Portrait
It took me a long time to plumb why people call Henry James “the Master.” Really, it just took me a long time to read anything by Henry James. Though I felt the force he exerts on the canon, all shadowy and oblique and as fundamental as the strong force that holds quarks together, I hadn’t taken the plunge.
But this April I read A Portrait of a Lady, and I do not exaggerate even a little when I tell you that he got his textual fingers right up there in my soul and he rocked it this way and that, and I felt it. When I was a kid I saw a humpback whale breach off the California coast: fantastic spray, sleek back bigger than you can fathom, and also somewhere in my child-brain this mute awareness of the great thousand-year undercurrents that circulate in the deep oceans. Through this little prism of experience, young eyes, the ocean, the whale, I’d accidentally tapped into nature’s mainframe. That was reading Portrait. Something breached; it was larger than I knew; and it gestured down and down toward the churning underflows.
In good old English major style, I’m going to do a little discussion of Portrait. Bear with it, if you want; or skip it. If you do skip it, you’ll find some good old English major style discussion of E.M. Forster’s A Room With a View, which I’m going to use to catapult some of James’ ideas into modern life. If you decide to skip that, too, you can always just read what I thought of the new Ben Lerner book; it’s also in good old English major style. As they say in Forster’s Italy, prego! Now buckle up.
Portrait is organized as a journey to the dark heart of convention. Isabel Archer — committed to freedom and exploration, built of a “tonic wildness,” full of “the love of knowledge” yet possessing “the finest capacity for ignorance” — leaves a mechanical, forward-looking America to visit her uncle in England, whose country is reserved and aristocratic and full of spectacular wit. After rejecting marriage proposals from the English Lord Warburton and the American capitalist Caspar Goodwood, she travels to a literary Rome in which the very air is crowded with the ruins of convention; there she’s courted by the eminently tasteful Gilbert Osmond, and eventually marries him. Osmond is “convention itself,” though chiefly in the sense that he’s entirely an act, a husk (yet he wears it beautifully, and forces scrutiny of the relationship between beauty and performance). Fittingly, readers learn that Isabel’s marriage was covertly designed from the start by her clever, perfect, utterly pitiable friend Madame Merle, whose intimacy with Osmond proves far deeper than her friendship with Isabel.
Isabel’s journey toward Rome is a discovery of the wide world she sought so ardently and idealistically. But that world is not what she supposed. Traditional structures operate as confinement; taste is anxiety; marriage is icy melee; money is bait. The accomplishment of Portrait is that you, as a reader, undergo these revelations with her: you feel not only her inner trials and longings but also the specific experience of what it was like to live as her inside the brutal filaments of 1870s convention. You breathe the same air. As you get to know Isabel, you thoughtfully construct your own fierceness of spirit and commitment to the noble ideals that organized the era (the feeling is of discovering them within yourself); then you find yourself beside her at the brink of a cliff, and though you told yourself you saw it coming it nevertheless catches you off guard, and when she plunges, you plunge too.
After that plunge you’re estranged from her. Her marriage is skipped; she loses a child, but the loss occupies only a few sentences; she travels the world without passion and then returns to Rome. James forces you to pursue the intimacy you thought you had like someone fumbling underwater. And the conceit, of course, is that Isabel is likewise fumbling around her own mind in search of the youthful vision she thought constituted her identity.
Only after years in a marriage she names “a house of suffocation” does Isabel discover the truth of Madame Merle’s involvement, and in response she flees to England against Osmond’s wishes to see her dear cousin Ralph die. But her escape is tempered by contact with the very thing that might release it into the broad salvation of America: Caspar Goodwood, the capitalist suitor. Goodwood concludes the book with its most naked moment of violence. His desire for Isabel — to protect her, or to acquire her — is complete and unguarded; and though he is, functionally, America; though he is the new, the rejection of convention, the stolid inscrutable modern man, an embodiment of a country which James casts as complicatedly valorous and aspirational (like Isabel in her youth); he cannot represent honor. He is too concrete and too violent, too intensely himself, too alien to the intricate negotiation of idealism and actuality Isabel requires for her own self-conception. Instead, she recoils back to a Roman hell she accepts upon her integrity. For that was the structure all along. She was always a tool of a cultural convention voracious in its coldness and sly in its execution, built on idealism’s gravity. Her values were never her own.
Depending on your mood or constitution, that spiel might make you pick up a copy of Portrait or might make you stop clicking on the links I send you. (I could go either way.) But here are the two key points in plain language:
1: In offering a portrait of Isabel, James also depicts the structure and atmosphere of his era.
2: Isabel’s idealism enables and fortifies her awful, conventional marriage, because an ideal is also a fundamental mechanism of power.
It’s easy to condemn conventional strictures from our modern stance. It’s something else to feel those perforations as Isabel Archer — to sense the seismics, to recalibrate your own life as love and marriage and intellect and taste and wealth and family and culture are revealed to be duplicitous. To depict is to expose, and James’ critique goes to the core of what it means to be human, what propels a society forward, what holds it up and ties it down. His novel breaches the surface; it gives you young eyes. Then it dives.
Window
By the time he published A Room With A View in 1908, E.M. Forster was familiar with those depths. But he also felt the rumblings of new values, ideas, and ways of knowing, especially as global industry spun forward and geopolitical tremors accumulated. And they made him impatient.
Forster never permits himself the length to deal so directly and powerfully with character as James in Portrait. Instead, in A Room With A View, you’re thrust into crucial scenes as suddenly as the protagonist Lucy dropping down among the violets outside Florence; and you’re made to feel their crucialness by a tactful abundance of symbol. Chief among those symbols is, unsurprisingly, windows. To look out a window is to risk what Forster ironically dubs “the intolerable tides of heaven”; it siphons what is out there into the manageable “in here.” The titular “room” containing the window in question, then, becomes a figure for all that is conventional and regulated about the text and the society it satirizes. In other words, Forster’s room is Henry James’ world.
In part, Forster opens the window by playing with his authority. He narrates in fragments; he skips time; he flaunts perspectives; he catches the reader unaware with moments of odd objectivity or ridiculed high culture. In particular, his irony is insistent. At the time, of course, these were risky techniques.
But what interests me more is that Forster also sometimes — almost accidentally, or at least almost sloppily — disturbs society’s existential footing. In a Florentine square, for instance, a man is stabbed:
“He frowned; he bent towards Lucy with a look of interest, as if he had an important message for her. He opened his lips to deliver it, and a stream of red came out between them and trickled down his unshaven chin.”
That undelivered message — what an image of disruption, of exposed violence! Lucy faints in response; the man’s blood spatters across some photographs she had bought; George later discards them into the Arno, whose “roar [suggests] some unexpected melody.” This kind of discontent skirts the edges of the novel, as when Italian is widely used but always left untranslated, or when, in a pivotal scene, “the ground [gives] way” beneath Lucy. The effect is of an occasional glance at the great question of Forster’s later modernism: how to confront a world to which your system of knowledge is inadequate.
Here’s another paragraph I think captures these overlapping registers:
“But, once in the open air, she paused. Some emotion — pity, terror, love, but the emotion was strong — seized her, and she was aware of autumn. Summer was ending, and the evening brought her odors of decay, the more pathetic because they were reminiscent of spring. That something or other mattered intellectually? A leaf, violently agitated, danced past her, while other leaves lay motionless. That the earth was hastening to re-enter darkness, and the shadows of those trees over Windy Corner?”
This paragraph articulates Lucy’s recognition that she loves George Emerson, a ruddy and authentic young man without the all-too-common pretentious traditional upbringing. In “open air” — the atmosphere of her time — Lucy is at first confused about a “strong” emotion which has "seized her.” She hasn’t felt this before; it’s outside the vocabulary she’s been offered by society; it’s not “intellectual.” She’s also struck by a sense that “summer,” like the “evening,” is “ending,” heralded by “odors of decay” and an atmosphere “violent” in its agitation of a leaf and equally violent to her “agitated” psyche. Narratively, these details demonstrate Lucy’s concern that although she’s finally faced her feelings for George, it’s too late; she feels the world tip toward darkness as she nears her marriage to the aptly-named Cecil Vyse.
But the paragraph also articulates that change is literally in the air, its odors and its leaves, a turn into darkness, a confusing reality, a disruption of the duplicitous social organization of Portrait. The real world, Forster implies, is no longer the world of drawing rooms and convention, and the emotions adequate to reality can’t therefore be articulated in that vocabulary. Instead, you might need something more intricate, and sharper; something like a modernist novel.
Lucy’s concern is ill-placed, in the end. A Room With a View would not have made it into the “SDE Classics Romance Collection” (per my — Anna’s — copy) if she and George didn’t enjoy an ending together. But even that pleasantry is tinged with forward-looking impatience. In fact, I might venture to say it makes the central claim of the novel simply this: that authentic love is, in essence, modernist, in that it breaks open accepted knowledge. It forces the reader to face, alongside Forster, the state of the atmosphere, and thereby to reckon with the truly new.
Phone
Scroll forward 118 years and the notion of outpacing social and epistemological systems feels relevant once more. Ben Lerner’s novel Transcription, released early this month, plays with different modes of love and disruption, but it steps into the tradition of interpreting those tectonics.
Of contemporary novelists, Lerner’s work feels most attuned to the proposition that literature’s job is to articulate the atmosphere of an era. Thomas, our unnamed narrator’s dying mentor, puts it this way early in the novel: “this is the question — the state of the ether — that I take up in all my writing...” What does the ether of an era feel like? What is it like to be a person alive at a point in time, to inhabit the feelings structured by a particular society? Reading James lets you breathe the atmosphere of the 1870s; Forster wants you to want to escape the air of the nineteenth century as much as he does. Lerner’s own answer has to do with screens, and with memory.
Here’s a passage that gets at the argument:
“The dream is opposed to your phone, where no dead or distances are able to appear. Which is also their appeal, their function: to screen the dead, like we screen a fireplace. Screening out the calls of the dead, yes? You screen time.”
When Thomas, characteristically inscrutable and himself on the cusp of joining the screened dead, says phones allow “no dead or distances… to appear,” he mostly means, I think, that a device extracts you from the world. To “screen time” is to filter out history, both personal and social. You delete your past, and the world’s past, and all the responsibility a “past” entails, and submit to the relief of the device. You enter nonexistence.
I think that’s right. When social media companies sell platforms designed to capture attention, they’re selling nonexistence. When kids become addicted to their phones, they’re addicted to nonexistence. Never have so many people wanted, on a chemical level, to escape their lives — and never before have they been able to.
So what does that mean? What happens to the ether? Lerner’s easiest answer is that it becomes full of anxiety. Reading his prose is like stepping into his brain — and wow, is he one anxious guy. He sets up his book with a scenario riddled with trivial paranoia: just before conducting what is likely to be a final interview with Thomas, the unnamed Lerner-esque protagonist drops his phone into a sink and breaks it. He manages to arrive at Thomas’ house, but rather than confessing his quotidian catastrophe he somehow, impulsively, pretends to record the interview with his broken phone. Later, scholars and friends treat the interview, which the narrator reconstructed from memory, as a transcription, so when the narrator describes the broken-phone incident during a memorial talk after Thomas’ death, he unwittingly makes them angry. Thomas’ son Max, who went to college with the narrator, is particularly frustrated; in the final part of the novel, the two dance around Max’s ire as they discuss (in an interview) their deep anxieties about their similarly-aged daughters — including screen time, “refusal of school,” “failure to thrive,” and severe struggles with eating. Throughout, Lerner carefully confuses the two situations, the two daughters, even Max and the narrator. Thomas himself mixes the two up, making small omissions that nevertheless feel, to his son, like being deleted from existence. By the end, the pervading anxiety of the novel has become an anxiety of memory. What is recorded? What is not? What have we just read — a transcription or a memory? What is memory without a transcription, without all the accumulated data of a digital age? What is the narrator’s relationship to Thomas, or to Max, or to his daughter (“in this book I call her Eva”)? What is the narrator’s name? Does he exist?
In other words, Lerner’s anxiety is over the prospect of continued personal and historical reality amid a world tipping toward its opposite. To Lerner, screen time is collective: “We are together, erring. You are not disappearing into privacy. Hallucination, too, is social.” And chief among the social consequences of an epidemic of nonbeing is a great instability in personal relations, because when memory cedes ground to transcription, when life lapses into nonbeing, relationships become increasingly defined by anxiety — and its paralysis.
The reason Lerner pulls this claim off, and the reason I think his voice is worth reading, is his ability to execute his point in the reader’s psyche. The last paragraph of the novel begins like this:
“It was as though someone had placed an ice pack against the back of my neck.”
This metaphor — effective on its own, I think — stands out because Lerner has used it before. It opened another pivotal paragraph, somewhere earlier on, but for the life of me, reading it this time, I could not remember where that first instance was. I felt as if Lerner had performed inception; I couldn't remember. He had constructed a point of contact with destabilized memory (the same way Thomas misremembers his son or the narrator misremembers Thomas’ cooking) inside my own head. Which means, of course, that the only recourse would be to reread; to roll back time; to check the transcription.
Transcription taps into a feeling of ennui each reader already has — because people already know “the state of the ether” today. We feel it as we flash irresistibly in and out of existence. We see it as we watch people walk head-down through the city, faces lit, oblivious, not there. The world is once again, like always, running ahead of our systems of understanding it, but the windows we need aren’t the portals to nonbeing we carry with us everywhere. We need the undercurrents, the mainframe, the unifying big-time meaning-making feelings. We need renewed contact with the depths.
I think that’s what literature’s about, as a form, regardless of the era. Not escape: immersion. In articulating the ether, these three books tap into a collective soul, something subterranean, rumbling, ancient, intimate. They conjure the whale. You follow it down.