Past future: the chronotope of Bildung and its crisis in The Ambassadors, by Henry James

El cronotopo de formación y su crisis en Los embajadores, de Henry James

Abstract

This article intends to understand how The Ambassadors, a novel by Henry James published in 1903, refigures Bildung’s temporality and some fundamental topoi of the Bildungsroman tradition. The novel as a genre presents
itself as one of the historical forms of temporalization of time and, among its modalities, the Bildungsroman stands out for what Mikhail Bakhtin calls a “chronotopic” mode; a mode related to the ability to articulate the temporality of the main character’s formation to the notion of “historical time”, which, according to Reinhart Koselleck, emerges in the turn of the 18th to the 19th centuries, as a heterogeneous, accelerated, irreversible time, not reducible to natural or chronological time. While analyzing the way Henry James subverts the German ideal of Bildung, introduced in North-American literary circles specially through the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s work, I argue that, telling the story of the Bildung of a fifty-five years old American during his European adventure, The Ambassadors literarily depicts the crisis of historical time and of Bildung’s chronotope at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. This article concludes that the novel stages a “reverse” Bildung, which constitutes the way in which James converts the “future past”, that characterizes the modern temporalization of time, into a “past future”.