The Altar of the Dead
Consummating the Unconsummated
In ‘The Altar of the Dead’, Henry James might appear at his most morbid, but one way of thinking about James’s work is the attenuation of cause and effect. Here, a man goes each day to church and lights a candle to the various dead who are no longer in his life, including and most especially Mary Antrim, a woman he was due to marry. There, he sees a younger woman who is lighting a candle, too, and an unusual affinity develops between these two characters who appear more concerned with death than with life. George Stransom is fifty-five, and “he had not been a man of numerous passions, and even in all those years no sense had grown stronger in him than the sense of being bereft.” The love that he lost became the life that he lived as it came to define him, and there he is accumulating the dead as he continues living, attending the church less to acknowledge the presence of God than the increasing absence of people. It is in itself a rich theme: the notion that we pass through our lives as readily losing things as accumulating them, and few more than Stransom would sense this fact: his bride to be, died of a malignant fever after the wedding day had been arranged, “and he had lost before fairly tasting it an affection that promised to fill his life to the brim.”
However, though this is an important aspect of the theme, it collides with the central element of the story. The woman he sees each day becomes a complicit figure in his life, and, in another work, by another writer, this would indicate an emotional development, and also a realisation: that he should concern himself with the living more than the dead. James instead allows the story to become even more about death by showing us that this young woman is lighting but one candle, and this he works out is for Acton Hague, a man who has died relatively recently and was for years a sworn enemy. He is the one person he knew for whom he won’t light a candle, and there he is becoming fascinated by a woman who is lighting candles for one man only, and a man he couldn’t tolerate. James’ purpose is to allow the story that disrupts the theme to augment that theme by the conclusion. Christopher A Fahy believes, “only the descent of charity and Stransom’s forgiveness of his enemy, Acton Hague, allow for compositional harmony and the artwork's final execution.” (Christianity and Literature) It looks initially to Stransom that he has a fellow griever who shares his interest in the dead, and sees in her a faithful servant to the deceased, who turns out to be an unfaithful devotee of a man he hated. Instead of sharing his dark work, she is a grieving woman interested only in the death of one man, and it can seem to Stransom like a double betrayal. She isn’t living with the dead but grieving for one of its members, and that member is the one person who is for Stransom, somehow still alive, because his feelings of anger are still present. It is as if his feelings for others have settled into sorrow, while those for Acton Hague have sedimented into resentment, a resentment that becomes all the more pronounced when he discovers that the woman with whom he feels complicity is someone whom he then views as a figure of duplicity.
Returning to our opening remark about James’s approach to cause and effect, we can easily think of a narrative approach that would make causality much more pronounced. We could imagine a similar scenario, but in a different location. A cafe, perhaps, where each day an older man takes a coffee, and he sees a woman who starts to come in and order at the same time he does. They need never speak, but he assumes there is an affinity between them because they both order coffee in the same place and at the same time. After a while, he discovers that what he sees as a silent communion is a love she feels for someone else as he overhears a couple of staff members saying that the woman has come in every day since her boyfriend, who they mention used to work in the cafe, left the country and she comes in as if to remain close to him in his absence. The man realises who this person was and always believed he treated the regulars with contempt, and now feels a double betrayal as this woman isn’t sharing his lonely ritual, but is grieving for a loved one he didn’t like.
We offer a simplistic version of the James story, all the better to bring out the complicity/duplicity narrative in its most basic form. James offers it in its most complex manifestation, and it is why many commentators on James invoke the mystery and ambiguity of his work. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and Tzvetan Todorov, speak of the secret in James’s fiction. For the former pair, “if ever there was a writer who dealt with the secret, it was Henry James”, as they note he “began by looking for the secret in contents, even insignificant, half-opened ones, contents briefly glimpsed.” (A Thousand Plateaus) Todorov reckoned “the essential secret is the motive force of Henry James’s tales.” In our example, there need be no secret; only an irony that reveals the central character’s delusions. Instead of a woman who is implicitly complicit, he finds that there was no complicity at all, and discovers her duplicitousness in her lack of interest in sharing his rituals and thus sharing her life with him. It would be a tale of minor absurdity, nothing in the technique need complicate matters, and a device (overhearing a conversation) would be all it would take to dispel the fantasy that has been developing in the man’s head. It would be subjectivity meeting objectivity, and the actual nature of the events categorically revealed.
In ‘The Altar of the Dead’, cause and effect are weakened partly because James is interested less in subjective worlds and objective realities, but in the accumulation of virtualities. This is a matter of style, but not limited to it; a question of story, but not a notion that can be contained by the narrative. Three comments are useful here: one from Todorov, one Todorov quotes from Richard Ohmann, and the third from Deleuze and Guattari. Todorov notes, “James ‘style…has always been said to be too complex, obscure, pointlessly difficult. In fact, on this level too, James surrounds the ’truth,’ the event itself (which the main proposition often epitomises) with many subordinate clauses which are, in each case, simple in themselves but whose accumulation produces the effect of complexity.” Todorov notes that American stylistician, Ohmann, sees that James’ approach is one of ‘self-embedding’, with the ‘embedded’ elements of far greater importance than the main proposition. Meanwhile, Deleuze and Guattari say: James “never stopped pursuing his goal, inventing the necessary technical means. Molecularize the content of the secret and linearise its form.’’ Deleuze and Guattari, in some ways, echo Todorov’s remarks and Ohmann’s stylistic analysis by saying, James “…raised the possibility of there being an infinite form of secrecy that no longer even requires a content and has conquered the imperceptible.” (A Thousand Plateaus). Some may find in James a needless nuance, but others are more inclined to observe a necessary nexus that has created a complexity too great to be reduced to resolution. Again, one might say no more than this reflects the irresolute, and a simple reading of, for example, ‘The Beast in the Jungle’, could arrive at such a claim. There, the central character is fearing a great thing, and in the process, lives in such a way that he doesn’t see that the big thing he fears is the fear that he can’t conquer until it is too late. He fails to commit to a woman, and realises how much he has lost when she dies. But would such a take be too close to a molar reading, rather than the molecular Deleuze and Guattari talk about; would it indicate there would be no need for the intricate sentence structure Todorov insists is vital?
If we accept that there is the objective, subjective and the virtual, then what matters is how James dissolves the objective and the subjective to generate a proliferating virtuality. Returning to our earlier example, the story offers the subjective assumptions of the central character , one that collapses when confronted with an objective account of the situation. Any possible virtualities are quickly closed down, and the story concludes in reality rather than virtuality. In ‘The Altar of the Dead’, it is as if the death of his betrothed leads to the proliferation of the virtual when Stransom accepts this as the rounding of his own life. On her death, “it would have been false to say this life could really be emptied; it was still ruled by a pale ghost, still ordered by a sovereign presence.”
It is as though his fiancée’s death allows him to virtualise life, to see that there is in it not only subjective and objective states, but also ones that elude or expand these others. When Stransom meets his friend Paul Creston, a feeling of ‘felt strangeness’ overcomes him as he sees on Creston’s arm a woman. Was not Mrs Creston dead,” he first thinks, aware that his friend’s wife passed away, that this must be her, however impossible. But he quickly realises that this is another woman; that Creston went off to America to recover from his grief, and has promptly returned with an intimate duplicate. Kate Creston was a woman Stransom had known for “twenty years, and she was the only woman for whom he might perhaps have been unfaithful. She was all cleverness and sympathy and charm; her house had been the very easiest in all the world and her friendship the very firmest.” But there she is dead, and Creston has readily replaced her. Later, at home alone, “his eyes, in the swarming void of things, seemed to have caught Kate Creston’s, and it was into their sad silences he looked….He thought for a long time of how the closed eyes of dead women could still live — how they could open again, in a quiet lamplit room, long after they had looked their last.”
Simplifying this passage, one could say that Stransom always had feelings for Kate Creston, never acted upon them and finds himself horrified that while he always respected the Crestons’ marriage, the husband has now disrespected his wife’s memory by promptly taking up with another woman. That wouldn’t be a complete misreading, but it would be to misunderstand James’s preoccupations. Stransom isn’t annoyed with himself (for failing to take up with Kate), nor with his friend, for taking another wife. He is disturbed by it, and this unease rests on his relationship with the dead as virtual entities. It isn’t just that he conjures up Kate so easily in his mind’s eye, while it seems his friend can banish Kate from his, all the better to allow a new wife an actual existence. It is also that Kate still exists. When Stransom thinks that “the closed eyes of a dead woman could still live”, this is quite different from saying he closed his eyes and brought a dead woman back to life. The latter would merely be subjectivity. The former is virtuality. When Deleuze speaks of the virtual he notes, “the relationship between the actual and the virtual takes the form of a circuit, but it does so in two ways: sometimes the actual refers to the virtuals as to other things in the vast circuits where the virtual is actualized; sometimes the actual refers to the virtual as its own virtual, in the smallest circuits where the virtual crystallizes with the actual.” (‘The Actual and the Virtual’)
This notion of the virtual as its own virtual might be similar to Deleuze and Guattari’s claims on James in A Thousand Plateaus, when they speak of a secret revealed as close to D. H. Lawrence’s ‘dirty little secret’. This would be the type of revelation Stransom might discover in himself, or another might discover about him, where the important thing is the love he had for Kate that he never expressed. But that is of little interest; what matters much more is that Kate is more alive than her own ex-husband can recognise, and yet Stransom can see this. This has nothing to do with loving Kate, especially, but instead has to do with loving death as an encompassment of life. This isn’t the death drive of Freud, nor the potential nihilism in Nietzsche’s: "the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously!" (The Gay Science) It is to see the manifoldness of the world and that the folding of life into death, and death into life, all the better so that multiple virtualities can come out of existence. It makes what might seem a question of jealousy or morality, as insignificant next to what Stransom may see as Creston’s limitedness. In jealousy, Stransom could either regret never possessing the wife, and leaving her for years with this useless bofoon who hardly mourns her death, or see that Creston can do what Stransom can’t: find a beautiful younger woman and start all over again. In morality would lie the disappointment Stransom feels at his friend failing to give proper weight to his late wife’s death. But while these notions could be entertained, they would be turning James into a more straightforward writer than he happens to be. True, Stransom thinks that Creston “oughtn’t to have shown her at all”, instead of parading her on the street with him on his arm. But this is merely a first reaction. The important thing is that this meeting with Creston and his new wife haunts him.
This feeling also draws on the dead and on seeing a woman who clearly fascinates him and with whom he develops an increasing complicity. Yet while Creston wants actualised affection with his new wife, Stransom wants a virtualised one with this unnamed woman. This is clear in various ways, but we can comment on two of them. In the first, Stransom recognises his companion has suffered a bereavement, and he thinks less of the practicalities of her loss than the manifestation of her gains. Firstly, she now no longer has only one candle to light for the dead but two, as the dead in her life begin to pile up. Secondly, she will have more money, but this isn’t for Stransom a practical consideration chiefly, but one that relieves him of the vulgarity of such matters. Now “that her aunt’s tiny fortune had come to her, so that there was henceforth only one to consume which had formerly been made up to suffice for two…this was a joy to Stransom.” It would have been too ugly, he thinks, to have been by her side as a provider, the sort of thing that might seem to prove how honourable he is would be closer to a sign of dishonour: a demonstration that would “have been signally a false note”. Any sign of practical obligation on Stransom’s part would be anathema. Not out of meanness, but because it would be an example of quotidian reality. Their relationship is above such things.
He is in her late aunt’s place at the time, and these thoughts come shortly before he sees a small portrait of a gentleman who turns out to be Acton Hague. It becomes the moment of estrangement between them as Stransom says the man was a friend of all his youth, and goes on to tell her that he never forgave him after he did him an ‘unforgettable wrong.” We might expect to find out what that unforgettable wrong happened to be, but that would again be endangering the story’s virtualisation, which leads to our second example. Near the end of the story, Stransom is clearly very sick but still attending the church, and he sees, for the first time in months, his former companion of the dead. She comments on how ill he looks and says why she is there. While before she came to pay her respects to Acton, now she does so for the same reason that Stransom has been coming all these years. “So here I am,” she says. “It’s not for my own — that’s over. But I’m here for them.” There is now proper complicity between Stransom and the woman, and shortly afterwards, he insists that there needs to be one more of the dead. While she wails, “Ah no more —no more,” he passes away, perhaps aware in his dying moment that she will now honour him, and all the others, as he had honoured the dead too. This is an honouring quite distinct from grief and partly what has distinguished each’s visit to the church. Clearly, Stransom was hurt when he discovered that the person his companion was lighting a candle for was Acton, but this would be no more than jealousy and hurt pride. We shouldn’t deny there would have been an element of this: “why the deuce does she like him more than she likes me?” But the difference finally is more that she grieves the dead and he honours them. She is still in the realm of the living; he has incorporated into living the realm of the dead. His companion has been attentive to the narrow notion of grief, which is still too close to actualisation. He has expanded loss into seeing the boundaries between the two as far more porous. As the companion says, “You set up your Altar, and when I wanted one most, I found it magnificently ready. I used it with the gratitude I’ve always shown you, for I knew it from of old to be dedicated to Death. I told you long ago that my dead weren’t many. Yours were, but all you had done for them was none too much for my worship! You had placed a great light for Each — I gathered them together for One!”
Returning to those initial quotes from Deleuze,Guattari, and Todorov, we can perhaps better see how James demands the most complex of sentence structures, the withholding of the secret, and all the better to produce the molecular over the molar. When Todorov writes about James’s approach to character and contrasts it with more straightforward approaches in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and more subjective ones in Madame Bovary, he notes that neither Hugo nor Flaubert calls into question the reliability of the perception. James often does. “We can see only appearances and their interpretation remains suspect…” (‘The Secret of Narrative’) How does this work in ‘The Altar of the Dead’? When Stransom first sees the woman who will become his companion amongst the no-longer living, the narrator says: “He presently ceased to feel intrusive, gaining at last even a sense of community with the only worshipper in his neighbourhood, the sombre presence of a woman, in mourning unrelieved, whose back was all he could see of her and who had sunk deep into prayer at no great distance from him.” In other words, he noticed someone in the church praying. Yet this latter claim would be part of a perceptual simplification, one unlikely to protect the secrecy of the secret, as though James needs a sentence structure that allows for the secret to keep perception in a suspended state, always qualifiable. He often sees perception as tentative rather than assertive, as if what is offered could be viewed quite differently from a different perspective. Todorov would see that this is because in James’ work, there is often the story as forward momentum, and the tale as backward enquiry. As he says on ‘In The Cage’: “The first is a horizontal one, composed of events which fill the telegraph operator’s life. The second movement suggests rather a vertical spiral composed of successive (but not temporally organized) glimpses into Captain Everard’s life and personality.” What makes James unlike many a novelist before him is that “…the pursuit of knowledge takes precedence over the unfolding of events, the ‘vertical’ tendency is stronger than the ‘horizontal’ one.” (‘The Secret of Narrative’)
In this sense, we can perhaps see the horizontal as molar and the vertical as molecular. ‘In the Cage’ is the story Deleuze and Guattari focus upon when using the terms, and they talk of “the molar or rigid line of segmentary”, a line that allows for the “interplay of well-determined, well-planned territories.” (A Thousand Plateaus) The central character works as a telegraph operator, and her fiancé is employed next door at the grocer’s. He plans their life out, and everybody can see they are well-matched. But one day, a rich couple arrives at the post office, and the telegraph operator begins to interpret that the man is in great danger. She feels an odd complicity, which nevertheless has no impact on her life with her fiancé. It is a parallel world of affects and sensations based on interpretive assumptions. This doesn’t make it insignificant, but it does allow for a molecular world to take place alongside her molar one, even if “there is no question that the two lines are constantly interfering, reacting upon each other.” Incorporating within the terms molar and molecular, the actual and the virtual, one can see how, in The Altar of the Dead, they are reversed. Deleuze and Guattari say “our lives are made like that: Not only are the great molar aggregates segmented (States, institutions, classes) but so are people as elements of an aggregate, as are feelings as relations between people: they are segmented, not in such a way as to disturb or disperse, but on the contrary to ensure and control the identity of each agency, including personal identity.” By the end of ‘In the Cage,’ the telegrapher’s life has hardly altered, even if she has interpreted the lives of others and been involved indirectly in an adventure in high society. But she will remain in her molar, actualised life, with the molecular, virtual existence contained.
In ‘The Altar of the Dead’, the actual life is weak next to the virtual one, and this is clear when the narrator tells us that no feeling impacts upon him as strongly as the bereft. Death becomes the basis of his life, which is why it might seem his companion offers a double betrayal: she was close to the friend who did him wrong, and she grieves not for the dead, but for the absence of one person’s life in hers. In a different way, Creston’s is a betrayal too: he reactualises his life promptly with a new wife, and Stransom is horrified by what seems to be the ease with which he has done so. Neither of these events are actually that important, as they would be if Stransom had long been in love with Kate and she was with this shallow man who no sooner is she in the ground takes up with an American, or if Stransom were in love with his companion, and saw that he couldn’t be in a relationship with her because she is still getting over a man Stransom so disliked that he is the one dead for whom he won’t light a candle. Were Stransom holding a candle for the young woman, so to speak, then we would understand this reluctance. If he refused to do so after realising he is in love with someone who is still grieving an old rival, this could have been an ironic account of the rival apparently still getting one over him in death, and where, as a living man, Stransom could get one over him by winning the heart of this companion. That would play with the actual and the virtual but would come down strongly on the side of the living, while James wants to keep existence more fluid than that.
If James seems to support death over life, this isn’t for morbid or perverse reasons, though there will inevitably be aspects to be found of both. It is instead that life contains death, as anyone knows who responds to classical music, older literature, sculpture, painting and now even cinema. The dead are far from silent. We are constantly living amongst them, also in the buildings we occupy, the houses we live in and the food on our plate, if we eat meat. It is a permeating presence rather than a binary distinction with life. The perversity, such as it is, rests on Stransom refusing to get on with it when he has death to attend to, and the morbidity rests on that ending, one that indicates a drive towards his demise. “Yes, one more…Just one!” as he passes away and becomes another candle that will be lit. Yet it is also a way of extending virtuality beyond the subjective. Within subjectivity, there is only life and conscious beings: proliferation is limited by speculation, and would also deny the dead a voice. Of course, the story is full of speculation, evident, for example, when Stransom thinks about Acton Hague and his companion’s relationship with him. “He challenged himself, denounced himself, asked himself if he were in love that he should care so much what adventures she had had. He had never for a moment allowed he was in love with her; therefore nothing could have surprised him more than to discover he was jealous.”
This could be seen as denial. Obviously, we might say, he loves the companion and realises he has a love rival even if he happens to be dead. But to reach such a conclusion would be to misinterpret the story, all the better to arrive at a conclusion. This combination of speculation and denial — subjectivity and its inability to see the truth that his own thoughts cannot quite face — would make a nonsense of the wider purpose of the tale, one that rests on creating a virtualised maximimalism, one that can acknowledge jealousy without assuming to know the limits of it, to see in the companion a complicity that is then lost and regained, and to see that to live without fully acknowledging death is to be only half alive. Stransom sees this semi-life in thinking of Kate Creston, after seeing her husband with his new spouse. “He [Stransom] could spend an evening with Kate Creston, if the man to whom she had given everything couldn’t.” This is when he adds, “he had known her for twenty years, and she was the only woman for whom he might have been unfaithful.” Here, James isn’t talking about Kate’s infidelity to her husband, but Stransom’s to his late fiancée. Objectively, or even typically subjectively, the infidelity would be Kate’s, but not in a world where there is no difference between the living and the dead. If Stransom has given more time and attention to his dead betrothed than Paul has given to his living wife, then the betrayal would be to the fiancée, and not Kate’s to her spouse. There is no irony to James’ remark, nothing in Stransom that indicates he is thinking nonsense as he expresses it. It is this notion of fidelity to the dead that has its correlative in jealousy for the deceased. Stransom doesn’t understand life; he comprehends existence, and while we might believe that he has wasted it on an empty one, James proposes that Paul Creston will be wasting it far more by taking up with his new spouse, rather than dwelling upon his late beloved.
This leaves the maximum virtualisation. Speaking of James’s work, Omri Moses says, “More often than not in James's last novels, intentions and motives seem belated or halfhearted, expressing only a tendency to act in a certain way or to pursue a specific direction of thought; they are not fully formed purposes. James is, on the whole, an unpsychological psychologist in that he refuses to make the psychological reduction that translates impulses into preordained rationales that project onto tendencies a retrospective finality or that reads the future with the mistaken neatness of the past.” (‘Henry James's Suspended Situations’) Moses adds, referencing Henri Bergson: “At every instant, then, evolution must admit of a psychological interpretation which is, for our point of view, the best interpretation; but this explanation has neither value nor even significance except retrospectively." Moses (who also uses Deleuze, but his cinema books) sees that “Bergson, interpretations that seek a fixed order in all things suit certain practical human needs, but only by distorting the actual nature of unfolding events.” By refusing the motivational, causes and effects become entangled and take on a virtual quality that cannot be resolved in action ,but must find their own plane, their own virtualised substantiality. If the story were about secrets revealed and actions deployed, then we would know why Acton Hague had done Stransom a wrong, and we would understand Stransom’s jealousy, and so would Stransom’s companion. He and the woman could then move towards an understanding (how many romances in literature break off because of a misunderstanding that needs to be rectified?), and perhaps a relationship. But to have demanded the revelation and then embarked on an affair would be the ultimate betrayal within the context of the story James has set up. It would have been a vulgar actualisation when what James seeks is a profound (yet not necessarily religious) virtualisation.
To have known why Stransom fell out with Acton wouldn’t have added anything to the story’s purpose. It would have offered only a prosaic revelation, when James seeks the most encompassing one he can conclude upon — one that will absorb the actual within the virtual and the living within the dead. Stransom finds another person who understands that life isn’t all there is, and grieving is a weak form of that acknowledgement. The strong form comes in a manifold comprehension of loss, rather than one’s loss, and this is what the companion understands when she says, in thinking of the dead in general rather than specifically, it was “as if it all became possible.” Stransom couldn’t have asked for more, and will die shortly afterwards, as if he had found someone in life who could understand the dead, allowing him to remain faithful, and his companion to accept the limitations of her grieving fidelity to Acton, as his face takes on “the whiteness of death.” It is, in one way, a wonderful resolution from what ought to be the most pessimistic of outcomes. He has managed to be faithful to two women: to the memory of the first, and in the consummated unconsummation with the second, a consummation predicated on existence rather than narrowed down to the merely alive.
© Tony McKibbin