Just Finished: The Aspern Papers Henry James
In celebration of redundancy and because I'm glad I finally got around to finishing The Aspern Papers, I'm going to say that I finished The Aspern Papers. So...I finished The Aspern Papers. And because I've finished The Aspern Papers, I can finally comment thoroughly on what it was like to finish The Aspern Papers.
Overall, the rest of the novella was a quick read. I could have finished it in a day, however, there were profound obstacles in my way. Mostly myself. Actually, only myself. If I treat the book as something I have to read, or an assignment that has been forced on me, my visceral reaction is to gnash my teeth, don sackcloth, ashen my forehead and procrastinate. But when I rationalize the situation and recognize that the "assignment" to read the book is a direct result of a request I made, I find the impetus necessary to shut the hell up and do what I need to do. But I feel luckier than most in that all that is needed to remind me of my love of reading is an exercise this simple and rudimentary.
Because James's style placed a more than conscious emphasis on the psychological characterization of the narrator, the narrator's psychological evolution superseded the narrative. One particularly artful example of this occurs at the end of the novel:
"I also saw something which had not been in my forecast. Poor Miss Tina's sense of failure had produced a rare alteration in her, but I had been too full of stratagems and spoils to think of that. Now I took it in; I can scarcely tell how it startled me. She stood in the middle of the room with a face of mildness bent upon me, and her look of forgiveness, of absolution, made her angelic. It beautified her; she was younger; she was not a ridiculous old woman." (pp. 136)This is representative of the absoluteness of the narrator's obsession. His passion for Aspern's work is so consuming that he finds it is easier to reconstitute his entire person than to attempt to check his obsession. This quick-change in the way he views Miss Tina is not even the result of ardent rationalization or compromise. He actually sees her as beautiful! With his own eyes!
But the delightfully wicked part comes after she reveals that she has burnt the papers he so lusted after and can thus no longer be of use to him:
"The room seemed to go round me as she said this, and a real darkness for a moment descended on my eyes. When it passed, Miss Tina was there still, but the transfiguration was over and she had changed back to a plain, dingy,elderly person." (pp.137)However, the tragic irony is that the only transfiguration that took place was within himself. Realistically speaking about ten seconds had passed between hallucination and disillusion and in terms of the narrative, they had each only spoken two lines of dialogue. But what James successfully illustrates is that in life, the most profound moments are not the climaxes of grandiose narratives but occur independent of time and space and our control.
Let us step away then from this excellent literary analysis towards the obvious question: is James asserting that our quests are not grandiose? In other words, does James imply that the search for truth is a fool's errand that will lead only to the realization that we are the fool? I think so. There are many personal implications. It is necessary to persevere in work. It is equally necessary to know when to stop. There are limits to what we may do, and these limits are not spiritual or conspired, but rather simply limits. Nowhere is this truer than in scholarship. One can read as much as possible and come but little further than one was previously. In a classic Modernist twist - a pscyhological twist - James is telling us that knowledge is psychological knowledge. By knowing ourselves, we avoid the hallucinations and disillusionment that accompany false hope and pride.
ReplyDeleteThese qualities makes James' book important. His other works possess a similar theory - in fact this novella maybe taken as largely representative of the Jamesian cosmology and style.
I suggested it on these grounds, but not simply them. As you are no doubt discovering through your reading of Georg Lukacs' "History and Class Consciousness" there are other theories of knowledge, which might expose that James' limits are actually due to his inability to investigate his own self-knowledge.