chung, june hee _ getting the picture, american corporate advertising and the rise of a cosmopolitan...

8/13/2019 Chung, June Hee _ Getting the Picture, American Corporate Advertising and the Rise of a Cosmopolitan Visual Cult

1/27

American Literature, Volume , Number , June DOI ./-- by Duke University Press

June HeeChung

It may be counterintuitive to assert that HenryJames, the esteemed high stylist, was inspired by the commercial

arts. Yet James considered advertising a sufficiently complex art, withtechniques that rivaled, rather than simply imitated, those deployedin fine-art forms, such as painting and literature. Incorporating devel-opments in American advertising into his late writing style, Jamesboth exploited and helped give credibility to an emerging businessculture that increasingly relied on pictorial representation. Eventu-ally, participants in both a cosmopolitan literary modernism as well aspostmodernism would inherit Jamess adaptation to mass culture.

During the mid-s, advances in print technology allowed imagesto be produced inexpensively. Many time-strapped consumers of fic-tion, believing that one picture was indeed worth the novels thou-sands of words, preferred to purchase the illustrated short stories pro-liferating in magazines and newspapers. For a similar reason, dramaremained a popular alternative to the novel because its visual experi-ence could be consumed in the space of a single evening. In the s,James began to have difficulty publishing his fiction. His letters to

friends and family during this period describe his literary ambitionsas well as his anxiety about the rapidly changing literary market. Inan attempt at accommodation, James tried his hand at both drama andshort fiction. He even hired literary agent James B. Pinker in tohelp place the many stories he churned out. But he soon returned tothe novel. The Ambassadors, which documents the evolution of adver-tising into the premier American art form, is the first novel he wroteafter rededicating himself to this longer narrative form. In , the

Getting the Picture: American CorporateAdvertising and the Rise of a CosmopolitanVisual Culture in The Ambassadors


2/27

308 American Literature

once prominent but by then outpacedNorth American Reviewagreedto serialize it. Because James explicitly identifies Chad Newsome in The Ambas-

sadors with advertising, one mainstay in recent criticism has beento document the important role that advertising played in Americanculture at this time and to track Jamess response to it. A commonassumption is that Jamess concern about the negative impact of themass mediaa concern perhaps most famously documented in TheBostonians()surfaced early in his career and remained largelyunchanged for its duration. James is thus often presented as a staunchproponent of the fine arts rather than an enthusiastic participant inmass culture. While acknowledging the ample evidence of Jamess

anxiety about the rising influence of advertising and the popularmedia, I want to shift the critical emphasis to consider popular cul-tures influence on his style. In Jamess late fiction, an increase in figurative language is one ofthe key features scholars identify. What hasnt been considered, how-ever, is that Jamess innovations with figurative language reflect thenew set of pictorial styles circulated in advertisements, posters, illus-trated newspapers, and other popular art forms that were becoming

fashionable as publishers attempted to sell in quantities and to retainpopularity. Hoping to sell his novels in this altered marketplace, Jamesadopted a figurative language that could incorporate and simulatepopular visual forms. He thus managed to devise a style that couldbridge the high and the low arts. In The Ambassadors, James compares advertising to another popu-lar art form that exploits pictorial representation: continental theater,represented in the novel by the French dramatic arts, a comparison

that may at first seem odd. Because of the dominance in our own cen-tury of other visual forms such as cinema and television, we may per-haps forget that playwriting was as alluring for James as screenwritingwas for Faulkner and Fitzgerald. In trying to account for theaterscommercial success, James identified the ability of dramatic picturesto convey succinctly and yet strongly the impression of movement.An actors visual gestures function as signs or symbols because theycan register radical shifts in a characters mental state or uncover hid-den actions or secrets. Theatrical gestures produce still pictures thatencapsulate action, exploiting the innate propensity of the dramaticform to forge complex composites of picture and word. Dramatic pic-tures can create highly compressed forms of representation that func-


3/27

Cosmopolitan Visual Culture in The Ambassadors 309

tion as kinds of emblems, pictures with a motto or brief verse, becausethey are produced in three successive layers: the playwright repre-sents in words; the director and actors interpret the script in their

performance; and finally, the audience, in a kind of secondary perfor-mance, interprets the live production. Written words become physi-cally realized when the actor embodies the script of printed instruc-tions and transforms the words into a visual performance that thenfuses with the audiences experience and interpretation. Advertising is able to match theaters focus on the symbolic func-tion of pictures because it can exploit developments in print tech-nology geared toward mass production. James recognized that adver-tising (as well as the novel) was allied with media forms arising out

of what N. Katherine Hayles has labeled inscription technologies,such as photography, cinema, telegraphy, and phonographic soundrecording and reproduction, in contrast to older visual art forms, suchas painting and theater. These technologies rely on machines to inter-pose an additional layer of mediation between writer and user in theform of signscoded words or pictures, that is, symbolsengravedonto a material surface. Although the printing press itself was hardlya new invention, improvements in lithography and the invention of

photography during the mid-nineteenth century made it cheaper toprint pictures, which in turn facilitated the mixing of the word and thepicture on a single page. This synergistic partnering of two distinctiveforms of representation, each of which already had been pared downand compressed in form (into a visual tableau, a brief verbal slogan),possessed the potential to unleash an explosive, expressive force. Asin the case of the theatrical gesture that encapsulates words withina picture, the printed picture also functions as an emblem that the

reader must decode or interpret. Recognizing that literature as well as advertising is also producedvia an inscription technology, James tried in his novels to emulatethese mixed-media print images in his figurative language and toharness the power that this fusion of word and picture produces. Butinstead of exploiting pictures that use words as supplements, Jamesnot only perversely reversed this model by fashioning word-symbolsthat incorporate traces of pictures, but he outdid advertising in hisapplication of the approach so that his late style is no longer recog-nizable as belonging to a popular art form. Indeed, Jamess novel, as aresult of advances in technology, could accommodate and incorporatea variety of representational forms. Word-symbols in his late work are


4/27


repositories for complex networks of association. They serve as nodesembedded in the text that when activated by the readers decoding,accelerate into moments of epiphany, states of heightened awareness,

in which the represented situation can be viewed from multiple crite-ria and points of view. Capitalizing on the recent proliferation of mul-tiple media, James constructed what Jay David Bolter and RichardGrusin identify as a remediated novel: a work that uses one mediumto simulate another. Jamess development of this compressed symbolism situates himon the verge of conceptions of language usually identified with theworks of a succeeding generation of cosmopolitan American literarymodernists; that is, James serves as a precursor to a line of poets that

includes Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot. Together withFrench painter Georges Braque and Spanish painter Pablo Picasso,these poets aimed for a language that highlighted the symbol as imageby experimenting with representing words on the same plane ofmateriality as physical objects. Imagism, according to Pound, aspiredto present in a single concentrated image an intellectual and emo-tional complex in an instant of time. Eliot, too, idealized the symbolssubstantiality and intensity, asserting that an objective correlative or

a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events . . . shall be the formulaof that particular emotion. Eliots poet captures and draws atten-tion to diffuse, fleeting, and yet often complex mental experiences byidentifying an equally elaborate yet compact figure of speech, a verbalimage, which embodies those feelings. By devising a similar strategyfor adapting advances in print technology to words, James facilitatedthe cosmopolitan exchange of styles that American economic inno-vations had encouraged in business-inflected cultural forms. Jamess

fiction demonstrates that the advertising arts expressive power liesin folding continental theaters Old World pictorial traditions into NewWorld mass production capabilitiesnot just in importing Americanstrategies to Europe.

Making an American Scene

In The Ambassadors, James defines advertising as a business practice,but only to make the larger point that it is also a popular art form thatneeds to sell in considerable quantities the commodities it represents.By the s, manufacturers were beginning to seek the means bywhich to persuade consumers to buy their national brand. Although


5/27


the commodities were mass-produced and thus standardized, manu-facturers began to inflate small differences between their product andthose of their competitors. As both T. J. Jackson Lears and Roland

Marchand have shown, advertising at the beginning of the twenti-eth century increasingly moved away from a direct correspondencebetween the signs used to represent the marketed product and thecommoditys actual attributes. Rather than a form of representationthat intended verisimilitude and accuracy of factual information, thisnext generation of advertising sought to supply signs that blurred thedifference between the actual performance of a product and the feel-ing that the representation of it could give. James documents these changes through the Newsomes, a family

based in Woollett, Massachusetts, who discover that their thrivingbusiness urgently needs to improve its marketing. The success of thebusiness established by Chad Newsomes deceased father originallydepended on the quality of the manufactured product. As LambertStrether explains to his friend Miss Gostrey, the famously unspeci-fied commodity the Newsomes produce is a little thing they makemake better, it appears, than other people can, or than other people,at any rate, do. In this age of the corporation, though, James dem-

onstrates that Chads opportunity presents a different sort of chal-lenge. In their attempt to achieve monopoly status, the family mustconvert their commodity, which is of the commonest domestic use,into a brand that consumers notice on a national scale (A, ). Jamesaccurately represents the dilemma of American business at the endof the nineteenth century when he registers an only half-joking alarmat the nations tremendous economic growth. Strether compares thebusiness to a thriving baby boy on the verge of growing both larger

and strongerand louder, too, calling it a big brave bouncing busi-ness, a roaring trade, and a manufacture that, if its only properlylooked after, may well be on the way to become a monopoly (A, ).The Newsomes find themselves stymied in their ability to sell on sucha large scale because the rapidly growing business, like a baby, ishaving difficulties expressing what it wants. The preexisting verballanguage available to Americans isnt able to contain and representAmerican businesss developing desires for nonmimetic representa-tion: language that does more than create the illusion of verisimili-tude. Instead, the family turns to pictures to meet their aestheticletalone businessneed for symbols. James believed that American ideas about the function of pictures


6/27


and words were exemplified in the popularity of mass-producedmagazines. In one of his American Letter columns for Literature,the weekly literary supplement in theLondon Times, he argues that

despite the proliferation of magazine fiction, American society is para-doxically not comfortable with using language traditionally associatedwith fiction, namely, figurative language: [T]he magazines are, aboveall, copiously illustrated, which he believes speaks volumes on thewhole subjecttheir success, their limits, their standards, their con-cessions, the temper of the public and the state of letters. The factthat American magazines usually illustrate their fiction suggests thatwords are not deemed effective enough on their own. James insists, moreover, that almost all American magazines mani-

fest this distrust of nonmimetic language regardless of whether thepublications include illustrations or not (AL, ). The few maga-zines that did not use pictures, such as the North American Reviewand the Forum, found a different solution for dealing with this sus-picion of nonmimetic words: they avoided publishing fiction. ( TheAtlantic Monthlyis the exception.) As James explains it, [I]f literarystudies, literary curiosity and the play of criticism, are the elementmost absent from the American magazines, it is not in every case the

added absence of illustration that makes the loss least sensible (AL,). For James, the issue is not the use of pictures but how the maga-zines exploit the power of language. Even if a few magazines are notillustrated, whenever they publish fiction or critical studies, the con-tribution is an extreme of brevity that excludes everything but therapid business-statement (AL, ). Despite the additional spacecreated for literature by eliminating pictures in a handful of older jour-nals, these American publishers demanded a condensed style of writ-

ing that only allowed for a direct and literal mode of expression. Boththe survivors among the older generation of American magazines andthe generation of publications contemporaneous with James, such asCosmopolitan, McClures, and Munseys, held a common ideal of lan-guage that only accepted a narrow range of functions for words. Ineither case, verbal representation was treated as redundant to visualrepresentation and therefore deemed a luxury. Ironically, the fictionalReviewthat Mrs. Newsome and Strether putout is very much like a less successful version of theNorth AmericanReview. Representative of an older generation of American literarypublications, Mrs. Newsomes Review is characterized in the same


7/27


way that theNorth American Reviewis described in Jamess Ameri-can Letter; it, too, deals almost wholly with subjects political, com-mercial, economical, scientific (AL, ). The content of theReview

and style of the prose celebrate businesss prominence in Americansociety and endorse its ideals of rationalization. Strether observes that[t]he green covers at home comprised, by the law of their purpose,no tribute to letters; it was of a mere rich kernel of economics, politics,ethics that, glazed and, as Mrs. Newsome maintained rather againsthisview, pre-eminently pleasant to touch, they formed the speciousshell (A, ). To illustrate what the words in the journal lack, Jamesassociates its green covers with both corn husks and paper money.Unlike Jamess figured speech, Mrs. Newsomes journal treats words

as worthless protective wrappings. James uses the diminutive mereto challenge Mrs. Newsomes valuation of the journals contents as anear of corns rich kernel. Instead, he identifies a disembodied qualityto the words in the Review, which he feels lack a sense of physicalsubstance and concreteness; serving as an almost transparent glaze,the words feel smooth and slippery, making them difficult to graspsensually, and therefore mentally. James further elaborates on thiscriticism by also comparing the journal to currency or specie. He

offers the pun that although Mrs. Newsome circulates language as amedium of exchange, the words are ironically specious or deceptivebecause they dont exploit the full potential of words as vehicles forcommunication. According to The Ambassadors, earlier generations of New Englandsociety viewed verbal and pictorial representation as being com-petitors with each other. Scholars of the visual arts call this kind ofantagonistic relationship aparagone, an aesthetic in which the word

is favored over the picture. These Americans of an older generationvalued a nonmimetic, verbal aesthetic over visual forms because theyassumed that such a language was invisible or else physically imma-terial, which, they believed, made it a sign system less likely to lie;words convey meaning one step less removed from the object beingrepresented. According to Murray Krieger, this desire for a transpar-ent language originates with a neoclassical ideal for art in pictorial rep-resentation. This aesthetic strives for a natural sign that is faithfulto external, or real, origins in experience. But according to thesestandards, the verbal arts also have a limited ability to paint picturesbecause words are nonpictorial signs; rather than drawing attention to


8/27


themselves, words should instead suppress awareness of their powersof mediation. To underscore the United States almost exclusive dependence on

pictures, James contrasts American with continental aesthetic prac-tices, as represented by French art. In Jamess opinion, continentalculture traditionally asserts the possibility of a harmonious relation-ship between word and picture. Its popular theater tradition com-bines dialogue with visual cues of costume, setting, and gesture. Atthe garden party hosted by the Italian sculptor Gloriani, Strether isstruck by an unnamed European gentlemans theatrical social powers,namely, the skillful deployment of both his visual appearancecos-tume, deportment, and gesturesand his facility with a variety of lan-

guages. Strether especially notes how this man enhances his physicalpresence with his dress. He is rather stout and importantly short, ina hat with a wonderful wide curl to its brim and a frock coat buttonedwith an effect of superlative decision. Besides employing multiplevisual media, the gentleman is also a verbal magician: His Frenchhad quickly turned to equal English, and it occurred to Strether thathe might well be one of the ambassadors (A, ). In the end, it is theEuropeans way with words that wins him the attention of Madame

de Vionnet while, in contrast, Strether finds himself at a disadvan-tage to the stranger because of his limited ability in speaking French.The stranger made it good in the course of a minuteled her awaywith a trick of three words; a trick played with a social art of whichStrether . . . felt himself no master (A, ). In The Ambassadors, both generations of the Newsomes manifestthe extremes in representation discussed in Jamess American Let-ter. To explore how changing business needs affected aesthetics and

style in the United States, James initially embodies the advertisingarts in Chad Newsome. Characters throughout the novel repeatedlymention that this young American would make a successful busi-nessman, noting in particular his suitability for fronting his familysadvertising department. Thus, Strether accepts the opinion of Chadsbrother-in-law, Jim Pocock, a businessman himself, that Chad willbe,so far as capacity is concerned . . . the man to boss the advertisingbecause he has a natural turn for business, an extraordinary head(A, ). Moreover, besides his aptitude for business, Chad has alsomeanwhile acquired in France the skills of persuasion his family sourgently needs. Unlike his mother, Chad belongs to a later generation


9/27


of Americans who will travel abroad and become exposed to a varietyof cultural forms. In the end, though, James suggests that big businessonly reinforces established aesthetic habits when it ignores words and

capitalizes on an emerging visual culture to attract large quantitiesof consumers. While his mother prefers words to the exclusion ofpictures, Chad represents himself with pictures to the exclusion ofwords. Thus, the modern generation tends toward being copiouslyillustrated. Chads art sense is still influenced by earlier traditionsthat consider only pictures as capable of nonmimetic representation. Through Chad, James identifies advertising as part of a collection ofpopular art forms, such as theater, that rely heavily on pictures for theirexpressive force. To demonstrate his transformation into a gentleman,

for example, the new and improved Chad exploits the setting of theopera and his own physical appearance for his first meeting in Europewith Strether. Chads timing of his entrance with the rising of the cur-tain on the second act implies that he is creating a scene or tableau andthat Strether and his friends will become its spectators. It is throughChads performance at the opera, in fact, that Strether appreciatesthe young Americans facility with the theatrical strategy of assem-bling and composing multiple visual signs. Repeatedly bringing his

physical appearance to Strethers attention, Chad reinforces his newlyacquired refinement in manners. Conflated in Strethers memory aretwo absurdities that he remembers from this first encounter: Chadsgraceful performance of introducing himself despite his lateness andthe condition of his hair (A, ). Chad by a mere shake or two of thehead made his old friend observe that the change in him was perhapsmore than anything else, for the eye, a matter of the marked streaksof grey, extraordinary at his age, in his thick black hair. The grey

in Chads hair serves as a visual sign of refinement, that had beena good deal wanted, which quickly convinces Strether that Chad isolder and more worldly (A, ). Days after the incident, Strether stillremembers that the note had been so strongly struck during thatfirst half-hour that everything happening since was comparatively aminor development (A, ). Strethers first brief impression of thescene is powerful enough to establish the tone of their forthcominginteractions. James also foregrounds Chads visually sophisticated acting skills inthe following scene when Strether speaks to Chad for the first time ata caf. Strether is struck by how Chad repeatedly rearranges his facial


10/27


expressions so that Strether imagines the young mans countenanceas an acquirable possession that can be detached and reattached atwill like a mask. The older man notices that Chad

had leaned a little forward to speak . . . and the inscrutable new facethat he had got somewhere and somehow was brought by the move-ment nearer to his critics. There was a fascination for that critic inits not being, this ripe physiognomy, the face that, under observa-tion at least, he had originally carried away from Woollett. (A, )

A little while later when Chad makes the same gesture again, Stretherrealizes that Chad has learned the power of display in this spectacle-loving society: Chad raised his face to the lamp, and it was one of the

moments at which he had, in his extraordinary way, most his air ofdesignedly showing himself (A, ). Chad not only relies on nonmi-metic, visual forms of representation but his identity appears unstableand malleable because his real face or essence cannot be distinguishedfrom his acts of artifice. Chads deft conflation of his manners with his physical appearanceparallels advertisings reliance on concentrated pictures rather thanon words, which take more time to grasp, as well as the increasingly

sophisticated ability of pictorial designs to pack the maximum amountof information into the minimal amount of time and space. At theopera, Strether is overcome by Chads performance and notes thatthe rush, though both vague and multitudinous, had lasted a longtime, protected, as it were, yet at the same time aggravated, by thecircumstance of its coinciding with a stretch of decorous silence (A,). Rather than troping Strethers acquisition of knowledge with thegaze, which takes too long for this society, James foresees postmod-

ernist societys reliance on capturing its experiences at the rapid clipof the glance. James characterizes the gathering of information in thisfashion because he considers advertisings style to be economicallydetermined, a by-product of male, white-collar production practices.The novel documents the effects of rationalization in the workplace onemployees at home, as consumers: in both places, people demandedan increased compactness and brevity in their reading material.American characters associated with business, especially men likeMr. Waymarsh and Strether but also Mrs. Newsome, are portrayed asincreasingly pressed for time in a society overwhelmed by the produc-tion methods of business rationalization. Miss Gostrey will therefore


11/27


notice how Strether keeps looking at his watch, which they both con-clude is the failure of Woollett . . . to enjoy (A, ). According to Lears, the proliferation of advertisements starting

in the s eventually brought strategies that went beyond meredescriptions of a products qualities to include changes in advertisingcopy styles. Pictures were especially appealing for advertising andfor other popular art forms because of big businesss need to grab thepotential customers attention as quickly as possible; in the world ofmass production, time was money and pictures functioned as time-saving devices. Richard Pollays survey of household consumer maga-zines during the first half of the twentieth century documents thateven at the beginning of the s, advertisements almost always

included pictures along with verbal copy in contrast to earlier tomb-stone ads that relied on wordy arguments and informational strate-gies. Rather than words temporal unfolding of an argument, picturesaccomplished this feat by representing the product in terms of a com-pressed, tout coup effect. Looking to business needs for its aesthetic standards, advertis-ing deploys dramatic pictures that influence viewers to act: to pur-chase the represented commodity. These popular visual images may

be brief, but they are not static like the transcendental and essentialposes often associated with classical portraiture. Implied past actionsunfold and enrich the context and meaning of the acts performed atthe present instant, and they encourage the viewers to perform aswell through the act of interpretation. Thus, Chads performances asthe gentleman and artist inspire Strether in turn to recover his youthby playing the role of a young American man in Paris: the typical taleof Paris (A, ). Like Chad, Strether too will find himself choosing

between the values of Mrs. Newsome and those of Madame de Vion-net. The result is that rather than encouraging a simple act of imitat-ing Chad, advertising allows some leeway for the selfs reinterpre-tation and therefore reinvention, an important power for a business.Advertising must convince the consumer that improvement is pos-sible if the consumer were only to purchase the advertised product.Indeed, Chads self-advertising and his seeming transformation into agentleman are so successful that Strether needs to be reminded withsupreme queerness that he was none the less only Chad (A, ). Despite his admiration for advertisings expressive powers inshaping its audience, however, James also acknowledges that the art


12/27


forms ultimate business motives limit the possible range and scope ofinterpretations. Deploying pictures as mechanisms that standardizethe viewers perspective, the young American man exerts his skills

to render others powerless and to make them conform to his pointof view. Even as early as the opera sceneand also when Stretherfirst encounters Chads friend, the young American artist John LittleBilham impersonating Chad on Chads balconyStrether realizesthat Chads method of attack is to strike without prior warning andto crowd all other thoughts out of the viewers mind. Without anyverbal intercourse between the two men, Chads view is protectedfrom any challenge from Strether. Later in the novel, Strether recallsthat contact with [Chad] . . . elbowed out of Strethers consciousness

everything but itself (A, ). And even later, Strether realizes it isonly from the moment he had got his point of view that Stretherfinds his encounters with Chad had been of the simplest (A, ). Ina homologous fashion, advertisings theatrically inspired visual signsenforce a single kind of performance by the viewer: the purchase andconsumption of the advertised product.

Jamess Theatrically Remediated Novel

Jamess fiction documents advertisings participation in the growingdominance of pictures over words in the twentieth century but it alsoreflects a changing pictorial style, whose emergence James attributesto a combination of both corporate needs and technological innova-tions in mass-media capabilities. Rather than characterizing advertis-ings art as inundating the public with a crude, reductive styletheconventional assessment of advertising as a low artJames finds

that advertisings pictures are constructed out of a dense, highly com-pressed cluster of symbols. In particular, he characterizes advertis-ing design as geared toward a sensibility of excess and extremes onlyto achieve, paradoxically, the opposite aesthetic effects: balance andcoherence. In favoring techniques of collage, advertising selects andjuxtaposes seemingly disparate subjects already rich in associationsestablished by previous generations of artists in order to manufacturenew impressions that nonetheless suggest a unified effect. James alludes to advertisings suggestive powers and sophisticationwhen Strether tries to introduce himself to Chad soon after he arrivesin Paris. Although Chad is away vacationing in Cannes so that face-to-


13/27


face contact is postponed, the young American devises an indirect yetpowerful mode of communication with Strether by arranging to havehis friend John Bilham greet Strether in his stead. As an intermedi-

ary or ambassador, Bilham projects onto Chad qualities with whichChad would like to impress Strether and his mother. Chad scripts anddirects a scene that exploits the older Americans memories of Frenchpopular fiction, because Bilham reminds Strether of the romantic,bohemian characters and situations about which Chad as an art stu-dent initially wrote in letters home to his mother. Moreover, forChad, the medium is the message. He tries to convince Strether of hiscultural attainments via a collection of mediated visual images such asdramatic gestures, scenes plucked from old tales, and even selected

architectural details, such as the balcony of Chads apartment. By adopting theatrical pictorial techniques that minimize verbal rep-resentation, the young American successfully marshals what initiallyappears to be a motley collection of images into a strong unity of sym-bolic purpose. For example, Strethers first impressions of Chad duringhis encounter with Bilham on Chads balcony are made in silence whenStrether spots the artist from the street below. As a result of allowingonly images and not words to signify and express, the visual elements

of the entire scene must be encapsulated in Strethers glance. Like anadvertising executive, Chad composes a tableau of compressed visualgestures that have been calibrated to cumulatively and rapidly evokestrong desires in Strether as a spectator. When Strether first sees Bil-ham smoking a cigarette on Chads balcony, the display of people andobjects work together on the same symbolic plane so that Bilham, hiscigarette, and Chads balcony all function as metonyms that Stretherassociates with Chad in Strethers mind. Bilhams relaxed, leisurely

behavior reaffirms the balconys promise of a perched privacy thatappeared to him the last of luxuries while the balcony literallyserves as a stage to display Bilhams friendly and pleasant disposi-tion (A, , ). By referring back to a collection of already familiarsymbols, these condensed images facilitate the rapid detachment andtransfer of old meanings to the new referent. Through Bilham, Chadevokes in Strether feelings of loneliness and the desire for companywhile suggesting a way to satisfy this desire, thus opening up the pos-sibility for Strether to like and admire Chad: To him too the perchedprivacy was open, and he saw it now but in one lightthat of the onlydomicile, the only fireside, in the great ironic city, on which he had


14/27


the shadow of a claim (A, ). Strether could become friendly withChads friends, Chads home, perhaps even Chad himself. Chads visual style thus reflects Jamess ideal criteria for what he

identifies as artistic masterly structure in his review of TennysonsQueen Maryfor the Galaxyin . James depicts Chad as possess-ing standards for artistic form similar to that of the tasteful building heinhabits:

[T]he quality sprung, the quality produced by measure and bal-ance, the fine relation of part to part and space to space, was prob-ablyaided by the presence of ornament as positive as it was dis-creet, and by the complexion of the stone, a cold fair grey, warmed

and polished a little by lifeneither more nor less than a case ofdistinction. . . . (A, )

Here James highlights the importance of mental skills that contrib-ute to the construction of a work of arts arrangement of its constitu-tive elements. Jamess measure and balance imply the presence ofan individual who went through the effort to combine and arrange,interpolate and eliminateskills that James associates with the well-constructed scene, as evidenced in his review of Tennysons Queen

Mary. The benefit derived from this attention to harmony and bal-ance in Chads apartmentbut which also applies to a work of artin generalis that such a vehicle efficiently generates and ampli-fies a power of expression. The pressure and constraints of a sparenumber of interrelated parts, as in a machine, help to maximize theforce of the message, the quality sprung. Merely one light mentaltap on a single element sets off all the other closely related features.In a similar fashion, each and all of the displayed theatrical devices

Strether describes when he watches Bilham on Chads balcony havebeen orchestrated to make a concerted impression on the viewer.The characters appearance, props, and setting artfully resonate witheach other and strike Strether with the high quality of Chads artisticrefinement, that is, Chads distinction and sensitivity toward beautyand harmony. But it isnt only Chad who exploits advertisings representationaltechniques for the sake of personal gain. During the latter half of thenovel, Strether too learns to move beyond passively appreciating therepresentational powers of the popular arts and sets out to adapt themfor his own purposes as well. Departing from other scholars who read


15/27


Strether as an advocate of conservative representational traditions,I see this middle-aged American serving as a surrogate figure forJames, a pioneer of aesthetic innovations that surpass the represen-

tational strategies of even his younger companion. Strether discoversnot only the attraction and power of nonmimetic, dramatically activepictures but also demonstrates what the printed word can mean in anadvertising age by exploiting the same advances in print technologythat made this modern pictorial style possible in the first place. Due toChads manipulation of his image, Strether chooses to explore adver-tisings and then literatures potential as a modern media form. Before Strether can apply advertisings style to words, though,James traces his rapidly growing awareness of the power of visual

symbols to the emerging technology of the mass media. During a daytrip to the French countryside, just after Strether decides to sacri-fice his pending engagement to Mrs. Newsome by advising Chad toremain in France, he accidentally discovers that Chad and Madame deVionnet are not just good friends but lovers. This scene, however, alsopresents another kind of disillusionment for Strether; it forces him toacknowledge not only the demand for artifice in modern society butalso the role that advertising plays in satisfying it. Having arrived in

Europe with old-fashioned ideas of art similar to those of the New-somes, Strether first needs to confront and rid himself of contradic-tory illusions he has inherited about the relationships of artistic rep-resentation to reality. James establishes that Strether still chooses tocompare the French countryside to a superseded Boston fashion, alandscape painting by mile Lambinet, whose work he once wanted topurchase as a young man (A, ). In aesthetic terms, Strether wantshis art both ways: at the same time that he is seduced by the sensual

and emotional pleasures of visual representation and enjoys the day inthe country as a small and sweet painting, Strether still cant helpwishing that this display would yield what Miss Barrace identifies asthe Boston reallys (A, , , ). Strether enjoys the pleasuresof nonmimetic art, yet part of him continues to yearn for unmediatedsigns that directly and literally express their meaning. To expose these contradictory desires in Strether, James deploysthe traditional rhetorical form of ekphrasis: making verbal art fromvisual art. Ekphrastic representation can foreground visual imagespotential for nonmimetic representation, suggesting that what onesees is differentand perhaps morethan what is actually present.


16/27


Homer, for example, relies on a traditional kind of ekphrasis when hedescribes figures embossed on a physical object, such as a shield, andcomments on the figures verisimilitude while reminding the audience

that the piece is made of gold and is therefore a work of art. In asimilar vein, James chooses literary pictorialism to evoke the scenessimultaneously immediate yet painted qualities for Strether. The olderAmerican insists that he exists in the same space as the objects heviews, that [t]he oblong gilt frame disposed its enclosing lines, andthe scene was what he wanted: it was Tremont Street, it was France,it was Lambinet. Moreover he was freely walking about in it (A,). Strether mentions and then brackets the painting; marks of theartists presence are displayed, but then their traces disappear with

Strethers insistence that the painting transparently represents thereal landscape. But by providing physical and concrete details aboutthe content, composition, and colors used in the painting, remindersof the presence of an invisible artist who designed the representation,James disrupts the illusion that the space depicted in the art is con-tinuous with the viewers space. Although Strether loses awareness ofthe landscape as a work of art, James reminds the reader that the land-scape fell into a composition and the sky was silver and turquoise

and varnish; the village on the left was white and the church on theright was grey (A, ). James performs a more elaborate form of ekphrasis, though, whenhe simulates not only painting but a range of other visual arts asmedia forms, a practice Bolter and Grusin label remediation, the rep-resentation of one medium as another (R, ). Jamess point is thatdespite paintings attempts to immerse the viewer and conceal theefforts of the artist, Strether eventually realizes that his experience

of the countryside is unavoidably mediated by all kinds of representa-tions, that his understanding of even the natural world occurs throughhuman and, more recently, mechanical intermediaries or ambassa-dors. As Strethers accidental encounter with the couple draws near,James describes Strether viewing the countryside through the lensof a multiplicity of visual and verbal representational techniquesahybridized collage of painting, drama, and advertising media that ini-tially appear similar and harmonious in their relations but that morefrequently begin to jar against and compete with each other. Towardthe end of the afternoon, Strether oscillates between comparing thecountryside to a painting and to a play. He observes, first, that this


17/27


had been all day at bottom the spell of the picturethat it was essen-tially more than anything else a scene and a stage, that the very air ofthe play was in the rustle of the willows and the tone of the sky. The

play and the characters had, without his knowing it till now, peopledall his space for him (A, ). But then seconds later, when Madamede Vionnet and Chads boat floats into Strethers line of sight, Stretherwelcomes them as just another element to complete the compositionof a static painting: [I]t was suddenly as if these figures, or somethinglike them, had been wanted in the picture, had been wanted moreor less all day (A, ). By foregrounding how each visual elementis mediated, James signals a shift away from Strethers illusions ofLambinets picture perfect world; he gradually pushes the inani-

mate landscape into the background and expands the frame to revealand acknowledge the artists hand: the human and the human laborthat produce the artifice. James devises this style of excess to invoke an awareness of thematerial and social presence of media in his society, a strategy Bolterand Grusin identify as hypermediacy (R, ). Recognizing thevisual arts as part of a growing family of media forms, James exploreshow modern medias reliance on machines to inscribe their repre-

sentations confronts audiences with the fact that works of art dontsimply represent an external world but also serve as cultural arti-facts or objects within it. With the appearance of Chad and Madamede Vionnet, the images are no longer objects pinned in space withouthuman motive that the artist manipulates for purely formal purposes.As a result, Strether cannot help interpreting an intimacy betweenthe couple from their gestures. Madame de Vionnet suddenly freezeswhen she recognizes Strether during their surprise encounter in the

French countryside: [H]e too had within the minute taken in some-thing, taken in that he knew the lady whose parasol, shifting as if tohide her face, made so fine a pink point in the shining scene (A, ).At this moment, Strether discovers the presence of artifice as well assin in his edenic paradise. Madame de Vionnets pink parasol func-tions no longer as only a sensually pleasing pictorial element but alsoas a sign, and a duplicitous one at that, to hide her face and her adul-tery from Strether. Remediation and hypermediacy therefore allow James to illustratethe degree to which the popular arts such as advertising are inex-tricably caught in a network of related contemporary economic and


18/27


social practices. When Strether dines at a local inn with the deceiv-ing couple after the accidental encounter, the coopting presence ofChad and Strethertwo American men in the middle of the French

countrysidesignals the emerging power of advertising techniquesto permeate individual behavior in even the private sphere. Stretherdiscovers that Chads strategies for representing himself mirror thetechniques of producing images used by advertising to sell goods.The textual representation of pictorial space becomes fractured afterStrethers disillusionment about the virtuous nature of the couplesattachment so that he has the opportunity to look behind the scenesand witness the usually hidden work of representation (A, ).Strether realizes Chad imposes new interpretations on their acciden-

tal meeting by applying business techniques to personal situations. Aswhen Chad has his friend Bilham act in his stead, Chad habitually leftthings to others, that is, he delegates the task of representation (A,). At the inn, the older American observes that Chad in particularcould let her know he left it to her (A, ). Indeed, Chad managesMadame de Vionnet as though she were an employee in his familysfirm. Nor is Strether himself excluded in Chads skillful ploys to getothers to work for him. Even as Strether is conscious of the couples

attempts to detach and recombine signs of their guilt, the power ofChads single-mindedness coerces Strether to join in the coupleseffort to exploit surface appearances and make their countryside tripappear innocent. Strether comes to realize the degree to which hehas always accepted his experience in Paris on the same level as apurchased and consumed commodity when he sees for the first timeMadame de Vionnet laboring to produce the services Chad both over-sees and has so slickly advertised.

Rather than simply repudiating the powers these popular artsexploit, though, Strether chooses to assert the ascendancy of a newkind of verbal power that has its origins in these visual arts. Signifi-cantly, it is the use of the French language that makes Strether awareof this capability. At the inn after the accidental encounter, Strether isconfronted with the incongruity of the presence of two American mencrafting a scene in a French drama as well as the effort it must take forMadame de Vionnet to translate this typical tale of Paris into Ameri-can terms for him. The hybrid scene looks awkward and artificial, assignaled by Madame de Vionnets speaking French at the inn. Thespell is broken because she has been caught off guard, and Strether


19/27


realizes that Madame de Vionnet has been performing all this timewhen she reverts to her native French. She cannot keep up the per-formance of familiarity for Strether, and the present result was odd,

fairly veiling her identity, shifting her back into a mere voluble class orrace to the intense audibility of which he was by this time inured (A,). The status and the role of figurative language shift as Stretherwitnesses Madame de Vionnets efforts at mediation. As Bolter andGrusin put it, language fills up the space between signifying subjectsand nature (R, ): like pictures, words too are active, tangible pres-ences capable of expressing multiple meanings, and thus duplicity. On a formal level, Jamess figures of speech function like innova-tive typography in poems later in the century or newspaper print in

Braques and Picassos modernist paintings. Style calls attention tothe printed mediums properties as a physical entity and encouragesconsumers to look at the page as a material object. Jamess use ofornate language slows down the speed with which the reader movesthrough the text; the decoding of word-symbols in real time occurs ata pace different from that of the represented events so that our bodiesbecome aware of the experience of time and change. James devises alanguage that can interpenetrate the real world via prints materiality

so that these mediated images function as objects within systems oflinguistic, cultural, social, and economic exchanges. In the boatingscene, for example, ontological distinctions that separate Lambinetspainting from Strether, Strether from the countryside, the country-side from the painting, and the old plays and fiction Strether read as ayoung man from his present experiences with Chad and Madame deVionnet keep shifting and changing. By repeatedly referring to paint-ings and books that exist in a space contiguous with the outer world

that its readers inhabit, James subverts distinct ontological levels forus as well. Indeed, James has Strether realize that words can accomplishmore than pictures. Static pictures hold the danger of reducing andsimplifying; that is, they standardize meaning, in contrast to words,which serve better at recording and expressing changes in charac-ters. Jamess identification of languages temporal advantages is con-sistent with how traditional ekphrastic theory distinguishes betweenverbal and visual forms of representation. According to scholars whostudy the history of ekphrasis, Western tradition deems visual artsmore effective in the expression of spatial experience, whereas the


20/27


verbal arts excel at representing the temporal. Moreover, thesescholars see modernism as an effort to bring together word and pic-ture through the logic of the emblem, a picture with a verbal caption.

According to Krieger, this ekphrastic principle aims to compre-hend the simultaneity, in the verbal figure, of fixity and flow, of animage at once grasped and yet slipping away through the crevices oflanguage. Such words not only pack the initial punch of pictorialrepresentations intensity but also prolong the experience, since theyrequire more time to be savored and unraveled. The picture, that is,makes reference to a cluster of related associations that enrich andcomplete the meaning of the original images. Strether and Jamess style harnesses this tension between narrative

and pictorial representation by adopting an extreme style of conden-sationencapsulating the picture in the word rather than the otherway around, as advertising does. Toward the end of the novel, Strethertells Miss Barrace: Its beautiful . . . the way you all can simplify whenyou will. She retorts: Its nothing to the wayyouwill when you must(A, ). Rather than simplification leading to reductiveness, though,Strether adopts a style like the one James, in his preface to The Ambas-sadors, identifies with the novels very form and figure, one which

alternates between the dramatic or narrative scene and discrimi-nated preparation . . . the fusion and synthesis of picture (A, ).As scholars such as Sheldon Novick and Bill Brown have observed,James not only designs emblems that possess the attributes andappeal of pictorial advertisements but he also embeds these imagesin a prose style, laden with qualifiers and phrases, that evokes theillusion of stretching the readers experience of time. In an analysisof modernism and the visual arts, Marianna Torgovnick interprets The

Ambassadors as opposing the use of hasty impressions with a morecomplex state of knowledge. I argue, however, that rather than anepistemological program that rests on a dichotomy between impres-sion and knowledge, James calibrates a more gradual and continuousprocess of representation in which brief impressions yield to devel-oping knowledge by acts of accumulation. Pictures and brief wordsserve as building blocks for the construction of a more complicatedknowledge of affairs. Thus Strether stresses the danger of arriving ata partial, one-sided state of knowledge due to hasty preconceptionswhen at the end of the novel he advises Chad to remain in Paris withMadame de Vionnet, explaining: I feel how much more she can do for


21/27


you. She hasnt done it all yet. Stay with her at least till she has (A,). Indeed, these imaginative acts constitute what Strether derivesfrom the entire experience, despite his avowal to reject any profits.

Strether insists that he has [n]ot, out of the whole affair, to have gotanything for himself, because by now he has already acquired every-thing he originally desired: the word and the image (A, ). Jamessuggests that the older American has managed to take away an under-standing more complete than even Chads of how the powers of mod-ern advertising can be fully exploited. At the same time, James depicts Strether exploiting not just litera-tures cultural role but also its potential for economic intervention.As a member of the American middle class and a consumer, Strether

desires images that provide mental experiences not only quickly andpowerfully but also cheaply, because unlike his wealthier friends,Strether cannot afford to purchase precious objets dart. Earlier, inStrethers accidental encounter with Madame de Vionnet at the cathe-dral of Notre Dame, he compares the massive physical bulk of theseventy volumes of Victor Hugos fiction he just purchased to that ofthe cathedral building; the grandness of these works of art inspiresStrether to take on other extravagant acts, such as theatrically playing

the role of Madame de Vionnets hero, which enables him to matchMadame de Vionnet in her performance, costume and all, as a damselin distress. But ingrained economic priorities motivate Strether towork a compromise between his desire to make a grand gesture in thetradition of classical French theater and his typical American middle-class constraints. As with the Lambinet painting he remembers fromhis younger days, the secondhand books are a miracle of cheapness,parted with, he was assured by the shopman, at the price of the red-

and-gold alone (A, ). Deploying the modest sum of visual andverbal signs as well as money at his disposal, Strether thriftily asksMadame de Vionnet to lunch at an inexpensive, bohemian caf on theLeft Bank. As Miss Gostrey and Strether joke together early in thenovel, a poetry in tarriffed items, one that is both a commodity andan objet dart, is indeed possible (A, ). As a member of the middle class, Strether is also aware that tech-nology and the emergence of the mass media play an important role infacilitating words ability to achieve such an expressive force at so lowa cost. American popular literature exploited cheaper and faster printtechniques that allowed the proliferation of illustrations and adver-


22/27


tisements so that a higher proportion of the nations citizens couldenjoy the arts. The innovations in print technology that affected bothadvertising and popular literary styles also influenced other communi-

cation media arising from the mechanization of inscription processes.Like records, photographs, and telegrams, the printed page was pro-duced by a machine that in the course of inscribing information con-densed data by encrypting it into a series of images that another set ofmachines had to decode or interpret. In short, this mass technologyis indirectly responsible for facilitating the manufacture and wide dis-semination of images that encourage the performance of symbolicinterpretation. These images achieved the effect of brevity yet inten-sity, through compressionor, more specifically, through remediat-

ing a picture that in turn is made of multiple layers of other imagesand words. Because print stays itself and cannot be completely erasedlike todays digital technology, there is a mixing of pictures and wordswith the effect of a palimpsest. Traces of previous images remain stillpartly visible because the page constitutes a surface that has beenoverlaid with inscriptions that are partially struck out and then writ-ten over. Stretherand Jamesdesire a language that takes advantage of

mass medias technological advances. Strether, after his first en-counter with Chad at the opera, is frustrated by the limitations ofhaving to write letters to Mrs. Newsome to explain the changes he hasobserved in Chad: even this older American had had a sense of thepertinence of communicating quickly with Woollettcommunicatingwith a quickness with which telegraphy alone would rhyme; the fruitreally of a fine fancy in him for keeping things straight, for the happyforestalment of error (A, ). Due to the senders need to cut costs

by minimizing the words senta dilemma James shared as a short-story writerthe telegrams short, incomplete phrases are likenedto the lines of a poem, a composition in figurative language. Becausethe telegraph enables words to approximate the compactness andexpressive power of pictures, Strether wishes he could just simply sayto Mrs. Newsome: Have at last seen him, but oh dear! or Awfullyoldgrey hair (A, ). Strether comprehends the world throughsuch picture-words, and the letterperhaps a stand-in for the novelitself, which originated as an epistolary formcannot keep up withthe rapid pace at which all the new data pours in. In a similar vein,toward the end of the novel, when Strether visits the Postes et Tl-


23/27


24/27


[It was] one of those [hours] that he was to recall, at the end ofhis adventure, as the particular handful that most had counted. Themellowest lamplight and the easiest chair had been placed at his

disposal by Baptiste, subtlest of servants; the novel half-uncut, thenovel lemon-coloured and tender, with the ivory knife athwart itlike the dagger in a contadinashair, had been pushed within thesoft circlea circle which, for some reason, affected Strether assofter still after the same Baptiste had remarked that in the absenceof a further need of anything by Monsieur he would betake himselfto bed. (A, )

Despite the familiarity of the reading act, the moment is special for

Strether, as implied in Jamess use of superlatives: the light is themellowest, the chair the easiest, the servant the subtlest. More-over, playing the role of the advertising man himself, James illustratesthe luxurious range of aesthetic experiences reading offers throughhis remediation of multiple visual techniques in his own prose style.First, this reading performance is likened to a dramatic scene: theknife that cuts the pages of the book Chad has started is romanti-cally likened to a dagger in a contadinas hair. In addition, though,James contrives to have Strethers act of reading simulate the pic-torial experience of space. As in an illustrated story or a magazineadvertisement, he demarcates the scene by a soft circle of light thatfunctions to frame this verbal picture. James is conventionally viewed as a writer associated with conser-vative positions about the role of art, but in The Ambassadorshe dem-onstrates aesthetic practices that are ahead of his time. Thus, towardthe end of the novel when James unmasks Chads interests in adver-tising (Chad came out quite suddenly with this announcement and

appeared at all events to have been looking into the question andhad encountered a revelation [A, ]), James also reveals that thisbusiness form underwrites his own style as well. The writers last-moment exposure of Chads tricks simultaneously discloses James asa manipulator and advertiser, as an unreliable narrator of sorts. LikeChad, James too asserts that advertising is an art like another, andinfinite like all the arts. . . . In the hands, naturally, of a master. Theright man must take hold. With the right man to work it cest un monde

(A, ). Moreover, in his remediation of a variety of visual and ver-bal techniques, James shows the way to bridge seemingly opposedviews of popular and high art for the next generation of cosmopolitan


25/27


modernists as well as for the artists of our own postmodernist, hyper-mediated age.

DePaul University

Notes

For their helpful comments, I would like to thank Martha Banta, MichaelNorth, Mark McGurl, Lynn Itagaki, David Witzling, and the AmericanistReading Colloquium at the University of California, Los Angeles. Comple-tion of this essay was possible through a grant from the Faculty Researchand Development Program, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, DePaulUniversity.

See Michael Anesko,Letters, Fictions, Lives: Henry James and WilliamDean Howells (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, ). According toAnesko, James wrote to Howells after The Bostoniansand The PrincessCasamassimafailed to receive much attention in the s, saying thatan ominous foreboding overtook him (). In the s, after fiveyears of unsuccessful efforts in the London theater scene, Jamess lettersto Howells on November and January emphasize howmuch it meant to him that during the old friends meeting in London atthe end of October in , Howells continued to express his confidence

in James (, ). Anesko also mentions a letter to Jamess sister-in-law in which James mentions the professional help that Howellss visitgave him ().

See, for example, Jennifer Wicke,Advertising Fictions: Literature, Adver-tisement, and Social Reading (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, ),; William Greenslade, The Power of Advertising: Chad Newsomeand the Meaning of Paris in The Ambassadors, ELH (spring ):; and Richard Salmon,Henry James and the Culture of Publicity(Cam-bridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press, ), . In standard readingsof The Ambassadors, Lambert Strethers decision to help Chad Newsomeremain in Europe with his mistress rather than return to Massachusettsto take up his familys thriving business is usually read as Strethers (and

Jamess) repudiation of an emerging popular culture in the United Statesin favor of the ways of the Old World. By primarily analyzing the novelsplot, such traditional readings interpret the American characters as starkopposites of the Europeans in their views of business and culture.

A limited number of studies have examined James and the theater, albeiton a thematic level. See, for example, Leon Edel, introduction to TheComplete Plays of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel (; reprint, New York:

Oxford Univ. Press, ); Sheldon M. Novick, Henry James on Stage:That Sole Intensity Which the Theatre Can Produce, inHenry James onStage and Screen, ed. John R. Bradley (New York: Palgrave, ), ;


26/27


and William Storm, Henry Jamess Conscious Muse: Design for a The-atrical Case in The Tragic Muse,Henry James Review (spring ):.

N. Katherine Hayles, Saving the Subject: Remediation in House ofLeaves,American Literature (December ): .

See Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: UnderstandingNew Media(Cambridge: MIT Press, ), . Further references will becited parenthetically asR.

Ezra Pound, A Few Donts by an Imagiste,Poetry (March ): . T. S. Eliot, Hamlet, in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode

(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, ), . See T. J. Jackson Lears,Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Adver-

tising in America(New York: Basic Books, ); and Roland Marchand,

Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, ). Henry James, The Ambassadors(; reprint, New York: Penguin, ),

. Further references are to this edition and will be cited parentheticallyin the text asA.

Henry James, American Letter, June ,Literature, reprinted inEssays on Literature. American Writers. English Writers, vol. ofLiteraryCriticism(New York: Library of America, ), . Further referencesto Jamess American Letter of June are to this edition and willbe cited parenthetically as AL.

Murray Krieger,Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, ), .

See, for example, William A. Gleason, The Leisure Ethic: Work and Play inAmerican Literature, (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press,). See also Martha Banta, Taylored Lives: Narrative Productions in the

Age of Taylor, Veblen, and Ford(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, ). See T. J. Jackson Lears, Some Versions of Fantasy: Toward a Cultural

History of American Advertising, , inProspects: An Annual ofAmerican Cultural Studies, ed. Jack Salzman (Cambridge, Eng.: Cam-

bridge Univ. Press, ), . Richard W. Pollay, The Subsidizing Sizzle: A Descriptive History of Print

Advertising, ,Journal of Marketing (summer ): . Allen W. Menton argues that Chad performs roles that Strether would

have read in the yellow paperbacks from the Paris of his youth; see Typi-cal Tales of Paris: The Function of Reading in The Ambassadors,Henry

James Review (fall ): . Henry James, review of Queen Mary, by Alfred Lord Tennyson, Galaxy,

September ; cited in Edel, introduction toPlays, .

Ibid. Grant F. Scott, The Sculpted Word: Keats, Ekphrasis, and the Visual Arts(Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, ), .


27/27


Ibid., . See James A. W. Heffernan,Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis

from Homer to Ashbery(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, ). Krieger,Ekphrasis, .

In his preface, James oscillates between pictorial (non-scenic) andnarrative (scenic) representation. He defines an excellent standardscene as copious, comprehensive, and accordingly never short, butwith its office as definite as that of the hammer on the gong of the clock,the office of expressing all that is inthe hour (A, ). However, he alsodistinguishes the charms of a non-scenic, more pictorial technique.

The non-scenic shows a direct presentability diminished and compro-miseddespoiled, that is, of itsproportionaladvantage (A, ).

Novick observes that Jamess text often functions like a script in which

the text serves as a dramatic skeleton that must be fleshed out andbrought to life in performance (Henry James on Stage, ). See alsoBill Brown, A Thing about Things: The Art of Decoration in the Work ofHenry James,Henry James Review (fall ): . In his consider-ation of The Spoils of Poynton, Brown argues that Jamess late style resiststhe hyperpresence of objects within realist fiction ().

See Marianna Torgovnick, The Visual Arts, Pictorialism, and the Novel:James, Lawrence, and Woolf(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, ),.

Analyzing JamessIn the Cage, Richard Menke considers how the elec-tric telegraph encouraged the conceptualization of language as a coderather than as a transparent channel for the exchange of information. Foran extension of Menkes insightful discussion of language that exploresspecific stylistic implications for James and modernism, see his Tele-graphic Realism: Henry JamessIn the Cage,PMLA (October ):.

chung, june hee _ getting the picture, american corporate advertising and the rise of a cosmopolitan...

Documents