face to face

via futurenostalgia

"She had a sad, soft, pale face, which (and it was the effect of her whole head) looked as if it had been soaked, blurred, and made vague by exposure to some slow dissolvent. The long practice of philanthropy had not given accent to her features; it had rubbed out their transitions, their meanings. The waves of sympathy, of enthusiasm, had wrought upon them in the same way in which the waves of time finally modify the surface of old marble busts, gradually washing away their sharpness, their details." Henry James, The Bostonians (1886)

I've been writing about ecstasy and de-composition in James's prefaces, with an effort to lead up to this moment in The Bostonians, where the dis-figuring force of enthusiasm is on display in the exposed face of Miss Birdseye. After multiple efforts, I'm still trying to say something about the pathos of this moment (it strikes me as particularly a "moment," engaged as it is with questions of historicity, monuments, with the analogy of time). It is parodic, no doubt, but from within the parody it registers a double loss: if Miss Birdseye is a monument to mid-century reform fervor gone defunct or dysfunctional in the post-Reconstruction era, the monument itself is compromised, de-composed, eroded. The body that stands in for history is fragile, worn, disfigured, at risk--a move that could signal the conservatism of the novel, its alignment with defunct or dysfunctional ideas of privacy. But that the realist narrative cleaves in such detail to the lack of detail--that it offers a portrait that so strikingingly undoes itself as portrait--makes me think otherwise. Miss Birdseye's exposure (like the various exposures and confessions at work in the prefaces) signals a certain tendency towards dissolution (c.f. James's professed fondness for Miss Birdseye, "the best figure in the book" despite her "essential formlessness"). Another thread here--a thread I need to pick up (this is also a piece about ficelles, thread, fringe, boundaries, textiles)--has to do with the stillness of statuary and the wave-like work of enthusiasm. As Barbara Johnson notes, a monument "is supposed to confer on a memory the immortality that only inanimate things can possess." Miss Birdseye's enthusiasm introduces corruption, but it also undoes the stillness of statuary, of type-casting or molding--character becomes possible via a certain corruptibility (c.f. Pygmalion; Frankenstein; James's tenderness towards his "monstrous" little texts).

I wonder, too, about the loss of detail here; Miss Birdseye remains a detail in the text, notable for her very formlessness but also highly accessory in the novel (and highly accessorized: the glasses that keep sliding down her nose, the hat that keeps falling off--as if the body itself ceased to be a fixture). I wonder about the gendering of the detail, whether gender and form come together in the analogy between the body and the text that James is quite fond of...

and this brings me to skin. The skin that melts, that fails to hang together, the skin that stays a skin in the discourse of the realist novel (and not, for example, a mask or an index--c.f. Anne Cheng's recent work on modernist skin). Realism's investment in the legibility of character (c.f. Leo Bersani's The Freudian Body) demands a move beneath or beyond the surface. Ecstasy manifested at the level of skin does something different, puncturing the surface (as a boundary or a threshold) but refusing to open onto some more instructive interiority (ex-stasis, beside the self, an ethics of tangentiality or facing, of the face to face). Exposing the face in its constant erosion, James makes a very anti-phrenological, anti-symptomatic move; he insists on the wearing away of the surface itself, on the process that marks the "public"-ness of interaction and relation. If James worked to parody "the obliteration of any idea of privacy" in this novel of the feminist movement, he also more radically aligned realism not with a hermetic, gender-specific domesticity but with its exposure and erosion (is it that?), with the threshold or the skin, the compromised and corrupted body.

the creative mind

"According to James, we bathe in an atmosphere traversed of great spiritual currents. If many of us resist others allow themselves to be carried along. And there are certain souls which open wide to the beneficent breeze. Those are the mystical souls. We know with what sympathy James studied them. When his book Religious Experience appeared, many saw in it only a series of vivid descriptions and very penetrating analyses--a psychology, they said, of religious feeling. This was a complete misinterpretation of the author's thought. The truth is that James leaned out upon the mystic soul as, on a spring, we lean out to feel the caress of the breeze on our cheek, or as, at the sea-side, we watch the coming and going of sail-boats to know how the wind blows. Souls filled with religious enthusiasm are truly uplifted and carried away: why could they not enable us to experience directly, as in a scientific experiment, this uplifting and exalting force? That is no doubt the origin, the inspiring idea of the 'pragmatism' of William James. For him those truths it is most important for us to know, are truths which have been felt and experienced before being thought."

Henri Bergson, "The Pragmatism of William James," An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903)

current events

from Henry James, The Scenic Art; Notes on Acting & the Drama (1872-1901), ed. Allan Wade (New Brunswick, 1948)

"The Théâtre Français has had the good fortune to be able to allow its traditions to accumulate. They have been preserved, transmitted, respected, cherished, until at last they form the very atmosphere, the vital air, of the establishment. A stranger feels their superior influence the first time he sees the great curtain go up; he feels that he is in a theater that is not as other theaters are. It is not only better, it is different. It has a peculiar perfection--something consecrated, historical, academic. This impression is delicious, and he watches the performance in a sort of tranquil ecstasy. [...] He has heard all his life of attention to detail, and now, for the first time, he sees something that deserves that name."

"The Théâtre Français" (1876)

"It is enough to be sorely puzzled, and have carried away a considerable store of tough problems, to be solved at leisure. One of those, for instance, will be connected, as we may surmise, with the extraordinary vogue of Mademoiselle Sarah Bernhardt, and will concern itself with enquiring into the sources of tender interest excited by this lady. I speak of her 'vogue' for want of a better word; it would require some ingenuity to give an idea of the intensity, the ecstasy, the insanity as some people would say, of curiosity and enthusiasm provoked by Mlle. Bernhardt. I spoke just now of topics, and what they were worth in the London system. This remarkable actress has filled this function with a completeness that leaves nothing to be desired [...]."

"The Comédie Française in London" (1879)

c.f. Jennifer Fleissner on the fad; here Bernhardt is the "vogue," filling her function to the end point of desire, using up the movement of curiosity and enthusiasm which is the movement of (cultural) history, the construction of "currency" (the temporality of the "current event," the movement of currency, and the tidal motion of currents all apply here).

button pressers

On the relationship between enthusiasm and the fad:

"Photography as a fad is well-nigh on its last legs, thanks principally to the bicycle craze. Those seriously interested in its advancement do not look upon this state of affairs as a misfortune, but as a disguised blessing, inasmuch as photography had been classed as a sport by nearly all of those who deserted its ranks and fled to the present idol, the bicycle. The only persons who seem to look upon this turn of affairs as entirely unwelcome are those engaged in manufacturing and selling photographic goods. It was, undoubtedly, due to the hand camera that photography became so generally popular a few years ago. Every Tom, Dick and Harry could, without trouble, learn how to get something or other on a sensitive plate, and this is what the public wanted-no work and lots of fun. Thanks to the efforts of these persons hand camera and bad work became synonymous. The climax was reached when an enterprising firm flooded the market with a very ingenious hand camera and the announcement, 'You press the button, and we do the rest.' This was the beginning of the 'photographing-by-the-yard' era, and the ranks of enthusiastic Button Pressers were enlarged to enormous dimensions. The hand camera ruled supreme."

Alfred Stieglitz, "The Hand Camera--Its Present Importance" (1897)

"The fad is that embodiment of historicity that most pressures the self-determining individual, producing instead a subject that is fully public and fully historical. What I mean is simply this: if we ascribe someone's interests or actions to a fad for that activity, we imply that those actions derive purely from inhabiting a particular moment in time. That moment was 'the time when everyone was doing x'; we might indeed say that any given moment becomes legible as a moment through the category of the fad. This is not to suggest, however, that the fad's relation to the writing of history is a straightforward one. In fact, I claim the opposite, that the fad often operates as the limit of historical knowledge."

Jennifer Fleissner, Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism (Chicago, 2004).

[note how the commercialization of photography archives the landscape, and particular the female artist/author, as residual forms]

spectral

Special thanks to the OED, always.

spectral, a.

Isaac Taylor (attr.), A Natural History of Enthusiasm (1830)

"A spectral resemblance of piety, unsubstantial and cold as the mists of night."

like a revolution

Although Jim Burden and I both live in New York, I do not see much of him there. He is legal counsel for one of the great Western railways and is often away from his office for weeks together. That is one reason why we seldom meet. Another is that I do not like his wife. She is handsome, energetic, executive, but to me she seems unimpressionable and temperamentally incapable of enthusiasm.

from the opening pages of Cather's My Antonia. There is an alternate opening chapter (included as an appendix in an edition that also had a foreward by Kathleen Norris, which I have scouted on Google Books Search but haven't yet been able to look at in depth), where the description of Burden's wife is extended:

"She was a restless, headstrong girl, even then, who liked to astonish her friends. Later, when I knew her, she was always doing something unexpected. She gave one of her town houses for a Suffrage headquarters, produced one of her own plays at the Princess Theater, was arrested for picketing during a garment-makers' strike, etc. I am never able to believe that she has much feeling for the causes to which she lends her name and her fleeting interest. She is handsome, energetic, executive, but to me she seems unimpressionable and temperamentally incapable of enthusiasm."

Perhaps not incidentally, the absence of Burden's wife enables the narrative (her lack of enthusiasm being utterly opposed to the work of narration).

The only other appearance of enthusiasm in My Antonia relates to Mrs. Harling, the domestic revolutionary:

"Her enthusiasm, and her violent likes and dislikes, asserted themselves in all the everyday occupations of life. Wash-day was interesting, never dreary, at the Harlings'. Preserving time was a prolonged festival, and house-cleaning was like a revolution."

Next up: Wharton's The House of Mirth

(more).

"Velocity, mechanics, heat, thermodynamics, light, chaos of formulae, electromagnetic induction must be called back into the Sublime, found and forgotten. Dickinson was expert in standing in corners, expert in secret listening and silent understanding. Bristling with Yankee energy, chained to an increasingly demanding agoraphobia, she moved through that particular mole of nature in her--she studied Terror. Adopted parataxis and rupture to tell the feverish haste, the loss, to warn of storm approaching--Brute force, mechanism. Cassandra was a woman. All power, including the power of love, including the nature of Time, is utterly unstable." (Howe, 116)

"Poetry is the great stimulation of life. Poetry leads past possession of self to transfiguration beyond gender. Poetry is redemption from pessimism. Poetry is affirmation in negation, ammunition in the yellow eye of a gun than an allegorical pilgrim will shoot straight into the quiet of Night's frame." (138)

Susan Howe & Joan Richardson on the work of writing as encoding the precedent and the Other, DNA and ventriloquizing, genetic code and inspired vocalization. But: poetry beyond gender?