Although they represent a small proportion of the vast range of Jamesian criticism, some writers do examine James’s language in detail, concentrating on the characteristics of the late style. Levin (1986), for example, makes some detailed observations on James’s syntax and its application in his introduction to The Ambassadors:
[s]entences can be prolonged but seldom periodic, with relatively few subordinate clauses and a good many parentheses. Word order is rhythmically varied by inversions and expletives. Formality in structure is relieved by a plasticity in style, which searches not so much for the mot juste as for the gradual approximation, the continuous modification, the qualifying nuance. Since the work was dictated, it sounds vocal (note the contractions),20 though with James's highly literary voice. (Levin, 1986, pp.
27-28).
It is unclear what comparator Levin is using in claiming that there are ‘relatively few subordinate clauses’; I count the actual frequency of subordinate clauses in WS and GB in Chapter 5 as part of a wider measure of syntactic complexity (see section 5.2.2).
Springer, also commenting on The Ambassadors, points out the variability of James’s late style. She notes that at the end of the book the sentences are very short, equating sentences ‘full of breaks, of semiotic music, of qualifications’ (Springer, 1993, p. 278) with strong emotion. This accords with my association of short, simple sentences and strong emotion, described in section 6.5.1.4. Springer praises James’s role as ‘a developing linguistic revolutionary’ whose language has an ‘expansive strangeness’ (Springer, 1993, p. 278) which has its purpose in showing the depth of the mind of the focalizer.
Menikoff’s 1971 paper exemplifies a detailed focus on a particular aspect of James’s prose. He associates James’s late style with ‘the attempt to simulate the process of the mind, the manner in which an individual apprehends or perceives an idea - and to engage the reader in that process’ (Menikoff, 1971, p. 436). This is similar to James’s own explanations of his goals, and of commentators such as Blackmur, described in section 3.1, although with more emphasis on the role of the reader. Menikoff explores the idea of the representation of mental processes by looking at James’s use of the third person singular pronoun, for example James’s use of ‘she’ in his story ‘Julia Bride’, which starts with that word without any further introduction to the focalizer. Although there is an implied narrator, Menikoff points out that we soon feel that we are seeing through ‘her’ eyes, so that the method is very close to the first person narrative which James rejects. He notes that ‘she’ is
20 However, Virginia Llwewellyn Smith points out in her Notes on the Text to GB that many of the
negative contractions were introduced when James revised GB for the New York edition, and so were a reaction to reading rather than a result of dictation (Llewellyn Smith, 2009, p. xxxiii).
often combined with verbs of mental action, and they are often used as a conditional so that the reader is drawn into ‘her’ thought process.
Cross also looks in some detail at James’s language, having first noted, once more, the difficulty it causes readers as they share feelings of uneasiness and disorientation with his characters. She locates the problem specifically in his sentences, with ‘their constant flicker and spill of meaning’ (Cross, 1993, p. 1) and agrees that some of the features of his style may be due to his habit of dictating his work. She emphasises the radicalism and innovation of James’s prose:
James's is a syntax that takes grammar to the limit and outplays its codes; it is radical in that it usurps word order and complacencies of grammar, revolutionising the way meaning could be disseminated over a text. (Cross, 1993, p. 2)
Cross notices a difference in style between James’s early and late work, though without giving quantified data for her analysis. She discusses the frequent use of compound sentences in his early work, and uses the word ‘doubling’ to describe sentences where a proposition is expanded or contradicted in second and subsequent main clauses. This shifts the focus, Cross explains, from the object(s) described to a number of contrasting meanings they may carry. On the subject of the late style, Cross uses the early sentences of The Ambassadors as an example and notes how James uses long clausal and phrasal constructions for single grammatical functions within the sentence. While compound sentences are a feature of the earlier work, later in his career she suggests that the parallels are expanded but also varied so that the symmetry is broken. A further characteristic which makes for difficulties in interpretation is the way that the meaning of a sentence may be carried not by the main clause but by a dependent clause, such as in the example below:
His "peak in Darien" was the sudden hour that had transformed his life, the 1)
hour of his perceiving with a mute inward gasp akin to the low moan of apprehensive passion that a world was left him to conquer and that he might conquer it if he tried. (James, 2000 [Original work published 1904], p. 82)
This sentence of Adam Verver’s free indirect thought only comes to the point in the two conjoined dependent clauses which are direct objects of the verb ‘perceiving’, from which they are separated by 13 words. Cross particularly emphasises the way that James’s prose remains within the rules of grammar and uses syntax to gain his effects:
If James takes grammar to the limit by relaxing its barriers, expanding its rules of syntax in lexical selections and patterns that are extravagantly marginal [...] none the less, it is important to add, James still relies on the logic of grammar to carry his sentences through (Cross’s italics) (Cross, 1993, p. 23).
Although the grammar is technically correct, difficulty is also sometimes created by vague reference, and words which build up special meanings, such as the word ‘wonderful’ in The Ambassadors. This forces the reader to consider the paragraph as a whole, rather than the individual sentence they are reading, in order to work out to whom personal pronouns are referring. The multiplicity of references using abstract nouns adds to the effect, resulting finally in a text which Cross considers ‘baroque’ (Cross, 1993, p. 30).