Encoding the Circumambient Psychological Moment: Clause Relations, Parallel Structures and Alliteration in Henry James’ “The Ambassadors”

Henry James’ “The Ambassadors” might be termed an Impressionist Suspense Novel in that the action of the novel centers on the shifting impressions and groping for hidden meaning in the mind of its main character, Lambert Strether. The subtle changes in Strether’s struggle for understanding are registered in a series of intense encounters with Chadwick Newsome, and his lover, Madame Marie de Vionnet and are communicated to the reader in the complex syntax of James’ prose. This article will examine James’ use of four linguistic devices to render character portraits and signal shifting impressions: clause relations, parallel grammatical structures, lexical repetition and replacement, and serial alliterative modifiers.

the second character, Madame Marie de Vionnet, a sophisticated and cultured divorcee who is deeply in love with Chadwick. Despite Strether's initial firm resolve to view her in the light that Mrs. Newsome does, as a "ferociously interested person", and to deal with her as such, Madame de Vionnet eventually captivates him. What also effects a great change in Strether's perceptions of the affair he has been sent to end is the change he observes in Chadwick himself. Under Madame Marie de Vionnet's influence Chadwick has become much more polished and urbane, and this, together with Strether's growing admiration of Madame Marie de Vionnet herself, transforms Strether's attitude towards the affair.
The noble bet made by the two characters is that Chadwick will stay in Paris and marry Madame Marie de Vionnet, thereby honoring the gift of cultural enrichment she has bestowed on him, and vindicating the great risk Strether has taken in reneging on his commitment to his patron and fiancée Mrs. Newsome.
"The Ambassadors" has been called an Impressionist novel because much of the drama and action occurs within the mind and perceptions of its lead character, Strether. The vivid impressions made on him by the artistic and cultural beauty of Paris and of Madame Marie de Vionnet's person and milieu form a key part of the action in that they precipitate what is the central event of the novel, the change in Strether's perceptions of the affair and the shift in his loyalties. This article will examine a set of linguistic devices used throughout the novel by James to enhance the impact on the reader of Strether's impressions during key dramatic moments in the story. The linguistic devices are clause relations, parallel grammatical structures, lexical repetition and replacement, and serial alliterative modifiers.

Literature Review
One defining feature of Henry James' late period, which included 1903's "The Ambassadors", is what has been termed "difficulty". Chatman has described this as "abstractness" (Chatman, 1972in Moss, 2014. Moss (2014) argues one source of the difficulty is syntactic complexity characterized in part by a high concentration of subordinate clauses (2014, p. 75). One purpose of this syntactic complexity is to "simulate the process of the mind, the manner in which an individual apprehends or perceives an idea-and to engage the reader in that process" (Menikoff, 1971, p. 436). Cross (1993) points to the "constant flicker and spill of meaning" (Cross, 1993, p. 1) in James' sentences and suggests that complex sentences compel the reader to share characters' unsettled thought processes. Trotter (1993) stresses that the difficult syntax characteristic of James became a defining feature of the Modernist writers he so influenced and argues.
A speaker or writing aiming at optimal relevance will try to ensure that his or her utterance can be interpreted without too great an expenditure of effort. However writers sometimes go out of their way to make things more difficult. For example, a periodic sentence structure, which withholds the main constituent and requires that subordinate or dependent constituents be held in the mind until its belated appearance, places a considerable burden www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/sll Studies in Linguistics and Literature Vol. 3, No. 4, 2019 303 Published by SCHOLINK INC.
on the reader's short-term syntactic memory and thus achieves its effects at great cost (Trotter, 1993, p. 69).
Trotter's finding echoes Watt's (1960) analysis of the first paragraph of The Ambassadors in which delayed specification of referents was found to play an important role. Cross (1993) emphasizes clause relations as an important source of meaning, using the term "doubling" to refer to sentences in which "a proposition is expanded or contradicted in second and subsequent main clauses" (Cross, 1993in Moss, 2014. Regarding "The Ambassadors" in particular, Cross found that long clausal and phrasal constructions were used for single grammatical functions within the sentence (Cross, 1993). Leech (2008) argues that such unusual linguistic usages typically serve a stylistic purpose called "foregrounding" which he defines as "a deviation, or departure, from what is expected in the linguistic code" (Leech, 2008, p. 3). Leech and Short (2007, p. 81) underline the importance of such anticipatory structure in James' ability to "pin down the psychological moment in the full complexity of its circumambient conditions". Short (1996) stresses that "If a part of a poem is deviant, it becomes especially noticeable, or perceptually prominent" (Short, 1996, p. 11). One important technique of foregrounding according to Short is repetition and parallelism including alliteration and assonance, and Short argues that parallel items tend to be linked in the reader's mind (Short, 1996in Moss, 2014). Eastman (1984) defines "parallel structures" as "a principle of expressing similar thoughts in duplicate grammatical structures" and stresses that "it can be applied to structures of all ranks" (Eastman, 1984, p. 210). As an example, he offers the following example: I wanted to cry out, to complain in courts of law, to lead an indignant army. Winter (1994) defines "clause relations" as the "sequential relations between clauses, both inside the grammatical domain of their sentences and immediately outside this domain, whose sequence may be further signaled by conjunctions, lexical repetition and replacement of the clause (Winter, 1994, p. 46).
Winter gives the following examples: 1) The symbols seem easy to the point of glibness. So does the skepticism that repeatedly informs them.
2) No Russian wants to conquer the world. Some Americans do, on the best crusading grounds.
3) The bee didn't get tired-it got dead.

Method
The current study applies what Leech and Short (2007)  linguistic and syntactic choices contribute to signaling the shifting perceptions and alliances of the characters.

Findings and Discussion
In this section a series of key passages from the novel is presented to demonstrate James' use of the target linguistic and syntactic devices and to analyze how they contribute to character and plot-development and shifting psychological dynamics between characters.

Parallel Structures: So finely Brown, so sharply Spare
James' use of multiple modifiers often creates complex noun phrases and clauses and the effect of these can be either to signal an equivalent intricacy of shifting impressions in a complex social situation, or a humorous incongruity between complex descriptive structure and ridiculous character behavior or situation. In the opening chapter of Book 1 we meet three of the main characters, and James' liberal use of complex noun phrases and clauses, serial modifiers, parallel structures and clause relations conveys with an economy of words a range of subtleties in the interpersonal dynamics and character quirks that bring the characters vividly to life. Figure 1 shows extracts from this opening chapter dealing with use of devices in character descriptions with type of device identified.

Character Description Type of Device
He was burdened, poor Strether with the oddity of a double consciousness. There was detachment in his zeal and curiosity in his indifference (p. 56).

Parallel Structure
She had, this lady, a perfect plain propriety, an expensive subdued suitability (p. 59).
•Parallel Structure

•Serial Modifiers
•Alliteration each so finely brown and so sharply spare, each confessing so to dents of surface and aids to sight, to a disproportionate nose and a head delicately or grossly grizzled, [that] they might have been brother and sister (p. 60).

Parallel Structure
In each of these passages parallel structures are used. In the first, paradoxical character traits belonging to Strether are described. Typically "zeal" is characterized by a strong focus and attachment to some particular purpose, course of action or viewpoint, but here this trait is countered by an equally salient diametrically opposed character trait, Strether's habitual detachment and second-guessing of himself.
Similarly curiosity and indifference are virtual antonyms. Taken together these two word-pairings suggest a character often at cross purposes with itself, a quality that will play out in myriad situations and encounters as Strether struggles to find some coherent course of action that will honor his commitment to Mrs. Newsome while doing justice to Madame Marie de Vionnet. The second passage gives the sense of a painter rendering a portrait with a few quick evocative strokes, an effect heightened by the rhythm and stress pattern. The description features a pair of adjective triplets with the first two in each triplet, "perfect, plain" and "expensive, subdued" followed by an adjective converted to noun with the same suffix, "propriety", and "suitability". The alliteration of hard consonant "p" in "perfect, plain propriety" and the strong stress on each word also captures the attention, and the rhyme of the final suffix adds to an overall rhythmic and even musical quality. The lady in the description is Maria Gostrey, an unmarried 33-year-old American expatriate who gives the following humorous description of her occupation: I'm a general guide-to "Europe", don't you know? I wait for people-l put them through.
I pick them up-I set them down. I'm a sort of superior "courier-maid". I'm a companion at large. I take people about (p. 65).
Maria and Strether hit it off straightaway, Maria recognizing in Strether a kind and decent man who is somewhat adrift in life. The third and most elaborate passage has a complex pattern of parallel structure and alliterative multiple modifiers and establishes numerous connections and similarities between the two. "So finely brown and so sharply spare" describes their physical appearance with lexical repetition of "so" and with parallel structure of adverb then adjective. "So" again appears but syntactical variation is introduced with a change in position "confessing so to-" and again parallel structure, "dents to surface" and "aids to sight". These latter two phrases, particularly "dents to surface", carry a metaphorical connotation as well with the "dents" in question suggesting a hint of both carrying similar "battle scars" sustained in the course of their lives. In the final parallel structure, the past participle "grizzled" is modified by a pair of opposing adverbs, "delicately or grossly", the latter adding alliteration with the "gr" sound shared with "grizzled". The sense of the word "grizzled" here is likely "grey", and "grossly grizzled" sounds humorous when "grey" is substituted for "grizzled". Taken together the passages in this section establish a strong affinity in the reader's mind between these two characters whose friendship will bring them together at key moments in the novel, and whose final meeting closes and brings closure to the novel.
The third character introduced in Book 1 is Waymarsh, Strether's stolid and somewhat stodgy travel companion. Waymarsh is a humorous figure in that he utterly lacks any of Strether's "double-consciousness" or self-deprecation, and is in fact a rigid and unyielding American who does not feel any need whatsoever to adapt himself to his new environment. Indeed, he is quite out of his element in Europe, and one gets the sense of a passive-aggressive curmudgeon suffering himself to be ushered through a distasteful chore rather than a traveller opening himself to stimulating discoveries: He struck his visitor as extremely, as almost willfully uncomfortable; The discomfort was in a manner contagious, as well as also in a manner inconsequent and unfounded...On This passage is densely concentrated with lexical repetition and parallel structures. The parallel adverbs "extremely" and "willfully" are both attached to adjective "uncomfortable". The "uncomfortable" adjective is repeated with a slight modification as noun "discomfort", and the phrase "in a manner" is also repeated with additional adjectives "inconsequent" and "unfounded". Finally the similar phrases "if not the" and "at least the" are used with parallel structures "habit of disapprobation" and "despair of felicity". Taken as whole this description, composed of a series of parallel structures and amplified by this structural symmetry, gives a detailed and amusing impression of Waymarsh as being quite stubbornly unwilling to adapt, or as Strether later terms it, "float in", the unfamiliar European environment. His hostility extends even to his hotel room. The reader's sense of humorous incongruity between Waymarsh's usual "handsome, fine silent" bearing and his aura of pitiful helplessness when forced to endure "the ordeal of Europe" is further sharpened in the following passage: [Strether] found his own part in their relation auspiciously enlarged by the smaller touches of lowering the lamp and seeing to a sufficiency of blanket. It somehow ministered for him to indulgence to feel Waymarsh, who looked unnaturally big and black in bed, as much tucked in as a patient in a hospital (p. 74).
The parallel gerund phrases, particularly the complex phrase "seeing to a sufficiency of blanket", emphasize the humor in the scene, which centers on the elaborate coddling the normally strong and silent (and one presumes, self-reliant) Waymarsh is reduced to requiring to calm and reassure him. The humorous disparity is underscored by the alliterative "big and black in bed", which conveys the impression of a sprawling, giant lump of a man. The alliteration mirrors the alliteration in the earlier "lowering the lamp and seeing to a sufficiency of blanket". This overall humorous impression culminates with Waymarsh's reaction when Strether hints that they may separate for part of their travels: "Waymarsh took it-silent a little-like a large snubbed child. 'What are you going to do with me?'" Waymarsh's comical helplessness carries over to the next morning, when his friend stands outside the door of his room to check on him: (Waymarsh) laid upon his friend, by desperate sounds through the door of his room, dreadful divined responsibilities in respect to beefsteak and oranges (p. 77).
The alliterative pair of complex noun clauses in italics is perhaps the best example of the humorous mismatch between elaborate syntax and absurd character behavior. The sentence opens with the figurative weight of Waymarsh's massive, helpless frame poised to collapse on Strether, and for such a strong solid man to be so close to prostration, the reader imagines a comparably terrible burden as the cause of the crisis. As in much of James' complex syntax, he withholds the main consituent of the sentence until the very end. The reader works his way through the long subordinate constituent and, finally, reaching the end of the sentence, comes to learn that the root of the crisis is that he needs his standard morning breakfast of beefsteak an orange.
The final example in this extended comic set-piece involving Waymarsh's struggle with the "ordeal of Europe" occurs after he finally summons his courage to venture out of his hotel room into the streets of Paris with Strether for companion and Maria for guide. While Strether is enjoying the stimulation of Paris and "the full sweetness of the taste of leisure", Waymarsh himself adhered to an ambiguous dumbness that might have represented either the growth of a perception or the despair of one (p. 80); In parallel structure "th-of a-, or the-of-" the initial phrase's "growth of" is replaced with "despair of" and then "perception" is replaced with "one". This lexical repetition and replacement allows James to convey with a spare economy of words the humor of Waymarsh's "ambiguous dumbness" of exterior concealing two diametrically opposed internal possibilities, flowering of perception or enduring density.

Alliterative Modifiers: Quaint and Queer and Dear and Droll
Strether begins the trip to Europe firmly committed to viewing everything through his fiancé and  The

Clause Relations in Dialogue
Finally, James uses clause relations in a series of dialogues at key moments in the novel. The earliest such dialogue occurs when Strether first confronts Chadwick with the demand he has been sent to deliver. Strether is still searching for the reason why Chadwick has defied his mother for so long. He alludes to the general assumption held by Mrs. Newsome, her family and even himself as to the reason why: "But our suppositions don't matter", he added, "if you're actually not entangled".
Chad's pride seemed none the less a little touched. "I never WAS unseemly assumptions, and heighten the force of the rhetorical punch he lands at the end. First he takes the clause "if you're actually not entangled" and replaces "entangled" with an outraged "that" then he takes the clause "What has kept you?" and replaces "what" with an equally outraged "by women".
Finally he asks "Is that what they think in Woolett?" putting the whole weight of his scorn on the one word "that", encompassing the entire preceding series of assumptions in that word and disposing of them summarily. A bit later in the same scene Madame de Vionnet acknowledges the deception she and Chadwick had practiced on him in concealing from him how far their relationship had progressed.
"We've thrust on you appearances that you've had to take in and that have therefore made your obligation. Ugly or beautiful-it doesn't matter what we call them-you were getting on without them, and that's where we're detestable. We bore you-that's where we are.
And we may well-for what we've cost you. All you can do NOW is not to think at all.
And I who should have liked to seem to you-well, sublime!" He could only after a moment re-echo Miss Barrace. "You're wonderful!" "I'm old and abject and hideous"-she went on as without hearing him. "Abject above all.
Or old above all. It's when one's old that it's worst. I don't care what becomes of it-let what WILL; there it is. It's a doom-I know it; you can't see it more than I do myself.
Things have to happen as they will (p. 484).
Strether's sincere "You're wonderful" is abruptly taken up by Madame de Vionnet who replaces "wonderful" with "old", "abject", and "hideous". Then she lingers for a moment over which of her defects is worse, "abject above all. Or old above all". Then she glances at her dim future and discards it with disgust, with two subordinate clauses: "I don't care what becomes of it. Let what will". With this succession of short, choppy clauses, James enables Madame de Vionnet to demonstrate both her despair and a kind of resilient readiness to deal with whatever disgrace comes of her dilemma.

Conclusion
The aim of this article was to explore the use of certain linguistic devices in Henry James' 1903 novel "The Ambassadors". The linguistic devices discussed in the article were lexical repetition and replacement, clause relations, parallel grammatical structures, and serial alliterative modifiers.
Examination of a series of extracts from the novel found that recurrent use of serial parallel grammatical structure and alliterative modifiers were used to capture the reader's attention by adding rhythm and repetitive consonant sounds to James' descriptions of characters. Parallel grammatical structure were also used in the novel to give a sense of cohesion and symmetry to Strether's free-ranging inventories of external scenes (Madame de Vionnet's home) and descriptions of character subtleties (Little Bilham's bohemian lifestyle, Strether & Maria's character), connecting the external space with the internal qualities of the resident of that space. Complex noun phrases and clauses were used to humorous effect by creating an incongruity between elaborate syntax and absurd descriptive content. Topics for further research include a more systematic corpus linguistic study of James' body of work and exploring corpus stylistics approach to his works.