The Logic of Delegation in The Ambassadors

Abstract

Abstract Strether's final gesture of renunciation, like his various attempts to live vicariously through those around him, follows from his own position of ambassador—both for Mrs. Newsome and for Henry James. The logic he invokes in the closing scene to justify his renunciation denies the ambassador any direct profits in his own person but permits him to delegate to others his desire to “live all [he] can.” This Jamesian logic of delegation conforms to the Derridean “logic of the supplement” and governs both the novel's fictional and its compositional plots of the deviation from authority and the mediation of experience. In particular, it regulates the novel's central thematic conflict between a New England theory of representation as the preservation of an original and a Parisian theory of representation as a potentially infinite dispersal of delegates without a guiding origin or authority.

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