Henry James and the Language of Experience (review)

Collin Meissner. Henry James and the Language of Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. 237 pp. $59.95.

Collin Meissner's Henry James and the Language of Experience is an exquisitely rendered and lucid response to postmodern skepticism about the creative construction of human identity in Henry James's fiction. Meissner takes issue with Mark Seltzer's claim in Henry James and the Art of Power that Henry James deceitfully and manipulatively forecloses his characters' fates through reinscription of the cultural status quo in their lives. Rather, James's characters discover, through experiential anomaly and bewilderment, the freeing awareness "of the economies of power which exert influence [on themselves] at culture's visible and invisible levels" (7). Of course, the idea that one can divest oneself of culture implies a judging self apart from culture. However, this personal "self" is never instantiated in Meissner's readings.

Meissner explains that, as in Gadamerian hermeneutics, James's experience is "a fundamentally negative process through which one's subjectivity is constantly being breached and restructured anew" (187). There is, indeed, a phenomenological dilemma for Americans whose consciousnesses are split, as described by philosopher Georg Simmel's The Philosophy of Money, between objective and subjective modes of being in a money culture where human value has a cash nexus basis. Subtly finessing Seltzer's use of Foucault, Meissner points out that Gadamer, James, and Foucault all agree that "an experience [. . .] cannot really be considered an experience [. . .] [if] it brings with it nothing new and leaves the experiencing/subject unchanged" (22-23).

However, in Meissner's reading of The American, it is not Christopher Newman's all-objective mode of being that wreaks havoc in the novel, but the "all-subjective" (47) French Bellegardes' exclusionary European history which is deliberately closed off to the vissicitudes of chance or change. By contrast, Newman's all-objective and accumulative response to "the world as open arena" (61) enables him to respond "to situations which require productive action" as a part of "a growing and live culture [America] [. . .] [whose] deep moral impulses do have productive consequences beyond [dogmatic] Puritan and Calvinist zeal" (49, 51).

At times this reading presents us with little more than an embellished articulation of the simplified cultural oppositions in James's International Theme: a corrupt and decayed Europe and an ethically innocent America. We learn that in Meissner's view, "all objective" can mean not only money at the base of all value, but "without prejudice" (42) as well, surely a conflict in terms.

"Without prejudice" implies a veritable tabula rasa. One wonders how such a being can achieve a growth in consciousness that must germinate from literally nothing. As Meissner himself puts it, "Not being subjective, Newman's subjectivity does not get in the way of his understanding, but neither does it provide any space for understanding to occur" (41).

Since Meissner does not instantiate the "self," the conclusion must be drawn that Newman's subsequent understandings evolve from some sort of cultural DNA. At odds with his characterization of Newman's implicitly moral open-ended response to experience, is Meissner's concession that Newman is not entirely without prejudice nor without a subjectivity borne from the "commercial rapacity" (63) of the mercantile temperament. Although Meissner argues that European cultural fixity dooms Valentin de Bellegarde to repeat the errors of his ancestors' past, one must surely factor in the two brilliant essays of John Carlos Rowe on The American that argue that Christopher Newman's compulsively repetitive imposition of his will and ego upon the Europeans in his wake produces disastrous results that deconstruct American innocence.

Against the taint of commercial rapacity, Meissner argues that, although Newman treats Claire as a commodity, her personal qualities eventually revise his gauging of value. Finally, Newman's astonishment at Claire's retreat from their engagement unhinges his unreflectiveness. This challenge to Newman's form of seeing enables, in Meissner's view, Newman...