“My Real Smash”: Elenctic Negation in Henry James’s The Ambassadors

Abstract

Elenctic rhetoric—the Socratic rhetoric of scrutiny, accusation and refutation—is a feature of texts as diverse as The Iliad, Gulliver’s Travels, and Something Happened. Its nature and application, however, have been narrowly formulated by philosophers with reference to strategies of discursive analysis.1 Thus, its relevance to literary study has not been appreciated, despite the concept’s application to issues in negation theory. Budick and Iser speak of “the wide-ranging adaptability of negativity, which can function equally as the nihil originarium and as the agent of world-making described by Heidegger as well as the Nothing of Revelation invoked by Scholem and Celan” (xv). Because it is neither a kind of negativity nor simply another word for it, but is rather an ur-process, primitive to genre and cultural distinctions, with its roots in the origins of classical epistemology, elenchus may paradoxically encompass all of Budick’s and Iser’s negative categories at once; and does so most strikingly in Henry James’s novel The Ambassadors, with, among other things, significant consequences for the reading of its conclusion.