American Memory in Henry James: Void and Value

American Memory in Henry James is about the cultural, historical and moral dislocations at the heart of Henry James' explorations of American identity between power and love; modernity and history; indeterminate social forms and enduring personal values. It is about the power, and the limits, of the language of morality and interpretive imagination as James grapples with what America and Europe have in common and what, because their contexts and sense of history are so profoundly different, they cannot have in common. Its great theme is the tensions that impelled James ultimately to stretch the novel, his beloved "prodigious form", almost to breaking point, in search of an ultimately elusive synthesis. The American Scene his account of an America, revisited after long absence, that was reinventing itself right down to the touchstones of its identity is its entry point; The Golden Bowl is its primary testing ground. Part I sets the scene, exploring the evolution through which James, the passionate explorer of Europe's "composite historic light", comes to a troubled reinterpretation of America through Europe. Part II is a reading of the cultural, aesthetic and moral conflicts in The Ambassadors. Parts III and IV explore in detail the contradictory moral, cultural and philosophical pressures in The Golden Bowl. Finally, Part V returns to the Jamesian sense of history, and of America, which were implicit in 'American City' both as cultural project, and as emblem of incommensurate values. In his last unfinished projects, James wrestled with the creation of a semblance of intelligible unity and moral identity from the raw material of a radically altered 'new America' which fascinated and appalled him. If the imagination and representational powers that produced the Bowl ultimately failed, it was a failure that opens up questions about the limits of language. These are questions that transcend the historical moment and the specifically Jamesian sense of dislocation, to go to the heart of modern identity, and the nature of literary endeavour.

William Righter was Reader Emeritus in English Literature at the University of Warwick.