I found Henry James' novel What Maisie Knew to be an unusual work. It was characterised by a sense of impregnability. One had a sense of glorious architecure obscuring some treasure behind stone walls. This, I know, is very James, but it is particularly pointed in What Maisie Knew because the protagonist herself is in the same condition. That is she similarly is surrounded by events and relations which she doesn't understand although is affected by a sense of their propriety and importance. The difference is she is inside looking out and we are inside looking in.
This unusual set up seems to me a perfect example of the emergence of the hermenutics of suspicion and reader anxiety. At first one worries the whole time that one has not satisfactorily understood, that one is missing something. In particular the title is infuriating, because we spend the whole time wondering what it is the Maisie knows, and it is often mentioned by the narrative voice or the other characters, but it is never told in full. As a reader ones affected intellectual relations to the work become exposed and challening. We wonder, 'oh dear, am I not as smart as I think?' or 'I should know what Maisie knows by now, shouldn't I? What if I've missed it? What if I don't understand this cannonical author! ... How am I going to lie about this in class?...'. The obsurity of James' writing brings to the fore this bundle of anxieties and self expectation associated with the act of reading, and the role of reading in our lives, which is normally masked by the accessibilty of other works.
The hermenutics of suspicion are raised with even greater force then reader anxiety in this work. One sees the self proclaimed motives of the women using Maisie to gain ascendency over Sir Claude, and those of Maisie herself, grate against an almost palpable hypocrisy of sexual tension. The increasing sordidness of the whole affair, masked vainly by Mrs Wix' tempest of morality, screams for some authorial comment. The fact that this is refrained from by James, at least in my case, resulted in the most enourmous suspiscious of not only what he was doing, but who he was such that either a) he was blind to the terrible animal tensions that underlay his text, or b) a unbelivably dark thinker who saw the sexual termoil and cruelty hidden beneath skin deep English propriety, maintained in a type of self-deluding mantra of politeness and reasonableness. While increasing my engagement with the work I still wonder when I look at and of James' book, 'what on earth were you thinking?'.
I think I would have to go with b. At first I thought it was my own dirty, 21st century youthful mind which instantly drew the most sexually 'debauched' assumptions wherever something eluded me. I would immediately correct myself, assuming it to be inappropriate to the context and deciding to put on my 19th-century goggles but it kept happenning. From what I know of late 19th-century culture, things got pretty sexual and crazy, it just wasn't mentioned in public discourse and therefore wouldn't have explicitly entered a novel. But James must have been aware of it. I guess I shoudln't be referring to him as I've just slipped into the 'intentional fallacy'. I guess, whether intentional or not, there is an undercurrent of latent sexuality within the text that can only exist in a culture of repression. I think maybe what I said before about the actual culture not being reflected in public discourse is very significant to What Masie Knew. We can never know what she knows, we can never know what James knew, or any of the individuals within that context. The book is about what Maisie knew but couldn't or wouldn't say. While the book is about knowing, it is about not articulating this knowledge, leaving this knowledge an eternal mystery to us.
ReplyDeleteI think that your opening paragraph defines the novel in an incisive and penetrating way. Maisie is definitely "looking out whilst we are looking in" and the dichotomy of this frustrates the reader and haunts us no end. Every time there was the expression "Maisie knew" I marked it and reread it as a form of evidence to which I consoled myself - 'there is nothing else I am to know at this stage...'How is that possible?
ReplyDeleteI appreciate your observation that the suspicion induced by James' style of writing is far worse than reader anxiety. My preoccupation with it in my blog begun to bore me - it felt narrow and self-absorbed. You perfectly articulated the kind of anxiety that slides beneath you skin, slowly increasing as you make your way literally and psychologically through the novel, until when you pause reading to go on with your day you are left with an bitter taste on your tongue, or feeling like a muscle is twisted somewhere you can't quite locate or stretch out. It is interesting that the lack of moral authority by James increased your feeling of suspicion, when a common criticism of novels are that they are morally over-bearing. Perhaps we need this for a happy reading experience? Although I would rather an uncomfortable experience than one that will end with life as I know it being affirmed in a pleasant way.
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