The Reality and Reflectors in Henry James’s International Novel1
Diana-Gabriela Popa (Lupu), “Al. I. Cuza” University, Iasi, Romania
Abstract: Henry James disapproves the traditional omniscient convention. He insists that the
authorial functions are taken by reflectors and the text has its own fictional reality, made of
impressions. His international reflectors are extremely flexible and complex fictional characters
with abilities of „seeing‟, of perception and analysis similar to those of any other human being.
James chooses a great variety of reflectors, from male to female, young to old, innocent to
experimented, provincial to cosmopolitan and also American to European.
Key Words: reflectors, fictional reality, central intelligence, observer.
Henry James was a promoter of change in the traditional poetics of the novel. His ideas can be
found in the (pre)modernist and post modernist literature. In his famous critical works, Henry
James disapproves the traditional omniscient author convention, the creator‟s intrusive moral
commentaries about his characters, but also the French naturalists‟ impersonal, morally neutral
method of omniscient narration. In The Art of Fiction, for example, he expresses his
dissatisfaction that: “certain accomplished novelists have a habit of giving themselves away
which must often bring tears to the eyes of people who take their fiction seriously.” 2 He insists
the authorial functions are taken over by the narrators and the text has its own phenomenological
reality, and not a total control from the author: “A novel is a living thing, all one and continuous,
like any other organism, and in proportion as it lives will it be found, I think, that in each of the
parts there is something of each of the other parts.”3
James‟s conception about the novel is clearly stated in his famous critical study: “A novel is, in
its broadest definition, a personal, a direct impression of life that /…/constitutes its value, which
is greater or less according to the intensity of that impression”.4Since the reality is similar to a
puzzle made of impressions, the result is obvious: “in a novel the truth is never complete”. 5 That
is why it is very difficult to establish or quantify the reality: “The characters, the situation, which
strike one as real will be those that touch and interest one most, but the measure of reality is very
difficult to fix. The reality of Don Quixote or of Mr. Micawber is a very delicate shade; it is a
reality so colored by the author‟s vision that, vivid as it may be, one would hesitate to propose it
1
This work was supported by the European Social Fund in Romania, under the responsibility of the
Managing Authority for the Sectoral Operational Programme for Human Resources Development 2007-2013( grant
POSDRU/88/1.5/S/47646).
2
James, Henry, “The Art of Fiction” in The Portable Henry James, edited by Morton Dauwen Zabel, The
Viking Press, New York, 1967, p. 6.
3
Ibidem, p. 404.
4
Ibidem, p. 398.
5
Ibidem, p. 401.
as a model: one would expose one‟s self to some very embarrassing questions on the part of a
pupil.”6
The perception of fictional reality is influenced by the experience of the three participants in the
creation and reception of the novel: the author, the reflector and the reader. Their experience is
not a static concept, but it has a dynamic character, defined by relativity and incompleteness:
“Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of
huge spider web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and
catching every air-borne particle in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when the
mind is imaginative- much more when it happens to be that of a man of genius- it takes to itself
the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations.”7
James gives a clear definition of the reflector: “the person most capable of feeling in the given
case more than another of what is to be felt for it, and so serving in the highest degree to record it
dramatically and objectively, is the only sort of person on whom we can count not to betray, to
cheapen or, as we say, give away, the value and beauty of the thing.” 8 The reflector is not a
voice, but a fictional character, “whose background James usually sketches before launching
him, and whose curiosity, keenness of observation and intensity of interpretative activity James
carefully accounts for in terms of his personal drama.”9They interfere in the moral issues of vital
importance or they even can play the role of the protagonist‟s savior. R. P. Blackmur describes
the confidante‟s special role: “Generally speaking, the confidante is stupid, or has the kind of
brightness that goes with gossip, cunning, and malice….each confidante has a kind of bottom or
residual stupidity and each is everlastingly given to gossip; but the gossip has a creative purposeto add substance to the story- and the stupidity is there to give slowness and weight and
alternative forms to the perceptions and responses which they create.”10
The reflectors play a complex role, having a variety of functions to fulfill. These include, besides
telling the story to the reader, the ones of making a moral and psychological analysis, evaluating
the dangers, diagnosing the situation, and predicting its ending. All these are possible as they
usually assist at the most dramatic scenes of the novel, they interfere in the protagonists‟ life or
they become their confidents. All the Jamesian observers are interested in personal relationships
and this aspect influences their perception of reality. The narrators are different from the author
and obviously, their reality can‟t be considered a complete or an objective one. The reflectors‟
narration and interpretation are complex and complicated activities because, in comparison to the
authorial narrator, they can‟t go beyond the fictional universe. Their perspectives and points of
view are limited and take form gradually during the meetings they have with the protagonists or
the other characters. The observers‟ consciousness is dramatized as the observation is illustrated
in process. The reader receives a gradual evolution of the reflector‟s vision on the meaning of the
situation.
6
Ibidem, p. 401.
James, Henry, “The Art of Fiction” in The Portable Henry James, edited by Morton Dauwen Zabel, The
Viking Press, New York, 1967, p. 401.
8
James, Henry, Preface to The Princess Casamassima, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1977, pp. xii-xiii.
9
Segal, Ora, The Lucid Reflector, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1969, p.235-6.
10
Blackmur, R. P., “The Loose and Baggy Monsters of Henry James: Notes on the Underlying Classic
Form in the Novel,” Accent 11 (Summer, 1951), pp. 141-2.
7
“The author‟s deputies”, as James called his reflectors in the Prefaces to the New York Edition,
are classified according to their various roles and influences in the international novels. In his
work, The Lucid Reflector11, Ora Segal speaks about two categories of Jamesian narrators. The
central intelligence (the first-person narrator, a dramatized center of consciousness) is the
reflector who controls the story, the phenomenological substitute of the omniscient narrator, an
independent character who participates directly in the narration and whose subjective universe is
imposed as the only way to judge the epic reality. It is the case of Rowland Mallet in Roderick
Hudson, Christopher Newman in The American, Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady,
Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors. The second type is represented by the observer, the choric
commentator, raisonneur, confident, known also as ficelle. Their interventions are modest but
informative, non-elaborated but coherent, peripheral but still influential. Such reflectors are
Ralph Touchett in The Portrait of a Lady, Maria Gostrey or Waymarsh in The Ambassadors,
Fanny and Bob Assingham in The Golden Bowl.
Lambert Strether
The novel The Ambassadors consists entirely of the impressions received by Lambert Strether.
The events are secondary; they represent extensions of the moral events that take place in the
ambassador‟s mind.”Nothing in the scene has any importance, any value in itself; what Strether
sees in it- that is the whole of its meaning.”12 Strether‟s consciousness is “a kaleidoscope
wherein all the figures and events of the drama are reflected and rotated one by one.” 13Every
aspect in the novel is measured from Strether‟s point of view. The vision of Paris, the beauty of
Madame de Vionnet, Chad‟s transformation, the final epiphany, all these are filtered through a
cultivated intelligence. His consciousness absorbs the physical reality and turns it into images
and metaphors.
James is nowhere more successful in consistently maintaining his reflector‟s point of view than
in the novel The Ambassadors. Strether is different from the other Jamesian observers, as he is a
middle-aged American who has a superior existential experience. Unfortunately, he lost his wife
and child in unrevealed circumstances, which somehow determined him to gradually develop a
guilty consciousness. Strether accepts the ambassador role, even if he doesn‟t have a good
opinion about his own life: “I…have never made anything. I‟m a perfectly equipped
failure.”14His curiosity leads him to accept Mrs. Newsome‟s proposal to go to Paris and bring her
son back: “Nothing could have been odder than Strether‟s sense of himself as at that moment
launched in something of which the sense would be quite disconnected from the sense of his past
and which was literally beginning there and then.”15
Furthermore, unlike other American characters, he has prejudices about Europeans even before
his visit to Europe. He sees them as arrogant and conservatives and he is reluctant and even
11
Segal, Ora, The Lucid Reflector, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1969, p. xi.
Lubbock, Percy, “The Point of View” in Henry James. A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Leon
Edel, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1963, p. 40.
13
Maini, Darshan Singh, Henry James. The Indirect Vision, UMI Reesrach Press, Ann Arbor, 1988, p. 57.
14
James, Henry, The Ambassadors, Penguin, London, 1985, p. 28.
15
Ibidem, p. 18.
12
hostile to their history and tradition: “Europe was best described, to his mind, as an elaborate
engine for dissociating the confined American from that indispensable knowledge, and was
accordingly only rendered bearable by these occasional stations of relief, traps for the arrest of
wandering western airs.”16
Despite his stereotypes about Europe, Strether promises to investigate and reveal an objective
reality: “The simple truth is exactly what I am trying to discover.”17The reality he discovers is
the result of a cultural and ethical epiphany. Strether‟s reality is opposed to the one of the other
American reflectors. America is viewed as a realm of failure, where he lost his family and lived
according to certain stereotypes, while Europe becomes a place of success, where he discovers
his self and his intimacy. “Strether is, thus, European before traveling to the Old Continent. He
lives according to strict conventions (his eternal stereotypes) and always relates himself to the
past. His drama of identity, as much as it is, ends with a victory (which is quite unusual for the
Jamesian fiction). The hero discovers his true self after a long, paradoxical cultural journey.”18
Ralph Touchett
In The Portrait of a Lady James places the center in the protagonist‟s consciousness. The record
of Ralph Touchett‟s feelings and impressions about Isabel seems to supplement the direct
presentation of her feelings and to make him a central observer. He seems to be a Jamesian alterego, as he lights up several things which Isabel is not destined to know on her own. Isabel, as
well as other characters, such as Madame Merle, Casper Goodwood, Lord Warburton, Henrietta
Stackpole and Osmond are partially presented through the evaluating and subtle consciousness of
her cousin. An important part of the novel is the result of his consumptive consciousness and
vision.
Ralph is a Europeanized American who studied at Harvard and Oxford. These qualifications
seem to present him as the right candidate for the novel‟s main observer, but are also a guaranty
of his ability to equally see the merits and mistakes of both the American and European systems:
“it is Ralph‟s thorough acquaintance with the international scene which equips him to appreciate
the international complexities of Isabel‟s tragic history.”19 Another aspect that explains Ralph
Touchett‟s role as Isabel‟s drama observer is that he has precarious health state, which forces
him to be just a spectator at the play of life, investing all his intelligence, imagination in the
contemplation of it.
Ralph Touchett is not only Isabel‟s observer, but also her initiator. This happens in the first part
of the novel, when he introduces her to the European reality, while in the second one his role
diminishes to that of a choric interpreter who is present only in the scenes of analysis. Isabel
imposes him some limits as she wants to hide her unhappy marriage and life from the rest of the
world and he is “deprived of all the observer‟s privileges, turns into a silent, helpless, and
16
James, Henry, The Ambassadors, Penguin, London, 1985, p. 51.
Ibidem, p. 165.
18
Cutitaru, Laura Carmen, Distance and Deconstruction. A Poststructuralist Approach to Henry James’s
Fiction, Stand@rt Publishing House, Iasi, 2001, p. 235.
19
Segal, Ora, The Lucid Reflector, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1969, p. 35.
17
resigned witness of his cousin‟s secret suffering.”20 Paradoxically, “the more Ralph‟s
observational role shrinks, the greater his thematic significance grows, and the less he is
physically present, the more does he come to occupy Isabel‟s thoughts.”21She starts judging
Osmond relating to Ralph, who has a spiritual light, despite his health darkness.
Ralph falls in love with Isabel, but no conflict appears between the exigencies of the lucid
reflector and those of convincing characterization. He is ill so he has no hope of love fulfillment.
In the introductory chapter, it is told that “the imagination of loving- as distinguished from that
of being loved- had still a place in his [Ralph‟s] reduced sketch. He had only forbidden himself
the riot of expression.”22He seems to find his spectator status enough absorbing and rewarding
and his love for Isabel doesn‟t obscure his vision. He lives with the only wish of seeing Isabel
fulfill the requirements of her imagination, and from the moment she engages Osmond, his
decline begins and culminates with his death.
Going beyond any classification and exemplification, the Jamesian international reflectors are
extremely flexible and complex fictional characters, with many guises and voices. Their main
ability is that of „seeing‟, a strong curiosity, an analytical mind, a reflective nature, sensitivity to
impressions and a great ability of appreciation. James experiments all possible choices and
combinations regarding his narrators, a great variety of character types, ranging from male to
female, young to old, innocent to experimented, provincial to cosmopolitan and also American to
European. He combines his attitude of irony and detached amusement with that of compassion
and emotional involvement, he “constantly varies the emotional, moral and intellectual distance
between the observer and the observed in accordance with the logic of the drama he projects that
the device never hardens into a rigid, mechanical convention.”23
Bibliography
1. Blackmur, R. P., “The Loose and Baggy Monsters of Henry James: Notes on the Underlying
Classic Form in the Novel,” Accent 11 (Summer, 1951), pp. 129-46.
2. Cutitaru, Laura Carmen, Distance and Deconstruction. A Poststructuralist Approach to Henry
James’s Fiction, Stand@rt Publishing House, Iasi, 2001.
3. James, Henry, The Ambassadors, Penguin, London, 1985.
4. James, Henry, “The Art of Fiction”, in The Portable Henry James, edited by Morton
Dauwen Zabel, The Viking Press, New York, 1967.
5. James, Henry, The Portrait of a Lady, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1986.
6. James, Henry, The Princess Casamassima, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1977.
7. Lubbock, Percy, “The Point of View” in Henry James. A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by
Leon Edel, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1963.
20
Ibidem, p. 49.
Segal, Ora, The Lucid Reflector, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1969, p. 49.
22
James, Henry, The Portrait of a Lady, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1986, p. 54.
23
Segal, Ora, The Lucid Reflector, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1969, p. xi.
21
8. Maini, Darshan Singh, Henry James. The Indirect Vision, UMI Reesrach Press, Ann Arbor, 1988.
9. Segal, Ora, The Lucid Reflector, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1969.