Beauty and the beastly cause: Aesthetic value, anarchy, and the theater of representation in James's The Princess Casamassima

The Journal ofValue Inquiry 28:313-125,1994.@ 1994 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Beauty and the beastly cause:Aesthetic value, anarchy, and the theater ofrepresentation in James's The Princess Casamassima

BRUCE M. GATENBYDepqrtment of English and Philosophy, Idaho State University, Pocatello,ID 83209, USA

Overview

From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuckwith the task of defending art.

Susan Sontag, "Against Interpretation"

Of what value is art, specifically literature? Although Plato dismissed

artistic representation as being thrice removed from the immutable realm ofideal forms, Western culture has privileged art into an exalted expression oftruth: for example, Yeats's "monuments of unaging intellect," at a "higher"remove from the everyday world of political, economie, and class struggle.

Through the Romantic reversal of Platonic ideals, art, specifically represen-

tation itself, has become the realm of the ideal. Art is the ultimate ordercapable of revealing a quasi-Platonic transcendental truth, a redemptivemeaning available only through the faculty of interpretation. This ultimateorder is predicated upon the concept of an absolute subjectivity, a whole-ness of identity capable of interpreting the wholeness of truth or meaningitself.

Hyacinth Robinson, the "little" hero of Henry James's The PrincessCasamassima, is a man with "a hundred different theories of his identity"(166). He is the offspring of "a daughter of the wild French people" and (he

assumes) an English artistocrat. "Hyacinth" is the name of his mother'sfather, a man who died in the July 1830 revolution overthrowing Charles X;"Robinson" comes from Lord Frederick's assumed name in his affair withHyacinth's mother, Florentine, who late stabbed him to death. It is from thismultiplicity of crime, revolution, murder, and fictionalization that Hyacinthderives his desire "not to be pampered, but to be initiated into the excludedworld of the aristocracy" (16a) and its privileged notions of aesthetic value.

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Being one of the poor, and yet "regard[ing] himself, irresistibly, as the sonof the recreant, sacrificial Lord Frederick" (167), Hyacinth has amelancholy sense of exclusion, a paranoia that all of London is mocking thepoverty of this "son" of an aristocrat. Through this confusion of identityHyacinth Robinson comes to get lost, or caught up, in what James calls the"dramatic illusion" of the theater of his life.

The contradictions of Hyacinth's identity are a microcosm of the con-tradictions in which this novel is caught up, contradictions about the

foundations of political power, artistic power, and the very representational

foundations of art. For, while Irving Howe believed that "the temptation ofpolitics seems never to have troubled Uamesl at all" (139), we actually find,as Mark Seltzer has argued, that "James's art of representation always also

involves a politics of representation, and one reason for suspecting this linkbetween art and power is that James works so carefully to deny it" (16).

Seltzer points out the relationship between seeing (interpreting) and powerthat James develops in The Princess Casamassima, where "the underclasses 'exist' only when they have become the object of regard of theupper classes" (40-41); by extension, the details of "real" life only existwhen they have become objectified in the author's gaze or vision. Accord-ing to Seltzer, disguise is the one escape from this kind of aristocraticsupervision, or surveillance, "and indeed, seeing without being seen

becomes the measure of power in the novel" (4I\.If the supreme authorityof the writer as artist is to produce, as James writes in "The Art of Fiction,"a work with a "large, free character of an immense and exquisite corespon-dence with life" (179), what is James saying about the nature of representa-tion when he also promotes the value of disguise? A disguise whose valueis concealment not only from those in control of political power but alsofrom the person in control of what Foucault has termed the "author func-tion"? Seltzer sees, ultimately, the incompatibility of aesthetic value andpolitics as the message of James's novel:

If James's novel is systematically the story of a criminal continuitybetween seeing and power, this continuity is finally disowned. If Jamesworks toward a demystifying of the realist policing of the real, this policework is finally remystified, recuperated as the "innocent" work of theimagination. (56)

But I cannot fully agree. To me it is exactly in the concept of theatricalitythat James brings together both the political and the aesthetic - and in amore meaningful way than just offering an imaginary solution to unresolv-able social contradictions. In deconstructing his position on representation(as discussed below) in "The Art of Fiction," the James of this novel isoffering a very political statement about the role of multiplicity and how

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representation and the aristocratic ideal of aesthetic value ultimately failwhen confronted with the non-representable empty space of the "sinisteranarchic underworld." This empty space, James suggests, must be revealedin all "its power and its hate," but representation ultimately fails to do thatexcept through the "innocence" of the imagination. It is the same failure of"making it all up" for which James chastizes Anthony Trollope in "The Artof Fiction": a calling for the reader's attention to the fiction of art.

By understanding the connections between concepts of aesthetic valueand radical politics, and hence, the connections between art and power inThe Princess Casamassima, we can understand James's disruption of hispremises concerning the value of representation. First, we must examine theaesthetic value of fiction as representational authority, as it is argued in"The Art of Fiction."

The fiction of art

I'd prefer art to mirror life, if it's all the same to you.Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

In "The Art of Fiction," Henry James defines the novel "in its broadestdefinition" as "a personal, a direct impression of life; that, to begin with,constitutes its value, which is greater or less according to the intensity ofthe impression" (170). James's major concern in this essay is what role the

author plays in constructing the impression that the artistic form of thenovel accurately reflects the historical representation of the past. For James,the novel ls history, is a representation of "real life," and in "The Art ofFiction," he severely criticizes the techniques of writers such as Trollope -who break the illusory continuity of narrative only to admit that it is allmade up - as "a betrayal of a sacred office" (167). James promotes therepresentational authority of the author as the standard of judgment bywhich a good novel, one which represents life, can be recognized. Theauthor functions, then, to sort details and events into a stable unity reflect-ing real life.

In "What Is an Author," Foucault defines this Jamesian tactic or pose ofnarrative authority as the "author function." According to Foucault, theconcept of "author," of an individual whose name is affixed to the text-as-property, plays "the role of the regulator of the fictive" (119). This role bothdetermines and limits the production of meaning in a literary text:

the author is not an indefinite source of significations which fill a work;the author does not precede the works; he is a certain functional principleby which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by

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which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the freecomposition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction. In fact, if weare accustomed to presenting the author as a genius, as a perpetualsurging of invention, it is because, in reality, we make him function inexactly the opposite function. (119)

If the author is the anchor of authenticity, as well as the origin of meaning

and truth in fiction, that function also plays the role of impeding the

proliferation of meaning through the establishment of "the author" into an

ideological figure. For Foucault, the author function is an example ofideological production, or the inversion of a "historically given function,"where "the author [becomes] an ideological product, since we represent himas the opposite of his historically real function" (119). At the same time,writing, according to Foucault, is referential only to itself, but is notconfined to itself:

Referring only to itself, but without being restricted to the confines of itsinteriority, writing is identified with its own unfolded exteriority. Thismeans that it is an interplay of signs arranged less according to itssignified content than according to the very nature of the signifier.Writing unfolds like a game Qeu) that invariably goes beyond its ownrules and transgresses its limits. (102)

Because it is a game or, in the Derridian sense, aplay, writing exists as aparadox, art disrupts the very premises and rules by which it is supposedlygoverned. Denida argues in Dissemination that if reading and writing are

one, reading is writing, then the result is not unity but a tearing apart of thatunity, through the playful addition of a supplementary thread via readingthat disrupts the notion of writing as an absolute object. "One must then, ina single gesture, but doubled, read and write. The reading and writingsupplement must be rigorously prescribed, but by the necessities of a game,

by the logtc of play, signs to which the system of all textual powers must be

accorded and attuned" (64).Even James himself, in "The Art of Fiction,"declares that "art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise fromflying in the face of presumptions" (175). As we shall see, this is exactlywhat James does to his own presumptions about artistic representation inThe Princess Casamassima.

Foucault's point is that the "death" of the author, or the effacement of the

writing subject as arbiter of meaning, is a point of rupture or discontinuitythat liberates a text from the "authority" of the ideological construct"author" and allows us to explore the meaning of its "unfolded exteriority."Foucault insists that "we must locate the space left empty by the author'sdisappearance, follow the distribution of gaps and breaches, and watch forthe opening that this disappearance uncovers" (105). James's emphasis on

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the author's "execution" as a standard of judgment, on how well a writer isable to produce that "exquisite correspondence with life," can be read in thespirit of play, of a game, for it contains a marvelous pun. Granted, James'sconcept is another attempt to fix a moment of origin as a guarantor ofmeaning and value. But if we "execute" the author function, in the sense ofeliminating it, we find ourselves in the position of empty space. In addition,when temporary manifestations of order disappear into the black hole of thegrid of continuities and discontinuities, the liberation of meaning occurs. AsDerrida comments at the beginning of '?lato's Pharmacy,"

there is always a surprise in store for the anatomy or physiology of anycriticism that might think it had mastered the game, surveyed all thethreads at once, deluding itself, too, in wanting to look at the text withouttouching it, without laying a hand on the "object," without risking -which is the only chance of entering into the game, by getting a fewfingers caught - the addition of some new thread. (63)

The "new thread" I am introducing into this consideration of the uses andmeaning of aesthetic value is anarchy. Anarchy is traditionally viewed as achaotic resistance to State control, an outside threat to order and stabilitythat seems beyond control because of the very discontinuities, the binaryopposite of the continuities of order, it embodies. As something excludedfrom the State system of order, anarchy is classified as dangerous, outside,alien; however, the excluded is dangerous precisely because it contains thepower to affect the system from which it has been excluded. Anarchymeans the State system of power and order derives its power from itsposition relative'to what it has marginalized and excluded. But that meansconcepts of order and origin are repressions, exclusions, marginalizations ofthe essentially discontinuous nature of.the gridwork of social power in theirillusions of continuity and totality. In speaking of The Pincess Casamas-sima, the first American novel to deal with the concept of anarchy andanarchists, John Carlos Rowe has already noted a reciprocity between theState concept of order and what this concept has excluded as disorder,chaos, anarchy:

Even more subversively, the ruling order permir,s, even invites, suchpowerless radicalism, because it knows its "other," its antagonist, to beno threat in that it attracts, centralizes and defuses the radical energies ofits various members. In the place of revolution, these radicals get theconsolations of their weekly meetings, their secret societies, and theirparanoia. (187)

Yet in The Princess Casamassima James has many more things to sayabout this reciprocal relationship betwen government and anarchy, controland chaos. He questions his own stand in "The Art of Fiction" on the

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authenticity of the author function. Rather than giving us a "direct impres-

sion" of life, James, through the disruption of his premises, as detailed in

the preface to The Princess Casamassima. offers "a presentation not ofsharp particulars, but of loose appearances, vague motions and sounds and

symptoms, just perceptible presences and general looming possibilities"(47).In doing so, he provides what Derrida calls a supplementary thread

that becomes a disruptive commentary on the failure of representation to

"see" through the surface details of life. The thread reveals "the suggested

neilrness (to all our apparently ordered life) of some sinister anarchic

underworld, heaving in its pain, its power and its hate" (47). Michael

Anesko terms this conflict in James a "vocational debate" between the

novel as art and as an object of commerce (111). It is this debate between

the aesthetic and the economic values of art that tears apart the life ofHyacinth Robinson. In the underworld of anarchy, James has discovered his

non-representational black hole.

The theater of representation

The only reason for the existence of the novel is thatit does attempt to represent life.

Henry James, "The A1 of Fiction"

In The Novel and the Police, D.A. Miller, writes, "the novel's criticalrelation to society, much advertised in the novel and its literary criticism,masks the extent to which modern social organ\zation has made even

'scandal' a systematic function of its routine self maintenance" (x11).In The

Princess Casamassima, the anarchists function in the same way as scandal,

revealing a society that allows them to defuse their revolutionary impulses

in its systematic function of routine self-maintenance. James's model forthis function is the theater, with its basis in dramatic illusion and representa-

tion. As Fredric Jameson argues:

The secondary model which organizes Jamesian point of view is themetaphor and the ideal of theatrical representation. As in the develop-menf of perspective (itself the end product of a theatrical metaphor), the,

structural coiollary of the point of view of the spectator is the unity oforganization of the theatrical space and the theatrical scene. (231-232)

But as we have seen, there is no unity of "the point of view of the spectator"

in Hyacinth Robinson, whose identity is fragmented between worlds. Anyunity of theatrical spectator, space, and scene is the fantasy of omniscientcontrol, the fantasy of a representational realism that is an illusion of power.

Hyacinth reveals the fantasy of representational realism, in that he is the

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embodiment of the multiplicity of conflicts that the novel portrays. AsRowe points out, "Hyacinth's self-consciousness can be the recognitiononly of his lack of a 'self other than those roles whereby he attempts tolegitimate himself in a world that brands him illegitimate" (165). While theindividual is the source of supreme power in the creation of art, Hyacinthdiscovers that individuals are of little or no importance in the socfrzs itself,which always classifies threats as outside, other. In fact, individuals becomealways other, playin g a p{t in the theater of the socius which the masters ofthe theater will always write for them in their attempt to belong. The ironyis that, by participating in this dramatic illusion, they will always beexcluded from the system of power.

It is in the theater where Hyacinth first meets the Princess, "the mostremarkable woman in Europe" (186), who is his entrance into both theworld of the aristocracy and the world of the anarchists. When CaptainSholto requests that Hyacinth join the Princess, to talk about "the lowerorders, the rising democracy, the spread of nihilism, and all that" (188),Hyacinth immediately blurs the distinction between reality and fiction intoa literary illusion with his response: "being whistled for by a princesspresented itself to Hyacinth as an indignity endured gracefully enough bythe heroes of several French novels in which he had found a thrillinginterest" (188). In this state of confusion between "art" and "reality," thisblurring of usually opposed classifications, Hyacinth enters the Princess'sstage box while the Pearl of Paraguay is in progress, the actors voicesblending with the voices in the box. The result is a scene of dramaticillusion where Hyacinth is seduced into the world of both aristocraticaesthetic value and radical ideological politics. Glimpsing the Princess forthe first time, Hyacinth trembles with revelation:

That head, where two or three diamond stars glittered in the thick,delicate hair which defined its shape, suggested to Hyacinth somethingantique and celebrated, which he had admired of old - the memory wasvague - in a statue, in a picture, in a museum. (l9l-192)

The Princess is seen, through the dramatic illusion of Hyacinth's vision, tobe a living work of art, one capable of transforming his mundanecraftsman's life as a bookbinder into theater, a spectacle, that makes "one'sown situation seem a play within the play" (192). His inability to sort thedetails of her "real" appearance into a representation revealing her truecharacter, however, is James's telling comment on the failure of representa-tion to accurately mirror the underworld of chaos and terror that thePrincess's antique, "eternal" beauty hides. In the "apparently ordered life"of the socius, disguise, not seeing, role playing, not identity, are the sourcesof power.

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It is exactly this supposed power of art to order or remake life, tostabilize Hyacinth's fragmented identity, that James begins to question as asystem of power, especially as he exposes the theatrical dimensions ofHyacinth's revelation. According to Rowe,

the aesthetic in which the ennobling and idealizing functions of art aredesigned to give the appearance ofcoherence and order to a fickle socialorder belongs fully to the discursive practices of the dominant ideology.Close to official propaganda, such art also works to perpetuate certainfalse distinctions between "art" and "reality." (169)

Yet far from being divorced from humanity, a "monument of unagingintellect," the Princess is a woman of many faults and contradictions, whois haunted by a fear of the common. Her title is, in many ways, theatrical as

well, a title received through a bad marriage which allowed her to rise intothe aristocracy and a condition of unhappiness that leads her into an interestin the radical politics she thinks can undermine the system which has

provided her unhappiness. Like Hyacinth, moreover, she too is illegitimate,the offspring of an American lady and an Italian cavalier, an exact reversalof the differences between Hyacinth's parents. Illegitimate, outside, other,her status based upon contradictions and not on an origin or authority ofpower, the Princess embraces the very aristrocratic system which excludesher, only to find herself marginalized in marriage and, ironically, attemptingto destroy the system by making use of the safety valves of power that thesystem allows in its atternpts at self-maintenance. In participating in thetheater of dramatic illusion, both the Princess and Hyacinth fail to achievethe power of ordering their lives. Instead they remain fragmented andexcluded through the operations of the power of "order." Hyacinth, abookbinder, can only bind together the theatrical (or narrative) roles thatothers author for him, always in a temporary illusion of stable identity.

Now that the Princess has achieved the ascension up the social ladderwhich Hyacinth so desperately wants, she finds herself personallyhumiliated and wishing to destroy the class system in a desire to returx toher beginnings. From this position she is able to seduce Hyacinth and, lostin the world of dramatic illusion, he is unable to see into this dark world ofcontradictory purposes; instead, he goes home and binds a copy of Ten-nyson in blue-tinted Russian leather for the Princess, further falling into theworld of illusion that his desire for art and aristocracy brings him: "raresensations and impressions, moments of acute happiness, almost always,with Hyacinth, in retrospect, became rather mythic and legendary" (254).

For the dominant aesthetic of the art-loving aristocracy, according toJames, is one of collecting and contemplation. The Princess is a collector,and Hyacinth is one more interesting bibelot for her to add to her collection.

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The Prince, her estranged husband, best personifies this ideal of aristocraticcontemplation and inaction which, in the aesthetic ideology noted earlier,works of art always serve to foster: "he could remain motionless, with theaid of some casual support for his high, lean person, considering serenelyand inexpressively any object that might lie before him and presenting hisaristocratic head at a favourable angle, for periods of extraordinary length"(233).

Hyacinth is invited to the Princess's country estate, the seat of aris-tocratic contemplation, after making his "blind vow of obedience" toHoffendahl, "the Maestro ... the Master indeed, the very genius of a newsocial order" (332-333). He is certain Hoffendahl has picked him toassassinate a government official because "the Master knew how to pick outhis men" (334). Once there, Hyacinth formulates his idea that he has madethe wrong oath to the wrong "Master" and is playing the wrong role. Onceagain, through his ability for dramatic illusion, Hyacinth transforms thePrincess into something she is not: while reading a story by M. OctaveFeuillet, he sees her as a fantasy, "presenting herself to our young man, atthat moment, as a sudden incarnation of the heroine of M. Feuillet's novel,in which he had instantly become immersed" (308). This time, though,Hyacinth's representation of the Princess is shattered by the revelation thatshe already knows Hofendahl personally, and he is "thrown quite offbalance by this representation of the ground the Princess had alreadytraversed" (332). Hyacinth's introduction into the ordered harmony of theworld of the English country estate, which leads to his embracing of thearistocratic tradition of art as salvation, is ironic because Medley and thePrincess contain all the disordered contradictions of his life that he isseeking to escape. In the theatrical world of the aristocracy, Hyacinthdiscovers that revolutionaries and aristocrats are motivated by the samehuman drives of ambition and greed, drives that are always played out asrepresentations, or roles, of some other's design. There is no ultimateMaster of the theater outside the theater, only an endless displacement ofmasks within theatrical simulation.

The opposite of the inactive contemplation of art is action, and on thislevel the terrorist act that Hyacinth has vowed to commit can be seen asantithetical to an objet d'art. contemplation and inaction within theframework of the system only reinforces the system; ironically, the aris-tocratic value of inaction characteizes the anarchists involved in Hoffen-dahl's plot, the ones who meet at the "Sun and Moon" to discuss radicalpolitics, but never act upon their destructive desires. Violence functions forthem in the same way that art functions for the aristocracy: it is an object ofcontemplation, but something never translatable into action. Therefore, theauthority of Hoffendahl's plot, as well as the aims and motivations of the

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revolutionaries, are revealed to be fictions. The myth that they are "of the

people," rather than individuals serving a Master who is really an illusion ofauthority (the "author" of the plot), only serves to fix their "meaning," tomarginalize them as other.

Hyacinth, through the desire to escape action, decides to embrace the

ideal of aristocratic inaction and become a preserver, rather than a destroyer

of tradition. He attempts to flee back into the fiction of a stable social order

by leaving England for Paris,"home" of revolution and of half his ancestry.

Along the boulevards of the City of Light, Hyacinth discovers that "the

great legend of the French Revolution, sanguinary and heroic, was more

real to him here than anywhere else; and strangely, what was most present

was not its turpitude and horror, but its magnificent energy, the spirit of lifethat had been in it, not the spirit of death" (393). This discovery of the spirit

of life, where "the shadow was effaced by the modem fairness of fountain

and statue, the stately perspective and composition" (393), turns Hyacinth

back toward the aristocratic ideal of inaction. While recognizing that this

system of art and power is built upon human misery, Hyacinth comes to

believe that "the splendid accumulations of the happier few, to which,

doubtless, the miserable many have also in their degree contributed" (396)

are a system worth preserving, that the passive contemplation of art ispreferable to the violent action that Hoffendahl's "sacred cause" demands.

James's description of Hoffendahl's plot aS a "sacred cause" recalls his

description of the representational artifice of the author as a "sacred office"

in "The Art of Fiction." In linking together the anarchist dream of power

with the author's intent of omniscient control, James is revealing that the

relationship between art and power, between representation and reality, is

primarily an illusion, a fiction. Order exists only in the imagination.

According to Rowe, "The Princess Casamassima addresses a particular

conception of artistic representation, in which the appearance of formal

autonomy and the complementary identity of a controlling, omniscient

author might be judged to be the 'work' of other, more powerful social

forces" (180). The origin of power is not tied up with contradictions but

with discontinuities in the gridwork of social power. Caught up in a binary

system of representation where one alternative is only the mirror image ofthe other, where action masquerades as inaction and vice versa, Hyacinthcan only flip-flop from one extreme to the other.

In a letter to the Princess, Hyacinth writes why the aristocratic traditionof art is valuable and must not be torn down:

The monuments and treasures of art, the great palaces and properties, theconquests of learning and taste, the general fabric of civilization as weknow it, based, if you will, upon all the despotisms, the cruelties, theexclusions, the monopolies and the rapacities of the past, but thanks to

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which, all the same, the world is less impracticable and life moretolerable. (396)

Even though the socius is based upon a violent and reprehensible past, itmust be tolerated because it is also a system that produces the works of artwhich make life "tolerable." Art, according to Hyacinth, consists of those"things with which the aspirations and the tears of generations have been

mixed" (396), a tradition which Hoffendahl wishes to tear "into strips so

that every one might have a little piece" (396-397). The value of art is thatits beauty, even though it is built upon a foundation of misery, is exclusion-ary: it makes life tolerable only for those happy few who can afford it.Hyacinth wishes to be one of those, and his dramatic illusion of the aes-

thetic value of art does not allow him to see that he, too, will always be

excluded by a system so violently opposed to any concept of democracy.Hyacinth, then, is caught in this contradictory gridwork of social power,

at a time when the transformation toward the concept of democracy was

occurring all around him: "What was most in Hyacinth's mind was the idea,

of which every pulsation of the general life of his time was a syllable, thatthe flood of democracy was rising over the world; that it would sweep allthe traditions of the past before it" (478). Trapped in a system that promotesthe value of the changeless past, Hyacinth mistakenly links togetheranarchy and democracy, and in the paranoia of his'ordered identity "sees" a

conspiracy of dark forces lurking underneath; a conspiracy whose onlyrepresentation has been the theatrical perception of the dramatic illusion ofhis life:

[He had] the sense, vividly kindled and never quenched, that the forcessecretly anayed against the present social order were pervasive anduniversal, in the air one breathed, in the ground one trod, in the hand ofan acquaintance that one might touch, or the eye of a stranger that mightrest a moment on one's own. They were above, below, within, without,in every contact and combination of life; and it was no disproof of themto say it was too odd that they should lurk in a particular improbableform. To lurk in improbable forms was precisely their strength. (486)

This form ofparanoia is a distinguishing feature ofthe capitalist socizs; it isin this atmosphere of paranoic discontinuities and "improbable" (rather thanfixed) forms that the representational strategies of art fail: the conspiracy'sstrength being its abilities and disguise. Terrorism and anarchy inhabit anon-representational black hole; if they were representable, they could bemastered. Ironically, according to James, the system provides outlets forpowerless radicalism precisely because the radicals and the rulers operateunder the same system of motivations and desires. The fiction of Hoffen-dahl's plot is its illusion of power. Unable to commit an actual terorrist act,

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these powerless radicals rely upon Hyacinth, who, unable to carry out theassassination plot against the Duke, shoots himself in the heart. Ultimatemastery, authority, is an illusion, because it is always other to the needs andwishes of some other force; that force, in turn, is always other as well in anendless series of theatrical displacements of roles and directors. Thedramatic illusion of art is the sleight of hand that it represents the real.

In The Princess Casamassima, James inflates the role of the imaginationwhile deconstructing representation. By "making it all up," James, likeFoucault, brings into question the concept of the author function. James

may be betraying his "sacred office," but unlike Hyacinth, he is able torecognize what is really lurking in the gridwork of continuities and discon-tinuities, of chaos and multiplicity: the democracy of meaning. In the searchfor authority, the true Master will always remain secret, away from anysingle place, because that is the secret of the Master - which contradicts theconcept of mastery. Hoffendahl, as the Master, really only presents anillusion of authority. Ironically, Hoffendahl's secret plot involves thereplacement of mastery with democracy. Democracy negates the concept ofmastery. According to Lewis H. Lapham, democracy "assumes conflict notonly as the normal but also as the necessary condition of existence, and itallies itself with the freedom of mind and the continuing process of change"(8). It makes mastery multiple, making us all masters, making all meaningsequally possible and legitimate. As Gilles Deleule and Felix Guattari havewritten:

If ever there was a writer who dealt with the secret, it was Henry James.In this respect he went through an entire evolution, like a perfecting ofhis art. For he began by looking for the secret in contents, even insig-nificant, half-opened ones, contents briefly glimpsed. Then he raised thepossibility of there being an infinite form of secrecy that no longer evenrequires a content and that has conquered the imperceptible. But he raisesthis possibility only in order to ask the question, Is the secret in thecontent or in the form? And the answer is already apparent: neither.(2e0)

The secret remains a secret because of its absence. It is a black hole, non-representational. James is showing us that without the presence of theMaster, without a transcendental signified that guarantees authority, theinfinite possibilities of the imagination make meaning free, open to play - agame, if you will. That James saw writing as a game to be played with/onreaders is evident from the Preface to the New York Edition of The Turn ofthe Screw. "The merit of the tale," he writes, "as it stands, is accordingly, Ijudge, that it has struggled successfully with its dangers. It is an excursioninto chaos while remaining, like Blue-Beard and Cinderella, but an anec-dote - though an anecdote amplified and highly emphasized and returning

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upon itself; as, for that matter, Cinderella and Blue-Beard return. I needscarcely add after this that it is a piece of igenuity pure and simple, of coldartistic calculation, an amusette to catch those not easily caught (the 'fun' ofthe capture of the merely witless being ever but small), the jaded, thedisillusioned, the fastidious" (120). The value of writing as game, accordingto James, is "the intellectual echos it may again, long after, set in motion"(120). Through his questioning of the powers of aesthetic value, representa-tion, and narrative authority, James has ironically eame,d the title of Master.It is a brilliant disguise.

References

Anseko, Michael. "Friction With the Market": Henry James and the Profession ofAuthorship. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism andSchizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 1987.

Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1978.

Foucault, Michel. lnnguage, Counter-Mem.ory, Practice: Selected Essays andInterviews. Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca, NY: CornellUniversity Press, 1977.

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