Henry James’s The Ambassadors: The Author’s Multiple Personality is Manifest in Multiple Narrators

My post earlier today focussed on the novel’s second paragraph, but I’m only a psychiatrist. A real literary critic would focus on the first, as did Ian Watt in “The First Paragraph of the The Ambassadors: An Explication” (1960) (1, pp. 442-455).

“…The ‘multidimensional’ quality of the narrative, with its continual implication of the community of three minds—Strether’s [protagonist], James’s, and the reader’s—…[is] established tacitly in every detail of diction and structure, and it remains pervasive. One reason for the special demand James’s fictional prose makes on our attention is surely that there are always at least three levels of development—all of them subjective: the characters’ awareness of events; the narrator’s seeing of them; and our own trailing perception of the relation between the two” (1, pp. 444-445).

“…the abstractness and indirection of James’s style are essentially the result of this characteristic multiplicity of his vision. There is, for example, the story reported by Edith Wharton that after his first stroke James told Lady Prothero that in the very act of falling…he heard in the room a voice which was distinctly, it seemed, not his own, saying: ‘So here it is at last, the distinguished thing.’ James, apparently, could not but see even his own most fateful personal experience, except as evoked by some other observer’s voice…” (1. p. 447).

“Obviously James’s multiple awareness can go too far; and in the later novels it often poses the special problem that we do not quite know whether the awareness implied in a given passage is the narrator’s or that of his character” (1, p. p.448).

The above analysis reminds me of my post on James’s The Turn of the Screw, whose “ambiguity” I said was really the contradictory opinions of James’s multiple narrators.

1. Henry James. The Ambassadors. A Norton Critical Edition, Second Edition. Edited by S. P. Rosenbaum. New York, WW Norton & Company, 1994.