The Aspern Papers: I-V

Currently Reading: The Aspern Papers Henry James
The Footnote: A Curious History Anthony Grafton

Now that I've overcome the hurdle of James's style, I have to overcome the hurdle of James's substance.

The narrative has not progressed very far (it took two chapters for the narrator to establish a connection with the Misses Bordereau and three more to regress back to anonymity). Meanwhile, in those five chapters, James has artfully revealed to the reader many layers of the narrator's character.

His motives and motivations become apparent to the reader in many episodes such as his physiological reaction at being "really face to face with the Juliana of some of Aspern's most renowned lyrics...[his] heart beat so fast as if the miracle of resurrection had taken place for [his] benefit" and he subsequently "felt nearer to him at that first moment of seeing her than [he] ever had been before or ever have been since" (pp.21).

Additionally, the reader is able to sense his despair at not having "been able to look into a single pair of eyes into which [Aspern's] had looked or feel a transmitted contact in any aged had that his hand had touched" (pp.6).

He even articulates, in a quite self-aware manner, that he admires Aspern because "at a period when our native land was nude and crude and provincial, when the famous 'atmosphere' it is supposed to lack was not even missed, when literature was lonely there and art and form almost impossible, he had found means to live and write like one of the first; to be free and general and not at all afraid; to feel, to understand, and express everything" (pp.48).

Insights such as these into the nature of the narrator reveal not a dispassionate academic respect for Aspern but a more frenzied, passionate fervor not only for Aspern's work but for Aspern himself. For the narrator, literary, scholarly and even experiential immersion in Aspern's poetry is not fulfilling enough. His is a desire to taste of Aspern's marrow--the stuff of his genius.

Through his development of the narrator, Aspern illustrates what he believes the academic temperament to be. The true academic is not content merely making bookish and cerebral attempts at intellectual discourse; the academic's passion plagues him, forcing him to surrender his life, his mind and his free will to the pursuit of the study regardless of how banal or uninspiring the subject matter might be. Once the passion grips the academic (the passion always finds the academic never vice versa) even the scholar of 15th century Balkan undergarments will sacrifice himself in order to further his study.