Mary Cross

The Contingencies of Style

The fiction of Henry James reveals on close examination the ‘vast thematic and semiotic network’ (de Man, 1979, p. 16), the system of relations, which structures his texts, a syntagym that attempts the paradigmatic in its effort to totalise the discourse and bring about the unity James seeks. In the face of a language that works always already against his quest, James devised a hermetic system of signs which could speak only of themselves, ‘motivated’ to serve the text and to erect the arbitrary fictional orders that would stem the tide of contingency and trace threatening to dissolve them in difference. Joining language at its own game, James mobilised a style that could accommodate and exploit the oppositions words mount against determinancy, a play of difference whose infinite movement he yet struggled to contain. His fiction may be seen as Jean-Francois Lyotard’s ‘temporary contract’, a but ‘local’ stay against the slippage of signs and the inexhaustible ‘possible utterances’ of language’s reserve that Lyotard says must restrict any attempt at meta-argument to a ‘limited time and space’ (Lyotard, 1984, p. 66). If ‘rules and categories are what the work of art itself is looking for’, it is only in form and ‘its recognizable consistency’ that they can be provided, for content is ‘missing’, in its absence alluding to the unpresentable, and in ‘pain that imagination or sensibility should not be equal to the concept’ (ibid., p. 81).

Aristotle and Business Writing: Why We Need to Teach Persuasion

As old as the rhetoric of Aristotle and as new as the latest gambit from Madison Avenue, techniques of persuasion are fundamental to business writing, motivating vital reader response to letters, memos, reports, and proposals. Persuasion, the ability to win over an audience and inspire action, is, after all, the underlying goal of most corporate correspondence, whether it’s trying to create an image, keep goodwill, or collect an overdue bill. As James L. Kinneavy observes in his comprehensive look at persuasive discourse, &dquo;Of all the uses of language, persuasion may be the most frequent&dquo; f~4 Theory of Discourse, 1980, p. 212). Indeed, in the mode of modern advertising, persuasion is virtually the language of capitalism. Everyday business writing in the office and in the classroom, however, hasn’t really begun to capitalize on that language. Millions of words are wasted when business writers neglect or fail to understand basic strategies of persuasion. In the classroom, where persuasion is easy

To ‘Glory in a Gap’: The Wings of the Dove

The ‘largeness of style’ (WDI, p. 208) that is everywhere the mark of the late Jamesian mode, becomes in The Wings of the Dove the ‘rich and obscure and portentous’ (Prefaces, p. 301) setting for a story built on deceit and carried on in the most polite of conversations. ‘Forms and ambiguities’, made ‘charming’ (Prefaces, p. 306) in the hands of such accomplished practitioners as Kate Croy and Aunt Maud, are given licence in the multiplicity of aspects James’s sentences here create, their processive structure, abstract subjects, embedded clauses and uncertainty of reference adding to the general sense of hovering, hidden meaning. Here a soap-opera melodrama, hinging on the exploitation of yet another American heiress, takes on dimension in the surround of James’s style it could never otherwise have had. And, writing at a rare time without impending serialisation to dictate his design, James, delighting in his ‘free hand’, produced a novel remarkably all of a piece, in its allusions and overlapping reference his most resonant.

The Verbal Portrait

The Portrait of a Lady offers in its insistent foregrounding of language a veritable treatise on ‘style’: style both in the sense of pretence and facades of language, and style as a questioning of these, a liberation within the exigencies language imposes on the ‘fabulist’. The Portrait is for James an interrogation, what might be called the first in a series, of his own problematic ‘archi-ecriture’ as ‘fabulist’ and architect of fiction. Exposing ‘the representational presumption on which it relies’ (Culler, 1982, p. 249) as an artificial construct, The Portrait offers to undo any preconceived notions about ‘art’ that its characters, readers, even its author, begin with. At the same time as it relies upon the hope of some unifying support from its careful method of composition, The Portrait ultimately is the result of its own contingencies.

Text and Countertext: The Golden Bowl

The Golden Bowl, James’s last completed novel, represents the apparent triumph in his art of form as content. It is a dominion achieved, for the most part, by style. Yet both James and his heroine face at the end the painful irony that even so highly wrought a form may not be adequate to what it seeks to contain.

Adventures of the Signifier: The Ambassadors

The Ambassadors is a story of signifiers, a narrative of the process of denomination by which words categorise the world. The names for things, especially for his experiences, give Strether of Woollett great trouble in Paris, trapped as he is in his own lexicon. It is his triumph, eventually, ‘to find the names’, only to discover that they do not settle anything; the signifiers are in motion and the process of denomination keeps coming undone. In reversing and displacing the conceptual order Strether arrived with, the text performs its essential deconstructive movement to up-end all his ‘categories’. In the event, Strether learns to understand language as difference, to note its most subtle plays with difference, and to recognise that knowing the names is not enough to halt the supplemental nature of language, which continues, ad infinitum, to lead him astray. The Ambassadors thus presents itself not only as a narrative of naming but as one of deconstruction. Its plot winds up and winds down on this movement.

Decoding the Code: What Maisie Knew and The Awkward Age

Maisie Farange and Nanda Brookenham are deconstructors in the making. While their stories narrate primarily their acquisition of language, once these two crack the code they become dangerous, threatening the stability of the text. Indeed, with their knowledge, they are forced to leave town, in James’s pre-emptive way of ending. Mostly they keep quiet about their secret knowledge of the signs and signifieds, too busy trying to match them up and to reconcile the play of difference in their verbal milieux.

The Jamesian Field

Henry James was very consciously an artist. His style was the result of artistic choices. In his view, it was his art. As he said of Shakespeare, [W]hat is important to note being simply our Poet’s high testimony to this independent, absolute value of Style, and to its need thoroughly to project and seat itself….. It had been in fine his material, his plastic clay; since the more subtly he applied it, the more these secrets might appear to him, at every point, one with the myriad pulses of the spirit of man. (James, 1907, vol. 16 pp. ix–xxxii) James thus took ‘Style’ seriously, as evidence of his own claim to artistry, and discussed it frequently in his prefaces, criticism and letters as the mark of the true artist. Ever the organicist, he speaks of it as a kind of ‘fusion’, a process of expression that is at one with the artist’s creation: So close is the marriage between his power of ‘rendering,’ in the light of the imagination, and whatever he sees and feels, that we should much mislead in speaking of his manner as a thing distinct from the matter submitted to it. The fusion is complete and admirable, so that, though his work is nothing if not ‘literary,’ we see at no point of it where literature or where life begins or ends; we swallow our successive morsels with as little question as we swallow food that has by proper preparation been reduced to singleness of savour.