Henry James et autres: Bibliography, Otherness, and "the great name of Balzac"

Abstract

Abstract:This article tracks James's imaginative relation to Honoré de Balzac from the scenes of childhood encounter with Balzacian Paris in A Small Boy and Others (1913) to the five critical essays on Balzac that James published between 1875 and 1913, focusing on his attention to elements of bibliography and textual history and to the apprehensions of otherness they produce. James's sustained engagement with the bibliographical condition of Balzac's work models his lifelong concern with the activity of discrimination. It also invites us to discriminate, as readers of James, between modes of otherness: to register not just the otherness of alterity but an otherness of the additional—the distinctive mode of otherness, profoundly characteristic of his critical and autobiographical writings, that is indicated by the phrase "and others."