience to particular forms or angles of perception. The “character” that takes on generative force in the Turgenev “quotation” becomes here the defining “character” to which the novel might remain “true”; the “latent extravagance” marks a defining quality of internal difference, and the novel, a genre that coheres insofar as it differs from itself. The novel that “conserves” its “literary form” “with closeness” appears “more true to its character in proportion as it strains, or tends to burst, with a latent extravagance, its mould.” I will note other figures that make difference into a principle of unification or coherence; for the moment, the novel’s versatility, or its inner difference, is also quasi-personifying to the degree that the burst mold also evokes a statue stepping free of its shaping material and, Galatea-like, walking forth on its own (as Maggie Verver does in a famous metaphor in The Golden Bowl).³ James’s figure in the preface ties together the originating power of “character” as an equivocal personification (equivocal because the figure is both animating and de-animating, and because of the temporal loop that produces this “character” subsequent to the originating force it then embodies) and the novel as a high-priced form of perpetual self-reinvention.

Critics (myself included) have offered detailed considerations of the “house of fiction,” which appears just after this; for the moment, I would emphasize the curious abstraction of that figure as it is set up by this framing. It isn’t just that the “direct impression or perception of life” turns out to be mediated by the angle of view, or that the angle would seem to take priority (of genesis) over the “figure” who watches (as in Deleuze’s account of Proust, it is the perspective that forms the subject rather than the other way around).⁴ Nor is it only that the personified view falls uncannily short of full personification (“a figure with a pair of eyes, or at least with a field-glass,” as he disorientingly phrases it).⁵ It is also that in the framing account, as in the extended metaphor of the “house of fiction,” James assimilates a particular fictional method (mediating views through a “center of consciousness”) within a work to an account of the difference of authorial sensibility that shapes the work itself. The choice of subject and the specifics of literary form are “as nothing,” he later writes, “without the posted presence of the watcher—without, in other words, the consciousness of the artist” (1075). In the allegory or figure here, that posted presence, of course, arrives on the scene after the house of fiction itself—to gaze out apertures, as James puts it, “pierced, or … still pierceable … by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will.” Perspective becomes a figure through which to render choices that might include the (putatively authorial) use of particular perspectives. The indeterminacy of inside and out (of the literary text) figures, and seems a consequence of, the recursive structure of literary inception, the disappearance of the origin in a self-reflexivity at once constitutive and secondary.

This account of literary form—in his summary, the author’s “boundless freedom and his ‘moral reference’ ”—is, he then suggests, “a long way round, however, for my word about my dim first move toward ‘The Portrait’ ” (1075). That dim first move, the grasp of a single character (“an acquisition I had made, moreover, after a fashion not here to be retraced” [1075]), then raises the question of how the vivid character is “placed”—how the book containing the initiating presence of Isabel Archer comes to be generated:

One could answer such a question beautifully, doubtless, if one could do so subtle, if not so monstrous, a thing as to write the history of the growth of one’s imagination. One would describe then what, at a given time, had extraordinarily happened to it, and one would so, for instance, be in a position to tell, with an approach to clearness, how, under favour of occasion, it had been able to take over (take over straight from life) such and such a constituted, animated figure or form. The figure has to that extent, as you see, been placed—placed in the imagination that detains it, preserves, protects, enjoys it, conscious of its presence in the dusky, crowded, heterogeneous back-shop of the mind very much as a wary dealer in precious odds and ends, competent to make an “advance” on rare objects confided to him, is conscious of the rare little “piece” left in deposit by the reduced, mysterious lady of title or the speculative amateur, and which is already there to disclose its merit afresh as soon as a key shall have clicked in a cupboard-door. (1076)

The narrative progression of the preface (“the long way around”) points once again to the intertwining of two forms of originating personification that are at the same time consequences of the forms they initiate or imagine: the character who instigates the novel’s genesis and the authorial consciousness—or, rather, its retrospective narration, the “so subtle, if not so monstrous” project of writing “the history of the growth of one’s imagination,” an imagination that it seems is not, under normal conditions, able to say “what, at a given time, had extraordinarily happened to it.” To add to the quandaries of origin, it is all the more difficult to differentiate the novel that contains the stray figure from the consciousness that imagines both insofar as the figure for the waiting idea derives from, or at least retells, a central episode in The Golden Bowl: Charlotte and the Prince’s visit (later reenacted by Maggie) to the Bloomsbury shop containing the eponymous bowl, the visit that catalyzes the novel’s plot and establishes its symbolic structure. To say only the least complicated thing about the relations thereby established, the novel would thus seem to be the “source” of the originating consciousness more than its result. As the preface continues, the “spacious house” still further confounds the novel (and its “organizing [of] an ado about Isabel Archer” [1077]) with the authorial consciousness that conceived it—and also with the many-windowed “house of fiction” itself. (It would also be easy to show the many ways that the novel’s characterization passes through, is constituted by, described houses—the bifurcated house of Isabel’s aunt in Albany; Gardencourt, the Touchetts’ home in England, with its interior spilling warmly out on to its thoroughly domesticated lawn; Gilbert Osmond’s two-faced, backward-facing citadel in Florence.)

When, therefore, the prefaces produce origin stories as (self-consciously) retrospective reconstructions, at issue is perhaps both the provisional quality of the posited authorial consciousness and its dependence on the texts that it ostensibly creates. These origin narratives, then, are “revisions” in the sense that rereading creates them, and the author is linked to the virtuality of events in James’s fiction. Hence, for example, the accounts give us what “must have” occurred—a locution that recurs throughout the prefaces: “It was at any rate under an admonition or two fished out of their depths that I must have tightened my hold of the remedy afforded … It was for that I must have tried, I now see, with such art as I could command” (1049).⁶ Such markers of retrospective construction could also be paired with those of mediation—“I seem” or “I seem to myself”—and with the provisional or hypothetical status of much of the fictional events in James’s work, the “as if” that so often modifies descriptions of action:⁷

I seem to myself to have waked up one morning in possession of them—of Ralph Touchett and his parents, of Madame Merle, of Gilbert Osmond and his daughter and his sister, of Lord Warburton, Caspar Goodwood, and Miss Stackpole, the definite array of contributions to Isabel Archer’s history.… It was as if they had simply, by an impulse of their own, floated into my ken. (1081)

Authorial consciousness and germinating character alike are at once originating and self-consciously posited, lending a certain groundlessness to the figures of organic wholeness that describe the remembered emergence of the texts. The retrospective gaze of revision provides the “fascination” for the author: “These are the fascinations of the fabulist’s art, these lurking forces of expansion, these necessities of upspringing in the seed, these beautiful determinations, on the part of the idea entertained, to grow as tall as possible, to push into the light and the air and thickly flower there; and quite as much, these fine possibilities of recovering, from some good standpoint on the ground gained, the intimate history of the business—of retracing and reconstructing its steps and stages” (1072).

“These necessities of upspringing in the seed”: James’s term for origination is “germ,” and the difficulty of locating an origin is echoed by the term’s multivalent figural resonances.⁸ Seed and sprout, a sprouting or the germination that presages it, the germ’s connection to what germinates can be direct (a seed becoming a plant) or indirect (as a germ triggering an illness): thus the author’s consciousness or sensibility is the “richer soil” into which a seed is transplanted (1074; 1140) and is, at other moments, an organism infected by a “virus.”⁹ The results, cultivated or nurtured, can also be involuntarily caught. (How the mind nurtures the germs it encounters, he writes in the preface to The Spoils of Poynton, is “an enquiry upon which, I hasten to add, it is quite forbidden me here to embark” [1139].) “Germ,” etymologically, is both the ovum (or ovary—in botany, the pistil that will be the fruit) and the sperm; fertilized and fertilizing, it, like the author’s consciousness, both acts and is acted upon—thereby naming the indeterminate agency in “having” an idea. The metaphor is also spatially multivalent: Both seed and sprout, germ can name the seed that contains the sprout, what sprouts from the seed, and the embryonic plant contained within the seed. In the several prefaces where James emphasizes the “quite incalculable tendency of a mere grain of subject-matter to expand and develop and cover the ground when conditions happen to favour it,” the “unforeseen principle of growth” (1120) that makes “projected … small things” into “comparative monsters,” he exploits the non-resemblance between the seed and what it becomes. A germ is also, simply, a small amount of something; the inspired writer, James asserts, wants only the merest hint of inoculation—too much information, and it will cease to be suggestive.¹⁰ And the term invokes the characteristically retrospective temporality of Jamesian thought—the essence, what an idea, under analysis, later boils down to, or its central grain. In James’s disorienting terms in the preface to The Ambassadors, “nothing can exceed the closeness with which the whole fits again into its germ” (1305).

This inside-out structure emblematizes the way these origin stories are also readings of the prefaced texts—and emblematizes the complex relation of authorial life to work. To forget the germ of “The Beast in the Jungle” (as James claims to have done) is to locate the story’s beginning in a repetition of Marcher’s own initiating forgetfulness (Marcher has told May Bartram the central, structuring secret of his life—and then forgotten he has done so). Likewise for the repeated note of “failure” in the preface to The Wings of the Dove: The novel’s realized aesthetic form in some sense is Milly Theale’s foreshortened life, Kate Croy’s baffled scheme, and Merton Densher’s thwarted love—a realized form of potentiality, the paradoxical mode whereby the authorial life enters the work, and disappears there. The search for origins in the prefaces (ever-baffled but never to be called off) is the cipher for that authorial life, and is where James locates an ethics of reading.

Even at a cursory glance, James’s texts valorize tact in approaching the author’s life; the novelizations by Colm Toibin and David Lodge are, whatever their many virtues, also violations to the degree that they are, at their inception, deaf to the sensibility they presume to ventriloquize. One thinks of “The Death of the Lion” or “The Aspern Papers” or “The Birthplace.”¹¹ In each case, though, the question becomes more complex, and returns us to a rhythm of creation—evoking a similar rhythm in Blanchot—where writing seeks an origin that recedes from it, seeking a beginning and a dissolution it can never achieve.¹² The elusiveness of origin stories in the prefaces evokes this view—for they are playful in their supposed revelations and more often than not keep what they conceal. Hence, they raise the question of whether the origin, even if known to the author, can (or should) be shared. Writing of the “miracle” that led to “The Pupil,” James remarks:

But there are fifty things to say here; which indeed rush upon me within my present close limits in such a cloud as to demand much clearance. This is perhaps indeed but the aftersense of the assault made on my mind, as I perfectly recall, by every aspect of the original vision, which struck me as abounding in aspects. It lives again for me, this vision, as it first alighted; though the inimitable prime flutter, the air as of an ineffable sign made by the immediate beat of the wings of the poised figure of fancy that has just settled, is one of those guarantees of value that can never be re-captured. The sign has been made to the seer only—it is his queer affair; of which any report to others, not as yet involved, has but the same effect of flatness as attends, amid a group gathered under the canopy of night, any stray allusion to a shooting star. The miracle, since miracle it seems, is all for the candid exclaimer. (1165)

The miracle is identified as a story told to him by a doctor “in a very hot Italian railway carriage,” a narrative that suggested, obliquely, the story of Morgan Moreen and his family. The language of prophetic vision, however, is striking, though, if I am not wrong to think that there is no specific biblical or mythological reference in this beating of wings, there is, characteristically, a crossing of different figural contexts and registers. Most immediately, the figure of poetic inspiration (one thinks of the beginning of Paradise Lost and the “advent’rous song / That with no middle flight intends to soar / Above th’ Aonian mount while it pursues / Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme,”¹³ of depictions of the muses as winged women, and even of bird song as a figure for poetry) is as if literalized (a “figure of fancy,” therefore, in more than one sense), and that register is combined with a (again, I think, vague) context of reference: “canopy of night” perhaps comes from Milton (PL, III.556–7), while the star that may or may not be a sign evokes Genesis¹⁴ and Revelation (also perhaps recalled by the beat of wings in the dark), or perhaps the star that guides the Wise Men in Luke’s Gospel (here, of course, a falling star). And so on: Jane Eyre hearing the beating of wings in the red room; Herod hearing the beating of the wings of the Angel of Death in Wilde’s Salomé; moments in Ezekiel where the beating of wings is compared to the sound of a voice;¹⁵ again in Paradise Lost, the visits of the archangels Raphael and Michael to the Garden; St Francis among the birds; the writing on the wall in the Book of Daniel; perhaps even the Annunciation or Morpheus, the wingèd god of dreams, or the abduction of Ganymede by Zeus. The originating vision leads one to a range of possible references—hardly personal, hardly discrete, and, further, almost generic literary topoi—suggesting, if one had to press for a point, that literature, like the figure of beating wings, has no beginning. Yet it also seems to posit an originary moment—as if that recursive movement into an infinite range of references could be located in a particular moment. And all of this is contained in a personal, anecdotal instant—the exclamation of small, private, ultimately incommunicable aesthetic pleasure at a natural wonder that will have passed before others’ attention can be drawn to it, and one that is, moreover, at once deflated (by the possibly pathetic desire to point) and invested (as a stand-in for more uncommon pleasures).

Nevertheless, one exclaims aloud, and however elusive origins in the prefaces turn out to be, it also seems that the search for them is not to be dispensed with: “I call such remembered glimmers always precious, because without them comes no clear vision of what one may have intended, and without that vision no straight measure of what one may have succeeded in doing” (1103). The equivocally ironical tone—in, for instance, “the air as of an ineffable sign made by the immediate beat of the wings,” with its jarring collision of registers (especially evident in the word immediate)—perhaps marks this ambivalence or doubled relation to the project of uncovering origins. The “immediate beat” underlines the tendentious (or possibly ironic) literalization, and is in contrast to the series of attenuations that mark the receding of the origin from us: the “prime flutter,” inimitable, is made an “air,” not, in turn, “of an ineffable sign” but “as of an ineffable sign,” and the “prime flutter” itself names an anteriority that precedes what initially seems an unequivocal assertion of recovery: “It lives again for me, this vision, as it first alighted” (1165). That first alighting of the vision turns out to have a prehistory, and the seer’s difficulty communicating what he has seen replays his previous difficulty in locating his vision’s source.

Writing seeks to surmount the problem of the perceived shooting star by prolonging the miracle, or by producing another one, the writing, in other words, that, directly or indirectly, it inspires; that the exclamation must come too late for the perception to be shared links a cognitive structure of belatedness (the cognition that must lag behind what it perceives) to the problem of other minds—each mind keeps as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world, and keeps locked within it the miracles it shelters. Each moment of perception, in those terms, replays the unfathomable moment of origination to which the mind, by dint of being one, ever arrives too late to witness.

The failure to find the biographical source (“a torment,” James writes of Shakespeare, “scarcely to be borne” [1215])¹⁶ is, like the putative aesthetic “failures” confessed in the prefaces, a mode of sustaining (perpetuating, but also enduring) this mode of creation. The successful artist, James suggests many times, disappears, and, like Milly Theale or John Marcher, or like Shakespeare in The Tempest, turns his back on us, and escapes. Thus, explaining another kind of “failure”—a failure to make Nick Dormer “as interesting as he was fondly intended to be”—the preface to The Tragic Muse suggests that the artist’s success may entail his disappearance:

I come upon a reason that affects me as singularly charming and touching and at which indeed I have already glanced. Any presentation of the artist in triumph must be flat in proportion as it really sticks to its subject—it can only smuggle in relief and variety. For, to put the matter in an image, all we then—in his triumph—see of the charm-compeller is the back he turns to us as he bends over his work. “His” triumph, decently, is but the triumph of what he produces, and that is another affair. His romance is the romance he himself projects; he eats the cake of the very rarest privilege, the most luscious baked in the oven of the gods—therefore he may n’t “have” it, in the form of the privilege of the hero, at the same time. The privilege of the hero—that of the martyr or of the interesting and appealing and comparatively floundering person—places him in quite a different category, belongs to him only as the artist deluded, diverted, frustrated or vanquished; when the “amateur” in him gains, for our admiration or compassion or whatever, all that the expert has to do without.… The better part of him is locked too much away from us, and the part we see has to pass for—well, what it passes for, so lamentedly, among his friends and relatives. (1118)

The “comparatively floundering person”: the curiosity of Toibin and Lodge is not a reading of the texts (may even, in my view, desecrate those texts—at least to the degree that that curiosity about the amateur is taken as interchangeable with a sounding of the “expert.” Their admiration or compassion is, at any rate, an act of aggression, which might be what is most interesting about those books, and what lingers in one’s sense of whose psychology, ultimately, is revealed). One might be led to think of John Marcher turning away from us (to lie, face down, on the tomb of his friend) at the end of “The Beast in the Jungle,” or of Milly Theale turning her face to the wall. The turning away from us of the successful artist is—as the Shakespearean echo makes clear—a disappearance of the flesh, or a becoming-spirit of the body in art that is also an amorous address: “When thou reviewest this, thou dost review / The very part was consecrate to thee: / The earth can have but earth, which is his due; / My spirit is thine, the better part of me” (Sonnet 74).¹⁷

The prefaces’ confessions of putative failures thus ask to be read as complex markers of authorial presence, even of his (vanishing) person. The discussion of bewilderment in the preface to The Princess Casamassima, or the “failure” outlined by the preface to The Wings of the Dove, like other such moments, makes their confessions interchangeable with another sort of authorial disappearance—into the potentiality of art. The “was to have been” that, in the Wings of the Dove preface, describes various plans that fail to come to fruition is, as I have noted elsewhere, a characteristic orientation of Jamesian verbs: Suspending “happening” between two temporalities (one marking what was to happen and then did happen, and another marking what was to happen but then didn’t), this complex verbal form is often how the late novels express what occurs in them. Particularly striking in The Ambassadors, it marks every novelistic happening with the shadow of Strether’s belatedness; the late novels are novels without plots because nothing happens—less in the colloquial sense (for, contrary to popular opinion, they are in fact eventful) than in the sense that happening is suspended, rendered hypothetical or potential. Writing in 1918, Virginia Woolf compares James to “a priest to whom a vision of the divinity has been vouchsafed at last.” She continues: “A glimpse of the possibilities which in his view gather around every story and stretch away into the distance beyond any sight save his own makes other people’s achievements seem empty and childish. One had almost rather read what he meant to do than read what he actually did do.”¹⁸ What from one angle looks like failure from another looks like the securing of potentiality, an ever-renewed possibility of beginning again. And, thus, too, if the Jamesian artist fails more often than he succeeds, failure is also another name for the creative act—and one where the “real” man is no more to be found or known than is the successful artist, turning away from us.

Hence the proximity of the prefaces to the autobiography under the aegis of what James calls revision: “The rate at which new readings, new conductors of sense interposed, to make any total sense at all right, became, to this wonderful tune, the very record and mirror of the general adventure of one’s intelligence,” he writes of The Golden Bowl (1335); in the preface to The American, it is the “joy of living over, as a chapter of experience, the particular intellectual adventure” (1060). (As he says of the artist’s freedom, “It may leave him weary and worn; but how, after his fashion, he will have lived!” [1061].) If the prefaces make revision a form of autobiography, A Small Boy and Others makes autobiography a kind of revision, reliving, even reanimating the past: “I retrace our steps to the start, for the pleasure, strangely mixed though it be, of feeling our small feet plant themselves afresh and artlessly stumble forward again” (6).¹⁹ Reanimated, the authorial life, subject to revision, is potential or provisional: “My cases are of course given, so that economy of observation after the fact … becomes inspiring, not less than the amusement, or whatever it may be, of the question of what might happen, of what in point of fact did happen, to several very towny and domesticated little persons, who were confirmed in their towniness and fairly enriched in their sensibility, instead of being chucked into a scramble or exposed on breezy uplands under the she-wolf of competition and discipline” (177). The possible gap between “what might happen” and “what in point of fact did happen” is the mark of “revision” in the autobiography; the economy of observation after the fact returns the past to potentiality, and the “lapse of consciousness” with which Small Boy ends as if registers the corrosive effect of that potentiality on the consciousness whose emergence the text narrates.²⁰ Unlike Romulus, the consciousness eclipsed does reemerge for another volume; in the context of the autobiographies, moreover, to “lose” oneself is aesthetically generative.

James’s central statement on revision is the preface to The Golden Bowl, which articulates a complex relation between revision and the authorial life. “To revise,” he writes, “is to see, or to look over, again—which means in the case of a written thing neither more nor less than to re-read it” (1332). Rereading is not rewriting (a “task so difficult, and even so absurd, as to be impossible”) because the new terms are already there: “the act of revision, the act of seeing it again, caused whatever I looked at on any page to flower before me as into the only terms that honorably expressed it.” The “ ‘revised’ element in the present edition,” he continues, “is accordingly these terms, … registered; so many close notes, as who should say, on the particular vision of the matter itself that experience had at last made the only possible one” (1332). To revise is thus to perceive potentiality—what might have been, but wasn’t—as lingering presences in the ostensibly finished text; like James’s visions of past compositional milieux, they impose themselves on his imagination as visions of the texts in potential. “The deviations and differences,” he writes, “became … my very terms of cognition” (1330). The gap between old and new readings thus limns the history of the authorial life—becomes “the very record and mirror of the general adventure of one’s intelligence” (1335):

The interest of the question is attaching … because really half the artist’s life seems involved in it—or doubtless, to speak more justly, the whole of his life intellectual. The “old” matter is there, re-accepted, re-tasted, exquisitely re-assimilated and re-enjoyed—believed in, to be brief, with the same “old” grateful faith …; yet for due testimony, for re-assertion of value, perforating as by some strange and fine, some latent and gathered force, a myriad more adequate channels.

The reread text is at least double: The old matter, re-assimilated, reveals new terms that impose themselves as inevitable. Various figures render this doubleness: children or old people made presentable for company, garments repaired, properties renovated, new terms “looking over the heads” of older ones, “alert winged creatures, perched on those diminished summits and aspir[ing] to a clearer air” (1332–3). Thus to see the old and new is to retrace the growth of the artist’s taste, “to hold the silver clue to the whole labyrinth of his consciousness” (1333).

Discrepancies, and the relation to the productions of one’s past dictated by a shifting consciousness, make reading “a living affair” (1335), which will link revision to “responsibility.” That note is struck early in figures amply commented on—by, for example, J. Hillis Miller²¹—where revision is the effort to follow footprints after one’s gait has changed:

Anything, in short, I now reflect, must always have seemed to me better … than the mere muffled majesty of irresponsible “authorship.” Beset constantly with the sense that the painter of the picture or the chanter of the ballad (whatever we may call him) can never be responsible enough, and for every inch of his surface and note of his song, I track my uncontrollable footsteps, right and left, after the fact, while they take their quick turn, even on stealthiest tiptoe, toward the point of view that, within the compass, will give me most instead of least to answer for. (1322–3)

This figure recurs throughout the preface, where revision raises the question of whether “the march of my present attention coincides sufficiently with the march of my original expression,” whether the “imaginative steps” of the reader he has become sink into the “very footprints” (1329) of the younger composer he was, whether his current mind can trace “that so shifting and uneven character of the tracks of my original passage” (1334):

It was, all sensibly, as if the clear matter being still there, even as a shining expanse of snow spread over a plain, my exploring tread, for application of it, had quite unlearned the old pace and found itself naturally falling into another, which might sometimes indeed more or less agree with the original tracks, but might most often or very nearly, break the surface in other places. (1330)

The “spontaneity” of these “deviations and differences,” matters, he asserts, “not of choice but of immediate and perfect necessity,” is what is “predominantly interesting” (1330). He couldn’t, he writes, “forecast these chances and changes and proportions; they could be shown for what they were as I went; criticism after the fact was to find in them arrests and surprises, emotions alike of disappointment and of elation: all of which means, obviously, that the whole thing was a living affair” (1335).

The repeated forgetting of germs in the prefaces is an index of belatedness, what I elsewhere suggest is the thematic marker of James’s style: consciousness arrives too late to perceive the emergence of its own ideas. The asynchronicity of consciousness might be said to enter the prefaces through figural discrepancies (of seed and germ, for example); through revision, the authorial life unifies, in its disappearing shadow, those discrepancies. The Golden Bowl preface figures that very process—makes discrepancy harmonious by articulating figures of bodily movement (tracing his uncontrollable footsteps) with figures of vision (falling into a gait and seeing the tracks of one’s footsteps over a plain of snow). The first difference, made into something seen, turns discrepancy into the mark of perspective. Hence the first line of the preface: “Among many matters thrown into relief by a refreshed acquaintance with ‘The Golden Bowl’ what perhaps most stands out for me is the still marked inveteracy of a certain indirect and oblique view of my presented action” (1322). Later, those terms evoke a coincidence of original and retrospective vision more possible with recent works, the reader’s footsteps sinking “comfortably” into the author’s, so that “his vision, superimposed on my own as an image in cut paper is applied to a sharp shadow on a wall, matches, at every point, without excess or deficiency” (1329). With the passage of time, coincidence gives way to discrepancy, and hence to “relief”: “This truth throws into relief for me the very different dance that the taking in hand of my earlier productions was to lead me; the quite other kind of consciousness proceeding from that return” (1329). Throwing a discrepancy into relief, the retrospective gaze makes it a unified vision. The maneuver is all the more complex in that refracted vision is his method of narration—“the marked inveteracy of a certain indirect and oblique view of my presented action,” the mediation through a “center of consciousness” that, as opposed to “an impersonal account of the affair in hand,” presents “my account of somebody’s impression of it,” the impression of the author’s “concrete deputy or delegate,” the “convenient substitute or apologist for the creative power otherwise so veiled and disembodied” (1322). The authorial life could here be said to be the anthropomorphizing shadow of a disembodied form—an indirection of view. Revision—reading one’s previous work in the light of one’s current consciousness—has that authorial life “intervene” on the text in a way analogous to a certain indirect and oblique view of the presented action within the text.

Thus James moves from focalization to revision because revision, too, is an indirect view—of new terms mediated by old ones.²² Moreover, I have simplified things; the preface’s highly abstract opening suggests that in The Golden Bowl, the technique of an indirect view mediated by an unimplicated observer (typical of the shorter works) is paradoxically embodied by the central characters (whose vision is then described as refracted); the Prince and the Princess are at once characters and anthropomorphic mechanisms of narrative method. (One’s sense of Lambert Strether’s remove from “life” in The Ambassadors is perhaps shifted when read in this context.) The “mere muffled majesty of ‘irresponsible’ authorship” describes an unmediated, or perhaps “omniscient,” narration; implication, and responsibility, come, in the first place, with focalization. Maggie and the Prince personify focalization, and turn mediated vision into “direct” contact, pulling the author “down into the arena” with “the real, the deeply involved and immersed and more or less bleeding participants” (1323). (In short, the involvement here is perspectival; his angle of view places the author in the fray.)

By the end of the preface, the language of responsibility shifts to a different register of implication. The final paragraph begins by asserting the salience of the literary “deed,” established through the felt unity of our actions and our expressions. It is as if the freedom of our capacity for expression made it one with our actions, and therefore susceptible to, and worthy of, ethical consideration:²³

as the whole conduct of life consists of things done, which do other things in their turn, just so our behaviour and its fruits are essentially one and continuous and persistent and unquenchable, so the act has its way of abiding and showing and testifying, and so, among our acts, are no arbitrary, no senseless separations.… [W]ith any capability, we recognize betimes that to “put” things is very exactly and responsibly and interminably to do them. Our expression of them, and the terms on which we understand that, belong as nearly to our conduct and our life as every other feature of our freedom. (1340)

That analogy (“just so”) becomes consequence (“so”) perhaps enacts his assertion; the passage begins with likeness, and seems to give agency to likeness itself. The binding connection between “things done” and what “other things” those things “do,” begins a chain of likeness formed by the asserted connection: consequence (our actions have consequences that ramify), linked by the verb to do; the link between our “behaviour and its fruits,” asserted to be “essentially one and continuous and persistent and unquenchable”; and the link between our various acts, which makes writing and doing one. “Literary deeds” enjoy an advantage over “other acts”: “their attachment and reference to us, however strained, needn’t necessarily lapse.” If the claim at the end of the paragraph initially seems unremarkable—that our writing and reading, our thought, are all parts of our conduct and our life—the way that, as ethical acts, they form features “of our freedom” (a central term for James’s understanding of writing, beginning as early as “The Art of Fiction”) is crucial to the closing claims of the preface. As is often the case in such climactic moments in James, the logic is perhaps less important than its enactment by the writing (the very exercise of the writer’s freedom)—here, by analogy and resemblance, which perform or enact the very connection he claims.

Thus the preface—and the prefaces as a whole, for the second volume of The Golden Bowl is the last volume of the New York Edition—ends on this hortatory note:

Our relation to them is essentially traceable, and in that fact abides … the incomparable luxury of the artist.… Not to be disconnected … he has but to feel that he is not; by his lightest touch the whole chain of relation and responsibility is reconstituted. Thus if he is always doing he can scarce, by his own measure, ever have done.… Our noted behaviour at large may show for ragged, because it perpetually escapes our control; we have again and again to consent to its appearing in undress—that is in no state to brook criticism. But on all the ground to which the pretension of performance by a series of exquisite laws may apply there reigns one sovereign truth—which decrees that, as art is nothing if not exemplary, care nothing if not active, finish nothing if not consistent, the proved error is the base apologetic deed, the helpless regret is the barren commentary, and “connexions” are employable for finer purposes than mere gaping contrition. (1340–41)

The claims at the end are built, in more than one way, on “connexion”—that, most immediately, linking us to our words—a joining together material or immaterial, physical or rhetorical. The word appears ten times in the preface (eleven if one includes “disconnexion”), most often as a synonym for context. The final paragraph makes the connections between words or ideas²⁴ into material, bodily, or tangible relations (evoking the group of meanings of the word that center on sex, intimacy, and family). That link is also enacted in the peroration’s own connections—the rhetorical assimilations of parallel rhetorical forms, most immediately, but also the crossing of registers that assimilates words, actions, and emotional states, makes a deed “apologetic” and a “regret” a “commentary.” “Traceable” explicitly evokes rereading, James’s tracking of his footsteps—or the silhouette that later reading seeks to retrace. Tracing an outline or deciphering a trace, rereading asserts various forms of connection.

How is one to understand the “attachment and reference to us” that James asserts here? His claims evoke other moments in the late writing—for example, in “Is There a Life after Death?,” which asserts that connections will not lapse, that death will not rupture the links among us because we are capable of thinking them in the first place.²⁵ The traceable relation is our relation to our words—our words as actions, and the ethical dimension, therefore, of what we say; at the end of the preface, that dimension turns on the claim that connection is, ultimately, our capacity to revise: not to be reduced to mere gaping contrition, not to reduce care to passivity, is to assert the claims of connection by seeing, perpetually, our words afresh. In my view, the claim of ostensibly personal responsibility needs to be read in the context of the prefaces’ confessions of “failure,” and James’s rendering potential of the authorial life as it disappears into the text. That question in late James calls to mind Foucault’s exploration, in his final seminars, of parrhēsia—a mode of truth-telling to be distinguished from others in ancient Greece and Rome. Couched as historical investigation—a systematic outline of this particular mode of veridiction—it is also a theory of speech acts, and one that, separating truth from propositional content, shifts attention toward the context of utterance, and most often, to a risk incurred by the speaker: One example is telling someone you love him, and the risk is an isolation whose ultimate horizon is social ostracism. (In my memory, this is not an example that Foucault himself cites; the more immediate context for parrhēsia is political.) For parrhēsia entails a relation; it takes place “between two partners” (fundamentally, between friends).²⁶ The term evolves in complex ways; in political speech, it is, initially, the honesty that the benevolent ruler (forestalling flattery) will allow or invite. (This is the primary focus of the exploration of the term in the 1982–83 course on “the government of self and others.”) But it later becomes a mode of assuming a life: “I must be myself in what I say.… I do not content myself with telling you what I judge to be true. I tell this truth only inasmuch as it is in actual fact what I am myself; I am implicated in the truth of what I say,” as Foucault puts it in a commentary on Seneca (247).²⁷ I find moving and compelling in these late texts the way his interest in parrhēsia and the “care of self” tends to escape containment in the genealogy of confession’s production of docile subjects that motivates it.²⁸

This is not merely, in other words, the familiar story of subjects produced by a discourse of truth about sex; Foucault’s courage of truth meets Jamesian revision in what Agamben calls potentiality.²⁹ In Il fuoco e il racconto, Agamben suggests why the work cannot be finished—why, to echo the terms of the prefaces, no work fully realizes the author’s intentions, fully actualizes what was to have been: “Is it not the case that every book contains a residue of potentiality, without which its reading and reception would be impossible? A work in which creative potentiality [la potenza creativa] were totally exhausted [spenta] would not be a work but the ashes and sepulcher of the work.”³⁰ This has nothing to do with perfectionism, with an anecdotal sense that nothing is ever finished, or with academics’ laborious cultivation of writer’s block. It has rather to do with potentiality, with a capacity that remains sheltered, as potential, within the creative act that actualizes it, with the words that peer out, in James’s image, above or beyond the words that one has written. “It is,” Agamben continues, “perhaps only this hybrid creature, this non-place in which potentiality does not disappear but is preserved and, so to speak, dances in the act, that deserves the name of ‘work’ ” (94).

Potentiality is thus the central term for Agamben’s reading of Deleuze’s late lecture on the act of creation. Agamben reminds us that all creation, for Deleuze, is an act of resistance—“to death, first of all, but also … to the paradigm of information media, through which power [il potere] is exercised in what he calls ‘control societies’ ” (33/39). The elaboration of the concept of potentiality that comprises the bulk of Agamben’s essay is a complementary explication of the act of creation as resistance. Deleuze’s own account of Foucault in the seminar on his friend and fellow philosopher affirms this connection. In the seminar, which preceded by a year the lecture on creation, Deleuze devotes considerable time to resistance, which, he says, emerges in Foucault’s thought between Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality. In the lecture of February 25, 1986, for example, Deleuze links “resistance” to a “beyond.”³¹ Resistance is not a term or a vector of force within the “disciplinary diagram” but that which escapes capture in it. So, if discipline (on the one hand) takes any group whatever and forces it to perform any task whatever and (on the other) cultivates, manages, fosters a population, resistance is not a counter-force to either procedure. Likewise, it is not a resistance “to” either knowledge or power, which Deleuze conceptualizes according to formal, molar forces (on the one hand) and informal (de-forming) or molecular forces on the other. It is rather what remains beyond, or unrealized within, that schematization. And, outlining Foucault’s characterization of power in the first volume of the History of Sexuality, he suggests, invoking Kant, that resistance is not to be confused with either “spontaneity” or “receptivity,” with either the “power to affect” or the “power to be affected.” In Deleuze’s rendering, resistance is primary; it precedes relations of force. Potentiality in Agamben’s account of the 1987 lecture offers a way to gloss Deleuze’s understanding of “resistance” as a “beyond” that is not a form of transcendence.³² Or to frame the centrality of origins to James’s account of revision.

As in Agamben’s other writings on potentiality, creation cannot consist purely in the passing into act of what was potential. Potentiality is sustained in the work by a trembling between creation and decreation, necessity and contingency—by “revision.” Thus, every “authentic” creative process is “intimately and emblematically suspended between two contradictory impulses: upsurge [slancio, which the French translator renders as élan (Agamben, Le Feu et le recit, 53)] and resistance, inspiration and critique” (43/48). Artistic capacity is lined with a fundamental incapacity that one might call resistance—a potential-not-to that is a resistance internal to potentiality or power that prevents its being “exhausted” in its actualization (48); revision is the cipher of the authorial life because it bodies forth this contradiction, the suspension within creation that Agamben links to the non-trivial self-reflexivity of great poetry. Such poetry “does not simply say what it says, but also the fact that it is saying it”—says “the potentiality and impotentiality to say it” (48/52–3). Such self-reflexivity does not mean that poetry is the “subject” of “poetry,” or “thought,” of “thought.”³³ Rather, “the painting of painting means simply that painting (the potentiality of painting, the pictura pingens) is exposed and suspended [è eposta e sospesa] in the act of painting, just as the poetry of poetry means that language is exposed and suspended in the poem” (50/55 [translation modified]). What remains potential within thought makes thought possible; the work, subject to revision, lays bare what Agamben calls “materiality,” language as such prior to any meaning.

In “Opus alchymicum,” Agamben asks why the ethical project of the self’s transformation needs to pass through an opus (a work)³⁴—in spite of the great temptation to dispense with that seemingly unnecessary detour. In accounts of various such projects—including Rimbaud’s famous renunciation of poetry, and Foucault’s “souci de soi”—Agamben ultimately finds an answer in the structure of potentiality. A preliminary problem is logical or grammatical; the self is not a “subject” that can transform or work “on” itself: “The pronoun ‘se,’ the marker of reflexivity in Indo-European languages, lacks for this reason the nominative case. It presupposes a grammatical subject that reflects upon itself but that can never itself be in the position of subject. The self [sé], to the degree that it coincides with a reflexive relation, can never be a substance, or a substantive.” “The idea of an ethical subject,” therefore, “is a contradiction in terms.”³⁵ This aporia, Agamben notes, menaces every effort to work on the self: “there is no subject prior to the relation to the self: the subject is this relation itself and not one of its terms” (132–3/136–7 [translation modified]).³⁶

Hence the transformation of the self has to pass through an “opus,” and hence I think James’s characterization of revision might speak to the intimate question of why one writes—and, among other things, to the political investments of queer theory. Queer theory, like many liberationist critical practices, asserts a connection to the world, even aspires to an alchemical power to counteract its injustices. In Sedgwick and others, this imperative often appears in the form of a guilty conscience about writing, which, bringing the prose alive, nevertheless deforms the thought. This is the tension between the “proto-gay” child and the gay person whose necessity in our immediate world we are (I would say justly) enjoined to avow.³⁷ It perhaps also marks Sedgwick’s turn to shame and affect, which is formulated in her brilliant reading of James’s prefaces—an account that might be better known to readers of queer theory than are the prefaces themselves.³⁸ On the one hand, shame allows Sedgwick to posit queer identity in the mode of its suspension: “Shame interests me politically, then, because it generates and legitimates the place of identity—the question of identity—at the origin of the impulse to the performative, but does so without giving that identity space the standing of an essence” (Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 64). On the other, the reading of the prefaces’ “lexicon” is at least partly enabled by a reification of the authorial consciousness that the prefaces themselves put into question—or that they posit as a belated consequence of the writing itself. The positing of James’s psychological reactions—to the failure of Guy Domville and the lackluster sales of the New York Edition, to the physiological experience of constipation—seem, like the generalizations about the “kinds” of persons whose personalities might vibrate to the key of shame, both true (because they resonate with experience and observation in profound ways) and false (because reductive of, most importantly, the relation between identity and writing explored by the prefaces’ probing of origins). Insofar as shame, in her account, begins with a dynamic of (albeit thwarted) recognition, the account is grounded in a supposedly identifiable, psychological, and—harsh to say—therefore banalizing context.

In other terms, for all its opening of disparate questions of affect, by beginning from shame (especially as it formulated by Tomkins) it makes recognition (given or withheld) the primary mode of relation to the world. A more detailed reading of Sedgwick’s argument might thus begin with her own essay’s curious beginning: Sedgwick looks down at lower Manhattan and the site of the missing World Trade Center towers and feels shame. This leads her to the dynamic of withdrawn or missing recognition (indicatively, a mother’s) that defines shame for Silvan Tomkins. Whatever one thinks about that derivation (as evocative as it may be as a description), it is also worth holding on to how strange the affect is for the occasion. A fundamental disorientation in one’s world legible to many of us, I have to assume, who have had to find new ways to discover north and south in Manhattan, that unmooring could potentially lead one to feelings of shame, but it wouldn’t obviously be shame for the buildings. It seems to me that that movement relies on a transfer of survivor’s guilt to a theatricalized sense of self-exposure that replays (replays as a further level of exposure) the unspeakable theatricalization of death in the spectacle of 9/11. The content of shame is withdrawn and becomes almost synonymous with a formal structure of insides made visible—as the insides of the towers themselves were made visible—that can therefore render the very process of identification that would, in a meta-level recursion, structure the identification of affect with destroyed buildings in the first place. I’m not sure what good it does to call all of this “shame” and to submerge that vicarious identification (both with the dead and with the thrill of survival that Canetti diagnoses as the triumph of the last man standing,³⁹ which is surely the obscene basis, too, of many violent entertainment spectacles)—however canny and astute the labeling of the complex “affect” there might be.⁴⁰ Or perhaps better, the naming of that feeling—naming it, specifically, as shame—regardless of how illuminating it might be as an illustration of unrelated movements in shame, closes off—both concretizes and abstracts—the complex drama she invokes by making it an identifiable (and, it may be, morally valorized) feeling.

That movement of abstraction is likewise visible, paradoxically, in the turn to the highly lurid thematics of fisting, which thus has a curiously sublimating effect, since shame is made queer while as if euphemizing a more obvious occasion for gay male shame: anal sex.⁴¹ So the effect is, potentially, both a derealizing of gay specificity and a reifying of psychology. Privileging recognition, then, it further contains the various, loaded dynamics of vision and exposure in the invoked scenario. Arguably, this reifying of identity (combined with a despecification of homosexuality) has marked shame’s career in queer theory; moreover, it has allowed critics, because they were saying something “true” to avoid the truth of the texts they read—and to take as given queer identity precisely to the degree that, as a “subject” of constatation, it is presumed to be suspended. For some, it is not regrettable that criticism might thereby become a psychologistic, sociological, and largely descriptive enterprise. That turn perhaps brackets questions of identity that—by refusing to resolve them—previous instantiations of queer theory found so productive. Partly, this is a (justifiable) shift away from the closet as a governing trope for understanding sexuality, and therefore a muting of the largely epistemological questions that shaped that earlier theory. And yet the turn to shame and affect might also then short-circuit the passage through the work that I have tried to name by way of James’s revision.

“It’s not writing that is happy,” says Foucault, in the context of elucidating the source of what he calls an “obligation to write,” and the “absolution” it offers one; “it’s the joy of existing that’s attached to writing, which is slightly different.”⁴² In Agamben’s gloss: “Happiness—the ethical task par excellence toward which all work on the self tends—is ‘attached’ to writing [‘sospesa’ alla scrittura], that is, becomes possible only through a creative practice. The care of the self necessarily passes through an opus, implies an ineluctable alchemy” (Agamben, The Fire and the Tale, 134/138 [translation modified]). Thus, for Agamben, the transformation of the self through the creative act is made possible only if it constitutes a relation to a potentiality not exhausted by the work. “We write,” Foucault suggests, “to hide our face, to bury ourselves in our own writing”; what he goes on to describe as an attenuation of the self is never achieved—life can never be contained in the text, can never be made “thin” enough to become one with the line of writing (Foucault, Speech Begins After Death, 66, 67).⁴³ The poet-become-seer (“voyant,” in Rimbaud’s terms) contemplates language itself—“not the written opus but the potentiality of writing” (Agamben, The Fire and the Tale, 137/141), like James, confronting the new terms as they impose themselves on his vision, or tracing his uncontrollable footsteps across a plain of snow. Because, in Spinoza’s terms, “potentiality is nothing other than the essence or nature of every being, inasmuch as it has the capacity to do something, contemplating this potentiality is the only possible access to ethos, to ‘seity’ ” (137/141 [translation modified]).⁴⁴ The transformation of the self, which must pass through the work, also deactivates the work, and returns it to potentiality. “Truly poetic,” Agamben writes, “is that form of life that, in the work, contemplates its own power to do and to not do and finds peace in it [Veramente poetica è quella forma di vita che, nella propria opera, contempla la propria potenza di fare e di non fare e trova pace in essa]” (137/141 [translation modified]). This is one way to read James’s rendering of revision as autobiography, and of autobiography as revision: a life suspended in, maintained in perpetual relation to, the potentiality of the creative act by way of a work that, ever-to-be-revised, is thus perpetually unwritten, a life, and work, that consume themselves in the origin where language speaks itself.⁴⁵

This structure of origin is allegorized by James’s story “The Middle Years,” whose title, in a well-known, but not for that the less cryptic, gesture, he borrowed for the final (unfinished) volume of his autobiography—and which derives, in the story, from the title of the main character’s final book.⁴⁶ An ailing writer named Dencombe, receiving an advance copy of “The Middle Years,” discovers that he has, at last, and belatedly, achieved clarity about his aesthetic project even as death threatens to make him unable to realize that vision. Just then, he meets a devoted young reader, Dr. Hugh. A fuller reading would dwell on, among many other things, that erotic relation, and the way that it is structured against the claims of the Countess, a wealthy and ailing woman who has hired him as a personal doctor—a relation then further circuited through the Countess’s companion, Miss Vernham (and her desire for Dr. Hugh). Here, however, I will focus on the story’s consideration of revision. It is not merely that Dencombe never stops revising, marking up (as James himself did) even published copies of his work. More crucially, the story explores what a life given over to revision might be. Notably, it begins with a caesura; Dencombe has completely forgotten his book. This caesura makes possible something like a literal experience of revision: he reads the text again and sees that it is good: “Everything came back to him, but came back with a wonder, came back above all with a high and magnificent beauty. He read his own prose, he turned his own leaves, and had as he sat there with the spring sunshine on the page an emotion peculiar and intense. His career was over, no doubt, but it was over, when all was said, with that” (81).

The encounter with Dr. Hugh makes him dream that “ebbing time” and “shrinking opportunity,” his sense that “he hadn’t done what he had wanted” (80), might be vanquished, makes him dream of a second chance whereby his discovery of his capacity could structure his life: “It came over him in the long quiet hours that only with ‘The Middle Years’ had he taken his flight; only on that day, visited by soundless processions, had he recognised his kingdom. He had had revelation of his range. What he dreaded was the idea that his reputation should stand on the unfinished. It wasn’t with his past but with his future that it should properly be concerned. Illness and age rose before him like spectres with pitiless eyes: how was he to bribe such fates to give him the second chance? He had had the one chance that all men have—he had had the chance of life” (90–1). “I want another go,” he later explains; “I want an extension” (95, 96).

It would be easy enough to read in the story a renunciation of the aesthetic life in favor of what might crudely be understood as erotic fulfillment. For the story ends with Dr. Hugh and Dencombe together, Dr. Hugh pronouncing him a “great success,” “putting into his young voice the ring of a marriage-bell” (105). Ironized or not, the offered erotic consummation as a substitute for the aesthetic life is turned down by the writer, who “taking this in,” demurs: there are no second chances, except to the very degree that no first chance is ever fully realized. Consummation would, of course, entail a contradiction; only their shared passion for Dencombe’s work urges them toward the literal consummation in which they might dispense with it. The more crucial point is that the fantasy of second chances is also the fantasy that work could be something other than “unfinished,” that the aesthetic life could be complete. Dencombe’s demurral—one of the most often quoted passages in James—is a comment on the authorial life suspended in revision: “A second chance—that’s the delusion. There never was to be but one. We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art” (105).

The tones of ethical exhortation are unmistakable; also unmistakable is a rhetorical structure typical in James: It has all the appearance—all the sound, and, to read, all of the satisfactions—of formal closure, but that form conceals, or rather discloses, terms that prove unexpectedly elusive. The satisfying closure comes from the series of repetitions—“We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have”—followed by the (also ostensibly parallel) terms of a chiasmus, sealed by the certainty of the paired copula: “Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task.” Paraphrased, this might assert that doubt—not being certain of our aesthetic vocation, perhaps, or of writing’s purchase on the world—is what makes for our passion, and that that passion is our ethical imperative. I think, however, that we are meant to be struck by the unresolved heterogeneity of the terms—doubt, passion, passion, task, all linked by “is.” This isn’t—as it has often been understood—a claim for art’s transcendence, and not only because art is put in a possibly ambiguous relation to “madness” (is the genitive objective or subjective; is all art mad, or just a part of it?), but because what is thus defined—doubt and passion, passion and task—forms a totality that excludes art, or produces it as a remainder: “the rest is the madness of art.” The satisfying formal closure, whatever it might actually mean, thus bears on everything that isn’t the statement’s primary concern. The last claim links “art” to the unwritten; in context, “the rest” has been defined: the “pearl,” Dencombe asserts, isn’t the public’s admiration; “the pearl is the unwritten—the pearl is the unalloyed, the rest, the lost!” (104). No doubt, too, James was thinking of Hamlet: “the rest is silence.” The madness of art is what remains unsaid or unexpressed, consists, perhaps, in the gap between the formal closure of this peroration and its content. That gap, one might say, is life as revision, or as potentiality.

The search for origins might be understood as a search for transcendence, a desire to escape history in a return to an uncorrupted state. But as Teskey points out in Milton, there will be no postlapsarian return to Eden; Eden is “destroyed in the Flood, torn loose from its foundations and washed down the Euphrates to the Persian Gulf, where it is now: ‘an island salt and bare, / The haunt of seals and orcs and sea-mews’ clang.’ ”⁴⁷ In “The Middle Years,” when Dencombe is confronted with what loyalty will cost his young friend, the blow—and the renunciation he resolves on, of nothing less than his “second chance”—evokes Genesis prior to creation: “Oh yes, after this Dencombe was certainly very ill.… [I]t was the sharpest shock to him to discover what was at stake for a penniless young man of fine parts. He sat trembling on his bench, staring at the waste of waters, feeling sick with the directness of the blow” (100).⁴⁸ The echo of the story’s opening—“He sat and stared at the sea, which appeared all surface and twinkle, far shallower than the spirit of man. It was the abyss of human illusion that was the real, the tideless deep. He held his packet, which had come by book-post, unopened on his knee” (77–8)—is perhaps less important for the tone of near despondency that marks the baffling of his hopes than for the formal return to the beginning, with (moreover) its evocation of the unread, the unopened, the forgotten book. In that echo, the story intimates that there dwells, in the baffled hope of second chances, a perpetual return to potentiality in writing’s search for its origins. Thus to step outside history is not to secure transcendence for the work of art but, by consigning it to revision, to make it what James calls “a living affair” (1335), structured by “onset distortion” and the imperfections of created beings; suspended within this return to the origin, the writer strives to hear the exhortations of truthful speech, and to bear the risks of its equivocal importunings.