Henry James’s Literary Remains

Abstract

In his critically neglected autobiographical writings, Henry James depicts himself as a young boy given to cooing over school notebooks, gazing dreamily at peeling bills, and luxuriating in the grease of theatrical posters. Such tattered wastepaper acts as a kind of material plug with which James fills his many confessed memorial gaps: James, that is, stuffs the blank spots of his memory with paper. But the persistence of a tangible past can be a dangerous thing, as James—a prodigious destroyer of his own literary remains—was well aware. Letter-burning, a recurring motif in his fiction from “The Aspern Papers” to The Wings of the Dove, is for James a surprisingly ethical act of destruction: it not only lays troubled ghosts to rest but, at the same time, re-enchants the past by eradicating its ability to speak through matter, transforming the palpable objects of memory into impalpable objects of desire.