Tea at Trianon: Henry James’s Difficult, Powerful Final Novel

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, April 3, 2022

Henry James’s Difficult, Powerful Final Novel

From LitHub:

The Golden Bowl is a novel about secrets, about what happens to an immensely wealthy family when its secrets begin to rise to the surface. It is James’s most difficult work, an interweaving of filaments of words and sentences, luring the reader on as he begins to sense the eroticism and cruelty embedded in it. The secrets in James’s novel are made more awful because they are never explicitly defined, the people often silent, mirroring the book’s atmosphere of concealment and secrecy.

Typical of James’s “Late Style,” the book has a muffled quality, its characters moving from grand estate to grand estate—(no one seems to have a job)—their exquisite manners veiling their actions, none of them speaking the truth. One of its pleasures for the modern reader is that James takes us back into a world that no longer exists, a 19th Century world of grand estates and formal gardens in which the characters enact their desires and their lies.

James’s style became increasingly complicated throughout his career. In The Golden Bowl, his last complete novel, the complexity reached its apogee. Gone are the typical conventions of the Victorian novel epitomized by Dickens—the scene fully described, people speaking more or less in full sentences, like actors on the stage. In the Victorian novel, the characters are known for what they look like and what they say. James’s characters are known through the ins and outs and digressions of their consciousnesses. The reader sees the truth of his inner life, reflected back at him from the page. James’s style has been called a pre-cursor of modernism and it reverberated through succeeding generations of writers, from Edith Wharton, to Joseph Conrad, to Ezra Pound and others who took their cue from him, delving into their subjects’ minds.

People in The Golden Bowl often speak in partial sentences, not in the set speeches and complete paragraphs of James’s predecessors. Almost for the first time in the development of the novel, the reader recognizes the reality of his own language, its fits and starts, its hesitations. James understood that when confronted with the unthinkable, people often cannot find the words to express it, that unfinished utterances convey far more effectively the horror of the situation, leaving the reader to wonder about its worst possibilities. (Read more.)