Les liaisons métaphysiques: unfolding worlds and wasted pedagogies in Henry James’ The Awkward Age

This article draws on Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1968) and The Fold (1988) to explore the fiction of Henry James. Among James’s works that counter the legacy of American individualism with a fragmented, enfolding conception of subjectivity and temporality, The Awkward Age (1899) stands out as an experiment in Baroque imagination. Like many of James’s works that reject the prototypical Franklinian self – committed to self-affirmation and the pursuit of happiness – The Awkward Age challenges the traditional notion of growth as an inherent trait of the self, portraying it instead as a seductive illusion or comforting chimera. By disrupting the conventional etiology of the subject, the novel destabilizes its theoretical foundation, that is, the linear temporality through which both subject formation and child development are typically understood and projected. In its place, the novel depicts an epistemic and metaphysical order made of unfolding worlds and identities and of contracting temporal series. The story of Nanda, the novel’s protagonist, exemplifies the failure of any pedagogical project intended to shape her life and personality – a failure that dramatizes the impossibility of constructing the subject within traditional onto-epistemic categories.