THE INSECURE WORLD OF HENRY JAMES'S FICTION Also by Ralf Norrman NATURE AND LANGUAGE: A Semiotic Study ofCucurbits in Literature (with Jon Haarberg) TECHNIQUES OF AMBIGUITY IN THE FICTION OF HENRY JAMES The Insecure World of J Henry an1es's Fiction Intensity and Ambiguity Ralf N orrman © Ralf N orrman 1982 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1982 978-0-333-32196-6 AII rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission First published 1982 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS L TD London and Basingstoke Companies and representatives throughout the world ISBN 978-1-349-16826-2 ISBN 978-1-349-16824-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-16824-8 For E-L Le style est l'homme meme (Buffon) Contents Foreword IX Acknowledgements X Introduction 1 1. Referential Ambiguity in Pronouns 6 2. End-Linking 66 3. Emphatic Affirmation 84 4. The 'Finding a Formula'-Formula 108 5. Chiastic Inversion, Antithesis and Oxymoron 137 Conclusion 185 Notes and Refirences 193 List of Works Cited 207 Index 211 Foreword Though published only now, this book was written several years ago. In the time that has passed since then my thinking on James has developed. I have now become firmly convinced that the most important key to an understanding of the psychomor phology of James's thinking is the nature and function of the rhetorical figure of chiasmus, which, in the present study, is dealt with only in the fifth chapter, which is the last. James was what I would like to term a chiasticist: his use of chiastic thinking was habitual and compulsive. Chapter 5 of the present work is therefore the most important of all chapters, and impatient readers may want to begin with that rather than Chapter 1. I could of course have rewritten this book, laying more stress on chiasmus, and structuring the text around what is now Chapter 5. However, I decided to let it stand, and to return to James's use of chiasmus in another context. Meanwhile, I would like to refer any readers who become interested in the nature and function of chiasmus to a book on the subject that I am at present writing, and which I hope will be published in the near future. The preliminary title is Samuel Butler and Chiasmus: A Study of an Ambilateralist Mind. This study will use the works of Samuel Butler ( 1835-1902) as source of examples but the results will be applicable to Henry James as well, and it is actually astonishing how similar James and Butler were in their ways of thinking. The similarity is accounted for by the fact that both were addicted to one particular pattern of thought - chiasmus. Oxford Ralf N orrman December 1980 Acknowledgements I am grateful to Dr Larzer Ziffofthe University of Pennsylvania (formerly of Exeter College, Oxford) for reading drafts of the first two chapters and making a number of helpful comments and suggestions. I am very grateful for financial assistance from the H.W. Donner Fund. I wish to thank my wife Eva-Liisa for typing and proof reading and for a number of discussions that brought forth new ideas and helped to put old ones into perspective. While writing this study I was at Linacre, and for a short time at Queen's. I am grateful to these Oxford colleges, and to the Finnish Academy, for academic hospitality and financial support. Chapter 1 and an early version of Chapter 2 of this book have appeared as articles in periodicals: 'Referential Ambiguity in Pronouns as a Literary Device in Henry James's The Golden Bowl', Studia Neophilologica, vol. 5 ( 1979), no. 1, pp. 31-71; 'End Linking as an Intensity-Creating Device in the Dialogue of Henry James's The Golden Bowl', English Studies, vol. 61 Qune 1980), no. 3, pp. 236--51. Some ofthe material in the present fifth chapter appeared earlier in my essay 'Chiastisk inversion: Ett monster hos Henry James', in Peg as och Snobollskrig: Litteratur vetenskapliga studier tillagnade Sven Linnir, Publications of the Research Institute of the Abo Akademi Foundation, no. 44 (Abo Akademi, 1979), ss. 209-25. I thank the editors for permission to reprint. Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first oppor tunity.