The Lucid Stillness of His Style

The patient who begins a therapy session by naming the topic they refuse to discuss will wind up talking about that very subject before the fifty minutes is up. This is so infallibly true, and moreover so widely known to be true, that it is scarcely possible to announce refusals to a therapist in good faith. I don't find myself very credible, either, when I start this essay by declaring I cannot write criticism about Henry James. You and I both know where such declarations lead.

Plenty about my failure to write about James was contingent — a dissertation on mesmerism that was supposed to reach his novel about mesmerism, The Bostonians, and never did — but to the extent that I avoided James actively, my difficulty was that I wanted only to praise him. The interpretive puzzle I want to talk about, then, is the problem of praise. Sometimes I find myself standing before the object of an unrequited love without anything much to say. Or with everything to say, but suddenly, and uncharacteristically, without the means to speak it. Being tongue-tied as a problem of criticism is perhaps worthy of the same sustained discussion that being tongue-tied gets as an obstacle in love. Everywhere in romantic comedy you see people stumbling over their words when confronted with the very person to whom they would hope to have most to say; all over criticism you do not see it, I suppose because this is the very criticism that does not necessarily get written, or at any rate, does not get submitted for publication.

I don't think this is a case of having an impoverished vocabulary for praise and joy because of some professional blindness we have trained ourselves in. Praise and joy simply are vocabularies that risk impoverishment, in part because their currency is valuable. Flattery will get you everywhere, so there is reason to mistrust. When words of praise don't seem motivated and false, then danger often lurks on another side: they seem platitudinous and boring. Again I doubt that it takes any particular academic training to be bored by a mutual felicity between the critic and the work that in no way involves you. Isn't it rather a commonplace, well beyond scholarly conversations, that one must put one's protagonist in trouble? The satisfied critic is a protagonist without a predicament, unless they can make a predicament of their satisfaction — or of the problem of how to express it. Beatitude is boring.

Charlotte, the spider of E. B. White's Charlotte's Web, thus strikes me as a critic in an enviable position: all she wants to do is praise the pig Wilbur, and to do so will be both difficult and consequential. She may be platitudinous if she wishes — and she does wish, for the most part, although there is an exception that I want to discuss in a minute. The material act of writing her clichéd words is extraordinarily difficult, because she has to spin them and even go scavenge them (or get the rat Templeton to scavenge them) from where they lie, discarded and strange to her, all over the human world. Also, the object of her judgments of reflection will be slaughtered if she doesn't get the job done right. Here's a critical protagonist with a problem. Every stroke of the spinnerets is an acrobatic feat on which Wilbur's survival depends. She writes out SOME PIG. Then TERRIFIC. With that she absolutely triumphs.1

SOME NOVEL, I should like to say of The Bostonians. TERRIFIC. But its life is not at stake, nor even its place in the canon. And typing is unfortunately very easy. Maybe if I needlepoint it.

Stanley Cavell understands the critical act of praise as a passionate utterance in which I aim to win your assent to my judgment of the object's excellence. As Sianne Ngai explains in Our Aesthetic Categories, Cavell understands such judgments as statements with perlocutionary force, which means they are performative statements that appeal to you, their auditor, for your judgment as to whether they succeed or fail (and not to felicity conditions, such as whether I am licensed by the state to perform a marriage). Thus praise can fail in an uncountable number of ways.2 I am interested in praise that fails in such a way that it seems to be empty, belated, already-said, and possibly, in the anticipation of those pitfalls, unspeakable in the first place. What kind of speaking-around such pitfalls would be possible?

Henry James confronted a problem that is at least adjacent to this one, if not identical with it, in his preface to Shakespeare's The Tempest.3 On Cavell's reading, James is "torment[ed]" in this preface by "the risk that false praise kills what it is we have to be grateful for."4 The preface could be summarized as a long description of how he is troubled by the task of describing his joy in this work. I think we too easily psychologize and dismiss people who describe their problems with happiness, so let me just say that I don't see this introduction as in some way neurotic; I don't see it as a symptom of a mistaken view of the world. I don't think James should be more healthy-minded. Talking while tongue-tied is a worthwhile problem for a person to think about. Speaking admiration can be easy, or it can be fraught with genuine difficulty, just like speaking disappointment.

Shall James say "some play! terrific!"? It has been said. "Everything has thus been attributed to the piece before us, and every attribution so made has in turn been brushed away," he writes. And if we "cross the scene of action at a mortal risk" to find the "calm at the center of the storm"? There we will only find an enigmatic idol: "the subject itself intact and unconscious, seated as unwinking and inscrutable as a divinity in a temple, save for that vague flicker of derision, the only response to our interpretative heat, which adds the last beauty to its face."5 Cavell notes, with psychological acuity, that "if you for some reason no longer want to join in the common praise of Shakespeare and cannot satisfyingly find a way of your own, then . . . you may well want to find a way to discount it."6 Some people in other words might want to smash the derisive idol. James discloses a frustration that could have gone in this direction. But he chooses puzzlement instead. "It may seem no very philosophic state of mind, the merely baffled and exasperated view of one of the supreme works of all literature," he admits, "though I feel, for myself, that to confess to it now and then, by way of relief, is no unworthy tribute to the work."7 He remains eloquently, movingly baffled all the way to the end, including over how Shakespeare could have projected a plan to make this his last play, and then carried the plan out. No greater completeness than to finish a thing, then go quietly die.

Talk of the smooth wholeness of an artistic object is apt to be setting off people's Cleanth Brooks alarms. But the smooth wholeness I mean is less that of a Grecian urn than of a baseball bat; and it is less a property of the object than of a certain experience of confrontation with it, in which the problem is that the thing has no problems you can help it solve. Didn't Shakespeare need James at all? It can feel like the artwork does not need you, is ostentatiously whole without you. Then it might seem there is no critical plot to be found.

But the plot some critics have found, at such times, is that of a bow so virtuosic that it turns into a dance. Charlotte has the acrobatics of her upstroke on the T; we have stylish self-abasement.

Simply to say SOME PIG is for Charlotte a virtuosic achievement. She needn't fancy it up. But for the more prosaically literate human being, it is in style that the labor of writing can best appear. It is not exactly that a good style should look laborious, or not obviously so; but as D. A. Miller points out, we are capable of perceiving the expenditure behind the construction of a style's effortless lightness.8 Before we can register that it is style we are seeing, we must see art; that is, the slight imbalance of artifice; that is, the heavy lifting that is labor. This is no less true when what is labored at is the impression of ease. For this reason I like very much Brian Dillon's definition of style: it is "ruined poise."9 Style is necessarily in an interchange with its own failure to pull something off. We only know something was being pulled off if it nearly wasn't — which is to say, at least in some small part, actually wasn't. Some will see this chink and some won't.

I said that not all of Charlotte's praise was platitudinous. She calls Wilbur RADIANT, after Templeton the rat finds a description of the "radiant action" of a detergent on its discarded package (advertising copy being the very type of false and meretricious praise).10 Wilbur is definitely not radiant. He is excitable and needy; loving; innocent of any venality; in short, he is quite an ordinary pig and no better than he ought to be. His ordinariness is just what Charlotte's friendship sanctifies.

RADIANT is Charlotte's most audacious and thus her most self-exposing judgment. The pig is definitely not radiant. Or is he? When she is trying to decide if the word will take, she has him jump around. "I'm not sure Wilbur's action is exactly radiant," she muses, "but it's interesting." Already the idea is having its effect on Wilbur. "Actually," he tells her, "I feel radiant!"11 All from a laundry box. Seen from the perspective of the animals, whose grasp of the meaning of words is apt to wobble, praise shows itself to be a way not of labeling facts already in existence, but of making, fostering, and sustaining a life.

The work of making radiant takes many hands. After Charlotte calls Wilbur radiant, he works diligently at it. When visitors come, he does "everything possible to make himself glow. It is not easy to look radiant, but Wilbur threw himself into it with a will."12 He capers and breathes deeply. Mrs. Zuckerman, showing her above-average grasp of criticism's workings and the help they may need, scrubs the pig with buttermilk before he leaves for the fair, correctly judging that a crust of slop behind his ears and a patch of manure on his side will dim his rays considerably. The book sustains the joke of the radiant pig all the way through to the end; Charlotte's word appears in everyone's mouth, from the wise old sheep to Fern to the fairground crier. "Note the general radiance of this animal!"13 the crier sagely remarks, speaking Charlotte's words in the same breath as he denies that she wrote them. It is as if Charlotte, like a hypnotist, has put into circulation an interpretation of a change. Once it's out there, this interpretation has its own radiant action.

Criticism can put into circulation a way of seeing a thing — a way of seeing that attaches to the thing. There is no one rule for how this is done. But I am interested in pointing out that the task is not, in the first instance, description — although description is no doubt a common mode of approach. The task is to change the object by what you say. Change it how, is your responsibility; there is no general answer. One way to change it is to expose yourself by praising it to the top of your bent. What's true isn't the words, it's what it cost you to say them. Style is lavish expenditure. With a self-abasing style, you spend not only your flourishes, but also your reputation.

I am inclined to forage up the laundry-soap box of James's introduction to The Tempest, and apply his praise of Shakespeare's style to James's own novels. "In The Tempest," James writes of Shakespeare, "he sinks as deep as we like, but what he sinks into, beyond all else, is the lucid stillness of his style."14

Some will be apt to think that James's style is no more lucid and still than a pig's action is radiant. James's late style, in particular, can seem turgid, as though it issued from the resolution not to leave not one single particle of sediment unchurned in the whole river. But to consider James as someone who aimed at lucid stillness is to me an indispensable way of looking at his novels. He may have felt lucid and still. James's novels do have the quality he attributes to The Tempest: they are notable less for what happens than for the quality of the light in which these events are held. You have to get into the frame of mind for being still within them. And then you can see that they are precisely about what can happen while no one moves, without any turbulence; about the way people perceive things of which there was no one outward sign. In them a person can go from not knowing something to knowing something without even the slightest dart of a fish across the water.

Thus there is a perspective from which, say, The Golden Bowl is precisely lucid and still. A perspective from which the progress from the earlier novels to the later novels is one of the gradual settling out of silt, over a period of dry weather, until the bottom of the river can be perceived. One can look at the novels' shift in style as the transcript of change, as their author gradually refined the lucid stillness of his style.

One takes a certain risk of exposure in calling James lucid and still.15 Someone may well snort. But one of the implications of Cavell's account of criticism as a perlocutionary utterance of praise is that it can't be determined in advance what mode of rhetoric would conduce to your seeing the virtues of the thing. I might want you to see how besotted I am by it, if I am not sure of being able to show you anything else. Every now and then I come across a critic offering a description so over-fond as almost to falsify its object — not by the fervency of the praise, but by the attribution to the text of the very features it most failed to have. Virginia Woolf's assertion that Daniel Defoe is notable for his ability to reduce narrative to "perfect order and simplicity" — that he will characteristically "put in nothing, however attractive, that will tire the reader unnecessarily, or divert his attention from what he wishes him to know" — is a case in point. Surely this extraordinary claim has been causing regular spit takes in readers of Robinson Crusoe ever since it was first published in The Yale Review in 1926.16 It seems to me — and presumably to everyone else, except Woolf — that words in Robinson Crusoe are notable for their superfluity, not their economy; that one of the book's most characteristic features is the marked refusal to edit out the sort of rambling that might appear in a real diary. This refusal is an important way the novel achieves its reality effect. What can Woolf have been thinking? I suspect, though it is the sort of thing one can never say for a fact, that she was losing her cool, and letting it be seen. I gape at her error; and yet the effect it has on me is to make me want to go back to look again at the object so impassionating it has overwhelmed her judgment. That this is an effect Woolf aimed at I can't, of course, know. But there is no reason it mightn't have been. There is nothing about the activity of criticism that must exclude such effects.

Performing one's ineptitude may have a certain critical purchase in these cases of standing awed before the object. It is certainly one way that a character's stumbling tongue works in romantic comedy: to indicate love. And to indicate it, one could sometimes believe, more truthfully than the free flow of speech might have done; a tongue tie trades on our ancient suspicion of rhetoric. So the critic may break their own style, or compromise their professional judgment, against the perfect smooth enclosure of the object. This might be an effective way of drawing our attention to the object. It might be an effective form of praise, to show how ineffective the great thing renders us.

To praise, you must spend. And one way to spend — indeed a totally conventional way, so conventional as almost to seem hackneyed when you see it in a love-plot — is to lose face. James loses face, stylishly, over Shakespeare's "farewell to the stage." He is, he says "reduced" to "rubbing [his eyes] in public."17 This bafflement — this voluble tongue-tie — is his tribute.

The Bostonians also ends with a farewell to the stage that elicits the tribute of an admirer's baffled self-abasement. The novel tells the story of a naturally gifted speaker, Verena Tarrant. The daughter of a mesmerist, she finds her talents first by his laying on of hands. One way to describe the plot is to say that it gives a series of answers to the question of who will "handle" her. Among her would-be hypnotists are Matthias Pardon, a booking agent avant la lettre; Olive Chancellor, a woman's rights activist with whom, over most of the novel, Verena develops her speaking career; and Basil Ransom, her eventual husband. At the end, Verena is to speak at a Boston theater, her biggest engagement yet. But at the last moment, she bids farewell to the stage at what would have been the height of her career, going off to marry Basil Ransom and leaving Olive bereft in the wings. James writes of Verena: "her talent, the talent which was to achieve such wonders, was nothing to her; it was too easy, she could leave it alone, as she might close her piano, for months; it was only to Olive that it was everything."18 The puzzle of Shakespeare for James is not altogether unlike this: he asks, "What manner of human being was it who could so, at a given moment, announce his intention of capping his divine flame with a twopenny extinguisher, and who then, the announcement made, could serenely succeed in carrying it out?"19 Verena's twopenny extinguisher is Basil Ransom, who sees her divine radiant action as his private candle, to be snuffed out at will. Leaving the theater with Verena, he draws her hood over her face.

And Olive? The reality for her was the reality for the critic, or for this critic anyway; "the reality was simply that Verena had been more to her than she ever was to Verena." What she has to give is only the loss of face. She gives it. She rushes toward the stage. Asked where she is going, she replies, "I am going to be hissed and hooted and insulted!"20 Basil, listening as he leaves with Verena, hears instead a silence. The crowd, "even when exasperated," was "not ungenerous," he was relieved to learn.21 It is too much to infer that the Boston audience actually did receive Olive's exasperating and exasperated abasement as the tribute it was. But it is not too much to infer that a different audience could.

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Emily Ogden (@enogden) is the author of Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism. Her second book, On Not Knowing: How to Love and Other Essays is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press in 2022.

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