Agnes Pokol-Hayhurst on Gert Buelens
The US in 1884, 1904 and 2014. People have always been fascinated by the changes that can be seen in the life and development of any given country or city that a few decades can bring about. It was a kind of fascination mixed with horror that Henry James felt in 1904 during his year-long visit to his native land after twenty years of absence.
His reaction was so ambiguous, in fact, that it has sparked a hot and still ongoing debate among critics. The charges brought against James are usually linked to anti-patriotism, xenophobia, or downright anti-Semitism. Immigration issues in the US as well as around the whole world have only become the hotter and the more controversial since. This also makes James’s The American Scene—the written reaction of the Master to his native land during the afore-mentioned visit in 1904—and Gert Buelens’s Henry James and the “Aliens”: In Possession of the American Scene all the more topical.
Buelens’s book fulfills a gap-flling role. Although the 1990s saw the rise of cultural studies and increasing attention was paid to James as a social and cultural critic, what has hitherto been missing in James criticism is “that close analysis of James’s words, sentences, and paragraphs that […] (is) essential to a proper assessment of his (James’s) perspective on the ethnic other” (16). This kind of close reading of The American Scene and of some relevant passages of the Autobiography and the Prefaces is what Buelens offers in Henry James and the “Aliens” in order to address “the gulf that separates native-born and immigrant, European and American” along with the exploration of the continuities “that keep on reuniting these paradigmatically distinct socio-geographical categories” (9).
In line with his inclination to steer a middle course between apologists and those who condemn James as a xenophobe and anti-Semite, Buelens’s analysis uncovers the logic behind James’s apparently inconsistent behavior towards the “alien”: “James allows himself to be subsumed by an American scene of which the ‘alien’ seems master; this James is pleasurably possessed by that scene. Yet when, more rarely, James, as an individual, tries to probe their distinctive character, then his response is determined by the reactionary, nativist, Anglo-Saxon basis of his judgment” (17).
James’s ambivalent response to the US and its inhabitants is scrutinized with a wonderful attention to detail and a focus on James’s reaction to certain parts of New York and other major American cities that have remained tourist attractions ever since. Two of the attached photographs show one such attraction, namely Ellis Island, which is “the first harbor of refuge and stage of patience for the million or so of immigrants annually knocking at our official door,” to quote James (425). According to Buelens, James’s reaction to Ellis Island has “been cited in evidence of James’s anti-immigrant stand.”
If you are interested in the increasingly important issue of immigration, the changing faces and the history of the US or Henry James the writer and social critic, I invite you to read my book review of Buelens’s study and then continue with reading the study itself.
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