Le Sabot Post-Moderne

Admiring Henry James

Henry James has had nearly as many books turned into movies as Stephen King -- Wings of the Dove, Portrait of a Lady, Washington Square, The Bostonians, The Europeans and others.

I'd be surprised, though, if he's all that widely read these days. Especially in his later period his prose became almost baroquely ornamental. The Ambassadors is probably the only book not written by a Dutch theologian that I've tossed against a wall in frustration.

But he's worth reading. A good jumping-off point would be his Gothic horror novella The Turn of the Screw -- considered by many to be the best short fiction ever written by an American. One thing I appreciate about his work is that it remains relevant. I read The American during the lead-up to the Iraq War. A story of an honorable American having a bitter encounter with proud, cynical France, it was impossible not to see Chirac in the manipulation and false-dealing of the de Cintré family. Commentators portray the cultural division between Europe and America as something new. It was enlightening to see it so clearly delineated before the turn of the 20th Century.

Also check out The Bostonians. After having endured residency in the People's Republic of MA, I was fascinated to see how the character of the people was already formed a hundred years past. The story focuses on a quirky love-triangle -- an austere Boston feminist vying with a Southern conservative for the heart of her protégé. In fifty years, this observation will probably suit most of the grrrrls who formed our Uni's student senate:

"She belonged to the Short-Skirts League, as a matter of course; for she belonged to any and every league that had been founded for almost any purpose whatever. This did not prevent her being a confused, entangled, inconsequent, discursive old woman, whose charity began at home and ended nowhere, whose credulity kept pace with it, and who knew less about her fellow-creatures, if possible, after fifty years of humanitary zeal, than on the day she had gone into the field to testify against the iniquity of most arrangements."

Posted by Discoshaman at mai 2, 2004 10:45 PM | TrackBack