What I’m Reading

Notes on The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James: The unity of sight and sound

The author is suggesting here that, in Isabel’s mind, there is a profound connection between the sound of the music she hears and the sight of the gathering darkness. It is not just that an emotional correspondence exists between the solemn music and the darkening sky, but that the music actually serves to usher in the nightfall and to open Isabel’s eyes to the beauty and the sadness of it. The shadows are darker, the wind is stronger, the rain is wetter thanks to the music that accompanies their movements. Henry James understood that at moments of intense emotion or of insight, there is a connection between the sights we see and the sounds we hear. The two different sensations don’t just complement each other, they actually meld together and become one and the same.

A similar scene unfolds in another portrait novel, James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In Chapter 4, a teenaged Stephen Dedaelus is walking home from Belvedere College in Dublin. He has just had an interview with the Jesuit headmaster, who asks Stephen whether he thinks he has a vocation for the priesthood. Stephen is noncommittal, and afterwards, as he walks through the streets in the long Irish twilight, he accepts the idea that “He would never swing the thurible before the tabernacle as priest.”

At home, he finds his parents are out, and his brothers and sisters have just finished their supper in the kitchen. The table is littered with crusts of bread and puddles of spilled tea. The family is so poor that the children drink from chipped jam jars rather than porcelain cups. Outside, night is beginning to fall, and in the kitchen the shadows are growing darker.

The voice of his youngest brother from the farther side of the fireplace began to sing the air Oft in the Stilly Night. One by one, the others took up the air until a full choir of voices was singing. They would sing so for hours, melody after melody, glee after glee, till the last pale light died down on the horizon, till the first dark night clouds came forth and night fell.

He waited for some moments listening, before he too took up the air with them. He was listening with pain of spirit to the overtone of weariness behind their frail fresh innocent voices.

Although he doesn’t say so explicitly, Joyce is presenting his reader here with the celebration of a secular Eucharist. The crusts of bread and spilled tea take the place of the consecrated host and wine, the children singing a song by the Irish poet Thomas Moore replace the church choir, and Stephen, who feels in his own heart the pain and weariness of his brothers and sisters, assumes the role of the officiating priest. It is really at this point in the novel that Stephen embraces his vocation as a writer. And, as in the scene from Portrait of a Lady, the sound of the music created by the children intensifies the sight of the gathering dusk. In turn, the visual perception of nightfall intensifies, or makes more apparent, the sadness in the children’s voices. As Stephen will note a few pages later, the disparate but simultaneous sensations of sight and sound can sometimes harmonize, like separate keys on a piano, to form a “chord” in the mind of the observer.

What I’m referring to as the unity of sight and sound is something very different from simple synesthesia, which the dictionary defines as “the production of a mental impression relating to one sense, by the stimulation of another sense;” for example, when one “sees” the colour blue on hearing a church bell ring. Instead, I am referring to the experience when two sense impressions so inform each other that they become something different from either one by itself, they literally conspire to form a third impression. The best explanation of this phenomenon that I have found comes from one of R. H. Blyth’s books on haiku, when Blyth presents the reader with a rather cryptic haiku by Shiki, and then gives his own interpretation of the three-line poem.

Having lighted a candle to the god

On the way back,

The voice of the deer.

The poet went to a nearby shrine in the early evening, lighted a candle, prayed, and returned to his house through the gathering autumn shadows. Now and again the cry of an unseen deer was heard from the mountainside. What is this strange harmony between the uprising yellow flame of the candle burning like a soul of fire in his mind, and the voice of the deer that comes through the darkness and fades into the distance? The light of the candle is the visible voice of matter, the cry of the deer the audible flame of life. How then should they seem anything but a two in one, a one in two, to the poetic mind?

We have travelled rather far at this point—from the posh drawing room of an English country estate, to the kitchen of a Dublin tenement, and from there to a rural scene in Meiji Japan. Now it is time to return to where we started because there are still a few things to note about the paragraph we are considering from Portrait of a Lady. Although this paragraph might seem unremarkable at first glance, it does quite a bit more than simply describe the way twilight deepens at the end of a rainy day. Not only does it reflect a psychological experience that takes place in the mind of the novel’s heroine, but it also performs a thematic and structural role in the novel as a whole.

The woman who plays the piano with such delicacy and skill turns out to be the one truly evil character in the novel. Her name is Madame Merle, and it will be largely thanks to her scheming that Isabel Archer enters into the disastrous marriage that ruins her life. It is fitting, therefore, that Madame Merle’s playing of Beethoven ushers in darkness rather than light. As Isabel listens to the music and watches the gathering shadows fill the room, she has already, in a sense, handed herself over to the person who will act without a trace of pity to destroy her.

The way the room shrinks around Isabel as the shadows gather in, the bleak picture she sees of the rain washing the lawn and the wind shaking the trees, all this is a prefigurement of the “house of darkness,” an image that occurs to her much later in the novel, at the point when she finally admits to herself that she is trapped in a marriage with a man who despises her.

It had come gradually—it was not till the first year of her marriage had closed that she took the alarm. Then the shadows began to gather; it was as if Osmond [Isabel’s husband] deliberately, almost malignantly, had put the lights out one by one. The dusk at first was vague and thin, and she could still see her way in it. But it steadily increased, and if here and there it had occasionally lifted, there were certain corners of her life that were impenetrably black…. But when, as the months elapsed, she followed him further and he led her into the mansion of her own habitation, then, then she had seen where she really was. She could live it over again, the incredulous terror with which she had taken the measure of her dwelling. Between those four walls she had lived ever since; they were to surround her for the rest of her life. It was the house of darkness, the house of dumbness, the house of suffocation.

Note the way that the image from the early paragraph—of twilight shadows growing thicker—is repeated in the later and longer passage.

From the early paragraph:

The shadows deepened in the room. The autumn twilight gathered in…

From the later passage:

Then the shadows began to gather…. The dusk at first was vague and thin…

These verbal echoes between the two passages make it relatively easy for the reader to understand what Henry James is suggesting in the first. As Isabel Archer listens to Madame Merle play and watches the bleak night develop around her, she is, in effect and without knowing it, regarding a picture of her own unhappy future.