Finding the Figure in the Carpet: Vision and Silence in the Works of Henry James

Copyright © 2006 Lee Johnson

Art Credits: The Frick Collection, Art Resource, Peter Milton

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ISBN: 978-0-5954-1859-6 (sc)

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To my wife Alice who has had the grace to live with the ghost of Henry James around the house, off and on, for the past thirty years; for her unfailing support and belief in this book and for her insights and encouragement.

Contents

List of Illustrations

List of Absent Pictures

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction to James’ Narrative Pictorial Method

2. The Portrait of a Lady: The Discovery of Narrative Picture

3. The Grammar of Painting: The Sister Arts/The Brother Arts

4. The Turn of the Screw: Visible Silence

5. The Beast in the Jungle: Hallucinatory Vision

6. The Jolly Corner: Self -Haunted Space

7. The Ambassadors: The Novel as Gallery

8. The Wings of the Dove: From the Unspeakable to the Ineffable

9. The Golden Bowl: Imaged Prose

10. Back to The Portrait of a Lady: Isabel’s Meditative Vigil

Appendix A: Virtual Memory Palace

Appendix B: What Maisie Knew

Appendix C: An Interpretation of Literary Impressionism

Appendix D: The Albany House Portrait in The Portrait of a Lady

Appendix E: Las Meninas and Decoding Pictorial Silence

Bibliography of Sources Quoted

About the Author

Note to the reader: I am also bolding the names of paintings and the titles I have assigned to James’ narrative pictures so that the reader curious about going back to re-read sections will have an easier time locating the references. I am also bolding the following titles given to James’ works by his editors: James’ Prefaces to the New York edition collected as The Art of Fiction, edited by Richard Blackmuir, The Collected Tales of Henry James in Twelve Volumes edited by Leon Edel, The Notebooks of Henry James edited by F.O Matthiessen and Kenneth Murdock, and The Theory of Fiction: Henry James edited by James E. Miller. The full citation will appear as the titles are first used in the text. After that the titles will be abbreviated as Art, Tales, Notebooks and Theory in a parentheses with page numbers to note the citation.

List of Illustrations

1. Diego Velasquez, Las Meninas, Prado, Madrid

2. Jan Vermeer, Girl with the Pearl Earring, Maritshuis, The Hague

3. William Holman Hunt, The Awakening Conscience, Tate Britain, London

4. Agnolo Bronzino, Portrait of Lucrezia Panciatichi, Uffizi, Florence

5. Jacopo Tintoretto, Crucifixion, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice

6. Jacopo Tintoretto, Wedding at Cana, Santa Maria Della Salute, Venice

7. Jacopo Tintoretto, The Miracle of Saint Mark, Accademia, Venice

8. Jacopo Tintoretto, The Last Supper, San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice

9. Jan Vermeer, Officer and Laughing Girl, Frick Collection, New York

10. Jan Vermeer, A Young Woman Receiving a Letter from her Maid, Frick Collection, New York

11. Jan Vermeer, Girl in Blue Reading a Letter, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

12. Diego Velasquez, The Rokeby Venus, The National Gallery, London

13. Paolo Veronese, The Feast in the House of Levi, Accademia, Venice

14. Paolo Veronese, Wedding at Cana, Louvre, Paris

List of Absent Pictures

For the interested reader/viewer here are the locations for all the paintings mentioned that are not reproduced in this book in black and white. It is relatively easy to go to museum web sites on line for a viewing of theses images or simply Google the painting by name. Some of the images are not reproduced here because the color or the texture of the paint forms the basis of the reference, and nothing can be seen in a black and white. For example, Vermeer’s Lacemaker is mentioned because of the drippings of red paint that make up a skein of thread. Vermeer’s View of Delft is referred to several times in relation to Proust and his imaginary write/character, Bergotte, for whom the little patch of yellow wall becomes an iconic passage of paint, important for the layers of glaze as well as the texture. Although color images would give the viewer a better idea, the actual quality of the surface texture can not be fully seen unless the viewer were to go to Paris or The Hague and get as close to the Vermeers as possible without alarming the guards. Naturally the reader/viewer might also like to see the paintings that are reproduced here in black and white, in color versions as well. The yellow rent in the sky above Golgotha that Sartre points out in Tintoretto’s Crucifixion, or Vermeer’s Girl in Yellow at the Frick or his Girl in Blue in the Rijksmuseum, only to name a few, would all be enhanced by looking at color versions. Other paintings not reproduced are only briefly mentioned in James’ texts, like Holman Hunt’s The Scapegoat, referred to specifically as an image in The Golden Bowl or Vermeer’s Artist in his Studio or Velasquez’s Portrait of Innocent X.

James refers at times to specific painters but with no named picture indicated. For example, in The Wings of the Dove, he describes Milly in The National Gallery as surrounded by Titians and Turners; later he sets up Milly’s encounter with the Bronzino as if the whole day is suffused with the overall festive melancholy of a Watteau. In The Portait of a Lady he creates imaginary fresos by Caravaggio for the Palazzo Roccanera. I also refer to painters, like Delacroix and Giorgione, unattached to specific canvases, when discussing certain aesthetics aspects of painting as an art form. Still another category for absent pictures are those images implied by James with no specific canvas in mind, as well as no specific named painter, but where it is clear enough from the context that a type of image is brought immediately to mind. We see Spenser Brydon’s picture in The Jolly Corner as one of many possible portraits of a society man in black painted by Sargent. We see Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove as loosely resembling one of the many iconic Pre-Raphaelite faces painted by Dante Gabriel Rosetti or Edward Burne-Jones. All of these painters will be indexed. (Etching, drawing and photography will be indexed in the General index.) For a full set of references to all of the works of art referred to by James, see Adeline Tintner’s two comprehensive volumes, The Museum World of Henry James and Henry James and the Lust of the Eyes.

1. Fra Angelico, The Annunciation, San Marco, Florence.

2. Francis Bacon, Number VII from Eight Studies for a Portrait, Museum of Modern Art, New York City

3. Agnolo Bronzino, Portrait of a Young Man (circa 1540) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.

4. Agnolo Bronzino, Venus, Cupid Folly and Time, The National Gallery, London.

5. John Constable, Wivenhoe Park, Essex, 1816, National Gallery of Art, Washington

6. Correggio, Madonna of the Tribune, Uffizi.

7. Gerrit Dou, Old Woman Reading, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

8. Augustus Egg, Past and Present No.1, Tate Britain, London.

9. Hans Holbein, The Ambassadors, The National Gallery, London

10. William Holman Hunt, The Scapegoat, Lady Lever Art Gallery, Liverpool

11. Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa, The Louvre, Paris

12. Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral Series. Louvre and Musee d’Orsay, Paris

13. Jacopo Tintoretto, Crucifixion, San Cassiano, Venice.

14. Jacopo Tintoretto, The Discovery of the Body of Saint Mark, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milano

15. Jacopo Tintoretto, The Massacre of the Innocents, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice

16. Jacopo Tintoretto, Removal of the Body of Saint Mark, Accademia, Venice

17. Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), The Young Man with the Glove, The Louvre, Paris

18. Georges de la Tour, The Penitent Magdalene, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.

19. Jan Vermeer, Artist in his Studio, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

20. Jan Vermeer, The Lacemaker, The Louvre, Paris

21. Jan Vermeer, View of Delft, Maritshuis Museum, The Hague

22. Paolo Veronese, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, Galleria Sabauda in Torino, Italy

23. Paolo Veronese, Frescoes at The Villa Barbaro at Maser, Italy.

24. Antoine Watteau, L’Enseigne de Gersaint, Staatliche Museum, Berlin.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank two professors from Stanford University, Ian Watt and Albert Guerard, both deceased, who read early versions of this book several years after I had finished my graduate studies and had embarked on teaching. I would also like to thank Barbara Gelpi, my dissertation advisor at Stanford, who has encouraged me by reading portions of this manuscript in the recent past. Two colleagues from Guilford College, where I taught for the past twenty years, Beth and Mel Keiser have both given me generous time as critical and perceptive readers when I began another return to the project. My wife Alice has shown extraordinary patience in persevering over the years, reading sections of manuscript and listening carefully when I needed to talk things through yet one more time. And finally another colleague from Guilford, Jerry Godard, appeared at just the right moment, as a devoted friend willing to read the entire manuscript, word by word, all 546 pages in double spaced type, as I went through the final revisions over the past two years. I am deeply grateful to all who helped me along the path.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction to James’ Narrative Pictorial Method

The Figure in the Carpet

In a famous challenge, James invites his critical reader to detect a hidden structural principle in all his major work. In 1896, eleven years before beginning the Prefaces to the New York edition, James throws out the gauntlet to all future critics in The Figure in the Carpet, where a well-established novelist, Hugh Vereker, informs the narrator about a secret pattern which runs throughout all his novels, never discovered by the critics. Vereker states that this repeating pattern is everywhere present, but hidden in plain sight. Regretting this inadvertent disclosure, Vereker asks the narrator, a literary critic himself, not to reveal the existence of the figure to anyone else. He does not want to initiate a literary sleuthing game as he is convinced the nature of the pattern will never be discovered. Unfortunately the unnamed narrator has already told his friend, Corvick, a fellow journalist and literary critic and Corvick, in turn, has told his fiancée, Gwendolyn. All three become obsessed with trying to find what the narrator names as the figure in the carpet, a metaphor which Vereker himself accepts as entirely apt. James teasingly describes the figure as Vereker’s undiscovered, not to say undiscoverable, secret.¹ James throws out similar arcane hints about a hidden structural pattern in his own practice all through the Prefaces he wrote to the New York Edition in 1907, Prefaces which serves as his literary manifesto, his Art of the Novel, as the collected Prefaces were entitled by Richard Blackmuir in his1934 edition. Teasing the narrator, Vereker asserts that the figure is quite distinct even though the critic cannot see it. Vereker goes on to say:

It stretches, this little trick of mine, from book to book, and everything else, comparatively plays over the surface of it. The order, the form, the texture of my books will perhaps some day constitute a complete representation of it. So, it’s naturally the thing for the critic to look for, my visitor added, smiling, even the thing for the critic to find."

This seemed a responsibility indeed. You call it a little trick? That’s only my modesty. It’s really an exquisite scheme.²

Obsessed in his determination to uncover the pattern which is tantalizingly right in front of his eyes, but invisible, the narrator speculates on Vereker’s enigmatic description:

For himself {Vereker}, beyond doubt, the thing we were also blank about was vividly there. It was something, I guessed in the primal plan, something like a complex figure in a Persian carpet. He highly approved of this image when I used it, and he used another himself. It’s the very string, he said, that my pearls are strung on! (Tales Vol. IX 289)

Vereker assents to the figural pattern as a metaphor and also suggests a second image, a thread, which runs throughout his works and on which all his beautiful and separate pearls are strung. The frustrated narrator asks the novelist for help in deciphering the riddle of a thread, which runs throughout the weave and finally begs for a clue. Vereker replies:

My whole lucid effort gives {the critic} the clue—every page and line and letter. The thing’s as concrete there as a bird in a cage, a bait on a hook, a piece of cheese in a mouse— trap. It’s stuck into every volume as your foot is stuck in your shoe. It governs every line, it chooses every word, it dots every i, it places every comma. (Tales Vol. IX 283-284)

The narrator asks if the always elusive it is an aspect of style or an aspect of thought, perhaps a stylistic game or a philosophy. Vereker rejects or deflects all these inquiries and advises the obsessed critic to simply give it up. The novelist states quite flatly that he doubts the narrator, or Corvick, or Gwendolyn, or any other critic will ever see the figure. When the narrator objects that it is all too vague, Vereker replies:

That’s only because you’ve never had a glimpse of it … If you had had one the element in question would soon become all you’d see. To me it’s exactly as palpable as the marble on the chimney. (Tales Vol.282)

Vereker then elaborates on how the figure came into being for him, that is retrospectively. He stresses again that the figure is fully in sight for eyes that can see and that it is only a secret because it has remained unseen. Then Vereker tells the critic that he himself only began to see the figure come into clarity as he continued to work: As it was I only became aware little by little and meanwhile I had done my work. (Tales. Vol. IX. 283)

Implicitly James has Vereker deny any attempt to set out a pre-planned trap for critics. The figure is something deeply embedded, some permeating aspect that is radically present in all of his writing. We can imagine James here in 1896, looking back at The Portrait and his discovery of his narrative pictorial method and recognizing that he himself is at the beginning of an immense undertaking, prefiguring his use of silence and vision in works to come in 1897. James is looking forward to being in Vereker’s place, looking back retrospectively at a body of work that fully embodies the figure.

Looking back to the figure from the perspective of writing the Prefaces to the New York Edition, James describes his progression to the figure as {having} been led on by seductive steps, albeit perhaps by devious ways. (Art.228)

James admits here to the seduction of his own concept for a secret plan hidden in plain sight. He goes on to refer to his string of evolutionary pearls which can also be seen as a cluster of intentions. And James imagines an ironic consciousness in the designer left wholly alone, amid a chattering unperceiving world, with the thing he had most wanted to do, with the design more or less realised- some effectual glimpse of that by itself, for instance reward one’s experiment. (Art.229)

As James slides here from Hugh Vereker to himself, he extends the concept of the figure into a cluster of intentions: we can see how fully the whole group of interrelated aspects of James’ narrative pictorial system fit into Vereker’s metaphor.*

Now if we go back here to The Figure in the Carpet we can see what the narrator was totally unable to see. Vereker says to the critic about seeing the figure, that it has been there all along hidden in plain sight and that he is amazed that no one has seen it. The figure is something to be seen, something that is visible, something that can be thought of as a representation, something as palpable as a Velasquez. And the figure is threaded throughout the text so that every single word, every comma, every dash contributes to the whole and the whole is present in every part. Once your eyes are open you cannot not see: the field of relations is always shifting as a dynamic whole. James speaking through Vereker, is announcing in 1896 the structure of the narrative pictorial method which James is now formulating to use as the underpinning for What Maisie Knew in 1897 and then introduced full blown and precisely formed in The Turn of the Screw, written later in 1897as well. What Maisie Knew is a trans-formative work for James in using vision and silence for the first time to sustain the entire novella. I have included a brief reading of Maisie (Appendix D)for those interested readers. Here we will brush past Maisie in a few pages to get on to the stunning use of the figure in The Turn of the Screw where the holistic structure of the text brings the reader into the Governess’ world, which is, for her consciousness, as bewildering and complex as a hologram.

So when James speaks of letting himself go, he is now ready to don his Hugh Vereker mask and costume. He becomes the writer who has discovered his own figure in the carpet and is deploying his narrative pictorial method for the first time. He has become the Master of brimming silences and pulsating invisibilities: he is now having his fun with his canny readers.

A short while later, Corvick takes a journalistic assignment in India, and Gwendolyn tells the narrator that she and Corvick both believed that India would in some way provide the necessary shock to lead Corvick to the discovery of the figure. She receives a two-word telegram from Corvick in India, who announces that he has, in fact, identified the secret: Eureka. Immense. Gwendolyn tells the narrator:

… it’s the thing {the figure"} itself … that has simply sprung on him like a tigress out of the jungle. He didn’t take a book with him—on purpose; indeed he wouldn’t have needed to—he knows every page, as I do, by heart. They all worked in him together, and some day, somewhere, when he wasn’t thinking, they fell, in all their superb intricacy, into the right combination. The figure in the carpet came out … The elements were in his mind, and in the secousse {shudder} of a new and intense experience they just struck light." (Tales Vol. IX 297)

The disappointed narrator says to Gwendolyn:

"He doesn’t say what it is.

How could he—in a telegram? He’ll write it.

But how does he know?

Know it’s the real thing? Oh, I’m sure when you see it you know. (Tales Vol. IX. 296)

We learn in a few pages that Corvick has been right. When you know, you know you know; It was immense but it was simple-it was simple, but it was immense, and the final knowledge of it was an experience quite apart. (Tales Vol. IX.300) The figure teases {the reader} out of thought like the silence of Keats’ Grecian urn as the knowledge communicated by Vereker’s design is beyond the normal conception of knowledge which can be articulated in language and beyond what the critics of the day accepted as the meaning of a text.³

In his original sketch for the plot, recorded in his Notebooks in 1896, James has the critic ask the novelist, Does it flash—is that the way it comes—in a sudden revelation?⁴ The figure has indeed been discoverable, has flashed all at once, and the find is confirmed as the right thing by Vereker himself who embraces Corvick and tells him there is not a wrong note. Corvick is prepared to write his exhaustive study, the only one that would have counted, was to turn on a new light, to utter-oh so quietly!—the unimagined truth. It was in other words to trace the figure in the carpet through every convolution, to reproduce it in every tint. The result, said Corvick was to be the greatest literary portrait ever painted, and what he asked of me was just to be so good as not to trouble him with questions till he should hang his masterpiece before me. (Tales Vol. IX. 303)

Before the masterpiece is hung in front of the narrator’s eager eyes, Corvick is killed in a road accident on his honeymoon. The narrator, like the literary hound in The Aspern Papers, considers momentarily marrying the widow to get at the secret. But he abandons that idea as Gwendolyn refuses to break her silence. She only describes the book Corvick would have written as a great study which was to have been a supreme literary ‘portrait, ‘a kind of critical Vandyke or Velasquez. (Tales Vol. IX. 307) The story ends, naturally, with the figure in the carpet still left a blank.

My book, substituting James for Vereker, is the book Corvick would have written. Just as Vereker asks the narrator not to think of him as demented, I am asking my reader to test my bold claim by re-reading this opening description of the figure in the carpet again when you finish this book to see how every aspect of James secret plan comes together in a concatenated whole. If we look at the terms used to refer indirectly to the figure we will see how many relate to seeing and painting so that this book, like Corvick’s intended volume, unveils James’ figure, like a painting hung on the wall, offering us a verbal portrait, a critical Velasquez. As my reader will see, we will spend many pages in Chapter 3, The Grammar of Painting, studying Velasquez’ masterwork, Las Meninas (Fig.1), as an analogue to what James calls a narrative picture. (Art 5) [All the terms that form the working vocabulary for this book will be bolded as they first appear in this Introductory Chapter (or in subsequent chapters) and included in The Glossary of Terms at the end of the introductory chapter, before the Endnotes] I believe that after reading the book and returning to this opening section on The Figure in the Carpet, my reader will see the figure in such a way that all the terms will fit and fit and fit again. The design will be as obvious a foot stuck in a shoe. The figure in the carpet or the thread on which James strings his pearls is the narrative pictorial method, which makes silence visible for the reader. It is indeed an exquisite scheme which can be seen in James’ works from The Portrait of a Lady in 1881 to The Golden Bowl in 1904 and on to his last unfinished novel, The Ivory Tower in 1917. He sets up each novel or tale, which is governed by his pictorial scheme, as a sequence of narrative pictures to be seen by the central character, who serves as a pair of eyes (Art 46) for the reader. The reader follows the character as observer, as he or she moves through the text as if proceeding down a horizontal gallery of pictures with stops in between for dialogue with other characters. James uses a complex verbal structure to represent the effect of the silent, visual radiation of an image, multiple meanings emerging simultaneously, for his character and reader alike. James privileges what I will refer to as the epistemology of the eye, the kind of knowledge which might emanate from a masterpiece of painting like Velasquez’ Las Meninas, knowledge which is by its nature ineffable but nonetheless tangible and clearly registered (non-verbally) in the consciousness of the character, the viewer, and the reader. James’ narrative pictorial scheme allows him to move deeper and further into his own special form of novelistic silence. James progresses from his instinctive grasp of the power of dramatic silence early in his career to the discovery of pictorial silence in writing The Portrait of a Lady. He hits upon a device, a trick, but a sublime one; a trick as obvious as a piece of cheese in a trap. (Tales Vol. IX. 284) James shows us the character seeing and makes the reader see as well. Reading James becomes a completely different order of experience once we have had that glimpse of the figure in the carpet as a pervasive design which is concretely there in plac[ing] every comma. (Tales Vol. IX 284)

Throughout your reading of this book, keep in mind that Corvick experiences his revelation, figuratively, in the temple of Vishnu where he has seen the idol unveiled. (Tales Vol. IX 297 and 305) This location is no mere whim for James, who, along with his brother William, was fascinated with aspects of Vedic metaphysics, which can be linked both to Buddhist metaphysics and quantum physics as well.⁵ For Henry James consciousness always exists in a reciprocal field of relations. (Art 5) The observer and the surrounding field are in continuous process of mutual modification: the seer and the seen alter each other in the act of perception. James sets up his novels and tales as a process of vision (Art 308) where the main character experiences an adventure of consciousness. (Art 317) Consciousness changes and expands millisecond by millisecond. The field of vision frames one moment in time where all aspects, including the observer, conspire and interdepend (Art 151) simultaneously to form a picture which includes the observer seeing. This awareness, which is both pre- verbal and post-verbal, is automatically reduced by the effort to decode the meanings into articulated language, which can only narrow the range of possibilities inherent in the silent picture. The field of relations or the field of consciousness is constantly expanding and deepening. Relations stop nowhere. (Art 5) James’ narrative pictorial method is deeply grounded in his subject, the whole of human consciousness. It is fairly astonishing that James developed his own field theory before the turn of the last century that encompasses the phenomenon of shifting perceptions in non-verbal awareness. The Hindu-Buddhist cosmic view is expressed as a continuously changing field of reciprocal relations characterized by inter-dependent co-arising. No cause, no effect, everything reciprocally modifying all parts of the expanding field simultaneously. James greatest challenge is to depict a shift in consciousness, which is happening in silence and simultaneity, with a field of words. Everything happens all at once with reciprocal energy. In this holographic universe, the separate self is an illusion, for James as well as the Buddhist.

James’ exquisite scheme, positions the reader to see the simultaneous reciprocity in the consciousness of all relations as the field is unfolding. The scheme operates continuously on the textual scale so that it governs every line, it chooses every word, it dots every i, and it places every comma. (Tales Vol. IX 284) My task is to convince my reader that James’ narrative pictorial method is operating at every point on the representative surface (Art 346) in all of his major works analyzed here, except for The Portrait, where the pictorial method is discovered and then sketched out in embryonic form between Chapter 40 and the end of the novel and for What Maisie Knew where he tried, for the first time, to use a narrator who could see more than she could say. The narrative pictorial method is fully operative starting with The Turn of the Screw in 1898 and deployed with intense concentration in the three big novels, The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl. Pictorial silence is brought to a hallucinatory edge in the short story The Beast in the Jungle in 1903 and in The Jolly Corner in 1908. We find aspects of the method at play in other texts, contributive aspects where James experiments with various forms of silence, such as The Spoils of Poynton, The Awkward Age, which both incorporate stage silence and dramatic form into prose narrative. In The Sacred Fount, the entire novel transpires through intense looking and comically exaggerated decoding, where the narrator enacts a parody of James’ observer caught up in a process of vision. We find numerous references to paintings (and other visual art) throughout all of James’ work, in novels and tales, which are not rendered in the narrative pictorial method. James returns often to themes and images that have to do with the painter, the relation of art to life, writer to painter, picture and text, as well as the interplay between art and money, collectors and connoisseurs, the provenance of paintings and the act of composition; many of these topics appear in various works which do not employ the narrative pictorial scheme of composition. Many texts in James’ canon, brilliant in their own right, serve as contributive and preparative experiments in form for his great masterpieces, which we will examine in this book. Unlike Vereker’s figure which is broadly construed as covering all his writing, James reserves his secret design for his major works where he fully deploys his arcane and occult system, creating pictorial silence for the reader. Thus my claim for discovering the figure in the carpet extends only to those major works we will examine here: the three tales of self-haunting and the three big novels listed above. The final mystery is why James made the decision (after his discoveries in The Portrait and in Maisie) to use his full-on narrative, pictorial method in these six major works. But in these major works, the method does indeed control the whole text down to the position of a comma.⁶

Word and Image: Verbal Proof and Silent Exhibition

For James, consciousness extends to non-verbal knowledge which can be seen through the eyes even when this knowledge cannot be formulated in words. James’ reader, along with the central character, learns to know through Silent Exhibition with no need of corroboration from Verbal Proof, the opposing terms in The Ivory Tower⁷ which denote, in a succinct aphorism, competing epistemologies, terms refined as aspects of the narrative pictorial method worked out over a lifetime of concentrated literary practice.

In all these major novels and tales listed above, a tangible silence becomes a substance enveloping the central character who provides the point of view for the reader, who, somewhere in the reading process, becomes aware of a prevailing hush. We realize, perhaps all of a sudden, perhaps gradually, that all of the key moments are transpiring in virtual silence. Once aware of the predominance of silence, we see that James’ elaborate verbal structure functions to foreground silence as an absent presence worked throughout the entire design. James’ prose frames the silent moments of perception that occur when the central character, (who James names as the centre of consciousness (Art, 15-16)) becomes aware of seeing more in the visual field than he or she can articulate. James highlights the blanks (Art, 177) in the dialogue and the sustained mutual gazes when a reciprocal silence is shared between the principle characters. The reader is positioned to inhabit the point of view of the center of consciousness in the retrospective attempt to decode the significance of the silences either in conversation with an interlocutor or in interior monologue. With a minimum of speech, the characters in James’ world communicate at the deepest level by receiving and transmitting silent impressions⁸ but only the best of them learn to live within the silence. Other characters often retreat headlong from the proliferating possibilities inherent in silent exhibition, seeking the illusory certainty of verbal proof.

James invariably frames the impression as a visual image taken in through the eyes of the character serving as the centre of consciousness. The impression as visual image is given the power of the Symbol in its post-Romantic sense, the power to transcend the limits of ordinary language and to radiate a complex of multiple meanings that cannot be paraphrased as they work on the reader like poetry. At key moments James produces a visual epiphany for the reader who is not necessarily aware that a major shift has occurred in the experience of reading prose on a flat page in a book. We are suddenly within the consciousness of the central character, seeing the world as optical spectacle through her or his eyes. Ruskin uses the term optical facts in Modern Painters⁹ to designate what James calls the visible appearances (Art, 332): in both cases the terms indicate what can be taken in by the eye before any interpretation begins. Every narrative picture in James begins with what is framed by the eyes of the central consciousness, what James denotes as immediate images, (Art, 331) and then in a second beat, the picture frame widens to include that character as a spectator. We will use optical spectacle as a tag phrase for that first frame and narrative picture for the fuller version, which includes the character as the represented spectator, the figure in the picture doing the observing. Instead of listening to the voice of an omniscient narrator, we are positioned closely behind the central character as another perceiver. The reader may wonder at this new ability to read so much into the prolonged mute exchanges between characters. Building his verbal structure to highlight his literary equivalent of pictorial silence, which frames a single expanded moment in time, James places the reader into the text like an unrepresented spectator, just outside the frame, watching the character in the act of seeing.¹⁰ Playing a compositional conjuring trick, James focuses the reader’s attention, almost subliminally, on images he projects onto the screen of the character’s consciousness. The images scroll along and then stop in an intense focus on the optical spectacle set in front of the character like a complex painting, a mute but speaking picture.¹¹ The reader now sees along with the character and takes in visual knowledge, which, like the knowledge we take away from the perusal of a painting, contains more latent possibilities than a sequential catalog of words could say. James says emphatically, The writer makes the reader. (Theory 321) As the prose begins to penetrate our own consciousness we realize he has made us see within the silences he has created. James’ narrative pictorial method makes silence visible.

In all the texts we will look at in this book, the narrative pictorial method does indeed govern the entire composition down to the placement of every comma. Once we begin to see the narrative pictorial system, we recognize that James’ famous control of the character’s point of view is quite literally grounded in the visual, in specifically framed images and ocular impressions. Many critics have noticed James’ wide knowledge of painting and painters and the frequency with which his own critical terms are grounded in the visual arts. Percy Lubbock’s classic study of The Ambassadors¹² underlines the dominance of point of view and the way in which Strether, the narrator, becomes a pair of eyes (Art 46) for the reader so that as a narrator, James’ centre of consciousness is predominately an observer. James’ other term, reflector (Art 65-67) which he uses interchangeably with centre of consciousness, denotes that the character, like a reflecting glass or silver mirror (Art 70) is reflecting specifically visual images back to the reader.

The narrative pictorial method is the figure in the carpet in that the entire verbal structure of each work considered, in all its ramifications, is needed in order for the words to mime the power of painting to communicate in radical silence. Narrative pictorialism governs overall structure, permeates style, sets up its own epistemology and implies its own metaphysic. The narrative pictorial method is deeply embedded in James’ subject, the consciousness of all relations. (Art 289) To depict consciousness in operation involves James in progressively experimental stretches of his medium. Because James attempts to render consciousness with a phenomenological accuracy, he must devise a way to bring the reader to the precise place where consciousness is coming into language or moving beyond language and this must be done in language, with language. Even when consciousness has moved from the pre-verbal into the realm of speech there is always a gap between the actual awareness in the present moment and any expression of that awareness in words. So James refines his ability to deploy stage silence in his dialogues while he is finding more complex representations of pictorial silence. Thus in all of the novels and tales from his major phase, the entire structure of each work renders the silent process of vision that the central character is experiencing under the surface of language and makes that deepening of vision open to the reader. Once we take up the topic of narrative pictorialism in this way, as a structural pattern, which operates in every piece of the text, we are close, I think, to seeing the figure in the carpet. Once we begin to see how James’ system works, it is so concrete and pervasive, we can’t see anything else. It is as obvious as a foot stuck into its shoe and we understand why James is so proud of his secret plan and why his invention of pictorial silence would be the all—pervasive aspect of his work he esteems as most important.

Alexander Gelley in Narrative Crossings challenges the critic working on the novel to analyze how visual experience is actually constructed out of a string of words and to document precisely how the reader’s image—making powers are utilized by a particular writer.¹³ Gelley uses The Ambassadors as a prime example of prose focused on vision, but he only treats this one novel in a brief overview, inviting other critics to take up the challenge of investigating the phenomenon of seeing in prose. I argue that all of James’ major works provide us with a splendid opportunity to specify exactly how the prose paragraph can set up a narrative picture which acts as a prompt for the reader’s own mind’s eye. By tracing James’ secret design in detail in the following chapters on the individual works, we can understand seeing in prose and how close that seeing can come to actual, optical sight. Gelley’s challenge can be fully answered by tracing the minutiae of James’ narrative pictorial method.

Discursive language cannot capture this continually expanding field of relations. The central character holds the silence and watches the drama of human relations unfold as a process of vision. As the drama in each novel or tale increases in the complexity of relations, (Art 5) silence between the characters becomes more pervasive until the air is filled with the unspoken, ranging from the unspeakable to the ineffable. At this point, in each text, as the delicate tissue of silence is stretched to bursting (Art11) with possibility, speech becomes aggressive. Language has the power to destroy, by brutally reducing the latency of any situation to a single spoken version. In James’ esoteric schemes, words can kill.

James uses an elaborate verbal structure to set up this process of vision (Art 308) where the character acting as the centre of consciousness serves the reader as a pair of eyes. Many writers and literary historians have credited James with having invented the close third person, an ostensible third person narrative voice which inhabits only one point of view in the story, that of the central consciousness. (Art 46) As noted, this central character (also referred to as the reflector by James (Art 67)) mirrors the entire action back to the reader. But richer than an objective mirror, the reflector is more like a photographic plate for registering and developing visual impressions, a metaphor applied to James himself by A.L. Coburn, the photographer who took the pictures to illustrate the New York Edition of James’ works in 1909. He describes the process of wandering around London with James to find locations for the photographs. Coburn saw James’ visual imagination as a set of sensitive plates in his brain:

Although not literally a photographer, I believe Henry James must have had sensitive plates in his brain on which to record his impressions! He always knew exactly what he wanted, although many of the pictures were but images in his mind and imagination, and what we did was to browse diligently until we found such a subject.¹⁴

Coburn understood that James’ specifically visual brain could record impressions and then transmit them as pictures to the reader through the arrangement of words in the text. Like the photographic plates, which Coburn imagines in James’ brain, the visual plates of the character as reflector serve as a screen for the projection of the images, which form the narrative pictures.

Yet in James’ narrative pictorial method, even the photographic metaphor seems too passive for observers engaged in the participatory action of seeing. At a certain point in each narrative the central character ceases to act as a passive plate for receiving impressions and becomes more like a painter, endowed with the painter’s eye (the title James invented for his book about painting), an eye that selects, composes and confers meaning on the optical spectacle.¹⁵ How does James’ perform this sleight-of-hand that makes the reader feel as if he or she is seeing through the eyes of the central character? How does James persuade the reader to read a character’s visual process as an ongoing deepening of vision? How does James give the reader the felt experience of a character’s consciousness engaged in the act of visual perception? How does James’ perform his conjuring trick of rendering silence in words on a page? What is the alchemical formula that allows him to represent a silence on the page? James builds his narrative pictorial structure around these silent moments so that they can be read without the author’s voice supplying a discursive explanation. The silence is not blank, the silence becomes visible, the silence is represented by a narrative picture. Language is re-organized to render non-verbal experience. The principle of re-organization is one that James discovered at the mid-point of his career, in writing The Portrait of a Lady: the writer can make silence visible by enabling the reader to see narrative pictures. In Chapter 3, The Grammar of Painting, we will look closely at Las Meninas, the masterpiece by Velasquez, to investigate the phenomenology of vision. Obviously seeing a painting and seeing in prose can never be the same act, but the writer can approximate and mime the effects of the painter and thereby stretch the narrative form, so that as James claims in referring to his use of picture, the Novel remains still … the most independent, most elastic, most prodigious of literary forms. (Art 326)

James’ technical alchemy, his conjuring trick, (Art 232) his way of making the silence visible, depends upon hiding the authorial voice behind the optical surface, a deft synaesthetic sleight-of-hand. James’ depiction of consciousness is based on his acute awareness of the figure/ground relation between absence and presence. For James all language is perceived against the ground of silence and all vision is perceived against the ground of the invisible. In Chapter 3, in The Grammar of Painting, (Theory 33) we will look closely at Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s insight into the role of the invisible as an aspect of seeing and the role of silence in relation to language and to painting, so these concepts will be further elucidated. James constructs each narrative pictorial text so that the key moments for the reader and for the central character are represented (Art 3) as narrative pictures perceived in silence. Neither the author’s own voice nor the character’s inner voice are allowed, to go behind (Art111) what the character sees on his or her optical screen. James describes the visual field as if he were describing a painting; we see the figures, gestures, eyes, objects. We perceive the tone and color and emotional resonance of the spectacle. But the authorial voice refuses to decode the significance at this original point of ocular contact. The process of interpreting the optical spectacle in words is always delayed and never complete. Thus the pattern sets up a rhythm; visual impression followed by a retrospective attempt to decode the picture in words, an effort which can never duplicate all of the ramifications of the field of relations as they are embodied with the momentary frame. I am appropriating the term delayed decoding for this pattern in James a term I am appropriating from my mentor, Ian Watt, who used it in a slightly different way to refer to an aspect of Conrad’s style in his major work, Conrad and the Nineteenth Century.¹⁶ (We will come back to a fuller discussion of delayed decoding on page 72 of the chapter.)

James makes his pictorial silence as mute as he can get away with given that the medium is language. He translates what he calls the grammar of painting, all the forms of expression available to the painter, his brother of the brush, (Theory 33) into their narrative equivalents so that the prose surface reflects a highly charged visual spectacle back to the reader. James specifically compares himself to his brother of the brush, in his Preface to the The Tragic Muse, his one novel in which a painter serves as a major character: the novelist who doesn’t represent, and represent all the time, is lost, exactly as much as the painter who, at his work and given his intention, doesn’t paint all the time. (Art 94) Like his painter character, Nick Dormer, James faces away from his audience to direct the reader’s inquisitive eyes to the imaged prose. (Art 347) In the last paragraph of the Preface, James talks about why it has been difficult to make his painter character interesting:

Any representation of the artist in triumph must be flat in proportion as it really sticks to its subject—.… For, to put the matter in an image, all we see then—in his triumph—see of the charm-compeller is the back he turns to us as he bends over his work His triumph … is but the triumph of what he produces, and that is another affair. (Art 96)

The artist, depicted here with his back to us, is placed in the same position as the painter in Vermeer’s allegorical canvas, now in Vienna at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, known by several titles, The Artist in his Studio, The Artist at Work and The Triumph of Painting, believed to be the source for James’ description. ¹⁷ In Vermeer’s self-portrait celebrating his art, the face of the artist is preciously unseen, (Art 161) as James says of his invisible portrait of Mrs. Newsome in The Ambassadors.¹⁸ In James own practice he hides his authorial presence by positioning himself as an invisible observer behind the central character. The author becomes a pair of eyes turned away from the reader looking in on the optical spectacle in front of the central character. The author’s personality is left unrevealed as such.

Each picture is constructed with an implicit double frame so the reader can see through the lens of the character’s eyes and see over the character’s shoulder at the same time. In the inner frame we are able to read the images appearing on the character’s visual screen during the moments of silence. In the larger frame we see the character positioned just in front of the reader. We see the character seeing: James subtly reinforces the reader to follow the second-by-second curve of perception. The two views often appear to be fused, as if the camera lens has been adjusted into a sudden, sharper focus. But in all of James’ narrative pictures, he explicitly includes the almost imperceptible gap of the shift between the first frame and the second frame. This subtle click into focus, accentuates the central character’s sudden awareness of being within the visual field; the character becomes conscious of being seen as well as seeing.

Painter’s from Leonardo to Delacroix have argued that painting’s prominence over poetry, in the debate over the relative merits and qualities of these sister arts, resides in the ability of the framed painting to deliver everything at once in a single glance. But let us note that in looking at a representational painting from one of the artists James admires, Tintoretto, Vermeer, or Velasquez, the viewer’s eye will travel around the canvas in various paths determined by the structure and the iconography of the painting, so that something like narrative time is needed to take in the full import of the painter’s vision. According to Leonardo and Delacroix all of these aspects of the optical field are at least theoretically visible in a single moment of simultaneity.¹⁹ The eye can take in the whole visual field before it is unscrambled in that original nanosecond. I will use the term theoretical simultaneity to refer to this first fraction of a second when the eye is bombarded with the optical spectacle. Theoretical simultaneity exists as a perceptual limit available to the art of painting, an edge of possibility, so that this temporal effect is in itself, a meta-pictorial quality, a discussion to be treated at length in Chapter 3, The Grammar of Painting. But we can also note that after the eye has moved into the canvas and the canvas has moved back into the eye, the viewer can experience pulling all aspects of the painting back together within a few seconds, so that this retrospective simulation of the original moment of simultaneity can be reconstructed by the viewer’s eye as a second order of simultaneity, a term which confesses to the first order as a theoretical absolute only attainable as an impossible ideal.

James finds his literary equivalents of these meta-pictorial aspects of painting, silence and simultaneity, in setting up his narrative pictures. In every picture the central character models the act of seeing for the reader. In every picture the reader is necessary as another pair of eyes engaged in seeing the character see. In every picture the double frames are collapsed back into theoretical simultaneity: we see what the character sees and we see the character seeing at virtually the same instant. But let us note how James goes to the very root of the act of visual perception. He slows down what he calls the process of vision so that the reader must see that the optical spectacle of even a single image is broken into frames which may only last a millisecond but which are then re-telescoped retrospectively into a moment of consciousness which seems to be instantaneous.

James elides what the character is seeing with how the character is seeing. The reader is given the images that comprise the character’s optical field and at the same time we grasp the felt consciousness that arises from the visible facts, to borrow a phrase from John Ruskin, James’ mentor in looking at paintings. But just as the character has not even begun to decode the interpretation of the narrative picture, the reader is not allowed to go behind the character to pick up whispered hints from the authorial voice. For James operating in full pictorial mode, if the reader were allowed to go behind the character’s back to a scene narrated by the omniscient narrator, a scene in which the character as reflector is not present, a scene not mediated by the character’s lens, we would be experiencing an illegal operation. Thus instead of going behind the character to obtain information outside the scope of the character’s ken, we are placed firmly behind the character’s back as a constant witness of the character’s process of vision.

What happens in this moment of perception is that the character enters into the state Merleau- Ponty describes as the chiasm.²⁰ This term is explored in an essay and appears in his working notes for his last, unfinished book, The Visible and the Invisible, which was composed in 1965, applies perfectly to the visual experience that James highlights as the key to his narrative pictorial method. James’ central character becomes aware of the chiastic nature of vision: to see is to be seen, to become aware of oneself as enfolded and included in the visual field. We can see this chiastic vision in operation in the very first silent picture that James composes using the central character as the centre of consciousness, a paragraph in Chapter 40 of The Portrait of a Lady with Isabel Archer poised on the threshold of the red-drawing room of the Palazzo Roccanera in Rome, a paragraph we will study in more detail in Chapter 2. The Discovery of Pictorialism.

The Discovery of the Pictorial Method and The Prefaces

In Chapter 40 of The Portrait of a Lady, we locate the exact paragraph where James writes his way into his first fully pictorial narrative picture.²¹ James, as a writer who reads himself in retrospect with the scrupulosity of a literary critic, marks this passage in the Preface written twenty-two years later for the New York edition of his collected works, as obviously the best thing in the book. (Art 57) He refers to the picture of Isabel "motionlessly seeing (James’ italics) a previously perceived silent impression which functions like a framed picture. During an all night meditative vigil" Isabel begins to decode the visual image into speech. (Art 57) She unfurls a long interior monologue exploring, in retrospect, everything that had been contained in the silent glimpse framed by the doorway earlier that afternoon. In that instant of heightened awareness when Isabel stops in mid-stride just beyond the threshold of the doorframe to the red drawing-room of the Palazzo Roccanera, she perceives the vision within the room specifically as a little picture, composed of the related figures of Osmond and Madame Merle in a moment of still, silent communion, facing each other in an absorbed mutual gaze. (Portrait 343) When Isabel begins to plumb the silence of the image later that evening by the dying fire, she finds that her picture which registered as a sudden flicker of light (Portrait 343) contains more meanings than could be unraveled into a verbal catalogue. James is delighted to discover that a still picture, seen and then seen again in retrospect, can advance the action faster than the surprise of a caravan or the identification of a pirate. (Art 57) James revels in the fact that the mere still lucidity of Isabel "seeing, which illustrates the general plan of the book" (Art 57) can be as exciting as an action packed adventure tale. The novel, for James, becomes an adventure of consciousness. With hindsight, James recognizes that the structure of his own peculiar way of depicting consciousness through a process of vision has come into being. From the silent picture in Chapter 40 to the delayed decoding during Isabel’s meditative vigil, his narrative pictorial method has been born.

Let us look at The Palazzo Roccanera Picture and we can see how James’ first full scale narrative picture works to foreground his new form of silence. In Chapter 40, Isabel returns from gathering wildflowers in the delicate winter light of the Roman campagna and stands arrested in motion just beyond the doorframe. She stops short as she crosses the threshold because she receives an impression which causes her to slow down the act of perception. James does not give us an exhaustive visual catalogue of what Isabel sees as George Eliot or Balzac might do. Instead Isabel’s optical field is sketched in with a few brief notes: the Dresden clock on the mantelpiece, the red damask walls, the low burning fire. The emphasis is placed on the larger structural elements of the composition, the frame of the doorway and the relative positions of the two figures, Osmond seated in an armchair and Madame Merle standing, facing one another, musing in silence, as still in their absorbed mutual gaze as if they were in a frozen tableau on a stage.

She had gathered a handful of flowers in a sunny hollow, far from the walls of Rome, and on reaching Palazzo Roccanera she went straight to her room, to put them into water. Isabel passed into the drawing-room, the one she herself usually occupied, the second in order from the large ante-chamber, which was entered from the staircase, and in which even Gilbert Osmond’s rich devices had not been able to correct a look of rather grand nudity. Just beyond the threshold of the drawing-room she stopped short, the reason for her doing so being that she had received an impression. The impression had, in strictness, nothing unprecedented; but she felt it as something new, and the soundlessness of her step gave her time to take in the scene before she interrupted it. Madame Merle was there in her bonnet, and Gilbert Osmond was talking to her; for a minute they were unaware she had come in. Isabel had often seen that before, certainly; but what she had not seen, or at least had not noticed, was that their colloquy had for the moment converted itself into a sort of familiar silence, from which she instantly perceived that her entrance would startle them. Madame Merle was standing on the rug, a little way from the fire; Osmond was in a deep chair, leaning back and looking at her. Her head was erect, as usual, but her eyes were bent on his. What struck Isabel first was that he was sitting while Madame Merle stood; there was an anomaly in this that arrested her. Then she perceived that they had arrived at a desultory pause in their exchange of ideas and were musing, face to face, with the freedom of old friends who sometimes exchange ideas without uttering them. There was nothing to shock in this; they were old friends in fact. But the thing made an image, lasting only a moment, like a sudden flicker of light. Their relative positions, their absorbed mutual gaze, struck her as something detected. But it was all over by the time she had fairly seen it. Madame Merle had seen her and had welcomed her without moving; her husband, on the other hand, had instantly jumped up. He presently murmured something about wanting a walk and, after having asked their visitor to excuse him, left the room. (Portrait 342–343)

Isabel Archer has come into the Palazzo Roccanera, the gigantic, rusticated Roman monument she inhabits with her husband, Gilbert Osmond. This imaginary architecture is described as an historic building with frescoes by Caravaggio and mutilated statues in the courtyard, a dark habitation with violent undertones. (Portrait 307) Isabel stops short just as she approaches the doorframe of the red drawing room. In the first beat of Isabel Archer’s pictorial impression she sees Osmond seated in an armchair in front of the fireplace and Madame Merle standing facing him, both figures musing in silence. The reader is first aware of the optical spectacle within the room seen through the lens of Isabel’s eyes. And then in another millisecond, we are aware of Isabel herself as observer standing in the doorframe. The reader is now drawn into the paragraph as another observer, the unrepresented spectator (the full discussion of my adaptation of Wollheim’s