Narrative

ABSTRACT:

In part because of Henry James’s own emphasis on the “rigour” of his practice, the strict limitation of The Ambassadors to Strether’s point of view has dominated critical discussions of the novel’s narrative technique. This essay argues that authorial narration plays a more prominent role in The Ambassadors than has previously been recognized and that the narrator’s efforts to read and describe Strether’s consciousness parallel Strether’s own interpretive activity. Even during instances of free indirect discourse (FID), the narrator of The Ambassadors is a consistent presence, describing Strether’s consciousness in precise, evocative detail and modeling for the reader a posture of careful and responsive attention to otherness. (In this respect, the essay’s argument about narration bears on one of the central conceptual questions in the theory of FID—that is, whether the two subjectivities [narratorial and figural] evoked by FID coexist, with the figural subjectivity contained or framed by the subjectivity of the narrator—or whether, instead, narratorial subjectivity simply disappears in FID, replaced or superseded by figural subjectivity.) Finally, The Ambassadors is a sustained exercise in reading—reading the subtle grammar of the Jamesian sentence, reading delicate shifts in subjectivity or reference, reading the suggestions and intonations in dialogue—and its subject matter is Strether’s reading of the characters around him and his own cognition and perception. The novel’s narrative technique mirrors this preoccupation with reading—and with the ethical implications of reading—by incorporating the perspective of an attentive external reader or observer into the text, in the presence of the narrator.