Seeing from the Inside: Henry Adams’s Affective Transformation - John C. Orr
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SEEING FROM THE INSIDE:
HENRY ADAMS’S AFFECTIVE TRANSFORMATION
John C. Orr, Ph.D.
University of Portland / Emeritus Professor
My talk proposes an answer to a question that has long puzzled me: why in 1901 did
Henry Adams print a revised edition of his book on Tahitian history originally published in
1893? A corollary question is why—if his sole desire in pursuing the revision was to gather
more historical data—did he wait eight years before issuing the revised edition? Adams
was notoriously quick at researching and writing; David Brown notes that he completed
his biography on John Randolph in “a remarkable three-months sprint” (201). Why the
eight-year gap in the two editions of his Tahitian memoir? Since the book was privately
printed and had a limited distribution, one would be entirely justified in thinking that a
revision of the book was unnecessary. Yet, Adams spent his time and money revising and
reprinting it. For what end? And what does the timing of the reprint indicate about what
motivated the revision?
Edward Chalfant claims that the 1893 Memoirs of Marau Taaroa is, strictly speaking,
“not a book,” but instead “proof-sheets of a work-in-progress” (56). He likens the process
that Adams was following in 1893 to the 1907 version of The Education of Henry Adams
that Adams printed and sent to friends and associates asking for revisions and corrections. And indeed, one of the few remaining copies of the 1893 Tahiti book housed at the
Massachusetts Historical Society includes revisions apparently made by Marau’s brother,
Tati Salmon. Chalfant’s claim, however, rings a bit hollow when we remember that the
1918 posthumous version of The Education varies only slightly from the 1907 edition of
the work. I find it hard to believe that Henry Adams—a recognized stylistic perfectionist—
would allow anyone access to what he knew was an incomplete draft. Moreover, even if we
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view the 1893 book as a work-in-progress, the second question of why the eight-year gap
in editions remains unanswered.
In a letter from 1905, Adams claimed that the second edition of the book “was not
made to be read. It was made only for my brother Tati to offer to the French government as
a basis for a family pension. At least, for that it was printed” (LHA V: 630). A measure of that
statement is undoubtedly true—Adams was attempting to assist the Salmon family in their
negotiations with the French government, and the addition of “The Story of Arii Taimai,
1846” appended to the revised edition as well as subsequent translations of the volume
into French lend credence to his assertion. However, I hear in his statement, “it was not
made to be read” a kind of disingenuous dismissal of his work that Adams occasionally
voiced when describing one of his books, often as a means of masking disappointment
when they were not widely acclaimed. His dismissal of the book stands in contrast to the
intention he had for it while in Tahiti when he wrote to Elizabeth Cameron that if Marau
“completes the memoirs, you will see” what the archaic woman was (LHA III: 485). Even if
only his private circle of friends, he anticipated an audience. Moreover, he noted in a letter
to Cameron in 1902 that he sent copies of the second edition of the book “in Tati’s name to
half a dozen public libraries” (LHA V: 378). Clearly, Adams prepared for the possibility of a
wider readership beyond his friends in Washington D.C.
Furthermore, if his sole intention in revising the book was to aid his adopted family, why would he alter the narrative in such a manner that makes the book decidedly
more difficult for a Western reader to decipher: beginning with Tahitian genealogy and
legend rather than Western linear history? Ronald Martin in The Language of Difference
claims that due to the intensive reliance on traditional Tahitian oral legends which do not
translate easily into English (and by association, French) the book’s “quality of readability
is highly questionable” before he sums up nicely that “the greatest drag on the book as
a literary performance is exactly what makes it ethnographically valuable” (77). The only
part of the revised edition that aids the Salmons in their appeal to the French government
is the concluding Arii Taimai story recounting her efforts to unite the island’s leaders in
negotiations with the French. If his true desire in printing the book was to aid the family,
would he not want to make that narrative the central story of the book?
These unsatisfactory answers to my initial questions lead me to propose an alternate way of approaching the revision to the volume and the intervening space between
editions. I contend that the revisions are evidence of a change in Henry Adams, historian
and writer, a change that allowed him to draw upon his emotions and affective responses
to the primary material in ways that were foreign to him only a few years prior. This affective transformation in Adams began in the South Seas as he slowly learned to see from the
inside, and it flourished as he traveled in France in 1895 and rediscovered French cathedrals. The impact of this shift led, I contend, to the revision of the Tahitian memoirs as well
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as the decidedly unusual stylistic orientation of his two great masterworks: Mont-SaintMichel and Chartres and The Education of Henry Adams.
Traveling to Polynesia with the American artist John La Farge, Adams was immersed in the difficulties of painting watercolors, yet his letters routinely mentioned his
dabbling in paints as well as his and La Farge’s failures when attempting to capture tropical light and color. After decrying the weakness of his paintings in a letter, Adams noted that “I have learned enough, from La Farge’s instruction, to make me look at painting
rather from the inside, and see a good many things about a picture that I only felt before”
(LHA III: 448). Two elements of that quotation are important for my argument: first, the
emphasis on starting to see from the inside, a metaphor that I employ throughout this
paper to explain the changes that occurred in the sensibility of Henry Adams, one that
is manifest in his late works. The second is the emphasis on feeling and learning to be
available to what emotions reveal as an alternate epistemology that is more intuitive than
rational. As J. C. Levenson succinctly phrases it, Adams’s watercolors in the South Seas
were “the instrument of his sensuous education” (210), an enlightenment that impacted
his later books.
This enlightenment fully bloomed in 1895 with his rediscovery of French cathedrals. In a telling description, he remarked in a letter that although “it is the third time
I have seen Amiens, I never thoroughly felt it before” (LHA IV: 311). There is that word
again: felt, feeling, emotion, affect. David Brown notes that the “word ‘felt’ suddenly and
conspicuously entered his correspondence” when describing his response to cathedrals,
and just as Adams became a Teva by right of adoption in Tahiti, Brown notes that by
“Rejecting the rational, Enlightenment side of the recent European past, Adams once
more picked a persona that met certain psychical needs” when he began identifying with
his supposed Norman heritage (311). In both cases—Teva and Norman—he is learning to
see from the inside and permit his affective understanding to inform his identity. In an
extended flight of fancy to John Hay, Adams proposed that with his ancestors he helped
“in building the cathedral of Coutances, and my soul is still built into it.” “There is not a
stone in the whole interior which I did not treat as though it were my own child” (LHA IV:
319), he concluded. The felt experience of revisiting the cathedrals outweighed his rational
understanding of them, allowing Adams a new means of awareness and expression.
Ernest Samuels comments that Adams was trained from childhood to hide his emotions
and to suppress emotional outbursts, but Tahiti first offered him the opportunity to
“cultivate the garden of his sensibilities” (249), a freedom that flourished a few years later
when standing in the nave of the Coutances cathedral. Adams remarks in The Education
that if “history had a chapter with which he thought himself familiar, it was the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries” (354), since he once taught medieval history at Harvard. Yet he
returns again to affect when describing the change that occurred in 1895, claiming that
“this atmosphere, in the touch of a real emotion” transformed his understanding, and he
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“drifted back to Washington with a new sense of history” (354-355). To understand that
new sense of history, we need to investigate the evidence of changes that occurred in Adams between the start of his voyage to the South Seas and the revision of the Memoirs.
His affective transformation is manifest in his letters and in the choices he made when
revising Memoirs of Arii Taimai.
Late in the chapter entitled “The Dynamo and the Virgin” from The Education of
Henry Adams, Adams ponders how the lens through which one observes and thinks about
a scene or event is informed by what the American thinker Kenneth Burke would later call
terministic screens: the discourse one inhabits and the contextual orientation that discourse prescribes. Noting that the British historian Edward Gibbon dismissed the cathedral in Amiens as one of “the stately monuments of superstition,” Adams notes succinctly,
“One sees what one brings, and at the moment Gibbon brought the French Revolution”
(387). Discourse partially constructs the reality one sees; context colors the objects one
meditates upon. Nowhere in his own experience is the power of contextual orientation
more apparent than when Adams traveled to Japan in 1886 and then sojourned in Polynesia in the early 1890s.
Despite a growing awareness of the effects of Western imperialism on native cultures, Adams carried with him to Japan and the South Seas many of the reprehensible
and racist attitudes Westerners routinely projected onto non-Western cultures. He found
Japan “a child’s country,” where the “whole show is of the nursery” (LHA III: 17), and Polynesians, “like all orientals, are children, and have the charms of childhood as well as the
faults of the small boy” (LHA III: 302). Samoans “are the happiest, easiest, smilingest people I ever saw, and the most delightfully archaic… They have virtues of healthy children”
(LHA III: 346). Undoubtedly, Adams is guilty of the worst kind of Orientalism: the process,
notes Kojin Karatani, that views “the people of the non-West as convenient objects of analysis for the social sciences but ignores their intellectual and ethical existence” (140). That
attempt at analysis certainly applies to Adams who also brought with him to the Pacific a view of modern man as degenerated from his ancestors, a perspective promoted by
eugenicist thinkers that Adams was sympathetic to. Ever the amateur scientist, Adams
routinely measured Samoans in the months he spent on the islands in order to provide
evidence for degeneration at home. At his best, he might be accused of exhibiting towards
Japan what Karatani calls “aestheticentrism,” a reverence for the aesthetic of a non-Western culture while ignoring the lived reality of the people who actually inhabit the space.
In the South Seas, however, Adams initially could not recognize anything to admire aesthetically. In a dismissive statement regarding Polynesians, he commented that, beyond
their aristocratic social schema, they “have no other arts worth mentioning” (LHA III: 293).
However, while these racists perspectives oriented his initial understanding of the
cultures he was exposed to, it became clear during his time in Samoa that Adams was be36
ginning to question them. “I find myself now and then regaining consciousness that I was
once an American supposing himself real,” he wrote to Elizabeth Cameron in October of
1890. He continued, “The Samoan is so different from all my preconceived ideas, that my
own identity becomes hazy” (LHA III: 292). Even when recognizing the artfully exaggerated nature of this statement, we hear in this version of the master/slave dialectic Adams’s
questioning the stability of his own identity when confronted with challenges to his preconceptions about Samoans.
A true historian, Adams reported from Samoa that he routinely questioned his
hosts about their legends and histories, but the inquiries often proved unfruitful. La Farge
corroborates Adams’s version of the resistance he met, noting that Adams “is patient
beyond belief; he asks over and over again the same questions […]. But everywhere one
comes right against some secret […], something that cannot be well disentangled from
annoyance to the questioned one” (242). His experience in Tahiti proved remarkably different once Adams met the Salmon family of the Teva clan, particularly Arii Taimai who
he noted “tells us about pagan Taiti; old songs, superstitions and customs” (LHA III: 420).
Consequently, Adams suggested to her daughter Marau that if she would write her
memoirs, he would serve as her scribe. To his great surprise, she accepted the offer, and
on 10 May 1891 they began. Within a week, he reported that he was “rather amused and occupied. My ‘Memoirs of Marau, Queen of Tahiti’ give me a sort of excuse for doing nothing”
(LHA III: 477). Eventually, Arii Taimai became more heavily involved and “astonished her
children by telling me things she would never tell them” (LHA III: 478) while they served as
translators. Soon the entire family was providing him with material. Swamped with “new
stories, legends or songs” (LHA III: 478), Adams soon recognized the stylistic difficulties
such a work would entail; twenty years of writing political history had ill-prepared him
for the task, rendering his hand “too heavy for the work” (LHA III: 479). His methods were
“all intellectual, analytic and modern”; notice the absence of any reference to feeling or
affect (LHA III: 434). It would require a distinctly original approach to write the history of
Tahiti, one that intertwined island history and politics with legends and poems. While that
methodology appeared partially realized in the revised edition of Tahiti, it clearly proved
adaptable for Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres.
Although Adams hyperbolically claimed after completing his History of the United
States During the Administration of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, “With the year
1890 I shall retire from authorship” (LHA III: 225), work on the memoirs apparently rekindled his literary aspirations, for shortly after his arrival in France from the South Seas
he suggested that John Hay join him “in writing […] a volume or two of Travels which will
permit me to express my opinion of life in general” (LHA III: 598-599). He conceived of
the book as “a sort of ragbag of everything; scenery, psychology, history, literature, poetry,
art; anything in short, that is worth throwing in” (LHA III: 599). The Memoirs of Arii Taimai
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stands as an initial excursion into that realm of ragbag compilation, one that despite its
weaknesses excited Adams. After producing the first edition in 1893, he confessed that
“I really enjoy writing that kind of history,” since unlike American history, “Tahiti is all literary” (LHA IV: 156). The result of his labors “amused me much more, and is much better reading, than my dreary American history” (LHA IV: 157). The 1893 edition was limited
to no more than ten copies and appeared under the title Memoirs of Marau Taaroa, Last
Queen of Tahiti. Robert Spiller points out that, despite the title, the memoirs were “always
Arii Taimai’s, never Marau’s” (iv). Adams acknowledged his true source in the subtitle of
the 1901 edition when the book reappeared as Tahiti: Memoirs of Arii Taimai. However, the
primary difference between the two editions is one of perspective.
The 1893 edition begins with the 1767 arrival of Captain Samuel Wallis on board
H.M.S. Dolphin, thus giving that edition a decidedly European slant. A few chapters later,
Adams picks up island legend predating Wallis. He reorganized the second edition so that
the first chapter of the original becomes the sixth of the new edition. The first five chapters now recount island prehistory, primarily the ascension of the Tevas, accessible solely
through legend and genealogy. Besides reorienting the book on a strict chronology, this
alteration forces readers to recognize the initial balance among rival tribes as well as to
confront their arcane customs and mores. Consequently, when the Europeans arrive in
Chapter VI, we are made more conscious of the tragic errors they made in treating island politics and customs as derivations of a European model. Adams acknowledges this
perspectival dysfunction in the concluding sentence of Chapter V of the second edition
when noting that up to that point he has depended “mainly on tradition, but here Captain
Wallis and Captain Cook begin their story from the European stand-point” (46). Surely he
realized that this rearrangement makes the volume more difficult to read, for the labyrinthine genealogical structure of the first five chapters challenges even the most dedicated
reader. But it clearly forces the reader to identify with the Tahitians and their ordered, if
markedly different, society and to recognize the destruction of that society at the hands
of the Europeans.
Adams in essence begins the revised edition from the inside of Tahitian culture in
order to avoid Othering the people and their way of life. His conceit of writing in the voice
of Arii Taimai allows him to produce what Ronald Martin describes as “an unusual text
that largely gave the narration over to the native informants; that scrupulously followed
indigenous concerns, often couched in indigenous nomenclature, legend and song” and
that finally “eschewed the imperialistically loaded classifying terminologies such as ‘primitive’ and ‘barbarism’” (66). Edward Chalfant nicely summarizes the differences between
the two versions of the book when he asserts that the 1893 edition “could seem a book by
a Europeanized Tahitian queen” while the second iteration “would appear to speak for a
person in no way European, the last of the ancient Tahitian leaders, a great chiefess of the
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Tevas” (56). The change in Adams from his dismissive letters of 1891 to the reorientation of
the book in 1901 is remarkable.
Understandably, Adams was approaching oral legend as a Westerner steeped in
print culture. Thus, the permanent nature of written expression was what he expected of
the more fluid elements of oral legend. Soon after Arii Taimai began participating in the
recounting of legends, Adams wrote to Elizabeth Cameron that the “old lady’s memory is
prodigious, but even she often makes mistakes. Marau tells me a story; Moetie (Mrs. Atwater) tells me a different one; the old lady laughs at both, and tells it in a way totally unlike either” (LHA III: 478). Notice that Adams attributes the different versions of a legend
to someone making mistakes. He fails to grasp how his orientation in print culture ills
suits him for understanding oral performance, for as Walter Ong reminds us, in “the
total absence of any writing, there is nothing outside the thinker, no text, to enable him
or her to produce the same line of thought again or even to verify whether he or she has
done so or not” (34). Adams’s frustration continued when he returned to the U.S. and was
communicating with Marau about stories she was providing him. In a letter to her from
1892, Adams again voiced a desire for exactness and precision, informing Marau that he
wanted “the full and exact native text” of one of the genealogical puzzles she was sending
him. The full and exact native text is the desire of a print culture outsider looking at the
opacity of oral culture. Telling her, “I stumble over every word and name,” he encouraged
her to write out the legend “with a literal meaning under each word” (LHA IV: 83). She responded by lamenting the difficulty of translating Tahitian into English while being “able
to keep a little of its charm” before noting that one of the conundrums she faced was a
result of the lack of written versions of ancient legends, meaning that there “are so many
words that we have lost all trace of, & a great many more that are not used today” (quoted
in Chalfant: 30). “Written words are residue,” notes Walter Ong, while “Oral tradition has
no such residue or deposit” (11), and the meaning of words becomes occluded over generations.
Even so, Adams attempted in the revised edition to capture the elusive nature of
Tahitian legends and solidify them in written form. And we can see subtle evidence that
he began to appreciate how oral cultures differ from his own. In the first paragraph of the
revised edition, Adams attempts to describe the shape of the island, noting that it looks
like “an hour-glass or figure of 8; but as the natives knew neither hour-glasses nor figures,
they used to call the island a fish, because it had a body and a tail” (1). In the traditional
Tahitian culture, they neither mark time in the Western manner nor do they have abstract symbols for their language or mathematical systems. Likewise, Adams notes that
with “the want of writing,” Tahitians “seem to have kept certain stock-stories […] which
represent the sharp points of their history and the names of their heroes” (21), precisely
how cultural history is passed down in an oral culture. In both instances, Adams is seeing
from the inside and understanding how inhabiting an oral culture alters one’s means of
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knowing and telling. Genealogy, likewise, offers another way of relating historical narrative that Adams relished.
He remarked in 1886 that “genealogy has a curious, personal interest, which history wants” (LHA III: 6). Genealogy represents for Adams a more material approach to a
past than can be afforded in rational, abstract history. He was predisposed then to write
the history of Tahiti, where he claims in the revised edition that “genealogy grew into a
science” and “swallowed up history” (17). To an extent, the genealogical emphasis is the
fascination for Adams. It pre-dates Western history, it offers him a recognizable methodology for working within an alternate epistemology, and it inevitably relates the narrative
of the rise and fall of great families, primarily the Tevas of Papara with whom the displaced
American aristocrat identified. But the genealogical perspective is what also makes the
book initially so challenging to read. Even Adams appears to throw his hands up in frustration at one point, noting that one generational progression leaves behind “one of the
most complicated puzzles in genealogy that ever perplexed a succession” (38).
In my remaining time, I want briefly to touch upon the changes in Adams’s style
and the importance of his Tahitian book in relationship to his final two major works.
Adams revised Tahiti while drafting Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, and that connection
is important to remember. Both are examples of a new kind of historical writing that he
was pursuing, and both contain a playful, more emotional tone than what he called his
“dreary American history.” Here is the first sentence of his History of the United States: “According to the census of 1800, the United States of America contained 5,308,483 persons”
(1). Facts, data, analytics, what David Brown terms “the unmistakable imprint of the era’s
self-conscious scientific training” (353). Here is the opening of Mont-Saint-Michel and
Chartres: “The archangel loved heights” (1), a playful description of the statue atop MontSaint-Michel’s cathedral. He has evolved as a thinker and writer, one whose work is, according to Brown, “literary, suggestive, subjective” (353), brought about initially by his time
spent in Tahiti. Memoirs of Arii Taimai is the first production by the transformed Adams,
and while not a major work, it does prefigure the works yet to come. Louis Auchincloss
contends that the book “marks an important step in Adams’ career” as his first attempt to
approach a subject with the combined skills of historian and artist (8). Likewise, Levenson
notes that the book and Adams’s letters from the South Seas “point the way to Adams’s
extremely personal expression of an historical subject” in Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres
(217). Tahiti also formally prefigures The Education of Henry Adams as Adams’s first attempt at a posed autobiography (Rowe 661). Likewise, Willam Merrill Decker asserts that
the appeal of oral legend that Adams grew to understand “may have done much to prompt
the uncle of Chartres and the Adams of the Education to affect talk” (231). Clearly, Memoirs
of Arii Taimai represents the pivot point in Adams’s evolution as a thinker and writer, and
to experience his affective transformation required that he spend time living and learning
on Samoa and Tahiti. As Levenson nicely sums up, “La Farge’s friendship quickened his
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eye,” and “Arii Taimai lent a primeval dimension to what he could feel” (232). Both taught
him to see and feel from the inside, and the result is the transformation of Henry Adams
into the artist we recognize in his subsequent masterworks.
Works Cited
Adams, Henry, The Education of Henry Adams, ed. Ernest Samuels, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1973.
Adams, Henry, History of the United States During the Administration of Thomas Jefferson
and James Madison, New York, Albert and Charles Boni, 1930.
Adams, Henry, The Letters of Henry Adams, ed. J. C. Levenson, et al., Cambridge, Harvard
University Press, 1982/1988, Vol. 1-6.
Adams, Henry, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, Garden City, Doubleday Anchor Books,
1933.
Adams, Henry, Tahiti: Memoirs of Arii Taimai, ed. Robert E. Spiller, New York, Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1947.
Auchincloss, Louis, Henry Adams, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1971.
Brown, David S., The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education
of Henry Adams, New York, Scribner, 2020.
Chalfant, Edward, Improvement of the World: A Biography of Henry Adams, His Last Life,
1891-1918, North Haven, Archon Books, 2001.
Decker, William Merrill, The Literary Vocation of Henry Adams, Chapel Hill, University of
North Carolina Press, 1990.
Karatani, Kojin, “Uses of Aesthetics: After Orientalism,” in Edward Said and the Work of
the Critic: Speaking Truth to Power, ed. Paul Bove, Durham, Duke University Press,
2000.
La Farge, John, Reminiscences of the South Seas, New York, Doubleday, Page, 1916.
Levenson, J. C., The Mind and Art of Henry Adams, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1957.
Martin, Ronald E., The Languages of Difference: American Writers and Anthropologists Reconfigure the Primitive, 1878-1940, Newark, University of Delaware Press, 2005.
Ong, Walter, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the World, London, Routledge, 1988.
Rowe, John Carlos, “Henry Adams,” in Columbia History of American Literature, New York,
Columbia University Press, 1988.
Samuels, Ernest, Henry Adams, Cambridge, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
1989.
Spiller, Robert E., “Introduction” to Tahiti by Henry Adams, New York, Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1947.
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Abstract
My paper seeks to answer a simple question: why did Henry Adams revise his short
book on Tahiti in 1901 after having published it initially in 1893? Beyond the obvious titular
attribution to its true speaker and his attempts to aid the Teva family as they negotiated
with the French government, I contend that the revised edition is Adams’s first foray into
a new type of documentary style that reaches its zenith in Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres
and The Education of Henry Adams.
My title references a comment he made in a letter from Tahiti while painting with
John La Farge when he noted that he might not be getting better as a painter, but he was
learning to see a painting “from the inside, and see a good many things about a picture
that I only felt before.” Seeing from the inside serves as a key metaphor when comparing
the differences in the second edition of the Memoirs to the first edition, and it informs his
later masterworks when compared to his earlier works.
This new narrative strategy seeks new ways of knowing beyond the strict linearity
and causality of Western history. Adams in essence introduces readers into a new episteme, one that focuses more on the felt reality of history derived in part by according legends and myths equal value to seemingly objective facts. His trip to France in 1895 when
he learned to listen to his affective responses to French cathedrals provides him the impetus to revise the Tahiti volume as well as to pursue his masterworks.
John C. Orr is an Emeritus Professor at University of Portland, where he taught
American Literature. In addition, he served as Assistant Provost for Scholarly Engagement and Career Readiness for many years. Beyond multiple articles on Henry Adams, he
has published on regional American women writers, particularly those experiencing life
in the American West.
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Résumé
« Voir de l’intérieur : la transformation affective de Henry Adams »
Ma communication cherche à répondre à une question simple : pourquoi Henry
Adams a-t-il révisé son ouvrage sur Tahiti publié en 1901 après l’avoir initialement publié
en 1893 ? Au-delà de son choix évident de rendre son texte à son véritable auteur et de sa
volonté d’apporter son aide aux membres du clan des Teva qui avaient entamé des négociations avec le gouvernement français, je persiste à croire que l’édition révisée constitue
la première incursion de Henry Adams dans un nouveau genre d’écriture documentaire
qui atteint son apogée dans ses ouvrages ultérieurs, Mont-Saint-Michel et Chartres ainsi
que The Education of Henry Adams.
Le titre de ma communication fait référence à un commentaire qu’il a publié dans
une lettre de Tahiti alors qu’il s’adonnait à la peinture avec son compagnon de voyage,
John La Farge. Il écrivait en effet que, certes, il ne s’améliorait peut-être pas en tant que
peintre, mais qu’il apprenait par contre à voir une peinture « de l’intérieur, et à percevoir
beaucoup de choses dans un tableau que je ne pouvais alors que ressentir ». « Voir de l’intérieur » apparaît comme une métaphore clé lorsque l’on compare les différences entre
la deuxième édition des Mémoires de 1901 et la première édition de 1893, métaphore qui
sous-tend et informe également ses chefs-d’œuvre ultérieurs, par rapport à ses œuvres
antérieures.
Cette nouvelle stratégie narrative traduit une volonté d’explorer de nouvelles modalités de connaissance, au-delà de la logique strictement linéaire et causale de l’histoire
occidentale. Adams introduit en substance les lecteurs dans un nouvel épistémè, qui se
concentre davantage sur la réalité ressentie de l’histoire, en partie par l’attribution aux
légendes et aux mythes d’une valeur égale à celle des faits apparemment objectifs. Son
périple en France en 1895, où il apprend à écouter ses réactions affectives devant les cathédrales françaises, l’incite vivement à réviser le volume tahitien ainsi qu’à poursuivre
l’élaboration de ses œuvres majeures.
John C. Orr est professeur émérite à l’Université de Portland, où il a enseigné la
littérature américaine. De plus, il a été vice-recteur adjoint à l’engagement scientifique
et à la préparation à la carrière pendant de nombreuses années. Au-delà de multiples
articles sur Henry Adams, il a publié sur les écrivaines américaines régionales, en particulier celles dont les écrits rendent compte de la vie dans l’Ouest américain.
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