The text of a class presentation by Shashi Thandra™
The multiple threads that knot Henry James’ The Real Thing together cannot be unraveled easily or without an arbitrarily chosen starting strand. Let me then begin by outlining some of the material social conditions within the text before moving on to a more aesthetic formal reading.
The absurdly named Mr. and Mrs. Monarch’s arrival at the narrator’s studio points to the drastic social mobility and individualism signaled by modernity. Their status as “Lady” and “Gentleman” is no longer a stable predetermined given, but rather subject to the same flux as other characters. This social flux, in turn, combines with the density of city life, London in this case, to force the mixing of various social ranks. The narrator’s studio becomes a contact zone where old aristocracy in the form of the Monarchs meet the working class cockney Miss Churm, the recently arrived Italian Oronte, and incisively unproductive Jack Hawley. Common to all, however, is their relationship to the narrator, a relationship predicated on another entailment of individualism, namely labor power. As Singer states, “Whatever the reality of material compulsion, they were at liberty to sell their labor on the market, entering into contracts independently and voluntarily” (Singer 31). Within the rise of mature capitalism, these contracts were impersonal, with nonspecific others, such as the ultimately anonymous narrator. This situation is foreign to the Monarchs as evidenced by their awkward negotiations with the narrator, and ultimately revealing itself as the shock of equality to Mr. Monarch and his efforts to secure employment. “There are thousands, as good as yourself, already on the ground” (James 15).
The ground itself becomes compressed in the narrative, through the mention and use of transportation technologies such as the train and omnibus. Moreover, the arrival of Oronte and the voyages of Jack Hawley hint toward the rapidity and relative affordability of travel. These material circumstances provide ground for the constant arrival, stasis, and departure of characters in the narrative. For the purposes of this presentation, I want to morph these themes into a theory of time, focusing first on the Monarchs as representations of a past historical moment.
“But, somehow, with all their perfections I didn’t easily believe in them. After all they were amateurs, and the ruling passion of my life was the detestation of the amateur. Combined with this was another perversity––an innate preference for the represented subject over the real one: the defect of the real one was so apt to be a lack of representation. I liked things that appeared; then one was sure. Whether they were or not was a subordinate and almost always a profitless question” (12).
The Monarchs are professional aristocracy but amateur models of a historical moment that has already passed. As living monuments to that past moment, however, they are real, which is precisely what makes them useless for the narrator-artist. If one envisions the Monarchs as a historical archive, as historical data available in the present, their uselessness takes on another dimension; their literal and figurative bankruptcy can only be undone by their value for representation. Our narrator’s preference for the represented subject, although posited as a perversity, is the inevitability of accessing the past only as a representation. Indeed, he begins to envision them as such from the moment of their arrival. “The defect of the real” is that it raises the “profitless question” of facticity, which is subordinate to the concerns of the present. In other words, the value of a representation of the past is not in its factual faithfulness but rather its ability to serve the present moment. One can then be sure of things that appear precisely because one is sure that they are representations.
The narrator’s moment requires figures for a book and the Monarchs’ realness doesn’t translate into, and in fact hinders, their representability. Mrs. Monarch has no variety, is “insurmountably stiff” and rather pleased with a self-identified facticity, that “she was the real thing.” The narrator-artist’s attempt to contort and reposition cannot repress the ‘real,’ and she ultimately cannot fit adequately within the representation’s frame, always coming out “too tall” (21). As a metaphor for the historical archive, Mrs. Monarch and her stiffness allude to the ultimate incomprehensibility/ unrepresentability of a past ‘real’ and its perpetual bankruptcy if it cannot be molded for present use. Beyond this metaphor, Mrs. Monarch specifically and the Monarchs generally stand in as premodern subjects who have not adapted to the fundamental plasticity required by modernity, a plasticity that is given voice by our narrator.
“I adored variety and range. I cherished human accidents, the illustrative note; I wanted to characterize closely, and the thing in the world I most hated was the danger of being ridden by a type…I might only be a presumptuous young modern searcher, but I held that everything was to be sacrificed sooner than character….It couldn’t be everybody’s––it might end in being nobody’s” (22).
The narrator-artist’s notion of “character” seems to point toward a unique individual “essence” but is rather the plasticity of modern subjects, as exemplified by Miss Churm and Oronte. The former is characterized positively as having an “inexplicable talent for imitation” and negatively as having “no positive stamp” (22). In contradistinction to Mrs. Monarch, Miss Churm does not bear the mark of the ‘real’ and so can “sit for characters that had nothing in common with each other” or her (23). Her point of pride is demonstrated in the narrative by her ability to represent a Russian princess and Artemisia, the love object in an acclaimed novel series (38). The name Artemisia itself is the phonetic equivalent of combining ‘art’ and ‘amnesia’, which in turn doubly signals the necessary plasticity of ‘character’ required in representation specifically, and modernity generally. Even more plastic, however, is Oronte.
His arrival is the kind of “human accident” valued by the narrator, one that bespeaks a heroic dimension to the plasticity of the modern subject. Oronte’s “dumb, dog-like fidelity,” his “innocent impudence” and “manner of a devoted servant” almost instantly make pictures (27). One of these pictures envisions Oronte at St. Peter’s, an instant transport that places his actual journey from Italy in sharp relief. More than sudden changes of location, however, Oronte is able to communicate his desires, acquire employment and perform his duties without language, demonstrating infinitely more plasticity than the Monarchs. Indeed, it is precisely this “uncultivated, instinctive” plasticity of the “bright adventurer” that allows him to represent the novel series’ hero, Rutland Ramsey (27).
As a brief aside, and for my own intellectual interests, Oronte’s migration also becomes an instant “assimilation;” he becomes an Englishman as soon as he dawns the clothes of one. That is to say, he is instantly ‘home.’ Moreover, Miss Churm’s ability to look Italian when called upon seems to negate the necessity of ‘real’ border crossing because the representation of such is equally valuable to the present. From another angle, we could say that Miss Churm and Oronte demonstrate the ‘character’ performance that is citizenship. But, I digress. Let me return to the original metaphor framing this reading. If the Monarchs represent a historical archive rigidly imposing itself as ‘real,’ then Miss Churm and Oronte are the malleable present. Beyond their relative youthfulness, the hero and heroine are a metaphor for the temporal present precisely because they are ‘characters,’ infinitely plastic and representable. Explicating this, however, requires an examination of the narrative’s form.
Two formal qualities will be briefly analyzed here: 1) The narrative is framed as a memory, within which are indicators of the temporal distance but ultimately eluding specificity. 2) Within the narration there are tangential moments, drifts to other spaces that imbed us further in an ambiguous past.
The narrative is a recounted memory whose temporal distance from the narrator’s “actual” moment is impossible to determine. Phrases such as “in those days,” ubiquitous use of the past tense and the lack of dates yield an ambiguous orientation vaguely pointing to an unlocatable past; we can, however, note that the narrator has acquired the contract for the Rutland Ramsey series during the interim (26).
Other narrative clues point also point toward time passing, the most notable of which is the narrator’s trip to Italy. When Oronte arrives, the narrator remarks that he “had not then visited his country’ (26 Italics mine). Although the “then” of his comment establishes Oronte’s arrival as temporally prior, it does not help us gauge the temporal distance in any specific way. Such travel in the premodern period would require a great amount of time but, as has already been mentioned, emergent technologies, themselves rapidly developing, greatly reduced travel time disabling our temporal orientation in the narrative. Moreover, the “then” implicitly points to the “now” the narrator ‘actually’ occupies as he tells the story; however, our inability to locate the “then” with any specificity negates the search for the “now.” Indeed, the narrative flow itself negates the “now.”
When Mr. Monarch first asks his wife to show how “smart” she is, the narrator-artist is immediately “reminded of an incident” in Paris, in which his friend, a dramatist, is approached by an actress who begins to audition for him (8). The narrative tangents for a mere two sentences here but breaks continuity in at least three different ways. Most obviously, we are spatially dislocated from London to Paris. Second, the art form shifts from the illustrative to the dramatic. (One could easily argue that this is in fact a juxtaposition meant to illustrate the former’s performative needs). Thirdly, the moment is a temporal break that places us doubly in the past; that is, within the narrative as memory, we are placed in another memory, all without being able to locate a stable present. [A more explicit example of this is the opening two paragraphs of section II]
Finally, I want to argue that the narrative form––the impossibility of locating a “then” and “now,” and the temporal ruptures within it––combined with the plasticity of Oronte and Miss Churm, points to the absence of an immediate “now.” Rather, we have degrees of the past. The illusion of a present is actually the immediate past that, like Oronte and Miss Churm, is a ‘character’ without essence but infinitely plastic. However, this ‘character’ is only useful, it only ‘works’ literally and figuratively, if it is represented.
