Abstract
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.
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It isn’t playing the game to turn on the uncanny. All one’s energy goes to facing it, to tracking it.
(AMI, p. 106)
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© 1993 Mary Cross
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Cross, M. (1993). Adventures of the Signifier: The Ambassadors. In: Henry James. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22661-0_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22661-0_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-22663-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-22661-0
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