Abstract

This study draws on the thought of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein to analyze Henry James's late style as seen in such works as The Golden Bowl and The Wings of the Dove . The analysis has three facets: interpretive, narratological, and philosophical. Interpretively, the study argues that James's late novels are "tragedies" in a distinct and definable sense. First, I compare the structure of James's late novels to that of some of Shakespeare's tragedies, pointing out both the continuities and discontinuities. Secondly, I draw on the insights of Americanist and Shakespearian New Historians to place Jamesian tragedy within a social, cultural, and political context, just as Shakespearian tragedy has been placed in such a context. Narratologically, the study employs the methods developed by structuralists and post-structuralists to analyze the components of Jamesian narrative discourse. The analysis shows that James used not just tragedy but the traditional fairy tale to create a highly stable metonymic plot structure or histoire that would not only contain and delimit the consciousness embodied in his metaphorical narrative discourse but also give it a controlled and disciplined freedom to expansively pursue its own elaborate, continuous, and self-generating train of associations. Such analysis concludes that James subverts in many ways the techniques of traditional and even modernistic narrative discourse. Philosophically, the study argues that the development of the novel as a genre rests in part on an essentialist concept of the nature of self-identity that finds its counterpart in the works of Hume and Kant and its logical antithesis in those of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. Jamesian tragedy subverts not only the techniques of much novelistic discourse, but the essentialism that is its philosophical basis. This view is at odds with the widespread notion that James's late works belong thematically and narratively within the organicist and romanticist tradition of Emerson and Coleridge