The Ambassadors

The Ambassadors

I began listening to an audio book version of Henry James's The Ambassadors on my trip back to Oklahoma over the fourth of July weekend. This book, according to the introduction of the edition I have, is a sort of connection between the Victorian and the Modern Novel. In many passages, listening to this very civilized work, I felt a sameness to two summers ago listening to Ulysses. The samenes is not in terms of the story structure or lack thereof, or in terms of the images or the types of characters, but there is a sameness, in certain passages, in terms of language. There is-- and the introduciton to the book pointed to this-- a similarity with any of the Moderns (Joyce, Faulkner, Woolf) who use a stream of consciouness technique. James's novel has that feel in parts, but at the same time it is simply not as hard to follow as Ulysses or The Sound and The Fury or Mrs. Dalloway. James, perhaps, has not completely gone over to the experimental techniques so common among modernist authors, but is breaking groung all the same, and so really bridges victorian 19th centruy fiction with modern 20th century writing.

It is interesting the way James always details the psychological aspects of his characters. I've heard the argument that his brother William was a gifted psychologist who could write like a novelist, and so made his ideas more accesible, and that Henry was a novelist who could think like a psychologist, and so created amazing psychological depth among his characters. This fixation on the internal working of characters' minds, even the acknowledgment of a subconscious world, again prefigures much that is great in modernist novels.

I am very interested in some of the thematic contents of this novel: the 'innocent' American (Strether) coming into contact with the more cultured, refined Europeans; the idea of 'living one's life' to some fullness, conflict between personal pleasure and duty. That idea of enjoying one's life occured to James after a conversation with a friend, novelist William Dean Howells. Howell's had traveled to Paris to visit his son, and had been positively ovewhelmed by the european capital, and had come to doubt whether or not he had really lived-- if he had not wasted his life.