While the early phase imagines a geography where Europe and America only make sense in a scenario of opposition, with the other as a repository of often frightening irreducible differences, James’s late phase nuances this scheme by introducing the possibility of transatlantic overlap and misperceptions of the earlier “Americano-European legend.”7 This complex encounter might be interpreted through the prism of Levinas’s question relating self and other: “But how can the same, produced as egoism, enter into relationship with an Other without immediately divesting it of its alterity? What is the nature of this relationship?”
(Levinas 38). Imagining an alternative to the romance of discovery that actually divests otherness of alterity by subsuming its manifestations into a colonial script, James’s late novel The Ambassadors (1903) can be read as an intermediary model towards a fully-fledged global ethical encounter.
In this sense, The Ambassadors reiterates the earlier colonial pattern, only under the sign of loss, errancy, and in a belated key. In opposition to Newman’s active assimilation of Paris, The Ambassadors is centered on Strether’s famous postponement, described as imbued with the “sweetness of vain delay”:
[H]is final appreciation of what he had done—his appreciation on the spot—
would provide it with its main sharpness. The spot so focussed upon was of course Woollett, and he was to see, at the best, what Woollett would be with everything there changed for him […] Well, the summer’s end would show;
his suspense had meanwhile exactly the sweetness of vain delay
(The Ambassadors [1987] 489).
7 The international theme is notoriously absent from the middle phase. However, it is possible to discern traces of this in the multiple valences of Mr. Longdon’s innocence as an ‘oncle d’Amerique’ in The Awkward Age (1899), in the colonial fables staged by Maisie as “untutored and unclaimed subject” engaged in a play of knowledge and innocence in What Maisie Knew (1897) or the kitsch Arcadias of The Turn of the Screw (1898), all suggesting, in addition, an adumbration of the veritable Lolita complex that Nabokov was to develop fully-fledged.
Moreover, transatlantic space itself is altered, and no longer functions according to transatlantic oppositions. The image of Chad formed in Strether’s mind is inappropriate to the likable reality Strether finds in Paris, and the image of Chad as a “brute” is in fact a “violence” that Strether actually misses, as it would have simplified his reading:
[T]he turn taken by his affair on the whole was positively that if his nerves were on the stretch it was because he missed violence. When he asked himself if none would then, in connexion with it, ever come at all, he might almost have passed as wondering how to provoke it. It would be too absurd if such a vision as THAT should have to be invoked for relief; it was already marked enough as absurd that he should actually have begun with flutters and dignities on the score of a single accepted meal. What sort of a brute had he expected Chad to be, anyway? (183)
Unlike the symmetric oppositions staged in The American and reflected in what could be termed the straight planes of allegory, corresponding to Euclidian geometry, Strether inhabits a space of curvatures, in which planes are not flat but curved. Images from across the Atlantic come modified and Strether has to account for the “extravagant curve of the globe” in interpreting Mrs. Newsome’s messages, marked by a “primal crudity” pertaining to the afore-mentioned “violence” of transatlantic oppositions:
He could himself, comparatively recent as it was—it was truly but the fact of a few days since—focus his primal crudity; but he would on the approach of an observer, as if handling an illicit possession, have slipped the reminiscence out of sight. There were echoes of it still in Mrs. Newsome’s letters, and there were moments when these echoes made him exclaim on her want of tact. He blushed of course, at once, still more for the explanation than for the ground of it: it came to him in time to save his manners that she couldn’t at the best become tactful as quickly as he. Her tact had to reckon with the Atlantic Ocean, the General Post-Office and the extravagant curve of the globe (183).
The “extravagant curve of the globe” suggests what one might call an international Riemannian geography that results in the distortion of information or, on the contrary, in efforts to recompose the message in the receiver’s mind, the latter having to allow for warped distance. The situation is strikingly similar with the effort of anamorphosis demanded by the painting The Ambassadors by Holbein the Younger, a possible source of inspiration for James’s title, of course (see Figure 2 and Figure 3).8
8 See Tintner Museum World, for example.
Figure 2. Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors (1533) National Gallery, London
Just as the viewer of Holbein’s painting has to recompose the death’s head from an angle, so Strether’s dialogue with Mrs. Newsome is fraught with transatlantic misperceptions which no longer allow straight-forward readings or symmetrical oppositions.
In this sense, The Ambassadors complicates the geometry and geography of conquest outlined in The American (and reiterated, to an extent, in Waymarsh’s appropriation of the European frontier).9 In keeping with warped visions of self and other, communication requires, as in Holbein’s 9 The vast frontier of European space is a script still present especially in Waymarsh’s assimilation of European space. Thus the Catholic Church is, for Waymarsh “the enemy, the monster of bulging eyes and far-reaching quivering groping tentacles,”
while society is “the multiplication of shibboleths, exactly the discrimination of types and tones, exactly the wicked old rows of Chester, rank with feudalism;
exactly in short Europe” (The American [1983] 82).
anamorphosis, the effort of reinterpretation and the risk of misreading.
Europe, and Paris in particular, imply an excess of impressions, as
“wherever one paused in Paris the imagination reacted before one could stop it”:
Many things came over him here, and one of them was that he should doubtless presently know whether he had been shallow or sharp. Another was that the balcony in question didn’t somehow show as a convenience easy to surrender. Poor Strether had at this very moment to recognise the truth that wherever one paused in Paris the imagination reacted before one could stop it. This perpetual reaction put a price, if one would, on pauses;
but it piled up consequences till there was scarce room to pick one’s steps among them
(The Ambassadors [1987] 123).
Figure 3. The recomposed head of death from Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Ambassadors
Paris, in this sense, is over-signified, yielding surprising consequences and reactions. In Strether’s eyes, the temptation of Paris is that consequences and interpretations can hardly be contained: “it piled up consequences till there was scarce any room to pick one’s way among them. What call had he, at such a juncture, for example, to like Chad’s house?” (123-24).
If, as argued earlier, the ‘golden years of the Americano-European legend’ freeze the two poles of James’s world into a (failed) romance of discovery and love, in The Ambassadors the colonial pattern is present as a simulacrum, revealing senseless repetitions and its inherent belatedness.10 10 Critics have pointed out the function of refigured transatlantic spaces. Méral,
The distance separating the continents dramatises the mutual gaze that the two loci fix on each other, and transatlantic space, in fact, is as distorted as Holbein’s skull. Europe, in this sense, is the space of delay, a warped space of geography, no longer offering the consolations of a confrontational encounter. Both America and Europe, in fact, read and misread each other as modified by an extravagant curve of the globe, and appear distorted, only to come into focus in a Riemannian geography that accounts for extravagant curves, as with death’s head in Holbein’s The Ambassadors.