Belatedness and Style

Abstract

The tale of belatedness and equivocal aesthetic recompense offered by The Ambassadors has often served to reinforce a current in James studies that—more or less explicitly and to vastly different effects—understands James’s style in biographical terms: its opacities or seeming evasions point to the way the man himself diffused, postponed, avoided, sublimated, obscured, or more or less missed, “life.” The novel is particularly available to such readings because of Strether’s strikingly rigorous—and, for many critics, frustrating—renunciation, which has often been read in terms of a failure to be adequate to his experience: the “exemplar of the life of the senses,” Strether, Richard Blackmur argued, is “not finally up to that life” (49–50), a diagnosis that is often extended to the author who created that temporizing American pilgrim. F. W. Dupee suggested that if James “drew on Howells for Strether’s sentiments, he drew far more on himself” (33); F. O. Matthiessen wrote that the “passive rather than active scope” of Strether’s desire “is one of the most striking consequences of James’s own peculiar conditioning” as he describes it in Notes of a Son and Brother and A Small Boy and Others (27). Strether, according to Matthiessen, speaks for James as well (28), and “neither Strether nor his creator,” he argued, “escape[s] a certain soft fussiness” (39).

Style—the foreign language within language …

Deleuze, “He Stuttered” (113)