Henry James is not the first author I would insist someone read (that would be Chekhov). As an undergraduate I’d read
The American,
The Turn of the Screw,
Daisy Miller, and
The Beast in Jungle, among some other works. And I became a convert. If you were interested in psychological realism, as I was then, James was your man. In graduate school, I read more, but
Wings of the Dove did me in. It was to be the last James novel I read for many years, confounded by or just plain impatient with, for me, its unprofitable density, questionable structure, and tedious pacing. Of course some of this is what you sign up for when reading Henry James, and some of it in
Wings of the Dove was James out Jamesian himself. I made it through, however, wrote my twenty-page paper, and didn’t go back.
Until recently. On a binge of reading classics I had neglected,
The Brothers Karamazov, Moby Dick, Great Expectations, I thought, why not. Let’s visit the master again and see if I can renew my initial idolatry before I turned on the great man. I chose to look at
A Portrait of a Lady, one of his most celebrated works of his early period.
I’m still a bit of the school that agrees with H. G. Wells, who in his satirical novel
Boon compared James’ prose style to that of a hippopotamus trying to pick up a pea in a corner. But once you get by that and say to yourself, well, it’s sort of
interesting that a hippo
can do this, you come away marveling at the intricacy of the prose, the sweep and sheer multitude of the characterizations, and the depth of feeling for an entire other continent—Europe—that goes into this book. As a writer, you also come away with a great appreciation for how much James instinctively knew about craft, especially the permutations of point of view.
One movement—and I mean that almost as one would in composing a symphony—struck me in particular. It occurs in Chapter 36. After intensive efforts by several men to marry her, Isabel Archer, the novel’s very central character (more about this in a moment), chooses Gilbert Osmond. Up until this point, the novel has completely revolved around her and her somewhat obscure intentions. Everybody falls in love with this woman and admires her intelligence, charm, grace, beauty, compassion, education, cleverness, humility, and many other appreciable assets. The men want to marry her, the woman want to have a hand in who does, and yet Isabel Archer has undisclosed, almost ineffable reasons for not cooperating, much to the chagrin of the crowd of her admirers who all believe they have her best interests at heart. When she finally does choose Osmond, wrongly as it turns out, we see and learn relatively little of why she does so, considering how James can expound on motivation.
It should be noted that up until this moment, which takes us into chapter 36 of the novel’s 55 chapters, we never stray far from our focus on Isabel, even if we depart from her point of view. The novel is simply all her. It’s called
A Portrait of a Lady, but it might as well have been entitled
Isabel in the eponymous fashion of Emma Bovary, Emma Woodhouse, and Ann Karenina.
Perhaps James, in the convention of Victorian stories, could have wrapped up the novel with Isabel’s marriage to Osmond. But of course that’s not what he’s after. Questions of destiny and freedom must be played out in the novel long beyond whom Isabel chooses to marry. The challenge is, and it’s one that confronts anyone trying to write a novel that having fulfilled its trajectory at midstream has little use for continuing as is, how to keep the story growing. Isabel has chosen; she’s no longer available; our involvement over whom or if at all she will marry and what her recondite reasons are for doing so or not—after all, she’s not seeking the usual ends of fortune or position in society—have expired. Now what?
And James does what is so necessary but so difficult: he “resets” or restarts his novel. That is, he seeds a narrative path whose beginnings have been stubbed out earlier and will now take a lead in the novel.
When Chapter 36 opens, a number of years have passed. In the interim Isabel has married Osmond. But James doesn’t focus immediately on their marriage or on, as he’s done, Isabel. Instead we get a scene of Madame Merle talking with a gentleman, Ned Rosier, whom we’ve only had the faintest acquaintance with and who wants to marry, we eventually learn, Pansy, the daughter of Osmond and stepdaughter now of Isabel. What’s marvelous about the scene as a transitioning device is that we become completely caught up in this present action. After all, the last time we’ve seen Pansy she was a shy young girl with convent training who had rather lackluster attributes to offer any suitor, especially compared to the elegant, consummate Isabel. We’re dying to know what’s happened to Isabel during these intervening years. Her place in the novel has been hitherto so closely held; we rarely left her side or strayed from a character who wasn’t talking or thinking about her. She’s been in the novel’s consciousness at all times. And now she’s . . . absent. Or suspended.
It’s a bold move, to take her so much out of play and replace her predicament with that of the modest, demure (if fetching in her own way) Pansy’s. But it works. And it works because Pansy revitalizes the novel’s romantic urgency, while placing Isabel offstage for the time being, thereby increasing the mystery about her and our interest in when she will return. In other words, Isabel’s central role is reanimated not by having something momentous happen directly to her or by having other characters continue to discuss her with fascination (enough already), but by having Pansy rise from a secondary position and seize our attention as an unexpected and fresh extension of Isabel’s world. We know Isabel will regain center stage. Soon enough, James will provide a long disquisition bursting at the seams with expository revelations about her unhappy marriage. But at this junction we’re almost relieved to break out of the continual orbit we’ve been in with her and have Pansy’s predicament bear some of the narrative load.
When the shift is made, it's not only to get attention off of Isabel, take a breather from her and the now familiar pattern of her behavior, "reset" things, but to begin the triangular forces between Pansy, her father, and Isabel that will limn the difficult issues of Isabel's marriage. In other words, the situation has to have complex enough potential aside from its own sake and to exert changes on the novel's protagonist. A very simple way to put this is that if Pansy doesn't matter to Isabel on some vital emotional level then the bridge will never be made back to Isabel's story. You might have all sorts of plot intersections but that won't matter unless Pansy's fate is tied up with Isabel's at some junction.
On the other hand, in more contemporary novels, these separate subplots often work more by association than by cause and effect. That is, thematic resonances may play out in parallel stories that don't have to intersect in the way one would expect from a more traditional novel. And I think the contemporary reader's expectations of how much "intersection" is necessary are different. Contemporary readers are used to discreet and even remote narrative lines that parallel rather than intersect or create a concomitant effect that feels resolved in its variations on a theme. Think of Borges, Calvino, and any modernist writer, including Faulkner in
The Sound and the Fury and
As I Lay Dying. And very recently, David Mitchell's
Cloud Atlas is a pure example of these independent or interrupted story lines that willfully defy a funneling down into a single narrative stream.
Regardless, at some point in writing a novel, you realize you can’t keep doing the same thing. Even if it’s been working. Some major shift has to occur that creates an action in the narrative, or plot, if you will, that continues the original thematic trajectory and conflicts of the novel but doesn’t keep repeating the tactics and tropes. Isabel Archer can only go on so long refusing proposals while serving as James’ model for at least one sort of independent American sensibility, and being more pure of motive than any other character in the novel. James slips our attention away from her but he really doesn’t actually;it’s more as if Isabel is backlighted behind a scrim. You can see her there dimly, make out the outlines of her impending significance, but you’re unaware as to how exactly she will recapture the spotlight. This “shadowing” or silhouetting of Isabel keeps Pansy’s involvement from running away with the story on its own while holding Isabel in the wings.
James must have had a sense, even being Henry James and guilty of the longueurs that can characterize his writing, that his narrative was in danger of Isabel becoming overexposed as a character. Making an abrupt shift to Pansy’s situation takes some of this heat off of Isabel so she can cool down a bit as a character and not be overdone at the wrong time.
The question inevitably arises how many of these resets or shifts should occur in a novel. And the answer of course is as many as it takes. Which means not so many as to be a distraction, and not so little as to have the narrative become monotonous. Diverting our attention from a character or situation that has been so deeply invested in by the author takes a risk. Yet that’s precisely the reason to do so. The author has to sense, before the reader does, when the story might go stale and then make the leap to breathe new and necessary life into the fiction.
