The Fan and the Idol: Re-tracing Authorship in “The Author of Beltraffio”

This article is an investigation of the theme of authorship in Henry James’s tale “The author of Beltraffio.” Written at a crucial stage of James’s career, this tale stands at the crossroads between James’s high realism, his uneasy flirting with aestheticism, and his more experimental narrative turns. The article argues that in this story authorship is step by step not only mobilized, but also vampirized and dispossessed by the narrator, who exchanges the intimacy with the author and his individuality for commodities to be consumed. Authorship, Martinez contends, is figured in the tale as the result of a social discourse, where the veneration of the narrator for the “author of Beltraffio” borders on the relationship between “fan” and “idol.” Such a gesture is located within the broader cultural concerns James was dealing with at the time: the establishment of literary realism in America; the reconfiguration of the relation between private and public experience; the emergence of a mass readership; and a growing bifurcation between the mutually constituting high-brow and low-brow cultural spheres.