This book offers an interpretation of Henry James from a phenomenological perspective. But this interpretation suggests in turn that James’s own perspective is essentially phenomenological—that his understanding of the process of knowing, the art of fiction, and experience as a whole coincides in important ways with the standpoint of phenomenology. This convergence between art and philosophy indicates that phenomenological thought is less foreign to our country’s cultural and intellectual heritage than most critics and literary historians realize. As we shall see, both William and Henry James rank as important American participants in the phenomenological tradition.
The main purpose of my study is to shed new light on an issue with a long and distinguished history in James criticism—the relation between his fascination with consciousness and what is commonly called his “moral vision.” An important justification for invoking phenomenology to interpret James is that it provides a conceptual framework that can illuminate the connections between these two dimensions of his fiction. Guided by phenomenology’s theories about the workings of consciousness and the structure of existence, I have identified and analyzed five major aspects of experience that, together, map James’s understanding of human being—the “impression” as a way of knowing, the imagination, freedom, personal relations, and the politics of the social world. The network of connections between these various categories helps to explain the interdependence of the epistemological and moral explorations that James’s art undertakes. From the early Roderick Hudson to his final masterpiece The Golden Bowl, these five aspects of experience are the underlying bases on which his house of fiction rests.
One of my secondary goals is to provide an introduction to phenomenology for the humanist who may know James but who is less well acquainted with contemporary philosophy.1 Certain kinds of phenomenological criticism have enjoyed wide currency in the United States—particularly Georges Poulet's “Geneva School” and, more recently, some of the reader-response theories. But at least in this country, the philosophical tradition behind them is hardly known and rarely understood. Many of its major names appear with considerable regularity in discussions of literary theory. But even theorists all too frequently have at most a passing familiarity with phenomenology’s main concepts and are little more than vaguely acquainted with its complicated, diverse philosophical backgrounds. These backgrounds are important for understanding phenomenology’s thinking about aesthetics. They are also, as I hope to show, a useful source of concepts to aid practical interpretation. My exposition of the basic elements of the phenomenological tradition may be of benefit to both the literary theorist and the practical critic.2
The question “What is phenomenology?” is difficult to answer in part because no single credo contains the phenomenological perspective. My book offers a phenomenological perspective on James’s achievement, but this many-faceted school could sanction other approaches as well. Phenomenology is less a monolithic entity than a lively family with substantial differences between its members. I point out their disagreements in the course of my interpretation—for example, the dispute between Sartre and Heidegger about the basic nature of personal relations that I describe in Chapter 5—and I try to make use of them in delineating the precise shade of James’s phenomenological significance. But I also hope to develop a coherent picture of the underlying assumptions that the members of the phenomenological tradition share as participants in a recognizable style of thought.
Generally speaking, the philosophical assumptions of phenomenology lead to two different kinds of theories about literature. On the one hand, theorists like Ingarden, Sartre, Poulet, and Iser approach the literary work by studying its relation to consciousness. Although the work is not reducible to the motives of its author, it nevertheless depends for its existence on the acts of consciousness that constitute it. These acts lie dormant in the work, hibernating and waiting for the reader to bring them to life by lending them his or her subjectivity. Poulet seeks to unite himself with the subjectivity present in the work by “going back, within the sphere of the work, from the objective elements systematically arranged, to a certain power of organization inherent in the work itself, as if the latter showed itself to be an intentional consciousness determining its arrangements and solving its problems.”3 Sartre’s method of “existential psychoanalysis” looks for the “original choice” that an author expresses in his creations.4 Turning from the author to the reader, Iser attempts to identify the kinds of tasks that a work sets for its audience and to characterize the discoveries that a reader makes in the very process of activating the text.5 On the other hand, ontological theorists stress the work’s relation not to consciousness but to Being. Heidegger regards man as that being whose being is an issue for itself and who, consequently, asks about the meaning of Being. In Heidegger’s view, poetry is the original naming that discloses beings and brings Being into the open.6 Bachelard’s interest in the imagination might seem to make him a theorist of consciousness. But Bachelard understands poetic creation and the aesthetic experience as ways of enabling the presence of Being to shine forth.7
Although I refer to many of these theorists, my approach to James is not identical with any one of their methods. My study belongs first of all to the grand old tradition of cultural criticism. By employing the central concepts of phenomenology to clarify the relation between consciousness and moral vision in James, I have undertaken a comparative study of philosophy and literature in the spirit of the many previous investigations of his work that have placed him in the context of such intellectual figures as his brother William, the British empiricists, Swedenborg, and Nietzsche. The goal of such comparative analysis is twofold. Concepts borrowed from a nonliterary context can sometimes make possible a more penetrating interpretation of a literary issue than purely intrinsic study might allow—in the case of James and phenomenology, a deeper understanding of his epistemology and its relation to his ethics. Comparative studies also further the work of cultural history; identifying Henry James as a literary ally of the phenomenological tradition illuminates an important, hitherto insufficiently recognized connection between modern thought and literature.
The specifically phenomenological components of my method have to do with both consciousness and Being. Because of their importance to the shape and structure of his world as a novelist, the five aspects of experience that I have identified qualify as the “intentional foundations” of his authorial consciousness—a term I explain in Chapter 1. It refers, briefly, to the characteristic tendencies, assumptions, and rules of operation that govern the creation of meaning in a writer’s fictional universe. The “impression,” the imagination, freedom, personal relations, and the politics of daily life—these are the defining preoccupations of James’s consciousness as a creator. But they are also demarcations of man’s being. In reading James’s novels as testimony to his understanding of the structure of experience, I follow Ricoeur’s suggestion that “texts speak of possible worlds and of possible ways of orienting oneself in those worlds”—worlds that disclose “possible modes of being, . . . symbolic dimensions of our being-in-the-world.”8 The worlds projected in James’s works are occasions for explorations of the essential constituents of man’s experience. James is not a poet of Being in Heidegger’s almost spiritual sense; more secular in orientation, and with more immediate relevance to everyday life, he is a novelist of experience. His approach to man is ontic rather than ontological, existential rather than metaphysical.
I have chosen to read a few texts closely instead of sketching interpretations for all or most of James’s works. This decision reflects in part a desire to respect the integrity of the world of each novel and to follow carefully its process of disclosure. Close reading of selected works also minimizes the risk of fitting the text to the context, a danger that comparative approaches must always try to avoid. Nevertheless, I have chosen my texts and themes so that they might suggest how a reading of his entire canon would follow from the view of James that this book outlines. For example, I have attempted to make diachronic inclusiveness one of my principles of selection by dealing with texts from each decade of James’s mature artistic life (Roderick Hudson from the 1870s, The Portrait of a Lady and “The Art of Fiction” from the 1880s, What Maisie Knew and The Spoils of Poynton from the 1890s, and The Golden Bowl from the 1900s). The global reading of What Maisie Knew in Chapter 1 surveys all of the major aspects of experience that preoccupy James’s imagination as they come together in a single work. Each later chapter then focuses in more detail on one dimension of his exploration of experience.
This selective approach to James could support further individual readings that would demonstrate not only how different works give special prominence to various aspects of man’s being but also how each displays all of them in their fundamental unity. For example, among James’s later works, Lambert Strether’s adventure in The Ambassadors primarily invokes the contradiction between the exhilarating call of freedom and the limiting claims of necessity, where The Wings of the Dove (in this respect like The Golden Bowl) explores the complexities of conflict and care through the entanglements in which Milly Theale, Merton Densher, and Kate Croy are enmeshed. More than either of these novels, The Sacred Fount depicts the values and risks of extravagant imagination as well as the perceptual possibilities and liabilities of the impression as a way of knowing. All of these works explore the politics of social life because all portray struggles over power. Inasmuch as all of the aspects of experience of concern to James are inextricably related, however, Strether’s adventure is also a story of how his imagination responds to the wonderful yet dangerous inspiration of Europe and how he struggles with his impressions to achieve a revealing but reliable understanding of his world. And, of course, his involvements with Chad, Madame de Vionnet, and Maria Gostrey show all of the complications that the opposing possibilities of antagonism and communion can lead to in personal relations. Although my treatment of James’s works is selective, each reading has more extensive implications for interpreting his canon.
During my interpretations I quote widely from the major figures in the phenomenological tradition. This strategy is a deliberate departure from the standard critical practice of making one’s argument exclusively in one’s own words, with methodological and theoretical sources acknowledged in the notes. The following pages contain many names—some of them domestic, like William James and Charles Sanders Peirce, and others foreign, like Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. I have invoked these names and their words in part for the purpose of acquainting the reader with phenomenology’s leading theorists, their thought, and their major works. My reading of James provides, then, a kind of running annotated bibliography on phenomenology. I also hope to domesticate the many foreign theorists I invoke by setting their names and words next to the name and words of Henry James. Placing these Continental thinkers with James in the same world of discourse is a way of emphasizing that the phenomenological tradition belongs both to America and to Europe. My strategy of quotation is an attempt to dramatize rhetorically the convergence of perspectives that joins Henry James and phenomenology.
There will be different audiences for this book as there are for all interdisciplinary studies. I have already described what I hope the book offers to its primary audience—practical critics and students of literature with at most a general acquaintance with modern philosophy. Literary theorists and philosophers already well versed in the phenomenological canon will probably be most interested in my argument about the relations between James and intellectual history. They may also be interested in the use this book makes of philosophical concepts in order to advance our understanding of certain literary texts. My main focus, however, is on Henry James. Technical controversies that have consumed the attention of many philosophers are discussed in the body of the argument only when they help to elucidate James’s artistic world and his phenomenological significance. Otherwise they are referred to in the notes.
A phenomenological reading is obviously not the last word on Henry James, but it does have a place in the ongoing critical activity of interpreting and assessing his artistic achievement. As far back as 1931, William Troy observed that James “has come to mean something different to each of the successive literary generations that have taken up his work.”9 Like all interpretation, a reading of James that reaches back to his past achievement from the standpoint of phenomenology in the present contributes to the constant process of appropriating anew the meaning of his work—the process that enables his voice to speak across the span of generations. Such acts of interpretation are part of the work of making sense of ourselves by engaging in dialogue with the past, and this work in turn is one of the crucial forces that give momentum to cultural history. If a phenomenological reading seeks to appropriate James anew for the present, my study also hopes to shed light on his place within the past itself by helping to clarify one aspect of America’s intellectual and literary history. Phenomenology is widely regarded as a European movement that comes to us as a transatlantic import. With his brother William, though, Henry James places phenomenology firmly on native ground as part of America’s cultural heritage. James was always fascinated, of course, with relations between America and Europe. It is only fitting and proper, then, that James should contribute another chapter to the “international theme” as he does when we recognize his phenomenological perspective.
It is a pleasure to acknowledge the many debts I have acquired in writing this book. I alone, of course, am responsible for its failings. David Halliburton gave sound advice when I began the project, and he made important criticisms of the first draft. Thomas C. Moser has been an unfailing source of wise counsel and generous encouragement. Jonathan Arac read the entire manuscript at a crucial stage and offered invaluable suggestions for revisions. I am grateful to Austin E. Quigley for his tireless interest in my ideas, his shrewd criticisms of their weak points, and his persistent belief in the worthiness of this work. I also wish to give special thanks to a number of friends and colleagues who made helpful criticisms of parts or all of the book: George Dekker, Darryl J. Gless, Harry Hellenbrand, David Langston, and David Levin. The press’s anonymous readers offered much good advice that I was glad to take advantage of and that I wish to acknowledge even if I cannot thank them by name.
The Committee on Research at the University of Virginia generously awarded a grant that freed me to complete and revise the book. The same source provided funds for typing. The finishing touches were applied while I held a research fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In preparing the manuscript, I had intelligent, diligent help from Nancy Prothro, Sue Ellen Campbell, Pam Fitzgerald, and Anita Wiseman. Parts of Chapters 1 and 2 appeared in somewhat different form in Texas Studies in Literature and Language 20 (1978): 517-37 and Novel: A Forum on Fiction 12 (1978): 5-20. I am grateful to the editors for permission to reprint them here.
My greatest debt, however, is to my wife, Christina Buck, who was with me from the start of this project to its end.