Okay, Malabou: Plastic Narration in The Portrait of a Lady

If we didn’t know it to be very bad practice to conflate the author with the narrator or speaker of a work of literature, we might call Henry James the narrator of The Portrait of a Lady. The identity of the narrator constitutes itself as the novel progresses, so that his instability reminds one more of a person going through the world than of a storyteller committing words to print.

The narrator refers to him or herself as biographer, as first person “I”, he uses free indirect discourse, and is also the omniscient third person. Clearly there is a contradiction here: the I of firsthand experience can be a biographer perhaps, but he cannot also know the unspoken thoughts that free indirect discourse and the third person relate.

As biographer, the narrator identifies himself thus, disclaiming any knowledge of her thoughts: “‘Do you know I’m very much afraid of it -- of that remarkable mind of yours?’ Our heroine’s biographer can scarcely tell why, but the question made her start and brought a conscious blush to her cheek.” But in the next sentence we see the narrator lapse from biographer -- a role which supposes an outside, human perspective, which is limited in its knowledge, --  into omniscience. “She returned his look at moment, and then with a note in her voice that might almost have appealed to his compassion, ‘So am I, my lord!’ she oddly exclaimed.” Here, he knows more than the biographer in discerning Ralph’s compassion having been “almost...appealed to”.

Later in the book, the narrator speaks from the first person, describing a Roman scene based on his own experience in the city. “It is impossible, in Rome at least, to look long at a great company of Greek sculptures without feeling the effect of their noble quietude.... I say in Rome especially, because the Roman air is an exquisite medium for such impressions.” He is no longer the disinterested omniscience who stands by to note Ralph’s compassion; instead, the narrator of these lines has his own feelings to express.

And, in a moment of editorializing (though it may appear to be free indirect discourse, it is not: it addresses a reality that the characters have not yet encountered -- they have not yet gone to Rome), we learn that “There were ten days left of the beautiful month of May -- the most previous month of all to the true Rome-lover,” followed by what may either be free indirect discourse or further editorial: “Isabel would become a Rome-lover; that was a foregone conclusion.” Was this a foregone conclusion for the narrator, who would then style himself as human -- he concludes and opines -- or for Isabel? Whose voice is this? And, what happens when we suddenly  cannot tell the difference between a character’s thoughts and the narration? Or between narration and editorial?

I would argue that this proliferation of personhood in the narrator mimics the self-presence of an interlocutor, at once offering more than and undermining the usual fixity of narration. Yet in doing so, it doesn’t detract from the overall coherence of Portrait, even if destabilizes the storyteller. Instead, the variously limited and de-limited viewpoints add a richness of perspective, putting the reader into conversation with each. It shows the differences that exist within a self, like ourselves, that is always present to a changing reality, which it both accepts and shapes, plastically, as per the thinking of Catharine Malabou.

Malabou’s main concern is with the difference between the brain’s being perceived as “neuronally” plastic rather than flexible and thereby accounting for the creative and ongoing construction of the self-present, mental self. It is through understanding the relationship between the plastic brain and its environment that we can account for the possibility of radical action and resistance in the individual.  Harnessing the difference between the similar concepts plasticity and flexibility, where plasticity embodies a reactive tendency to change while flexibility indicates acceptance of outside input, we glimpse hope for individual agency. In this mode, the narrator constitutes an interactive and radical self by inhabiting multiple modes at once and by refusing the limits inherent in each, which is how plasticity works.

The plastic reaction is precisely that: it acts again or against the influence, growing or strengthening thereby while the flexible response only bends in avoidance or degrades itself in making way for. Malabou (I’m unclear whether she ascribes to neuroscientists the idea of flexibility or of plasticity) wants to privilege and harness the idea of plasticity over flexibility as a model not just for the brain’s activity, but for political and self-actualizing activity. For, what individualism have we anyway if we do not both resist and strategically utilize systems requiring conformity? In order to achieve freedom -- the freedom to speak meaningfully, we must respond creatively and positively to the powers that be, and in this re-activity (I know; deconstructionist move there), constitute selfhood. It is a plastic relation with the usual narrative modes that James uses to engage the reader as interlocutor rather than simply as storyteller.