Boring Postcards. Spaces and Places in the Photographic Frontispieces  to Henry James’s New York Edition
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Boring Postcards. Spaces and Places in the Photographic Frontispieces  to Henry James’s New York Edition
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Boring Postcards. Spaces and Places in the Photographic Frontispieces  to Henry James’s New York Edition
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/download/5450/5615
13
                Boring postcards.
                Spaces and places
        in the photographic frontispieces
                to Henry James’s
                New York Edition

                               Donata Meneghelli

Abstract
      The essay offers a new reading of the photographic frontispieces pro-
duced by Alvin Langdon Coburn for the New York Editon of Henry James’s
novels and tales published between 1907 and 1909. This reading is grounded
in three main moves. First, taking as a starting point the overall project of
the New York Edition and the multiple textual layers with which the images
interact in the material support (not only the literary texts, but also the pref-
aces that James specifically wrote for the edition, and even the captions that
accompany each of the images). Second, considering the frontispieces as a
series of images related to one another and to several texts at the same time,
in an intersectional pattern that goes beyond the mere one-to-one associa-
tion. Third, situating the frontispieces – that are scenic still – in the context
of James’s spatial imagination, the uses of photography in late nineteenth
century visual culture and literary tourism. Thanks to these critical moves, it
is possible to reflect upon the images’ force and the multifaceted intermedial
relations they trigger, within what one may call a performative framework.

Keywords
     Spaces; places; photography; scenic still; visual culture; tourism



Between, vol. XIII, n. 25 (maggio/May 2023)
issn: 2039-6597
doi: 10.13125/2039-6597/5450
Donata Meneghelli, Boring Postcards




           Boring postcards.
 Spaces and places in the photographic
    frontispieces to Henry James’s
           New York Edition

                               Donata Meneghelli



                       1. The James-Coburn dossier
      Much has been written on the photographic frontispieces that Alvin
Langdon Coburn produced for the twenty-four volumes of the collected edi-
tion of Henry James’s oeuvre issued by Scribner’s publishing house between
1907 and 1909 under the title New York Edition. With few exceptions, this
bulk of critical investigation can be summarized in three main focuses.
      To begin, there are the allegorical/symbolical interpretations of the im-
ages in relation to the texts they are associated to via the very basic means
of a caption. The caption is supposed to link one image to one single text,
or two images to one text when the text is a long novel divided into two
volumes, therefore providing a ground upon which the interpretation can
be built. To give a few examples, the gushing fountain in the picture cap-
tioned «By St. Peter’s», which opens the volume containing “Daisy Mill-
er”, points to the exuberant, sparkling character of the eponymous heroine
(Higgins 1982: 671); or «The Roman Bridge», a picture of Ponte Sant’An-
gelo in Rome, which opens the second volume of The Portrait of a Lady,
«allegorically introduces Isabel’s ‘Passion’, figuratively presented by the
Bernini statues» (Nadel 1995: 110). The problem with such interpretations
is twofold. On the one hand, they are almost always exclusively centred on
both the story’s anecdotic and the image’s figurative content, leaving aside
issues of form, composition, framing, or paratextual function. On the other
hand, no matter how convincing each of them may or may not be, they
always sound slightly arbitrary, because, as Philippe Dubois (1990) has
argued, in photography reference and meaning are two different things
and a photograph, in itself, can “mean” almost anything.


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                                             Between, vol. XIII, n. 25 (maggio/May 2023)



      Second, much attention has been paid to the collaboration between
James and Coburn, and the issues of authorship raised by it. It is well
known how active a role James played in the choice of the subjects, even
the frames and angles of vision, by giving Coburn very detailed written
instructions. Furthermore, James was present right at the moment when
most of the images which feature views and objects in London were taken,
and everything leads to believe that they were taken under his strict super-
vision. Many have maintained that James and Coburn’s collaboration was
a happy instance of the productive interplay between literature and pho-
tography, of a true intermedial endeavour1. According to others, James’s
intrusive presence throughout the process was a form of high-handed con-
trol exercised by the writer on the photographer, aimed at muting pho-
tography (and illustration), by inhibiting Coburn’s own creativity. Such
control would be the cause of the poor results that Coburn – an undeniably
talented photographer, if not Atget, and a prominent member of the Cam-
era Work group – achieved with the frontispieces to the New York Edition2.
Be it as it may, it is hardly debatable that the results are weird when com-
pared with Coburn’s other achievements, and even with his other experi-
ences as illustrator: it is sufficient to consider H.G. Wells’ The Door in the
Wall and Other Stories (1911), or the 1954 edition of Stevenson’s Edinbourgh:
Picturesque Notes (fig. 1) to seize the difference3. In contrast, the pictures
for the New York Edition, with very few exceptions, look strangely frigid,
insignificant, and dumb. But that is precisely the reason why they continue
to be puzzling and to invite scrutiny.
      A third focus of inquiry revolves around the everlasting question:
why? Why did James, given his well-known scorn towards the photograph-
ic medium, stated again and again in letters, essays and fiction writing,
choose photography for such a cherished project as the New York Edition?
Did his attitude towards photography change over time? Was he struck
with Coburn’s skill, to the point of reversing previous judgments4? Was
photography, at the time the modern (and democratic) medium par excel-
lence, a way to appeal to modern readers, to a larger public, a strategy to

    1
       Cf. Higgins 1982, Bogardus 1985, Harmon 2002.
    2
       Cf. Tick 1993. It is worth mentioning that the photographs are not credit-
ed, and that James only acknowledged Coburn’s contribution in the last preface,
the one to The Golden Bowl, after an appeal made by Coburn himself.
     3
       The date of the edition of Stevenson’s book should not be misleading: Co-
burn’s Edinbourgh pictures were mostly taken between 1904 and 1905.
     4
       Cf. Bogardus 1984.


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Donata Meneghelli, Boring Postcards




                        Fig. 1. Edinbourgh, 1905.


make difficult – and less and less read – books more appealing5? Or, given
James’s ambivalent and anxious feelings towards illustration in general,
was photography, in James’s eyes, a “no medium”, an “anti-medium”, a
transparent medium susceptible of entirely diluting itself in the represented
object, and therefore perceived as less menacing, less competitive vis-à-vis
the literary text6 – if compared with the traditional black and white draw-
ing? Such questions are not to be offhandedly dismissed, on the contrary,
and some of them are very relevant indeed. However, the problem here is
again twofold. On the one hand, they put too much emphasis on James’s
intentions while downscaling the tangible effects that the photographic
images may engender in the specific context of the New York Edition, the
ways readers are apt (or prompted) to process them in that context. On
the other hand, such questions often tend to “essentialize” photography,
overlooking issues related to its established uses in the last decades of the
nineteenth century, cultural practices, photographic genres, etc.
      That said, it is true that, if James didn’t exactly choose to be illustrated
in the New York Edition (illustrations were an integral part of the publishing


     5
         Cf. Nadel 1995, Tucker 2010.
     6
         Cf. Schloss 1989.


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                                              Between, vol. XIII, n. 25 (maggio/May 2023)



protocols for a deluxe collected edition, printed on handmade paper, beau-
tifully bound and sold by subscription), he did choose frontispieces and,
most of all, he did choose photography7: what did he expect from it? What
did he imagine its added value to the volumes would be? James’s choice
was undoubtedly original, though less so than it may appear. Photograph-
ic illustration of serious literature was not so unprecedented at the end of
the nineteenth century, as we shall see.
      The lines of inquiry that I have rapidly summed up provide percep-
tive insights on this curious photo-literary case. However, they miss two
fundamental points. First, they fail to read the frontispieces in the context
of James’s spatial imagination, where space is at the same time metaphor,
structural principle, and theatrical stage. Despite his proverbial spare de-
scriptions, sparer and sparer in the later phases of his career, James is an
essentially spatial writer, and the relevance of space in his fiction is par-
amount. Aptly, in the Preface to The Golden Bowl, James referred to the
frontispieces as «pictures of our ‘set’ stage with the actors left out» (1984:
1327), and indeed they mostly represent empty spaces/places, that is, spac-
es/places emptied of the human element, as if they were waiting for an
entrance, for someone to appear. More technically, they are scenic stills,
that work as the apparatus of that same spatial imagination, at various levels.
As such, the frontispieces should be considered less as a succession of sin-
gle illustrations, each one related to ‘its’ own text, than as a series of images
related to one another and to several texts at the same time, in an intersec-
tional pattern that goes beyond the mere one-to-one association. Despite
the captions that should keep every image in its proper place, what Roland
Barthes has called the «anchorage» function (1977: 37), the frontispieces
tend to migrate and to establish multiple connections, overstepping their
paratextual borders, and should therefore be read together.
      Second, many analyses fail to take into account – and to connect the
frontispieces to – the New York Edition’s overall project (on which James
spent nearly five years of his life), both literary and editorial. The New
York Edition is a compromise-formation between different and conflicting

    7
        The correspondence between James, his literary agent James B. Pinker, and
Scribner’s editors during the making of the New York Edition leaves no doubt
about Coburn’s images being the author’s choice. As for the choice of frontispiec-
es (and not images disseminated in the body of the text), in the memorandum
written for Scribner’s in 1905, James specified: «a single plate [for each volume],
though of a thoroughly superior quality» (1984: 368); clearly a strategy to keep
illustration at a safe distance.


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Donata Meneghelli, Boring Postcards



designs, marked by multiple fractures: a marketing enterprise (which will
turn into a financial failure); a complex exercise in authorship; the con-
struction of a literary monument reflecting/establishing the canonical sta-
tus of the author; an autobiographical journey through one’s experience
and writing career; the foundations of a Jamesian aesthetic. Accordingly,
it also targets different publics, both a «highly specialized, sophisticated
group of readers, most of them presumably already familiar with the oeuvre
the Edition re-presents», and the more «”distracted” modern reader» (Mc
Whirter 1995: 12-13). In this manifold venture, the prefaces that James ex-
pressly wrote for each novel or group of shorter stories play a key role, as
the publishers understood at once:

            We cannot refrain – wrote Scribner’s editor to James – from
         expressing to you our absolute delight with the prefaces which seem
         to us not only to constitute a real feature of the edition but to furnish
         something very nearly, if not quite, unique in literature itself, and
         we cannot imagine anything more enchanting to the interest of your
         readers and the attractiveness of the volumes (Brownell 1906).

      The publishers were right. The prefaces are indeed a «feature», some-
thing unprecedented that they hoped would make the volumes more sell-
able, being at the same time the connective tissue of the New York Edition.
They trace links between the different – and up to that point scattered
– texts, suggesting unifying patterns. More importantly, they weave to-
gether and overlay texts and author, fiction and biography, fiction and
critical discourse, theory, aesthetic, and literary practice. For these rea-
sons, the prefaces should be considered as another linguistic block with
which the images interact, in a network of cross-relations between fic-
tional texts and images, fictional texts and prefaces, prefaces and images,
images and images8. It is this kind of reading that I intend to develop in
my essay. In addition, while the role of the captions is often overlooked
by critics, I mean to take them seriously, as still another textual layer to be
reckoned with.




     8
      To my knowledge, only two scholars have addressed the relationship be-
tween Coburn’s frontispieces and James’s prefaces: De Romanis 1999 and Mc
Whirter 2006.


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                                               Between, vol. XIII, n. 25 (maggio/May 2023)



                2. Reading against the captions:
               spaces and the narrative proxemics
      What do the frontispieces illustrate? Jan Baetens and Hilde Van Gelder
have argued that in the last decades of the nineteenth century photographic
images were perceived as incapable of conveying any narrative or dramatic
effect whatsoever, and this partly explains the belated encounter between
photography and the novel (2006: 258). James’s attitude appears perfectly
coherent with such common view. In the last preface he discusses Coburn’s
frontispieces and praises them for their «shyness», for managing «not to
keep, or to pretend to keep, anything like dramatic step with their sugges-
tive matter»: «subjects […] the reference of which to Novel or Tale should
exactly be not competitive and obvious», «images always confessing them-
selves mere optical symbols or echoes, expressions of no particular thing in
the text, but only of the type or idea of this or that thing» (1984: 1327).
      Coburn’s «shy» images are indeed completely nondramatic and
non-narrative, except for the last frontispiece, that could be seen as illus-
trating a scene, since at the end of The Golden Bowl two characters leave a
house in Portland Place on a cab (fig. 2). Otherwise, as we have already
noted, they represent spaces/places emptied of human presence. But there
is something more in James’s words. First, the insistence on abstraction,
the general – as opposed to the particular – content of the images, almost
as if they were pictograms («optical symbols», «the type or idea»), which
is perfectly consistent with their being frontispieces, symbolic de jure. Fur-




           Fig. 2. «Portland Place» (The Golden Bowl), vol. XXIV.



                                                                                      75
Donata Meneghelli, Boring Postcards



thermore, the claiming of a tenuous relation between the single image and
the single text (a not obvious or competitive reference: in other words, a
reference not immediately apparent). This way, the identity of referents
that is supposed to link text and image (Baetens and Van Gelder 2006: 266)
becomes uncertain, open. Going a step further, we could almost understand
James’s words as an invitation to disregard the captions, captions that in
many cases are themselves very general and do not act as «a control […]
in the face of the projective power of pictures (Barthes 1977: 38)». Can we
read the frontispieces against the captions, and also against the common
usages of illustrations at the time? Let’s go back to the spatial imagination.
       In many ways, James anticipated «the spatial turn» that has recently
hit literary studies and the humanities9, first of all because he conceives the
act of narration itself in spatial terms. By general consent James is not only
the practitioner, but the theoretician of point of view in fiction. Particularly,
he is the strenuous advocate of the limited perspective(s), that is, the tell-
ing of the story through the standpoint (consciousness, vision, perception,
biases…) of one or more characters, actors in the fictional world. He is the
one who dismissed omniscient narration, so paving the way for modern-
ist multiperspectivity, perceptual relativism, etc. This theory – as Jameson
put it, «Henry James’s codification of this already existing technique, his
transformation of it into the most fundamental of narrative categories, and
the development around it of a whole aesthetic» (1981: 221) – was system-
atized in the prefaces to the New York Edition. We might even say that
in the prefaces James “invented” point of view as a theoretical tool. To
conceptualize and phrase it, in the preface to The Portrait of a Lady he used
a spatial image that was to become famous:

            The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million – a
         number of possible windows not to be reckoned, rather; every one of
         which has been pierced, or is still pierceable, in its vast front, by the
         need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual
         will. These apertures, of dissimilar shape and size, hang so, all
         together, over the human scene that we might have expected of them
         a greater sameness of report than we find. They are but windows at
         the best, mere holes in a dead wall, disconnected, perched aloft; they
         are not hinged doors opening straight upon life. But they have this
         mark of their own that at each of them stands a figure with a pair
         of eyes, or at least with a field-glass, which forms, again and again,


     9
          Cf. Pickles 2004, Tally and Drakakis 2012, Tally 2014.


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                                                    Between, vol. XIII, n. 25 (maggio/May 2023)




Fig. 3, «The Court of the Hotel», vol. XIII (The Riverberator).


      for observation, a unique instrument, insuring to the person making
      use of it an impression distinct from every other. […] The spreading
      field, the human scene, is the ‘choice of subject’; the pierced aperture,
      either broad or balconied or slit-like and low-browed, is the ‘literary
      form’; but they are, singly or together, as nothing without the posted
      presence of the watcher – without, in other words, the consciousness
      of the artist (James 1984: 1075).

      The window as a metaphor of representation is certainly not a novelty
in western culture, nor in the mimesis discourse and practice that accompa-
ny the rise of realism in nineteenth century literature. Following Philippe
Hamon10, it has mainly two functions. First, in the meta-discourse, it is a
figure that stands for the author’s vision, with a special emphasis put on
the glass as a filter. Second, the window, together with its variants, such
as the door, the wall, the mirror, the shopwindow, is a technème, that is, an
architectural element inside the text, that allows the writer to segment the
fictional world (inside vs. outside, public vs. private, visible vs. invisible)
and to justify descriptive passages by delegating the vision to some charac-


     10
          Cf. Hamon 1989, 1993.


                                                                                           77
Donata Meneghelli, Boring Postcards



ter placed in front of a shopwindow or a mirror, or looking out a window.
In this framework, the technèmes that haunt the realistic text are operators
of visibility and, therefore, of legibility.
     James draws on this tradition in the prefaces to the New York Edition,
where windows, doors, glasses surface throughout the volumes, gravitat-
ing around the metaphor of the house of fiction. Accordingly, Coburn’s
frontispieces, which are placed at each volume’s threshold, on the left page,
which introduce the prefaces even before the fictional texts, reproduce a
collection of technèmes, in their manifold possible material embodiments.
In other words, they may be regarded as illustrating or punctuating the
metatext, the (self)commentary on the text, rather than the text (Baetens
2022: 64). More bluntly still, they may be seen as illustrating the way the
stories are narrated, the aesthetic framework from which they stem: some-
thing much more nonrepresentational and nonfigurative than a scene in a
novel, or even the setting of a novel.
     The frontispieces are a sequence of houses, façades, doors, windows,
shopwindows, balconies, fences, grids, mirrors (fig. 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8), starting
from the windowed house that opens the first volume of (and the pref-
ace to) The Portrait of a Lady (fig. 9), and offers itself as a visualization of
James’s metaphor. We will go back to this image, which is indeed – with its
frontal and postcard-like framing – a meagre equivalent for the visionary
architecture conjured by James’s words. Most likely, Coburn’s creativity
was hindered by James’s controlling presence, because a few years later he
autonomously produced a much more masterful take on the same theme: a




 Fig. 4. «On Sundays, now, you might be at home» (“Lady Barbarina”), Vol. XIV.



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Fig. 5. «The Curiosity Shop», vol. XXIII    Fig. 6. «Some of the Spoils», vol. X (The
(The Golden Bowl).                          Spoils of Poynton).




Fig. 7. «St. John’s Wood», vol. VIII (The   Fig. 8. «The Doctor’s Door», vol, XIX (The
Tragic Muse).                               Wings of the Dove).



                                                                                      79
Donata Meneghelli, Boring Postcards




        Fig. 9. «The English Home», vol. III (The Portrait of a Lady).




                       Fig. 10. The Thousand Windows, 1912.



80
                                             Between, vol. XIII, n. 25 (maggio/May 2023)



modern, urban, overbearing, stifling,
panopticton-like house of a thou-
sand windows (fig. 10).
      However, in his use of the tech-
nèmes, James distances himself from
the tradition I have hinted at. His
windows have nothing to do with
description, and little to do with the
author’s vision, at least in the usual
sense of the terms and despite the
reference to «the consciousness of
the artist» in the passage that I have
quoted. Neither are they operators
of legibility. On the contrary, their
role is more often to obstruct or blur
vision, as the invariably closed doors
in the frontispieces testify, or as the
shopwindow that opens the volume
containing In the Cage – with its grid-
like and fragmenting glass, made
opaque by advertising posters –
shows (fig. 11).
      In James’s discourse and prac- Fig. 11. «The Cage», vol. XI (In the Cage).
tice, the window has two interlaced
and often superimposed functions. First, it is a threshold that both separates
and connects two different spaces: the space where the story is narrated
and the space where the story unfolds. Second, as James accurately phrases
it, the window is «the literary form», and corresponds to the character’s
limited perspective from which the narrative is not only told but construct-
ed. Every window – each one different from the other, great windows at
some piano nobile, balconies, French doors, little upper windows, splits in
an old wall – has different shape and dimension, is placed at a variable dis-
tance from the «human scene», and therefore each time it frames a differ-
ent portion of that scene, it circumscribes a visual field, it traces a perimeter
and fixes the borders. James is the keenest land surveyor of modern fiction,
and the frontispieces to the New York Edition – with their sharp lines, neat
contours and contrasts, unimaginative style, so distant from the soft focus
and pictorialist effects of Coburn’s work of the same period (fig. 12) – are
also the diagrams to be delivered to the Castle authorities (the cultivated
readers, the critics, James’s fellow-practitioners…).


                                                                                    81
Donata Meneghelli, Boring Postcards




Fig. 12. Regent’s Canal, 1906.           Fig. 13. «The Faubourg Saint-Germain»,
                                         vol. II (The American).


       The window stands for the «related point of view», the «actor’s im-
agination and vision», «the wondering witness» (James 1984: 1297, 1089,
1160), either speaking in the first-person or mediated by an impersonal
narrative voice. This is a fundamental distinction, in James’s narrative the-
ory and practice, because the limited perspective combined with the im-
personal voice is something like his technical trademark. As he points out
in the preface to What Maisie Knew, the «difference […] is but of a shade:
it is [Maisie’s] relation, her activity of spirit, that determines all our own
concern – we simply take advantage of these things better than she herself»
(ibid.: 1161). Looking out the window, then, there is the baffled, puzzled,
confused witness; and next to her, there is an illegitimate presence which
watches Maisie watching, a second witness who «takes advantage» of Mai-
sie’s vision and always risks superimposing his gaze on hers. For this very
reason, James’s window is a paradoxical object: it both hangs on the scene
and is within the scene; it is a threshold that is not placed between the in-
side and the outside, but inside and outside at the same time (Meneghelli 1997:
216). Likewise, most of the frontispieces are two-faceted, they represent
both the intangible site of narration and the “concrete” scene of the stories:
both an abstract and de-contextualized façade, door, window (even more



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              Fig. 14. «The Halls of Julia», vol. XVII (Julia Bride).


abstract and de-contextualized thanks to the framing, the close up, and the
lack of human presence), and the aristocratic district in Paris where Chris-
topher Newman experiences his defeat (fig. 13).
     The house of fiction deals with what Georg Simmel, discussing the
bridge and the door, called «the relentless separation of space», in order
to locate interfaces, to bridge connections, to identify gaps (1995: 5). It is
probably true – as Stanley Tick has argued – that doors, bridges and shop-
windows are, and were already at the beginning of the Twentieth centu-
ry, photographic staples (1993: 82, 91). But in the New York Edition they
also become theoretical objects in Simmel’s sense, almost an experiment in
conceptual photography. Through the house of fiction and its gravitating
technèmes, James doesn’t simply describe a literary technique, nor a dy-
namic of representation. First and foremost, he stages a narrative proxemics:
that is, the arrangement of voices and points of view, a mobile system of
emplacements, a measurement of the distances or the proximity that each
time obtain between author, narrator, characters, and the reader, to whom
the «related point of view» offers an ideal emplacement from which to per-
form interpretive processes and enact aesthetic responses. Such proxemics
is precisely the unrelenting shifting between those different poles, like the
two ghost-like, sliding silhouette that haunt the façade of the Metropolitan
Museum in the frontispiece to vol. XVII (fig. 14).
     Within this framework, Fredric Jameson’s well known allegations, that
the Jamesian’s point of view is one of the «textual determinants which pro-



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Donata Meneghelli, Boring Postcards




                        Fig. 15. Intérieurs parisiens.


duce and institutionalize the new subjectivity of the bourgeois individual»,
a late nineteenth-century bourgeois «containment strategy, which comes
into being as a protest and a defense against reification, [and] ends up fur-
nishing a powerful ideological instrument in the perpetuation of an increas-
ingly subjectivized and psychologized world» (1981: 154, 221), should be
reconsidered. Because the point of view as proxemics is a process that con-
tinuously decentres what should be the centre, both in the narrative theory
and in the concrete textual realizations. The celebrated Jamesian «centres of
consciousness» or «reflectors» are less «monads» (Jameson) than intersub-
jective nexuses with permeable borders, that expose the contradictions and
tensions within the very myth of individualism11.
      Furthermore, what I have called a narrative proxemics is anything
but a disembodied schema. The space of narration, as James conceives it,
is the space where knowledge is negotiated, and knowledge, for James, is
not only an epistemological concern (anticipating, once again, modernist
stances), but a political one, related to issues of status, gender, class, na-
tionality. James’s essential questions – who knows what, who can tell it


     11
          Cf. Cameron, 1989.


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                                               Between, vol. XIII, n. 25 (maggio/May 2023)




Fig. 16. Andy Stephenson, Hardwick House, 2007 (source: Wikipedia, https://en.wikipe-
dia.org/wiki/Hardwick_House,_Oxfordshire).


and to whom, who is the object of whose gaze, to whom does the gaze
belong, where does it stand and who/where the target is – always underlie
a set of highly intertwined power-relations. But knowledge concerns and
power relations, in turn, always rely on «positions», as geographer Denis
Cosgrove has noted (1999: 7). James’s space of narration can be construed
as a narrative proxemics because, though intangible, it remains an essen-
tially social space, abstract and concrete at the same time: the theatre of the
negotiation I have mentioned above. Photography, in the form of Coburn’s
scenic stills, allowed James to materialize it with a force that no black and
white drawing could match.
      And yet, Jameson is right, at least as far as the frontispieces are con-
cerned. Because, if they are an experiment in rendering James’s narrative
proxemics, if they are visual equivalents of the shifting work of conscious-
ness, that same consciousness is seen from a distance (despite the close
ups), as an external object which can be observed. This feature comes to
the forefront if we compare Coburn’s frontispieces with the photographs
collected by Eugène Atget in 1910 in the album Intérieurs parisiens. What
strikes, in these pictures, is their being suffocatingly full, and the sense of
closeness they suggest, as if the registering instrument (the camera) and the
objects were in the same scale (fig. 15). As Didier Maleuvre has pointed out:

        In trying to take a picture of the place where one is, Atget really
     attempts to represent the place where vision and consciousness take



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Donata Meneghelli, Boring Postcards



     place – the place of the subject. The Intérieurs parisions bridges the
     distance between the camera and the scenery by collapsing the field of
     vision and the object it seeks to seize (1999: 152)

     In contrast, in the frontispieces to the New York Edition «the place of
the subject» appears objectified and therefore domesticated. Either con-
sciousness – the narrator’s, the character’s, even the reader’s – is in front
of the window (the door, the façade, the shop window, the mirror…) and
look at it from outside, from a safe position; or it is made into a bourgeois
door, a bourgeois house, a great palace, a museum. Either way, a friction
emerges between the prefaces and the images, since the images convey a
somewhat petrified and “monumental” version of James’s aesthetic. They
are not consistent visual translations of James’s metaphors, but – partly,
at least – counter-texts that problematize those very metaphors. This is
especially true of the core-image of the house (repeated at least ten times
in the frontispieces), fetish of the bourgeois culture, equivalent and pros-
thesis of the bourgeois subject and individualism’s ideology. And of the
particular house that opens the third volume (fig. 9), a reproduction of
Hardwick House (fig. 16), a Tudor residence in Oxfordshire to which the
magazine Country Life had devoted an illustrated reportage in 1906. The
house of fiction becomes «The English Home» (this is the caption affixed
to Coburn’s photograph), with its web of references to Englishness, tra-
dition, hidyllic rurality, class, heritage. Downtown Abbey avant la lettre.

3. The writer and the transatlantic scene: spaces into places
      There is another English home, among the frontispieces to the New
York Edition, that holds a special status: the one that opens vol. IX, con-
taining a novel by 1898, The Awkward Age. Its remarkable feature is – once
again – related to the photograph’s referent (fig. 17). It is a picture of Lamb
House, James’s residence in Rhy, Sussex, where he moved at the end of
1897, with a twenty-one-year lease, and which is today a museum owned
by the National Trust. But it is captioned «Mr. Longdon’s», and is therefore
supposed to represent the residence of a character in the novel.
      As I have already suggested, the frontispieces hold together and con-
flate different spaces: the space of narration, the fictional space, the real
space (the “world of the author”, the space of writing). The example just
mentioned perfectly embodies this manifold function: it is another version
of the windowed house of fiction, it is the house of the main character in
The Awkward Age, it is an «English home», and James’s own house, a house,


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Fig. 17. «Mr. Longdon’s», vol. IX (The Awkward Age).


furthermore, that he acquired just at the time when he was writing the nov-
el in question. Simultaneously a theoretical, fictional, real and biographical
object, it tells us something about the mobile borders between the different
spaces.
      Again and again, in the prefaces, James tells «the story of one’s story»
(1984: 1309), that is, the circumstances surrounding each act of writing, and
these circumstances mostly amount to some spatial coordinates. The image
network of the house (the room), the wall, the window, and the bustling
world outside, obsessively returns, but with a different meaning: now the
subject is the author in flesh and blood. The same scenario, though, is set
in ever-changing locations: a palace in Venice, an apartment in London or
in Boston, a house in the English countryside, a small hotel in the south of
France or on the Alps, some rented rooms in Paris, in Florence or in Rome.
The dissemination of the self makes Lamb House a mark in a wider map: I
am here, but also there…
      Each time James minutely discusses the multifarious relationships be-
tween the location where the writing occurred, or where the first germ of
the story was gathered, and the location where the narrated action occurs:
to transplant to Paris an anecdote originally set «in a grand old city of the


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Donata Meneghelli, Boring Postcards



south of Europe» (ibid.: 1195), and develop it into a full-fledged story in a
small pension in Baden; to write in New York about Paris, in London about
Italy or the South of France, in Washington about Europe, in Paris about
London, in Florence about New England, in Venice about Rome, as for the
second part of The Portrait of a Lady, written in Venice and mainly set in
Rome, the pages of which evoke in James memories of the former rather
than the latter.

        There are pages of the book which, in the reading over, have seemed
     to make me see again the bristling curve of the wide Riva, the large
     colour-spots of the balconied houses and the repeated undulation of
     the little hunchbacked bridges, marked by the rise and drop again,
     with the wave, of foreshortened clicking pedestrians (ibid.: 1070).

      It is also possible, of course, to write in Paris about Paris, in London
about London, in an English country house about an English country
house, but it is a much rarer circumstance. This way, he constructed an im-
age of himself as the ever displaced writer, always caught in a “space lag”:
as the observer from a distance, as the gazer from elsewhere, who does not
belong, who lives (and writes) in a perpetual hotel, symbolic when not ac-
tual (fig. 3). An image where the notion of perspective finds a further, more
situated application: «I have ever, in general, found it difficult to write of
places under too immediate an impression—the impression that prevents
standing off and allows neither space nor time for perspective» (ibid.: 1059).
      Spaces turn into places, with geographical identities and names. Since
what do the frontispieces represent, sometimes explicitly, sometimes more
allusively, if not London (fig. 11), the English countryside (fig. 9), Venice
(fig. 18), Rome (fig. 19), Paris (fig. 20), New York (fig. 14), or New England
(fig. 21)? And again, they are two-faceted. On the one hand, the frontis-
pieces offer something like an autobiography in pictures of the wandering
writer, who in the New York Edition advertises himself as the cosmopolitan
novelist par excellence, boldly using – thanks to the weld joints between
prefaces, images, and literary texts – his life and biographical persona to
sell his books. More precisely, the frontispieces mark the «positions» of the
perpetual zigzag race that James – looking for perspective, for distance –
recreates in his telling «the story of one’s story».
      On the other hand, the wondering writer stages (and markets) him-
self as the epic poet of the late nineteenth-century transatlantic scene. The
space of autobiography becomes the fictional space and vice versa. The
frontispieces also trace the perimeter of James’s fictional world: a fictional


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Fig. 18. «The Venetian Palace», vol. XX       Fig. 19. «By St. Peter’s», vol. XVIII (Daisy
(The Wings of the Dove).                      Miller).




Fig. 20. «Splendid Paris, Charming Paris», vol. VI (The Princess Casamassima).



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Donata Meneghelli, Boring Postcards



world that, taken as a whole, is always the same, no matter the particular
story we pick up. Together, they form the enclosed map on which all the
stories can and should be grafted, the signposts of a real/symbolic geogra-
phy that works as a federative principle, somehow similar to Thomas Har-
dy’s Wessex, «an amalgam of the literal, the material, and the imaginative»
(Bullen 2013: xvii). It is not by chance that, though the idea of Wessex dates
from the publication of Far from the Madding Crowd in 1874 and was already
discussed by critics in the late 1880s, it became «a powerful package», as a
universe geographically both articulated and complete, in the first collect-
ed edition of Hardy’s works published from 1895.

          [Hardy] began to reassess Wessex in other ways too, reconstructing
      it in the new prefaces to individual novels. […] First of all, he decided
      to show readers something more of where Wessex was located. Each
      of the Wessex Novels came now with a map. In the preface to Far from
      the Madding Crowd (1895), he acknowledged that his work had already
      generated “explorers”; it is hard to avoid seeing this addition as an aid
      (though not an exact one) for pilgrims (Haslam 2009: 167-8).

     James’s Euro-America, too, is «an amalgam of the literal, the ma-
terial, and the imaginative» that could be explored, as we shall see.
And James, too, took the collected edition opportunity to give his ge-
ography another turn of the screw, by «reconstructing it» in the pref-
aces, by «show[ing] readers something more» of it through Coburn’s
frontispieces, by making that geography more delimited and defined
through the arrangement of the volumes. This way, he tried to turn his
oeuvre into something akin to a literary cycle, by using not recurring
characters (spare and episodic cases in James’s fiction) but recurring
places, a «unity of locale which create[s] a fictional world which exists
between the texts» (Pothier 1997-98: 110)12. If indeed characters don’t
recur throughout James’s novels and tales, it is undeniable that they
could have easily bumped into each other because they beat the same
tracks. The famous «international theme» that James exploited during
his whole career, the cultural clash between Europe and America, the
perpetual travelling through the Atlantic, is first and foremost a geog-
raphy, a recognizable territory in which all the stories unfold.

     12
        It is worth noting that Pothiier’s remarks refer to another amazing (mod-
ernist) experiment in literary geography: Faulkner’s creation of Yoknapatawpha
County.


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Fig. 21. vol. XVI, «The New England Street» (“Four Meetings”).


     The frontispieces to the New York Edition – and the captions that ac-
company them – work accordingly. The anecdotal reference that links each
of them to the single text to which it is associated is only half of the story.
Much more significant is the reticular system achieved by James. On the
one hand, there is the crossing reference of one image to several texts at the
same time, that are thus placed in relation to each other, in a trans-textual di-
mension13. But the trans-textual dimension also works the other way round,
since multiple scattered images can be associated to one single text beyond
the order arranged by the layout of the volumes. Thus the images appear
extremely integrated as signposts of James’s narrative geography, and at the
same time fungible, interchangeable: up to a certain point, one is as good as
the other. In this reticular system, captions play a key role, because of their
weak fictional reference: St. Peter, the Faubourg St. Germain, the court of
the hotel, the Venetian palace, the English home are simply locations, stages
where anything may happen. Either way, the single element is less relevant
than the whole series. James’s model seems to be the album, the portfolio.


    13
        To make a few examples: «By St. Peter’s» (fig. 17) could be related to “Dai-
sy Miller”, The Portrait of a Lady, Roderick Hudson and many other stories if we
interpret the image as a synecdoche or a symbol of Rome; «The English Home»
(fig. 8) to The Portrait of a Lady, The Princess Casamassima, The Spoils of Poynton,
“The Turn of the Screw”; «The Faubourg St. Germain» (fig. 11) to The American,
The Ambassadors, The Riverberator, and several short stories.


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Donata Meneghelli, Boring Postcards



                      4. Flirting with photography:
                    geography and the tourist-reader
      Usually, when photography thematically surfaces in Henry James’s
fiction, it is in the form of the photographic portrait: the uncanny portrait of
the man, full of spectral resonances, in “The Friends of the Friends”, Nan-
da’s photograph owned by Wanderbank in The Awkward Age, or the picture
where the antiquarian recognizes the Prince and Charlotte in The Golden
Bowl14. However, there is a short story, a much less known and canonical
text, though a little chef-d’oeuvre, where the photographs in question are
scenic still: “Four Meetings”, originally published in 1877, and included in
volume XVI of the New York Edition, where it is the text which the frontis-
piece refers to (fig. 21).
      “Four Meetings” opens on tea party set «in the depths of New Eng-
land» (James 1985: 227), in a small town ironically called North Verona, a
name invented by James. The narrator, a much travelled American who
has visited Europe several times and knows it at his fingertips, is asked
by the hostess, a Mrs. Latouche, «to show the photographs» to some of
the ladies present: the photographs, collected «in a couple of great port-
folios» brought home by Mrs. Latouche’s son, just returned from Europe,
are «large views of Switzerland, Italy and Spain, landscapes, reproduction
of famous buildings, pictures and statues» (ibid.: 227-9). He selects an at-
tractive young woman named Caroline Spencer and begins the strange
ceremony – or perhaps a common social ritual – consisting in looking at
the pictures with her and commenting on them, that is, talking about the
represented places (in the story, it is never question of the pictures qua
pictures, their artistic qualities or value).

         Occasionally, as I laid one of the pictures down, she said without
      confidence, which would have been too much: «Have you seen that
      place?» I usually answered that I had seen it several times […]. I had
      asked her at the outset whether she had been to Europe; to this she
      had answered «No, no, no» – almost as much below her breath as if
      the image of such an event scarce, for solemnity, brooked phrasing.
      But after that, though she never took her eyes off the pictures, she
      said so little that I feared she was at last bored. Accordingly when we
      had finished one portfolio I offered, if she desired it, to desist. I rather


     14
        On photographic portraits in James’s fiction, see Ceserani 2011 and Clayton
2017. I borrowed the title of my fourth section from Clayton’s brilliant essay.


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     guessed the exhibition really held her, but her reticence puzzled me and
     I wanted to make her speak. I turned round to judge better and then
     saw a faint flush in each of her cheeks. She kept waving her little fan to
     and fro. Instead of looking at me she fixed her eyes on the remainder of
     the collection, which leaned, in its receptacle, against the table.
        «Won›t you show me that?» she quavered, drawing the long breath
     of a person launched and afloat but conscious of rocking a little.
        «With pleasure,» I answered, «if you›re really not tired.»
        «Oh I›m not tired a bit. I›m just fascinated.» With which as I took
     up the other portfolio she laid her hand on it, rubbing it softly. «And
     have you been here too?»
        On my opening the portfolio it appeared I had indeed been there.
     One of the first photographs was a large view of the Castle of Chillon
     by the Lake of Geneva. «Here,» I said, «I’ve been many a time. Isn’t
     it beautiful?» And I pointed to the perfect reflexion of the rugged
     rocks and pointed towers in the clear still water. She didn’t say «Oh
     enchanting!» and push it away to see the next picture. She looked a
     while and then asked if it weren’t where Bonnivard, about whom
     Byron wrote, had been confined. I assented, trying to quote Byron’s
     verses, but not quite bringing it off. She fanned herself a moment and
     then repeated the lines correctly, in a soft flat voice but with charming
     conviction. I complimented her and assured her she was perfectly
     equipped for visiting Switzerland and Italy […] (ibid.: 229-30).

      The long scene is imbued with eroticism: she blushes, rubs her lips
with her fan «almost excitedly», and at a certain point the narrator says
that «she looked as pretty as if instead of showing her photographs I had
been making love to her» (ibid.: 231). The photographs work as both an
object of desire and an object mediating desire. From the start, the narrator
is drawn to the young woman, and when Mrs. Latouche states that Caro-
line Spencer is «just the person» because she «doesn’t care for flirting», he
replays that «if she didn’t care for flirting she wasn’t perhaps just the per-
son» (ibid.: 228). For him, the photographs are little more than memory
tokens and props in a seduction game. Things are less simple for Caroline
Spencer. She is captivated by the photographs, and by the narrator’s talk
about the represented places, because she has longed to visit Europe all
her life but has never been there. The short story dramatizes at the utmost
photography’s special appeal that results from its combining iconicity
(resemblance between image and referent) with indexicality, its being not
a mere image but an imprinting, «an emanation of the referent» (Barthes
1981: 80, my italics). In fact, the narrator himself interests Caroline Spen-
cer mainly as an «emanation» of Europe: he has been there, in front of


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Donata Meneghelli, Boring Postcards



those buildings and landscapes, exposed just like a negative; he literally
merges with the photographs, and like the photographs he is a medium
transmitting, representing, standing for the object of desire, Europe.
      In the short story, photography is placed in a complex network of ac-
tors, media, genres, practices, and even senses, beyond sight. Actors: the
narrator, the man of the world who has much travelled, Caroline Spencer,
the young woman from «the depth of New England» who cannot travel for
lack of money, Mrs. Latouche’s son, who has collected the pictures, who
probably bought them from some of the photograph retailers that were
becoming more and more widespread at the time; more generally, the
Americans travelling to Europe. Media: photography, literature, the spo-
ken word, and the intermedial dimension the pervades the whole scene.
Genres: at one point Caroline Spencer declares: «I know more about [for-
eign lands] than you might think […]. I mean by reading – for I’ve really
read considerable. In fact I guess I’ve prepared my mind about as much
as you can in advance. I’ve not only read Byron – I’ve read histories and
guide-books and articles and lots of things» (James 1985: 233). Practic-
es: travelling for leisure, flirting, social gatherings like the one offered by
Mrs. Latouche, collecting pictures, looking at them and conversing about
them. Senses: Caroline Spencer softly rubs the portfolio, the narrator hears
her soft flat voice repeating Byron’s lines. And then there is the emotional-
ly charged attitude that the female character projects onto the images and
the whole context.
      The network, and the emotion, revolve around one of the most im-
portant social phenomena of modernity, a practice in itself: tourism. Many
have highlighted the relation between the rise of modern tourism and the
medium of photography. According to John Urry and Jonas Larsen, not
by chance they both date back to 1840 and have contributed to create «the
tourist gaze», that is, the specific tourist’s ways of seeing places, ways that
are culturally shaped and directed by the tourism industry.

        We show how the tourist gaze has been inseparably tied up with
     the development and popularisation of cameras and photographs. The
     gaze is constructed discoursively and materially through images and
     performances of photography, and vice versa. We analyse significant
     moments within tourism photography and show how photographs
     enhance, frame and substitute for physical travel in complex and
     contingent ways […]. […] we show how photographs activate both
     ‘imaginative mobility’ and ‘memory travel’ […]. Photographs are
     more than just representations, and while photographic images are



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Fig. 22. The Castle of Chillon, 1860-1880, Archivi Alinari, Firenze.


      caught up with the moment, photographic objects have temporal and
      spatial duration. They are performative objects generating affective
      sensations (Urry, Larsen 2011: 155).

      Every point stressed by Urry and Larsen is made relevant in “Four
Meetings”. However, there is a missing link in their analysis, and this is
literature, as James’s story perfectly shows, by making Caroline Spencer
and the narrator immediately recall Byron’s reference (and lines) while
looking at a picture of Chillon, of which the Alinari archive can offer us a
model (fig. 22). The relation between tourism and photography intersects
the one between tourism and literature, tourism being indeed one of the
grounds where photography and literature meet, most especially in the
nineteenth century, when the spread of photography goes hand in hand
with the development of literary tourism. A striking example of such an
alliance are the extra-illustrated books put forth, between the end of the
1860s and the beginning of the twentieth century, by Tauchnitz publisher:
unbound editions of novels and travel guides set in Italy that «contained
blank spaces onto which tourists could paste photographs or postcards
relating to scenes in the text […]. When complete, the books were taken
to a specialist binder to be bound to their owner’s specifications» (Mills
2016: 65). The series, aimed at an Anglo-American audience, included in-
ter alia Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, Eliot’s Romola, Bulwer Lytton’s The




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Donata Meneghelli, Boring Postcards




Fig. 23. Venice, Canal Grande, 1896, Archivi Alinari, Firenze.


Last Days of Pompei, and James’s first travelogue book, Portrait of Places15.
      Such a phenomenon calls attention to a particular type of readers,
the tourist-readers, who could be commercially exploited, as the Tauchnitz
editions testify, and to whom Caroline Spencer (though she has never been
to Europe) certainly belongs. And it suggests that for these readers the
frontiers between fiction, travel-guide and travelogue were blurred, while
it points out new “ways of reading” literature: performing, acting out the
text, by visiting the places described in a novel or in a poem, by using it
as a plan or a map, capable of shaping cognitive and emotional responses,
triggering either memories or expectations. It also tells us something about
the readers’ desire for photographic illustrations and for turning literature
into an intermedial experience. Furthermore, the Tauchnitz extra-illustrat-
ed series, with its singular dialectics between customized books and ready-
made images (the same for everybody), emphasizes how photography, in
the last decades of the nineteenth century, had already produced an iconic

     15
       See the catalogue of the Todd collection of photographically extra-illus-
trated Tauchnitz editions at Princeton University Library (https://catalog.princ-
eton.edu/catalog/9933841343506421: last retrieved December 15, 2022). James’s
book is listed at p. 5.


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archive, a formatted and stereotyped imaginary of places.
      The portfolios in “Four Meetings” and the extra-illustrated Tauch-
nitz series give us a fundamental key for reading Coburn’s and James’s
frontispieces. Because the frontispieces clearly “flirt” with late nineteenth
century touristic visual culture and photography, in at least two different
ways. First of all, the frontispieces are – as the whole New York Edition – a
conflicting project, in that they partly reproduce touristic clichés and partly
work to mark a distance from those very clichés, without finding a balance,
a visual manner to treat and reframe the cliché, unless it be the close up and
the frequent depth of field reduction, that differentiate Coburn’s images
(fig. 18) from the typical vistas at the time (fig. 23). What James wrote to
Coburn about the Venice subjects is telling: «And do any other odd and
interesting bit you can, that may serve as a sort of symbolised and gen-
eralised Venice […]; preferring the noble and fine aspect, however, to the
merely shabby and familiar […] – yet especially not choosing the pompous
and obvious things that one everywhere sees photos of». (James 1984: 428).
      What is there in between the «shabby» and the «pompous» or «obvi-
ous»? What is the difference between the «symbolised», the «obvious» and
the «noble»? Is not «noble» Venice what «one everywhere sees photos of»?
The problem is that James’s geography, even when/if allusively presented,
had to remain recognisable, so as to appeal to the reader’s experiences and
expectations. As one reviewer of the first volumes of the New York Edi-
tion aptly wrote: «It was a very happy idea to illustrate each volume with
portraits of some scene, situation, etc., representative of the locality of the text
[…]: the pictures are an immense addition to the novels» (Hale Jr. 1908:
176, my italics). The pictures counterbalanced James’s «modernistic text»,
by materialising his «spirit of place» and making it match the reader’s own:
the sense, in his fiction, «of great centres, of Rome, of London, of Paris, “the
splendid, the glorious”, the sophisticated, the decadent, as they [the read-
ers] used to say themselves» (ibid.).
      However, there is another way to “flirt” with photography. As Victoria
Mills rightly argues, the Tauchnitz extra-illustrated books «rise questions
about what happens when a real thing becomes a literary object» (2016:
82). This is certainly true, but we could also ask the opposite question:
what happens when a literary thing becomes a real object? Because this
is precisely how some of the frontispieces work, thanks to the deep-root-
ed belief (at least in late nineteenth and early twenty century debate) in
the veracity of the photographic image, its claim to be “the real thing”. A
nameless bench, in an unidentifiable spot, becomes «Saltram’s Seat», titled
after the name of the main character of the story in question and only made


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Donata Meneghelli, Boring Postcards




Fig. 24. «Saltram’s Seat», vol. XV (“The   Fig. 25. «Juliana’s Court», vol. XII (The
Coxon Fund”).                              Aspern Papers).


noteworthy by it (fig. 24); an anonymous bit in Venice (but in the picture
Venice is unrecognizable as such, if not on the story’s authority) becomes
the back door of the old crumbling palace where the unfathomable Juliana
Bordereau lives (and dies) in The Aspern Papers (fig. 25).
      The issue at stake, here, is less a hide-and-seek game with reality and
fiction than the promotion – legitimized by photography – of one’s literary
texts to a collective (touristic) mythology, to a territory to be explored by
pilgrims, by juxtaposing, and thus equating, places «one everywhere sees
photos of» and places that primarily exist in Henry James’s fiction. Any-
one can find St. Peter, the Arc de Triomphe or the Canal Grande, but how,
armed with a copy of The Aspern Papers, to search for Juliana’s faded Pala-
zzo16? We learnt from biographical data that it is or it should be Palazzo


     16
       The «Museo del Camminare», an online based institution for the promo-
tion of walking tourism in Venice, has reconstructed two Jamesian itineraries,
mixing fiction and the author’s biography. See: http://www.museodelcammina-
re.org/progetti/re_iter/james/james_en.html (last retrieved December 15, 2022).


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Fig. 26, Hardy’s plaque in Dorchester (source: https://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/lite-
rarytourist/? p=143)


Capello, where James’s friend Constance Fletcher lived and James himself
stayed. But, as far as we know, it is «Juliana’s Court». «A place – writes
Philippe Hamon – is never truly a place until it has become a named local-
ity (lieu-dit)» (1993: 45). Perhaps James dreamed of some plaque, one day,
like the one that we can see today affixed to a building in Dorchester and
celebrating it as the house of Hardy’s Major of Casterbridge (fig. 26). Some-
thing like: «This Palazzo is reputed to have been lived in by Juliana Bor-
dereau in Henry James’s story titled The Aspern Papers written in 1888».
      In my essay, I have tried to shift the focus from a classificatory frame-
work – what is an illustration? How does it differ from an iconotext? To
which kind of intermedial relation should it be traced back? – to a perform-
ative one, asking myself: what does an illustration, or a set of illustrations,
do (to the text, the author, the readers)? In other words, freely borrowing
from the speech-acts theory lexicon, what is its force, both illocutionary and
perlocutionary. That is, both in terms of intentions (author’s, illustrators’,
publishers’) and in terms of the effects produced on the readers, effects
that can be actual or potential, foreshadowed by the authors and/or her
«allies»17, so blurring the rigid divide between illocutionary and perlo-
cutionary, or completely unpredicted. Far from being an absolute value,
this force is a variable magnitude, so to speak, that changes over time, ac-


    17
         Cf. Genette 1997.


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Donata Meneghelli, Boring Postcards



cording to different contexts, triggering different interpretive processes.
However, as the frontispieces to the New York Edition make evident, such
a force only exists within a wider relational and intersectional network,
in the multi-layered interplay between the images and the whole set of
linguistic messages – far beyond what we may call the “main text” – that
dynamically surround them.




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                                References
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                               About the author
     Donata Meneghelli

      Donata Meneghelli is Full Professor of Comparative Literature and
Literature and Visual Studies at the University of Bologna. She is member
of the PhD program in “Letterature, arti, media: la Transcodificazione” at
the University of L’Aquila (Italy), and of the directive board of the inter-
national PhD Program in Comparative Studies at the University of Lisbon
(http://phdcomp.net/). She has participated in many international projects,
is member of the editorial board of several periodicals, and is editor in
chief of “Scritture migranti”. Her interests focus on the theory and history
of the novel, modernism, intermediality, narratology, adaptation, litera-
ture and visuality, thing theory. Amongst her publications: Una forma che
include tutto (1997), Teorie del punto di vista (1998), “What Can a Film Make
of a Book? Seeing Literature through Apocalypse Now and Barry Lyndon”,
Image [&] Narrative (n. 8, May 2004), “Sophie Calle: tra fotografia e parola”,
in Guardare oltre, Eds. S. Albertazzi – F. Amigoni (2008), “Le texte et son
ombre ou le lecteur supplicié dans Projet pour une révolution à New York”, In-
terférences littéraires (n. 6, mai 2011), Storie proprio così. Il racconto nell’era della


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Donata Meneghelli, Boring Postcards



narratività totale (2012), “Thinking Literature, Thinking Narrative: Liaisons
dangereuses”, L’Esprit créateur, special issue “The Idea of Literature” (4.3,
2014), Senza fine. Sequel, prequel, altre continuazioni: il testo espanso (2018),
“Gli oggetti di Balzac: tra segno e presenza”, Strumenti critici (n. 1, gen-
naio-aprile 2022). She has also worked as a translator of critical and literary
texts both from English and French.

      E-mail:donata.meneghelli3@unibo.it



                                      The Article
      Date sent: 31/10/2022
      Date accepted: 28/02/2023
      Date published: 30/05/2023



                            How to cite this article
      Meneghelli, Donata, “Boring postcards. Spaces and places in the pho-
tographic frontispieces to Henry James’s New York Edition, The Illustrated
Fiction between the 19th and 20th Century, Eds. C. Cao – G. Carrara – B. Seligar-
di, Between, XIII.25 (2023): 69-104, http://www.betweenjournal.it/




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