Shooting Off James's Blanks: Theory, Politics, and The Turn of the Screw

Abstract

The Henry James Review Spring, 1984 ultimate threat to the patriarchal system, for its continuation depends upon absolute knowledge of paternity. Romantic as the implied liaison between the Prince and Charlotte is, because of its threat to the prevalent system of social organization, the remainder of the book is an attempt to right this probable violation and to alter the relations among the characters so that another possible future illicit union can never occur. For Maggie, the slightest hint—a mere innuendo —of a suggested link between these two lovers is enough to alter her life's plan and her relationship with her husband. She must not, at all costs, name her fears to Adam, her father, the patriarch. To do so would be to explode these unspoken fictions by which they all have lived. The "unthinkable " price for her—that of separation from her father—is preferable to an utterance that would name their real situation, and it must be paid in order to retain the structure of familial relations appropriate to the socio-economic order—and to preserve the line of inheritance for her own child. The Prince is forced, too, to reaffirm his marital alliance and to deny Charlotte—in silence, of course—and he watches with Maggie as the Ververs depart for America. James's narrative is an utterance utilizing the silent and unspoken modes of communication among characters who understand subliminally the system by which they live and to which they can never refer. Therefore, the text must end in a silence. Not only does James's narrative closure—by stabilizing these two marriages—ultimately serve to valorize the system of capitalist patriarchy, but by allowing his characters to remain silent in the end, the unspoken hierarchical relations of both class and gender are reinforced for the audience as well, by virtue of the fact that these structural relations are already shared at an unconscious level by the members of the culture. Therefore, the narrative, the surface utterance and play of signs that constitute James's artistry, must continually defer its explicit connection to the historical referent, in order to create an aesthetic of these silences. Key to Works by Henry James GBI, GBII-The Golden Bowl. 2 vols. New York: Scribner's, 1909. Other Works Cited Jameson, Frederic. The Political Unconscious : Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1981. Macherey, Pierre. A Theory of Literary Production. Trans. Geoffrey Wall. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978. Shooting Off James's Blanks: Theory, Politics, and The Turn of the Screw by Bruce Robbins, Rutgers University In the New York preface to The Turn of the Screw, Henry James states his intention not to specify the evil of the ghosts but to leave it to the imagination of the reader. "I cast my lot with pure romance," he says. "There is not only from beginning to end of the matter not an inch of expatiation, but my values are positively all blanks . . ." (TS 121, 123). Since the Thirty Years' War over the ghosts petered out in the 1960s, the rise of critical theory, which continues to make surprisingly active use of the Turn, has furnished two new and contradictory reasons for reflecting upon James's statement. The first is the reappearance of blankness, the emptiness or absence that F. W. Dupee identified as "the question of Henry James" Volume V 192 Number 3 The Henry James Review Spring, 1984 in 1945, as the answer or watchword of a broad theoretical front. In a review of Wolfgang Iser's The Act of Reading, a work that borrows James's authority for its praise of literary blanks or Leerstellen, Frank Kermode offers the same phrase (slightly misquoted) as the provisional motto of the entire discipline, such as contemporary theory has been refashioning it: "The motto of an institution whose responsibilities are no longer canonformation and evaluation but rather the discrimination , in terms of what is accepted intersubjectively, between subjective determinations of 'blanks,' might well be from Henry James: 'all my values are blanks'" ("Figures" 300). In order to measure the pertinence of this remark, it is useful to consider how contemporary theory has spoken about the Turn of the...