The Contingencies of Style

Abstract

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-François 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).

And the great domed head, con gli occhi onesti e tardi

Moves before me, phantom with weighted motion,

Grave incessu, drinking the tone of things,

and the old voice lifts itself

weaving an endless sentence.

(Ezra Pound, Canto VII)