“ Horrible Impossible ” : Henry James ’ s Awkward Stage

It was not irritation he appeared to express, but the slight strain of an effort to get into relation with the subject. Better to focus the image he closed his eyes awhile. —The Awkward Age (207) In a now-familiar account of Henry James's career, the failure in the theater so spectacularly marked by the Guy Domville debacle of 1895 sent the bruised novelist back to the consolations of fiction and on to the achievements of the major phase. The formal experiments James conducted in the final years of the century (this story goes) led him to the aesthetic principles he would expound in the prefaces to the New York Edition and which many of James's expositors would later adopt as the dogma of the novel itself. Chief among these formal principles—and one particularly crucial to James's pioneering explorations of interiority in the novels of the new century—was the necessity for dramatic presentation in fiction. The " scenic principle " has a genetic relation to the theater that has been well explored by James's critics: once James finally abandons his theatrical misadventure, we are told, he is able to incorporate the theater's lessons into the novel, now grasped as all along his true form. In the process he perfects the narrative technologies that have earned his critical stature as the father of the psychological novel. " The master " is born from the death of the playwright. 1 But this story—for which the master himself is of course largely respon-sible—overlooks James's continued obsession with the theater in the last years of the century and underrepresents the peculiarity of the work he produced in the period. Far from returning triumphantly to his chosen form, James embraced the novel after Guy Domville in a mood of profound ambivalence. This hankering for the theater is especially manifest in the deeply uncharacteristic and un-novelistic Leon Edel Prize Essay