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Selected by the Modern Library as one of the best novels of all time Set amid the splendor of London drawing rooms and gilded Venetian palazzos, The.
Table of contents
This by no means prescribes some strict law of conformity. Laws of genre are established in order to be broken. Every new work to some degree breaks generic laws or establishes a new genre and new modes of consistency of which it may be the only example. All sorts of hiatuses and anacolutha, or failures in following, are possible. The adept reader will expect them. They will be defined as hiatuses or anacolutha, however, by their relation to this first sentence. It is a special kind of performative speech act. It is as though James had waved a magic wand and said, "Let there be Kate Croy waiting in exasperation for her father in his shabby quarters".
This speech act is also an implicit promise. It is a pledge to tell the rest of Kate's story and a guarantee that the rest will in one way or another fit with this first sentence. The reader knows that much will follow these words. The reader also knows that she has been plunged in medias res and that what she needs to know of what has preceded will probably be revealed in good time. The first sentence exposes a little of the novel's virtual reality, as it unfolds word by word, but it also leaves many unanswered questions.
Then she is named: "Kate Croy". But who is Kate Croy? We then learn that her father is living and that he is late for an appointment with her, to her great irritation. We also learn that she is in a room with a mantel and with a looking glass over the mantel, but where and when we are is not yet revealed. Nevertheless, the reader assumes that whatever comes after will follow from this first sentence.
THE WINGS OF THE DOVE
The first sentence establishes rules and laws for this virtual reality. It is an inaugural first step from which the whole novel grows, just as all United States history follows from the Declaration of Independence. The first sentence of The Wings of the Dove functions as a qualified declaration of independence from historical reality. It promises that the text will look like a real account but be a fictional one, an imaginary telephone book.
Since Kate Croy and all the other characters are imaginary, not real, the first sentence initiates a virtual reality into which all the realistic details, with all their verifiable verisimilitude, are transposed, translated, displaced, by which they are borrowed, given a new existence within the words of the novel. To what, then, do those words now refer? In the preface to The Golden Bowl, in a brilliant and difficult passage on which I have commented elsewhere , James asserts that re-reading his novel is like matching the words of the novel against an ideal novel to which the words more or less accurately correspond.
The ideal novel, something that exists independently of the actual words on the page, is spoken of as the "clear matter" of the tale. In this strange locution the word "matter" names a peculiar form of nonmaterial materiality. It also names "matter" in the sense one speaks of "the heart of the matter," that is, the essential subject matter.
In this case the word "matter" names the total circumstances of some event, as James in this preface calls his narrator the "historian of the matter". These phrases label the whole cycle of Arthurian or Trojan legends. These "matters" make possible innumerable stories but exist independently of them all and do not rely on any particular ones for their existence, as anyone knows who has tried to untangle the tangle of Arthurian legends and poems from medieval times down to Malory or Tennyson.
The words of the novel are one set of tracks through that field.
James expresses his satisfaction on rereading The Golden Bowl by asserting that he finds he would take the same track through the snowfield today. He expresses his dissatisfaction at reading his earlier work by saying he would now take a different path through the snow. His present footsteps sometimes match and sometimes fail to match his old footsteps, but the snowfield that is the matter of a given work exceeds them both and would have gone on existing as a possibility of being turned into words even if he had never written a word of the novel, or of the preface.
The latter registers not only an act of re-reading but an act of revisiting the clear matter of the tale, that is, the field of snow. Here is the way James puts this:. To re-read in their order my final things, all of comparatively recent date, has been to become aware of my putting the process through, for the latter end of my series as well as, throughout, for most of its later constituents quite in the same terms as the apparent and actual, the contemporary terms; to become aware in other words that the march of my present attention coincides sufficiently with the march of my original expression; that my apprehension fits, more concretely stated, without an effort or struggle, certainly without bewilderment or anguish, into the innumerable places prepared for it.
As the historian of the matter sees and speaks, so my intelligence of it, as a reader, meets him halfway, passive, receptive, appreciative, often even grateful; unconscious, quite blissfully, of any bar to intercourse, any disparity of sense between us. Into his very footsteps the responsive, the imaginative steps of the docile reader that I consentingly become for him all comfortably sink; his vision, superimposed on my own as an image in cut paper is applied to a sharp shadow on a wall, matches, at every point, without excess or deficiency. This truth throws into relief for me the very different dance that the taking in hand of my earlier productions was to lead me; the quite other kind of consciousness proceeding from that return.
Nothing in my whole renewal of attention to these things, to almost any instance of my work previous to some dozen years ago, was more evident than that no such active, appreciative process could take place on the mere palpable lines of expression — thanks to the so frequent lapse of harmony between my present mode of motion and that to which the existing footprints were due.
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It was, all sensibly, as if the clear matter being still there, even as a shining expanse of snow spread over a plain, my exploring tread, for application to it, had quite unlearned the old pace and found itself naturally falling into another, which might sometimes indeed more or less agree with the old tracks, but might most often, or very nearly, break the surface in other places. What was thus predominantly interesting to note, at all events, was the high spontaneity of these deviations and differences, which became thus things not of choice, but of immediate and perfect necessity: the necessity to the end of dealing with the quantities in question at all.
James, , xiii-xiv. James measures the actual words on the page by their degree of fit to his present apprehension of the matter of the novel. He speaks as though that matter did not depend on his consciousness or on his words for its existence. The "historian of the matter," that is the narrator of this or that novel, does not invent that matter. He simply "puts the process through" in one way or another, that is, tells it as well as he can.
He makes one set of tracks among innumerable possible tracks across the trackless snow. James now as re-reader of his own work measures that work not against his own ideal of satisfactory form but against his new apprehension of a "matter" that has ge ne on having a separate existence not only independent of the words on the page but also independent of James's thinking of it or not.
He stresses the spontaneity and necessity of his present apprehension of the matter. It is not a matter of free invention, but a revelation dictated to him by the matter itself. The snow shines and glistens with the force of an illumination, an exposing, a showing forth, an uncovering. It is "clear" in the sense of "transparent," open to comprehension. The clear matter is still there and would still be there even if every copy of The Golden Bowl were destroyed and even if James's consciousness were to vanish, as indeed it now has, definitively.
The novel invents the story not in the modern sense of making it up but in the older sense of "inventio" as discovery of something hitherto hidden that has nevertheless always been there, waiting to be brought out into the light, though only the words of The Golden Bowl can give the reader access to it. It is to this separately existing matter that the words of the novel refer. The novel makes transferred use of all the words that apparently refer to historically real places and things in order to refer by catechresis to features of the clear matter of the story.
I say "catachresis" because that word names a "forced and abusive transfer" of words naming real entities to make them name more occult entities that have no proper names of their own and therefore can be named only in this indirect way. The way this works is expressed allegorically by James as the relation between the tracks in snow and the shining expanse of trackless snow that was there before anyone walked across it.
What actually gets written is always a figurative substitute for what can never be expressed or referred to directly, but only in figures like that of the snowfield or like that of the novel itself as a vast integument of invented words bringing into existence personages or consciousnesses in interaction.
Is there any evidence that it is exemplified in a specific way by The Wings of the Dove?
The Wings of Henry James | The New Yorker
The preface to Wings precedes that to The Golden Bowl and was presumably written earlier. It contains one curious feature that confirms in anticipation the strange doctrine of reference in the preface to The Golden Bowl. The Wings of the Dove, James says in its preface, is, like so many of his works, at once too long and too short. It is too long because the whole first half exceeds its predetermined bounds and leaves James not enough space for the second half. The novel, this architectural figure implies, is constructed of self-enclosed units with spaces between that are then set side by side to make a structure.
The spaces between might be identified as the gaps created when James shifts abruptly from one reflecting plate or center of consciousness, represented in the narrator's inveterate indirect discourse, to another one.
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An example is the shift from Kate's consciousness to Densher's across the blank page between the end of Book First and the beginning of Book Second. At the end of Book First the reader is still placed within Kate's mind. In the opening pages of Book Second the reader gradually enters into Densher's mind, from which perspective Kate's mind, so recently presented with intimacy and interiority, is now to a considerable degree alien and other, secret.
Much more remains to be said of this law of rotation, but that must be deferred for now.
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What architectural fabric the novel's building blocks construct the further development of the figure makes explicit. It is a bridge. This structure carries the reader from here to there over a stream. The plan was one thing, namely an intention to represent fully and adequately the subject or "matter".
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What James actually succeeded in writing is quite another thing. What he sees on re-reading the novel is not a solid narrative texture or architecture but a torn fabric full of gaps, hiatuses, absences, emptinesses, places where what should have been represented is not represented or only represented inadequately, though it remains there, waiting to be said. James measures his failure by the still almost palpable presence of all in the matter that did not get said.
His account is punctuated by the "alas" of regret and compunction:. I have just said that the process of the general attempt is described from the moment the "blocks" are numbered, and that would be a true enough picture of my plan. Yet one's plan, alas, is one thing and one's result another; so that I am perhaps nearer the point in saying that this last strikes me at present as most characterised by the happy features that were, under my first and most blest illusion, to have contributed to it.
I meet them all, as I renew acquaintance, I mourn for them all as I remount the stream, the absent values, the palpable voids, the missing links, the mocking shadows, that reflect, taken together, the early bloom of one's good faith, xiii. A bridge gets built and bears weight after all. James enunciates, on the basis of this act of re-reading, an unforeseen law unforeseen by me at least whereby the failure in representation is the prerequisite of its success.
This is "the 'law' of the degree in which the artist's energy fairly depends on his fallibility" xiii. The au thor must be the "dupe" of "his prime object," or "illusion," the object of his "good faith," that is, his beguiled confidence in the possibility of adequately rendering or bringing to light what I have been calling the "matter" of the story.
This belief in an illusion is necessary if he is to be "at all measurably a master, that of his actual substitute for it" xiii. The actual novel is not the initially intended work, the ideal representation of the matter that remains an impalpable illusion, like a ghost in broad daylight , but a relatively poor substitute for it.
It bears weight. The reader can get from here to there across it. It is as though the bridge builder had put down solid piers to hold up his bridge, but had then built the actual bridge in another place, where it hangs in the air, without solid foundations or abutments. Nevertheless this foundationless bridge serves its purpose.
This happens "by the oddest chance in the world" xiii.