The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 33 (2022)

Copyright © 2022 The Japanese Association for American Studies. All rights reserved.

Mobile Monuments:
Dialectic of Commemoration in
Henry James’s The American Scene

Takahiro SAKANE*I.

INTRODUCTION

Returning to his native land in 1904 after an absence of twenty-one
years, Henry James found New York—his birthplace, where he also spenthis boyhood—now obsessed with motion and driven by “the universal
will to move—to move, move, move, as an end in itself, an appetite at any
price.”1 For James, the city’s mobility was synonymous with its incessant
replacement of old buildings with new ones. James ventriloquizes the voiceof “powers above” that commands the city’s architectural configuration:“[T]here’s no step at which you shall rest, no form, as I’m constantly
showing you, to which, consistently with my interests, you can. I build you
up but to tear you down” (448). The city, as it were, engages in destructive
creation rather than creative destruction, rendering every element of its
landscape transient and provisional.
The above quotes are from The American Scene (1907), an account ofJames’s one-year visit to his homeland from 1904 to 1905, a travel bookeulogized by Edmund Wilson as “one of the very best books about modern
America” (118). Although the book covers various regions from New
England to the American South, the entire book is penetrated by the sense*Associate Professor, Kwansei Gakuin University

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TAKAHIRO SAKANE(felt in his native city) that the past and history are rapidly being “sweptaway” in the ruthless processes of industrialization and modernization—
processes underpinned by “that perpetual passionate pecuniary purpose
which plays with all forms, which derides and devours them” (447). As
Bill Brown argues, James’s New York, a city obsessed with a “relentless,pecuniary pursuit of novelty,” testifies to “the foreclosure of any possibility
that experience, memory, and history can be lodged in static physicalstructures” (184–85). Irving Howe’s observation made decades ago stillholds good: “In motivation, if not always perspective, it [the book] is often
elegiac, a journey of the imagination backward in time, where all is fixedand irrevocable, beyond the blur of fashion” (vii). Howe adds: “Toward
the present James marches boldly; he grasps it, embraces it, repulses it; but
always he is most deeply engaged by the memory of an earlier America”(vii).
James figures his experience of loss as a demolition of commemorated
objects or personal monuments that he wanted most to be immobile andfixed.2 Significantly, he describes those personal sites of loss in conjunction
with or, more precisely, in contiguity with public monuments—many ofthem Civil War monuments—that had been erected during his absence.
James’s purpose in juxtaposing personal and public monuments seems
twofold. On the one hand, the juxtaposition works as an implicit criticism
of public monuments. Kirk Savage, a historian and theorist of Civil War
monuments, writes that public monuments “pretend to be permanent,
eternal, and static” (x). They are meant to “remain a fixed point, stabilizing
both the physical and the cognitive landscape” and thereby “to mold alandscape of collective memory, to conserve what is worth rememberingand discard the rest” (4). Anticipating Savage’s and other theorists’ critiquesof modern monumental projects,3 James—who (as a returning expatriate)
sees newly built monuments as part of changing landscapes—does not
permit them to operate as “a fixed point.” James describes them as if they
were built at the cost of his personal sites of memory. These monuments
then emerge as objects that represent a collective failure to remember the
past. On the other hand, by juxtaposing public and private monuments,
James seems to suggest that the project of identifying a certain place
as a static monument that commemorates the personal past is always
flawed from the outset. Even when seeking a private site of memory,
James seems aware that there are no places unmediated by a kind ofcollectivity fabricated by public monuments. Through a close reading of
the book’s pivotal scenes that foreground James’s experience of loss,4 I

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seek to investigate how James envisions an alternative monument that issimultaneously personal and public,5 immobile and mobile.
I have used the terms “mobility” and “immobility” to indicate,respectively, an urban obsession with renewal, and what might be called amonumental attempt to achieve fixity within a rapidly changing landscape.
The American Scene is so complex because this mobility/immobility
dichotomy is constantly transposed into a more internal conflict—between
James’s mobile sensibility and his immobilized memory. In his influential
study of James as an anti-antimodernist writer, Ross Posnock argues that
despite his announced revulsion against urban mobility, James himself
registers analogous mobility:6 “[T]he turbulent movements of the American
spectacle are refracted in the ‘odd, inward rhythm’ of James’s own ‘fluidityof appreciation.’ He visualizes this fluidity as a ‘warm wave’ permitting
him to be ‘floated’” (88–89). Gert Buelens makes a similar point when hedefines “the basic tension that governs The American Scene” as follows:“[O]n the one hand, the ‘restless analyst’ is eager to probe beneath thesurface of the American spectacle that he wants to understand; on theother hand, the narrator’s sensibility frequently seems to beat to the sametune as the surface that provokes his penetrating impulse” (2). Indeed,
immobility and fixity are the last features attributed to James’s convoluted
later writing style, which has been understood by critics to be enacting an
impressionistic influx and mobile responsiveness. Whether James intends
or not, his syntactic and perceptual fluidity in The American Scene comesto align with the urban compulsion to “move,” which he seeks to condemn.
While James does not surrender to a nostalgic retreat from modernity, histhrill at rediscovering sameness remains real. On arrival in his native city,
he expresses his excitement at reencountering “a past recalled from very
far back” (357). James identifies the past “at every turn, in sights, sounds,
smells, even in the chaos of confusion and change; a process under which,verily, recognition became more interesting and more amusing in proportion
as it became more difficult” (357). James remembers the past townscapeastoundingly well—it remains immobilized in his inner vision with utmost
precision, with the “indelibility of the childish vision” (421). This extreme
fixity of memory renders the moment of loss perplexing for James. Even as
his fluid perceptivity responsively registers the changing influx of externallandscapes, the past landscapes inscribed on his inner vision insistently
persist. It is not so much James’s fluctuating sensitivity but an implicit
contradiction between sensitivity and immobilized memory that makes his
text dynamically dialectic.

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TAKAHIRO SAKANEII.

PHOTOGRAPHIC COMMEMORATION AND TEMPORAL MOBILITY

To begin, I will explore James’s own account of what I have describedas the contradiction between fluid perceptivity and persisting memory. In
the first chapter (entitled “New England: An Autumn Impression”), James“confess[es]” how “the play of perception” during the first weeks of his
return is “quickened, in the oddest way, by the wonderment . . . of myfinding how many corners of the general, of the local, picture had anciently
never been unveiled for me at all, and how many unveiled too briefly andtoo scantly, with quite insufficient bravery of gesture” (398–99). James
continues:
That might make one ask by what strange law one had lived in
the other time, with gaps, to that number, in one’s experience, in
one’s consciousness, with so many muffled spots in one’s generalvibration—and the answer indeed to such a question might carry with
it an infinite penetration of retrospect, a penetration productive ofghostly echoes as sharp sometimes as aches or pangs. So many had
been the easy things, the contiguous places, the conspicuous objects, toright or to left of the path, that had been either unaccountably or all too
inevitably left undiscovered, and which were to live on, to the innervision, through the long years, as mere blank faces, round, empty,
metallic, senseless disks dangling from familiar and reiterated names.
(399)
The “unveiled” corners of the local “picture” in this passage turninto “muffled spots in one’s general vibration,” “experience,” and“consciousness.” The “easy things, the contiguous places, the conspicuous
objects” that had been “left undiscovered” would simply seem outside
James’s “consciousness.” However, he assumes that they “were to live
on, to the inner vision” as a sort of subconsciousness buried close to“familiar” associations. The passage encapsulates James’s radicallysubjectivized perception of landscape, whereby newly discovered elements
are immediately transposed into “spots” (of the “inner vision”) that had
somehow been concealed. Given James’s explicit use of photographic
tropes in the following passage, which I shall presently discuss, it would
be safe to assume that the faculty of memory here is conceived as a camerathat records everything it sees, even things to which the photographer does
not pay attention. The revisited landscape appears as a “picture” he had

DIALECTIC OF COMMEMORATION IN HENRY JAMES’S THE AMERICAN SCENE

9taken but of which he has failed to see the details.
If everything James discovers anew is immediately translated into apart of “inner vision” that had already been there but which he has failed
to see, then what would occur when he discovers that the place or object
he had seen has been lost or modified? Of course, confusion occurs: “[T]he hundred emendations and retouches of the old picture, its greater depthof tone, greater show of detail, greater size and scale, [were] tending by
themselves to confound and mislead, in a manner, the lights and shades ofremembrance” (399). Lamenting those “emendations” as undermining “thegeneral richness,” James states:
The richness might have its poverties still and the larger complexity
its crudities; but, all the same, to look back was to seem to have beenpresent at an extraordinary general process, that of the rapid, thatof the ceaseless relegation of the previous (on the part of the whole
visible order) to one of the wan categories of misery. What was
taking place was a perpetual repudiation of the past, so far as there
had been a past to repudiate, so far as the past was a positive rather
than a negative quantity. There had been plenty in it, assuredly, of thenegative, and that was but a shabbiness to disown or a deception to
expose; yet there had been an old conscious commemorated life too,and it was this that had become the victim of supersession. (399–400)
The words “positive,” “negative,” and “expose” (along with “retouches”
and “lights and shades”) indicate James’s deployment of photographic
tropes.7 The intricate formulation of “looking back” as having “been present
at an extraordinary general process” (in which the “visible” grows “wan”)
figures James as witnessing a reverse development of a picture where animage gradually fades away. The loss of “an old conscious commemoratedlife” assumes a particular urgency precisely because the (lost) “visible”
image constitutes James’s “inner vision”; which is to say, the “process”
of repudiation occurs not outside but in his “consciousness.” James
experiences the process of loss or the loss as a process by adjusting the“lights and shades of remembrance.”
In the ensuing passage, the temporal mobility of the Jamesian perception
seems transposed onto the “old” life itself:
The pathos, so to call it, of the impression was somehow that it
didn’t, the earlier, simpler condition, still resist or protest, or at all

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expressively flush through; it was consenting to become a past with all
the fine candour with which it had tried to affirm itself, in its day, as apresent—and very much, for that matter, as with a due ironic forecastof the fate in store for the hungry, triumphant actual. (400)James’s play with the verbal tense confuses the reader’s temporal sense.
The infinitive phrase “to become a past” is preceded by the promissory
verb (“consent to”) cast in the past progressive form (“was consenting”),
obscuring the temporal axis of the sentence. This sense of confusion
deepens with James’s subsequent use of the pluperfect form (“had tried”)
for the insistence (of the “earlier, simpler condition”) on affirming itself
as the “present.” The two infinitives (“consent to become” and “try toaffirm”) simultaneously register futurity and suspend the success of theintended action. This futural uncertainty unsettles the sense of certitude
that is supposed to be conveyed by “forecast.” At the moment of its“supersession,” the “commemorated life” enacts temporal mobility that
unsettles its own “earlier” status. This mobility would seem to correspondto the temporal restructuring of James’s “inner vision,” whereby James
experiences the loss of the past as a process that occurs in the present.
Thus, the moment of loss embodies a dynamic interaction between James’s
fixed memory of the past landscape and his keen sensitivity to the observed
scene.
This conflict also characterizes scenes highlighting the loss of amore personal past. However, in those scenes, James evokes a kind ofcollectivity that is not apparent in his photographic recollection discussed
above, presumably because the evocation of a personal memory brings up
matters of privacy and publicity. As Ian F. A. Bell succinctly puts it, in The
American Scene, “James overtly castigates the world of publicity at lengthand in detail, emphasizing its corruption of the equation between public andprivate through the interchangeability of market and home” (94). How can
one establish a space to commemorate a personal past within a culture that
increasingly dismisses privacy? James implicitly addresses this question in
his description of personal loss, to which we shall turn.
III.

INSCRIPTIONAL COMMEMORATION AND THE READERLY COLLECTIVITYJames grants a particular significance to the removal of his birthplace in
New York, to the extent that, as John Carlos Rowe argues, “[t]he ‘vanished. . . birthplace’ [. . .] sets the tone for all the other historical absences heDIALECTIC OF COMMEMORATION IN HENRY JAMES’S THE AMERICAN SCENE

11encounters in The American Scene” (214). The episode begins with James’s
stroll around Washington Square, a stroll that he calls “excursions ofmemory” (428). Before his arrival at the birthplace, James thinks of “theunquenchable intensity of the impressions received in childhood”: “Theyare made then once for all, be their intrinsic beauty, interest, importance,
small or great; the stamp is indelible and never wholly fades” (430). The
photographic connotation of the “stamp” becomes clear when he mentions a“daguerreotypist’s art” that “preserved” the costume he used to wear in hischildhood (430).
Arriving at Washington Place, James finds his birthplace superseded by“a high, square, impersonal structure” that “blocks . . . the view of the past,”
so that he feels “amputated of half my history” (431). James deploys a“tablet” metaphor to express the city’s failure to commemorate:
This was the snub, for the complacency of retrospect, that, whereas theinner sense had positively erected there for its private contemplation acommemorative mural tablet, the very wall that should have borne thisinscription had been smashed as for demonstration that tablets, in New
York, are unthinkable. And I have had indeed to permit myself this free
fantasy of the hypothetic rescued identity of a given house—taking
the vanished number in Washington Place as most pertinent—in order
to invite the reader to gasp properly with me before the fact that we
not only fail to remember, in the whole length of the city, one of thesefrontal records of birth, sojourn, or death, under a celebrated name, butthat we have only to reflect an instant to see any such form of civic
piety inevitably and for ever absent. (431–32)
The abiding sense of loss—figured as amputation—is followed by
the subsumption (or expansion) of the narratorial pronoun “I” into
“we,” a remarkable move, given the deeply subjective nature of the loss
experienced through the “inner sense” and “private contemplation.” Themove derives from James’s explicit appeal to readerly sympathy. This
rare appeal seems triggered by the term “inscription,” a piece of writing
James’s “inner sense” had sought to carve on the wall of his birth-house.
A “commemorative mural tablet”—erected as it may be for “privatecontemplation”—necessarily presupposes the reading public. He goeson to interrogate: “Where, in fact, is the point of inserting a mural tablet,at any legible height, in a building certain to be destroyed to make room
for a sky-scraper? And from where, on the other hand, in a façade of

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fifty floors, does one ‘see’ the pious plate recording the honour attached
to one of the apartments look down on a responsive people?” (432).
The verb “see,” underscoring the illegibility of the tablet located highon the building, emphasizes that the inscription ought to be read, rather
than seen, by “responsive people.” Herein, perhaps, the differentiation
between photographic and inscriptional preservations comes into play.
They may externalize one’s “inner vision” that is “indelible”; however, thephotographic seems evocative of a more private and interiorized registerthan the inscriptional.
Evoking the reading public, the imagined tablet allows James a “freefantasy of the hypothetic rescued identity of a given house.” James’s
recasting of his birthplace as “a given house” stems again from thetablet metaphor, as his generalizing impulse first manifests in his
recognized “demonstration that tablets, in New York, are unthinkable”—ademonstration that recasts the personal “tablet” as plural and pertaining to
the narrating present (431). Thus, the plural subject (“we”) emerges, who“fail to remember.” James discovers that commemoration is “unthinkable”
in New York. However, through the act of inscribing (or writing) the urban
incapacity of remembering, James seems to perform an alternative form ofcommemoration, in which the reading public, including the writer himself,
remembers that they fail to remember.
There is another striking instance of James’s invocation of collective
readers (of inscriptions) as an alternative form of commemoration of
personal loss. James is taken by a deep sense of loss on discovering theremoved birthplace, but he does not write about a place that had arousedin him the most overwhelming sense of loss—the graves of his parents andsister (who died of breast cancer in 1892). In his journal written during
his stay in his homeland, James notes of “the never-to-be-lost memoryof that evening hour at Mount Auburn—at the Cambridge Cemetery”(Notebooks 240). He is overtaken by “the blessed flood of emotion thatbroke out at the touch of one’s sudden vision and carried me away” (240).
The moon was there, early, white and young, and seemed reflectedin the white face of the great empty Stadium, forming one of theboundaries of Soldier’s Field, that looked over at me, stared over atme, through the clear twilight, from across the Charles. Everything
was there, everything came; the recognition, stillness, the strangeness,the pity and the sanctity and the terror, the breath-catching passion andthe divine relief of tears. William’s inspired transcript, on the exquisite

DIALECTIC OF COMMEMORATION IN HENRY JAMES’S THE AMERICAN SCENE

13little Florentine urn of Alice’s ashes, William’s divine gift to us, and toher, of the Dantean lines—
Dopo lungo exilio e martiro
Viene a questa pace—took me so at the throat by its penetrating rightness, that it was as
if one sank down on one’s knees in a kind of anguish of gratitude
before something for which one had waited with a long, deep ache.
(Notebooks 240)
In the published travelogue, James removed the whole personal
implication from the scene:
Why, if one could tell it, would it be so wonderful, for instance, tohave stood on the low cliff that hangs over the Charles, by the nearerside of Mount Auburn, and felt the whole place bristle with mercilessmemories? . . . Just opposite, at a distance, beyond the river and its
meadows, the white face of the great empty Stadium stared at me, as
blank as a rising moon—with Soldiers’ Field squaring itself like someflat memorial slab that waits to be inscribed. I had seen it inscribed aweek or two before in the fantastic lettering of a great intercollegiate
game of football, and that impression had been so documentary, as
to the capacity of the American public for momentary gregarious
emphasis, that I regret having to omit here all the reflections it
prompted. (The American Scene 412)
In her reading of this revision, Sharon Cameron argues that “the griefoccasioned in the notebook passage by the writing of the transcript becomesincredulity first at the absence of writing and then at its triviality” (16).
The “epitaph” is “being done away with, and awaited” (as exhibitedby the description of the field as “some flat memorial slab that waits to
be inscribed”) (16). Thus, “the subject to be mourned is a subject to beironized: ‘the capacity of the American public for momentary gregarious
emphasis’” (16). Further, in the conversion of the letters on the urn into
football players, Cameron identifies “a parody of writing that leads to its
erasure—making writing transitory by construing the players themselves
as letters gone off the text/field/slab—as if this might facilitate, by analogy,
the vanishing of other letters (those in the epitaph)” (16–17).

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Cameron’s otherwise forceful reading of the revision remains
obscure as to why James, who could have entirely omitted the memorial
image from the scene, kept it, if only in a metaphorical form, and why,consequently, he displaced the personal and familial “epitaph” into theemphatically collective and public “field.” We might answer these questions
tautologically. Arguably, James kept the memorial image to suggest thata public and collective space, when empty, may serve as a displaced formof a personal memorial. James certainly ironizes “the capacity of theAmerican public for momentary gregarious emphasis.” It seems implausible
to say, however, that his parodic intent informs the depiction of the stareby “the white face of the great empty Stadium” (gleaned from the journal
ad verbum). This is because the “stare” seems to make an essential partof “one’s sudden vision” that effects the “blessed flood of emotion.” Theempty Stadium (in the journal) suggests that James’s deeply personalized
moment of mourning necessitates as its constitutive element a huge public
space, albeit in a vacant state.
As Cameron argues, to figure the football players as the letters is toimagine an inscription that easily vanishes, but it is also to imagine an
inscription that will reappear, one to be achieved collectively in the future
insofar as the memorial slab “waits to be inscribed” (412). If, as Cameronnotes, the empty stands of the stadium imply the disappearance of thereaders who had read the field (as a text), they would also anticipate thereaders to come. In sum, the “empty” field, which for James constitutes
part of the personalized vision of loss, is recast as an in-between space thatstands simultaneously for the collective inscription made in the past and theone to be made in the future. This alteration of private commemoration intoa public one seems to demarcate a form of displaced mourning in which
James silently engages.
IV. THE CLOSET OF MEMORIES AND THE LOGIC OF DISPOSSESSION
In the previous section, I argued that James’s dismissal of gregariousness
does not necessarily indicate an irreconcilable antagonism between
personal commemoration and public collectivity. Rather, James seeks toimagine—by invoking inscriptional memorials and their potential readers—an alternative commemoration that retains a trace or possibility of public
collectivity.
This scenario, however, may appear too optimistic when we recall thatthe depiction of the effaced birthplace (discussed above) is immediately

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followed by James’s denouncement of the commercial nature of anurban collectivity. James dismisses “a huge, continuous fifty-flooredconspiracy” as undermining “the ancient graces,” which had “flourishedjust in proportion as the parts of life and the signs of character have notbeen lumped together” (432). He concludes: “So interesting, as objectlessons, may the developments of the American gregarious ideal become;so traceable, at every turn, to the restless analyst at least, are the heavy
footprints, in the finer texture of life, of a great commercial democracy
seeking to abound supremely in its own sense and having none to gainsayit” (432).
James seems to find “democratic” collectivity essentially at odds withpersonal commemoration. The Boston chapter, however, signals his struggle
to negotiate a collective and democratic space (in its operating, not “empty”
state) that somehow makes personal mourning possible. To examine sucha struggle, we first need to trace how James dramatizes his discovery in
Boston of the vanished house where he used to live. Instead of depicting thesurviving landscape at first, James from the outset inscribes “the harshnessof change” added to Ashburton Place, “a particular spot [he] had wished
to revisit” (542). “In this immediate neighbourhood of the enlarged State
House, where a great raw clearance has been made, memory met that pangof loss, knew itself sufficiently bereft to see the vanished objects, a scant
but adequate cluster of ‘nooks’” (542). He fortunately finds a surviving“pair of ancient houses,” in one of which he had spent “two-years of faraway youth” during “the closing-time of the War,” a spot “full both of
public and of intimate vibrations” (543).
A month later, however, he returns to the spot “to see if another whiff ofthe fragrance were not to be caught” and instead finds “a gaping void, thebrutal effacement, at a stroke, of every related object, of the whole precious
past” (543).
I had been present, by the oddest hazard, at the very last moments ofthe victim in whom I was most interested; the act of obliteration had
been breathlessly swift, and if I had often seen how fast history could
be made I had doubtless never so felt that it could be unmade still
faster. It was as if the bottom had fallen out of one’s own biography,
and one plunged backward into space without meeting anything.
(543–44)
The last sentence echoes the expression quoted earlier, “an infinite

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penetration of retrospect, a penetration productive of ghostly echoes as
sharp sometimes as aches or pangs” (399). The “ghostly echoes” also findtheir equivalent: In his first visit to the house, James seeks to “recover. . . some echo of ghostly footsteps—the sound as of taps on the windowpane heard in the dim dawn” (543). When James feels “as if the bottom
had fallen out of one’s biography,” he seems precisely at the edge of (orin the process of) an “infinite penetration.” In other words, somewhat
paradoxically, the house had served for James as a closet to put away
memories—one that saved him from remembering too much.8 “The place
itself was meanwhile, at all events, a conscious memento, with old secrets
to keep and old stories to witness for, a saturation of life as closed together
and preserved in it as the scent lingering in a folded pocket-handkerchief”(543). The formless “scent” is congealed (or “closed”) in an object thatis to be sequestered into a “pocket.” Together with “old secrets to keep,”
this image of concealment seems to figure James’s commemoration as avariation of hoarding and hence, perhaps, the house as “the whole precious
past” (my emphasis). To extend this reading, the clearance of the house
amounts to a kind of dispossession—perhaps in a double sense insofar as
the demolition implies an exorcized “echo of ghostly footsteps”—whichsets memories into motion.
James draws an implicit correlation between the removal of the houseand the erection of public monuments:
I recall a Sunday afternoon in particular when I hung about on
the now vaster platform of the State House for a near view of themilitary monuments erected there, the statues of Generals Hooker andDevens, and for the charm at once and the pang of feeling the whole
backward vista, with all its features, fall from that eminence into grey
perspective. The top of Beacon Hill quite rakes, with a but slightly
shifting range, the old more definite Boston; for there seemed no item,
nor any number, of that remarkable sum that it would not anciently
have helped one to distinguish or divine. (544)James mentions the “near view” of the (recently erected) monuments
only to underscore “the whole backward vista,” whose “fall”—along withthe attendant “pang”—would seem to reenact James’s backward “plunge.”
Public monuments represent an unwelcome change to James’s familiar
vista, crystallizing the town’s misguided way to commemorate the past.
Absorbed in a “backward” landscape, James finds “the old uplifted front

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17of the State House . . . more delightful and harmonious even than [he] hadremembered it” (544). However, “[t]he irresistible spell, . . . was something
sharper yet—the coercion, positively, of feeling one’s case, the case of
one’s deeper discomfiture, completely made out” (544–45). He sees “acontinuous passage of men and women . . . who struck [him] as labouring
wage-earners,” from whose lips “no sound of English, in a single instance,
escaped”; “the people before me were gross aliens to a man, and they werein serene and triumphant possession” (545). Their “possession” urges Jamesto reclaim his ownership of the city: “Nothing, as I say, could have been
more effective for figuring the hitherward bars of a grating through which
I might make out, far-off in space, ‘my’ small homogeneous Boston of themore interesting time” (545). The “aliens” seem to represent an American
mobility that defamiliarizes his homeland: “[T]hey gave the measure of
the distance by which the general movement was away—away, always andeverywhere, from the old presumptions and conceivabilities” (545). James
reports his “vision” of “a huge applied sponge, a sponge saturated with theforeign mixture and passed over almost everything I remembered and might
still have recovered”—a sponge that effects an “obliteration” (545–46).
The terms “saturation” and “obliteration” reiterate the vocabulary used forthe lost house, exemplifying how James conceives his dispossession of the“ancient house” as forced by immigrants.9
V. THE PUBLIC LIBRARY AS A SPACE FOR DEMOCRATIC COMMEMORATIONIn effect, James’s vexing experience in Boston (described in the preceding
section) reenacts, in a reversed order, a sequence of events that revolves
around his discovery of the vanished birth-house in New York. James’s“excursions of memory” in New York start as “an artful evasion of theactual” or an “escape” into the past from “the ubiquitous alien”—swarming
immigrants (in Ellis Island) whom he writes about in the preceding section(428). In that section he likens his experience of witnessing immigrants
to a ghostly possession of an old house: “So is stamped, for detection, thequestionably privileged person who has had an apparition, seen a ghost in
his supposedly safe old house” (426–27). Here, James implicitly puns on
the word “possession.” In Ellis Island, James deplores the “native” people’s
reduction to “unsettled possession” or “dispossession” resulting from theimmigrants’ “note of settled possession” (427).
James’s nostalgic stroll in New York also involves a (dis)engagementwith a public monument. On the familiar streets, his “sense of other

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days” keeps “meeting, half the time, to its discomfiture, the lamentable
little Arch of Triumph which bestrides these beginnings of Washington
Square—lamentable because of its poor and lonely and unsupported andunaffiliated state” (430). The monument continues to occupy a corner of
his consciousness: “With this melancholy monument it [the sense of otherdays] could make no terms at all, but turned its back to the strange sight
as often as possible, helping itself thereby, moreover, to do a little of thepretending required, no doubt, by the fond theory that nothing hereabouts
was changed” (430). The arch, which commemorates the centenary ofGeorge Washington’s inauguration, was erected in the 1890s, during
James’s absence. The erection of the public monument is aligned withthe loss of his birthplace, both of which represent the urban mobility that
undoes the basis of his nostalgic recollection. In New York, immediately
following his discovery of the removed birthplace, he identifies analternative monument. James visits the Ascension (church), “a charming
and considerably dim ‘old’ church,” which he deems “very nearly as
commemorative a monument as a great reputation need wish” (433). His
evaluation derives less from its architectural or historical resonance thanfrom a work of art inside the church, “that noble work of John La Farge,” a“great religious picture” before which “the sensation, for the moment, upset
so all the facts” (433):
The hot light, outside, might have been that of an Italian piazzetta; thecool shade, within, with the important work of art shining through it,
seemed part of some other-world pilgrimage—all the more that theimportant work of art itself, a thing of the highest distinction, spoke,as soon as one had taken it in, with that authority which makes thedifference, ever afterwards, between the remembered and the forgotten
quest. A rich note of interference came, I admit, through the splendid
window-glass, the finest of which, unsurpassably fine, to my sense,is the work of the same artist; so that the church, as it stands, is very
nearly as commemorative a monument as a great reputation need wish.
(433)
Given James’s enduring friendship with the artist, he seems to besummoning a personal recollection here. La Farge’s picture dismantles
James’s sense of place, even as its inherent “authority” dictates what toremember and forget. The church for James serves as a monument, notbecause of its historical or topographical specificity, but because theDIALECTIC OF COMMEMORATION IN HENRY JAMES’S THE AMERICAN SCENE

19

artwork placed inside the building disturbs geographical fixity and shapes
the viewer’s mnemonic practice. If the church compensates for the city’s
failure to erect a “tablet,” it does so through James’s strategic dislocation ofwhat a “commemorative monument” signifies.
The transformative power of artworks speaks to the core of the Jamesian
redefinition of commemorative space. Nevertheless, the church operates
undeniably as a refuge from the reality represented by the ubiquity ofimmigrants, the sense of dispossession (given by the lost house), anderections of new public monuments. The reversed order of events inBoston would seem to insinuate the writer’s efforts to reach an alternative
conclusion. Arguably, in his depiction of the Boston Public Library, Jamesseeks to construct a commemorative space where he reengages the triad ofproblematics rather than escaping from them.
James’s initially dismissive view of the library gradually changes as heproceeds to write about that institution. American libraries, where he has an“impression . . . that every one is ‘in’ everything,” present “fresh evidenceof that democratic way of dealing which it has been the American office
to translate from an academic phrase into a bristling fact” (560). Jamesreevaluates “[t]he Boston institution” as “a great and complete institution”(560). However, it strikes “the restored absentee as practically without
penetralia,” without an innermost space that provides “a place of study andmeditation” (560). He speculates that “social democracies are unfriendly tothe preservation of penetralia” (560). Inside the library, James witnesses“the multitudinous bustle, the coming and going, as in a railway-station, of
persons with carpet-bags and other luggage” (561). The lack of penetralia
implies a presence of “the open doors and immediate accesses” on the one
hand, and on the other an absence of “the deeper depths,” “some part thatshould be sufficiently within some other part, sufficiently withdrawn andconsecrated” (561). “A library without penetralia may affect him [James]
but as a temple without altars,” a contradiction in terms (560).
One of the rare instances of James eulogizing public monuments occurs
within such a radically open and exteriorized “democratic” space:
The main staircase, in Boston, has, with its amplitude of wing and its
splendour of tawny marble, a high and luxurious beauty—bribing therestored absentee to emotion, moreover, by expanding, monumentally,
at one of its rests, into admirable commemoration of the Civil War
service of the two great Massachusetts Volunteer regiments of élite.
Such visions, such felicities, such couchant lions and recorded names

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TAKAHIRO SAKANE

and stirred memories as these, encountered in the early autumn
twilight, colour an impression—even though to say so be the limitof breach of the silence in which, for persons of the generation of
the author of these pages, appreciation of them can best take refuge:
the refuge to which I felt myself anon reduced, for instance, opposite
the State House, in presence of Saint-Gaudens’s noble and exquisite
monument to Robert Gould Shaw and the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts.
There are works of memorial art that may suddenly place themselves,by their operation in a given case, outside articulate criticism—which
was what happened, I found, in respect to the main feature, the richstaircase of the Library. (560–61)
As James’s reference to “stirred memories” suggests, the monuments
mentioned in the passage have personal implications for himself.
As Richard Howard notes, “The two lions . . . honor the 2nd and 20th
Massachusetts Infantry. Thirteen of the sixteen officers of the 2nd
Massachusetts killed in action were Harvard graduates; among the officersof the 20th Massachusetts was Oliver Wendel Holmes, Jr.,” one of James’s
lifelong friends.10 The 54th Massachusetts Infantry—“celebrated for its
assault on Fort Wagner, South Carolina,” during which its commander,
Robert Gould Shaw, was killed—had as one of its officers James’s younger
brother Wilky, who was badly wounded in the engagement.11 William
James (Henry’s brother) served as one of the orators at the unveiling
ceremony of the sculpture in 1897. If public monuments generally purport
to enact a form of collective memory, James’s “stirred memories,” and his
concomitant escape into “silence” as to their content, seem marked by arefusal to share his thoughts collectively with readers.12 The monuments
inside the library seem to enact a conflicted inversion of public and private,
or exterior and interior, relationality. James indulges in a meditative“silence” precisely in a markedly exteriorized space that lacks an innerspace necessary for “meditation.”13 The lions serve as “public” monuments
insofar as there is no penetralia in this building; however, James finds
their value in strikingly personal terms rather than in aesthetic or public
terms. He does not clarify (or publish) his memories but, in a rare gesture,shares his generational silence with the reader. Those monuments “place
themselves . . . outside articulate criticism”—outside a kind of discourse
publicly sharable. That “place,” which is “outside” in this instance, would
be neither private nor public, but it would be a contradictory space thatallows the manifestation (or exteriorization) of interiorized “silence”

DIALECTIC OF COMMEMORATION IN HENRY JAMES’S THE AMERICAN SCENE

21

without canceling its interiority. Despite his stress on the unavailability of awithdrawn space that guarantees consecration, James, by remembering andwriting about the place, seems to engineer a form of consecration available
only in “a temple without altars.”14
James’s obliterated house represented the modern destruction of“nooks,” an impossibility of preserving a closeting space in which to keep
“old secrets” and “old stories.” He had associated his shock of loss witha sense of dispossession induced by “aliens.” Although James might not
witness “aliens” in the library, “the open doors and immediate accesses”
render the place coterminous with the nation replete with immigrants.
James writes that the Boston library “exemplif[ies] the distinction between
a benefit given and a benefit taken, a borrowed, a lent, and an owned,
an appropriated convenience” (560). He characterizes the democratic
institution in possessive terms, but ownership here is collective. Jamesseems to reinscribe an alternative form, or space, of commemoration thatis neither entirely individual nor collective, private nor public, interiorized
nor exteriorized, possessive nor dispossessive, but can achieve both poles
simultaneously. He consistently castigates an American lack of privacy
throughout the book. In this particular instance, however, he seems to locate
a form of commemoration available only in a nation that has realized acurious ideal of democratic “gregariousness.”
VI.

CONCLUSION

In this essay, I have sought to trace some of the ways in which The
American Scene dislodges monumental projects—both the writer’s own
and public—of establishing a permanent and static memento expected to
be exempt from modern mobility. I have focused on the mutual interplay
between personal and public commemorations rather than on publicmonuments dispersed throughout the text. This is because, as I discussed
in the introduction, James’s writing becomes most dynamic, or mobile,when he seeks to negotiate the personal sense of loss and its public
implication. My titular usage of the term “dialectic” might hint that what
I have discussed as photographic, inscriptional, and democratic forms ofcommemoration get, in this order, sublated or sublimated, but that is not myintention. They all constitute the nub of the Jamesian struggle to articulate away to implement personal commemoration when public mediation renders
the project impossible and public commemoration when a modern obsession
with mobility suspends the concept of commemoration. The Jamesian

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TAKAHIRO SAKANE

dialectic I have sought to delineate has not “become a past” insofar as thecapitalistic urge for mobility and the attendant loss of personal sites ofmemory constitute the actuality of the present American scene.
NOTES
1Henry James, The American Scene (reprinted in Collected Travel Writings: GreatBritain and America, Library of America, 1993), 425. Subsequent references will be to thisedition and will be included parenthetically in the text.
2
Alan Trachtenberg notes of the book that “the dominant emotion is of loss—loss ofplace, of relation, of detachment of mind” (294). David McWhirter also legitimately argues
that James’s “late, explicitly retrospective writings [including The American Scene] . . . arefull of confrontations with loss and the places of loss, with a personal and collective past thatis irremediably ‘gone’” (2).
3
For a seminal critique of modern monumental projects, see Young, particularly
introduction and chapter 1 (“The Countermonument: Memory against Itself in Germany”).
4
My essay is about the interplay between personal and public sites of memory rather thanabout public monuments as such. James’s depictions of public monuments in Philadelphia,
Washington, and the American South are thus outside the scope of my essay, not least
because they do not entail the question of personal memory. Beverly Haviland oﬀers adetailed study of Independence Hall and the statue of Sherman. However, her interest
lies in “how places and objects, as opposed to verbal texts, convey meanings”; therefore,
she does not delve into a correlation between public monuments and more personal sitesof memory (268). My concern resonates more with Tamara L. Follini’s essay, where she
explores personal dimensions of James’s response to the Civil War statues of Augustus SaintGaudens.
5
Considerable attention has been devoted to the question of privacy and publicity in The
American Scene. Richard Salmon, for instance, notes that “an extinction of the possibility ofdiﬀerence between private and public spheres” is at issue in the book (181). In a similar vein,in her assessment of James’s treatment of public buildings, Martha Banta cogently argues
that “The American Scene continually provides diﬀering, contradictorily engaged responses
to matters of publicity and privacy, inclusivity and exclusivity—a dialectic expressive ofthe divergent needs and motives of James the private individual and of James the storyteller” (4). My essay, in one sense, is an attempt to reconsider the “dialectic” of privacy andpublicity in conjunction with the book’s pivotal issue of commemoration of the lost past.
6
James as a mobile observer is also clear in his various self-designations as the “restless
analyst,” “repatriated absentee,” or “visionary tourist.” Tony Tanner maintains that by thesevaried appellations, James “wants to dissolve away any sense of a distinct, historicallydeﬁned and culturally delimited individual” (5–6).
7
Paul Giles also points out “the photographic imagery that permeates the book,”
but his equation of the imagery with a “mood of abstraction” (as seen in words such as“impressions” or “spectralities”) diverges from my focus on a more precise reproductionof observed images (115). My view is close to that of Mark Goble. He indicates the “odddigitalization of memory” in James’s autobiography and argues that James’s “account ofmemory-at-work seems everywhere implicated in photographic and cinematic ways ofseeing” (359).
8
My use of the term “closet” derives from Georges Poulet’s striking observation on theJamesian memory. Poulet notes that, because of “superabundance” of memory, “[i]nstead ofallowing memory constantly to enlarge and deepen the ﬁeld of consciousness, James acts to

DIALECTIC OF COMMEMORATION IN HENRY JAMES’S THE AMERICAN SCENE

23

restrain it, to give it limits. These limits are those of the present. Life is a surface aﬀair. Let
us leave memory to the clothes closet” (351). Poulet quotes from James’s autobiography:“The ragbag of memory hung on its nail in my closet, though I learnt with time to control thehabit of bringing it forth” (qtd. in Poulet 351).
9
For the past few decades, James’s nativistic depictions of immigrants have been thecenter of critical studies of The American Scene. I argue that despite his explicit disdain
for the “ubiquitous alien,” James nonetheless requires their presence for his alternative
commemorative project. For a representative study of the book’s racial treatments, see Blair
158–210.
10
See Richard Howard’s textual notes (The American Scene 829).
11
See Peter Collister’s textual notes to the Cambridge edition, 267n50.
12Follini goes one step further and argues that James in this passage engages “further
recesses of private memory and an ongoing reﬂection, as a noncombatant during the Civil
War, on the relation between the kinds of knowledge accessible through imaginative
sympathy and those that can be derived only from immediate experience” (32).
13James E. Dobson reads the memorial as an instance of penetralia (53–54), a reading that
seems deeply misguided given James’s stress on the absence of penetralia in the library.
14
James’s admiration of Grant’s tomb follows a somewhat similar trajectory. The tomb
stands “unguarded and unenclosed, the feature of the prospect and the property of the people,
as open as an hotel or a railway-station to any coming and going, and as dedicated to the
public use as builded things in America . . . only can be” (476). He identiﬁes in its openness“a great democratic demonstration caught in the fact” (476). For a nuanced analysis of the
depiction of Grant’s tomb, see Buelens 83–86.

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