Henry James and the Ethical Moment

Henry James and the Ethical Moment by Myler Wilkinson, McGiIl University He had not only a dislike but a sort of moral mistrust of thoughts too admonitory ; one shouldn't hunt about for a standard as a lost dog hunts for a master. One's standard was the idea of one's own good humoured prosperity, the prosperity which enabled one to give as well as take. —Henry James, The American In March, 1914, Henry James received a letter from his friend Henry Adams in which the American statesman reflected on the futility of their age. A few weeks later James replied to this "melancholy outpouring" with what is a statement of philosophic and artistic principle during the last years of his life: Of course we are lone survivors, of course the past that was our lives is at the bottom of an abyss—if the abyss has any bottom; of course, too, there's no use talking unless one particularly wants to. But the purpose, almost, of my printed divagations was to show you that one can, strange to say, still want to—or at least behave as if one did ... . I still find my consciousness interesting—under cultivation of the interest. Cultivate it with me, dear Henry—that's what I hoped to make you do___Why mine yields an interest I don't know that I can tell you, but I don't challenge or quarrel with it—I encourage it with a ghastly grin. You see I still, in the presence of life (or of what you deny to be such,) have reactions—as many as possible .... It's, I suppose because I am that queer monster, the artist, an obstinate finality, an inexhaustible sensibility. Hence the reactions—appearances, memories, many things, go on playing upon it with consequences that I note and "enjoy" (grim word) noting. It all takes doing—and ldo. I believe I shall do yet again—it is still an act of life. (SL 173-74) It might be argued that James is facing in two directions at once in this eloquent letter. In it he looks back to his brother William's philosophy of pragmatism, which had such a profound effect on his thinking, and arguably on his artistic practice: a philosophy of "doing" and willed construction of belief in the absence of any transcendental a priori, a philosophy that recognized the abyss without "any bottom" in both ethical and epistemological senses but then moved on to "cultivate" meaning and value, even if at times with a "ghastly grin" directed toward the infinite regress of human consciousness and its objects.1 In his reply to Adams, James is both speaking out of, and contributing to, one of the dominant discourses of his time—the same discourse that imagined the death of God and then began seriously to revision the ends and purposes of man. That discourse is still very much with us, and James, in his letter and his work as an artist, looks forward to current debates about linguistic and ethical indeterminacy , the lost transcendental center, and the rhetorical construction of reality. The Henry James Review 11 (1990): 153-75 01990 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 154 The Henry James Review These issues are central to deconstruction, a practice that "equates the rhetorical , figurai potentiality of language with literature itself," where rhetoric "opens up vertiginous possibihties of referential aberration," and "truth" is nothing more than "the recognition of a certain kind of [linguistic] error" (de Man 10, 17). The de Manian textual "paradigm consists of a figure, or a system of figures, and its deconstruction. But since this model cannot be closed off, it engenders, in its turn, a supplementary figurai representation which narrates the unreadability of the prior narration" (de Man 205). Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, J. Hillis Miller and others have been accused of critical nihilism by a generation of older critics whose anxieties center on the apparent loss of referential meaning between language and its objects, and consequently the loss of grounds for ethical "humanist " judgment. In The Ethics of Reading, Miller has set out to answer those critics and, at the same time, to state...