Henry James in Contemporary Fiction by Bethany Layne

Author:Bethany Layne
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030316501
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

The opening to Bosanquet’s text bears all the characteristics of parody as previously defined by Hutcheon and Sanders: its relationship to James’s prose is ‘overt and defining’ (Hutcheon 2013, p. 3), its intention clearly satirical (Sanders 2006, p. 5). It is a single sentence, overloaded almost to the point of breaking with parenthetical clauses and subordination, its grammatical complexity serving to obscure, rather than clarify, its meaning. Bosanquet fondly lampoons James’s habitual discourse markers, such as ‘so to speak’, his tendency to interrogate idiomatic phrases, for instance ‘to take or leave’, and his characteristic stacking up of noun phrases (‘a brilliance, a scintillation, a radiance’) in search of le mot juste. So caricatured are James’s stylistic tics that there is little danger of the text being misidentified as the real thing.

In comparison, Frieda’s opening sentence seems to be rather a different entity:It had ever been his habit, of a morning, to take the air before indulging in such matutinal sustenance as his undemanding system, understood in a physical as well as a philosophical sense, required—if even that were not too grossly imperative a designation for the modest promptings of a constitution that seemed never to want as much for itself as Mrs Blythe was inclined to bestow upon it. (Heyns 2005, p. 25)

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