"Iniquities in such a country somehow always made pictures." (“A London Life”, Complete Tales, Vol. VII, Leon Edel ed., p. 88)”.

Pondering over the contrast between the picturesque serenity of an old dower-house and the scandalous custom of the expropriation of the widow it embodied , the American heroine of the story entitled “A London Life” expresses her unfavorable judgment of English institutions but is also overwhelmed and puzzled by the sense of a “curious duplicity (in the literal meaning of the word)”:  “She had often been struck with it before – with that perfection of machinery which can still at certain times make English life go on of itself with a stately rhythm long after there is corruption within it.” (“A London Life”, Complete Tales, Leon Edel ed., p.105).

Figures of duplicity abound in Henry James’s writings, both in form and contents, fiction and non-fiction, disrupting the established order, the normative vision or the canonic genre. “Successful duplicity” characterizes some of James’s achievements in the domain of short fiction – the way some nouvelles or “novels intensely compressed” managed to “masquerade” as anecdotes to be accepted as “good” short stories, “heroically” dissimulating their “capital.” (Preface to Vol. XVI of the New York edition, Literary Criticism II, p. 1240). The art of “duplicity” is also part of the lesson of Balzac, and other supposedly canonic realist writers whose complex vision “washes us successively with the warm wave of the near and the familiar and the tonic shock of the far and the strange.” (Preface to Vol. II, Literary Criticism, p. 1060). Duplicity also pertains to the ghostly and the uncanny effect, the double register of representations embroidering “the strange and sinister” on “the very type of the normal and easy” (Preface to Vol. XVII, Literary Criticism, p. 1264). 

We propose to examine the multiple facets of Henry James’s art of duplicity in both fiction and non-fiction, not forgetting the aesthetic borderlands where text and paratext coalesce, the clandestine figure of the author, “marking off,” as Foucault would have it, “the edges of the text.”   (“What is an Author?”  in Textual Strategies., J.H. Harrari ed., Cornell UP, 1979, p.147).