Always a Potent and an Impotent Romantic: Stylistic Enactments of Desire in Henry James's "The Ambassadors" and Wallace Stevens' "Anecdote of the Jar"

II The eponymous ambassadors of James's 1903 novel are the various emissaries dispatched from their New England home by the regal Mrs. Newsome to extricate her son, Chad, from the clutches of the sophisticated Madame de Vionnet. [...]the plot of this novel is fundamentally organized around what is a métonymie and even synecdochic relation: the ambassadors represent Mrs. Newsome and her interests; ideally, they serve as instruments of her will, as though they were hands that are attached to her arms by means of invisible anatomical connections stretching across the Atlantic Ocean. First we must consider the leadup to that scene, which occupies the final two sections of Book Eleventh, the penultimate part of the novel. [...]we come to perceive the jar primarily as a threedimensional object actually put down in wild nature, in which case the more relevant artistic association appears to be with Marcel Duchamp's readymades - objects that were also (dis)placed in an incompatible environment. 3 Allusions to "Ode on a Grecian Urn" recur throughout Stevens' writings, sometimes more implicitly, as in "Sunday Morning" (see Brogan, "Stevens and the Feminine" 184), sometimes more directly, as in "The Poems of Our Climate" (see Bloom 141). Since the latter has been read as an explicit revisit to the jar anecdote, we might note, in light of what follows, that "The Poems of Our Climate" proclaims itself explicitly to be about desire: because of "the never-resting mind" "one desires / So much more than [pink and white carnations in a bowl]" (CPP 178-79).