The Phenomenology of Henry James (review)

Paul B. Armstrong. The Phenomenology of Henry James. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1983. 242 pp. $26.00. Armstrong's book on The Phenomenology of Henry James explores a topic that is very pertinent to James's fiction and his comprehension of experience, of art, and of the processes of knowing. In this intertextual study, Armstrong situates James within his cultural, intellectual, and historical context by using the ideas and concepts of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Ricoeur, Binswanger, Merleau Ponty, Iser, and Ingarden in order to demonstrate the relationship between phenomenology and existentialism in terms of James's persistent concern throughout his career with questions of consciousness and "moral vision." In postulating the unity and "interdependence of the epistemological and moral explorations," of "knowing and doing," in James's work, Armstrong analyzes five aspects of experience that characterize James's representation of individual being— the "impression" as a mode of knowing, the imagination, freedom, personal relationships, and the politics of the social world. Finally, Armstrong shows the relevance of the phenomenological tradition to modern thinking and literature. Armstrong lucidly investigates the "intentional foundations" of James's consciousness, that is, those five modes of experience, of "being-in-the-world," that govern the "creation of meaning" in the fiction. He uses What Maisie Knew as a paradigm in order to show how all diese aspects function within a single work. Each of the following chapters concentrates on one of these phenomenological preoccupations structuring the author's consciousness, but also shows how they inevitably interact and are dependent on one another. Although Armstrong recognizes that existence does not divide itself "naturally" into such categories, he still wishes to examine its components separately, moving from "the private realm of consciousness outward toward the public stage of politics and society" (31). He also emphasizes here the importance of such an interdisciplinary examination in that it reveals James's relationship to his cultural, literary, and intellectual history: existential phenomenology can help give an idea of the writer's attitudes or philosophy about life. Armstrong proceeds to examine the first of James's "intentional foundations"—the author's understanding of consciousness, the "impression" as a mode of knowing— in terms of his theory of representation and view of the aesthetic value of the novel. For the Jamesian character the "impression" can take the form of perception yet involves die embellishing properties of the imagination to complete it. Since the reader perceives the fictional realm through the protagonist's individual phenomenal vision, one cannot determine how much of the character's interpretations are founded on reliable observation of an object or event and how much on the elaborate hypotheses and fantasies formulated by the imagination. AU of these conclusions take on an innovative dimension when Armstrong relates this function of the "impression" to Ingarden's phenomenological aesthetic that involves a theory of representation relevant to James's notion of selectivity, that is, of describing objects through the perspective of a particular character's perceptions. Because of the process of selection, simplification of "reality," and the indeterminacy resulting from this restriction to a single consciousness, the reader must participate by intentionally extrapolating beyond the object and facts given. Thus the success of representation depends not only on the writer but on the active role of the reader as well. Exploring how the imagination functions as "a bridge that leads from phenomenological significance of the 'impression' to the existential dynamics of his 'moral vision '" (70), Armstrong employs Ricoeur's dialectical hermeneutics of suspicion and revelation to explicate the risks and "extravagance" of the imagination in Roderick Hudson . This process would protect the individual since it would work in a reciprocal way and would reinforce faith in the imagination's "wonders," yet through doubt would disclose its dangers and excesses. In other words, impressions can become too imaginai and can cause a debilitating detachment from reality. However, an imaginative comprehension of the Other can help transcend the barriers and limitations separating us from a world beyond our own personal horizons . Such a situation would lead into the next two aspects of experience and emphasize the relationship of imagination to existence, particularly to freedom and personal relations. Dealing with the...