The American and “Le Roman policier”

In Henry James’s third novel The American one matter of critical discussion has revolved around the novel’s problematic genre. Is the text a melodrama or a Gothic romance, as Chiyo Yoshi notes?[1] Is it an example of the realism that flourished toward the end of the nineteenth century in novels of writers like Howells and Twain, a realism sometimes expressed as comedy of manners? Might the novel be a discourse on French politics?[2] Or is it an example of the French nineteenth-century “intrusion plot,” as exemplified in Émile Augier’s plays?[3] And it may even enclose a reverse immigrant narrative, as Donald Weber claims.[4] A final supposition involves the detective novel genre: did James insert (and then abandon) an early model of the detective genre in a kind of novelistic pluralism, a sort of Bakhtinian heteroglossia, a practice that informed later novels?

Even in James’s earliest texts he forced readers to become involved with his discourse, an involvement that occasionally resulted in frustration on the part of some readers. We begin one narrative only to find our expectations thwarted, our desires interrupted, as a second or even a third narrative replaces the first. His texts’ fluidity challenges readers to make sense of a number of possible plots, perhaps allowing them in a sense to create their own narrative: readers inclined to romance find in The American a romantic love affair; those with a political bent find French politics intertwined with that romance; readers seeking humor find the previously-noted comedy of manners; and those who enjoy intrigue find a discourse of detection, either theirs or Newman’s or the narrator’s.

Early reviewers expressed dissatisfaction with the novel’s formal generic elements,[5] a dissatisfaction expressed in terms of plot resolution. James himself claimed The American was a romance. In the preface to the New York Edition, he states that as he began composing the novel it “unfurled, with the best conscience in the world, the emblazoned flag of romance” (4), and he later refers to The American as “Arch-romance” (4). Other reviewers did note its elements of comedy or comedy of manners,[6] but none have noted its use of the detective genre.

It was not unknown for mid-nineteenth-century writers to enclose a detective narrative within their larger canvasses. Stendahl, for example, embeds a detective subtext within his Italian Chronicles. Franc Schuerewegen discusses the generic complexity of the Italian Chronicles, noting that the reader becomes a participant who must sort out these various narratives. He suggests that the relationship between the detective narrative and the chronicles themselves is a complex one:

There is drafted in the Stendahlian collection a genre in which the chronicles do not let

themselves be confined, but which they overwhelm. Foreshadowing the

detective genre in order to deconstruct it, they [the chronicles] resist integrating

themselves with a structure from which they are not yet far removed. . . . (215)

The Italian Chronicles themselves vacillate indecisively between genres, as does The American. Pierre Walker has already taught us how useful it can be to read James through a French cultural lens, emphasizing the need to broaden this reading from just French canonical texts to the wider context of French popular culture: “That the texts are immersed in French culture implies that their reading should be too (since how can one separate a text from the reading of it?” (xii). In this case it proves fruitful to read James against French detective fiction. Here it is the generic structure of the stereotypical detective plot that enters into our reading of The American, particularly in its final section.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, both in France and in America, detective novels represented an emerging genre. The French detective novel resulted from historical events combined with generic narrative forms already present in the years from 1820 to 1850. Gothic romances and serial novels, printed in the French popular journals of the day (including the widely circulated Le Petit Journal, Le Siècle, and Le Journal de Débats), already involved hermeneutic codes which assumed posing a question, finding its solution, and the slowness, retardation of reaching that solution. The serial, extremely popular in France with the reading public (Diébolt 8), was based at this time on actual events. Crime was a major public concern at the beginning of the nineteenth century in Paris, and the epoch produced a blossoming of memoirs from highly-placed police officials. In 1829, for example, ex-police chief Fromart wrote a memoir detailing his astonishing career. Popular serials celebrated traitors and assassins, and crime was a major pre-occupation for social investigators and statisticians. Balzac, Stendahl, Hugo, Sue, Dumas (all of whom James had read) took one or the other of these criminal narratives as models for their own fictional texts (Vareille 24). The detective genre, nourished by fact and history, had its beginnings.

Concomitantly the detective genre emerged in American fiction. James Fennimoire Cooper’s frontier hero/detective presents one model for Christopher Newman. According to French critic Jean-Claude Vareille, the detective figure in early novels descends from Cooper’s trappers and pioneers of the American forest, likely generic models for Newman with his Western brashness and his own frontier codes of behavior. Just as Cooper’s trappers decipher tracks and “read” them, so detectives make deductions based on clues. “The adventure novels of James Fennimore Cooper are the origin of another theme essential to the [detective]

genre: that of the chase and tracking” (Vareille 27). Vareille claims that the detective descends from the trapper on one hand and the revenger of popular French serials on the other. By the 1870s, during the decade James wrote The American, the detective story had replaced the Western in New York dime novels as the most popular genre, just as Newman in James’s text moves from being a stereotypical Western hero to the investigator of the Bellegarde family’s darkest secrets.

The mid-nineteenth-century detective genre, therefore, results from a combination of popular French serials and American frontier fiction.[7] What, then, does James do with such a hybrid genre? How does he transpose these diverse elements into a new key? What aspects of the early detective genre can readers/detectives find in The American?

Signs that The American will enclose a detective narrative emerge early in the text. When Mrs. Tristram introduces Newman to the French noblewoman Claire de Cintré, she announces, “ ‘I want Mr. Newman to know you,’ “ (49). (Might the novel have been better titled “What Newman Knew”?) But knowing Claire, as it turns out, represents a difficult task of detection. Newman must first know her family, which includes knowing/deciphering her family’s ancient and shadowy past. Newman’s knowing necessitates the realization that language and action are entirely separate in the Bellegardes’ world: the signifier does not represent the signified. Family members are on one level “beautiful guards” of the purity of an ancient inherited language entirely removed from reality. The Marquis, for example, refuses to be committed to action because of his speech-acts. His verbal promise not to interfere with Newman’s courtship of his sister Claire does not commit him, in his own linguistic codes, to honor their marriage contract.

James thus positions Newman as a seeker of knowledge in a world of mysterious discourse and also as a detective. His behavior on his European tour, which he undertakes just after meeting Claire, is characterized by proto-detective behavior, as he takes cryptic notes in his various guidebooks. He “reads” these cultural artifacts in similar fashion to Cooper’s woodsmen reading footprints in the forest. Vareille notes, “For the idea that these footprints [in Cooper’s novels] should be deciphered to read like an alphabet or a book is presented many times in J. F. Cooper . . . “ (9). Just so James’s frontier detective-hero Christopher Newman must decipher (know, read) the footprints/signs in this “new” Europe and in the Bellegardes’ complex world.

Even in its earliest versions the detective genre involved writing alternative narratives. Newman imagines a crime before he learns (or believes he learns) that one has actually been committed. Speaking to the Tristrams of his early visit to Claire’s household, “ ‘It is like something in a play,’ said Newman; ‘that dark old house over there looks as if wicked things had been done in it, and might be done again’ “ (80). Valentin later corroborates Newman’s suspicions when he tells his friend that the Bellegardes may have “old secrets” (109). In Chapter Thirteen, after Newman has been visiting Madame de Bellegarde, he tells his confidante, Mrs. Tristram, “ ‘I shouldn’t wonder if she [Madame de Bellegarde] had murdered someone—all from a sense of duty, of course’ “ (151). And of her son the Marquis he notes, “ ‘If he has never committed murder, he has at least turned his back and looked the other way while someone else was committing it’ “ (152).

In constructing yet another alternative narrative, Newman tries to follow (“track”) the clues given him by Claire’s brother Valentin de Bellegarde on that young man’s deathbed concerning the suspicious circumstances surrounding the old Marquis’ death. He begins to construct yet another narrative, one which he can use to help him reach his goal of marriage. The detective genre is characterized by just such a search:

The most rudimentary definition, but probably the most effective, of the

detective narration describes itself as a dual narrative structure, that is to say,

a story which is in search of another, the first following from the discovery

(or anticipation) of a crime, the second furnishing the identity of the criminal,

his motivations and the methods of his act. (Schuerewegen 215)

Newman seeks to write such a narrative, unraveling the story of the Marquis’ murder in an attempt to revenge the Bellgardes for forbidding his marriage to Claire.

As Newman constructs alternative narratives early in the novel, there are clues he fails to include within his constructions. He is as yet an incomplete version of the detective-writer. (Here one might recall the indecisions in the narrative voice in the Italian Chronicles. It is the detective-reader who must ultimately organize the alternative narratives within the text.) At his engagement ball, for example, Newman misses signs that something is amiss: he fails to detect the strong undercurrents of the Bellegardes’ dislike of him. His promenade with old Madame de Bellegarde about her rooms as the aristocratic family’s friends watch is in fact a masterpiece of irony of situation. While Newman revels in this public display of his success at winning Claire, her mother is appalled at having to appear thus with the brash American. Their dialogue pointedly represents language that does not communicate. Newman fails to “detect” that the Bellegardes’ world evades his reading of it. In a sense, he is as seduced by French language and culture as he is by Claire herself. He lacks the objectivity—and the sophistication--to decipher these signs or clues.

Just before Valentine hands Newman his first real clue, the jilted American has been forced to re-read and re-decipher the Bellegardes. In his painful interview with them regarding their refusal to let Claire marry him, Newman accuses her mother of bad behavior. He questions her children’s adherence to her will.

“My power,” said Madame de Bellegarde, “is in my children’s obedience.”

“In their fear, your daughter said. There is something very strange in it. Why

should your daughter be afraid of you,” added Newman, after looking a moment at the

old lady. “There is some foul play in it.” (217)

Naively happy at his engagement ball, he now realizes the Bellegardes are not as they had seemed and that he must break their hold over Claire by detecting (reading, writing) another narrative. At this point the detective genre emerges as the dominant genre in the novel, eclipsing romance, realism, comedy of manners, melodrama, etc.[8]

As Newman pursues Valentin’s clue he envisions himself (combining again mystery and melodrama) as white knight and avenger. On his way to Fleurières to confront Madame de Bellegarde and her son, he ponders the secret he learned from Valentin. He defines this secret in the discourse of a detective: “But is he [Valentin] had not really told him the secret, he had at least given him the clew to it—a clew of which that queer old Mrs. Bread held the other end” (246).

As Newman tries to unravel the mystery of the Marquis’ murder, his inquiries are expressed partially in metaphors of reading, recalling Cooper’s early development of the detective genre. Michael Hobbs has already analyzed Newman as reader, though not as detective-reader, noting “James often describes Newman’s confrontation with the world he inhabits in terms of reading, and his reading is always an attempt to possess and to author. Newman acts as reader in several ways throughout the novel” (115). Newman persuades Mrs. Bread to meet him in the dark churchyard at night, yet another Gothic touch. As he listens to her evidence, he responds as though he were reading her spoken words. “Here Mrs. Bread paused again, and the most artistic of romancers could not have been more effective. Newman made a movement as if he were turning over the page of a novel” (262). In addition, the text’s subsequent use of the detective mode relies on written evidence, a note. Early French detective novels sometimes involved the use of letters. Mystères de Paris concerned an enigmatic letter found in a secretary, and of course Lacan’s famous analysis the seminar on the “Purloined Poe” highlights the many ambiguities present in reading signs in the form of a missing letter. Newman’s impassioned indictment of the Bellegardes rests upon the evidence provided in this encoded message. Mrs. Bread relates the circumstances surrounding this crucial piece of evidence: “Then he [the dying marquis] said it was ended, and I let him down on his pillows, and he gave me the paper and told me to fold it, and hide it, and to give it to those who would act upon it” (263). The astute Jamesian reader, however, at this point must assume the role of detective. The narrative provides clues that Bread may be an unreliable narrator as she recounts her master’s death and that Newman may have misread these clues. K. C. Probert has remarked, “For example, no reliable account of the events surrounding the late marquis’ death is ever provided in the novel. The only source of information on the matter is Mrs. Bread, and her credibility is established only by the fact that Newman believes her” (204).[9] Vareille notes that in the detective genre

In the texts that interest us . . . a break is introduced between the signified and the

signifier; the cards are cheated and their signs falsified. The reader then becomes

uncertain; it is on a correction of the decoding that intrigue is built, a reconciliation

slow and progressive of two yawning borders. (213)

James highlights the detective genre even more emphatically here. As Newman listens to Mrs. Bread in the churchyard, the narrator notes, “Newman felt as if he had been reading by starlight the report of highly important evidence in a great murder case” (265). When Newman reads the actual “document,” the primary evidence in the case he constructs against the Bellegardes, his interpretation of the note himself is ambiguous. The careful reader/detective will here recall Newman’s acquaintance with the French language, sketchy at best and based on lessons given him by M. Nioche. We might conjecture that Newman translates the note as he wants it to read, not as the Marquis had written it, of course again a careful commentary on the act of reading as a whole. We read to reconstruct our own desires. “It [the note] was covered with pencil-marks, which at first, in the feeble light, seemed indistinct. But Newman’s fierce curiosity forced a meaning from the tremulous signs” (268). Hobbs suggests “The dim illumination offered by the stars suggests both the Romantic uncanniness of the tale and Newman’s inability to see properly while reading” (119). But despite this uncertain reading, Newman determines to unmask the Bellegardes, to force meaning from his “clews,” just as the reader must detect and construct meaning by intertwining the text’s multiple narratives and genres.

And does Newman even read his chief witness correctly? Is Mrs. Bread in fact a reliable narrator? Mrs. Bread, on that same dark night, tells Newman that Madame de Bellegarde has been jealous of the old marquis’ attentions to her when she was a young serving girl in the Bellegarde household. Earlier in the novel it was Mrs. Bread who warned Christopher Newman that Claire de Cintré had been poorly treated by her family. But despite the possibility that Mrs. Bread’s testimony might be biased, Newman (at this point the archetypal detective) proceeds as though these “clews” were incontrovertible fact, pursuing the supposed criminals and confronting them with his “evidence.” If in fact the novel were no more than a variant of the early detective genre, then the outcome could be easily predicted. Newman would unmask the Bellegardes, Claire would be restored to him, and they would live happily ever after. This was an ending many readers were annoyed not to find, the ending James later conceded his audience in the heavily melodramatic play version of the text.

But the ending of the novel The American is ambivalent, its meanings as indecipherable as the Marquis de Bellegarde’s deathbed note. Newman finally decides to burn the incriminating document; its final destruction represents the ephemeral nature of his quest, of the novel itself, and perhaps of the early detective genre. This destructive act marks the end of Newman’s attempt to detect/ read this mysterious French culture.

In a sense Newman, as James characterizes him, could not have filled the role of stereotypical detective-avenger of early mystery fiction. Although elements of that genre pervade the novel, James omits other distinctive generic markers. While Newman does seek vengeance for a crime, the French community certainly has not designated him to repair its own wrongs. “In the detective novel, for revenge, the detective enters the field in pursuit of wrongs inflicted on others; the community delegates one of its own to repair the wrongs it has endured” (Vareille 30-31). The French community, that of the Bellegardes’ ancient lineage and social world, emphatically does not chose Newman to avenge the Marquis. In addition, in early classical detective novels, families disintegrated beneath the blow of the revealed crime (Diébolt 14). The Bellegarde family unit (except for Claire who is immured behind convent walls) remains intact, despite Newman’s efforts to unmask them. Another critic suggests that Newman’s failure to complete his revenge and this particular plot structure lies in James’s feminization of Newman. In making Newman give up his revenge, his quest, he is essentially feminized in the standards of that era and in comparison to Valentin’s dueling, a stereotypically masculine act. “James is still trying to mediate here between the demands of his plot and the threat it poses to his hero’s masculinity, and this is about the best he can do” (Porter 106).

Perhaps in a sense James’s refusal to complete the detective narrative (along with his ability to meld it with other fictional genres) helps maintain our interest in his novel: its ending is not easily interpreted. One critic notes:

And with this complete closure [solving a mystery] the novel no longer contains

any interest for the reader. Because the mystery was initially defined as the meaning

of the text, no relevance remains when the meaning becomes extractible and the

mystery is removed (the book then leaves nothing to be desired). (Hühn 458)

And Vareille reminds us, “ . . . that the power of the author consists in drawing out events to the last possible moment to leave us in uncertainty” (26). James employs just such powers as Vareille describes as he adapts the detective genre as one narrative within The American. His refusal to satisfy neither Newman’s desire (for Claire, to solve the mystery) nor the reader’s expectations invites us to re-read the text.

Susan E. Gunter

Westminster College/ Sofia Universtiy

sgunter@westminstercollege.edu

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[1] Yoshii notes James’s use of the Gothic plot in her introduction to her paper. Possibly James “beefed up” his potentially weak plot by inserting these various plot structures. See Chiyo Yoshii, “The American and the Romance of Modernity,” Papers on Language and Literature 33.2 (1997): 142-168.

[2] See Edwin Fussell’s “Time and Topography in The American,” Henry James Review 10 (1989): 167-178, for a thorough analysis of the role of French politics and religion within the novel.

[3] Oscar Cargill, in “The First International Novel” PMLA 73 (1958): 418-425, explains the intrusion-plot and James’s familiarity with it. “Going constantly to the theater and devouring printed plays while he was developing his novel from Turgenev’s A Nest of Gentlefolk, Henry James must have been struck by the parallel afforded to the situation in Turgenev’s novel in a device being exploited with great effectiveness by Emile Augier upon the French stage—the ‘intrusion plot.’ As many as twenty-two of Augier’s twenty-five plays, according to Gerdler B. Fitch, utilize this device as their principal plot mechanism. To state this theme in its simplest form, suspending qualifications for the moment, the basic action of a typical Augier play is this: Into a group there comes an intruder whose presence is resisted by one or more persons and accepted by one or more, with resulting conflict, until someone’s eyes are opened to the true situation, to the danger, to a possible solution. Different outcomes are possible, but the most frequent is the elimination of the intruder” ( Cargill 422). We know that James saw the following Augier plays: Post Scriptum, L’aventurière, Paul Forestier, Lions et Renards, Gendre de M. Poirier, Les Forchambault, Le marriage d’Olympe, Les lionnes pauvres, and Mâitre Guerin.

[4] See “Outsiders and Greenhorns: Christopher Newman in the Old World, David Levinsky in

the New,” American Literature 67: 4 (1995): 725-745.

[5] A summary of the early reviews of The American indicates this dissatisfaction. T. S.

Perry, James’s friend from his Rhode Island days, said in a review in The Nation:

But it is also to be remembered that if readers ask that a love-story should end

with a marriage or a definite statement of some satisfactory reason why the

marriage did not occur, it is because they know that a real passion leads to

marriage unless there is some insuperable obstacle in the way, and that this

is a law which does not admit of exceptions. (The American 391)

Another review, in The Independent, notes, “The only indication of artistic failure is a sort of letting-down in the last chapter or two, as though the fastidious writer had wearied even of his own art” (The American 391). And even the Atlantic Monthly complained

Merely as a question of artistic obligation, it seems to us that having introduced the

element of intrigue, in Newman’s discovery of the paper criminating old Madame

de Bellegarde, Mr. James should have treated this element more consistently. One

may disdain incident of that sort, but the appetite which it excites for some striking

and dramatic results is a perfectly lawful one. (The American 393)

[6] For a thorough analysis of the novel’s genre see Peter Brooks’s article “The Turn of the American,” in New Essays on the American, Ed. Martha Banta (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987): 43-68.

[7] Timothy Steele has also noted Balzac’s and Cooper’s texts as the real forerunners of the detective genre. See “Matter and Mystery: Neglected Works and Background Materials of Detective Fiction,” Modern Fiction Studies 29 (Autumn 1983): 555-570.

[8] At least one other critic has noted the novel’s shift at this point. “Nevertheless, it is at about this point in the action that the frame of reference shifts. This change is not so much in the narrator’s outlook or attitude toward Newman as in his role. Thus it is a structural change. . . . “ (Blasing 77).

[9] “Christopher Newman and the Artistic American View of Life,” Studies in American Fiction

11: 2 (1983): 203-215.

Bibliography

Blasing, Mutlu. “Double Focus in The American.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 28 (1973):

74-84.

Brooks, Peter. “The Turn of the American.” In New Essays on the American. Ed. Martha

Banta. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987. 43-68.

Cargill, Oscar. “The First International Novel.” PMLA 73 (1958): 418-425.

Diébolt, Evelyne. “Du roman populaire au roman policier.” Le Français dans le monde 87

(Aug/Sept 1984): 8-14.

Fussell, Edwin. “Time and Topography in The American.” Henry James Review 10 (Fall

1989): 167-178.

Hobbs, Michael. “Reading Newman Reading: Textuality and Possession in The

American.” The Henry James Review 13.2 (1992): 115-125.

Huhn, Peter. “The Detective as Reader: Narrativity and Reading Concepts in Detective

Fiction.” Modern Fiction Studies 33 (Autumn 1987): 451-466.

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American.” Ed. Martha Banta. New York: Cambridge UP, 1985.

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American Fiction 11.2 (1983): 203-215.

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italiennes.” Orbis literrarum 39:2 (1985): 213-229.

Steele, Timothy. “Matter and Mystery: Neglected Works and Background Materials of

Detective Fiction.” Modern Fiction Studies 29 (Autumn 1983): 555-570.

Vareille, Jean Claude. “Préhistoire du roman policier.” Romantisme 16.53 (1986): 23-35.

Walker, Pierre. Reading Henry James in French Cultural Contexts. Delkab: Northern

Illinois University Press, 1995.

Weber, Donald. “Outsiders and Greenhorns: Christopher Newman in the Old World, David

Levinsky in the New.” American Literature 67.4 (1995): 725-745.

Yosii, Chiyo. “The American and the Romance of Modernity.” Papers on Language and

Literature 33.2 (1997): 142-168.