Les Liaisons Métaphysiques

This article moves from Gilles Deleuze’s impressive book about Leibniz, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1988), to explore Henry James’s fiction as an experiment in Baroque imagination. In Deleuze’s reading, the fold is theorized as the central concept of Leibniz’s thought. Deleuze maintains, via Leibniz, that monads are the minimal ontological units that reality is made of, each of them infinitely producing and reproducing its inner structure in the construction of the universe. Any traditional (especially Cartesian) difference between mind and body, or between material and immaterial, makes no longer sense: the progressive unfolding of the monad generates infinitely recombining worlds, which differ in their degree of intensity rather than in their ontological essence. My hypothesis is that Henry James’s work can be fruitfully read as a mechanism – or a machine – that functions as Leibniz’s enfolding and refolding monads. James’s fiction, thus, supplies the American epistemological and aesthetic tradition with the fractal geometries of Baroque imagination that it originally lacks. Constantly engaging with European culture, James has perceived more than other authors this fundamental lack at the origins of the American subject and of the American self. The latter is generated out a metaphysics of presence that, over the centuries, has simply changed its attributes, shifting from Puritan to Enlightenment and then to Transcendentalist presence. The sense of lack deriving from the perception that, from the seventeenth century on, the world was increasingly becoming elliptic and decentered – in philosophical as well as in geopolitical terms – is absent in the formation of the American self. This article investigates Henry James’s oeuvre as a crucial stage in the American literature and culture that – before and even more effectively than postmodern works – has tried to compensate for the “lack of lack” inherent in the American self. James, I argue, has provided different models of Baroque imagination that have reshaped the American self as finally aware of that subject’s off-centeredness that was so crucial to a specific philosophical and artistic tradition in Europe. Among the many James’s works that oppose a fragmented and enfolding genesis of the subject to the legacy of the mainstream American individualism, this article will focus on The Awkward Age (1899) as the novel that, moving from an apparently conventional quasi-dramatic form, turns out as an experiment in Baroque imagination. Each chapter of the novel, in fact, functions as a monad as Leibniz and Deleuze have theorized it. As a closed universe through which other universes – all of them possible, coextensive and simultaneous – can merely be fantasized or conjectured, each chapter/monad foregrounds the tragic finitude and, at the same time, the paradoxical incompleteness of the character it features. All characters, in fact, experience their own universe as progressively unfolding from a mere, vague perception of the self, of the outer reality, and of other characters. The novel, thus, stages the ontological precariousness of its subjects. The latter, in fact, cannot have any full grasp of the whole world they inhabit since, as monads, they can experience only one of its many possible and infinitely unfolding manifestations

Illusion · Impossibility · Individualism · Metaphysics · Repetition (rhetorical device) · Subject (documents) · Subjectivity · Temporality · Marxism and Critical Theory · Short Stories in Global Literature · Thomas Hardy Literature Studies

• Leibniz

  Open Access•Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Patrick Riley et al.•Leibniz•1996

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• Bringing Nanda forward, or acting your age in The Awkward Age

  Open Access•Pamela Thurschwell•Critical Quarterly•2016

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• Reproducing Women in The Awkward Age

  Susan L Mizruchi•Representations•1992

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• The Verbal Age

  Tzvetan Todorov, Patricia Martin Gibby•Critical Inquiry•1977

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