Psychological Complexity in James's "The Aspern Papers"

I have long admired Henry James.  He was a college discovery.  I should say, rather, that he was an author whom I discovered while studying in university through a course assignment.  To some, such an assignment would have seemed onerous.  To me, it was felicitous.

It was felicitous both in the sense of being fortunate and pleasing.  It was the former because the assignment prompted me to pay close attention to language, something at which my teacher was remarkably skilled.  Reading James, influenced by this instructor, helped me to become a better, a closer, reader.  In literary criticism as with many other things, skills develop through emulation.  I was amazed at how much my professor could unearth from the first paragraphs of a text that would throw an exegetical light on the rest of the narrative. 

Take, say, "Daisy Miller," which opens with an impersonal narration of a hotel in "the little town of Vevey, in Switzerland" where one might find "an unbroken array of establishments of this order, of every category" (in James, Great Short Works of Henry James, p. 3).  There is "German-looking lettering" on a wall in a spot that is an "American watering-place" with "'stylish' young girls" and much else.  Indeed, the story will concern an American in a foreign land, an emphasis on how things are typified and categorized, the propriety of styles and mores that are in their "order" and do not transgress, a narrator whose voice is like an upper-class tour guide with mock-aristocratic tones yet in which familiarity flourishes.  People visit and know places like this one.  At least some people do, those with means and manners.  There is an accent on appearance and semblance, what things look like:  "neat German waiters, who look like secretaries of legation."  Places (geographic, social, moral), nationalities (their mingling and distinctions -- when is one at home or out of place?), types (categories, boundaries, people) -- these prove to be at the heart of the short story.

A casual reader will likely pick up on these details and themes in time.  James is too good a writer for them not to snowball; indeed, it is precisely because he is such a good writer that one senses as one advances through the story that they do snowball.  But a close reader will eye them consciously from the beginning. In retrospect, those concerns would seem obvious, as though James were telegraphing them from the outset.  I, however, in my first reading had missed them.  I was impressed both that I had missed them and that my teacher could pinpoint them so lucidly.  I, too, wanted to see them in that light and from the beginning.

James in 1889, from the portrait by Mrs.
Anna Lea Merritt. New York Public Library.

Later while on school breaks, what struck me in my own reading of James, particularly The Portrait of a Lady, was the psychological complexity of James's characters.  James creates in his stories a world of personal interiority.  In this mental-emotional space, a reader naturally inhabits the thought and emotional processes of main characters.  It is less that point of view is transferred than it is that one adds points of view, one is enlarged in one's perspective of a scene, an event, an action, a social or moral conundrum.  This literary feat of James's -- and it is that, a feat -- is powerfully on display in Washington Square, for instance.  What I wish to reflect on briefly now, however, is the interior perspective of psychological complexity in another short work of fiction, "The Aspern Papers."

James first published "The Aspern Papers" in The Atlantic Monthly in 1888. This was one year before the nearby portrait was made. For whatever reason, he looks in the portrait much as I had mentally imagined the narrator, who is, after all, a literary man.

The story opens, "I had taken Mrs. Prest into my confidence" ("The Aspern Papers," in Great Short Works of Henry James, p. 217).  That is appropriate, because the story radiates out of this "I" and his perceptions of the tale that he tells, a tale about seeking, gaining, exchanging, and losing confidences.  The first-person narration is limited, and what we know of other characters comes through the lens of this "I's" eyes.  That is what contributes so magnificently to the narrative's suspense.

It is a suspenseful narrative.  (Rest assured, however, I will not dare give away anything here.)  The plot revolves around the unnamed narrator's taking up lodgings in a Venetian palace inhabited by two female American expatriates in order that he might try to obtain private documents of a now-deceased poet whom he admires and of whose works he is a co-editor.  The writer is Jeffrey Aspern. He was once a lover of the elderly Miss Bordereau, who is, the narrator suspects, in possession of these documents and, based on her rebuff of an earlier epistolary inquiry, seems unwilling to part with them.  It is the narrator's aim to determine if they exist, if she has them, and how to secure them if she does.

In the process, we the readers acquire an intimate familiarity with this literary man's mind.  Although James will at times press the limits of the reliability of his narrators, the one in "The Aspern Papers" is less unreliable than explicit about the various possibilities of his own and of other people's perceptions, which he analyzes through the multiple lenses of a prism.  The following excerpt from early on in the story illustrates how the narrator will turn over different theories, possible takes, both his own and that of Miss Bordereau. He does so in a way that is, and James would take this as a high compliment, realistic.

What he describes is known to us all, for it is how our minds work, springing from a piece of evidence to a theory, and from that to another consideration, perhaps of different ways of responding, whether our original theory were correct, and then second-guessing ourselves, and so forth. James opens a window into the narrator's mind, the turning of gears, theories, suppositions, and retractions.  We glimpse in the narrator's own experience and telling the different ways in which people actually think, the momentary thoughts, the fleeting and then lasting inferences or interpretations that we give to circumstances, words, and actions and upon which we base our picture of the world.

It seemed to me a proof of the old lady's determination to have nothing to do with me that she should never have sent me a receipt for my three months' rent. For some days I looked out for it and then, when I had given it up, I wasted a good deal of time in wondering what her reason had been for neglecting so indispensable and familiar a form. At first I was tempted to send her a reminder, after which I relinquished the idea (against my judgment as to what was right in the particular case), on the general ground of wishing to keep quiet. If Miss Bordereau suspected me of ulterior aims she would suspect me less if I should be businesslike, and yet I consented not to be so. It was possible she intended her omission as an impertinence, a visible irony, to show how she could overreach people who attempted to overreach her. On that hypothesis it was well to let her see that one did not notice her little tricks. The real reading of the matter, I afterward perceived, was simply the poor old woman's desire to emphasize the fact that I was in the enjoyment of a favor as rigidly limited as it had been liberally bestowed. She had given me part of her house, and now she would not give me even a morsel of paper with her name on it. Let me say that even at first this did not make me too miserable, for the whole episode was essentially delightful to me. I foresaw that I should have a summer after my own literary heart, and the sense of holding my opportunity was much greater than the sense of losing it. There could be no Venetian business without patience, and since I adored the place I was much more in the spirit of it for having laid in a large provision. That spirit kept me perpetual company and seemed to look out at me from the revived immortal face—in which all his genius shone—of the great poet who was my prompter. ... My eccentric private errand became a part of the general romance and the general glory— I felt even a mystic companionship, a moral fraternity with all those who in the past had been in the service of art. They had worked for beauty, for a devotion; and what else was I doing? That element was in everything that Jeffrey Aspern had written, and I was only bringing it to the light. ("The Aspern Papers," in Great Short Works of Henry James, 240-41)

It is that perceived or felt "romance" that contributes to the psychological complexity of the narrator in "The Aspern Papers."   He explicitly identifies an overriding sense or framework within which he is approaching the people and places that he encounters in his present project.  To be specific, revealed in James's characterization of the narrator is a beautiful picture of the standpoints, preconceptions, and interpretive lenses with, from, and through which we make sense of the world and various circumstances.  Admirable, as it relates to James's narrative technique, is the skill with which he represents this to reads, for he makes his narrator have a self-awareness of these interpretive biases that we readers rarely, if we are frank, achieve.  The narrator, in contrast, seems only too cognizant of his interpretations.  It is his purpose, in fact, to describe them in with painstaking exactitude:

She was perhaps amazed at my assurance, but I was surprised at hers; at her having the energy, in her state of health and at her time of life, to wish to sport with me that way simply for her private entertainment—the humor to test me and practice on me. This, at least, was the interpretation that I put upon her production of the portrait, for I could not believe that she really desired to sell it or cared for any information I might give her. What she wished was to dangle it before my eyes and put a prohibitive price on it. (pp. 271-72)

The passage involves the close interaction between self-conscious interpretation ("This, at least, was the interpretation that I put upon [it]") and indicative statement of fact ("What she wished...").  There is a sort of slippage from the one into the other, an interplay between what we attribute to ourselves and what we attribute to others.  Henry's brother William would publish in 1890, two years after "The Aspern Papers" first appeared, his Principles of Psychology.  I wonder how much each influenced the other through their correspondence.

"The Aspern Papers" is a story not only of human psychological complexity but also of suspense. It is suspenseful, and successfully so, precisely because we can identify with the twists and turns of a mind who has an aim, seeks to understand what is presented to him, foists interpretive grids upon happenings and saying according to preferences and conceits. If James, in narrating the intrigue involving and the pursuit of the papers, did not open up to us the mind's inner workings and turnings, if he did not invite us in and in fact draw us into that cavern of emotional and ratiocinative processes, would the story be so suspenseful? The art of James's storytelling involves our imagining as readers that we ourselves could have been in that particular situation in which the character finds himself, since we have, or someone we know has, been in similar such situations, or, again, because we might easily imagine that we resonate with the character's specific thoughts and feelings based on other different but similarly shared human experiences.  If this identification with the character in terms of our replaying in our own minds what might be going on in his is absent, then does suspense work? If there is no empathy, is there suspense?

I do not know the definitive answer to that question, but I tend to suspect that the answer is no. To the extent that we remain distant from, uninterested in, or unconcerned (positively or negatively) for the characters wrapped up in the thick of things, suspense likely fails.

Reading Henry James always presents me as a reader with characters whose carefully fashioned psychological complexity not only delights or engrosses me the more that I read. Reading his stories and novels also prompts me as a person to understand myself and others around me as I navigate the interiority of James's characters and how they seek to understand themselves and those around them.  James is rightly noted for his tight, realistic, and clever dialogue. He also had a profound insight into the undulations of human action, motivation, (self-)deception, and reflection.