James and the Consolations of Time

In 1971 I published my first article; its subject was The Ambassadors. A quarter century later, I taught the novel for nine hours and spent five minutes on the article’s concerns. The article seemed to me in retrospect not so much wrong, or even irrelevant, as partial. Henry James has, over the quarter century, become for me what Freud said of dreams—an exfoliatory wonder, an endlessly estimable intricacy. In human terms I now see in James’s fiction and his life what I wasn’t ready for in 1971, while professionally the practices of literary criticism over these years have drawn into the foreground what my new-critical training had slighted. The result of time’s tutelage is an affection for James deepened and complicated. I understand a small bit better the fabulous force that produced an oeuvre unequaled since John Milton’s. I sympathize, as I didn’t begin to in 1971, with a human man who saw the world as ferociously predacious and who fought back with bravery and self-deception. This is the Henry James I’ve tried to share with my students in recent courses on the fiction from The Aspern Papers through The Golden Bowl.

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What’s changed in my teaching is summed up in James’s characterization of The Spoils of Poynton as “a small social and psychological picture” (214). Or rather, what’s changed is my attention to these words. Attention to the interaction of social and psychological forces—within a narrative and within an individual character—has of course been fostered recently by our profession’s shift of emphasis from text to context. Unlike many younger colleagues, however, I’m engaged not in a reaction against New Criticism but rather in a supplementing of it. I may have spent only five classroom minutes on the new-critical concerns of my Ambassadors article, but what I do today in class and in print derives from what I did in that article. New Critics have rightly been faulted for reductively making close analysis an end in itself, but rather than settling for binary indignation, I believe that close analysis is a precondition for effective contextualizing. I also believe there’s more to texts than context. Texts, literary or otherwise, are characterized for me by one paramount quality—overdetermination. “In the arts, feeling is always meaning.” Already in 1971 I sensed the wisdom of James’s caveat, but as a formalist critic I couldn’t tap into it. Now I believe that feeling, affect, is generated by the overdetermined interaction of diverse social and psychological forces and that the meanings of these overdetermined affects are best approached through close attention to textual detail.

“‘There’s something in it that has to be recovered.’” Captain Everard’s stricken cry about his telegram in In the Cage (246) resounds with James’s sense of the multi-layered nature of texts and life. In turn, the telegraphist heroine of In the Cage constitutes the paradigmatic Jamesian reader insofar as her attention to detail enables her to supply Everard’s missing something. Another model reader is the “young person with a sharpened sense of latent meanings,” Maisie Farange, who knows that “everything had something behind it. . . . Nothing was less new to Maisie than the art of not thinking singly” (189, 54, 176). Her opposite number is “poor Owen [Gareth in Poynton who] went through life with a frank dread of people’s minds: there were explanations he would have been almost as shy of receiving as of giving. There was therefore nothing that accounted for anything” (61). Owen reflects Anglo-American society at century’s end, repressive and superficial. “‘London doesn’t love the latent.’” What Vanderbank establishes in The Awkward Age (32) is enacted with Maisie’s parents who “were awfully good looking—they had really not been analyzed to a deeper residuum” (37). Like the Jamesian reader, Maisie must analyze this residuum. “What she had essentially done, these days, had been to read the unspoken into the spoken” (205).

What we readers must not do, however, is to swing to the opposite extreme...