There is a moment in the 2001 film "Zoolander" when fashion mogul Jacobim Mugatu, in complete bewilderment at how male model Derek Zoolander can be ceThere is a moment in the 2001 film "Zoolander" when fashion mogul Jacobim Mugatu, in complete bewilderment at how male model Derek Zoolander can be celebrated for his many "looks," says, "Magnum? Blue Steel? They're the SAME LOOK! I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!"
Such was my response in my attempt to read "The Ambassadors", given its reputation and placement as one of the great novels of the 20th century.
A bit of context before I'm written off as a cretin without the refined sensibilities needed to appreciate "The Master."
First, this isn't my first go around with James. I read both "Turn of the Screw" and "The Spoils of Poynton." The former I felt was slightly disappointing; the latter I was fairly neutral on.
Second, I'm a Ph.D.-holding English professor who enjoys fiction that others would find prolix. "Middlemarch" is my favorite novel of all time. I find Austen endlessly engaging. Thomas Hardy is my jam. In fact, I organized my entire first trip to England around making pilgrimages to sites associated with these authors.
Having said that, I could not finish "The Ambassadors." I got halfway through, and I started becoming so frustrated and angry with the writing, the characters, and the entire aesthetic of the novel that I actually started to dread the time I set aside for pleasure reading because I knew the muck of "The Ambassadors" was waiting for me to wade through. When I realized that I would rather not read at all than continue with the novel, I tapped out--not something I ever do. The "good student" in me won't allow me to quit books. God help me, I actually trudged my way through the entirety of "The Fountainhead" (not altogether by choice, but still).
While acknowledging that such judgments are subjective, here's some of what made "The Ambassadors" literally unreadable for me, even when similar books--including others of James--hadn't had that effect on me.
First, the alleged "realism" James is famous for is, at least in this book, not real at all. James is writing between the era of realism seen in Victorian fiction (let's call this "object" realism, in which external situations are portrayed realistically) and modern realism (psychological realism that attempts to portray the inner workings of individual consciousness in a realistic way). So, it's not surprising that the novel reads like some sort of transitional moment between the two; but the result--at least for me--is unpleasant—bordering on grotesque. It does neither version of realism very well, and in that failure, its contrived nature is amplified. Perhaps the novel is important from an academic setting precisely because it captures this transition in narrative style, but that doesn't mean it works as fiction itself. The analogy that comes to mind is a fossil of one of those transitional creatures in the evolutionary tree that illustrate a moment in biological history when things were changing (e.g. feathered dinosaurs). But often, precisely because of this odd mixture of qualities, the actual organisms themselves died out. "The Ambassadors" is potentially a good discussion piece about the evolution of the novel, but as a standalone work of fiction, it's stillborn.
For example, the conversations the characters engage in are utterly preposterous--I cannot imagine anyone speaking as the characters in the novel do. To the extent the characters are allowed to speak for themselves by the narrator, the result is cutesy cleverness rather than anything that rings even slightly true to lived experience. No amount of willing suspension of disbelief made the interactions among the characters seem authentic. Every time Strether is speaking with Maria Gostrey, Chad, or Madame de Vionnet, I feel I'm reading dialog written by a pretentious MFA student attempting to be artful. I have an easier time believing the historical Richard III spoke in iambic pentameter than that any actual human beings spoke to each other in the contrived, pseudo-clever way of James’s characters.
Of course, the dialog is meant to be simply the "tip of the iceberg" of the underlying machinations of the characters, but again, the portrayal of what is going on inside the characters (almost exclusively Strether) is presented in such a contrived fashion that I felt unable to muster even a smidgen of empathy for any of the characters. And when I say "empathy", I don't mean that I have to like them. I just have to believe in them enough to see things as they see them. James, to my eyes, is far too busy calling attention to the language itself (which, to add to the issue, is not particularly memorable or engaging) to bother offering the reader any actual connection with the characters.
And on the issue of character, if there is a more annoyingly oh-so-clever character in literature than Maria Gostrey, I am unfamiliar with them. Again, simply being an annoying character is not a problem--literature is filled with them. It's not that the character herself is annoying within the world of the novel, but the presentation of her to the reader (at least this reader) is so trite and contrived as to be maddening. This is amplified by the fact that (again, to my eyes), she seems to be intended by her creator to be this utterly charming, mysterious, charismatic figure. Yet, when I spotted the name "Gostrey" on the page, I thought to myself, "God, not her again!" It’s possible that Madame de Vionnet would give her a run for her money—there were signs of it when she was introduced. But it wasn’t long after she appeared on the stage that I decided enough was enough.
Some fault James in general and this novel in particular for a lack of plot. Supposedly, the original idea for the novel was intended to be a short story. Stretching out a rather nothing plot to 500 pages does present a risk. And since putting the book down, I read an anecdote about it claiming that long after being in print, it was discovered by some careful reader that two of the chapters had been published out of order without anyone having noticed before. Whether true or not, it’s easy to believe given the wispiness of the plot and the meandering of the narrative.
But to me, it's not that. Lots of great works of literature, particularly novels, can mine small nuances and seemingly inconsequential events for deep insights. Those who think Jane Austen novels are nothing more than conversations over tea with the vicar are missing the fact that Austen *can* actually take a simple, everyday series of events, capture them realistically, *and* find depth.
So it wasn't the thinness of the plot--I could imagine the same characters and events being portrayed to great artistic effect. But there is a quality that I could only finally describe as "inhuman" in James's treatment of the story. I didn’t get the sense that James himself cared about his characters. They came across like constructs meant to display something like cleverness, and therefore to show the author’s own cleverness. And it’s this perceived lack of interest or care in the characters or his readers that ultimately gave me the sense that the I was keeping company with a bona fide misanthrope. One might imagine that James didn’t have the emotional wherewithal or artistic ability to create a narrative that had some humanness in it, but that hardly seems likely. If nothing else, James seems to be someone capable of producing what he wants on the page. If we assume this, the only conclusion is that “The Ambassadors� represents what James thought was a proper ethical and aesthetic view for the novel. And if so, he’s not someone in whose company I wish to be any longer.
I hadn’t read much *about* “The Ambassadors� until after having put it down, but on the off chance that I might learn that the novel redeemed itself in the second half, I did a bit of reading and saw that there was no reason to think the novel would change for me in the second half. Indeed, it sounds as if the characteristics I loathed only become more pronounced.
On the plus side, I discovered that I wasn’t quite as alone as I might have feared when it comes to people who take literature seriously and who actively dislike the novel. F.R. Leavis, the eminent historian and critic of the genre of the novel said the following:
“[The Ambassadors] produced an effect of disproportionate ‘doing’—of a technique the subtleties and elaborations of which are not sufficiently controlled by a feeling for value and significance in living.�
When it comes to “The Ambassadors,� I’m with him.
As a coda, I would strongly suggest not giving up on the James family. Henry’s brother, the philosopher/psychologist William James, can actually be read with great joy. Oddly enough, he’s a much finer wordsmith than his novelist brother, and even a paragraph or two from “The Varieties of Religious Experience� have (to my eyes) much more insight into the human condition and of true lived experience than the entirety of what his brother can scrape out in the two and a half books of his I’ve read. ...more
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