Abstract
Reading Henry James can make us feel as uneasy and disoriented as some of his characters are. In the maze of James’s language, both readers and characters find themselves struggling to get their bearings somewhere in his sentences, trying to contain their constant flicker and spill of meaning. James’s sentences, indeed, are disorienting, keeping things off balance by their delaying tactics, ambiguity of reference, and proliferating clause and phrase:
The principle I have just mentioned as operating had been, with the most newly disembarked of the two men, wholly instinctive — the fruit of a sharp sense that, delightful as it would be to find himself looking, after so much separation, into his comrade’s face, his business would be a trifle bungled should he simply arrange for this countenance to present itself to the nearing steamer as the first ‘note,’ [for him] of Europe. (AMI, p. 3)*
Coming as it does in the first paragraph of The Ambassadors, this is certainly a sentence to be reckoned with, vibrating with distinctions and picking up meanings at several levels. In its syntax, it requires a close attention to words and to word order. You can not take it in at a glance — ‘you can’t skip a word’, as William James complained of his brother’s ‘curliness’ of style (William James, 1920, vol. 2, p. 278) — nor, he might have added, can you afford to miss the connections among them.
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Up to his middle in Difference … his judgements, conclusions, discriminations … more or less in solution — on the pot, on the fire, stewing and simmering again, waiting to come up in what will be doubtless new combinations.
(Scenario for The Ambassadors, The Notebooks of Henry James)
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Notes
In this regard, J. Hillis Miller: ‘A recent skirmisher in the rarified atmosphere of pure theory argues that criticism went wrong when it became close reading [a reference to Gerald Graff’s ‘Who Killed Criticism’, American Scholar, vol. 49, no. 3 (Summer 1980) 337–55]. This, if I may say so, is a major treason against our profession. That profession is nothing if it is not philology, the love of words, the teaching of reading, and the attempt in written criticism to facilitate the act of reading’ (1982, p. 21).
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© 1993 Mary Cross
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Cross, M. (1993). Radical Syntax. In: Henry James. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22661-0_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22661-0_1
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