Aftertastes of Ruin: Uncanny Sites of Memory in Henry James's Paris

Abstract

This paper reexamines and resituates Henry James's curiously embodied spatial memory by turning not to the voluble buildings and vanished architectural limbs in The American Scene , but rather to the "aftertaste" of the post-Commune ruins of Paris in his correspondence, early travel sketches, and later novels. Reading James's attention to lost landmarks and charred landscape in light of their ongoing presence as transnational sites of memory in American magazines helps us rethink Jamesian "historic sense" in The Princess Casamassima and The Ambassadors as an intimate, synesthetic index of social space, and reveals the uncanny space of revolution in James's Paris.

The Author as Arsonist: Henry James and the Paris Commune

“…The play of absence and presence in the two clauses, "The palace was gone, Strether remembered the palace," initiates a process whereby Strether's personal sense of an unfulfilled life is positioned in relation to a larger temporality of defeat, for which the Commune is a resonant point of reference. James's relationship to the Commune has been little discussed until recently, 3 but it is of interest for at least two reasons: first, for what it tells us about James's "historic sense"; second, because James deploys an aesthetic that engages with the rupture between memory and history that anticipates that of his modernist successors, Proust, Richardson, Joyce, and Woolf.…”

“…A line in a later article, "The Parisian Stage" (9 January 1873), for Nation, makes it clear that he did visit the less than bright and neat, burnt-out buildings that littered the city, which had become what Michelle Coghlan describes as an "instant tourist destination." 21 I shall never forget a certain evening in the early summer when, after a busy, dusty, weary day in the streets, staring at the charred ruins and finding in all things a vague aftertaste of gunpowder I repaired to the Théatre Français...…”