A Revolution of the Screw: Peripheralising Europe

Can the documents of the west, Walter Benjamin's famous ‘documents of civilization’, help us to understand and articulate the peripheralisation, the provincialisation, of the west?¹ If we are at a moment, as Hamid Dabashi has recently put it, at which ‘“Europe” […] has exhausted its epistemic possibilities and has now positively imploded into itself’, can a European literary and cultural tradition shed any light on this implosion, or look to a refigured global scene that emerges from it?²

I will address this question here by attending to a faint echo that can be heard, passing between two of Henry James's later novels, The Ambassadors (1903) and The Golden Bowl (1904), an echo that reaches to our own time, and to the contemporary moment at which we are required to assess, again, the relation between barbarism and civilisation.

This is a glancing reference to Keats's sonnet, but its significance deepens, as Adrian Poole, Bart Eeckhout, and Gert Buelens have noted, when this moment in The Ambassadors finds an echo in a related moment in The Golden Bowl.¹⁰ Keats's sonnet stirs in The Ambassadors at the critical moment of Strether's discovery, and it is at a similarly significant turning point in The Golden Bowl that the sonnet appears again, this time much more forcibly. The Golden Bowl, like The Ambassadors, is concerned, above all, with the relation between America and Europe, and with the means by which an emerging American culture draws on and reconstitutes a European aesthetic, political, and intellectual history. Strether is the figure, in The Ambassadors, for this hinge or fulcrum between two cultural powers – dominance passing from the Old World to the New, as westward the course of empire makes its way. As Adrian Poole has pointed out, Strether's name suggests his predicament, his being stretched between one structure of knowing and the other – a stretching which, as Clare Pettitt has suggested, runs against the opposite experience of tethering which is also carried in Strether's name.¹¹ In The Golden Bowl, the figure for this transfer of cultural power is the unimaginably wealthy art collector Adam Verver, whose name suggests not stretching or tethering but veering (with perhaps a distant echo of Melville's Captain Vere, another veerer).¹² The adultery plot around which the novel turns – Adam Verver and his daughter Maggie are each married to rarefied specimens (the beautiful American Charlotte Stant and the Italian nobleman Prince Amerigo respectively), who, we are led to understand, are having an affair with each other – is orchestrated by Verver through his activities as a collector of European art. Verver purchases Prince Amerigo for his daughter, as a kind of gift, as he purchases Charlotte as a gift for himself. He regards them both as what he calls ‘human acquisitions’, and consistently describes Amerigo as a fine artwork, a rarity of exquisite old European provenance.¹³ ‘You’re round, my boy’, Verver says to Amerigo, as he is preparing to betroth him to Maggie. ‘You’re inveterately round in the detail. It's the sort of thing in you one feels – or at least I do – with one's hand’ (GB 126). Verver weighs Amerigo in his hand like a connoisseur, assessing his aesthetic quality, at one point, as if he were the artefact of the title, the crystal golden bowl. ‘You’re a pure and perfect crystal’, he says to Amerigo, who replies, with a peculiar knowing irony, that ‘if I'm a crystal I'm delighted I am a perfect one, for I believe they sometimes have cracks and flaws – in which case they’re to be had cheap!’ (127).

This turning, like the turns of James's earlier exploration of double-jointed being in The Turn of the Screw, supplies the principle of relation, of attachment, in The Golden Bowl, and in The Ambassadors. It determines Strether's relations with Madame de Vionnet and Chad on the one hand, and with Mrs Newsome on the other. It is there in every bodily attitude, every angle of incidence, in The Golden Bowl. It is palpable at the close of the narrative, as Adam Verver prepares to leave London and his beloved daughter in order to return to American City with Charlotte, thus breaking up her affair with Amerigo. In the closing moments of the novel, Adam Verver and Maggie step out of the ‘great eastward drawing-room’ (GB 585) of Maggie's house onto the balcony overlooking the street – leaving Amerigo and Charlotte to share a silent farewell in the great, golden room that has already begun to grow dark. Together father and daughter look west, over the street, and past that towards the Atlantic, and towards the America to which Verver is about to return. But then they ‘turned from the view of the street; they leaned together against the balcony rail, with the room largely in sight from where they stood, but with the Prince and Mrs Verver out of range’ (592). Amerigo and Charlotte, art objects both, commodities bought up by the Verver wealth, sit together in the eastward gloom, in whatever intimacy they have shared throughout, which the narrative has not been able to penetrate and which runs against the current of American capital, the rapid current which carries European art to American City. The interval between the two couples at this close is warped by the turbulence of opposing histories and epistemologies and economies, opposing ways of knowing that are moving under the skin of the polished air, so one can feel the turning, the shifting of the scene, as father and daughter look into the darkening room in which lover and lover sit like undiscovered planets, out of range, beyond our ken.

James's precise, delicate attention to the modulations of erotic and filial attachment is laid upon this shifting ground, on the turn of the intellectual plane that Verver finds embalmed in Keats's sonnet. His psychological complexity is powered by it; but while James's later prose tends to be absorbed in these domestic plots, in the rarefied and intensely anatomised relations between father and daughter, between husband and wife, between lover and lover, it is my suggestion here that the turning that is performed in these novels serves a powerful political function, one that is keenly attuned to the demand facing us today, that we fashion a critical response to our own shifting epistemological and geopolitical planes. Jonathan Arac suggests in a 2012 essay that a ‘postcolonial James’ might emerge from a close attention to Verver's reading of Keats. ‘As Adam Verver bears the spoils of culture to American City’, Arac writes, ‘The Golden Bowl modernizes the Roman Westward course of Empire, a trope deeply set in Western culture at large and in American culture particularly’.¹⁵ James's novel, for Arac, offers a critique of ‘the westering of culture that follows the westering of Empire’, an extension of the process which ‘brings Homer to England, via Chapman’ – and to trace this critique would be to find in James a version of Edward Said's analysis of the politics of aesthetic form.¹⁶ Said, Arac argues, is centrally concerned with the fact that our aesthetic artefacts are products of ‘European political domination’, and so European art is ‘compromised by the imbalance of power from which it arose’.¹⁷ The ‘consonance’¹⁸ that Arac finds between Said and James derives from his perception that both writers attend to the political power structures that give rise to cultural products, while at the same time investing in the capacity of those products – the art works that proliferate in James's novels, as well as the novels themselves – to exceed their own conditions of possibility. A Saidian James, for Arac, is one who exposes the colonial conditions that give rise to European and American culture, while performing a critique of those conditions, one which is not itself determined by them.

This may be so; but if James is to cast any light on the politics of European culture today – or on the ‘peripheral Europes’ to which this special issue is dedicated – then we need to see past the horizon of Said's orientalism. The westward course of Empire that shaped twentieth-century thinking about colonialism, postcolonialism and decolonisation has stalled, in the twenty-first century, with the decline of American hegemony, and the shifting of the geopolitical tectonic plates apparent in the growth of Chinese political and economic power, and latterly in the invasion of Ukraine by Putin's Russia. Dabashi's assertion that Europe has ‘exhausted its epistemological possibilities’ is related to these shifts – and to the waning of the ‘westering’ logic that saw the growth of a global western hegemony as inevitable. The historical momentum, after World War II, towards European integration – towards ‘ever closer union’ – has faltered in the current century, as the political will towards globalisation was weakened by 9/11 and its aftermath, and the economic base of the neoliberal project was weakened by the crash of 2008. The return, across Europe and the west, of populist nationalisms that reject the politics of globalisation (seen perhaps most clearly in Donald Trump's ‘America First’ rhetoric) is a symptom of this failure, as is the UK vote, in 2016, to leave the European Union – a secession whose consequences are still playing out today.

It is in this context that we are required to rethink the relation between Europe and its peripheries, and to undertake what Dipesh Chakrabarty has influentially called the ‘provincializing’ of Europe. As Cemil Aydin has suggested, in his 2007 book The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia, to understand the meaning of ‘Europe’ today requires us to break the ties that attached Europe to the idea of ‘the west’, and the west to the concept of modernity more generally. The difficulty, for Aydin, is how to ‘refashion Eurocentric modernity’, how to undo the binding in the project of European modernity between colonial violence and philosophical enlightenment, when so many of our conceptual resources for carrying out that work are a legacy of European modernity itself.¹⁹ ‘Added to the myth of the homogeneity of Western civilization’, he writes, ‘was the permanent association of the West with both modernity and the international order itself’ – an ‘assumption’ of the constitutive relations between Europe, the west, and modernity, that is ‘a legacy of the nineteenth-century ideology of western supremacy’.²⁰ Chakrabarty's commitment to the provincialising of Europe – the rediscovery that Europe is made of up of local parts and histories that are not affiliated to or consistent with the idea of an overarching Europe (itself a stand-in for western modernity) – is part of this attempt to resee the continent, in the context of larger shifts in the homogeneity and coherence of the west. The process of provincialising Europe, Chakrabarty writes in 2008, enables us to free ourselves from the ‘founding “myth”’ of Europe, the Europe that the history of colonialism ‘assumed’ into existence, and that was then projected as the ‘original home of the modern’.²¹ ‘To “provincialize” Europe’, he writes, ‘was precisely to find out how and in what sense European ideas that were universal were also, at one and the same time, drawn from very particular intellectual and historical traditions that could not claim any universal validity’.²² Chakrabarty wants to recover ‘parochial’ and particular Europes from the myth of a homogeneous and universalising ‘west’; similarly, Hamid Dabashi sets out to reassess the relation between a mythical Europe and its various others – what he calls Europe's ‘shadows’. ‘To me, today’, Dabashi writes in 2019, ‘Europe, and a fortiori the West, is not a reality sui generis. It is a delusional fantasy, a false consciousness, at the full service of an imperial hegemony. The object is not to run away from it. The object is to dismantle and overcome it.’²³

To approach the peripheral in Europe today is to take part in this discussion, this reassessing of the relation between the overarching concept of Europe and of the west, and the specific local instantiations which occur within and outside the realms of that concept. One cannot begin to understand the phenomenon of Brexit – a significant event in the peripheralising of Europe – without reference to this discussion. The legitimacy of the European Union, Dabashi argues, was ‘always contested’ by those who were represented as peripheral partners – ‘from Greece to Spain and Portugal’ – because it was a ‘forced’, manufactured entity designed ‘economically to counterbalance the United States’.²⁴ From this perspective, Brexit serves a useful function in dismantling the concept of European integration, even if it is driven by hateful and reactionary forces. ‘With their xenophobic Brexit’, Dabashi writes, ‘the British delivered the very idea of [the EU] a coup de grâce’.²⁵ One has only to consider the manifest reluctance with which Jeremy Corbyn (leader of the British Labour Party from 2015 to 2020) campaigned for Remain in 2016 – a reluctance that was in keeping with his lifelong Euroscepticism – to see how a strand of the British left resented the European Union as an apparatus of imperialism. But at the same time, how can one welcome a British secession from a political union that, however bound up it is in the globalisation of capital, also enshrines the possibility of a form of community that transcends the boundaries of the nation-state, and that is the closest we have to a guardian of international human rights? How can one welcome it when it is undertaken explicitly to obstruct the ‘free movement of people’ across national borders? How can one welcome it when it is so clearly part of a reactionary lurch to the far right in Europe that endorses every imaginable bigotry and hatred? Dabashi asks himself the rhetorical question, ‘What would the world do without Europe?’, in order to answer that it ‘will reinvent itself’²⁶ (at the risk, of course, that the authors of such reinvention might be the likes of Vladimir Putin, or Xi Jinping, or Donald Trump). It is a mark of the difficulty that Brexit poses to thinkers of the left, though, that many do not share Dabashi's sense that the future of Europe lies outside the borders of the European Union. Ali Smith, for example, in her recent Seasonal Quartet, suggests that it is the European Union itself that is the vehicle for such reinvention. Smith's four novels, Autumn, Winter, Spring, Summer, are a collective act of mourning for the union to which Brexit has delivered a coup de grâce.²⁷ Drawing on a literary and cultural tradition that runs from Ovid to Shakespeare to Dickens to Woolf and Joyce, Smith's quartet seeks to salvage a European tradition – and the products of European cultural history – in order to look to a future that sees the possibility of a European collective preserved, while divested of its will to power.

The question, then, that both Smith and Dabashi pose, in different ways, is how and whether we should draw on a cultural archive that has been formed by the history of ‘Europe’, in order to look past the current crisis in European and western democracy. Is it possible to employ the resources of a philosophical tradition, a lyric tradition, a literary tradition, to develop a kind of thinking that can anatomise the crisis that those traditions in part brought about? This is a pressing question for us now; it is the question, too, that provokes Henry James, when he looks through Keats to Chapman, and through Chapman to Homer's western isles. It is the genius of Keats's sonnet, and of Keats's sonnet as James reanimates it, that it allows us to see the terms in which the periphery inhabits the centre, and the centre the periphery. When Cortés's men look at each other with a wild surmise, their wonder arises from their sudden awareness that what for one person is periphery is for another heartland. To come to the Pacific coast, to travel to the edge of the known, is to discover that the world-making, paradigm-building forces that arrange the globe in terms of east and west, near and far, are contingent, and subject to sudden and profound reordering, as these paradigms give way in the face of revelation. The sight of the Pacific coast reshapes the planet, as the sailing of an obscure planet into our ken reshapes the solar system. James's allusions to Keats, in The Ambassadors and in The Golden Bowl, draw on the energy of this revelation, this discovery of a new relation between centre and periphery, just as the historical passage from Europe to the US as the dominant global power is under way. The faint Keatsian echo that we can discern between James's two novels is part of the effect – the sense that the kind of knowing that James is reaching for is achieved not by orienting oneself, by placing oneself securely in one's own ground, but through the realisation that the very possibility of orientation (and occidentation) involves a continual estrangement from that ground, a discovery of oneself not here but elsewhere. Strether's moment of realisation is achieved more fully when it comes into collision with Verver's – as both moments draw their power from their summoning of other displacements: James displaced into Keats; west displaced into east; old displaced into new; Homer displaced into Chapman; Greek displaced into English.

James's thinking about the relation between America and Europe at the turn of the twentieth century is conducted through this capacity to unsettle the ground of knowledge, to reproduce the turning – the veering, the stretching, the displacement – that knowing is (a capacity that is Maisie's special gift in What Maisie Knew). His work, for that reason, stands as a testament to the limits of a historical conception both of America and Europe, as the boundaries of the west shift under the pressure of a specific moment in the globalisation of capital. But, at the same time, the turning that James's work performs does not remain bound to its own historical moment, but comes into collision, too, with the moment of reading, with the paradigms of knowing within which a work of literature enters the world afresh, with each new ‘turning of the page of the book of life’.²⁸ To read James now is to read him at a time when, for Dabashi, the ‘faultiness’ of Europe, as ‘the quintessential condition of coloniality’ has been exposed: ‘all its sciences’, he writes, ‘have now ended in the nuclear calamity that hovers over all of us on this earth, all its moral philosophy ended in and at the Holocaust, all its glorious literary masterpieces ended in Donald Trump's tweets’.²⁹ It is to read him at a time when the realignment of Europe and its peripheries has required us to question the legitimacy of the cultural products of Europe and the west – and to ask how western centres of knowledge production, constituted, as Priyamvada Gopal has recently put it, ‘in the crucible of empire’, can be the vehicle of that inquiry.³⁰ James's novels seen in this light – his elaborate, filigreed syntactical constructions – are exemplary of the ‘literary masterpieces’ that lead, inexorably, to the 280-character utterances with which Trump has befouled the discursive environment. It is in this context, in this scene of reading, that James's aesthetics of turning – his capacity to examine and to enact the cultural, political, and aesthetic conditions of knowing – bears a political weight. In placing his actors on the turning ground of a form of knowing that is always outside itself, always situated at the dissolving threshold where new thinking might swim, unbidden, into our ken, James makes of his novels a kind of apparatus for testing the possibility of knowing itself. The artefacts of a cultural heritage that James collects and preserves in his work – as Verver preserves his spoils in American City – are always mobile, always unsettled, always prepared to come into new conjunctions with a kind of knowledge that has not yet been preserved, or assimilated.

One of the key forms that this kind of knowing takes in The Ambassadors, and that I offer here by way of a conclusion, is the experience of misrecognition. James's novel is held together by a series of failures of understanding, which occur at each weight-bearing passage in the narrative, and which gather around Strether's repeated failure to recognise a Europeanised Chad, to marshal the conceptual capacity to decode him, despite having known him since he was a child. The first of these moments comes when Strether is walking in Paris, shortly after his arrival in Europe, and he finds himself standing outside Chad's apartment in the Boulevard Malesherbes, looking up at the balcony. As he looks, thinking of Chad, so a lithe figure appears on the balcony, as if in response to his thoughts. ‘A young man’, the narrator says, ‘had come out and looked about him, had lighted a cigarette and tossed the match over, and then, resting on the rail, had given himself up to watching the life below while he smoked’ (TA 89). This scene on the balcony gains some of its arresting power from its precognition of the scene in The Golden Bowl, in which Adam and Maggie lean on their balcony rail, looking into the room in which their spouses are hidden from view. But it also sets up a dynamic of mutual observation that repeats throughout the novel, gaining weight and colour as it does so. Looking down, while Strether looks up, the man sees that Strether is watching him: ‘Strether soon felt himself noticed. The young man began to look at him as in acknowledgement of his being himself in observation’ (89). In this stretched moment, the identity of both men enters into a peculiar kind of suspension. Is the young man on the balcony Chad? In looking down at Strether is Chad recognising his mother's American ambassador, here to take him away, to take him home? Strether thinks that he might be. He ‘wondered at first’, the narrator says, if the man on the balcony ‘were perhaps Chad altered, and then saw that this was asking too much of alteration […] Strether had conceived of Chad as patched, but not beyond recognition’ (89).

‘Foreign to its familiarities’ Hamid Dabashi writes in Europe and its Shadows, ‘a stranger at home, I stand in front of Europe and ask Europe please to introduce itself’.³¹ The strangeness of Europe to itself, and to those who stand before it, is a legacy of its colonial history, and a necessary effect of its peripheralisation, the failure of the always spurious forms that made of Europe something homogeneous, and hegemonic. The products of its culture, the literary masterpieces that Dabashi sees as mere precursors to Trump's tweets, serve now not as vessels of knowledge, not as containers of a European heritage or tradition, but as witnesses to the intervals in knowing that are the conditions for the imagining of political community. Madame de Vionnet remarks, at the close of The Ambassadors, on the loss of nationality that has befallen Strether, as a result of his encounter with herself, with Chad, and with Europe. ‘Where’, she asks, ‘is your “home” moreover now – what has become of it?’ (TA 438). What has become, in The Ambassadors, of the sense that your country might be the same as mine, that we might belong, as we look at each other over the wavering gulf that separates us, to a shared community? If James's novel is an extended answer to this question, it is one that suggests both that such community, such mutual recognition, is always in part a fiction, and that it is the purpose of art – its vocation – to occupy the realm that opens when mutual recognition fails, and we feel the weightless turning of a whole intellectual plane.