from the inside, to to speak, in an act of doing and of taking responsibility for that doing, that repeats the episode from the past that is to be understood. Keywords: Henry James; ‘The Aspern Papers’; speech acts; history; responsibility I

No doubt people have long known that language can make something happen. Nevertheless, the publication in 1962 of J.L.Austin’s How to Do Things with Words marked a watershed in speech act theory. Austin himself had developed his ideas as early as 1939. He had published one essay using these ideas in 1946, had lectured at Oxford in 1952 and thereafter on ‘Words and Deeds’, and had delivered the lectures on which the book is based at Harvard in 1955. Even so, How to Do Things with Words is the basic speech act (though Austin would not have called it that) from which speech act theory in all its contradictory complexity has sprung. I call the book a speech act because it was inaugural. It used words to make something happen, though not quite what Austin may have intended or foreseen. In any case, he was dead by the time the book was published, though that did not deprive the book of performative force, any more than does the death of someone who has made a will. I shall return to this point.