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KENDALL JOHNSON. Henry James and the Visual.

2007; Oxford University Press; Volume: 59; Issue: 239 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/res/hgn018

1471-6968

Michael A. Peters,

Literature: history, themes, analysis

Kendall Johnson's complex and demanding book is an important addition to scholarship on James less for its capacity to ask new questions about its subject than for its willingness to address old questions in new ways. Why does the Bellegarde family refuse the financial benefits that Christopher Newman's introduction into their family would bring in The American (1877)? How did James structure his response to the overwhelmingly changed society he encountered on his return to the United States in 1904? Johnson's main subject, that is to say, is James's representation of racial and cultural inter-relations. The originality of Johnson's procedure lies in its concentrated assessment of the role of James's ‘visual’ language in structuring these concerns, and of James's use of the language of the ‘picturesque’ in representing the way in which his characters’ and narrators’ cultural sensibilities direct their visual experience. As Johnson documents, the picturesque is particularly susceptible to cultural and national prejudices and motivations; its aim to make the observer perceive ‘a particular arrangement of parts into something like a whole’ (p. 12) (as Johnson quotes one writer on the picturesque) conduces to nationalist promotions of cultural wholeness. While early theorists of the picturesque took advantage of its capacity to promote ideas of cultural and national unity, James, Johnson argues, used picturesque language to show the difficulties and limitations in realizing cultural authority. Influenced by Nancy Bentley's book The Ethnography of Manners: Hawthorne, James, Wharton (1995), Johnson contends that we should attend to James's ‘failure to be objective’, his acknowledgment of ‘truth's relativity’ and his insistence on ‘the partiality of any particular vantage on society,’ (p. 6). In a series of rich, sometimes difficult, but illuminating readings of James's varied forms of writing (travel writing, the short story, the novel, social criticism) Johnson examines the ‘function of people in James's narratives of visual experience’ (p. 8), and how James's ‘visual metaphors’ help to ‘dramatize crises in national manners’ (p. 6) at a time when ‘the rapidly changing modes of production and consumption, and new configurations of aesthetic value and cultural capital implied by the entrance of American industrial muscle on the world stage’ threaten the ‘established social codes’ (p. 9) of James's characters.