The Body Language Complex of The American

And all this took place quite independently of my will, and I sat watching it as if it were a play at the theatre. I could feel it going on inside of me. You may depend upon it that there are things going on inside of us that we understand mighty little about. 

– Henry James, The American

When I do count the clock that tells the time/And see the brave day sunk in hideous night…Then of thy beauty do I question make/That thou among the wastes of time must go 

– William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 12”

Henry James reflects the surfaces of life in his early novel The American, confronting the  problem of finding depth in Christopher Newman’s anti-romantic quest for “completion.” If James does not offer an answer directly, it is because he instead seeks to represent the complex patterns which weave together that typically American problem of individualistic egotism, nonetheless aware of itself, in the confrontation with an unfamiliar aesthetic and social order. To represent these patterns, James hybridizes genres. By understanding genre in terms of Bhaktin’s chronotope, we can unpack the role of hybridization in the overarching narrative and the various spaces Newman occupies throughout. In representing the patterns of psychology, James represents time through the experience of history itself, conditioned by habitually sublimated elements of culture, expressed without total volition. The complex expression of all these elements occurs through a knotting of the body and language in the fabric of the narrative itself.

Henry James’ realism in his early novel The American is concerned with the sedimentary build up of social and psychological experience and thus history, often at the level of culture and subjectivity. But where realism typically uses specific large scale historical events as a backdrop, James is interested in a historical process because of his deep fascination with the accretion of experience itself. As such, the event which the novel addresses itself to in the first paragraph, the removal of the “commodious ottoman” from the Louvre’s Salon Carre, is put outside of the novel’s time frame. So where most authors of realism lay the event in the spatial background, James uses a future event to act as a background for the reader but not the characters. This small but significant point of disruption represents the long degeneration of France’s elite aesthetic culture and nobility which Christopher Newman observes and participates in. Thus, the novel’s form is suffused with the process, acting as a psychological backdrop which looks at how the characters’ experiences accrete together to cause the event. So, The American doesn’t look at what objectively produces historical change, but shows how the event is overdetermined by the complexities of experiencing history.

James represents this accretive process by creating (mostly) subtle reverberations in the fabric of language which forms the novel, showing how previous experience coheres into language. For example, Newman often uses words that he has learned offstage. In one instance, he uses the word “‘authority,’ as they say of artists” (James, The American 165). James creates a feeling of intimacy here, pulling the narrator quite close to Newman’s consciousness, if not into free indirect discourse through using the word “you,” and suggesting that Newman has learned the word “authority” (presumably “l’autorité”) off stage, presenting it with the subordinate clause “as they say of artists” to align the statement with Newman’s eager personality while simultaneously showing how has accreted experience, and can use his intelligence to draw diagrammatic analogies between the visual and social registers.

This demonstrates for the reader how there is a constant, unobservable psychological process which experience feeds into, and which language emerges from back to the surfaces of experience. But James never reduces his characters to machines in this novel, in the way many naturalist authors do. In works of naturalism, time and behavior are often represented through the mechanical metaphors and repetitions of a body-machine complex, especially clocks. But by focusing on experience rather than causality, James constructs a different relationship to time and space. We can describe this using Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of the chronotope, from the Greek chronos (time) and topos (space). Bakhtin’s idea is that literary genres are defined through how language is used to develop a narrative that constructs a space that the narrative seems to inhabit. It is the conjoining of space and time in a fabric of language. Topos is also the etymological origin for the word “topic.” Examples of rhetorical topoi would include the Garden of Eden, the duel, or the damsel in distress. The chronotope is an extrapolation of this preexisting idea of rhetorical space into time as a fourth dimension, looking at how narrative functions through a particular kind of space. The chronotope thus has two axes–inhabited space and experienced time within that space, which is narrative

This passage creates two conflicting, though intersecting elements of Newman’s experience which build out the novel’s primary chronotope by developing interconnected sets of descriptors. Newman rests on that important “commodious ottoman” with

an æsthetic headache. He had looked, moreover, not only at all the pictures, but at all the copies that were going forward around them, in the hands of those innumerable young women in irreproachable toilets who devote themselves, in France, to the propagation of masterpieces, and if the truth must be told, he had often admired the copy much more than the original. His physiognomy would have sufficiently indicated that he was a shrewd and capable fellow, and in truth he had often sat up all night over a bristling bundle of accounts, and heard the cock crow without a yawn. But Raphael and Titian and Rubens were a new kind of arithmetic, and they inspired our friend, for the first time in his life, with a vague self-mistrust (33-34).

The unfamiliar aesthetic environment which Newman encounters at the start of the novel forces the normally energetic American to rest, showing how the environment practically forces a bodily shift from the American relation to time to an aristocratic one in which leisure is work, as Newman later observes. At the same time, Newman interprets his new environment in that forced state of rest and observation through his habit of financial calculation. James creates a diachronic axis which associates motion, exertion, time, confidence, copies, and finance/numbers. Conversely, he also forms a synchronic axis of observation that threads together rest, comfort, spatiality, self-doubt, original art, and the aesthetic. The intersecting point is the question of how Newman spends his energy, and how he spends it in relation to the new environment. This concern with energy is characteristic of a work of naturalism, but the difference is in James’ idea of objectivity. He creates a sense of realism through a doubled narration in which the narrator makes himself explicit, condescending but warm as he calls Newman “our friend” to justify poking fun at him with what amounts to a comment on the size of his ego. This is in a heterogeneous ambiguity of tone that signifies a state of double consciousness in Newman himself.

 Tom Lutz makes the brilliant observation that Henry James moves beyond surface/depth and whole/multiple models of consciousness in his later novel The Ambassadors to an idea of double consciousness “as a necessary psychological fact related to changing social relations” (Lutz 246). To me, this is intimately connected to James’ early attempts in The American to hybridize genres and create a more nuanced and subtle idea of objectivity and reconcile the ideas of environmental determinism/free will through the granular accretion of language itself in a doubled “descriptive psychology,” a term he used to describe his later work The Bostonians, and which seems very applicable here too (James, “Letter to William James” 29).

While Newman is not able to completely intercept the nuances of his environment, he is also aware of this, possessing a definite intelligence and self-awareness. So, the narration is put to an exponent, whereby the ironized narration is again doubled into another layer of heterogeneity in which it is representative of both an external narrator and an externalized free indirect discourse. James thus collapses emotional intuition and self-aware subjectivity into objective description through exceptionally rendered and hilarious irony. Despite exhausting himself at this moment, he cannot imagine anything different from the financial and mathematical system of reference. This inspires a “self-mistrust” that dominates the whole novel and Newman’s chronotope through his attempt to “complete” himself by marrying Madame de Cintre. In an America characterized by the rise of an intensive work and machine culture, where time is spent always working to cultivate a status and identity, his sense of self is challenged when he encounters a world that is not constructed according to numbers.

This is why there are few references to quantified time in The American except for dramatic effect, to create a sense of concreteness or urgency in a scene. Quantified time is not tied to the novel’s chronotope. Newman in fact describes time freezing or slowing down when he suddenly felt disgusted by finance and decided to go to Europe, expecting to return home unchanged: “I daresay that a twelvemonth hence the operation will be reversed. The pendulum will swing back again” (James, The American 58). Time and bodies are primarily represented through a fabric of language itself that constitutes time in the novel, not the machine via language. Even when someone acts “mechanically,” the effect is not quantitative, but rather accretive and qualitative—machines are always a matter of simile rather than metaphor in this novel. James thereby builds a dynamic flow of language that operates through subtle reverberations, eddies, and transformations of certain significant words and motifs. Moreover, the characters accrete meaning through their experiences and actions. It is language itself that demonstrates the social and psychological processes that occur. Thus there is no explanation of why the characters think or say a certain thing. If there’s a “machine” here (and this term is not even used in the pattern in the text), it is a social phenomenon manifest through the individual physiology in so far as it is connected with the mind and by extension a language, a culture, and a society. As the narrator says: “the traces of national origin are a matter of expression even more than of feature, and it was in this respect that our friend’s countenance was supremely eloquent” (35). The point is that Newman is not completely aware or in control of his expression’s “eloquence,” nor does he realize that it is far more illustrative than he is able to be through his deliberate use of language. Later in the novel as the agreement to marry Madame de Cintre dissolves, he begins to act “mechanically” as his confidence dissolves almost completely before he can reconstitute it in a revenge plot. So James expands the machine-language analogy that is typical of American naturalism to a triangular analogy between the body, the machine, and language. Thus, Newman is aware of his lack of self and cultural knowledge in his confrontation with French society, while being unable to break through that barrier all the same. He positions the expression, and particularly the eyes as the locus of these converging elements of the novel’s chronotope.

At the level of the individual, instead of a typically naturalist body-machine complex, we are looking at a body-language complex where the individual is conditioned mechanically by social forces which the ego consciousness hides from itself. Much like Bhaktin’s idea of the chronotope ties space and time together, the body-language complex ties those elements together as a fundamental construct of this narrative. By body I mean particularly how the body conveys information through the gestures, expressions, and gazes that James repeatedly refers to and emphasizes. But this also is the body in general–how it is experienced, used, and understood. By language, I similarly am thinking about what Saussure would call “parole” or language as it is spoken, particularly in dialogic contexts. But I am also thinking about how James constructs this narrative reality through language. 

For example: Throughout the novel there is a pattern of references to infantility, particularly in relation to Newman. Newman expresses to others that he thinks of himself as having worked since he was an infant: “You see, I began to earn my living when I was almost a baby, and until a few months ago I have never had my hand off the plow” (186). This expresses a particular element of Newman’s body-language complex—how he expresses his idea of his own labor, the use of his body. Setting the obvious masturbatory double entendre aside, natal labor is a very American myth upon which Newman founds his feeling of total democratic self-valuation, impermeable to the looks and insinuations of the Bellegardes. When Newman says he has been working since he was a baby, he obviously is exaggerating, but with some degree of seriousness. The fact that this is how he rhetorically imagines himself, the fact that he selects this particular hyperbole is significant. Newman later experiences a moment of infantile regression when he goes to cry about the loss of Madame de Cintre with Mrs. Tristram, which is very shocking to the reader in juxtaposition with James’ typical description of Newman’s long legs, his energy, and general physical ideality. This is all to say that there is a reciprocal relationship between the body and language for James–his linguistic expression of infantility manifests fully in behavior later in the narrative. 

This is relevant to the novel’s hybrid treatment of time because it is this relation to production and labor which conditions Newman’s body complex in its confrontation with the French one. An environment of continentally immense opportunity like the American frontier, in which as Valentin notes “your poverty was your capital,” is one in which the person who has been forced to be self-reliant by chance circumstances of birth can produce real wealth (140). Reading Newman’s infantility through this analysis, we discover that the moment of birth and its material circumstances are confused with the later need to work as a boy. Newman carries his infancy forward because of his hyper-independence. Infancy and birth are equated with independence and labor, where infancy signifies essence. The chance circumstance of an absent mother is converted into a self-conception of essential independence. The mother is forgotten in Newman’s self-conception and thus the effects of that absence fall into a casa sui of natal labor, leading Newman into a cycle of searching for completion in finding a mother figure, as he does with Madame de Bellegarde.

A comparison between Madame de Bellegarde and her daughter gives us a particularly rich example on the other side:

The coloring in Madame de Cintré was the same, and the high delicacy of her brow and nose was hereditary. But her face was a larger and freer copy, and her mouth in especial a happy divergence from that conservative orifice, a little pair of lips at once plump and pinched, that looked, when closed, as if they could not open wider than to swallow a gooseberry or to emit an “Oh, dear, no!” which probably had been thought to give the finishing touch to the aristocratic prettiness of the Lady Emmeline Atheling as represented, forty years before, in several Books of Beauty. … But her mother’s white, intense, respectable countenance, with its formal gaze, and its circumscribed smile, suggested a document signed and sealed; a thing of parchment, ink, and ruled lines (179-180).

A paper of greater length could be written on the set of relations this passage alone lays out. The complex of relations between mouths and language here is what is important. Madame de Cintré’s lips are simultaneously “plump and pinched,” suggesting both voluptuousness and withholding, representing the two feminine ideals of physical beauty and acquired beauty through said “Books of Beauty” or finishing schools through anal imagery. The fine distinction is that “plump” is simply bodily, whereas “pinched” is more physiological as an element of the expression controlled by muscles, but without volition. So the lips are therefore described specifically in relation to the sphincter aspect of the anus. In addition to withholding speech (or feces), the orifice also cannot receive. The bidirectional functionality of the sphincter, as  protection and self-control, is displaced onto the mouth’s superimposed functions of speaking and consuming. The implication is probably that she was taught that consumption would affect her weight, and thus her beauty. So anal retentiveness is displaced into the mouth because consumption is imagined as dangerous and in need of control, just as speech is. 

I have described this psychosexual interpretation in depth to show that James gives detailed descriptions of these physiognomic habits of expression to show how they are imposed on the body by a complex system of taboos, and was actually ahead of Freud on these ideas.  Victorian forms of class based social conditioning—whether the complex aristocratic one of conspicuous leisure or Newman’s sexless, democratic attitude toward women and labor—create these taboos. This shows how overlying gender norms are connected to underlying sexual taboos through the body itself. What happens then is that the taboo engenders the surface/depth model whereby these socially ingrained taboos signify an unseen cause that is not “deeper” but only unobserved, because it is constructed as habit in childhood and adolescence. This is why James focuses on surfaces and accretive/diachronic depth rather than explanations and “iceberg”/synchronic depth. This is the descriptive psychology of the novel. James wants to attend to the actualities of experience of the people living with these taboos and confusions, while simultaneously showing how they are an observable, sociological reality only fully knowable in a flow of patterns, surfaces, and expressions instead of individual, countable moments. Thus the repression of sexuality through gender norms constitutes at a fundamental level the experience of time in The American.

The order of time connected to Madame de Cintre’s expression is that which envelops Newman as the narrative moves from Paris into the Bellegarde house and other aristocratic topoi like the opera, even if Newman is doing other things off stage, and which he continues to move within. While he does, for the most part, stop thinking in terms of quantities when he has his epiphany in the carriage, the novel starts at a moderate, transitional pace. By contrast, time starts to move in terms of weeks and months after Newman finally accesses the interior of the Bellegardes’ house, rather than days. As with a stage play, we’re presented with the significant events as Newman slows down to the no-time of the absolute leisure practiced by the French aristocracy. Therefore, these events only seem to happen sporadically, and before the reader even really understands how time is passing, the six-month waiting period is completed. The primary figure in this representation of time is the circle, which is ultimately a reference back to Newman’s statement that the pendulum of his life would swing back into motion at the start of the story. But halfway through the “twelvemonth,” after waiting six months for Claire, Newman tells her: 

“Well, I am going to change now,” said Newman. “I don’t mean that I am going to be indelicate; but I am going to go back to where I began. I am back there. I have been all round the circle. Or rather, I have never been away form there. I never ceased to want what I wanted then. Only now I am more sure of it, if possible; I am more sure of myself, and more sure of you. I know you better, though I don’t know anything I didn’t believe three months ago. You are everything—you are beyond everything—I can imagine or desire (240).

In identifying this accretive cycle of experience and constantly deferred desire in which Newman desires to reconstitute, or complete, himself and resist the change to his self caused by the transatlantic experience, we can see how he is caught in a social body-language complex. But this is precisely because the subject is defined in a dynamic relation to the environment, through an interactive and nuanced idea of objectivity, rather than a simple naturalistic emplacement within the environment; it is a dramatic “situation.” The machine complex allows the subject to be defined as purely self-contained, the way a watch or locomotive is. But the dynamic here is dialectic, if weighted in favor of the environment as a “trap” (James, “Preface to ‘The American’” 21). It is an internal stage, a dramatic situation in which much of what one does is sublimated, rather than a machine which causes people to act without free will.

Newman’s frustrated attempt to find “completion” is reflected in James’ frustration with the novel itself which he lays out in his preface. His effort “was to make and to keep Newman consistent,” to give the work of art 

that effect of a centre, which most economise its value. Its value is most discussable when that economy has most operated; the content and the “importance of art are in fine wholly dependent on its being one” (37-38).

This notion of being whole, completed, is Newman’s whole goal. I cannot help but register, therefore, a sense of incompleteness within James’ perception of himself as an artist. Moreover, the idealization which James lends to the work of art here precisely reflects the irony of Newman’s encounter with the paintings in the Louvre. Newman reverts to infantility at the moment he fails to find completion in marriage to Claire. Perhaps this is simply attributable to James’ lack of full maturity as an artist. But precisely on this horizon of desire for being, oneness, and completion, both of self and of the work of art, it seems impossible not to fixate upon Newman’s relationship with Valentin, who is the only person in the novel that Newman says “I care about you” too (James, The American 310). 

While Newman’s quest for completion through finding this ideal is the primary chronotope in the novel, the narration is not reduced to his point of view. Thus there are others whose desires correspond to different chronotopes which enfold or balloon Newman’s based on his relation to them. There are even some moments where the narration shifts from Newman to others. Understanding Valentin is especially key to seeing the relationship between history and language which James is representing. Even if he is a depraved aristocrat, he is presented positively, a tragicomic figure in his death. That is, Valentin is not just a character, but also serves in his tragicomic way as an allegorical figure of Romance and the idealized past, introducing a substantial puncture point to the past, while also falling into the melancholy degeneration of the aristocracy that characterizes Romanticism. The connection between history and language is most explicit with Valentin’s frequent allusions to actual medieval allegory like Roman de le Rose or myths like Pygmalion, but this passage illustrates something more significant:

M. de Bellegarde, however, did not confine his conversation to the autobiographical channel; he questioned our hero largely as to the events of his own life, and Newman told him some better stories than any that Bellegarde carried in his budget (145).

This passage illustrates that, where Newman thinks in terms of commerce, Valentin perceives the world through the conceptual framework of romance literature. Though “our hero” is ironic and a marker of the “character” of the objective narrator as distinct from the actual characters at the same time intro, the term hero alone introduces a slipping point between Valentin and the narrator. As with Newman and his poor taste, James at once represents the narrator’s ironic objectivity (and ironized objectivity, as with the ideal observer introduced in the first chapter) and how Valentin’s own semi-ironized self-perception conceptualizes Newman’s life as a heroic narrative of events. This, plus the blatant allusions to allegories about desire, and gender introduces a different order of time interconnected with history, sex, and literature—and thus language itself. 

When Newman learns of Valentin’s impending death, he “groaned at this miserable news, and at the necessity of deferring his journey to the Chateau de Fleuriers” (324). While obviously anyone would go to a dying friend, the fact that the author chooses to defer Newman’s desire into the topoi of the Swiss alps and the duel is quite significant, all the more so for the fact that he asks Valetin “how can I show you a bridegroom’s face?” (334). We might even be willing to attribute Newman’s groan to the body-(sex)-language complex. The personal connection he forms with Valentin apparently disturbs his ideology and work ethic. So the procession of realist time is for a moment expanded into a bubble of Romantic time which represents a very real and deep connection of the chivalric and Romantic pasts with the present. The topoi of the duel and the Swiss alps create this. James’ use of Romance is not simply parodic, just as with exponentiated narration. The “romantic” connection between Newman and Valentin envelops Newman’s habitual relationship to time, production, and space, if not commerce. It is precisely Valentin’s connection to the past which enables this to happen, and is integral to Newman’s own growth, letting him see at least partially outside of himself. But then Valentin actually dies, and Neman leaves the Romantic topos of the Alps and the duel. Valentin’s chronotope is ultimately incompatible with Newman’s and thus must be removed from the narrative. For Neman to learn the secret of Valentin’s father’s death, Valentin himself has to die. James creates a constantly shifting chronotope of sexuality, with chronotopes enfolding or escaping other chronotopes. Time is multiple at the integral level of the novel’s very structure. 

The characters in The American find themselves trapped in a preexisting social environment. Through their dynamic response to it, they progressively accrete experience filtered through repressed social conditioning, reflected in their use of language and their bodily expression. But this accretion of experiences actually envelopes Newman in a totally new chronotope as he grows closer to Valentin in an extremely homoerotically charged relationship. Pecuniary emulation acts through the infantilized, enclosed subjectivity to form a castration complex whereby the threat to the illusion of wholeness posed by the aesthetic leads Newman to feel the need to “complete” himself through marriage into that semiotic system via the idealized, Madonna on the moon of Claire de Bellegarde. In failing, Newman reverts to mechanical and infantile responses, eventually reconstituting himself, as James does through the work of art, in his rejection of Romantic revenge. James thus imagines the self as fundamentally constituted by a body language complex in The American. This perhaps suggests an alternate reading of the history of psychology, and that literature should be given a more serious place in that history. I have certainly shown Henry James is very seriously dealing with these topics, and is using literature as a way to deal with psychology as a lived experience tied with language itself. Literature is just as much a means for transmitting serious ideas as science. Henry James demonstrates with great virtuosity how literature can tie extremely complex and seemingly disparate ideas together through language itself, just as language is tied into space, time, and the body in The American.